Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

High school graduation! A time for stepping out into the world, for proclaiming one’s burgeoning adulthood and independence, for redressing past slights in a fountain of blood and viscera! Incidentally, as graduation is a season rather than an exact date, I have chosen to tie this Year of Blood essay to the 2012 commencement ceremonies […]

Ironically, because there is no mail on U.S. Memorial Day, I didn’t get Memorial Day in time for a Memorial Day review. But what’s one day between friends, especially when the net result is celebrating the sacrifice of our brave men and women of uniform with fucking and killing, just the way they’d have wanted […]

Mothers, those wonderful ladies who ruin so many children with their demented ways! Let us take a moment to thank them all for their domineering religiosity, their incestuous lust, their Puritanical hatred of sex, their whoring about with a cavalcade of strange men, or just their all-around emotional inaccessibility – all the wonderful things that […]

The distress call “mayday” is derived from the French “m’aider”, meaning “help me”, and has nothing at all to do with 1 May, also called May Day. But I still thought it was a fun bit of trivia to share with all of you. No, May Day is more about honoring the change of seasons, […]

Hi, my Jewish friends! You didn’t think I was going to leave y’all out of the vaguely-insulting fun, did you? Of course not, and here we are with a film that, by virtue of referencing in somewhat slapdash fashion the ten plagues of Egypt, is the closest thing the world has to a Passover-themed horror […]

I promise, I’m not trying to be the flippant atheist. My intellectual cover is that David Edelstein, in the article where he invented the phrase “torture porn”, named-dropped our Good Friday subject, but truth be told I was already planning this essay before I recalled that fact. It’s not, of course, a horror movie in […]

I’m tired of blogging. It takes hours, and I have to watch shitty movies, and I never get any money for it, so this is going to be my last essay ever. NO! I’m lying, because it is April 1st! Haha. I am really bad at April Fool’s jokes. But at least I’ve never killed […]

So we arrive at what is, as of March, 2012, the last film in the much-derided and wholly-deridable Leprechaun franchise, and the first of the six that can be plausibly considered as an actual sequel to anything that has gone before it. I speak of 2003’s Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood, of course, which doesn’t […]

In the wake of Leprechaun 4: In Space, the Leprechaun series really didn’t have any choice but to improve, assuming of course that in the wake of Leprechaun 4: In Space anybody still gave a shit about the franchise on any level. And initially, it seemed like nobody giving a shit was exactly the fate […]

There is a notion with some currency out in the wide world that outer space is where horror franchises go to die; it is the modern analogue to how every Universal Studios monster series famously ended with a visit from Abbott and Costello. To a certain degree, this trend is overstated, but there are enough […]

With Leprechaun 3 in 1995, the franchise made its perhaps inevitable leap to the muggy swamps of direct-to-video horror, from whence it never returned. “And who would be able to tell?” I thought during every cheap-ass moment of Leprechaun and Leprechaun 2, assuming that the chintzy props and bargain basement supporting casts and tacky lighting […]

You didn’t think I’d stop with just one? Faith and begorrah, there are six of the fecking things! The first Leprechaun wasn’t exactly a box-office dynamo, but it cost pocket change to make it, and profitable horror films weren’t on every street corner back in 1993, so Trimark Pictures greenlit a sequel in short order, […]