Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

I would like to start by making it clear that The Nun II is not a good movie. I am giving it a good review anyway, because I am very easy mark for a certain kind of dipshit haunted-house atmosphere, so take that as you will. I would also like to point out that this […]

It’s odd to say of Insidious: The Red Door, no less than the fifth film in a series, “that sure seems like an unnecessary sequel”, but the Insidious series has followed a crooked path. First there was Insidious, which premiered in 2010 but for all intents and purposes is a 2011 film, and it was […]

Serial killer movies and TV shows are common as dirt, and most of the serial killers within them feel a bit commonplace as well: you’ve got your brutish animal menace, you’ve got your erudite reptilian wits, you’ve got your soft-spoken weirdo with an unnerving stare. There aren’t all that many movie serial killers who actually […]

In Abandoned, we find ourselves in the middle of a marriage in peril. Searching for a reprieve from the chokehold that is mental illness after pregnancy, the couple relocates to a remote farmhouse to somehow cure Sara, a new mother, of her depression and potential hallucinations. This beautiful house full of antiques and mystery somehow […]

Back before The Curse of La Llorona came out in 2019, I used that as a catalyst to explore every horror movie featuring the Latin American legend. I watched 18 different movies from across decades and cultures to compare and contrast how they handled La Llorona, the Weeping Woman who hangs out by the river looking for […]

Categories: horror, scary ghosties

1984’s Ghostbusters is a pretty damn good movie – prone to being over-praised by nostalgic fans, but pretty damn good – and it doesn’t seem like it’s all that difficult to understand why. But for whatever reason, it seems impossible to replicate it. Setting aside the question of the many sci-fi action-adventure comedies that clearly […]

I would be tempted to say that Last Night in Soho is the film with which director Edgar Wright proves that he needs somebody else to write his screenplays, but then, didn’t we kind of already know that? Specifically, that he needs Simon Pegg to write his screenplays, or co-write them, anyway: the three Wright-Pegg […]

Of all the rides or other attractions in any of the theme parks operated by the Walt Disney Company, if you were going to make a motion picture based on any of them – in this case, “you” are presumably either Chairman & CEO Michael Eisner or President & COO Bob Iger, and in either […]

My younger readers may not recall a curious media phenomenon, a relic of the ’90s and the period when the Walt Disney Company was expanding its theme parks at a rate unmatched before or since. To promote these new attractions – Disneyland Paris, Animal Kingdom in Florida, various new rides and facelifts to existing attractions […]

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 […]

The weird thing about Candyman – second film of that exact title, and an explicit sequel to the first, which I get is like a “thing” we have now, but I sure don’t like it – is that the one thing it was supposed to be doing, it’s kind of very terrible at, and the […]

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 […]