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14 Oct

Hellraiser: Are Pinhead and the Cenobites Demons or Angels?

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Director David Bruckner’s Hellraiser reboot just made a big and gooey splash on Hulu. In its messy aftermath, folks are discovering the old burning questions fans have long had about the world of Cenobites and chains: Are these creatures, created by Clive Barker, demons out of the actual biblical Hell, and is their menacing puzzle box (aka the Lament Configuration) a gateway to the whole of damnation, debasement, and diabolical disfiguration? Or is it something more… delicious? The original Pinhead in 1987 teased that they are “demons to some, angels to others.” So can these monsters represent a more heavenly…

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14 Oct

Halloween III: Season Of The Witch – The Inside Story Of A Cult Classic

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In the modern era of movie making, where the franchise is king, sequels haven’t just become a byproduct of box office success, they’ve become an inevitability.  Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the world of horror. Deliver 90 minutes plus of scares to large swathes of the cinema-going public and the chances are an order for seconds will be up before the original movie has even left multiplexes.  Blame it on market forces and the fact movie-making is fundamentally a money-making enterprise, but the results have proven gruesome for fans, in every sense of the word.  While critically-lauded sequels…

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14 Oct

10 Deleted Scenes That Would Have Completely Changed the MCU

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This article contains MCU spoilers. It’s been 14 years since Robert Downey Jr. first stepped into our lives as Iron Man, and across four phases, a whole Infinity Saga, and more Easter eggs than we care to count, the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to go from strength to strength.  The journey from page to screen is never an easy one, and while the MCU packs a lot into its runtimes, there’s inevitably some stuff that gets left on the cutting room floor. Whether it be post-credit stingers or entire characters, the carefully-crafted franchise could be completely upturned by axing a…

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14 Oct

Best Horror Movies of the Last 15 Years

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Fifteen years ago, the term “elevated” and “horror” rarely shared the same sentence, lest someone was talking about the setting of Snakes on a Plane; found footage was considered the spookiest new trend in terrifying audiences; and at least according to box office receipts, October signaled one thing: It was time for a new Saw movie. So, yes, things have changed a lot in horror and the larger moviemaking landscape in the years since Den of Geek launched in 2007. And through it all, we’ve been there to cover how 21st century horror cinema seemed to come of age. After…

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14 Oct

Halloween Ends Review: Do You Promise?

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How do you explain what is at the center of a black hole? By definition, the color black is the absence of light. Trying to comprehend that on a cosmic scale, where a vast inky emptiness is so overwhelming that literal light cannot escape its gravitational pull, remains difficult to fathom, be ye astronomers or storytellers. Take this weekend’s Halloween Ends for example. For two movies now, director David Gordon Green and his team of co-writers, which includes Danny McBride, have attempted to graph a rationalization for the absolute absence of light onto John Carpenter’s Boogeyman made flesh. Which is…

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13 Oct

Star Wars Brings Back Original Trilogy Legend for New Disney+ Series

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Somehow, Palpatine returned. Again. Okay, that’s not a real surprise, especially for an animated series like Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi, which is set in the Prequel Trilogy era. Created by Dave Filoni and Charles Murray, the Disney+ series tells the story of young Jedi Ahsoka Tano and Count Dooku before he abandoned the Jedi and fell to the dark side. Along the way, Ahsoka and Dooku encounter many familiar faces, including Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, and yes, Senator-turned-Chancellor-turned-Emperor Sheev Palpatine. As one would hope, the series features a number of fan-favorite actors returning to their signiture roles. Although…

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13 Oct

The Lord of the Rings Scene That Almost Destroyed the Peter Jackson Movies

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With The Rings of Power doing great numbers on Amazon, The Lord of the Rings is experiencing a resurgence. The mixed reaction to The Hobbit trilogy has largely faded and fans are ready to return to Middle-earth. While the first and best source for the enthusiasm garnered by the new series must be J.R.R. Tolkien‘s original books, there’s no denying that The Rings of Power would not enjoy its current level of prestige were it not for The Lord of the Rings trilogy from director Peter Jackson. The movies took a beloved but notoriously unfilmable series of books, filled with…

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13 Oct

First Black Adam Reactions Pour In

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It’s almost here! The long promised Black Adam movie, starring Dwayne Johnson in a role that the actor has spent over a decade preparing for, has finally screened for critics and a handful of fans. And the response so far? Well, we’ll call it mixed but positive. Early viewers (including this writer…and you can spot my reaction tweet later in this piece, as well) are praising Black Adam as an action-packed spectacle, one that is packed to the absolute gills with DC Comics and DCEU lore, and Johnson’s performance, while singling out the writing and pacing something of a mixed…

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13 Oct

Michael Sheen’s Best Roles Show Why He’s a National Treasure

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Michael Sheen recently went viral for an epic ‘pre-match’ speech to the Welsh football team on A League of Their Own – so much so that he was actually invited to address the Welsh World Cup squad for real – but anyone who’s seen a Michael Sheen role won’t have been remotely surprised he had such a rousing monologue in him. The man has range, charisma, and an extraordinary talent for channelling the characteristics of real people without resorting to impersonation. He’s also clearly game for anything, as the news he’ll be playing Coleen Rooney’s lawyer in Channel 4’s newly…

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12 Oct

A24 Horror Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

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It’s been less than 10 years since A24 released its first picture. And fewer than nine have gone by since their earliest horror movie hit art house screens (Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, for the record). These facts are remarkable when one considers how big of an impact this small, independent label out of New York has had on pop culture. Now synonymous with “indie cool,” A24 positions itself as an unofficial tastemaker for modern moviegoers, particularly millennials of a certain age. In the realm of horror cinema, A24 is even practically a brand unto itself, one as trusted (or loathed in…

