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17 Aug

Alien Movies Ranked (Including Romulus!)

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In space no one can hear you scream. Or at least that is what some rather ingenious 20th Century Fox marketers pushed back in 1979. Yet we did hear the people scream, and gasp, and panic as the facehugger’s tendrils tightened around John Hurt’s throat in movie houses across the world. And in the near half-century that followed, those screams continue to echo in our ears. Hence this weekend’s anticipated return of the xenomorph in Alien: Romulus, a movie which star Cailee Spaeny previously described to us as walking a careful line between the understated dread of the ’79 classic…

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17 Aug

Alien: Romulus Makes the Xenomorph Life Cycle Even Scarier with New Step and Metaphor

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This post contains massive Alien: Romulus spoilers. “I’m not going to go after the women in the audience. I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs.” So declared Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon in the 2002 documentary The Alien Saga, and no one can say he failed. The most famous moment in Alien involved Kane (John Hurt) giving violent birth after a facehugger forced itself inside him. Although later contributors would leave aside the male focus, pregnancy metaphors continued to drive…

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17 Aug

Alien: Romulus’ Biggest, Grossest, and Strangest Easter Eggs from the Other Movies

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This article contains spoilers aplenty for Alien: Romulus and the whole franchise. “I admire its purity,” a robot says during an infamous scene in Alien. Ian Holm’s synthetic science officer is of course referring to the “organism” (or “xenomorph” as Aliens later defines it). However, this line of dialogue has gone on to be cherished by science fiction fans all over the world as a metaphor for the original, sleek, and mysterious 1979 movie that started it all. It would seem director Fede Alvarez and his Alien: Romulus co-writer Rodo Sayagues would agree. Their new seventh entry in the mainline…

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15 Aug

It Ends With Us’s Marketing Campaign Cheapens the Movie and Its Themes

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This post contains spoilers for It Ends With Us. Lily Bloom sits at the edge of a tall building, smoking a cigarette while thinking about her late father, whose final days she intentionally avoided. Her contemplation is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni), who storms onto the rooftop and kicks a chair. Thus is the meet cute of It Ends With Us. “Meet Cute” is, of course, the term used to describe the unlikely circumstances under which the central couple first encounter one another. It can be a squabbling German couple prompting Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and…

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15 Aug

Ian Holm’s Ash is the Scariest Monster in Alien

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It is fair to say that Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s original million-dollar idea for Alien remains one of the great all-time movie scares. A crew of astronauts, or at least space truckers, sits down for dinner before the long hyper-sleep home. Earlier in the story, one of them, a man, was attacked when an alien organism attached itself to his face. The crew’s science officer, a cagey and unknowable figure, tells us the man is fine. Yet come dinner time, everyone realizes too late that the man has been implanted (or impregnated) with extraterrestrial life. And it is a…

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15 Aug

A.I. Making Minority Report a Reality Shows Failure of Cautionary Sci-Fi Movies

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Earlier this month, Argentina’s Ministry of Security announced the creation of an “Applied Artificial Intelligence for Security Unit,” a special task force whose remit will be to “use machine learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data to predict future crimes and help prevent them.” You can read the original announcement in Spanish here. Now whatever arguments exist for and against the creation of this new crime fighting course, all the least funny people reading the headline of this story skipped the article entirely to post animated Gifs of Tom Cruise operating what appears to be an Xbox Kinnect. Because if…

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14 Aug

Alien: Romulus Review – Brings the Whole Franchise Together with Love and Acid

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Since the beginning, every sequel and prequel in the now seven-film Alien franchise—yes, there are only seven movies, those other two monster mashes never happened!—has been at war with itself. And the battle has remained the same: How much do we evolve the sci-fi concepts suggested by the monster versus serving up what worked before? Over the past 45 years, the series has flirted with intriguing ideas, such as when Renny Harlin (who quit) and then Jean-Pierre Jeunet proposed respective Alien 3 and 4s that ended up on Earth. There was also the original intentions of Vincent Ward (who quit)…

