July 2, 2023.Reading time 8 minutes.
When Becky made its way to digital platforms in June 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic overshadowed the little action-thriller as it did everything else. No one was thinking about movies amidst the peak of the pandemic and certainly not small indie thrillers. But Becky and its mix of exploitation, gruesome practical effects, and willingness to […]
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December 15, 2022.Reading time 8 minutes.
If Silent Night, Deadly Night is something of a Grindhouse cult classic, its sequel inexplicably became a belated meme classic. What you may not know is that the sequels kept coming. Like other B-level horror franchises, Silent Night, Deadly Night lived on with a handful of straight-to-video sequels. Bill Moseley (The Devil’s Rejects) turned up […]
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August 31, 2020.Reading time 10 minutes.
Two years removed and 2018 still remains the ‘Year of Blumhouse Productions’. While Insidious: The Last Key and Truth or Dare were critical duds, both films were box office successes. And the studio’s re-invigoration of Halloween in October of 2018 marked a major course correction for the dormant franchise. Somewhere in between, Jason Blum tided […]
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June 16, 2020.Reading time 10 minutes.
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was more than a box office sensation – it was a cultural phenomenon. Along with Star Wars, Jaws changed how movies were made, released, and watched. And just like Psycho turned people off of their showers, Jaws scared a generation away from the ocean. Still there was no reason to make a […]
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January 18, 2020.Reading time 9 minutes.
If you were a certain age in the 1990’s, you remember Deep Blue Sea. Released in the summer of 1999, the Renny Harlin-directed shark thriller was a modest box office hit earning just over $73 million on a $60 million budget. Its premise of genetic experiments creating intelligent killer sharks made for delightfully silly B-movie […]
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November 30, 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.
Reviews for the latest Insidious installment have been less than kind. At the time of writing this review, the Tomatometer for Insidious: The Last Key was sitting at a ‘rotten’ 31%. Perhaps better than its 31% rating suggests, The Last Key is certainly ‘Exhibit A’ of the law of diminishing returns. Given that it’s now […]
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February 7, 2018.Reading time 6 minutes.
Last year horror filmmaker Adam Green dropped a pleasant surprise for fans with the announcement that a new Hatchet film, Victor Crowley (2018), wasn’t just in development, but was finished and due for an early 2018 release. The original Hatchet (2006) was a fun, refreshing return to late-1980s slasher basics, effectively balancing over-the-top practical gore […]
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