It was perhaps inevitable that a summer camp slasher was going to be set at a conversion camp eventually. It was probably less inevitable that it would be the directorial debut of John Logan, the screenwriter of The Last Samurai and The Aviator, but that’s what we get with They/Them (pronounced They Slash Them, get it?), a project […]
I don’t know what was going on in 2018, but the odds of this happening twice seems too high for it to be pure coincidence: a long-running slasher film franchise that had gotten snarled on insoluble convoluted and self-contradicting inter-film continuity rebooted itself by tossing out everything that had created that snarl, making a new […]
Sometimes, the peculiar alchemy of what makes a film click with an audience can never be fully understood, but merely accepted as what is, part of the ineffable magic of the movies. This is not the case with the six Leprechaun films that were released between 1993 and 2003. Every person who’s ever seen even […]
More than one filmmaker has burst onto the scene with one really good horror movie and built a career out of insubstantial remakes of that one movie. So for that alone, one must extend no small amount of credit to Frank Hennenlotter, whose 1982 debut feature Basket Case was rather more than just “one really […]
There’s no reason for a film as flat and uninspired as Leatherface to have taken such a painful path into the world as it did. The short version: Lionsgate and Millennium Films acquired the rights to make several Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels, but ended up dawdling so long on releasing the two it actually paid […]
There was a stretch of time around the end of the 2000s and the start of the 2010s where Ti West was pretty much the hippest director of English-language horror films. And then, for absolutely no reason I can confidently point to, he simply wasn’t there any more. His last horror feature was The Sacrament […]
There have now been eight sequels, remakes, prequels, or prequels-to-remakes of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror-redefining masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I think it is relatively easy to argue that every single one of them is bad. Hooper’s own 1986 follow-up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has its enthusiastic partisans, among whom I don’t number, […]
The fifth film in the Scream franchise has not been titled 5cream, which is all the proof you need that we live in a cruel, arbitrary universe devoid of meaning or justice. But other than that, this is a pretty snappy addition to the longrunning slasher movie franchise begun by a different movie with the […]
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 […]
In a bleak age for big studio moviemaking, when not all that many directors seem to really love their job, and even fewer seem to love the medium, we are blessed to have someone like James Wan. The man palpably, overwhelmingly, desperately loves movies, and at their best, his projects are so overripe and juicy […]
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 […]
