Gerard Johnstone’s dancing M3GAN took over social media this winter. As a horror movie, it’s not exceptional in the jump scares category, but as a dark comedy mashup of RoboCop, Terminator, The Twilight Zone‘s Talking Tina, and Child’s Play, it pretty much rules. Central to the movie’s charm is an emotional story that also serves …
HBO’s The Last of Us stands bloody and gulping for air over a field filled with so many dead and mediocre video game adaptations for film and television. The new series places a high degree of confidence in its source material so fans of the award-winning PlayStation 3 original title, the even more masterful 2020 …
Chapter I Joe Chaney is Dead It was a waterlogged afternoon in the bantamweight town of Arden Hurst, Virginia, and a mournful multitude stooped over a hole in the ground, slowly filling with tears for Joe Chaney. It was a slapdash funeral in the slanted rain. Joe was dead that winter from a silent heart …
Netflix’s The Pale Blue Eye is really trying as a self-serious mix of thriller, murder mystery, and period piece drama. Following in the blood trail left by Christopher Hatton’s artful, but mediocre Raven’s Hollow, Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye follows a shadowy story of mutilation and murder at the famous military academy Westpoint where …
From the producers of Midsommar, Hereditary, and The Witch, comes Resurrection, an afflicted psychological thriller that wrestles with the theme of motherhood and past traumas in chilling ways. It’s an A24-style movie through and through and a return to directing by Andrew Semans (Nancy, Please). Semans wrote the script while he was battling with himself …
A nebula of gnarled coast live oak trees hunched over the scene like fallen sons of God. The Escondido police dropship spotted the body near the side of the road on the way to a regular city water ration run. The body was wrapped in an unknown plasticine substance that stuck to the fingers like …
SMILE recently passed the $200 million milestone worldwide to become the highest-grossing horror film of 2022 so far. Beyond its solid opening weekend, SMILE‘s week two drop was only 22%, the best second-week retention for a horror film since Jordan Peele’s Get Out way back in 2017. SMILE‘s surprising box office run sets it up …
Papers of all kinds are what my mother collected. I say “collected,” but the reality show doctors on my TV call it “compulsive hoarding.” I often lay awake at night looking at my stack of unread books and wonder if I will transform into the same person in my old age; this action would be …
Shebna’s feeble voice reverberated like a drunken piano chord in the damp seven-foot square room. He thudded against the wall, all skinny wrists flailing and wrenching in volcanic blasts of weakened bone, muscle, and sinew. His home is a mosquito farm. A choked whisper of a man that knew nothing of his captors beyond scattered …
Mad Love (1935) originally opened on a black screen with an audience warning very similar to Edward van Sloan’s Frankenstein (1931) opening (also written by John L. Balderston). But it was edited out prior to release. The released intro for the film is far better as the opening credits appear over a window before a …
