The giant lizard Godzilla (maybe you’ve heard of him) has been around for 69 years. Nice. When the first movie came out in 1954, it was a clear allegory to Japan’s Postwar turmoil following the U.S. dropping atom bombs. Atomic energy created Godzilla, which led to more devastation. Over the years, Godzilla has gone from adversary to savior and back again. The last Japanese-made film was 2016’s Shin Godzilla which recontextualized the threat for a new generation. Now, Toho will take us all the way back to the beginning with Godzilla Minus One. Take a look at the terrifying new trailer for Godzilla Minus One below.

The synopsis for the movie shares, “Post-war Japan is at its lowest point when a new crisis emerges in the form of a giant monster, baptized in the horrific power of the atomic bomb.” And we see that power crystallize in our latest Godzilla Minus One trailer, which puts the kaiju at center as it reigns down horror. At the very of the tease, we see the emergence of some kind of glowing appendages. And that can only mean bad news. This Godzilla is pure terror on land and sea and is not holding back as it seeks to cause destruction.

Setting this new movie in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastation is also an interesting and harrowing new wrinkle in the Godzilla mythos. We’re used to seeing him demolish buildings, but what if the buildings are already destroyed? I wonder if any of the politics of the U.S. occupation following Japan’s surrender will be there at all. It’s clear from the trailer and the title, that Godzilla is just another horror for the people of Japan to deal with, one of many.

In addition to the new trailer, there is also a sweet new poster for Godzilla Minus One.

Godzilla Minus One is written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, who also wrote and directed 2019’s excellent Lupin III: The First. Clearly he has no problem tackling some of Japan’s biggest pop culture icons. The movie will open in Japan on November 3 and in the United States on December 1, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

Featured Image: Toho

Originally published on July 11, 2023.

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Whenever the prospect of a new video game movie adaptation materializes, we usually run the gamut from “Oh hey, cool” to “Oh, but probably it won’t be good” pretty fast. We’ve got years and years of movies like Assassins Creed, Doom, and Street Fighter tempering those expectations. Though we’ve also had the likes of Pokémon: Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog to perk us up a bit. (Also, sidebar, the original Silent Hill movie is actually quite good.) But nothing has given us as much cautious optimism as the following: a Ghost of Tsushima movie is in the works from John Wick series director Chad Stahelski. And happily, its showing signs of life.

Sony

In 2021, Deadline reported that Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions are developing the film based on the massive 2020 bestselling game from Sucker Punch Studios. Roundly considered the final big game of the PlayStation 4 generation, it has sold millions of copies. The story follows samurai Jin Sakai as he must thwart an invasion by the vicious Mongol army in the 13th century. In the course of the story, Jin puts his code of honor to the test as he engages in stealth and terror techniques to overtake the invaders. That right there is a pretty John Wicky character arc.

Since the initial announcement, we haven’t seen much movement from the Ghost of Tsushima movie. But recently, Chad Stahelski gave a fairly promising update to ScreenRant. He shared:

We have a script, we’re very close to getting our s–t together on that, as well. Development is always tricky, it’s studios, it’s strikes, and availabilities, and scouting. You have to will things into existence. I think the two things that I am closest and most interested in are Highlander and Ghost of Tsushima. Both amazing, amazing properties, the story of Ghost is, also, one of my favorite properties of all time.

Sony

Of any recent video game, Ghost of Tsushima already feels very cinematic. The massive open world allows players to traverse a damn near real-size map of the actual Tsushima Island. Massive open vistas and scenic mountains fill the screen. In fact, there’s a specific “Kurosawa Mode” which makes the player feel like you’re playing a movie by the legendary director Akira Kurosawa.

This is all to say that there’s a lot to make one think a movie adaptation could be amazing. Story and character-driven; fast-paced and visceral action; gorgeous period setting and landscape; plus you get to pet foxes, which better be in the movie or so help us. We already were keen to see Ghost of Tsushima turn into a TV series, a la The Last of Us‘ recent adaptation, but I guess a movie will be okay too.

In hiring Chad Stahelski to direct, Sony is ensuring some of the most bone-crunching, arterial-blood-spraying action one could hope for. It could do for samurai movies what the John Wick series did for gunplay. This might also hopefully be the rare instance in which people who played the characters in the game will reprise their roles for the film. The performance capture is so good, there’s really no mistaking any of the cast.

Ghost of Tsushima is born of the partnership between Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions. We hope we’ll get to see it come fully to life.

Originally published on March 25, 2021.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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In the lead-up to the Doctor Who 60th anniversary, along with a trio of David Tennant-starring specials, the BBC has announced a very cool thing for long-time fans. Tales of the TARDIS will see in-canon reunions between various classic-era Doctors and their companions. Fifth Doctor and Tegan, Sixth Doctor and Peri, and Seventh Doctor and Ace will all have scenes together again. For Doctor actors who’ve passed, companions will get back together. These include First Doctor companions Vicki and Steven and Second Doctor companions Jamie and Zoe. Third Doctor companion Jo Grant will meet up with Clyde from The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The interstitials—written by showrunner Russell T Davies and Who writers Phil Ford and Pete McTighe—will weave between episodes of classic Doctor Who to create 90-minute omnibus versions. It sounds like so much fun! But people outside of the UK, and more than that people who don’t pay for a television license fee, can’t watch them. You see, these are only available on the BBC iPlayer, the public broadcaster’s on-demand service. Only people who pay for a license fee and live in the UK can legally watch programming on this service.

In an Instagram post, Davies explained that he’s not sure when, or if, the Tales of the TARDIS episodes will ever make their way elsewhere.

This is the latest in a series of programming and distribution choices which have left many a bit confused. There, all of Doctor Who is on some BBC service. In North America, it’s a different story. So here’s a quick rundown of what episodes you can see on what service.

Brand New Doctor Who Will Be on Disney+

As we reported a year ago, starting with the three David Tennant specials, all subsequent Doctor Who episodes, and presumably specials, will stream on Disney+. This is a massive deal that will bring the show to the streamer day-and-date as it airs on BBC One in the UK. It’ll be on Disney+ everywhere else in the whole wide world (that has Disney+).

Classic Doctor Who Is Still on BritBox

BritBox, the global streamer the BBC and ITV went in on together, has been the home of classic series Doctor Who—a catalogue of nearly 700 episodes, including missing episode animation and reconstruction—since 2017. This also has a number of specials and ancillary material for your viewing pleasure. If you want to catch up on the first 26 seasons of the show, BritBox is the place to do it.

Where Is the Rest of Modern Doctor Who?

This is a little bit trickier. In the United States, Doctor Who from 2005 through 2022 is on Max. This is not the case for Canada, which has been without a streaming home of modern Doctor Who since January. The Max deal came from back in the halcyon HBO Max days when the WB-owned service wanted people to come to them for quality programming. Presumably, this is a deal that’s in place for the foreseeable future, but given how ephemeral Max programming is, we wouldn’t hold our breath that everything from the Ninth through Thirteenth Doctors will remain there forever. Where will it go after that? No idea.

That means, come November 25, you’ll need three separate streaming services to watch the whole of Doctor Who in the US. This is why I advocate for physical media, folks.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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November 3 is a very special day in the annals of history. It’s my wedding anniversary. End of article. Oh, and November 3 is also Godzilla Day, the yearly celebration of Toho Studios’ infamous King of the Monsters. We are all very excited for the release of the next movie in the Japanese film series, Godzilla Minus One, and fans will be able to preorder tickets for it on Godzilla Day. The movie hits cinemas in North America on December 1. But don’t fret! Several other Godzilla offerings are available that weekend, including a one-night-only screening of the first film in the Millennium Era, Godzilla 2000.