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14 Aug

The Worst Trailers for the Best Movies

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In a world… in which movies are just as much products as they are art, studios need to sell the latest releases to the broadest possible audiences. That means that they not only need to craft trailers promoting the films, but they need to misrepresent what films are really about. On a certain level, that tendency toward misrepresentation makes sense. Trailers only have a couple of minutes to get people interested in the film, and complex works of art don’t lend themselves to such simplicities. That said, it’s hard to see a masterpiece reduced to just a few sizzle moments,…

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14 Aug

Kraven the Hunter Trailer Unveils the Strangest Version of the Rhino Yet

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The latest trailer for Kraven the Hunter features a long-awaited character from the Spider-Man mythos. No, not Spider-Man. Of course it’s not Spider-Man. Kraven is the latest in latest in Sony‘s attempts to build a cinematic universe based on Spider-Man characters, but without using Spider-Man. No, the newest character is Aleksei Sytsevich, better known as the Rhino. We’ve seen clips of Aleksei in his civilian form, played by Alessandro Nivola. But this latest trailer is the first time he’s appeared in his Rhino form and it is… different. The trailer shows Aleksei transforming into a type of human/rhino hybrid, a…

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14 Aug

Brad Pitt Reveals Seven’s Horrifying Ending Was Almost Changed by the Studio

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“What’s in the box?” The very fact that you just heard Brad Pitt‘s unique delivery in your head demonstrates how iconic that line has become. The question and reveal brought David Fincher‘s unrelentingly bleak crime thriller, Seven, to a head (sorry) and confirmed a hopelessly despairing worldview. The box, of course, contained the severed head of Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), the sweet wife to Pitt’s detective David. The disembodying is the final move by the serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey), who based his crimes on Catholicism’s Seven Deadly Sins. Doe killed Tracy out of Envy, driving David to kill him…

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14 Aug

The Den of Geek Weekly Quiz! Movie Time Machines

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What sort of car does Marty McFly drive back to the future?DeLoreanFord PrefectVolkswagen BeetleFiat XI/9Which of these historical figures do NOT feature in Bill & Ted’s history report?Queen VictoriaSocratesBilly the KidSigmund FreudLa Jetée inspired which time travel movie?12 MonkeysThe TerminatorTime BanditsTime CopIn Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), to what year are the characters transported by the eponymous time machine?1986198419851987How many Star Trek movies feature time travel?FourOneThreeSixWhich 19th century villain must HG Wells attempt to thwart in 1979 movie Time After Time, feat. Malcolm McDowell?Jack the RipperMoriartySweeney ToddJohn Wilkes BoothWhat is the name of the time-travelling police force in 1994 Jean-Claude…

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13 Aug

Joel Schumacher’s Even Weirder Batman Forever Director’s Cut Almost Really Happened

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Release the Schumacher Cut! Okay, that nerdy battle cry maybe hasn’t caught on like the demands for David Ayer’s darker cut of Suicide Squad or another, longer cut of whatever Zack Snyder is making. But the Schumacher Cut of Batman Forever is a thing, a longer and darker version of the 1995 sequel based on director Joel Schumacher‘s original intentions, and according to Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote the script with Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler, the Schumacher Cut almost saw the light of day. Speaking with Collider at SDCC 2024, Goldsman revealed that the Schumacher Cut does exist and…

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13 Aug

The Real Reason That Halle Berry’s Storm Isn’t in Deadpool & Wolverine

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This article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine. Do you know what happens to a movie star when they’re not asked to be in your movie? Same thing that happens to everything else. Or, to put it another way, you gotta ask actors to be in your films. That’s the lesson that Ryan Reynolds might be learning, at least according to Halle Berry. In conversation with ComicBook.com, Berry explained the absence of her X-Men character Storm in Deadpool & Wolverine. “Blake [Lively] asked me one time,” Berry recalled in the interview. “I ran into her at a Marc Jacobs fashion…

