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 […]

Jurassic World is absolutely the best sequel yet to the 1993 Jurassic Park, which is one of the least-impressive compliments you can pay to a record-setting summer blockbuster. We should not feel obliged to mark it down as a strength when a movie can be confidently declared to be better than not just 1997’s enervating […]

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 fourth distinct film titled simply Godzilla continues the grand tradition of movies in which the uncertain march of […]

I sincerely doubt that Riddick counts as “long-awaited” – in order to await something, you have to assume that there’s a real possibility that it’s probably going to exist, and I don’t see how even the most devoted fan of the Riddick films could have imagined that during the back half of the ’00s – […]

To be sure, the 2000 genre film Pitch Black is a rattletrap old spook show, with a debt to Alien that’s extreme even by the standards of the “extraterrestrial monster devouring people bloodily” genre. It boasts a mixture of stock characters and regrettably “clever” characters that, all things considered, would have been better off with […]

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: if we’re being classy about it, overt Twilight knock-off The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones could be more generously […]

Everything that is good about Pacific Rim is good largely on the level of “that was cool”. Whereas everything that is bad about it is bad on the levels of character psychology, narrative structure and logic, interest in the world beyond white adolescent North American males, or the general feeling that no serious consideration of […]

As of this writing, the Wikipedia page for the 1982 giant killer rat picture Deadly Eyes notes only one piece of production trivia: “Dachshunds wearing rat suits were used in the filming of Deadly Eyes to achieve the effect of super-sized rodents”. Dear reader, I would like to assure you with all my heart: you […]

The operating theory behind this year’s Summer of Blood is there’s a certain something that Canadian horror films have that their southerly neighbors just can’t match: that pound for pound, the idiotic, disposable junk made by Canucks is just better than the idiotic, disposable junk made by Yanks – more mature, more psychologically astute. Every […]

Monsters University is both cute and charming, and I at least found it to be not in the least ways unenjoyable while I was watching it. This is, apparently, where we are now, with Pixar Animation Studios. And note that I’m of the mind that Brave is a pretty solid movie that got a completely […]

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: Pixar Animation Studios’ love affair with franchising continues with their first-ever prequel, Monsters University. In keeping with my quest […]

You can just about watch an era snuff itself out with Clash of the Titans, the final film for producer Charles H. Schneer and effects artist Ray Harryhausen (who also took a producer credit on what is frequently held to be the great labor of love of his career), and the first of those men’s […]