Confession time: Despite coming of age in the ’80s and landing in the heart of the target audience for John Hughes’ teen comedies, I never identified with the teenage characters in them — or aspired to be like them, really. Part of this...
November is the month wherein movie lovers, programmers, and critics turn their attention to the genre of film noir — Noirvember as it’s come to be known. While the main impetus for this is undoubtedly the hashtag-friendly wordplay of the...
Bill Murray was an actor once. Oh sure, he still stands in front of a camera and plays pretend. Very well, when he wants to. But that’s not what Bill Murray is known for anymore – Bill Murray is known for being Bill Murray. Though that’s...
Rob Reiner is not exactly the first name that pops up when people list their favorite directors — usually those lists include people like David Fincher, Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, and...
Everyone knows horror auteur Rob Zombie wrote and directed two Halloween films – which performed so well the franchise has since been handed over to screenwriter Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green for yet another retooling – but...
(For a film-by-film breakdown, see Part 1.)
Films: 8
Total runtime without credits or flashbacks: 11 hours, 17 minutes, 9 seconds
Total Michael Myers kills: 68
Overall KPH: 5.9, or a kill every 10 minutes and 10 seconds. Eliminating the...
Since 1978, Halloween hasn't just been a day to worship Satan and eat small candy bars. It's also been a celebration of a long-running, highly influential film series about a masked killer: Batman.
Just kidding. Trick-or-treat! It's Halloween,...
Practical Magic (1998) pits the magic of women against the villainy of an abusive man while showing the power of sisterhood. The movie equates witchcraft with feminism, reflecting the historical reality that witch trials have been used to punish...
The Devil has been a prominent part of film since its inception, but the depiction of Lucifer has changed with the times to reflect humanity’s vices. Let’s look at how Lucifer has transitioned from the big-horned behemoth into the shifting...
Obsessive compulsive disorder is an incredibly tough mental illness to live with. While numerous movies and TV shows portray OCD as a wacky personality quirk, the reality of it is much more complex and is far removed from the cliché that our...
In 2004, I was committed to a mental hospital in Cherry Hill, N.J., in the middle of the night. I couldn’t recall why. The last thing I remembered flittered through my consciousness like static between radio stations.
It was the movie...
If you've ever read anything about silent film, you've likely seen the image of an impossibly pale, kohl-eyed Theda Bara wearing little more than two gravity-defying snakes coiled around her breasts. It's as iconic an image as Charlie Chaplin in...
What does it mean to be a black man in America? If we believe the media, it means you’re a target or some kind of miscreant. In part because of the tone set by the current Administration, these stereotypes are promoted as truth and used as...
It takes a special talent to direct the weirdest Nightmare on Elm Street, a franchise that eventually stepped outside of itself for an entire movie about making another Nightmare on Elm Street, and not even realize it’s a feature-length...
E.2.: The Extra-2rrestrial
Thirty-five years after having his childhood disrupted and his worldview shattered by the arrival of an alien being, a divorced, alcoholic Elliott (Henry Thomas) is just starting to become functional again (with the...
