Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is where the wheels have started to come off the cart for me. With new series and movies seemingly every few weeks and too many of them playing out like advertisements for other series and movies (looking at you, Loki), the projects that grab hold of me these…
The formula for the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books was simple and effective: author and folklorist Alvin Schwartz collected ghost stories, urban myths, and legends from around the world and pared them down to language that would be easily understood by a readership of children. And if some of the stories were perhaps a…
The Halloween season brings with it many rituals and traditions, but there is one above all others that I steadfastly keep. At least once during this spookiest of months, I sit down either by myself or with a friend and try my best to beat the original Castlevania video game in one sitting. Originally released in Japan in…
By 1991, director Wes Craven had lived several lives. Over the course of 20 years, the college professor-turned-horror-auteur evolved from the grindhouse provocateur to the 80s slasher hitmaker behind the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Still several years from leading the meta-horror renaissance with Scream, Wes Craven released a movie that defies easy categorization. Parts dark…
From the moment when a desperate band of survivors beat down on zombie hordes in an English pub in time to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” in his 2004 directorial debut Shaun of the Dead, it was clear that director Edgar Wright had a rare knack for combining clever cinematography with needle drop pop songs. That same…
The first James Bond movie I saw starring the late and dearly missed Roger Moore was Live and Let Die in high school. I grew up with Sean Connery’s classics in heavy rotation on VHS at home and the adventures of Pierce Brosnan playing out in theaters and on my Nintendo 64, and while popular logic dictates…
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 opens in now familiar territory: our intrepid band of heroic space-goofs trade some quips, tease out some deeper emotional conflicts, and lay the smack on a cosmic slug to some super sounds of the 70s while Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) shakes what he’s got. It’s moments like these that made…
Rooster Illusion 