Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Unlike the other major horror franchises, the Halloween series has made room for so many mutually-incompatible narratives – there are five different branches of continuity distributed between thirteen films – that there’s a sense in which “this isn’t ‘really’ a Halloween film” is sort of an empty thing to say. Heck, the 1982 release Halloween […]

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

Being one of the best Hellraiser films released since 1988 is such a non-achievement that it’s a little discouraging that I can’t bring myself to say that the eleventh film in the series, simply titled Hellraiser, isn’t better than “one of” the best in that time span. This attempt by screenwriters Ben Collins & Luke […]

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

There are films for which the “here’s what this reminded me of” game can lead to some very strained and convoluted comparisons that make no sense to anyone, not even the person making them. This is not the case with Smile, which could not be more straightforwardly the film that happens when It Follows and […]

Categories: horror, thrillers

25 years ago, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke mightily pissed off some horror-loving cinephiles of my acquaintance with a nasty piece of work called Funny Games. (Just to pour salt in the wound, Haneke remade it almost shot-for-shot a decade later, in English, enticing the unwary with stars Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.) Everyone agreed that […]

It’s very easy to look at a movie and declare it “a labor of love” whether you actually know that to be the case or not, but for Pearl, there’s no doubt about it. Literally the fact that it exists at all is the proof that it was a labor of love, and that co-writers […]

There should never have been any sequels to the 1960 film Psycho, of course. It is not at all a perfect film (that godawful psychiatrist scene at the end is more than sufficient to guarantee that), but it is a fully-realized film, and one whose profound impact of the movie landscape is maybe literally impossible […]

Barbarian is the kind of film whose boosters (of which I don’t entirely count myself one, though I think it’s a pretty easy recommendation for anyone with a more than passing interest in grotty horror-thrillers) would have it be the case that even mentioning that it has a story constitutes an unforgivable spoiler, or some […]

Categories: horror, mysteries, thrillers

Psycho II being an actually good movie was about as unlikely a miracle as any I have ever encountered in all the annals of unnecessary sequels. To expect that kind of miracle to happen twice in a row would be far, far, far too much to hope for, and indeed, Psycho III – which I […]

If you had asked me at the start of 2022 if I thought that 2009’s Orphan had lived on as a classic of modern horror, I’d have looked sort of through you for an awkward moment in a confused, glassy-eyed way before tentatively replying “the J.A. Bayona film?” And we’d have had a beat before […]

To have come so close to losing the rights to the Hellraiser brand that one must quickly rush out a sequel for contractual reasons is sloppiness. To have done this twice begins to feel like deliberate sabotage. And yet, seven years after Hellraiser: Revelations was (barely) released in 2011, Dimension Films once again had to […]