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 […]
“Hello, my friends. I want to put on record that the flic out there using the word Hellraiser IS NO FUCKIN’ CHILD OF MINE! I have NOTHING to do with the fuckin’ thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.” -Clive Barker, who […]
Hellraiser: Hellworld was made during the second half of the same production block as Hellraiser: Deader, during the final weeks of 2002; the two shoots shared virtually an entirely identical production crew, working in both cases underneath director Rick Bota (the one significant change is that Deader cinematographer Vivi Dragan Vasile was replaced on Hellworld […]
There are a few different ways we can make sense of the title of Mad God, a new stop-motion animated feature that’s also not very new at all: with some footage dating back to 1989, it’s one of the longest-in-production films to have ever been released. But probably the simplest explanation is the one we […]
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 […]
Frank Henenlotter deserves at least this much credit: he has not lied about what went on in the creation of Basket Case 3: The Progeny, and he does not pretend that it turned out perfectly well. Basically, 1990’s Basket Case 2 went so well that he and everybody else wanted to get a jump on […]
Crimes of the Future, the second film of that title directed by David Cronenberg, is two contradictory things at one and the same time. On the one hand, it’s the director’s return to fleshy grotesques, more than two decades after he abandoned his characteristic mode of body horror (a term he does not use) for […]
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 […]
The phrase “elevated horror” is one I am very reluctant to use, since its meaning seems to generally land on something amorphous like “horror movies that people who think they’re too good for horror movies are willing to praise”. But there’s definitely something there, and “elevated horror” is as good a shorthand to describe that […]
I’m always a sucker for films that tell us early on how we are to approach them, and The Northman – the third feature film directed by Robert Eggers after 2015’s The Witch and 2019’s The Lighthouse, and the one where I’m comfortable declaring in front of all the world that he’s officially my favorite […]
A review requested by Mandy, 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! Everyone knows who knows anything about Peter Jackson’s third feature film as a director – first released in […]
