A Chinese remake of BREWSTER’S MILLIONS? Well, why not? Hello Mr. Billionaire turns out to be a pretty decent comedy.
Funny money
Mar 4
Lots of unintended inter-film echoes in this one. Killers with gas masks. Deep South swamp monsters produced by genetic meddling. Characters named Tom and Sara. Nigh-unwatchable parodies. Point-missing adaptations. Movies that got the way they are because somebody figured they were too cheap not to be cheesy. Jerks played by Josh Gad. Intervals of 28 years…
Deathstalker II (1987), in which Jim Wynorski first becomes JIM WYNORSKI…
Don’t Go in the House (1979), in which I suppose we can’t really call him a slasher when his weapon of choice is an army-surplus flamethrower…
Doom (2005), in which you might just barely recognize an element or two from the source games if you squint hard and hit yourself on the head with a hammer…
Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead (2009), which I fully admit I brought on myself…
Little Monsters (2019), which must surely be the only romcom in which zombies eat children…
Mark of the Beast (2012), in which you might recognize the source story, but you won’t understand why they treated it this way…
My Bloody Valentine (2009), which manages to be one of the better horror remakes of the aughts mainly because that’s one of the easiest leagues around…
Razortooth (2009), which tries to get away with mutating Asian swamp eels into giant viperfish…
Terror in the Swamp (1984), which tries to get away with mutating a nutria into a killer Bigfoot…
and…
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026), in which teenaged maniacs cosplaying as Jimmy Saville make life difficult for an elderly man who just wants to listen to old Duran Duran records and shoot morphine with his giant, naked rage-zombie pal.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
It has worn well
Feb 22
R.I.P. Robert Duvall. Overlooked, compared to many other 1970s crime dramas, The Outfit deserves to stand next to the well-known ones.
Mellow fellow
Feb 12
Pop singer Donovan plays the title figure in The Pied Piper, a G-rated movie that will freak out your kids.
Throwing mayhem on the barbie with John Doe: Vigilante, an offbeat Aussie actioner.
It’s a Canadian “Thing”
Jan 23
While it has more than a passing resemblance to a certain John Carpenter movie, Black Mountain Side actually isn’t bad for a Canadian cheapie.
No Go-Go boys? No go
Jan 13
Made without either Menahem Golan or Yoram Globus, the Cannon film The Human Shield understandably won’t completely satisfy fans of the company.
Oh, Falk!
Jan 3
Just before getting his first Oscar nomination, Peter Falk appeared in the Canadian film The Bloody Brood, and, like, it’s cool, daddy-o.
One Last Update for 2025
Dec 30
Thus concludes an unusually busy year for reviewing first-run films– and thus also concludes my coverage of the Hammer Dracula series, which I’ve been writing about intermittently for an incredible 25 years:
Appointment with Fear (1985), in which there’s no appointment, with fear or anything else, but I do get the astral-projecting serial killer whose absence so annoyed me in The Astral Factor a few months ago…
Bad Moon (1996), in which man’s best friend is werewolf’s worst enemy…
Blood Tide (1982), in which treasure hunters on an Aegean island unwittingly resurrect the gill man which the locals used to worship as a god until about A.D. 500, but the results have more in common with The Wicker Man than with Creature from the Black Lagoon…
Dracula, A.D. 1972 (1972), in which Hammer tries to get hip, but ends up proving instead how square it had really become…
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), in which they try again by keeping the modern setting, but pivoting to a faintly Bond-flavored conspiracy thriller format…
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), in which the studio’s last and strangest hail-Mary gambit entails teaming up with Shaw Brothers to make a kung fu horror film…
Frankenstein (2025), in which the passion project of a lifetime yields disappointingly good-enough results…
and…
The Running Man (2025), in which what ought to have been the perfect dystopia for the present era of tacky malevolence turns out even more disappointingly good enough.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
A super superhero
Dec 24
The Korean superhero movie Psychokinesis defies conventions in a number of aspects in order to be more believable than usual.