New DVD release

19 Jan

Scream 6 Trailer Honors Franchise’s Most Iconic Kill with Easter Egg

New DVD release

It may have taken 11 years for Hollywood to deliver a fifth Scream movie, but 2022’s soft reboot took off its black gloves and butchered the competition via Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s genre-defining requel. And now it’s “New York, new rules” for Scream 6, as the previous film’s surviving crop of tormented teens leaves Woodsboro for the Big Apple. Scream 6 is poised to be one of 2023’s biggest horrors, and it’s already honored its history with a brilliant marketing poster which retraced the past 27 years of spills and kills. Now the first full trailer confirms the next…

Read More

19 Jan

King Kong: When Peter Jackson Tried to Bring Horror to Blockbuster Cinema

New DVD release

In 2005, Hollywood did the unthinkable—it launched a remake of the 1933 cinematic masterpiece, King Kong. This was not the first attempt to do so, although if anything the previous attempts were cautionary tales about why you should never attempt to remake King Kong. The first, in 1976, replaced the original’s groundbreaking stop-motion effects with a guy in a gorilla suit and a hugely expensive, life-sized mechanical gorilla that provided a total of 15 seconds of usable footage. The second was an attempt in the late ‘90s to remake the film with an up-and-coming indie horror director better known for…

Read More

18 Jan

How Julia Louis-Dreyfus Altered Her MCU Character

New DVD release

While MCU Phase Four was a decidedly mixed bag, one of the most important developments was the introduction of Contessa Valentina de Fontaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Valentina made her MCU debut at the end of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, providing the USAgent identity to failed Captain America replacement John Walker. Since then, Valentina has been operating on the side-lines of the MCU, most notably meddling in Wakandan affairs in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. For those who limit their superhero diet to live-action entries, Valentina is still a mysterious figure. But comic book readers recognize the character as…

Read More

18 Jan

How Horror Movies Dominate in the Age of TikTok and Social Media

New DVD release

It’s like a scene from Carrie right now in Hollywood as the corn syrup flows and horror ascends back to the top. While the likes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe duke it out with behemoths like Avatar and the Fast & Furious movies, horror has been quietly, and consistently, carving its own path. It’s also been unafraid to get its hands dirty. Whereas Avatar: The Way of Water strives to make between $1.5 and $2 billion just to break even (depending on who you ask), our bloodlust proves that horror doesn’t need all the bells and…

Read More

17 Jan

Lord of the Rings: Saruman the Red and the Weirdest Choices in the Animated Movies

New DVD release

By the late 1970s, there were two major animated adaptations of The Lord of the Rings in development. Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, known for their holiday season specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman, had directed an animated dramatization of The Hobbit for television, broadcast in 1977 and they were planning a sequel, also for television, based on The Lord of the Rings. But filmmaker and animator Ralph Bakshi beat them to it in 1978 when he directed an animated feature film, The Lord of the Rings, which he intended to be Part 1 of…

Read More

16 Jan

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Is the Most Original James Bond Movie

New DVD release

For a long time, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the “lost” James Bond film. The sixth in the series, released in 1969, it came out at a time when tastes were changing and the initial Bond-mania of the mid-1960s had arguably peaked. It also didn’t help matters that Sean Connery had left the role following the previous movie, You Only Live Twice, and that producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman decided to go with an inexperienced unknown from Australia, George Lazenby, as the new 007. Although the film did reasonably well at the box office, with $82 million…

Read More

14 Jan

Rian Johnson Movies Ranked from Worst to Best

New DVD release

When Rian Johnson’s Brick arrived at Sundance in 2005, it was a bit like its namesake being thrown through a window. Here was a first-time feature, from a guy barely out of his 20s, talking about the high school experience. That wasn’t the unusual part for a Sundance indie though; the strange bit is that Johnson had made the high school experience look indistinguishable from a Dashiell Hammett novel. Brick was a full-throated, grizzled-to-the-bone noir about characters barely old enough to shave! This has of course been the fascinating paradox of Johnson’s career as it’s unfolded over the last several…

