I never finished the screenwriting advice book “Save the Cat,“ but what I did read contained a useful insight. The author advised that all great stories contain an element of irony. For instance, the Bruce Willis film “Die Hard“ could be thought of with the following question: what if a man cop dreading a meeting…

I have a love-hate thing with the work of Wes Craven. I think “Nightmare on Elm Street” is the greatest horror film ever made, and I came around on the “Scream” series after disliking it at first, but he’s made some stinkers. It might seem weird that I would dig deep enough into his ouvre…

I’ve mentioned “apartment horror” recently, the sub-genre where a protagonist tackles the strange modern isolation that comes with living in what are basically cells stacked upon each other. Usually, a mystery connected to the building appears, and the protagonist asserts their autonomy and individuality by getting to the bottom of it. Examples would include Roman…

I loved the 2021 horror film “Malignant” so much that I noted the name of the screenwriter who’d written such a terrific and twisty script. Thus, when I found out Akela Cooper had written the 2022 killer doll movie “M3GAN” I eagerly anticipated it. However, I was disappointed. Compared to “Malignant”, it was relatively bloodless…

Well, this is a little weird. I recently watched the film “House of Darkness“ which I’d berated for being an hour of people talking about modern sexual mores, followed by a big reveal and then violence. Then, the next day, I watched “Bone Lake” (I’ve got a cold, so I’m watching a lot of movies)…

Sometimes it seems the main beneficiaries of #metoo in Hollywood were white male actors. Why? Because the villain is always the best role, and since 2015 or so, there have been numerous films that flip the script of the previous 100 years. Instead of presenting a good lucking, charming white dude as the hero, he’s…

The 1980s was a period of some great Armageddon films—tales where much of society was destroyed by nuclear warfare or some kind of strange calamity. Think of the Mad Max sequels or “Night of the Comet,” or “Def-Con Four.“ One thing I’ve always noticed about these films: they make the apocalypse look like a hell…