Just so there’s no confusion, the Godzilla 2000 nationwide screening actually take place on Wednesday, November 1. It’s anticipatory for Godzilla Day.

After seven movies from 1984 to 1995, Toho relaunched the Godzilla continuity in 1999 with Godzilla 2000. It saw a theatrical release in North America in summer 2000 and was the last Japanese Godzilla movie to have such a release until Shin Godzilla in 2016. The movie depicts a world where Godzilla is a literal force of nature, like hurricanes or tornados, and a government agency tracks his movements. At the same time, an ancient, frozen flying saucer is discovered and suddenly springs to life. The aliens need genetic information only Godzilla possesses. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Kaiju battles! We’re definitely looking forward to Godzilla 2000 returning to theaters for Godzilla Day 2023.

But that is not the only Godzilla goodness in store. Both the Pluto TV Godzilla channel and Shout TV (Shout! Studios’ streaming service) will marathon giant monster movies all day long on November 3. Shout!’s sister channel, TokuSHOUTsu, will likewise stream kaiju movies all week long in the lead-up to Godzilla Day, beginning October 30.

More information on the Godzilla 2000 theatrical screening is at Fathom Events’ website.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Few things were as awesome in the ’90s as the animated Gargoyles. Disney’s attempt at a dark action series to rival Batman: The Animated Series was a dark fantasy epic with a mix of sorcery and science. It’s one of the coolest cartoons ever. And like everything cool in the ’90s, it spawned a video game. The 1995 Gargoyles game was late in the life of the Sega Genesis and as such was one of the best looking, most robust games on the platform.

Hot on the heels of news of a new live-action version, Disney Games has released Gargoyles Remastered, a gussied-up version of the beloved game. We received a review code for the game from Disney Games on the PlayStation 4. It’s never looked better, but it’s still just as hard and fast-paced as it was nearly three decades ago.

Disney Games and Empty Clip Studios have given the original game a very impressive facelift. As great as the Sega game was back in the day, the sprites were very dark and weren’t quite the look or the aesthetic of the cartoon. This version has remedied that. Goliath is a vibrant purple, the backgrounds truly pop, levels show tons of detail. They’ve also cleaned up the music and made a few quality of life changes—like a rewind function—but other than that, it’s still the same game, for better and worse.

Gargoyles spans five levels and puts players in control of Goliath, the leader of the titular creatures. The game roughly covers the story of the show’s five-part opening. The first two levels put Goliath against Viking invaders attacking the Scottish Castle Wyvern. After that the action heads to modern day NYC where Goliath fights robots on buildings, a speeding train, and in a laboratory. Eventually you get to square off against Xanatos and his Steel Clan robots, and finally evil gargoyle Demona. All of this serves a greater quest to destroy the Eye of Odin, which threatens all life.

The levels all require Goliath to climb walls, or smash through them, to fight enemies and avoid environmental hazards. Goliath can jump and double-jump (flap, because of wings), slash with claws, and flip enemies. The controls are straight forward. Easy to pick up but tough to master, the game’s primary challenge comes from platforming and puzzle solving. You have to figure out which walls to break to get health power-ups or to find the critical path. Sometimes you have to break a floor or grab a thing to open a secret passage. Like a lot of games of the era, the difficulty comes from timing and reflexes more than fighting.

And that’s what I mean when I say it’s the same game, for better or worse. When you’re firing on all cylinders, landing jumps, finding the right path, you can beat the game in less than 30 minutes. Unlike the original, this remaster offers several difficulty levels, giving Goliath more lives and taking less damage per hit. The rewind function is also clutch when you totally biff a jump or fall off a wall. These elements make for a more forgiving playthrough, but if you don’t vibe with the timing, it can be very frustrating. Sense memory for games like this needs to take over. Luckily it’s a short playthrough, but even on easy don’t expect to go in with your Elden Ring or Resident Evil 4 skills and fly through it.

Gargoyles Remastered is a beautiful update to a classic side-scroller. The art and music are superb, and for those who want the old-school experience, you can flip to the 16-bit visuals without even pausing. It’s a fun game that evokes the cartoon better than just about any game of the era. But definitely make sure you’re in a ’90s platforming state of mind or you’re likely to roar louder than Goliath.

Gargoyles Remastered is available for download on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Steam beginning October 19, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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You actually have to hand it to Monarch, the fictional clandestine government agency in Legendary’s Monsterverse. They have somehow managed to hide the existence of creatures the size of most skyscrapers from the entire world. Well, until now that is. Dun dun dunnnnnn. In the latest trailer for the Apple TV+ series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, we get a little bit more info about the many secrets the group have kept, and the one former soldier ready to blow some whistles. Also Godzilla is there for some boom-boom claw.

As the trailer explains, Anna Sawai’s character Cate was present in San Francisco when Godzilla made landfall in 2014’s Godzilla. A lot of people screamed, ran for cover, or stared in awe. But some filmed, like they expected it. This leads her to a collection of files from her father which contains information about Monarch. She, her brother, and friends eventually meet up with Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) who once served under Monarch back in the ’50s (when he was played by real-life son Wyatt Russell). Together, hopefully, they can get to the bottom of why this planet isn’t ours like we thought.

The trailer also shows us a bevy of monsters, creatures, and titans of all sorts. We see John Goodman, as his character from Kong: Skull Island, running from long-legged monsters on said water-surrounded landmass. It culminates in Shaw saying they could use some help. The conclusion gives us a gorgeous shot up Godzilla’s scaly back until he gives his iconic roar. Always gets us.

The 10-episode series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters will debut November 17 with two episodes followed by weekly episodes through January 12.

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Just in time for the spookies, Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher series has dropped on Netflix. As ever, he and his collaborators have proved once again they aren’t just highly cinema literate but also literature literate. The modern day mélange of Edgar Allan Poe stories, poems, and characters might be the best adaptations of any of them. But in case you want more Poe to pour over, we have some movies and TV episodes that you should watch after you finish The Fall of the House of Usher.

Because the series deftly weaves several Poe stories together, explaining what ones specifically could be spoilers to anyone who hasn’t watched. Ergo, we’re throwing a spoiler warning here and a message to go watch The Fall of the House of Usher first. It’s amazing, so you should anyway. I’m going to go in order of how the stories are adapted for the show.

House of Usher (1959)

The most obvious watch after Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher is arguably the second best movie adaptation. Roger Corman made a masterful cycle of Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price between 1959 and 1964. Basically I could just recommend all of them, but I’ll expand it a bit. Still, Corman and Price’s very first Poe film is among their very best. Price plays the pallid yet immaculately coiffed Roderick Usher, whose family he believes doomed. The movie adds a romance between Roderick’s sister Madeline and the visitor/audience surrogate, but it’s otherwise a very lavish and macabre adaptation.

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Another of the Corman and Price Poes, this one is the most artful of the bunch. Price plays Prince Prospero, the despicable and cruel nobleman who houses an orgy of aristocrats at his castle while the peasant class die of a horrible disease outside. Not only has he horded his wealth and refuses to help his people, but he decides to throw a masquerade to celebrate their suffering. Prospero’s hedonism can’t last forever, especially when a mysterious skull-masked patron shows up. The movie also adapts another Poe short story, “Hop-Frog,” since the titular story is very short indeed.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

The story in question is much less a horror story than the name would suggest. It’s actually the first in what would become “Detective Fiction,” or a story in which a clever sleuth uses perception and deduction to solve a crime. Poe’s master detective is C. Auguste Dupin who’d go on to appear in another two stories. But what most people remember about this story, and indeed what all subsequent movie adaptations have focused on, is the ape murderer. In Robert Florey’s 1932 Universal Horror film, Bela Lugosi plays a sideshow mesmerist who injects ape blood into women he has abducted in order to make a mate for Erik, his talking chimp. It’s wild, y’all. And somehow Dupin solves it. It’s truly something.

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)

The story “The Black Cat” has had a million film adaptations, so I decided to choose a giallo because I gotta be me. This Italian film from the heyday of the cycle finds a rich but cruel writer who is obsessed with his dead mother and mistreats his wife spends his evenings partying and drinking with hippies he invites into his dilapidated villa. So a little bit different from the story. A black cat does appear and all the stuff from the Poe story happens as well, there’s just a lot more sex, murder, and double-crossing intrigue. Also that title is beyond reproach.

The Tell-Tale Heart (2008)

This one is in the running for Poe’s most famous story. For this one I’m recommending The Witch and The Lighthouse director Robert Eggers’ 2008 short film. It’s a very faithful and moody version of the story of a young servant driven mad by his decrepit old master’s bodily functions. After murdering the poor man, the servant buries him under the floor only for the beat of the man’s heartbeat to keep haunting him. What makes Eggers’ short so cool is that the old man is actually a full-size puppet for supreme decrepitude. It is the perfect movie to quickly watch after you’re all done with The Fall of the House of Usher.

Spirits of the Dead (1968)

This European anthology film features three different Poe adaptations from three different filmmakers. The first story, “Metzengerstein” from Poe’s story of the same name, is not important for our purposes. Director Roger Vadim cast his wife Jane Fonda as the female lead and her brother Peter Fonda as the male lead…yes, think the things you’re thinking. It’s not a great one. In the second story, Louis Malle deftly adapts “William Wilson,” about a cruel and depraved man who sees his own doppelganger throughout his life. This one was the basis for Tamerlane’s story in Usher.

And finally and most famously, Federico Fellini loosely adapts “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” into the haunting “Toby Dammit,” about a boozed up Shakespearean actor in Rome to make a Spaghetti Western only to have several run-ins with the devil, depicted as a little blonde girl with a white ball. This story isn’t in the show, but the name Toby Dammit sure is.

The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967)

Another one with a great title! This surprisingly good and suitably atmospheric German horror film adapts Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and features the great Christopher Lee as the titular Dr. Sadism. That’s not actually the character’s name, it’s just for the title. A young heiress and her strapping, lantern-jawed lawyer make their way to “Castle Blood” in order for her to receive a handsome inheritance. Unfortunately, the castle was the property of Count Regula (Lee) who murdered 12 virgin maidens believing their blood would give him immortality. Also there’s a pit and a pendulum. It’s not a perfect adaptation, but it is really fun and hyper bloody for the time.

Tales to Keep You Awake – Episode 5 “El tonel” (1966)

Spanish television’s answer to The Twilight Zone was Tales to Keep You Awake, aka Historias para no dormir. Its maestro, Narciso Ibanez Serrador adapted several great authors like Ray Bradbury, Henry James, and of course Edgar Allan Poe. The first of these was “El tonel,” an adaptation of “The Cask of Amontillado.” Lowkey, Mike Flanagan’s show adapted this in the final episode. It features a man getting revenge on his wine-peddling rival buy bricking him up in a wall deep in a wine cellar, away from any help. Slowly dying in a dark pit is pretty bad if you think about it. I highly recommend this whole series, which you can now helpfully get on Blu-ray from Severin Films.

Beetlejuice – Season 4, Episode 13 “Poe Pourri” (1991)

This one is just for fun. An episode from the final season of the animated Beetlejuice series finds the author’s ghost wandering the Neitherworld irritating Beetlejuice with his laments for his lost Lenore. The episode gets increasingly trippy as a jazz-voiced raven walks around saying “Nevermore.” It also has a recurring gag where Poe says he’s Poe and people thinking he’s saying he’s poor and tossing him some money. It’s silly, but it was my first exposure to Edgar Allan Poe so it has a special place in my heart.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Mike Flanagan’s latest Netflix horror series, The Fall of the House of Usher, is a brilliant, modern-day adaptation of several Edgar Allan Poe stories, poems, and ideas. And, like Poe’s work, the show is incredibly brutal at times. We know from the very beginning of the series that bad stuff will befall the members of the Usher family. But some outcomes are much more viscerally upsetting than others. So, because we, too, are macabre weirdos, we’re going to rank the major The Fall of The House of Usher deaths (or outcomes) from least horrible to most disquieting. Here’s what befell the main characters of this Flanagan series and how gruesome a fate they suffered.

10. Lenore Usher – A Quick and Painless Death

Easily The Fall of the House of Usher death that feels the kindest (if one has to die at all) is the fate of the youngest Usher, Lenore. The forthright daughter of eldest, most moronic Usher child, Frederick. Verna clearly does not take any pleasure in collecting the final member of the Usher bloodline. She even offers the young lady the kindness of letting her know her mom will be fine and will set up a foundation to help others. This is really nice. And since Lenore Usher can’t hope to escape her grandfather and great aunt’s soul-selling, a quick, quiet death is the best outcome.

9. Rufus Griswold – Walled Up in a Building

The ostensible villain of the flashbacks of the series, Rufus Griswold, the a-hole CEO of Fortunado Pharmaceuticals, gets his just desserts in the last episode. Turns out, screwing over Roderick and Madeline Usher has its consequences. And while I would never say it’s a good way to meet your end, compared to some of the other deaths in the show, Griswold got off light. Yes, he’s going to suffocate in the dark, chained to a wall. At least that’s it. Once he wakes up and realizes he can’t talk the Ushers out of their revenge, has a chuckle. He has time to think about what he did, which sounds pretty rough, but he also has time to make peace with himself. If Grisowld’s is the second least brutal The Fall of the House of Usher death, that just tells you how bad the rest are.

8. Napoleon Usher – Falls to His Death Off a Penthouse Balcony

Napoleon is one of the more likable members of the Usher clan, despite being a drug-dealing philanderer. Still, that’s not always an indication that you’ll go nicely. He has the unfortunate fate of Verna driving him mad via his guilt over killing his boyfriend’s beloved cat in a drug-and-drink-fueled stupor. The replacement black cat is a nasty piece of work and attacks Leo pretty much non-stop and leaves dead animals in his bed. Eventually, Leo snaps and tries to crush the cat with a hammer. In his crazed state, he doesn’t stop to think that running at full speed toward a high-rise balcony is maybe not the smartest thing. He goes over the side and lands in a dead pile on the pavement below. Compared to his siblings, he got off light.

7. Victorine LaFourcade – Stabs Self in Heart

One of the hallmarks of Poe’s doomed protagonists is going mad before you meet your cruel fate. Leo obviously did. So, too, does another of Roderick’s adopted children, Victorine, who has become obsessed with getting her artificial heart-pumping machine to work. Having killed loads of poor chimpanzees, her partner wants to wash her hands of the whole thing. Not good for Victorine, who needs this to work to get into her father’s good graces. She doesn’t even realize she killed Alessandra until it’s way too late, with Roderick finding the dead woman’s corpse with the heart-beater pumping nothing. Victorine briefly comes to her senses, but in her grief, she uses a pair of scissors to stab and disembowel herself before piercing her own heart. It’s not a quick death, and it’s definitely not painless, but it is better than some of the other The Fall of the House of Usher deaths that we witness.

6. Camille L’Espanaye – Mauled to Death by a Chimpanzee

Camille is the Usher family’s PR person and also not a very nice person, all told. She treats her assistants-slash-employees-with-benefits quite poorly and generally has bad things to say about everyone. Camille is also convinced her sister Victorine is the mole selling family secrets to the U.S. Attorney’s office. As such, she goes to the R.U.E. facility late one night to find some evidence. Verna, impersonating a security guard, tries to talk Camille out of going into the lab, but Camille cannot be deterred. Unfortunately, this leads to Camille discovering lab-tested chimpanzees, one of which—powered by Verna—gets out of its cage and proceeds to literally rip Camille apart. There aren’t many deaths, even on The Fall of the House of Usher, that are as terrifying as this, and it probably lasted long enough for her to really feel it. Yeesh.

