Being cooped up in quarantine during a viral pandemic will make you consider some crazy ways to entertain yourself. For example, seeing that this year is the 40th (!) anniversary of the original Friday the 13th film, and knowing that I have for the most part had the entire franchise in my blind spot (except Jason X for some awful reason), I have taken it upon myself to make the trip through all 12 films, including the 2009 remake and Freddy vs Jason, and share my thoughts as a newcomer to the Cult of Jason. I am excited, but I […]Read more »
Initially set to release in September of 2019, The Hunt is a dark comedy/thriller that, due to its violent premise, was shelved after a rash of mass shootings in the United States and later released in March of 2020. As if the conflict between real-world events and fictionalized violence wasn’t enough, the film also drew the attention of President Trump for its politically-charged satirization of the divide between the liberal and conservative population of the United States. Based purely on the film’s marketing, the president claimed the film’s purpose is to “inflame and cause chaos.” While the film actually plays […]Read more »
Nearly three-quarters of a century before the Marvel’s Cinematic Universe would put into motion a long-term interconnected series of films, Universal Pictures would assemble a shared universe of their own centering on horror and science-fiction characters. This continuity of films that would later be known as Universal’s “Classic Monsters” includes Dracula, The Mummy, and Frankenstein, among others, and has been in recent years targeted for a series of reboots. The most recent attempt, known as the Dark Universe, kicked off with Dracula Untold and the 2017 iteration of The Mummy. The former went to lengths to establish the brand, even […]Read more »
In 2014 Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala made their feature film debut with the psychological thriller Goodnight Mommy, garnering critical acclaim as one of the top international films of the year. Amid the buzz, I sought it out and came away extremely disappointed with what I considered a film too straightforward to shoulder the weight of the twisty story it was trying to tell. Watching it I knew that there was going to be an eventual kink in the narrative and scope of the film limited the possibilities of how it was all going to end. In so […]Read more »
Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, or as it was known briefly prior to its “re-branding”, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is the partially-stand-alone, partially-preempted-franchise-starter follow-up to David Ayer’s 2016 film Suicide Squad. The latter was by all accounts a complete dumpster fire and one of my biggest letdowns of that year. Birds of Prey continues to follow Suicide Squad member Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), but nearly all other references to the previous film have been scrubbed clean in an effort to soft reboot the property. Meanwhile, nobody is complaining. While it retains some surface […]Read more »
The Gentlemen is the latest movie from writer/director Guy Richie and marks his return to the British street crime genre for the first time since 2008’s RocknRolla. In the interim, he has directed two Sherlock Holmes films, a failed King Arthur “reboot”, the live-action Aladdin film and the criminally under-seen The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After over a decade, he seems to very naturally slip back into the feel of things. The violence, the non-linear story-telling, the uncouth and frankly uncomfortable vulgarity; it’s all here. In all this time it’s refreshing to see he hasn’t really changed. Unfortunately for him, however, […]Read more »