By this point, 25 years since its debut, I suspect that the only people who would still willingly subject themselves to Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin must fall into one of three categories: 1) Franchise completists who feel compelled to watch every entry no matter what, 2) Bad movie aficionados who revel in its awfulness,… Read More Stone Cold Awful | Batman & Robin (1997) 4K Ultra HD
After four seasons playing around in HBO’s Westworld, husband-and-wife producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have moved over to Amazon with another high-concept sci-fi property, a series adaptation of William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral. Rather than robots, this one’s about VR and time travel and…. well, yeah, some robots too, as it turns out.… Read More Ready Inception One | The Peripheral (2022) Amazon Prime Series Premiere
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)
Reboots of long-running horror franchises so rarely work out that it’s a wonder producers keep trying them. The 2009 Friday the 13th and 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street were both dead on arrival, and the Halloween series has turned into such a running joke of multiple reboots overwriting one another that no one can… Read More Put a Pin in It | Hellraiser (2022)
Riddle me this: I was enormously popular yet everyone hates me now. I star multiple Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning actors yet every performance is terrible. I feature the so-called “world’s greatest detective” and make him look like an idiot. What am I? Why, of course we’re talking about 1995’s Batman Forever, the first of two… Read More A Riddle Wrapped Inside an Enigma | Batman Forever (1995) 4K Ultra HD
During the 1990s Bat-renaissance, no less than four actors played Batman on cinema screens in the span of five years, though one’s name may not spring to mind as quickly as the others. Nestled between the entries starring Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney was another take on the Dark Knight voiced by Kevin… Read More Batmanimation Appreciation | Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
Clive Barker’s stylish, creepy Hellraiser made such a splash in 1987 that studio New World Pictures moved quickly to cash in with a sequel ready for release less than one year later. With Barker himself and most of the original cast still attached, Hellbound: Hellraiser II is often regarded as the best of the many… Read More Your Suffering Will Be Legendary | Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) Blu-ray
The feature filmmaking debut for up-and-coming author Clive Barker, Hellraiser represented an attempt to produce what we might now call an elevated slasher movie. That was a risky proposition to deliver into a cinema landscape dominated by jokey genre schlock at the time. Amazingly, despite initially mixed reviews and modest box office returns, the little… Read More Demons to Some, Angels to Others | Hellraiser (1987) Blu-ray
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
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