The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is streaming on HBO Max Much like life, franchises find a way. Sooner or later, they realize they can’t keep doing the same thing over and over, and they need to evolve. The Fast and the Furious began as a charmingly low rent ripoff of Point Break. With F9 being released a few weeks from now, we’ll see a series that took enormous chances and transformed into something entirely different.  We’ve arrived at a point, not unlike the late 1960s, where studios don’t fully know what audiences want and are scared to death about it. Back then, the studios... Read More

Do you know what drives me absolutely batty? When a movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. You’d think that would be reasonably easy to work out, right? Perhaps not, but let’s perform a thought experiment from a couple of angles. Imagine you’re a screenwriter. A major studio hires you to pen the latest installment of their box-office dominating franchise. To do that, you need to figure out genre and tone. With genre, are you making a superhero movie? An action flick? A comedy? Science fiction? If you want to blend the genres, great. The Cabin in the Woods is ultimately a horror movie that... Read More

If the horror genre were a comedian, it would be Rodney Dangerfield. It gets no respect. Horror relies on pure filmmaking to create an atmosphere of dread. Directors can fudge things and get sloppy if they’re making a comedy, or particularly an action flick, but still get away with it. But horror is unforgiving. If it’s poorly done, then we get one of the many, many, many substandard horror films that grace theaters for 15 minutes or so, then enjoy a long life unbought in a bargain bin. The tragedy of the horror genre is that talented filmmakers are frequently ignored in favor of... Read More