Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is not a good film, which comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever. It is surprising, perhaps, that it isn’t much worse – and “much worse” is, to be fair, in the eye of the beholder. Nothing could be more understandable than somebody subjecting themselves to this film and declaring it an unmitigated […]

Yeah, you read that right. Spirit Halloween: The Movie is a branding exercise in repping the spookiness of America’s favorite way to temporarily fill abandoned storefronts Halloween superstore. Produced in conjunction with three studios you’ve never heard of, Spirit Halloween has taken the world by storm. And by “the world,” I mean “limited theaters and VOD where […]

Categories: comedies, horror

If all you know about heavy metal icon Rob Zombie is his directorial filmography, you would still have absolutely no doubt that here is a man who adores horror cinema. His first seven theatrical features all have the unmistakable energy of somebody who has seen all the movies and knows them inside and out, and […]

I’ll say this for Hocus Pocus 2: it isn’t simply Hocus Pocus a second time, despite appearances. Are there similarities? Of course. For one, the setup is near-identical: the Sanderson sisters, an infamous trio of witches from Salem, Massachusetts, return to the world of the living on a Halloween night, thanks to the lighting of […]

Categories: comedies, disney, horror

Technically speaking, Confess, Fletch is the third feature adapted from Gregory McDonald’s popular series of novels (published between 1974 and 1986) about Irwin Maurice Fletcher, occasional investigative reporter and near-constant wiseass. As far as any true Fletch fan is concerned, however, we’re starting fresh here, because the two movies starring Chevy Chase in the title […]

To wrap up the summer movie season, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 12: Mack & Rita explores the comedic potentials of what happens when a woman […]

A review requested by Carl, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! It is highly likely that 1999’s The Story of Us would inevitably bring to mind the once-in-a-generation classic […]

Not Okay, the Hulu-based sophomore effort from actress-writer-director Quinn Shephard, opens with a much-discussed “content warning” that the film we are about to experience contains “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.” It’s a tweak of the viewer’s nose intended to set a cheeky tone and make some kind of statement about […]

I think the fair thing to do is to regard Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank not with contempt that it exists, but with amazement that it survived to be released. Though I think you could temper that amazement with a little bit of contempt. That would be fair. Still, let’s not get too […]

To begin with, I find the very title of DC League of Super-Pets unpleasantly provocative. Not the League of Super-Pets part; that’s mostly just describing the content, though I might wonder why the film bothered to so subtly rename the comic book Legion of Super-Pets. Probably because Warner Bros. assumed (and with reason) that movie […]

If you work in media, you likely know someone like B.J. Novak’s Ben Manalowitz — someone hell-bent on finding a big idea that will propel them to fame and fortune, with or without any actual profundity. Novak has played this semi-punchable character more than once, and in Vengeance, his feature film directorial debut, leans hard […]

Categories: comedies, thrillers

There are things in Thor: Love and Thunder – the fourth movie to exclusively focus on the Marvel Comics version of the Norse god Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, who thus becomes the first individual character to headline a tetralogy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – that are pretty damn good. And conversely, there are […]