Intermittently 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: Disney’s new version of The Lion King presents painstakingly animated photorealistic CGI lions milling about doing lion shit. This might […]
It’s been just a little bit more than two years since Collateral Beauty barfed its way in and out of theaters, and ever since then, it feels like we’ve been living in a golden age for astonishing cinematic boondoggles. Over the decades, the Hollywood film industry has been fine-tuned to discourage truly horrible filmmaking, and […]
Categories: crimes against art, film noir, good bad movies, thrillers, what the hell just happened?
The very first thing that happens in Gotti is that the camera pans across the Manhattan skyline on the far side of the river, to land on John Gotti (John Travolta), turning around to regard the camera with practiced surprise, like the host of a cooking show welcoming us to their fake house. The second […]
Categories: crime pictures, crimes against art, gangster pictures, good bad movies, the dread biopic
The newest film titled simply Robin Hood – this one starring Taron Egerton as England’s favorite socialist thief – is dumb. Fucking dumb, one might even say; dumb as balls. But there’s an alchemical quality to its utter, hapless stupidity, one borne of its absolute commitment to the most insane shit. It is a terrible […]
Categories: action, adventure, good bad movies, men with swords, popcorn movies
A review requested by Salim Garami, 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! The story of how Miami Connection came into the world warms my heart and provide me with […]
Categories: action, good bad movies, indies and pseudo-indies, martial arts, musicals
From among the Video Nasties I could say “a movie from around the turn of the ’80s with the word ‘Don’t’ in the title, that caught the attention of Britain’s Director of Public Prosecution”. I could even throw in the detail that in addition to all of the above, the film is also about cannibals. […]
From among the Video Nasties I’m not sure whether what is most impressive about Night of the Bloody Apes is a positive (there’s so much wacky bullshit going on here that it saves the film from that meanest of fates, being boring) or a negative (it’s so boring that I lost interest halfway through even […]
2014’s God’s Not Dead has a loopy, auto-erotic concept that makes no sense, but I can vaguely see how, if you were so deep in the culture war trenches that you needed binoculars to see daylight, it might seem like its story of hostile academics trying to humiliate the Christ out of their students speaks […]
God’s Not Dead has become the stand-in in popular consciousness for a whole genre: the hectoring message movie designed exclusively for U.S. conservative evangelical audiences. And this makes a great deal of sense: it was a huge, shocking box-office success, making $61 million in North America from a $2 million dollar budget, which makes it […]
Amityville II: The Possession is coated in sleaze, filled with hokey bargain basement haunting effects, and it telegraphs its lack of inspiration on any level other than cashing in on a fad or two for a quick buck so intently, it feels almost like it must be proud of itself. It therefore should come as […]
A review requested by Patton, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Pop culture knows Deep Blue Sea, from 1999, as the movie in which Samuel L. Jackson delivers a big, operatic summer action movie monologue, and then right when he gets the soaring inspirational part, a giant super-intelligent […]
Categories: action, good bad movies, here be monsters, science fiction, summer movies, thrillers
