My friend Eric “Dee” Snider once asked me, “Hey Scott, you’re erudite and learned in the realm of horror cinema, so why not tell me what’s going on lately with your very favorite genre?” So instead of answering him I just hung up the phone and started writing. And the plan is to write something […]
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Against all odds, the spy-thriller-with-bonkers-stunts-and-goofy-disguises-starring-a-guy-from-Top–Gun-and-based-on-a-1960s-TV-show industry is booming. Six Mission: Impossibles deep and Tom Cruise doesn’t have much will to live left to lose. It’s no minor miracle that his obsessive devotion to squeezing every last bang out of the moviegoer’s buck has overshadowed his obsessive devotion to that murky volcano-alien religion. The spy-thriller-with-bonkers-stunts-and-goofy-disguises-starring-a-guy-from-Top-Gun-and-based-on-a-1960s-TV-show franchise […]
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After the unexpected success of Star Wars in 1977, studios rushed to recreate the film and its massive popularity. This saw a huge spate of ripoffs like Starcrash, Battle Beyond the Stars, and one of the most wildly inventive, strange, and beautiful films ever made: Toei Studios’ Message from Space. Directed by Battle Royale’s Kinji […]
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“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby As the chasm grows […]
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Mamma Mia! was a badly written headache based on a badly written live musical, adapted for the screen by the same people who had staged it on Broadway, who leaned on the show’s built-in fanbase like a crutch. (No reason to improve something that’s already popular, right?) The sequel, being based on nothing, has to […]
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At the end of The Equalizer (2014), you probably thought everything that needed equalizing had been taken care of. Wrong, dummy! The Equalizer 2 has non-equalized things up the wazoo, just waiting for Denzel Washington to equalize them. He usually does it by breaking someone’s arm, though he’s not opposed to shooting or stabbing, too. Whatever it […]
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Jukebox musicals have been popular on Broadway for years, and some — like Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys — have successfully been turned into movies. With the upcoming release of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, I thought I’d see if I could come up with some jukeboxes of my own. Since the songs don’t […]
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Blindspotting is an explosive racial comedy, a love letter to Oakland, and a jumpstart to the movie career of its star, Daveed Diggs, who co-wrote the screenplay with co-star Rafael Casal. Directed by first-timer Carlos Lopez Estrada, the film is set during the last three days of a year-long probation for Colin (Diggs), who served prison […]
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(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; distribution plans not yet announced.) Owing to the slippery definition of the word and our robust (for the time being) First Amendment, it takes a lot to get arrested for “obscenity” in America, let alone actually convicted. A few performers and publishers have been, with famous names like Lenny […]
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From The Searchers to You Were Never Really Here, the “captivity narrative” is one of America’s strongest tropes When Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (now available on DVD/VOD) came out this past spring, it was hailed as a modern update of Taxi Driver. Like Martin Scorsese’s similarly artful — and similarly brutal — […]
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The Blu-ray format arrived on June 20, 2006 — that’s a whopping 12 years ago for those of you who struggle with mental math — but there is still an abundance of films that have yet to see a release in that format. Ask a physical media collector which movies they’re hoping to see get […]
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(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; opens July 20 in U.S. theaters) Unfriended: Dark Web has no connection to 2015’s Unfriended except that they adhere to the same format: Both unfold in real time entirely on someone’s computer screen via their Skype sessions, Facebook chats, and so forth. This structure, a reflection of the “we live online” […]
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