The story of how Hellraiser: Hellseeker came into being as the sixth film in the Hellraiser franchise, the second to go direct-to-video, is rather more complicated than it ought to be. The short version is that it’s a heavily rewritten version of a script, titled Hellraiser: The Hellseeker (note the definite article), that was commissioned […]
Five films into a series that hasn’t really shown any signs of losing its audience is an odd time to decide to course-correct for quality; even less so when the series is the signature franchise of Illumination, an animation studio that has never yet indicated that it feels terribly worried about quality in any meaningful […]
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 […]
Was there any sense in which the world was clamoring for a sequel to 1986’s Top Gun? Any indication that the story told in that film was incomplete, or that it would be fruitful to return to its immodestly thin characters and scenario and see what else could be drawn from them? I would say […]
The new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel Death on the Nile written by Michael Green and directed by Kenneth Branagh is an almost perfect lateral move, quality-wise from the 2017 adaptation of Christie’s 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express, also written by Green and directed by Branagh. In a sense, this already speaks […]
So here we are, lucky number 13 – Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen, to be precise. And executive producer Jerry Pfeifer (the only common link between all thirteen of those films) and the good people at Vista Street Entertainment pulled out all the stops to celebrate hitting that milestone, having become the first (and […]
There’s no reason that Sing 2 had to be better than 2016’s Sing. Illumination has gotten a lot of mileage out of putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into their movies, and their sequels have generally been the worst of a sorry lot. Not that I assume that the development meeting for Sing 2 started out […]
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 […]
I had a short conversation with a friend about Venom: Let There Be Carnage that seemed pretty all-encompassing: he felt that the best parts of 2018’s Venom were the scenes where Tom Hardy played off of Michelle Williams, and since there are fewer of those in Let There Be Carnage, he thought it was a […]
The weird thing about Candyman – second film of that exact title, and an explicit sequel to the first, which I get is like a “thing” we have now, but I sure don’t like it – is that the one thing it was supposed to be doing, it’s kind of very terrible at, and the […]
The Suicide Squad is one of the most pleasantly “that was exactly the movie I assumed it would be” movies in ages. That is to say: it has always been very clear that it would be better than 2016’s Suicide Squad, to which it is a very vaguely-related sequel. It has also always been very […]
2019’s Escape Room is a fun and not-particularly-good thriller: fun mostly because of the ingenuity and narrative utility of its set design, not particularly good mostly because of its unbelievably stupid worldbuilding and attempt to paste a techno-paranoia mythology onto the gimmick “what if you died for real when you fucked up an escape room?” […]
