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 […]
A review requested by David, 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! Miike Takashi’s whole “thing”, as I suppose most people who know two things about him are aware (if […]
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 […]
The Tragedy of Macbeth comes burdened with a simply relentless amount of baggage, as much as any motion picture released in 2021. First, there’s the matter of the material itself: why in God’s name do we need another film of Macbeth? It is perhaps the Shakespeare play to have been the best-served by the movies: […]
Since the moment that the first Resident Evil film appeared way back in 2002, that movie and its five sequels have come under attack from fans of the video game series, on the charges of reckless infidelity to the source material. To be entirely fair, they also have come under attack from critics and audiences […]
If I may risk dipping my toes into The Discourse, I would like to offer a thought. It is possible for two things to be simultaneously true: first, that smartphones and social media have absolutely turned the brains of everyone under the age of 45 into mashed bananas, and left us a society unable to […]
The phrase “elevated horror” gets bandied about pretty freely for something that has no concrete definition beyond “the kind of horror movies distributed by A24”. But there’s certainly something going on that deserves a word to describe it, a strain of unconnected movies that mix in horror with serious character drama. It is a very […]
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 […]
A paradox about Titane, and not the only one, is that it almost certainly didn’t deserve to win the 2021 Palme d’Or, and also it’s extremely cool and exciting that it did so. The Palme is probably the major film award with the best batting average, quality-wise, so I don’t mean to impugn it in […]
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 […]
With Don’t Breathe 2, it becomes officially impossible not to conclude that co-writers Fede Álvarez & Rodo Sayagues just don’t know how audience identification and sympathy work. Their 2016 thriller Don’t Breathe (directed by Álvarez) was broadly liked, but certainly not by me: I found it to have wantonly miscalculated in assuming we’d effortlessly side […]