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12 Oct

Halloween Ends: Where to Watch and Stream Online

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This post contains spoilers for Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills. When will evil die? That’s been the overarching question of the Halloween sequel trilogy that began with 2018’s Halloween, continued through 2021’s Halloween Kills, and completes this month with this Halloween Ends. The third movie’s title certainly sounds final, as if the lifelong murderer Michael Myers will be seeing his end. But its predecessor Halloween Kills featured a mob of Myers survivors chanting “evil dies tonight,” and still Myers lived. When will we get to learn if Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) can finally put an end to Myers’s killing…

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12 Oct

Marvel Just Revealed Major MCU Phase 5 and 6 Delays

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The dust had finally started to settle from the blockbuster unveiling of Phases 5 and 6 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at Comic-Con last July, and now the studio has upended the whole thing. A total of six movies on the Marvel slate are changing their release dates, throwing the flow of both phases into question and leaving several mysteries still unanswered. The cascade of news began this morning when it was revealed by Deadline that pre-production on Blade had been shut down following the exit of director Bassam Tariq and suggestions that the script needed further work. While it…

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12 Oct

How Nanny Explores the Horror of the Mundane in America

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“I love horror. I love elevated horror. I love psychological horror. I love an unreliable protagonist.” Nikyatu Jusu’s love of horror is undeniable, evidenced in her short film Suicide By Sunlight (2018), and now even more so in her debut feature Nanny (2022). “I usually start every project with imagery. And as I’ve said many times, the springboard is my mother’s story, loosely… and I’m just fiercely protective of my mother,” Jusu explains about the entry point for this script and her personal connection to the story of Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant in New York and the nanny…

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11 Oct

Why Kevin Smith Won’t Make a Marvel or Star Wars Movie

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Back in the heady days of the second wave of superhero movies, after Batman & Robin but before the MCU, the biggest nerd in Hollywood wasn’t Kevin Feige, nor even producer Avi Arad. No, it was Kevin Smith, who filled laid-back and dialogue-heavy movies such as Clerks and Dogma with pontifications about wage-earners on the Death Star and the sexual habits of the Fantastic Four. Smith even gave Stan Lee a cameo in 1995’s Mallrats, before X-Men and Spider-Man put the head of the Merry Marvel Marching Society in a movie. Over the years, Smith has been connected to superhero…

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10 Oct

Ranking The Horror Movie Sequels That Sent Their Monsters To Space

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“In space, no one can hear you scream.” That tagline isn’t amazing just because it’s attached to Alien, one of the greatest movies of all time. It also captures the inherent horror of space: the vast emptiness, the utter solitude, the complete helplessness. It’s no wonder that horror has been a part of space stories since the beginning, as seen in not only the Alien franchise, but also forerunners such as It! The Terror From Beyond Space and Planet of the Vampires. With that in mind, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that several horror franchises have sought…

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09 Oct

Hellraiser: Inferno Is the Most Underrated Pinhead Sequel

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Whether it’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan or Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, almost every horror franchise out there has a skeleton or two in the closet, i.e. a sequel so poorly conceived that it’s been all but erased from memory by fans. The Hellraiser movies are no exception. Though some might point to the fourth entry, 1996’s Hellraiser: Bloodline, as the bête noire of many a Pinhead fan, that movie gets a pass on account of the studio interference and directorial changes that saw a potentially inventive entry, set partially in futuristic space, rendered into an…

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08 Oct

David Harbour Imagines Hopper’s Happiest Stranger Things 5 Ending

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Jim Hopper had a real rough time in Stranger Things 4. Before this summer’s blockbuster television event, the David Harbour character was a man of simple hopes and dreams: he wanted to take Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) out to a nice Italian restaurant; see his adopted daughter Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) keep the door cracked open three inches; watch Magnum P.I. on Wednesday nights! But after being abducted by Soviet agents, he spent most of the fourth season being tortured, plotting escape, and battling Demogorgons in a gulag. It’s why when we meet Harbour at New York Comic Con, where…

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08 Oct

How Hellraiser (2022) Changes the Lore of the Original

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This weekend’s anticipated Hellraiser movie is being marketed as a reboot. All the trailers and ads tease of familiar sensations, and suggest that we’re going back to the original source material for Clive Barker’s twisted mingling of pleasure and pain, dominance and submission. But in truth, this movie could almost function as a sequel to the original Hellraiser flicks—or at least the handful of early good ones before the series devolved into straight-to-VHS and DVD self-parody. The 2022 picture is a new story with all new characters that narratively does not revisit, even in passing, the psychosexual melodrama that everyone…

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08 Oct

Hellraiser Movies Ranked from Worst to Best

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This Halloween belongs to Pinhead with the arrival of Hulu’s reboot of Clive Barker’s  gruesome, twisted psychosexual 1987 horror film, Hellraiser. There have been 10 films in the Hellraiser franchise, not counting additional novelizations, comics, and video games, so it’s safe to say that Pinhead has long been a horror icon. Sadly, while the lead leather-loving angel of torture remains popular, the same cannot be said for the many films in which Pinhead’s shown his studded face.   Let’s look down the dark decades of a cult classic horror franchise that’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes painful, and sometimes just a torture to…

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07 Oct

The Big Reason Why Nintendo Fans Hate Chris Pratt’s Mario Voice

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Do you remember what life was like before Nintendo dropped the first trailer for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the film poised to be the most talked about video game adaptation of the 2020s, the one that will come to define this era of what’s likely to be mostly terrible video game movies and a few good ones? I wish I did. For over two minutes, Jack Black hams it up as the evil Bowser, who fries up some penguins in the trailer, while our titular plumber (Chris Pratt) tries to get his footing in the Mushroom Kingdom with the…

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