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21 Apr

Evil Dead Rise: Change in Book of the Dead Lore Leaves Door Open for Bruce Campbell Return

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This post contains light spoilers for Evil Dead Rise. Since the late 1980s, one of the key characteristics of a budding cinephile was the ability to explain the relationship between 1981’s The Evil Dead and 1987’s Evil Dead II. Where the first movie introduced the world to director Sam Raimi‘s dynamic style, as well as star Bruce Campbell‘s unique charisma, its independent production meant that it only rose to the level of a cult hit. To expand the audience, Evil Dead II opens not by picking up where the first left off, with Campbell’s beleaguered Ash Williams potentially possessed, but…

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21 Apr

Evil Dead Rise Has a Lot of Blood But Little Heart

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We know one thing—two, actually—about writer/director Lee Cronin after watching Evil Dead Rise, the fifth installment in this long-lasting horror franchise and Cronin’s debut in the series. First, he clearly seems to love the Evil Dead franchise, as evident from the numerous callbacks and homages to Sam Raimi’s earlier classics. And second, he loves The Shining, as he throws a handful of cinematic tributes to Stanley Kubrick’s genre landmark into the mix as well (you’ll know then when you see them). Why? We’re not exactly sure, since Kubrick’s expensive studio masterpiece and Raimi’s DIY indie scrappers are about as far…

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21 Apr

Chevalier Defies Whitewashing of Historical Movies Like Marie Antoinette and Amadeus

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Director Stephen Williams’ new film, Chevalier, starts with a concert that shatters any preconceived notions audiences might have about classical music. Staid and unexciting, it is not, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen) is introduced at the height of his fame, on tour and performing in Paris. The audience loves the ebbs and the flows of the sound from the orchestra, and at the end of the concert, Mozart asks the audience for requests. It is then that a Black man who we later find out is Joseph Bologne (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) stands up and asks to play onstage with…

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21 Apr

Quasi: Adrianne Palicki Suits Up for Broken Lizard Version of The Hunchback Of Notre-Dame

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In most versions of the classic 1831 Victor Hugo tale, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the female protagonist is Esmeralda, a French Romani girl who is so beautiful that every major male character in the story either wants to marry her or seduce her. (She’s also only 16 in the novel—a book from over 200 years ago). For all her kindness and compassion, Esmeralda is basically treated terribly throughout the story and finally ends up hanged for a crime she didn’t commit, just as she reunites with her long-lost birth mother. Quasi, a satirical new take on the story from the…

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20 Apr

Beau Is Afraid: Joaquin Phoenix’s Mommy Issues Aren’t the Only Problems in Ari Aster Film

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Even if Beau Is Afraid, writer/director Ari Aster is not. This is evident since after two intense horror outings via his bracing debut Hereditary (2018) and the folk-horror epic Midsommar (2019), Aster’s third feature has now arrived as an intensely strange mash-up of that initial genre along with surreal psychodrama, black comedy, and an outright experimentalism that even dabbles in animation. It’s a deliberately weird stew. But like some of his contemporaries—I’m thinking of Damien Chazelle with Babylon and Robert Eggers with The Northman—Aster’s big swing is failing to connect. Beau Is Afraid is three hours long and feels every…

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19 Apr

Renfield Box Office Failure Won’t Stop Universal’s Next Two Dracula Movies

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Renfield was always a risk for Universal Pictures: a high-concept reimagining of the Dracula mythology via horror-comedy. But in more ways than one, it’s come up a disappointment for the studio after an opening weekend which saw the Nicolas Cage-starring vehicle debut in fourth place during its first three days—behind not only Universal’s own The Super Mario Bros. Movie (which dropped a mere 40.6 percent) but also the much cheaper horror movie, The Pope’s Exorcist. While Renfield walked away with $7.7 million in its debut, Russell Crowe as an exorcist compelled moviegoers to hand over $9.1 million this past weekend.…

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19 Apr

Beau Is Afraid Forced Nathan Lane to Overcome Fear of Ari Aster Movies

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Beau is afraid, but at one time Nathan Lane was pretty scared too… of Ari Aster movies. Then again, as he admits when we catch up to him on a sunny Monday morning, he couldn’t even bring himself to watch them until meeting Aster about what would become their first collaboration together: Beau. “I had only heard, heard, how extraordinary Hereditary was, and then Midsommar,” Lane says in the tone of a sheepish confessional. “It was one of those things where I would see Hereditary on my pay-per-view or whatever it was, and I’m like ‘I have to watch that…

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19 Apr

Alien and the Movies Inspired by the Ridley Scott Classic

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If you are artistically inclined, here’s a challenge for you. Design the dining area of a spaceship for a working class, blue-collar crew but, and here’s the catch, it can look nothing like the dining area of the commercial towing vehicle USCSS Nostromo. Let us know how many drafts you get through. It is a look that is so ubiquitous in spaceship design that we barely even register it anymore, and yet it is also completely distinctive. Whereas before Ridley Scott‘s Alien we had seen spaceships as naval ships, wagon trains, and disheveled VW camper vans, with the Nostromo we…

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18 Apr

David Johansen Talks Working With Martin Scorsese, The New York Dolls, and a Lifetime of Music

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Showtime’s Personality Crisis: One Night Only may showcase a multi-hyphenated personality – David Johansen is a band member, solo artist, and a songwriter who composed the show’s tunes for his own alter ego, Buster Poindexter – but there is no crisis. Co-directors Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi are documenting a party, Johansen’s 70th birthday in January 2020, which he spent at the Café Carlyle. Martin Scorsese knows how to set a table, serving up Thanksgiving dinner along with The Band for their farewell performance in The Last Waltz at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. But the fancy venue on Manhattan’s Upper…

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18 Apr

The Flash Movie Has an Amazing Michael Keaton Batman ’89 Callback

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By now, we all know one of The Flash movie’s key selling points is the return of Michael Keaton as the Dark Knight for the first time since 1992’s Batman Returns. Keaton is all over the marketing for what’s shaping up to be WB’s biggest superhero blockbuster of the year, reciting classic lines like “I’m Batman” right into the camera to the glee of all the ’80s and ’90s kids who grew up with his Caped Crusader. Director Andy Muschietti and his design team have even brought back the yellow oval on the Batsuit. Ezra Miller’s Scarlet Speedster is in…

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18 Apr

Unearthing the Greatest Vampire Movie You’ll Never Be Able to See

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“I want you to promise to keep this a secret, from everyone,” says Edward C. Burke, a mysterious professor played by mythic master of the macabre, Lon Chaney Sr. The line is a warning to a mourning daughter in the surviving screenplay for London After Midnight; it’s also part of the eeriest horror movies of the silent era. Unfortunately though, director Tod Browning’s 1927 classic has become one of the most inadvertently well-kept secrets of Hollywood, even as it remains one of the most influential works in horror movie history. If only we could see it. While the film has…

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18 Apr

Super Mario Bros. Hype Could Make Video Game Movies the New Superheroes

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There was nary a soul in Hollywood who didn’t expect The Super Mario Bros. Movie to be number one at the box office during its second weekend. The long anticipated animated flick is an adaptation of the most popular video game franchise in the world, it’s been building hype for months, and as we’ve previously noted, it was also the first new family film released by a studio in four months. Mario was primed to power up in weekend two. Still, even for that Italian plumber, the meager 40.6 percent drop between first and second weekends is close to astonishing.…

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18 Apr

Ant-Man 3’s Ending Might Have Fooled Us All

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This article contains major Ant-Man 3 spoilers We’re shrinking down once again, and as Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania comes to streaming, it’s time to look back at the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s divisive Phase 5 debut. Paul Rudd’s pint-sized hero joins OG Avengers Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor in the exclusive trilogy club, while boosting the Multiverse Saga forward. Despite Quantumania putting the pieces in place for the franchise-shattering Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), some argue you could’ve skipped the end without missing much – apart from MODOK’s CGI butt. Whispers from behind the scenes suggest the…