5. Tamerlane Usher – Impaled by Many Shards of Glass

Tam has an identity crisis. Her self-esteem is quite low, and she has trouble connecting with people. This is evidenced by paying sex workers to pretend to be her in very normcore domestic scenes with her husband Bill. Slowly, her carefully constructed world begins to fall apart when one of these impersonators—it’s Verna, naturally—begins popping up everywhere. Tamerlane believes Bill is carrying on an affair with her, only Tam can’t quite seem to stay awake long enough to prove it. Eventually, she starts seeing Verna everywhere, even in the mirror. Tamerlane begins smashing mirrors all over her home and ends by jumping on her bed and smashing the ceiling mirror. Those shards fall on her, cutting her to ribbons.

Now you might wonder why that death is worse than a chimpanzee mauling. Well, as the episode shows us in slow motion, Tamerlane has a moment of dread clarity right as it’s too late. She sees what she’s done, that she’s just caused her own death and now only has moments to live. Not long enough to do anything about it, but long enough to reflect (ha) on all that transpired in her miserable life.

4. Roderick Usher – Crushed to Death by a Falling House

Roderick Usher, the patriarch of this brood and perpetrator of many ill deeds, does not receive the show’s worst death. In fact, having a house fall on you, in this show, seems pretty light punishment. However, what puts it this high on this list is that Roderick has had to suffer the knowledge that all of his children will die horribly, that his poor granddaughter has died but still taunts him via a Chatbot, and that he has just had to kill his sister. He could have spared all of this, and probably had a happy life with Annabel Lee, had his greed and thirst for revenge not gotten the better of him. This is all in addition to suffering the beginnings of dementia and seeing his empire crumble. Hard to feel too sorry for him, but it’s a pretty bad time.

3. Madeline Usher – Crushed by House After Brother Poisoned Her and Removed Her Eyes

Madeline is Roderick’s unscrupulous sister who more or less acts as his personal shoulder devil throughout the show. She’s the one who pushes him into the Fortunado scheme and has a rather ruthless approach to just about everyone and everything in the Usher family. To that end, she might “deserve” her demise more than a lot of other characters. But. Having your eyes gouged out and replaced with jewels while still alive is tremendously gruesome, and then to top it all off, she had to dig her way out of her makeshift grave only to try to find Roderick via sound and ultimately die under a toppling house. Yeesh, we say. Yeesh. It’s dramatic irony, but good heavens.

2. Frederick Usher – Slowly Bisected by Swinging Steel Girder While Immobilized

Frederick, being the eldest child of Roderick Usher, was always going to die last. At least once we saw the pattern of deaths Verna was playing with on The Fall of the House of Usher. The beginning of the show made him seem like a vapid, spoiled dummy. He gets everything handed to him and he quickly kowtows to Arthur Pym’s orders. However, once he begins indulging in loads of cocaine, Freddy shows his true colors. He tortures his bedridden wife for her perceived infidelity and refuses to get her the help she needs. He also turns to the mafia to cover up his poor real estate filings. Freddy is a putz but also a real piece of crap.

That’s why when he ends up on the floor of a building under demolition, dosed with the paralytic he had been giving his wife, unable to save himself, it’s a horribly fitting finale. As the pendulum of debris ticks down to his eventual end, Freddy has to stare his behavior right in the face. And the show doesn’t save him, or us, from the worst part of it, as the swinging metal cuts him in half across the stomach. Horrific.

1. Prospero Usher – Melted to Death Via Acidic Sprinkler System

In many ways, the first death on The Fall of the House of Usher is the worst. Young, vapid influencer Prospero wants to prove his father wrong by making an exclusive sex club for the city’s elite. He also wants to spy on all of them and hold the richos to ransom. He never gets to do that, however, because he chose to hold this orgy in one of his family’s ought-to-be-condemned factory buildings. Perry doesn’t do his due diligence on pretty much anything, and his evening’s coup d’état is a wet-and-wild dance-off via the building’s massive sprinkler system. Except Prosepero Usher didn’t check the water in the roof tank and was unaware, it was full of deadly corrosive chemicals. As the water comes down, all the naked debauchery becomes a sizzling mass of flesh and viscera. This death is slow, painful, and inescapable, and for that reason, I’m out.

The Fall of the House of Usher and all of its many deaths are on Netflix now.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Ranking the Deaths in THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER in Terms of Gruesomeness appeared first on Nerdist.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: anthology horror movies live and die by story quality. That seems fairly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many coast along doing very little, relying on one segment to do the heavy lifting. I caught the most recent entry in the long-running, newly revived V/H/S series at Beyond Fest 2023. V/H/S/85, certainly maintains a consistent level of quality throughout. Each segment feels of apiece with the others, even having the obligatory framing story be more of a story in its own right than previous ones. However, while each segment is impressive, almost all of them is way too long and drags as a result.

As the title implies, this one’s conceit is that every thing is 1985. The outdated format of VHS for home movies means the Shudder era of the franchise has had to go time traveling. 1994, 1999, and now 1985. Aside from clothes and hair, plus digital tape hiss and distortion, a couple of the segments veer into the realm of “Analog Horror,” which is all the rage with the YouTube kids these days. The one that does that the best—and incidentally is my favorite—is the movie’s framing story. “Total Copy,” from director David Bruckner, is a VHS copy of weird documentary about scientists finding a very strange humanoid figure and trying to communicate with it, showing it old tapes along the way. Rarely is the framing story even a story much less the best in the movie, but series staple Bruckner nails it.

The other big name among the directors is The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson and the story “Dreamkill.” It’s sort of two layers of found footage. First we see a grisly murder from the killer’s point of view. Then we follow a police detective (Freddy Rodriguez) and a forensic videographer (James Ransome) as they go to that selfsame crime scene…days after someone mailed them the video tape. This happens a few times, with the tapes arriving before the murders take place. Eventually the cops find the mysterious mailer, and that kicks the story into another gear. I enjoyed this one for the most part, well made and performed.

The other stories are fun, but I think in every case go on too long. Mike P. Nelson’s story is split in two halves. “No Wake” finds a group of 20-somethings in a boat on a lake at the mercy of a sniper on the shore, while follow-up “Ambrosia” features the sniper afterwards. The central twist of both parts, which I won’t spoil, doesn’t really pay off the way it ought. The brutality of the deaths helps it but it didn’t do much for me beyond that.

Gigi Saul Guerrero brings us “God of Death,” in which a Mexican news program suffers an earthquake. The crew find themselves buried in a sinkhole and have to find their way out as they happen upon strange artifacts of Aztec deities. “TKNOGD” from director Natasha Kermani is the one that had me scratching my head the most. It starts as a taped performance art piece about technology becoming the new religion. Later, the artist on stage enters a very cool retro-looking VR space only to find something terrifying inside.

So, obviously consistency is good, but I do think the fact that the tone and style of each segment is so samey, nothing stands out. It’s all equally impressive, the effects and gore are great. But, aside from “Total Copy” which has to feel like a documentary on some level, we don’t get the super weird or atypical entry. V/H/S/94, for example, has a news report with a rat monster in a sewer that looks way different from the others. Similarly, V/H/S/99 ends with a segment which necessitated the filmmakers create their version of the landscape of Hell. Yes it’s true 85 has no bad segments, it also has no truly great segments.

Still, for fans of this kind of movie and this franchise, V/H/S/85 is yet another fun Halloween season romp. And hey, I hope they keep making these every year! It’ll be on Shudder on Friday, October 6.

