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30 Sep

Hocus Pocus 2 Review: Sanderson Witches Can’t Break the Disney Sequel Curse

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It’s unlikely even Disney knew they had a classic Halloween scene on their hands when they put microphones in front of Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy, and said “sing.” Yet the original Hocus Pocus of 1993 conjured real magic from the moment Midler teased, “I put a spell on you, and now you’re mine” to the scene’s finale in which Midler cursed all the adults of Salem to dance until they die! Thirty years on, that spell endures still, making the scene and the movie it’s borne from a stone cold holiday classic. Hence Hocus Pocus 2’s…

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29 Sep

Why the Multiverse Could Be the Key to Wanda’s MCU Return

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This article contains spoilers for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. After Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) appeared to sacrifice herself to destroy Mount Wundagore in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, fans have been wondering when or if the Scarlet Witch will make a return to the MCU. While the fate of the Wanda Maximoff we know and love may still be up in the air, neither Elizabeth Olsen nor MCU mastermind Kevin Feige seem ready to say goodbye to the character just yet.  Feige has been vocal about his love of Elizabeth Olsen as an actor, telling…

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29 Sep

Hocus Pocus 2: How to Watch The New Witchy Halloween Movie

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It took almost 30 years and a little bit of magic to deliver Hocus Pocus 2. The original film, released in 1993, wasn’t a hit with audiences or critics, and it’s believed that the film may have lost about $16.5 million in its original theatrical run. However, through positive word of mouth and annual screenings on the Disney Channel and Freeform (formerly ABC Family), Hocus Pocus eventually caught on with the audiences that mattered and became a solid home video grosser for the House of Mouse. With legacy sequels en vogue and nostalgia constantly mined by the big studios, POOF,…

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29 Sep

Hocus Pocus Was Originally a Much Darker Kids Movie

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One of the greatest Halloween moments in any movie occurs when Bette Midler first ascends the stage of a costume party near the midpoint of Hocus Pocus (1993). Up until that sequence, we’d seen the legendary actor/singer play Winifred Sanderson, the eldest of three witchy sisters, but now Winifred was about to become Bette Midler. Bathed in a pale green light, befitting the spooky Halloween atmosphere, Midler takes the microphone and, along with Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy, begins to belt a barn-burning cover of “I Put a Spell on You.” To millennials of a certain age, it remains…

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29 Sep

Why Hellraiser’s New Pinhead Is a Woman

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Pinhead isn’t Pinhead. Any Clive Barker fan will be quick to point out that the iconic character from the beloved adaptation of the novel The Hellbound Heart is credited as Lead Cenobite, and known in the fiction as “the Priest,” a devotee of a dark, arcane religion. But in an era of gimmicky slashers like Freddy, Leatherface, and Jason, the Priest needed a catchier sobriquet, and so he was dubbed Pinhead, much to Barker’s chagrin. But even as it became increasingly standard, the name always seemed like an ill-fitting title for the elegant character portrayed by Doug Bradley. For those…

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29 Sep

Blonde and Marilyn Monroe’s True History: How Much Really Happened?

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This article contains lots of Blonde spoilers. When Joyce Carol Oates began writing Blonde, the 2000 novel on which the new Ana de Armas movie is based, she admitted she was less concerned with the facts of Marilyn Monroe’s life than the idea of the quintessential movie star. Oates saw Monroe as an emblem of 20th century America, a pivotal intersection of the nation’s values and fantasies about sex, power, and the role of women during a moment of cultural ascendence. This also means that much of the work is fictionalized—which is a polite way to say made up. These…

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29 Sep

Smile Is The Creepy Horror Movie of This Halloween Season

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From Gwynplaine’s disfigured visage in 1928’s The Man Who Laughs to Jack Torrance’s hideous grin in The Shining, and even more recently Pennywise’s leering grimace in It, the smile has played a longstanding and often terrifying role in horror cinema. So why not make a whole movie based around that stretching of the facial muscles, which can become a death’s-head rictus just as easily as an expression of happiness? Writer/director Parker Finn seems to have hit upon that very notion with his feature film debut, Smile, which is an expansion of Finn’s 2020 short film, “Laura Hasn’t Slept.” The result…