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17 Apr

Kevin Feige Star Wars Movie Mess Just Got Even More Confusing

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Will we ever know what we really went down when Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness scribe Michael Waldron set out to make their very own Star Wars movie? That remains to be seen. What we do know for sure is that the movie isn’t happening. Or was never happening at all. It really depends on who you ask at Disney. The latest update on this “shelved” project comes from Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy herself, who sat down with IGN to set the record straight during Star Wars Celebration 2023. Unfortunately, her comments…

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17 Apr

Renfield Team Talks Potential of Exploring Universal Monsters’ World

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In the new horror comedy monster flick Renfield, actor Nicholas Hoult is the titular character, a human familiar who has spent more than a century in servitude to the world’s worst boss, the vampire Count Dracula, played with relish by Nicolas Cage. And as directed by Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie), and based on a story by producer Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), this Universal film adds a chapter to Tod Browning’s classic 1931 Dracula, imagining that Bram Stoker’s vampire lived on before ultimately taking refuge in modern-day New Orleans. As he recovers from his latest row with slayers,…

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17 Apr

Ian Fleming’s Original James Bond Looked Nothing Like the Start of a Sexy Movie Franchise

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Happy birthday, Mr. Bond. It was 70 years ago last week (April 13, 1953, to be exact) that author Ian Fleming published Casino Royale, the first novel to feature his soon-to-be-iconic British secret agent, James Bond. Fleming had worked as a journalist earlier in his life and served extensively in British intelligence during World War II, two aspects of his background that provided lots of context and material for Bond’s exploits. Fleming’s own habits of drinking, smoking, gambling, and womanizing provided much of the rest. “When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely…

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16 Apr

The Weirdest Dracula Movie Adaptations

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Some things never go out of style, and Dracula is one of them. Bram Stoker’s novel helped to fully define the vampire in the cultural consciousness. Almost 130 years since its publication, it remains hugely popular, with the new horror comedy Renfield giving the one and only Nicolas Cage a chance to don the cape. The vampiric character is the most adapted in film and television history aside from Sherlock Holmes, so we have a full century of bloodsucking variety to revel in. There are the classics, of course, from Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola’s famous…

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16 Apr

The Last Voyage of the Demeter Director Wants to Make ‘The Scariest Dracula Movie Ever’

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An eclectic, wearied crew of working class stiffs; a mysterious last-minute change in the manifest that has them claiming unknown cargo; and a beast beneath the boards that’s picking them off one by one. It sounds like the stuff of Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking sci-fi/horror mashup, Alien (1979), but it could just as easily describe a brief and brutal section of Bram Stoker’s original 1897 novel, Dracula. The last voyage of the Demeter, a Russian sailing vessel intended to cross between 19th century Bulgaria and Victorian England, comprises a mere five pages in the book, but they’ve left an impression on…

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15 Apr

The Best Nicolas Cage Movies Ranked

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There never has been a movie star quite like Nicolas Cage. While obviously handsome and gifted with backlogs of charisma, beneath the surface there lies an unmistakable hunger, a sense of searching, and what some might even call a mania to take a role to its fullest extreme. Even when Cage is taking the “paycheck” parts, be it in glossy ‘90s Hollywood star vehicles or some of his lesser 2010s straight-to-digital efforts, the actor’s tangible desire to push boundaries and experiment is nothing short of riveting. In a Reddit AMA, Cage once said the following about his craft: “I think…

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15 Apr

The Last Kingdom Movie Ending Explained: Seven Kings Must Die’s Last Scene

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Warning: contains major spoilers for the Seven Kings Must Die ending. That battle was the crowning moment of Seven Kings Must Die, twenty-plus minutes of visceral squelch and blood flying on a scale that The Last Kingdom hasn’t seen before. But after the fighting was over, when the dead had been counted and the wounded carried away to their fates, the film ended with a quiet scene that concluded a thread woven throughout this story from the start. Alfred’s dream was finally achieved – England was formed – not by him, nor by Edward, but by King Aethelstan and Uhtred…

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