Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

I heard good things about this as a return, though I also hadn’t seen the first sequel until this year (spoiler: I didn’t like it). I figured I may as well work it into my “series project” for the year, so here I am. 25 years after the close of the last film, Bill S. […]

X (2022)

I’ve been seeing more slashers of late, finding an appreciation I wasn’t sure of in my youth of endless Friday the 13th sequels, and references to Sleepaway Camps and such. So when it was said that Ti West did a slasher, I was more intrigued than I might’ve otherwise been. Still, it meant going to […]

A Quiet Place Part II (2020)

I was not entirely enthused about the first Quiet Place. In some ways it reminded me of the work of Ari Aster: beautiful films with writing I just do not connect to. I was, as a result, less interested in this film as a sequel, but open to the idea that what bothered me in […]

Mortal Kombat (2021)

I grew up in the era of Mortal Kombat: the first game was released in when I was eight, and the home versions when I was nine. It was somewhere near my first exposure to “gore as fun”, with all of the intrigue around fatalities, and the controversies around its violence. My best friend at […]

PG: Psycho Goreman (2020)

Once upon a time, cult movies were made earnestly and sincerely, and gathered their audiences more by happenstance, chance, or sheer force of will from fandom. Sometime around fifteen or so years ago, it became, instead, a deliberate choice: aim for the cult audience by leaning heavily into the peculiarities of ideas, via insistent self-mockery, […]

Spree

I’m normally not inclined to rent things these days: I’ve got enough of a backlog (in the hundreds to thousands) of stuff I already own after all, but I decided to rent this one on what amounted to a request to have someone to talk to about a movie that spawned mixed feelings. I can […]

Bloodshot (2020)

I wasn’t really planning to watch this–the trailer gave me something like 1989 Dolph Lundgren Punisher vibes, though I knew Dinesh Shamdasani was involved. If that name doesn’t mean much to you, he was the primary force behind reviving Valiant Comics (as Valiant Entertainment) in 2012, eventually CEO and CCO for the company, and a gigantic […]