In the 50 years since Night of the Living Dead first introduced to the big screen the idea of mindlessly cannibalistic human revenants who spread themselves like a disease, the zombie movie has touched on just about every possible iteration of the basic scenario, in just about every possible setting, that one could reasonably imagine. […]
My hat’s off to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter: it surely does seem to mean its title literally. When it’s over, the series mythology has been wrapped up nice and snug, and while it leaves the promise that there will be many more adventures to be had in this universe, it does so in exactly […]
A review requested by Rob Graham, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I’m tempted to say that Messiah of Evil is good, but only by accident. Or good, but not on purpose. These are silly thoughts, of course: other than a very few heavily ironic examples, nobody starts […]
If we were to start off by directly comparing Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials to 2014’s The Maze Runner – and why shouldn’t we? For here we are, with Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials just dropped there right in front of us with all its petulant awfulness, like something the dog did on the carpet, […]
If I were to tell you that a movie called Zombeavers is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a 2015 movie (it’s been kicking around since the first half of 2014, but its commercial release was slow in coming), and you were to call me a piece of shit, no good […]
As an inveterate lover of making grand historical movements out of molehills, it pleases me to know end that it’s possible to pinpoint the exact year that American genre films switched from the classical to the modern age: 1968. In that year, both science fiction and horror made an immense, revolutionary leap forward, with a […]
A review requested by Eric “Sssonic” Mason, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There is a certain kind of film that has existed ever since the first generation of film school students began to direct features, and which came to its fullest prominence beginning in the 1990s, in […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/18 World premiere: 10 May, 2013, India You tell me if this sounds appealing or hopelessly stupid: modern stoner comedy classic Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle meets infamously terrible video game adaptation House of the Dead. I can’t actually say what it sounds like to me at this […]
If only by a small margin, Hot Fuzz probably has the stronger reputation; The World’s End is more sophisticated in all sorts of storytelling and filmmaking ways. But from where I stand, the very first feature made by director Edgar Wright, with stars Simon Pegg (who co-wrote with Wright) and Nick Frost, after the three […]
The first thing to admit is that World War Z is better than I assumed it would have any reason to be, if only because the very phrase “PG-13 zombie movie” is enough to make any True Genre Fan start dry-heaving. On the other hand, World War Z also fails to be as good as […]
As was true for a great many people born at the end of the 1970s or beginning of the 1980s, I suspect, Army of Darkness was the first film in the Evil Dead trilogy that I saw, by a margin of several years. For this exact reason, there’s always going to be a slightly abashed […]
By all means, The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness are grand movies: one terrifying, one wacky, and both a crazy amount of fun. But 1987’s Evil Dead II, the middle film in Sam Raimi’s best trilogy… it’s just well and truly special, a real once in a lifetime sort of movie. Astonishingly, a quarter […]