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28 Sep

Deadpool 3 Star Clears Up Wolverine Timeline Mystery

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When a video from Ryan Reynolds announced that Hugh Jackman would be reprising his role as Wolverine for Deadpool 3, we all had the same thought: “Again? Isn’t that played out by now?” Okay, some of us had that thought. Others wondered what this meant for Logan, the movie that not only ended with Wolverine’s death but also was declared by Jackman to be the last time he’d don the Canucklehead’s mutton chops. To help clarify matters, Jackman and Ryan Reynolds appeared in a follow-up video posted to social media. It went exactly how you would expect it to go.…

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28 Sep

Is Marvel’s Blade Reboot in Trouble?

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Kevin Feige knows how to give a spectacular presentation. But one of his most memorable moments was at the end of the 2019 MCU panel at Comic-Con, when Feige interrupted what appeared to be a closing celebration to bring out Mahershala Ali. The Academy-Award-winning actor simply put a hat on his head as the lights dimmed and a one-word logo appeared on-screen: Blade. Since that moment, anticipation has only grown, from original Blade actor Wesley Snipes offering his support for the project, to the exciting additions of Delroy Lindo and Aaron Pierre to the cast. Not even a baffling post-credit…

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28 Sep

Luther: What’s Happening With the Idris Elba Netflix Movie?

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Warning: contains spoilers for Luther series 1-5 It’s been nearly four years since London’s most morally dubious detective, DCI John Luther, last graced our screens. In January 2019, the fifth series of the BBC’s gritty crime drama premiered to much fanfare, with decent reviews and ratings success paving the way for a long-awaited, feature-length mystery for Idris Elba’s grizzled antihero. Since then, details of the Luther movie have been mainly classified, with only a few tidbits escaping. There’s not even a concrete release date yet. What we do know is that the film is a co-production between BBC Films and Netflix—the two are reportedly…

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28 Sep

Blonde Review: Ana de Armas and Marilyn Monroe Deserve Better

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Getting behind the artifice of more than half a century of pop culture fairy dust is difficult. The tactile quality of iconography is elusive; it’s starlight dancing between your fingertips. And yet, that same quality’s legacy for the truly timeless, seminal figures of history is irresistible. It’s a collective memory we all share of Elvis Presley shaking his hips on national television for the first time, or Marilyn Monroe standing above a New York City subway grate, waiting for the next gust of air to blow as a train passes. This year we’ve seen both figures re-contextualized by star-studded Hollywood…

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28 Sep

The History of Deadpool and Wolverine’s Prickly Relationship

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Well, how about that? Deadpool 3 is going to bring back Hugh Jackman as Wolverine! Considering the big announcement centered around it and the claw-based logo, Marvel looks to be treating this as a major part of the movie and not a high-profile cameo like Reed Richards in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. They are outright selling us on the idea of a Deadpool/Wolverine team-up at the box office! This is obviously not the first time we’ve seen these two together in the movies. Deadpool 3 will be coming out a sobering FIFTEEN YEARS after X-Men Origins: Wolverine,…

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28 Sep

Deadpool 3 Was Always Destined to Star Hugh Jackman

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Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine always needed to crossover with Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool. That’s at least how Reynolds and Deadpool (arguably the same person at this point) saw it. And now, six years after Deadpool (2016) outgrossed any mainline X-Men movie starring Jackman as Logan, Reynolds is finally getting the last laugh. In case you still haven’t seen the internet-breaking news, scroll on down and marvel at the perfectly on brand tweet from Reynolds’ official account. In the social media video, the Canadian actor sits on a sofa in a house, acting very vague about what he has planned for Deadpool 3,…

