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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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07 Oct

Best Horror Movies Streaming on Amazon Prime Video in October 2022

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Keep your warm-colored lights and green pine trees. For some of us, October is the most wonderful time of the year. You can smell it as autumnal leaves drifting across the grass; you can hear it as children laugh in their most beloved Halloween costumes; and you can see it with the cornucopia of horror movies to watch. Aye, horror flicks are the most important part of the season to some. For 31 days, you don’t need an excuse to indulge in the wicked and the weird, and to hopefully scare yourself silly. But in an age of streaming, and…

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07 Oct

Amsterdam Review: When Christian Bale Can’t Save You

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As quirky, messy, and undisciplined as the work of director David O. Russell can be, when he nails his material—which to be fair is more often than not—he can really get at the heart of human relationships and bigger thematic concerns with great humor and empathy. See Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings, and a good chunk of American Hustle, for prime examples of this. On the other hand, when Russell drops the ball (Joy, anyone?), the results can be tedious at best and unbearable at worst. His first film in seven years, Amsterdam, falls somewhere on the spectrum between the…

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07 Oct

Hellraiser Review: Reboot Is a Real Pain to Watch

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The original Hellraiser explored the outer limits of pleasure and pain in fascinating, grotesque ways. Hulu’s 2022 reimagining of the Clive Barker classic, however, is simply painful. It takes the most surface-level aspects of the original story and gnarls them into a bloated, forgettable modern horror slog that fumbles the series’ mythology. In broad strokes, the movie follows a bunch of supremely annoying twentysomethings as they run from an otherworldly evil, screaming at each other incessantly in an ear-splitting attempt to suss out what’s happening to them at any given moment. They act like complete idiots, and it’s incredibly hard…

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07 Oct

Hellraiser: How the New Movie Reimagines Cenobites and the Hellish Puzzle Box

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 If you aren’t sure what a Cenobite is, David Bruckner, director of the new Hellraiser, has the answer—“It’s an interdimensional BDSM thing that shoots chains at you from an ancient labyrinth.” It sounds outlandish but is actually astonishingly accurate.  The original Hellraiser (1987), written and directed by Clive Barker, is forever a classic horror hall-of-famer. It centers around a mysterious puzzle box that, when used, summons the Cenobites— a sadistic group of hell dwellers who take pleasure in torturing their unfortunate summoner for eternity. This new Hellraiser film will be the 11th installment of the franchise. “I think a lot…

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06 Oct

Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons – Exclusive First Look at When Robin Meets Superboy

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For a brief, glorious moment in the comics, Damian Wayne and Jon Kent were the next big thing in the DC Universe. Then Jon got aged up and sent to space, and Damian went off to Kumite Island to fight his grandma and they got split up. Oh well, that’s comics for you! In case you can’t tell, some folks are a little broken up about Super-Sons, the comic that followed young teen Superboy and Robin and was utterly delightful, ending. But fortunately for those people, there’s a new chance to see Jon and Damian goof off: Batman and Superman: Battle…

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06 Oct

Edgar Wright’s Surprising Top Gun: Maverick Connection Revealed

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The original Top Gun from 1986 remains memorable not just for its thrilling depiction of aerial combat and its effective propaganda for the American armed forces. It’s also a great soundtrack movie, filled with hits such as “Highway to the Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins, “Take My Breath Away” by Berlin, and, of course, Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” as performed by Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards. So when producer and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie was crafting the sequel Top Gun: Maverick, he knew he had to include some great…

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06 Oct

Hellraiser 2022: Release Time, Where to Watch, and How to Stream the New Reboot Online

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“We have such sights to show you.” That promise may come from the Cenobite priest known as Pinhead, who clearly knows a thing or two about pain, but we cannot help but follow. We want to see those sights, as presented by author and director Clive Barker in 1987’s Hellraiser and its many sequels. By the time Hellraiser: Revelations and Hellraiser: Judgment were released, the pleasure had largely given way to pain, and yet we still watched. So it’s good news to hear that Hellraiser is being rebooted and reimagined, this time with The Night House and The Ritual director…

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06 Oct

Why There Hasn’t Been a Great Salem’s Lot Movie

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Stephen King’s second published novel, ‘Salem’s Lot, arrived in hardcover in October 1975 and was King’s next step toward transforming himself from an obscure Maine writer to a pop culture phenomenon. His first novel, Carrie, had sold modestly in hardcover, but the paperback edition of the book took off, selling more than one million copies in its first year of release. Sales were also helped by Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie adaptation, which was not just a box office hit but yielded Academy Award nominations for stars Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie.   And the paperback edition of ‘Salem’s Lot…

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05 Oct

Christian Bale Says Method Acting as Thor 4 Villain Would Have Been “Pitiful”

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It’s hard to think of many actors more serious and respected than Christian Bale. The Welsh actor has a history of working with some of the most respected filmmakers in the business, starting with his breakout in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun at just 13 years old. Since then, Bale has earned praise and awards for his intense and mercurial performances in movies such as American Psycho, The Big Short, and The Fighter, the last of which earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. In pursuit of his art, Bale has been willing to put his body on the…

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