Movie Scum

Photo: Universal Pictures In hindsight, it's surprising that it took this long for me to get around to The Frighteners . With Robert Zemeckis and Peter Jackson still in their prime, as well as Michael J. Fox who arguably never left his prime (seriously, check out his arcs on The Good Wife ), I must have just presumed this movie was a stupid comedy with horror-like elements and moved on. Only now have I realized how great this movie actually is.

Photo: Sony/Columbia Pictures To be honest, I had chosen this movie primarily because it is a recent film beginning with an 'E' that is easily accessible and I fully expected to hate it. I knew nothing of Escape Room  other than what my almost 14-year-old has told me (she saw it twice in theaters) and the Saw -lite vibes I got from the trailers that I had seen. But shockingly, if not for trying to review random movies over the next two months, I'd probably have never gotten around to this one. But, as it turns out, I would have been missing out.

Photo: Anchor Bay Films "The real monsters were the people we met along the way." - Ancient Proverb (?)

Photo: Warner Bros. Reports earlier today indicated Warner Brothers' 'The Batman' had to cease production after a recent restart due to a crew member testing positive for Covid-19, the novel coronavirus. But it has since come out that the infected party is none other than The Batman himself, Robert Pattinson. If a billionaire vigilante can catch this, what hope is there for the rest of us? Source: Robert Pattinson Has COVID-19, Halting  The Batman  Production | Vanity Fair

Photo: New World Pictures A repeated line in the trailer for Children of the Corn is "it's an adult nightmare." Creepy kids? Religious cults? Middle of nowhere America, surrounded by corn? Yep, checks out. All nightmare fuel.

Like many of you in my age range, you probably have fond memories of roaming the aisles of the local video store and gazing at all the great VHS covers to try to pick that night's movie. Blood Diner  was definitely one of those films with eye-catching box art that has evaded me for years. I prefer it had stayed that way.

Considering Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem takes no more than fifteen minutes to murder a child by way of an alien chest buster, I was pretty stoked. And shockingly, it mostly held up to my grand expectations for it.

Photo: 20th Century Films It's finally happening! At least I presume someone is excited about this weekend's release of the long-delayed The New Mutants from Josh Boone , said to be the final hurrah of Fox's X-Men continuity. The film was shot in summer of 2017 with a targeted release date of early 2018. In case you don't have a calendar handy, that was over two years ago with the delays blamed on test screenings, reshoots, studios changing hands, and of course, a global pandemic.     So, in honor of this long-gestating piece of 2017 nostalgia, let's look at some other films that have fallen into the abyss of release date shuffles and burials.  

Photo: Lionsgate Entertainment This afternoon, I was surprised to see a news article about the directors of the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot being replaced. As anyone, I promptly exclaimed "Jesus Christ, another one?"

Photo: Warner Brothers Hey guys! It's been a while since I've posted! Has anything new happened? Oh, global pandemic? That sucks. Is this affecting movies? Oh, it is?

Photo: Warner Bros. Quite a week for family-friendly films.

Photo: Laurel Entertainment Inc. Oh, wait. The Walking Dead is still on? And SyFy had their own batshit crazy zombie show Z-Nation ? Hmm ...

Photo: Orion Pictures 2019's Child’s Play is an odd duck in the remake world. We are all used to the blatant money-grab approach from studios to leverage existing properties for more money (see most of the Platinum Dunes remakes). Occasionally, you’ll even have a long dormant franchise that gets new legs from a big name promising a new take (like the upcoming Candyman or Spiral: From the Book of Saw ).

Photo: 20th Century Fox With the news this week that Macaulay Culkin will be joining the upcoming season of American Horror Story , I thought about Big Mac’s films throughout the year and how horror-adjacent many of them are.

Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer The early 1990s were not a great time in the horror genre as the big slasher franchises had mostly run their course and the new teenage wave starting with Scream were still a few years away. Arguably, the biggest film to come from this barren time is 1992's Candyman , a smart and socially relevant tale with more heft than your later Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th installments.

Photo: Sony/Columbia Pictures Short of the 1930s adaptation of H.G. Well’s novel The Invisible Man, I can’t really think of any other version or variant that is renowned or even good. While Paul Verhoeven ’s Hollow Man takes some interesting approaches, I can’t give it more than mediocre with a few flourishes here and there. Perhaps this week’s The Invisible Man directed by Leigh Whannell can strike a better balance.

Not Fox News though. That can rot in hell.

Photo: STX Entertainment A fake boy and a fake dog? Interesting theme this week at the box office.

  Photo: Universal As I am wont to do, while on a recent excursion to my local Wal-Mart for some mundane item like socks or cat food, I wandered back into the electronics area, specifically to the DVDs. While I am many years removed from my bad habits of blind buying movies that I might have a passing interest in, I still like to peruse the new and new-ish releases for anything that catches my eye. On a recent trip, that title was Bulletproof 2.

New reports indicate that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series is still alive ... for some reason.

Photo: Paramount The Terminator series continues to prove itself as a tough nut to crack. Of course, that’s not for a lack of trying. After James Cameron’s acclaimed Terminator 2 in 1991, additional films ranging from ‘meh’ to ‘eh’ have tried to continue the franchise by either shamelessly aping the original , creating an arrid and boring futuristic hellscape , or by including Nick Stahl . Suffice to say, none of these films inspired much confidence in the future of the series.