V/H/S/85 ⭐ (3 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Sixty years of time and space travel, 15 Doctors (plus a few more), and hundreds of episodes have all led to this. The culmination of everything Doctor Who has been about since 1963. I only slightly jest, but it is pretty rad that fans of perennial deck building game Magic: The Gathering can now enjoy it in terms of their favorite sci-fi show (probably). As part of MTG‘s Universes Beyond imprint, which also recently announced Jurassic Park Magic cards, the various Time Lord incarnations, and their companions and villains are now playable cards. These Doctor Who Magic cards look pretty damn gorgeous, have to say.

Available for preorder October 13, Magic: The Gathering‘s Doctor Who line will have four separate, 100-card decks. Each will have 50 unique cards with brand new original Who artwork. The Blast from the Past Magic card set will feature all of the classic series Doctors and companions. Timey Wimey will have Doctors Nine, Ten, and Eleven. Meanwhile, the Paradox Power Doctor Who Magic card set will have the Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctors. And Masters of Evil will, of course, have all the baddies you could hope for. As part of WeeklyMTG on YouTube, the Magic team revealed a number of new Doctor Who cards and their abilities. Check out some of them in our gallery below, and watch the whole livestream on their channel.

Click To View Gallery

I’m not a Magic: The Gathering player personally, but I definitely am a Doctor Who fan. These cards are absolutely gorgeous, and I might just have to pick some up just to have them. Plus, it’s beyond awesome that the game calls the Doctors “Legendary Creatures.” Too right, MTG. Too right.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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It was five long years ago that we received the colorful action explosion of Aquaman. Still the highest grossing movie starring a DC character who isn’t Batman, James Wan’s first film was a gloriously goofy exploration of Arthur Curry’s (Jason Momoa) journey to Atlantis and fight against his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson). A lot has changed in both the real world and in the DC movie landscape since then, and after a number of false-starts and pushed releases, the sequel Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom is finally happening. Check out the full trailer now!

The story picks up a few years into Aquaman’s reign as king of Atlantis. He defends his people, the half-billion underwater dwellers, but he lives at his dad’s lighthouse still. Now, however, he has a child. Truly, how can he balance work and family? Unfortunately, it doesn’t get any easier. His old foe Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is back for revenge, but this time he has the Black Trident. James Wan told Nerdist along with other outlets at a trailer preview event that his “plan was always in the first movie to set up [Aquaman’s] relationship with [Black Manta]. He was kind of a glorified side character in the first one. But that was okay because we knew the second movie was going to have him in a much bigger role.”

Wan explained that elements of this movie came from the now-defunct Trench movie that was to be a spinoff of the first Aquaman. “We didn’t want that project to potentially step on the Aquaman films. But we came up with a lot of interesting ideas and a lot of really cool stuff that I felt we could use in this one. The Trench movie was going to be a secret Black Manta movie. Initially, we announced it as a Trench movie but we wanted to surprise people with a Black Manta movie. Some of those ideas found their way into this.”

Black Manta has tapped into the power of the fabled “Lost Kingdom,” a long-buried race of Lovecraftian nightmares, and in order to battle them, Arthur will need some help. Who better, it seems, than Orm? Well, like anyone else would probably be the more obvious choice. But Aquaman gets his estranged brother out of the pokey and enlists his help to save their home. Naturally it won’t be an easy alliance, but the Orm and Arthur relationship will be the major one in the movie. Wan said if the first movie is Romancing the Stone, the sequel is Tango & Cash.

The film, as you probably guessed, has been in a bit of upheaval as the state of DC Films has changed. Wan says he has mostly tried to focus on his own film, but likens the whole thing to “living in a house that’s being renovated.” That said, he is quick to point out how, at least from his perspective, the first movie is as standalone as any of the movies in the DCEU has been, without connective tissue to any other specific film or outside character. That will hold true for the sequel. So even if Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom doesn’t officially connect to the future DCU, they’ll exist on their own as a one-two punch.

Fans of Wan’s wackiness will hopefully find much to enjoy. “I’ve never shied away from weird,” he told us. “If you guys have seen Malignant you know what I mean.” He said he’s turned to Jules Verne and Ray Harryhausen for inspiration, and obviously his horror roots are coming through again. We don’t have too long to wait now, as Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom will hit theaters December 20, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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If you want to keep not seeing commercials, it’s going to cost you even more. Disney, the company that commands 28% of the media landscape, has announced it will raise its prices for ad-free tiers of both Disney+ and Hulu. Disney+ Plus Premium (ad-free) will go from $10.99 per month to $13.99 per month, an increase of just over 27%. Hulu’s ad-free offering will also raise its price $3, from $14.99 to $17.99, an increase of 20% per month. There will also be a bundle of Disney+ Premium and Hulu (No Ads) for $19.99. The yearly subscription model will also go up accordingly.

Additionally, Hulu’s Live TV packages will see increases as well, both the ad-free and ad-supported plans will increase by $7.00. Hulu’s Live TV with ads plan will go from costing $69.99/month to $76.99/month, and Hulu’s Live TV ad-free plan will increase from $82.99/month to $89.99/month. The Hulu and Disney+ subscription cost increases will come into play on October 12.

This all comes in addition to even more ad-supported tier options for international subscribers, including folks in Canada and Europe. The ad-supported tiers in the United States are currently $7.99 per month for each Disney+ and Hulu. A statement in the press release reads:

The strong momentum of our ad-supported plans in the U.S. demonstrates the importance of providing consumers with choice, flexibility and value,” said Joe Earley, President, Direct-to-Consumer, Disney Entertainment. “We are excited to expand that offering in more markets across the globe, including in Europe and Canada, and to launch a new premium duo bundle of ad-free Disney+ and Hulu this Fall, as we take steps toward making extensive Hulu content available via Disney+ later this year for Bundle subscribers.

As The Hollywood Reporter points out, this move is a bid by Disney to “bring its direct-to-consumer business to profitability.” This move comes at a particularly interesting time for big media corporations and their streaming services with regards to the striking WGA and SAG-AFTRA members. The lack of profit sharing and residuals from streaming content are at the forefront of the guilds’ complaints against the AMPTP, of which Disney is a member.

With its estimated 150 million subscribers as of September 2022, a $3 per month increase for premium subscribers could net as much as $450 million more per month. In 2022, Disney+ had a revenue of $7.4 billion, which contributed to Disney’s total revenue of $84.7 billion that year. And lest you fear, Disney has been losing money in 2023: Q1 2023 was the company’s largest on record, with $23.51 billion. Q2 tied for the second-highest ever, along with Q1 2022, at $21.82 billion. According to Reuters, Disney CEO Bob Iger’s new contract, which he signed in July, could net him five times his base salary in annual incentive bonus. His previous contract gave him $27 million per year in total compensation.

Why am I sharing all of these revenue and salary numbers? Well, it’s interesting to see just what “weak” box office means to a company like Disney. Disney, who still managed to bring in $55 billion in 2022 from media and entertainment. It may only be $3 extra dollars a month out of your pocket for Disney+ and Hulu each, but look where it’s going and know who is actually benefitting.

As mentioned, the new tiers and prices will take effect on October 12. The new Disney+ and Hulu ad-free bundle meanwhile arrived on September 6. Remember, both apps will merge in the fall as well, while the services will still remain separate.

Originally published on August 9, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The last time we saw the world of Legendary’s Monsterverse, Godzilla and Kong had just fought each other and then Mechagodzilla. And while we know the next movie will continue their adventures in the Hollow Earth, that won’t be the next time we see the King of the Monsters. Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters brings the action back to just after 2014’s Godzilla, the destruction of San Francisco, and the realization that monsters are real. The first trailer for the show is out now, along with the news that it’ll premiere November 17!

