The Watchers (2024)

The Original novel from A.M. Shine is now available.

Now Exclusively in Theaters.

With the debut of Ishina Night Shyamalan I was hopeful that we would get a bold new voice for the genre film. Instead, she offers up a lukewarm, barely edible movie that fails as cinema, and failed as a movie you cam just use it as a means of killing time on a boring Sunday. You won’t kill time, but you might just doze off every now and then, thanks to its almost pride in tedium and dullness. For almost a ninety minutes movie, Shyamalan’s movie is painfully uneven in tone and pacing slowing down big time in various moments as a means to stage her clunky symbolism.

Continue reading

Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)

Now Exclusively in Theaters.

I’ve had my problems with the “Bad Boys” series in the past, but unlike the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, it’s been one of the most consistent series of action films ever released. The vision for “Bad Boys” has remained very precise and direct without adding too much or taking too much away. The stakes get higher with every film, and through it all we’ve stayed with Marcus and Mike only without adding on so much excess characters like “Lethal Weapon” fell victim to. “Bad Boys” has mainly been a vehicle for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, sure, but at least it knows what it is and tries to deliver on more complex ideas and bigger stakes.

Continue reading

You Have to See This! No Contest (1995)

Now Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video, The Roku Channel

The nineties were an interesting time for action movies. You had your A tier action flicks hitting the box office, and then you had your C and D tier on home video filling shelves. Among them there was “No Contest.” If you were a premium cable subscriber in the nineties, you probably know what “No Contest” is. This movie fulfilled two big purposes in that it gave the studio their very own “Die Hard” wannabe, and it pushed their star Shannon Tweed to the forefront in her long effort to become a mainstream movie star.

Shannon Tweed was a gorgeous and sexy woman and former Playboy model in the eighties who got in to feature films in the nineties and worked hard to become a big screen actress.

Continue reading

Not Him (2023)

Director/Writer Sarah Young commits to what is a great horror thriller that many fans will likely connect with big time. “Not Him” is a tense and anxiety ridden horror thriller that works very well in mixing in horror with what too many have experienced in their lifetime. I was very much enamored with how many themes and the sense of ambiguity that Writer/Director Sarah Young is able to integrate through to the very end.

Continue reading

In a Violent Nature (2024)

Exclusively In Theaters on May 31st from IFC Films. 

When you’re a slasher movie buff as I have been for thirty years, you become convinced that you’ve seen it all. Every new kind of effect or aesthetic has been approached, all with varying degrees of success. So when a movie like “In a Violent Nature” comes around and changes your mind, it’s quite a special occasion. Chris Nash sets out to not only re-think the slasher movie, but deconstruct it, and succeeds with flying colors. He the best horror movie of the year, a nihilistic, gory, viciously mean slasher movie that’s also incredibly creepy, and downright haunting in its commentary about the unpredictability of nature.

Continue reading