Movie Scum

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.

Two weeks from Halloween opening. We can do it, guys.