Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

The found footage horror movie, birthed by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and thrust into the big time by 2008’s Cloverfield, burned itself out rather quickly, as will happen to a genre so cheap that you need neither a good idea nor talent to whip together something which enough damn fools will trudge out to […]

Our long national nightmare is over: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 has come out, and brought an end to the beloved teen paranormal love triangle franchise that began four achingly long years ago with Twilight, in which an insipid young woman falls in love with a shiny vampire who embodies all of […]

Though Isle of the Dead was the second horror film released by Val Lewton’s RKO production unit in 1945, it was the first one started; it was beset by backstage difficulties, and The Body Snatcher was made during a gap in production as Isle‘s cast was impossible to gather back together. It was also the […]

At the very least, Hotel Transylvania, the years-in-Development-Hell cartoon about classic movie monsters all gathered together in a remote castle built by Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) to shelter them from the probing eyes and torch-wielding fists of humans, has pretty fun character design. This I take to be characteristic of director Genndy Tartakovsky’s work, consisting […]

Calling Dark Shadows a return to form for director Tim Burton would be a damnable lie. It is, however, the first Tim Burton film in ages and ages that suggest that a return to form might even be possible. If I were looking for a pithy one-liner to describe the film, it would end up […]

Every Sunday this summer – and between the Year of Blood and a nightmarish stretch of shaky internet, I wasn’t able to get this in on Sunday, but let’s make believe – we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor […]

Sometimes, we compare movies to fast food: usually McDonald’s and usually in the context, “Some entertainment is like McDonald’s – no damn good, but it’s comforting to know what you’re getting”. This is a lazy comparison, but it has the benefit of being a really poppy image that anybody who’s ever eaten at a McDonald’s, […]

It’s precisely three shots into The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 that Taylor Lautner takes his shirt off, and in all honesty I don’t suppose that there can possibly be a more legitimate justification for seeing the movie. Actually, the shocking thing about Breaking Dawn 1 is that, after three years and four […]

Insofar as remaking any given 1980s horror film can be rightly said to make sense, it still doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to remake 1985’s Fright Night, a self-conscious throwback whose charms are largely a function of its position in history: it is an attempt to make an old-fashioned, embarrassingly so, […]

When last we saw director Scott Stewart and actor Paul Bettany collaborating, it was on a religious-themed action/horror hybrid that had virtually nothing to do with anything resembling coherent real-world theology, and it involved undead monsters that were a damn sight cooler than the insipid movie they found themselves inhabiting; it was called Legion. Now […]

Every Sunday this 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 one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: it’s the nature of vampires, being that they are creatures of evil, that they must be hunted by warriors […]

Let Me In is the best English-language vampire movie in ages. Ages. That must not be denied (though with competition like Twilight, we must ask ourselves: is it that big of an achievement). If it suffers, it is only because of 2008’s Let the Right One In, the best vampire film, irrespective of language (it’s […]