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13 Aug

George Clooney May Be Right to Be Annoyed with Quentin Tarantino

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They might have played brothers almost 30 years ago on the set of From Dusk Till Dawn, but it’s fair to say the sun has gone down on George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino’s camaraderie. Clooney’s shots across Tarantino’s bow are making the rounds, too, after the actor sat down with his frequent co-star Brad Pitt for a GQ cover story interview. During the careers-spanning conversation, the subject of actors and auteurs came up, including how each leading man has enjoyed long-lasting relationships with some of the greatest auteurs of their generation. For Clooney that can include Steven Soderbergh and the…

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13 Aug

Thomas Jane Thinks the Perfect Punisher Movie Has Yet to Be Made

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Following the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, Wesley Snipes is rightfully getting some late recognition for his work in the Y2K era Blade films, but there’s another early-2000s Marvel pioneer who deserves some praise as well. Thomas Jane, who portrayed the title character in 2004’s The Punisher, was part of the same generation of early Marvel films that showed there was a massive market for superhero properties. Along with Jane’s Punisher – X-Men (2000), Elektra (2005), and yes even Ben Affleck’s Daredevil (2003) walked so the juggernaut known as the MCU could run only a few years later.  While promoting…

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13 Aug

Inside Dan Aykroyd’s ‘90s Ghostbusters 3 That Never Got Made

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Forty years ago this summer, a perfect storm of moviemaking elements came together with almost supernatural precision: SNL alums like Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray at the height of their popularity; director Ivan Reitman and co-writer Harold Ramis at the peak of their creativity; unexpectedly innovative and convincing VFX developed by Richard Edlund on a budget because ILM was too busy; and a weathered and weary New York City that, still a decade out from “urban renewal,” proved a perfect backdrop for a comedy about working stiffs going into business. All these elements and more seemed to capture lightning in…

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12 Aug

David Lynch Movies and TV Shows Ranked: From Twin Peaks and Dune to Mulholland Drive

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David Lynch has been making movies since the 1960s, when he was an art student who wanted to see his paintings move. Since then, he’s become one of the most recognizable and beloved auteurs in cinema history, a filmmaker who enjoys remarkable success, given his idiosyncratic work. Because Lynch’s work is so personal, it has long been difficult for critics and fans to reach a consensus regarding which is his very best work. Every single one of his movies and TV series has value, and each one strikes different people in different ways. Indeed, even this writer finds himself changing…

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12 Aug

Kit Harington Admits Why He Really Took Black Knight Role in the Failed Eternals Movie

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The MCU is a star maker. Thor changed Chris Hemsworth from a guy with one outstanding scene at the start of Star Trek to an A-lister. Guardians of the Galaxy transformed Chris Pratt from the goofy guy on Parks & Recreation to an A-list action hero. All actors know that, so it’s no surprise that someone like Kit Harington would go from saying “I don’t want it” over and over in Game of Thrones to “I do want it” as Dane Whitman, looking at the Ebony Blade in the post-credit sequence of Eternals. In a career retrospective with British GQ,…

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11 Aug

Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu D23 Trailer Breakdown: Zeb, Razor Crest, AT-ATs, Hoth?!

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Although the next Star Wars movie has only just kicked off production, Lucasfilm wasted no time giving fans and journalists a first look at The Mandalorian & Grogu at this year’s D23. The first Star Wars film since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker is a continuation of the Disney+ series and picks up after the end of The Mandalorian season 3, which ended with Din and Grogu settling down on Nevarro. But from the looks of the teaser footage shown at D23, the vacation is over and our beloved bounty hunting duo is back on the road. Den of Geek…

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11 Aug

Fantastic Four: First Steps Costume Reveal Is an Unexpected Look From the Team’s Past

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps came to Disney’s D23 movie and TV preview at Anaheim’s cavernous Honda Center with just a little bit more than they showed at San Diego Comic-Con two weeks earlier. With the movie now two weeks into filming and the cast working in London, Marvel’s First Family—Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm)—delivered a video greeting to the 12,000 fans in the arena. The four were seated around what could have been the gang’s kitchen table, but what drew the most attention, of course, was that…

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