Pauly Shore was the early 90s. Not representative or symbolic of them – he was them. For several years, he went from MTV’s most chillin’ VJ to Hollywood’s own prophet of slack. If you needed someone to embody post-80s aimlessness dressed as radical self-expression, The Weasel was your guy. For the uninitiated, Son in Law … Read more
Predator 2 arrived in theaters for Thanksgiving 1990, and promptly got its spine ripped out at the box office, opening fourth behind the likes of Home Alone and Dances with Wolves. It’s still the series’ lowest earner. Then 20th Century Fox buried the film franchise for fifteen years. Harrigan was intended to be every hard … Read more
Coffee, gunfire, and the last known expression of the original punk scene before it all went… Straight to Hell arrived on Home Video today in 1987, after a limited June theatrical release. Alex Cox followed Sid & Nancy by dragging Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Courtney Love and The Pogues to Spain, then pointed … Read more
While the Material Girl’s cinematic vehicle suffered the supposed bad luck reserved for movies with actual question marks in the title, the lack of punctuation served the theme song and concert tour much better. Both were huge hits. So the superstition lived on? I guess. No, this was seriously a thing. There’s an old Hollywood … Read more
This warm-hearted Spielbergian cryptozoological adventure didn’t fare quite as well as the colossal hits he was producing earlier in the decade, but it’s far from being the Skunk Ape critics panned – the boy-and-his-bigfoot formula is still a fun Sask-watch 38 years later. While John Lithgow and Melinda Dillon are excellent as the harried parents, … Read more
Thanks to some gorgeously lavish full-body makeup effects by Rob Bottin, to me, Tim Curry will always be the definitive rendering of the devil. Legend was Ridley Scott’s attempt to course-correct after Blade Runner pretty much tanked. Fantasy was supposed to be bankable and the studios were desperate to find the next Star Wars by … Read more
If you were reading Starlog in the late ’80s, Millennium looked like the one to watch. It had time travel, air disasters, paradoxes, and future people trying to fix their civilization. It was supposed to be the thinking man’s mid-budget blockbuster. But 1989 had other plans. That summer dropped Batman, The Last Crusade, Honey, I … Read more
Yule Love it! These are my kind of yuletide shenanigans. Even though the original reviews were a mixed bag and the audience reception was moderate, Richard Donner’s manic yuppie spin on the ol’ Dickens Carol has become a bona fide Christmas classic – and a perennially quotable holiday staple. Scrooged never fails to put a … Read more
For those who like a little added new age hokum with their end-of-days prophecies, this Demi Moore thriller belongs to that post-Rosemary’s Baby lineage of religi’orror (think The Omen, The Exorcist, Beyond the Door) where cosmic forces use innocent people as pawns in their infernal shenanigans. By the time of this movie’s release, that wave … Read more
The Death Sentence: At the time of its release, prison-themed horror was about to get overcrowded. The Horror Show (aka House III), Prison, Shocker, Slaughterhouse Rock, The Chair, Death Row Diner… There was this whole little subgenre brewing where capital punishment would meet supernatural retribution. Wes Craven’s Shocker would be the most high-profile of the … Read more