The series follows Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) who, following Godzilla’s skirmish with the M.U.T.O.s, relays the story of Monarch, the secret agency designed to monitor monster activity on the planet Earth. Back in the ’50s, we see a young Shaw (Wyatt Russell) beginning work on the Monarch project. The teaser also gives us a glimpse at John Goodman, reprising his role of Bill Randa from Kong: Skull Island. Older Shaw watches a testimony from Randa from, presumably, the ’60s.

The series synopsis states:

Following the thunderous battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco, and the shocking revelation that monsters are real, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters tracks two siblings following in their father’s footsteps to uncover their family’s connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch. Clues lead them into the world of monsters and ultimately down the rabbit hole to Army officer Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell), taking place in the 1950s and half a century later where Monarch is threatened by what Shaw knows. The dramatic saga – spanning three generations – reveals buried secrets and the ways that epic, earth-shattering events can reverberate through our lives.

Other cast members include Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe, Mari Yamamoto, Anders Holm, Joe Tippett, and Elisa Lasowski. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters will premiere November 17 on Apple TV+.

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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What a dang world. We are presumably close to the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who and we already know a lot. We know David Tennant is back as the Fourteenth Doctor. Catherine Tate is also back, and Neil Patrick Harris is joining. We know there will be three specials with Tennant as part of the anniversary celebration, complete with all three titles and a teaser. They’re interesting, for sure.

The first special will be “The Star Beast,” which is, funnily enough, the initial title for the movie Alien when it was in spec script form. Special two will be “Wild Blue Yonder;” some of the bits of that part of the teaser have “redacted” and static added. Seems pretty TARDIS-y to me. The third one, “The Giggle,” has our man NPH in it. “Laughing at the human race.” We also see our first glimpse of live-action Beep the Meep, a very weird character who made the jump to TV from the old comics. The name of that comic? “Doctor Who and the Star Beast.” Sooooo, that’s fun, innit?

The little teaser also shows us a few shots of Yasmin Finney, who will portray Donna’s daughter Rose Noble. Donna married her husband Shaun Temple, whom we last saw in “The End of Time.”

We still don’t know exactly when these specials will air or how frequently. Will it be one per month? One per week? Three days in a row? All we know for sure is the actual 60th anniversary of Doctor Who is November 23, 2023.

Originally published on May 15, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post What We Know About DOCTOR WHO’s 3 Anniversary Specials appeared first on Nerdist.

I have a weird love of the ramshackle, often uneven, but undeniably interesting V/H/S franchise. I love a good horror anthology anyway, and the found-footage gimmick has waxed and waned in effectiveness over the years, but has remained a hallmark of the series. After the first three theatrical installments, the series took a hiatus until horror streaming service Shudder picked it up in 2021. Each of those has had the extra gimmick of taking place in a specific year. V/H/S/94, V/H/S/99, and now, going way back for its latest entry: V/H/S/85. Take a look at the first trailer below!

This latest installment is the sixth mainline entry since the original in 2012. And like all the films, it has a pretty impressive roster of filmmakers giving us the different shorts. David Bruckner (The Night House, Hellraiser) was one of the original directors back 11 years ago, and he returns in V/H/S/85. Joining him are The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson, Gigi Saul Guerrero (Bingo Hell), Natasha Kermani (Lucky), and Mike Nelson (Wrong Turn).

The charm of the V/H/S movies has always been the handcrafted ingenuity. Some of the segments are truly impressive, both in what they attempt and what they achieve. Standout segments over the years include: Amateur Night and 10/31/98 in the first film and Safe Haven and Slumber Party Alien Abduction in the second. I didn’t much care for V/H/S Viral if I’m honest. But, the Shudder-era movies have great bits. For me, the best are 94‘s The Empty Wake and The Subject, and 99‘s To Hell and Back. I can’t wait to see what we get from V/H/S/85.

The Shudder premiere of V/H/S/85 is October 6, 2023. Spooky season, ho!

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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It’s-a sad day for fans of Nintendo, and plumbers. The gaming giant has confirmed Charles Martinet, who has given voice to Super Mario since 1991, will step back from character work. They do explain that he’ll step into a new role. “Mario Ambassador,” a thing that they invented just for him. Mario Emeritus, if you will.

Martinet also confirmed the news on his own Twitter (which is what we’ll call it forever) saying:

“My new adventure begins! You are all Numba One in my heart! #woohoo !!!!!!!”

In addition to Mario, Martinet has provided the voices of Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi. He’s pretty much the entirety of video game plumbers. He has appeared in 151 games to date, plus he had a couple of cameo voices in the recent Super Mario Bros. Movie. Chris Pratt infamously took on the Mario role for that film, with Charlie Day as Luigi. Martinet was not involved in the upcoming Super Mario Bros. Wonder game for Switch, according to Variety. Thus, the movie is his final voice role for the storied franchise.

Nintendo’s statement went on to say, “[H]e’ll continue to travel the world sharing the joy of Mario and interacting with you all! It has been an honor working with Charles to help bring Mario to life for so many years and we want to thank and celebrate him. Please keep an eye out for a special video message from Shigeru Miyamoto and Charles himself, which we will post at a future date.”

Any time you’ve heard “It’s-a me!” “Let’s-a go!” or “Woohoo!” in the past three decades, it’s been Charles Martinet. His gentle, exuberant delivery and charmingly ridiculous stereotypical Italian accent has become part of the fabric of Nintendo. His work on the games will be missed, but he’s going out absolutely on top.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We know from the movies thus far in the Monsterverse that Monarch, the organization which investigates the various titans on (and in) the Earth, has been around for a good long while. At least as far back as the 1970s, as we learned in Kong: Skull Island. And while the subsequent movies have focused on Monarch’s activities now, the new Apple TV+ series, officially called Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, will give us some backstory. And some frontstory. Plus, in case you were worried, some first-look images from Monarch: Legacy of Monsters reveal Godzilla himself will roar in the show. Take a look!

In a recent release, Apple TV+ confirmed that the title of their Monsterverse series would be Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. The official plot synopsis for the series is as follows:

Following the thunderous battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco and the shocking revelation that monsters are real, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters tracks two siblings following in their father’s footsteps to uncover their family’s connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch. Clues lead them into the world of monsters and ultimately down the rabbit hole to Army officer Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell), taking place in the 1950s and half a century later where Monarch is threatened by what Shaw knows. The dramatic saga—spanning three generations—reveals buried secrets and the ways that epic, earth-shattering events can reverberate through our lives.

Yes, you read that correctly. In the Monarch series, Kurt Russell will play the character of Shaw in modern day, while his son Wyatt will play Shaw in the ’50s. That conceit alone is worth a watch, we’d say. Other members of the cast include Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe, Mari Yamamoto, Anders Holm, Joe Tippett, and Elisa Lasowski… And, of course, Godzilla, who is ready to show his teeth in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

This Monsterverse series will consist of 10 episodes. It is co-developed by Chris Black (Severance, Star Trek: Enterprise, Outcast) and Matt Fraction (Hawkeye). Matt Shakman (Wandavision) directs the first two episodes. 

Click To View Gallery

Hailing from Legendary Television, the Godzilla and Titans live-action series is executive produced by Black, Fraction and Shakman alongside Joby Harold (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Tory Tunnell from Safehouse Pictures, Andy Goddard (Carnival Row, Downton Abbey), Brad Van Arragon (Yellowjackets, Carnival Row), and Andrew Colville (Severance, Star Trek: Discovery). Hiro Matsuoka and Takemasa Arita executive produce on behalf of Toho Co., Ltd., the owner of the Godzilla character.

While we don’t know yet when Monarch: Legacy of Monsters will release, this fall is looking pretty good. So get ready for a decade-spanning Monarch mystery, with the King of the Monsters in tow.

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We’ve known that Macon Blair, director of I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore would reimagine cult classic The Toxic Avenger for a while now. The original movie, from house of indie gore and goofiness Troma, has remained a popular title for decades. For a mainstream studio to do the title justice, it’d have to make some powerful choices. One was casting Peter Dinklage as the titular first superhero from New Jersey. After years of waiting, The Toxic Avenger will open the upcoming 2023 Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX. And we have a first, very ominous look.

The official Fantastic Fest release describes the film thusly:

The opening night film for Fantastic Fest 2023 is the world premiere of Legendary Pictures’ THE TOXIC AVENGER, a hilarious and action-packed reimagining of the classic Troma film from director Macon Blair that features an all-star cast including Peter Dinklage who will pick up the infamous mop to become the toxic hero that no one knew they needed (or wanted) as well as Jacob Tremblay and Taylour Paige with Elijah Wood and Kevin Bacon.

In the original movie, a janitor named Melvin Junko became the Toxic Avenger. Here, the poor sod’s name is Winston Gooze, which is just *chef’s kiss* if we say so ourselves. Goo + Ooze in the same name. It’s just…it’s so good.

Other premieres at Fantastic Fest 2023 include Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, Blumhouse Television’s time-travel slasher Totally Killer, and Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher. (Episodes one and two, not the whole season.) We’ll also get V/H/S 85, the latest edition of the found-footage horror anthology that keeps reinventing itself. All told, the eighteenth edition of the fest will feature 29 World Premieres, 24 North American Premieres, and 18 U.S. Premieres. The fun kicks off with The Toxic Avenger on September 21 and runs until the 28th. For more information, go to Fantastic Fest’s website.

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The term “star-crossed lovers” takes on a new meaning in The Becomers, the new film from writer-director Zach Clark. The movie, which I saw at Fantasia International Film Festival 2023, is gory and fairly upsetting at times, but at heart is a romance, with very weird comedy thrown in. “Weird” is perhaps the best adjective for the movie, but at no point do you cease to understand the heart at the center of the story—that finding your soulmate transcends bodies, space, and suburban death cults. Usually.

The story follows a pair of aliens from a doomed world who end up on Earth, specifically middle America. In the tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they can only appear in human form if they kill and replicate a living person. So the beginning is pretty gruesome. Everywhere the alien goes and every interaction they have in their new body becomes a sinister experience. Our lead alien narrates the movie, in the voice of Sparks’ lead singer Russell Mael, which adds a particularly strange element.

As we continue on, we learn the alien is looking desperately for its mate. They send a signal out to hopefully find each other again. Though the alien takes on the appearance of several different people throughout the story, the bulk of the time is spent in the body of a suburban housewife (Molly Plunk). In this guise, they piece together from neighbor interactions that the husband (Mike Lopez) might be up to some bad stuff. Worse than killing innocent people to take over their bodies? Maybe.

Part of the fun of The Becomers comes from the aliens having to take on the personas and lives of the people they have overtaken. Plunk’s performance specifically as a worried alien trying not to seem alien is astoundingly good. She has a supremely effective deer-in-the-headlights expression any time she has to speak to a regular human. You can’t help but laugh any time this happens. The escalating wildness of the situations leads to the movie’s best comedic beats.

But at its heart—its surprisingly soft heart—is the story of two lovers looking for each other across the universe, proving they’re stronger together than apart. Clark presents the story as an incidental, though likely intentional, LGBTQ+ allegory. The aliens are in love, regardless of whether they’re in male of female human bodies. It never once becomes an issue for them, and it’s never played for comedy or awkwardness. The exception, of course, is a very purposely gross sex scene utilizing alien physiology while still wrapped in human husks.

I really liked The Becomers and what it has to say about the profoundness of love amid the absurdity of human existence. It’s a tough time for the world. If we can find a person or people to whom we can connect, it’s somehow slightly less bleak. An oddly hopeful message for a movie with so much wanton murder and dissolving body parts.

The Becomers ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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For a book written in 1897, Dracula has had an exceptionally long shelf life. As such, the story and especially the title character have made their way to screens both large and small for over 100 years now. Only a handful have made an indelible impact. Often the revisionism of the revisions just come across as so many extra footprints in territory so well-trod it’s a deep furrow. This year alone we already had Renfield which, Nicolas Cage aside, was maybe the worst in decades. However, I was oddly excited for The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a feature-length take on a single, rarely adapted section of Stoker’s novel. Sadly, good premise is almost all there is.

I should hasten to add, it’s not like the movie is bad necessarily. It’s a supremely competent horror-thriller that’s definitely in the vein of studio monster movies that came before. Certain shots and moments are very effective. The decision to make Dracula more monster than man is a fun riff, and the setting certainly sets it apart. But it’s also just loads of plot without much story, characteristics rather than characters, and a pace better suited to action than horror. But without much action either. They make for a pleasant enough two hours without ever engaging much.

The premise is certainly the strongest part. We follow the events of the second major section of Dracula, which features the logs of the captain of the Demeter, a cargo ship making its way from Romania to London with private shipments bound for Carfax Abbey. The captain here, naturally on his personal last voyage before retirement, is Liam Cunningham, who is basically perfect for the character. His first mate is Mr. Wojchek (David Dastmalchian), who will inherit the ship when his mentor leaves. The new arrival is Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a trained physician whose skin color makes him unhireable as such. This is easily the most interesting aspect of any of the characters and it’s little more than backstory.

Other deckhands have names but exist mostly as vampire fodder later in the story. We also, for some reason, have the captain’s eight-year-old grandson Toby (Woody Norman), and a strange stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi), sick with blood poisoning and riddled with bite marks. Wonder what happened to her. Naturally, the strange cargo turns out to be one of your Draculas (Javier Botet), whose makeup and vibe place him somewhere between the angel in Midnight Mass and Barlow from Salem’s Lot. Both, naturally, derive from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu which is still the movie with the best adaptation of the Demeter story.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter by its very nature is something of a foregone conclusion. It’s right there in the title! The movie also never hides the fact that it’s adapting part of Dracula, so we pretty much know they won’t stop the threat. This isn’t a problem inherently; plenty of amazing movies come from tragedies we know will happen. Frigging Titanic, anyone? The trouble is, the movie seems to entirely rest on the novelty of this being a Dracula movie without any of the typical trappings of such. This is a creature, a bat-thing that can move faster than anyone on the ship. The most tense sequences involve Dracula in an enclosed space, lurking in the shadows. Once he’s outside, which happens very frequently, he’s a CGI swoop.

Like I said, it’s not as though there’s nothing to enjoy or praise here. Director André Øvredal (Trollhunter, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) knows we want to see Dracula, so gives him plenty of big closeups. We also have a few legitimate surprises when it comes to the fate of some of those Dracula bites. Vampirism as plague is not a fresh idea, but it’s effective here. And I’ll say the siege on Toby when he’s locked in the Captain’s quarters is particularly well done. The problem is the movie seems to exist in spite of this artistry and not for it. The script is overwritten yet all-too spare. Characters talk about things we don’t get to see and speed through things on which they should linger.

If you want a mindless escape with a monster and some jump scares, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is plenty fine. If you wanted a truly fresh take on cinema’s most enduring creature of the night, keep looking.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter hits theaters August 11.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter ⭐ (2.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER Is Shockingly Lifeless appeared first on Nerdist.