Read More

14 Jan

The Menu’s Chef Is the Real Villain But Not for Reason You Think

New DVD release

This article contains spoilers for The Menu. Recent filmmaking has seen growth in a particular subgenre that, for the sake of brevity, we will call “Eat the Rich.” We meet a bunch of rich people, they are dreadful, and then they are either murdered or exposed, or made to suffer in one way or another. We have seen it in Glass Onion, in Triangle of Sadness, and we have seen it in the anthology series The White Lotus. The message of these stories is invariably that “these are dreadful people and every bad thing that happens to them is something…

Read More

13 Jan

Why Fast Five Is a Perfect Fast and Furious Sequel

New DVD release

This article contains Fast and Furious franchise spoilers It’s sort of amazing just how far The Fast and the Furious franchise has come—that it is even a franchise at all—when you consider where we started. The 2001 film could very easily have been a cheesy CW-esque drama fueled by biceps and bravado. But amid the roaring engines and nitrous-boosted action, there was the kernel of something special. The relationship between Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) elevated the film above base melodrama, and even though many of the subsequent films struggled to recapture the magic, the fifth…

Read More

13 Jan

Plane and M3GAN Show January B-Movies Don’t Have to Suck

New DVD release

January movies suck. Right? At least that’s always been the conventional wisdom. Just as movies released in the second half of August and early September are considered to be weak stragglers and cast-offs after the summer rush, the post-holiday haze of the very beginning of a New Year is supposed to be the same kind of repository for the trash that isn’t awards-worthy or good enough to spend a lot of marketing dollars on. After all, the kids are back in school, no one has money, so who cares? The truth of the matter, however, is that over the years…

Read More

13 Jan

12 Marvel Character Appearances Cut from the MCU

New DVD release

This article contains some MCU spoilers With the Marvel Comics we know today being founded in 1939 (originally known as Timely Comics), there are decades of stories and characters ready to be adapted for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Navigating a Galactus-sized franchise like the MCU means we expected some characters would be lost to the Multiverse. Whether it’s old favourites stopping by for a cameo or a brand-new addition being saved for another day, it’s more than the odd scene being left on the cutting room floor. Sometimes, whole characters are given the boot and banished to Gorr the God…

Read More

13 Jan

Edgar Allan Poe’s Haunting Cycle of Vincent Price Films

New DVD release

If you’ve watched the new Netflix mystery drama, The Pale Blue Eye, then you’ve seen a work of fiction in which a young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) helps Detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) in his attempts to solve a series of murders at New York’s West Point Military Academy. Of course while the real-life Poe did in fact attend West Point (and was later court-martialed and drummed out, partially on purpose), the man is much better known as the legendary author, poet, literary critic, and editor who is widely regarded as the inventor of detective fiction, a…

Read More

13 Jan

Friday the 13th: When Did Jason Voorhees Become the Hero of His Franchise?

New DVD release

This article contains Freddy vs. Jason spoilers. As a wrestling fan, one of the things I always found interesting was the idea of a match where it was bad guy vs. bad guy. In a form of entertainment based on cheering on the hero, the heel vs. heel scenario makes you question who the lesser evil is. Do you side with the kleptomaniac obsessed with repossessing people’s property or the supernatural voodoo priest who makes his opponents secrete black ooze from their foreheads? The egotistical male model or the egotistical gigolo? The flamboyant bullies or the evil rich guys? Horror…

Read More

12 Jan

Star Wars Just Redeemed a Controversial Revenge of the Sith Character

New DVD release

This Star Wars article contains spoilers for The Bad Batch. Eleven movies later, Revenge of the Sith remains the darkest chapter in the Star Wars film saga: the Jedi are all but decimated, the Dark Lord of the Sith becomes Emperor of the galaxy, Anakin Skywalker is transformed into an evil cyborg monstrosity named Darth Vader, and Luke and Leia are orphaned after Padme’s death. Back in 2005, fans already knew most of these things were coming. After all, everything established in 1977 about the Empire, Vader, Luke, and Obi-Wan had to be set up in the final Prequel film.…

