9 Best Movies To Watch After Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

Within the First Epistle to the Corinthians are a handful of phrases bound to send chills up anyone’s spine, regardless of their religious affiliation. For instance, Christ’s apostle Paul declares, “I wanna hide the truth/I wanna shelter you/But with the beast inside/There’s nowhere we can hide.” Later, he further opines, “They say it’s what you make/I say it’s up to fate/It’s woven in my soul/I need to let you go.” Such arcane declarations reflect how the duality of humanity has always been a fixture of art. The tug-of-war between the good and bad humans are capable remains eternally on our minds. Maybe that’s why the original Universal Monsters Wolfman is so enduringly popular. That and the incredible makeup work done to transform Lon Chaney Jr. into that hairy beast, of course. Inevitably, this creature has received a 2020s update since Universal refuses to let its creepy-crawlies from the 1930s/40s lay dormant for long. Following the likes of The Invisible Man and Renfield, this creature receives a 2020 update, arriving as a vintage brute into the modern-day world in Wolf Man. Invisible Man director Leigh Whannell takes charge of this reboot, one that will prove frustratingly familiar for monster movie fans. Wolf Man begins in 1995, with a young Blake awakened by his uber-strict father on their remote Oregon father. Theirs is a household where parents grip their kids by the arm if they misbehave, and something is always lurking in the woods waiting to kill them. After this glimpse into yesteryear, Whannell and Corbett Tuck’s script cuts to the modern world. Blake (Christopher Abbott), now a writer turned stay-at-home dad living in New York City, is married to journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and caring for their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Continue Reading →

Sometimes when a loved one exits this mortal coil, they leave us something we don’t necessarily want. Outstanding bills, for instance. Or perhaps a piece of truly hideous artwork, or a cursed doll collection, or a house stuffed to the eaves with worthless junk, and we’re stuck dealing with it.  Or, like the main character in Alberto Corredor’s Baghead, you inherit an ancient malevolent creature with a connection to the dead. What do you in that situation? Do you try to foist it off on a cousin you never cared for? Maybe sell it on Facebook Marketplace? Well, if you’re Iris (Freya Allan), you turn it into a moneymaking venture, because why not? What could possibly go wrong?? Iris has inherited a pub from her late estranged father (Peter Mullan) that’s inexplicably in the middle of Berlin, even though every character in the movie is British and the pub looks like the Winchester in Shaun of the Dead. Despite it being a pub, it doesn’t appear to have paying customers, or at least not the kind you’d expect. Iris learns that hidden away in a hole in the basement is some sort of female creature wearing an Elephant Man bag over her head, and who can shapeshift into dead people. Whatever customers her father had came to the pub to communicate with deceased loved ones through the creature, paying a substantial fee for the experience. Continue Reading →

After catching Lisa Frankenstein this weekend, check out some of these weird & wild spins on the legendary tale. Now that we've all established that Frankenstein (or Fronkensteen, whichever you prefer) is in fact the name of the doctor, and his creation is just "the Creature," we can sit back and enjoy a revival in appreciation for Mary Shelley's landmark story that skillfully wove together body horror, science, and existentialism. Following the critically acclaimed Poor Things is Zelda Williams' 80s-set comedy Lisa Frankenstein, opening in theaters tomorrow, which acts as a nice appetizer before Guillermo del Toro's long-awaited adaptation on the story and Maggie Gyllenhaal's version of Bride of Frankenstein, both set for release next year. While often overlooked in favor of the cooler, sexier Dracula, there's plenty of media dedicated to Dr. Frankenstein and his creation, starting with James Whale's unimpeachable 1931 adaptation and its even better sequel, 1935's Bride of Frankenstein. It's been lovingly parodied (Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein), given a family-friendly treatment (Tim Burton's Frankenweenie), turned into a musical (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and even made into porn (more movies than you can possibly imagine). Here now are a list of some of the more notably unusual (and non-pornographic) takes on the story, offering gore, laughs, romance, or just general weirdness. Continue Reading →

Serve up this bizarre, oddly funny 80s slasher as part of your holiday entertainment feast this year. Though Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s retro horror double feature Grindhouse met with audience indifference, the collection of fake movie trailers during its “intermission” became amusing pop culture ephemera. Of the four featured, Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” is probably the most fun to revisit, mostly because of its loving dedication to capturing the unique seediness of an 80s slasher film. There’s something so familiar about the murky film quality, the low budget special effects, the incoherent plot (it appears to be a trailer for two different, unfinished movies stuck together, as was the case for many 80s horror movies), the glimpses of T&A, and of course, that hilarious voiceover and excellent tagline, that it seems unbelievable that it hadn’t actually already been made. Though it took over 15 years, Thanksgiving is finally a full-length feature, released to largely positive reviews just last weekend. It is not, however, as has been claimed elsewhere, the first Thanksgiving slasher film. Before that, there was 1987’s Blood Rage, a movie that leans into all the best and worst tropes of its genre, while also being deeply strange and often undeniably funny. Continue Reading →

To talk about The Killer is to strip away pretense. Well, one can try. Cold it may be, but David Fincher's latest is an incredibly open film. The houses are made of glass; the windows are ceiling-high; the voiceovers from the title character (Michael Fassbender) give infallible insight into his worldview. The film is his worldview, simple in its machinations and complex in its philosophy. In most other circumstances, this would unfold over time. And it does here, at least to an extent. Continue Reading →

In such films as Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, filmmaker Todd Haynes has taken the stories of famous people and utilized what we know—or think we know—about them to explore ideas about celebrity and our all-consuming need to render their often-complex stories into straightforward narratives. That strange compulsion to explain, understand, and commodify the lives of real people is at the heart of his latest work, May December, and it certainly seems to have sparked something in him because the end result is the strongest work that he has done in quite some time.  Continue Reading →

At this point, you can roughly divide the output of Nicolas Cage into one of two categories. First, there are films so tailored to his reigning wild man of cinema persona that it seems unimaginable they could exist if he passed. In the other camp are the quieter efforts like The Weather Man, Joe, and Pig that remind of what a powerful actor he still can be. His latest project, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, combines both approaches into a single offering. The result is a strange and wildly audacious work anchored by a surprisingly deft and low-key turn from Cage that stands in marked contrast to the weirdness surrounding him. Continue Reading →

Upon the news of the passing of William Friedkin, every headline reporting on the news focused on two films. It’s not surprising that the media spent so much time talking about The French Connection and The Exorcist, two bona fide masterpieces that paved the way for a new era of American filmmaking. What was disappointing was this seeming willingness to reduce a cinematic legend’s legacy to a burst of time in the early 1970s, thus dismissing the five decades that followed as either negligible or outright unworthy of interest.  Continue Reading →

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →