Nine years and two months separated the releases 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful and 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, both directed by Sam Raimi. He made no other features between them (though he did some television work, and produced quite a bit), making this by far the longest break between projects […]
A review requested by Travis, 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! Two decades into the 21st Century, the phrase “a Sam Raimi superhero movie” surely takes us straight to […]
As was true for a great many people born at the end of the 1970s or beginning of the 1980s, I suspect, Army of Darkness was the first film in the Evil Dead trilogy that I saw, by a margin of several years. For this exact reason, there’s always going to be a slightly abashed […]
By all means, The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness are grand movies: one terrifying, one wacky, and both a crazy amount of fun. But 1987’s Evil Dead II, the middle film in Sam Raimi’s best trilogy… it’s just well and truly special, a real once in a lifetime sort of movie. Astonishingly, a quarter […]
From among the Video Nasties The making and production of The Evil Dead has become a legendary campfire story in its own right: writer-director Sam Raimi, looking to make his first feature, creating a demo short and forcing it upon potential investors; borderline-inhumane working conditions for most of the cash-strapped location shoot; a rapturous, career-making […]
There are good and bad things aplenty with Oz the Great and Powerful, but I am very pleased that the one which bothers me the most is a petty nitpick on a formal element. In an effort to recall the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz – and goodness gracious, does Oz TGAP ever […]
The superhero sequel is a peculiar beast. It is the nature of the sequel to be a chancy proposition, artistically at least: most stories really actually don’t need the extra space to be told, and cinema history is littered with sequels that can’t do better than feebly retread the same plot and conflicts as the […]
I feel like ten years is about the shortest amount of time you need in order for a statement like this to come off as well-considered and lofty, rather than fannish hyperbole: the 2002 Spider-Man is, to me, the best comic book movie of the 21st Century. I mean something fairly specific by that statement: […]
“THE RETURN OF TRUE HORROR” shrieks the trailer for Drag Me to Hell, and I’m almost willing to agree without reservation. The film finds Sam Raimi in a very rare mood indeed, making a PG-13 ghost story that doesn’t seem to understand the limitations that a PG-13 implies, going right ahead and presenting us with […]
It is nigh unto objectively true that Spider-Man 3 is not nearly as good as Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2, but that is not quite mean that it is in fact bad. It’s a good comic book movie that suffers only because everyone expected (reasonably) that it was going to be a masterpiece. There are, I […]