Read More

12 Jan

Edgar Allan Poe’s Scariest Story Unearthed a Real Murder Mystery

New DVD release

Written and directed by Scott Cooper, Netflix’s The Pale Blue Eye gazes on the young poet Edgar Allan Poe, played by Harry Melling, who would go on to invent the detective mystery with his short story “Murders at the Rue Morgue.” Based on Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel, The Pale Blue Eye is set in 1830 at the West Point Military Academy where the body of Cadet Leroy Fry (Matt Heim) is found hanging from a tree with his heart cut out of his chest. Poe entered West Point as a cadet on July 1, 1830. By October he had enough…

Read More

12 Jan

Damien Chazelle Breaks Down Babylon’s Sordid Hollywood History

New DVD release

This article contains Babylon spoilers. Despite the lurid imagery associated with Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s three-hour bacchanal of a movie about Golden Age Hollywood, it wasn’t wretched excess or decadence which first caught Chazelle’s imagination. Nor was it the glamor and gaudiness associated with a new (read: low) art form in those heady days when the silent era gave way to the earliest sound films. Rather the inciting idea for Babylon is borne from a simple yet disturbing bit of trivia on the mortality rate in Los Angeles—and how the number of deaths seemingly caused by suicide rose precipitously during the…

Read More

11 Jan

Letterboxd Reveals the Bad Movies People Love Anyway

New DVD release

As much as we love Mystery Science Theater 3000, Red Letter Media, and The Flop House, it’s time that we face the truth: there’s really no such thing as a bad movie. Sure, there are movies we may personally dislike for one reason or another, but when we use phrases like “so bad it’s good” or “guilty pleasure,” we’re twisting ourselves into knots trying to say something quite simple: this movie makes me happy, regardless of its quality or what other people think. The film-centric social media site Letterboxd has made that fact plain with a newly-released list of movies…

Read More

11 Jan

Glass Onion: Do Whodunit Mysteries Need to Play Fair with the Audience?

New DVD release

Major spoilers for Glass Onion, Knives Out, and several Agatha Christie novels. With Netflix’s Glass Onion, Rian Johnson has produced another highly enjoyable detective story. Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc has the perfect Poirot-inspired blend of likeability, slight ridiculousness, and believably extreme intelligence to anchor this type of tale. The mystery itself is intriguing with well-drawn characters and the same lightness of touch combined with subtle social commentary, and it has one of movie history’s more fun red herring characters just wandering around in the background throughout. However, if we approach Glass Onion as first and foremost a whodunnit, we cannot…

Read More

11 Jan

Every Marvel Movie and TV Show Coming in 2023

New DVD release

This article contains MCU spoilers It’s a new year and a new phase for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as the dust settles on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and we look at what comes next. Phase 4 of the MCU had the honor of uniting the worlds of TV and movies, with Disney+ helping bring the likes of WandaVision, Loki, and What If…? To the Multiverse Saga. Despite critics calling out franchise fatigue, there’s no rest for wicked (we’re looking at you, Agatha Harkness), thanks to a packed slate adding even more movies and shows to an already bulging roster. Beyond…

Read More

10 Jan

Luther Movie: Andy Serkis Teases Extremely Dark Villain

New DVD release

Andy Serkis knows a thing or two about being dark. The actor came to most people’s attention with his performance as Gollum in Lord of the Rings, shocking audiences with his portrayal of a goblin creature. Since then, he has returned to darkness many times, most recently bringing killer symbiote Carnage to the big screen by directing Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Heck, even his take on Alfred Pennyworth in The Batman had seen some things. But few roles have disturbed Serkis like millionaire David Robey, the villain he plays in the upcoming movie Luther: The Fallen Sun. Speaking with…

Read More