In discussing any long-running series that doesn’t exactly swing from pole to pole, qualitywise, one of the trickiest parts in reviewing the individual entries can be figuring out where to start: what specifically makes this film different from all of those films? Happily, then, Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft – which premiered in 1998 […]
When faced with the twelfth entry in a franchise that has been running for 43 years and in that time produced, if we are being spectacularly generous, four actually good entries (and I think it would be easier to defend the claim that only the very first one is actually good than that a whole […]
With Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh, we hit an exceptionally exciting milestone: the back half of the franchise. At the time of writing, anyway; the series came back after one nine-year hiatus, I am not in any way optimistic enough to assume it will not do so again. But for now, we celebrate. It’s a milestone […]
With Don’t Breathe 2, it becomes officially impossible not to conclude that co-writers Fede Álvarez & Rodo Sayagues just don’t know how audience identification and sympathy work. Their 2016 thriller Don’t Breathe (directed by Álvarez) was broadly liked, but certainly not by me: I found it to have wantonly miscalculated in assuming we’d effortlessly side […]
Intermittently throughout the 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 a major new release. This week: the myth of Candyman has been resurrected to remind us all of the nightmarish power of storytelling. It’s not the first […]
Intermittently throughout the 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 a major new release. This week: the myth of Candyman has been resurrected to remind us all of the nightmarish power of storytelling. It’s not the first […]
The true sign of how little the people who made Witchcraft 7: Judgement Hour cared about it is not that it has the typo “Judgement” right there on the cover of its VHS box. The truest sign is that it does this while also spelling it correctly in the onscreen title, Witchcraft VII: Judgment Hour. […]
We’ve got to start somewhere, so why not with the question that I’ve been kicking around in my head since I finished Space Jam: A New Legacy: how can anyone worship a God vindictive and hateful enough to allow this movie to exist? No wait, that’s the other question I’ve been kicking around. The one […]
2019’s Escape Room is a fun and not-particularly-good thriller: fun mostly because of the ingenuity and narrative utility of its set design, not particularly good mostly because of its unbelievably stupid worldbuilding and attempt to paste a techno-paranoia mythology onto the gimmick “what if you died for real when you fucked up an escape room?” […]
It took six entries – not six-hundred and sixty-six, though I can see where it feels like that many – for the Witchcraft franchise to arrive at a point that I honestly expected to show up a lot sooner: a film entirely devoid of merit about which I despair of finding anything to say. I […]
If there is one nice thing I can say about the threateningly-titled Spiral: From the Book of Saw – and I do think it is just the one thing – it’s that this represents a much braver attempt to haul the old Saw franchise back into the public eye than the last one. 2017’s Jigsaw was a […]
Whatever one things of the seven films to date that make up the Conjuring Universe – I admire their guileless commitment to the “jump out and say boo!” qualities of a good cheesy ghost story, and the thick mountains of period atmosphere they wrap that commitment in – surely we must all agree that the […]
