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Category Archives: Film

The Unfortunate Return of the Pandemic Panic Film Festival

Last year I came up with the idea of the Pandemic Panic Film Festival. One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic was the at-home accessibility of film festival screenings. The Telluride Horror Show and Nightstream Film Festival aligned in such a way that their virtual screenings meant two weeks of watching new films from the comfort of my couch. It was one of the highlights of an otherwise depressing year. As we went into 2021 my assumption was film festivals would return to normal, virtual screenings would come to an end, and I’d finally make it to Telluride in person. 

Alas, just as no one could predict the pandemic, no one could predict we’d still be faced with such uncertainty. No one could predict we’d still be dealing with ICUs at capacity due to COVID.

Due to the circumstances, there are multiple ways film festivals are approaching their return. Telluride Horror Show chose the all in-person option. Fantastic Fest is taking the hybrid approach and doing a little of both. Overlook Film Festival, the one that brought me to Nightstream, is sticking with all-virtual.

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Warner Bros. Pictures provides cinemas a long runway for reopening

Warner Bros. Pictures is saving cinema. 

In early December of 2020, I first sat down to write this article. That first line was going to be my headline. The same day HBOMax/theater release strategy felt like the best possible decision considering the state of the world. Not every theater in the country was closed. Those that were open had become dependent mostly on limited run and re-release films. Warner Bros. was making the risky decision to keep their film slate moving while offering open cinemas a bone. A very tiny bone, but a bone nonetheless. That was my gut response, but, holy cow, it was not the popular response.

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Nightstream Review: Ema

In no particular order: intoxicating, boring, horny, punk rock, hilarious, horrifying, bewildering. 

Those are all of the adjectives that passed through my brain during the viewing of this delicious puzzle of a film.

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Telluride Horror Show Review: 12 Hour Shift

In this day of age, Internet misinformation is just something we expect. We’ve almost reached a point where if something lands in front of you on a website or social network the instinct is to disbelieve. That hasn’t always been the case. One of the very first Internet rumors to take hold on a mass scale was that Marilyn Manson was a child actor on the television show The Wonder Years. In that falsehood, Manson used to be the actor Josh Saiviano who played the character Paul Pfeiffer. The actor grew up, changed his name, and became an industrial icon. An extra special version of the Internet story was that Manson had ribs removed so he could give himself a blowjob. 

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Frankensteining a pandemic horror film festival

The last time I was in a movie theater was March 13, 2020. COVID-19 had finally arrived on the U.S. shores and we weren’t quite sure what it would mean, but everything was starting to shut down. I figured it would probably be one of my last opportunities to visit the cinema for a couple of months, so I chose the earliest screening of Valiant’s Bloodshot.

It was an uncomfortable experience. The theater was mostly empty but one of the few other attendees chose to sit two seats away from me. He spent the film coughing, snorting, and, at least twice, spitting. I was pretty sure that was going to be it. My zeal to get one last film in would result in hospitalization from this virus we were still trying to understand.

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Hulk Snap: Worse Than Thanos Snap?

It probably doesn’t need to be said but this article has significant spoilers for Avengers: Endgame. If you’re okay with spoilers jump past this picture of the Hulk and keep going. If you aren’t? Well, stop right here or Hulk smash.

Hulk Snap: Worse than the Thanos Snap?

If you spend way too much time thinking about Avengers: Endgame you’ll start to realize the “Hulk Snap” may have been a terrible decision. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed Endgame and am firmly in the “just enjoy the movie for goodness sake” camp, but for funsies I decided to sit down and (over)think about all of the ways Tony Stark’s requirement for the “Hulk snap” was actually kinda, sorta selfish.

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Captain Marvel crushes completely ridiculous success metric

Captain Marvel has become the seventh film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to break $1 billion. It’s an incredibly significant metric for multiple reasons but perhaps most importantly because achieving $1 billion was a made-up measure of success by people looking for reasons to call the film a failure.

It wasn’t until after Captain Marvel‘s record breaking opening weekend that sites pushing for the film’s failure started to move the goalposts. Before the opening weekend, sites like Bounding Into Comics and Cosmic Book News had started telling their readers the film would be a complete failure if it didn’t break $100 million.

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Endgame Plus Dark Phoenix Equals A Secret Wars Film

We can preserve the X-Men and Avengers Universes while still bringing all of the heroes together. The stingers for Avengers: Endgame and X-Men: Dark Phoenix should start setting up a Secret Wars film. Here’s how…

Avengers Endgame plus Dark Phoenix equals Secret Wars film

Disney has acquired Fox and with it comes the Marvel’s X-Men and all of the related properties. We don’t know when we’ll start seeing mutants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but we do know it’s coming. This fact is cause to celebrate for fans who believe the MCU should reflect the comics. For others, (*raises hand*) there’s some hand-wringing as to what Disnification might mean for what’s become one of the more cinematically adventurous Universes under the superhero film genre. We’d be happy if the X-Men stayed in their own Universe (also, I’ll admit I’m one of the few people who would be totally fine with the Spideyverse staying with Sony).

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DC Universe Subscription: First Impressions

DC Universe is the new digital portal putting the many media iterations of DC, from comics to shows to movies, literally at your fingertips. Is the DC Universe subscription worth the introductory cost of $74.99 per year or $7.99 per month? I signed up for a year and here are my first impressions.

DC Universe subscription

This isn’t Marvel Unlimited. DC fans have been waiting for a DC digital service similar to what Marvel offers ever since…well…since Marvel launched Marvel Unlimited. In this early version of DC Universe, the company is offering both more and less than Marvel Unlimited. DC wants fans to have one place to find comics, television shows, films, and character biographies. They’re also attempting to build a community through discussion forums, regular giveaways, and a daily streaming show.

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New Halloween Trailer Creates An Awesome Shared Universe Infinite Loop

One of the most anticipated films of 2018’s Halloween season has to be the new entry in John Carpenter’s Halloween franchise. The film, which shares the same name as the original 1978 film and no sequel designation, ignores all of the various sequels (yes, even Halloween II) and remakes that followed.  Instead, it will pick up decades after the original with Jamie Lee Curtis returning to the role of Laurie Strode who is hell-bent on killing her little brother, Michael Meyers.

This isn’t the first time the Halloween franchise has ignored it’s own history. Notoriously, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, was a standalone storyline featuring only the moniker. It was likely a failed effort by Universal to leverage the Halloween branding for a series of feature films unrelated to trials and tribulations of Michael and Laurie. Read More »