Confession time: As someone who has reviewed movies on home video for more than two decades, I simply cannot stand to watch most DVD or Blu-ray bonus features. The days when I might get excited for a director’s audio commentary or a lengthy making-of documentary about the film I just watched feel like a distant… Read More Remember When DVD and Blu-ray “Special Features” Actually Used to Be Special?
I love movies. Let me start with that lest I sound too negative right off the bat. I’ve been obsessed with movies most of my life and have many fond memories of watching countless films on the big screen. All the time I spent in darkened movie theaters over the years played a critical role… Read More R.I.P. Cinema – Leaving the Theatrical Experience to Nostalgia
Even though 1987’s action hit Predator may have technically been rated R, plenty of younger teens and even pre-teens saw and loved the movie, if not in theaters then on VHS or its ubiquitous presence on cable TV for years afterward. Many of those same kids were psyched to play the official video game adaptation… Read More 8-Bit Replay | Predator (1987) for NES
Two of Clive Barker’s most famous creations, the Hellraiser Cenobites and the monsters of Nightbreed, collide – but only in comic book form. While the author/filmmaker’s Hellraiser was successful enough to launch a franchise of sequels, his Nightbreed wasn’t quite as lucky. Nonetheless, Epic Comics (an imprint of Marvel) spun off both properties into comics… Read More Chaos of the Flesh | Hellraiser Nightbreed: Jihad Comic Book (1991)
When Logitech discontinued its popular line of Harmony universal remotes last year, the company promised that existing products would continue to be supported. That alleged “support” was put to the test for many users last week when Harmony’s integration with Alexa voice control suddenly stopped working without explanation, and the standard array of troubleshooting suggestions… Read More Harmony + Alexa Integration Broken Again – How to Fix It
For as uneven and frequently disappointing as the 1990s Hellraiser comic could be, the book at least managed some pretense of being artistically motivated with ambitions of literary merit (however rarely achieved). In contast, spin-off title The Harrowers was a straight-up embarrassment in all respects. Its short six-issue run was six too many. In the… Read More Hellishly Dumb | Clive Barker’s The Harrowers Comic Book (1993-1994)
The success of both Hellraiser (1987) and Hellraiser II (1988) ensured that further movie sequels would of course get moved into development, but the next one wouldn’t show up on theater screens until 1992. In the meantime, Clive Barker’s horror franchise found additional life on the printed page as a comic book published by Epic… Read More Hell Illustrated | Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Comic Books (1989-1994)
Because Tim Burton’s blockbuster Batman had spawned a video game spinoff that was very popular in its own right, his sequel of course needed its own game adaptation as well. In fact, it got several different adaptations spread out among a host of gaming consoles. Unfortunately, the NES version of Batman Returns was a huge… Read More 8-Bit Replay | Batman Returns (1993) for NES
The history of video games based on movies is littered with poorly conceived duds that were quickly rushed to market to capitalize on publicity for their source material. That was especially true in the 8-bit era, which inflicted numerous outright unplayable disasters onto naive fans hoping to relive their favorite movies in game form. Somehow,… Read More 8-Bit Replay | Batman: The Video Game (1990) for NES
Of all the comic books Batman has headlined over the decades, perhaps no single title has proven as influential, especially to movie adaptations, as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. For better or worse, the 1986 graphic novel set the template for every “dark” and “gritty” depiction of the character to follow. The comic was… Read More Read-Only File | The Dark Knight Returns (1986) Graphic Novel
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