For a remake manufactured purely out of spite for Don Mancini, it’s shocking how great the 2019 “Child’s Play” is. It’s not a redo of the original 1988 and that works toward its benefit as the studio is able to build its own mythology and unique horror tale. While the commentary on AI run amok is on the nose, “Child’s Play” manages to be a great time that evokes a lot of the classic eighties aesthetic right down to fleshed out, clever teen heroes that we can root for.
Tag Archives: Science Fiction
Rim of the World (2019)
I’d love to know what the thought process was behind “Rim of the World.” Directed by McG, it’s much too crude and violent for kids, but much too juvenile for anyone looking for a good action horror movie. Netflix and McG obviously had in mind the “Stranger Things” crowd when they concocted this unpleasant, long, obnoxious film. It wants to be mentioned in the same conversation as “The Goonies”, Amblin, and “It,” but I doubt in a few years it’ll even be mentioned in the same favor as “Mac and Me.”
Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
Spider-Man entrance in to the MCU has been a god send as Marvel had managed to touch on areas of the character that we haven’t seen before, while also fleshing out much if his universe and world. After the epics of “Captain Marvel” and “Avengers: Endgame,” Jon Watts’ “Far from Home” is a nice detour in to the MCU where the studio is able to book end their biggest event thus far. Closing out phase three of the MCU, “Far From Home” is a vastly superior film to “Homecoming” that benefits from the lack of Iron Man, believe it or not.
Remembering 1994’s “Spider-Man: The Animated Series”
Before 1994 our only real animated Spider-Man fix was the 1981 series “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.” Intent on rethinking the Spider-Man mold for the nineties, FOX forked over a ton of money to New World Corporation (and then Saban) to create Spider-Man: The Animated Series. With a completely different animation style, and small uses of computer animation, “Spider-Man: The Animated Series” premiered in 1994 with the episode “Night of the Lizard” and managed to take off as a ratings boom for FOX in the wake of similar successes like “X-Men” and “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.”
Head Count (2019)
A group of students on vacation in the desert takes in a stranger who seemed like fun. Once the darkness falls, they start telling each other scary stories. One particular story is taken from the internet and involved an entity that likes to play with things in 5s. From then on, things start getting weird and scary.
Night of the Creeps (1986): Collector’s Edition [2 Blu-Ray]
After spending years out of print, it’s good to see Fred Dekker’s eighties horror classics finally being given the special treatment that they deserve. For fans of the 1986 “Night of the Creeps,” they’ll be happy to know that Dekker’s zombie comedy hasn’t aged much at all. While it’s very much of its time, it still allows for an accessible and very interesting mix of horror, science fiction, coming of age, and romance that’s tough to beat. Plus, there’s Tom Atkins who is just downright fun in the role of detective Ray Cameron.
You Have to See This! Tammy and the T-Rex: The Gore Cut (1994) [Cinepocalypse 2019]
“I was sticking all this shit in it, just to make it work.” – Stewart Raffill on writing “Tammy and the T-Rex”
In the nineties America was obsessed with dinosaurs. For reasons we could never put our fingers on, Dinosaurs were in just about every facet of pop culture you could imagine. Video games, movies, animated series, they were mascots for snack foods, they were the basis for a family sitcom, and yes, they were fit in to movies amounting to cinematic oddities still making movie buffs scratch their heads. We had a family film about miniature dinosaurs, a buddy cop comedy about a female cop and a dinosaur, and yes, we even had “Tammy and the T-Rex.”