Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

So, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, the 2002 DTV sequel to the hardcore conservative Christian classic Left Behind. If the only thing you tell me about that film is its title, and the fact that it involves a small group of True Believers facing off against the Antichrist during the Tribulation (which is, in the […]

At the risk of seeming indelicate or bigoted: fundamentalist evangelical Christian genre movies are weird. As I am not remotely the first to point out, they represent a miserable kind of paradox about them: they palpably want to be exciting cinema like wot the heathens all get to watch with their guns and their scantily […]

Every week this summer, 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 one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: by no means is Moms’ Night Out the highest-profile film of the weekend, but I couldn’t bring myself to […]

There have been few moments that bonded me as permanently to the friends I shared that moment with as the first time I watched the trailer for Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 in college. An epically bad CGI demon, lots of doom-wracked voiceover, a lisping child reading from the Bible, inexplicable action scenes, and best […]

How right it is to celebrate Apocalypse Day, 21 December 2012, with a movie about the grandpappy of all apocalypses, the one that gave us the very word itself. For “apocalypse” does not come from any source referring to widespread destruction, be it in the form of meteors or tidal waves or carnivorous rabbits; it’s […]

I promise, I’m not trying to be the flippant atheist. My intellectual cover is that David Edelstein, in the article where he invented the phrase “torture porn”, named-dropped our Good Friday subject, but truth be told I was already planning this essay before I recalled that fact. It’s not, of course, a horror movie in […]