I quite enjoyed the Bram Stoker award winning YA novel Clown in a Cornfield, so it made sense that sooner or later I was going to take in the film adaption of the story. It makes me laugh that the book is very much defined as a teen book, but the film itself, because of…
Tag: sequels
Tron: Ares (2025) – Joachim Ronning
I was there in 1982. I remember sitting in the Odeon in Kingston. It was me, my sister, and my father. It wasn’t my dad’s thing. I was gobsmacked by the idea of being able to go inside a computer, and live in this new world of video games, which, at the time, were just…
Terrifier (2016) – Damien Leone
Let’s get this out of the way, Art the Clown is a very cool creation, and a very deadly mime. That being said, the narrative around the character and the way the film is shot left a little to be desired. Trapped in a rough script, the film is luridly garish, but its uninspired cinematography…
Darkman (1990) – Sam Raimi
I enjoyed Darkman when it first came out. I had it on VHS. But it has been years since I watched it. And I’ll be honest, I liked it much more this time through. I love Raimi as a filmmaker and you can see his always moving camera at work here, as well as his…
Olympus Has Fallen (2013) – Antoine Fuqua
Antoine Fuqua delivered another actioner with Olympus Has Fallen. Taking an obvious page from the Die Hard playbook of the lone hero taking on seemingly insurmountable odds, the story casts Gerard Butler in the role of Mike Banning, a secret service agent no longer on the President’s (Aaron Eckhart) protection detail after a horrific accident…
Deathstalker (1983) – James Sbardellati
Deathstalker is pure 80s sword and sorcery, and while I’m all for gratuitous nudity, there is a lot of it, I don’t need all the rape, I don’t care what the thought process is behind it. It’s repugnant and doesn’t serve to tell us anything about the characters we didn’t already know. Setting that aside,…
Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters (1968) – Kimyoshi Yasuda
Wow, did I have fun with this one. I had never heard of it, but I do love a lot of J-horror, and this one definitely had an interesting sound to it, a Japanese monster movie with practical effects, costumes and a touch of animation, what’s not to like? The monsters are allowed to show…
The Substitute (1996) – Robert Mandel
Its action sequences are flawed, and don’t look anywhere as near as cool, and sharp as they could, but 1996’s The Substitute (which spawned three increasingly bad direct-to-video sequels) is packed with familiar faces. The cast is led by Tom Berenger, and includes Raymond Cruz, Luis Guzman, William Forsythe, Rodney, A. Grant, Ernie Hudson, Marc…
Haunted Mansion (2023) – Justin Simien
There’s just a little too much going on in Disney’s Haunted Mansion. It seems to want to dip its toe into as many genres as it can, but doesn’t give any of them enough time to actually pay off. There are some great concepts and the cast is solid, but it just doesn’t fire on…
Shin Godzilla (2016) – Hideaki Anno, and Shinji Higuchi
Crunchyroll, the streaming service, doesn’t just have anime series for every taste and genre, it also contains a number of films, among them is Shin Godzilla. I love a good Godzilla film so I was very eager to dive into this one, and was very happy to see that it had more in common with…
The Mind Reels 