This review is based on the most commonly-available copy recorded from the broadcast by the CBS affiliate in Baltimore, MD, with all commercial breaks intact. When we began our little retrospective of the Star Wars franchise, I asked you to do something unfathomably difficult, and pretend that it was 1977, and you just saw Star […]
A review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny isn’t an inexplicable movie. Hell, I’m about to explicate it here in just a moment. But it’s exactly the kind of movie that feels inexplicable, colliding random nonsense in […]
Speaking entirely personally, you understand, I’d be quick to identify the 1980s as the worst decade in the history of American filmmaking (though I recognise the strong argument in favor of giving that title to the 1960s, and frankly, the 2010s aren’t heading in a very promising direction). It was a formulaic, money-driven, recklessly safe […]
Don’t miss the first part of this two-part review! It says everything that the titular character character from the 1997 Jack Frost is the soul of a serial killer, who turned his victims into meat pies, inhabiting a snowman who murders people, including one whose face he bites off with his icicle teeth, and he […]
Those of you who’ve been around for a while have undoubtedly picked up on my certain disdain for movies that play the “we know we’re making a bad movie, so it’s actually funny that our movie is bad” card. And oh my Lord, does the 1997 direct-to-video Jack Frost lean on that conceit as unrelentingly […]
It is not possible to talk about the Hollywood star system or film culture or really mass media in general as those things existed in the 1930s without talking about Shirley Temple. She defines her era in a way that very few movie performers have: she was the most popular movie star in the world […]
The Best Man Holiday – which possesses a truly awful title, I hope we can all agree; even a simple apostrophe-s after “Man” would have helped – is the weirdest sequel of the year, greeted with some awfully hostile “why on earth are you bothering?” criticisms. I wish more films would do exactly the same […]
Who’d have thought it would take three direct-to-video sequels to get the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise back to its roots? Not psychopaths dressed as Santa: that playfully tawdry premise had run itself out with the first movie, and wasn’t coming back, because that might result in some kind of decent horror picture, and there […]
After three movies, the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise had apparently exhausted itself – in point of fact, it had done so after the first Silent Night, Deadly Night, but it took people a couple of horribly misjudged sequels to figure that out – because 1990’s Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation found the series […]
With 1989’s Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!, the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise made a jump that was not uncommon for horror around the start of the ’90s: onto VHS. Usually, the shift in a series from theatrical releases, even very trifling, meaningless ones, over to direct-to-video productions is the clearest sign […]
In an ironic twist that could only be seen coming by everybody, the film with the extravagantly notorious reputation – the film that was protested right out of theaters in one of the few times such a trick actually worked for the morally outraged protestors – ended up generating so much interest that, instead of […]
Christmas! The bloodiest, most vicious holiday of them all! Or at least that is what the preponderance of yuletide horror pictures would have you believe. Clearly, I cannot let such an important day for death and destruction go by with just a single review, and thus I no a launch a full week with the […]
