Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

I would say that Thanksgiving is the best version of itself I can imagine, but even that’s selling it short: I couldn’t even imagine it turning out as well as it did. The film originated as a parody trailer directed by Eli Roth for the 2007 exploitation film homage Grindhouse, written by himself & Jeff […]

Scream VI is the first movie in the 27-year-old Scream franchise that strikes me as being very much “a generic Scream picture”, which is already an achievement. Most slasher franchises have felt like “a generic _____ picture” by the time the end credits have started rolling in their first entry. That we have made it […]

The last time Blumhouse created a modernized slasher-thriller that they released exclusively on Peacock, it was the underwhelming and grating They/Them, so it wasn’t exactly impossible for them to raise the bar with Sick, which dropped on the streaming service this Friday the 13th. They even had Scream scribe Kevin Williamson on hand, working together […]

Categories: horror, slashers

I love the horror genre. Where else are you going to get a minor classic Jamie Lee Curtis slasher (Terror Train 1980) halfheartedly remade two and a half decades later (Train 2008) before actually being remade almost word for word by Tubi another decade and a half later (Terror Train 2022), at which point it […]

Categories: sequels, slashers

I can hear you right now. You’re asking, “They made a remake of Terror Train?” That is, if you even remember the movieĀ Terror Train existed in the first place. It’s a minor 1980 classic notable for its setting (a train), its holiday theme (New Year’s Eve), its star (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a couple notables […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

There probably aren’t more than a half-dozen movies in the history of American cinema more sacrosanct than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho from 1960, a film standing proudly alone as such a defining achievement in cinema that the mere notion of ever trying to cash in on it in any way is genuinely immoral. Which hasn’t stood […]

Many people (including Tim, which is why I’m the one covering this movie), have been turned off by the trailer of Bodies Bodies Bodies because of its artless display of the characters misappropriating Gen Z “woke” language. That’s notĀ not part of it, to be fair. But, like pretty much any A24 genre film, the publicity […]

Categories: mysteries, slashers