Reviewed under its original title, Eight for Silver, at the time of its premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival The Cursed somehow manages to be two irreconcilable things simultaneously: a thorough re-imagining of the werewolf movie that’s also the most traditional, formulaic werewolf movie in years and years. At the level of plot, it’s […]
At the dawn of the third decade of the 21st Century, I for one am ready to anoint Cartoon Saloon the finest animation studio in the world outside of Japan. The studio’s wonderful first three features – 2009’s The Secret of Kells, 2014’s Song of the Sea, 2017’s The Breadwinner – might have been enough […]
1974 is awfully damn late to be indulging in William Castle-style carnival barker tactics to sell a movie – that belongs to an age of cheesy B-movies, not an age of grim, violent grind house fodder. But that is, nonetheless, exactly what The Beast Must Die gets up to, over the vehement objections of its […]
Amicus Productions was only around a short time, from 1962 to 1977, and it produced a fairly small number of features, 28 in total (one of which it sold off rather than distribute under its own name). Despite this, it has one of the strongest reputations in the history of British genre film production. Of […]
Over the course of its horror-film heyday (1957-1974), Hammer Film Productions made four mummy films, seven Frankenstein films, two Jekyll & Hyde adaptations, three movies about evil cults, and a whopping 17 vampire pictures, nine of them involving Count Dracula. That covers most of the classic movie monsters, except for one: the werewolf. And as […]
Twice isn’t enough to make a trend, but it’s maybe cause for hope: apparently any animated franchise, no matter how crappy, can reach its third entry and simultaneously hit the “we don’t give a fuck” point, and suddenly become good. In 2012, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted succeeded in being the first Madagascar film that […]
There has historically been a one-to-one relationship in the Underworld films between Kate Beckinsale being onscreen and the films being even a little bit palatable to watch. In the fifth and very probably final entry in the series, Underworld: Blood Wars, we see less of Beckinsale than in any of the others besides the 2009 […]
In the week before the movie opened, Hotel Transylvania 2 director Genndy Tartakovsky sat for an interview with animation news site Cartoon Brew that’s breathtakingly direct in communicating his disappointment with the whole corporate structure in which he’s been obliged to work, and his frustration with his writers/executive producers Adam Sandler & Robert Smigel. One […]
Watching 1935’s Werewolf of London 80 years later is taking a peek into a history that never was. The first feature-length werewolf movie in English (and probably the first in all of sound cinema, though it does well to be a bit cagey with absolute pronouncements on the history of genre films) was one of […]
The first half of the 1990s were the worst time ever to be a fan of horror. Even the stretches of time where horror films weren’t being made were better, since at least the absence of horror is preferable to the virtually uninterrupted stream of shit that was North American genre filmmaking in the era […]
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 […]
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 […]
