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 […]

There are two claims I would like to make about Saw X, and both of them surprise the hell out of me. The weaker claim, which is still a bit on the aggressive side, is that Saw X is the best of the ten Saw films stretching back to 2004, though the series has been […]

A review requested by STinG, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. If there is such a thing as “objective” quality in cinema, then Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is objectively a bad movie. Fortunately, there is no such thing as objective quality in cinema. Sure, you could point to lots […]

A review requested by Michael, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! We have absolutely no evidence that this is actually how it went down (arguably, we have evidence to […]

The sad thing about Evil Dead Rise is that it is so extremely happy to be an Evil Dead movie. Writer-director Lee Cronin is clearly a huge fan of the series, and has put great effort into making sure his movie evokes all sorts of specific lines and story beats and whatnot. One might say, […]

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 […]

In 2017, John Wick: Chapter 2 opened by showing footage from the 1924 Buster Keaton comedy Sherlock Jr., one of the greatest stunt-driven movies of all time, and the gesture was an obvious, swaggering brag: “what we’re up to here is just as good as Keaton”. And for the next two hours, director Chad Stahelski […]

“Wouldn’t it be WILD if a black bear got totally fucked-up on cocaine?” “Yes, it sure would.” “Like, don’t you think that a bear on cocaine would just be CRAZY?” “It, yes, that would be weird, I wouldn’t want to meet that bear.” “Like, it’s a BEAR, and it’s on COCAINE.” “I mean, you said […]

Bones and All, the seventh feature film directed by Luca Guadagnino, is kind of about cannibalism, and this is where it gets itself into trouble. No film should be “kind of” about cannibalism. Some subjects just don’t allow for half measures. You should never walk out of a film whose protagonists are cannibals – bisexual […]

The most obvious way to sum up Violent Night – and when I say “most obvious”, I mean “so obvious that the film itself does so, explicitly” – is that it combines modern cinema’s two foremost Christmas classics that aren’t really in any significant way about Christmas, 1988’s Die Hard and 1990’s Home Alone, and […]

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 […]

To have come so close to losing the rights to the Hellraiser brand that one must quickly rush out a sequel for contractual reasons is sloppiness. To have done this twice begins to feel like deliberate sabotage. And yet, seven years after Hellraiser: Revelations was (barely) released in 2011, Dimension Films once again had to […]