A second review requested by Jackie Theballcat, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I would fear that nothing can be left to say about The Room, but then, is not The Room inexhaustible? I’ve seen it multiple in times in a number of wildly different contexts, and […]

A review requested by Will T, with thanks for contributing to the ACS Fundraiser. In celebration of the late Irwin Allen on the occasion of his centennial There are very few movies that you can point to that single-handedly killed off a thriving career. The Swarm is one of these. Prior to making this film, […]

There is a critical conceit that I’m sure you’ve all bumped into, where certain filmmakers get a number of “freebies” – at one point in their career, they made a single film so impressive that the critic in question has decided that they get to make several bad films before we give up on them. […]

Here’s a fun game I discovered by accident: describe the plot of The Perfect Guy to somebody. Better yet, see how much of the plot they can guess just from the title. It’s not hard to get most of it: the girl is dating this really swell guy, but he absolutely refuses to commit, so […]

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: once again, it has proven impossible to make a remotely decent movie out of the seminal comic book Fantastic […]

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: the notorious insta-flop Pixels is an adventure about a group of competition-level video game players. It’s also pandering to […]

So you’d have to be such an idiot that there’s not a word for it in English to expect a film titled Nail Gun Massacre to be even a little bit classy. Still, the speed with which it reveals the incorrigible depths to which its not-classiness reveals itself caught me by surprise – it’s not […]

There was always going to be a mash-up of the nuclear monster movie and the beach movie sometime in the mid-’60s. B-movie producers, as a breed, are too good at mimicry and chasing the latest fad with Terminator-like focus for the two biggest subgenres of cheap drive-in programmer to go unwed for too very long. […]

In looking at the vast corpus of American movies made between 1945 and 1968 that are typically considered under the umbrella of horror, one thing that leaps to mind is that, almost without exception, they aren’t scary. Nor, in a great many cases, does it seem like trying to make them scary was ever the […]

When horror came back to American cinema in a big way in the 1950s, it was after receiving a face-lift: gone were creaky Mitteleuropean castles and villages, banished were old dark houses, and even the outright lifts of Expressionist aesthetic techniques were mostly snuffed out (though a genre that gets so much mileage from a […]

A review requested by Robert K, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I’m greatly pleased that, when the time inevitably came for me to write about The Apple, it would be in the context of a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. There’s a deep connection between this […]

I do not, in general, believe in the phenomenon of actors being the solitary saving grace of an otherwise disposable movie, but I’ll say this: Jeff Bridges is clearly the solitary reason that Seventh Son is an absolute blast of a bad movie, the kind that immediately upon departing, I wanted to start listing the […]