Last week, we began by watching one really good Dracula movie and one pretty good Dracula movie, and we learned that with the absence of Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing, Christopher Lee’s Dracula is unable to die in a particularly dignified fashion. But, he has five more appearance in this franchise, so plenty of opportunity to…
By 1958, American movie studios had largely gravitated away from the classic monsters that ruled the horror genre in the ’30s and ’40s. Until slashers became dominant in the late 1970s, American horror merged in elements of sci-fi, and plucky young heroes battled aliens and nuclear mutants instead of the supernatural, for the most part.…
Unfortunately, I already used the headline “Edgar Allan Poesers” (for which I cannot take credit) back in 2016 while reviewing Extraordinary Tales. It would apply extremely well here. The Raven (2012) The Plot: When a string of grisly murders mirroring the work of Edgar Allan Poe hits Baltimore, police inspector Fields (Luke Evans) enlists the…
We’re back! Another year, another October, another Octoberween. Everybody has their own way of getting in the mood for Halloween (everybody who does get in the mood, anyway), and my personal preference is with spooky movies. Of varying spook factor. Sure, I love me something genuinely scary, like John Carpenter’s Halloween, and I love kid-friendly…
Everybody I know seems to have a Christmas favorite that they watch every holiday season, with family or without. For some, nothing says Christmas like It’s a Wonderful Life (which I recently re-watched for the first time since I was a kid; I liked it, but it struck me that about 65% of the screenplay…
On December 19th, 2001—that is to say, exactly fifteen years ago from the day after this article’s publication—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring started playing in cinemas around the world. I was nine… and a bit. Despite its PG-13 rating for “Intense battle sequence and some scary images,” I did see…
At the Academy Awards in 2012, there was a little video montage in which an interviewer asked a bunch of Hollywood celebrities the same question: “What makes a great film?” A variety of answers ranging from dull to insightful spouted forth, but the best by far came from Robert Downey Jr., who said, “I think…