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27 Sep

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Officially Sets Up the X-Men

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This post contains potential spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever While the MCU tends to be far more faithful to the comics than many other live-action adaptations of superhero properties, they are still adaptations. Some deviation from the comics should be expected. For example, the James “Bucky” Barnes of Captain America comics was a plucky teen who donned a domino mask and a machine gun to fight Nazis in World War II, not the handsome contemporary to Steve Rogers seen in the films. Yondu is a mystical hunter who lives in harmony with other life forms in Guardians of the…

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27 Sep

The Most Infamous NC-17 Movies

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Netflix’s new original Marilyn Monroe movie, Blonde, marks the streaming service’s first NC-17 rated movie, due to its graphic depiction of sexual assault (as well as a point-of-view shot of a fetus in the womb). The Motion Picture Association’s most severe rating has long been known as a both a box office killer and a publicity gift, but this movie from director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly) doesn’t have to worry about theater tickets. Blonde will, after all, be seen primarily by people at home via Netflix, and the movie’s…

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27 Sep

Ana de Armas’ Most Significant Roles Before Blonde and Where to See Her Next

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Ana de Armas is stepping into arguably the biggest role of her career with her upcoming turn as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s Blonde. It may really be that intangible moment where she transitions from actor to star, complete with a potential Oscar nomination on the horizon, but the Cuban-born thespian came a long way to get to the apex of the movie industry, going from playing exclusively Spanish-speaking roles to starring in some of the biggest American productions on the planet. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most significant roles de Armas played…

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27 Sep

Hocus Pocus: Disney Needs to Scare Kids Again Like in the Original

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I was not allowed to see Hocus Pocus when it opened in theaters in 1993. Even at the ripe and mature age of six, it was considered to be too dark, and worse still too scary, for the youngest of audiences. That was the conclusion our local newspaper’s critic came to, in any event. The evaluation would’ve probably amused the writers who first began spinning Hocus Pocus’ bewitching web in the 1980s. Originally the brainchild of writer/producer David Kirschner (who would go on to help create Chucky and the Child’s Play franchise), the first draft of Hocus Pocus was penned…

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26 Sep

James Gunn Reveals Scooby-Doo Movie You Never Got To See

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Scooby-Doo has always walked a wobbly line between kid-friendly antics and grown-up gags. Although one of the many cartoon series Hanna-Barbara produced in the late ’60s and ’70s, complete with bubble-gum pop tunes and recycled animation, Scooby-Doo is fundamentally a horror show starring hippies. It didn’t take too much imagination to see why Scooby and Shaggy were always hungry. Even better, Scooby-Doo ended every episode by revealing that capitalism was the true monster, predating “elevated horror” by several decades. With such a mixed history, it’s no surprise to learn that when Scooby-Doo got a live action, big-budget adaptation in the…

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26 Sep

Why Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Didn’t Recast T’Challa

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Legacy is a key part of superhero stories. When one hero falls, another rises to take their place, often adopting the same code name and costume as their predecessor. In Marvel Comics, we’ve seen that when Bucky became Winter Soldier after the death of Steve Rogers or when James Rhodes took over as Iron Man from Tony Stark. Those dynamics are happening in the MCU as well, as actors leave the franchise and others join. We’ve already had a taste of this dynamic with Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson becoming the new Captain America after Chris Evans retired. But perhaps the…

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26 Sep

Batgirl Movie Footage Reveals Firefly Action Scene

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In retrospect, it’s pretty ironic that Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the Batgirl movie after it had already finished principal photography in order to claim a $90 million tax write-off. Because if the precipitous drop of the media company’s stock options are any indication, the bad publicity they generated has cost the studio far more. Yet more than just media bookkeeping, the death of Batgirl is also a small tragedy for the folks who worked on the movie: directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah whose career was on the rise after 2020’s early (and only) box office sleeper hit, Bad…

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