On The Second Day – Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation May ‘Bug’ Fans of the Series

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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The First Purge: A Franchise Reborn With Its Best Entry Yet

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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Jaws 2: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back in The Water

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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Deep Blue Sea 2: Something Fishy Off the Starboard Bow

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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Insidious The Last Key: Haunted By Franchise Strain

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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Victor Crowley (2018) Shows Franchise Fatigue

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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