Pretty much no monster has had more opportunity in the spotlight in the history of cinema than Dracula. Bram Stoker’s vampire has had a number of guises, mostly handsome and debonair in film and television. But in the novel, and especially in F.W. Murnau’s classic unauthortized adaptation Nosferatu from 1922, the count is a pretty horrifying, monstrous figure. That aspect, along with a whole chunk of the novel not often adapted to film, makes its way to cinemas again in The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

In the below featurette from the riff on the classic story, filmmaker Andre Ovredal and actor Javier Botet discuss how they brought this bestial version of Dracula to life. Well, undead-life.

Ovredal mentions that he wanted this Dracula’s blood addiction to come to the fore, and hence cast Botet, a supremely tall and slender creature performer. You might have seen Botet as the titular haunter in Andy Muschietti’s Mama or the horrifying Tristana Medieros in the [REC] franchise. Dracula here is more a creature than a person, and actually resembles very much Kurt Barlow in the 1979 miniseries Salem’s Lot. Truly as if a bat had taken on human characteristics.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is an adaptation of a portion of Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel. Most people remember Jonathan Harker going to Transylvania and meeting Dracula, and later Dracula arriving in London. But how did he get there? Well, wouldn’t ya know it, he took a ship. It was called the Demeter in point of fact. Many adaptations skip this section, but Murnau didn’t, and it’s in fact one of the best parts of Nosferatu. We hope The Last Voyage of the Demeter‘s full-length exploration of it does the silent movie justice.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter hits theaters August 11.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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One of the best things about film festivals is you can step into a theater with absolutely no knowledge of what you’re about to see and at the very least leave entertained. Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal is maybe the best I’ve ever been to in this regard. I had a gap in my schedule and decided to step into a new South Korean horror/dark comedy called New Normal and got a cynical, truly brutal experience that feels perfectly torn out of the hell of modern city living. The loneliness, the awkwardness, and the chance that at any moment someone could murder you. It’s fun!

Writer-director Jung Bum-Shik clearly has a point of view with this movie. That is: “the world sucks, and you can’t do anything about it.” Indeed, it’s rare to see a movie with such a sense of downbeat inevitability. The movie depicts snapshots in a four-day stretch of time in Seoul as six different vignettes playout, intersecting and leading to shocking conclusions. I confess that after the first couple stories, the movie’s cynicism put me off. As it went along, it started sinking its teeth into me. The sheer style, exuberance, and seething rage on display—well, I won’t say it “won” me over, but I definitely started to vibe with it.

The stories all run the gamut of the hell of modern society. A single woman contends with a pushy smoke alarm inspector amidst reports of a serial killer. Elsewhere, a middle-school boy decides to help an old lady in a wheelchair for a lot longer than he planned. App-dating proves especially nightmarish on one terrible evening. A hopeless romantic follows a series of clues to hopefully find his perfect match. Then, a creepy loser is obsessed with his hot neighbor and does very dumb things. Finally, a fed-up convenience store clerk kills time posting about murder on a message board. Each has a wicked bite to it, each increasingly more brutal than the last.

New Normal takes familiar public spaces—city streets, gas stations, crowded restaurants—and turns them sinister or accentuates their already sinister aspects. The movie revels in making the situations cringingly funny before hitting us with growing tension and finally the swerve to horror. It never feels rote or perfunctory, and each vignette has its own ambience befitting its lead character. A real standout is the second story, which finds the middle-schooler’s journey into an increasingly foreboding part of the city. This all happens with the orchestral strains of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf underlaid. The final story, too, is exceptionally tragic, even for this movie. The young would-be musician leads her mundane, frustrating life only to decide to turn off the road at the last minute.

It seems a bit like the ethos of the movie isn’t just “F*** the World” (which the movie literally puts on screen several times) but “never take risks,” in any sense of the word. Don’t do things that put you in danger. This can include going down a dark alley or meeting a person for a blind date. It’s not a movie for the faint of heart, and you have to be in the mood for something very dark that plays the darkness for laughs more often than not. But it’s an undeniably effective movie in this regard. I think it showcases the skill and energy of Jung Bum-Shik (whose previous film was the found-footage creeper Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum) exceptionally well. Just, I guess, be careful literally everywhere you go.

New Normal ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We’ve seen tons and tons of time travel stories in our lives, especially as sci-fi fans. Growing up in the late-’80s, I had the one-two punch of the Back to the Future series and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure basically on repeat on my VHS player. So when I see a movie that tackles familiar ground in a new way, a smart way, and a supremely heartfelt way, it makes me take notice. Jared Moshe’s Aporia, which premiered at Fantasia International Film Festival 2023 isn’t the most polished or most mind-bendy riff on the subject, but it does feature outstanding performances and a firm grasp of the morality of messing with the past.

Judy Greer, who as always is excellent here, plays Sophie, a nursing home nurse with a 12-year-old daughter, Riley (Faithe Herman). Nine months ago, her husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) died by a drunk driver, leaving Sophie and Riley spinning out. Her only help is her husband’s best friend (Payman Maadi) who tells her that he and Mal (both brilliant physicists who lost their jobs) had been working on a machine that might be able to help. It can’t send people back in time, but it can send a small explosive particle back to a particular moment and space. Effectively, it’s a time gun and with it, they can kill the drunk driver before he kills Mal.

Well, wouldn’t ya know it, it works. Mal returns and only those in the room when the time gun fired are aware anything happened. This leads to small changes, however. Sophie is no longer a long-term care nurse, she now works in hospice. The kitchen utensils are in different places. Mal picks up on Sophie’s confusion very quickly and she tells him what they’ve done. From here, we begin a really fascinating exploration of the responsibility one has when messing with time. By killing the drunk driver, they’ve left a woman and child without a husband and father. What can they do to help those affected? Should they do anything?

Aporia doesn’t mess around with attempts at visual effects or too much sci-fi jargon. The machine works, the end. But through its superb performances, it lays bare the grief that would lead to someone using this dangerous machine. It explores the butterfly effect of changing even one seemingly minor thing. The ripples continue out. But when you have such a device, how far can you and should you go? At what point are you done trading one life for another? And is it even up to you to play God? These are all really intriguing suppositions that most time travel movies don’t spend much time on.

It’s not the highest concept movie, and it has a few rough spots with exceedingly obvious ADR’d lines, but the performances and the premise do wonders to keep the audience invested, and make them care. Aporia really worked for me. If you go on for big moral philosophy concepts, and like Greer and Gathegi as much as you should, then it’ll work for you too.

Aporia ⭐ (4 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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With the recent naming and surge of folk horror in the movies, we’ve gotten many examples from all over the world. I eat this stuff up with a big ol’ spoon. There’s a reason these movies feels so viscerally creepy. They show us fears that have lasted centuries. Bengali filmmaker Nuhash Humayun has taken this one step further by crowd sourcing Bangladesh’s most prevalent and scary superstitions and fables. The result is Pett Kata Shaw, a four-story anthology of modernized dramatizations of them. I saw it at Fantasia International Film Festival 2023, and it absolutely blew me away. This anthology is a creepy, darkly funny, and profoundly disturbing look at tales passed down in the oral tradition.

What makes these stories work so well is that Humayun depicts each as realistically as possible while still making the otherworldly thing suitably unnerving. The key to any good horror anthology is the pacing and the order. Pett Kata Shaw provides an ebb and flow of styles and stories for maximum effect. And even though the stories come from a culture I knew nothing about, they remain exceedingly relatable and engaging.

The first story relays the fable that jinn, or demons, visit sweet shops late at night. So we find a forgetful sweet shop owner who comes across such a creature—shown mainly as a bearded older man. The poor shop owner’s terror and confusion becomes something entirely else when the jinn grants him a wish. He wants to remember things. But, as jinn are not the most trustworthy, he begins to remember everything. Everything he’s ever seen, read, or lived. Knowing everything isn’t much good if you can’t stop it. This is a wicked little tale with a really upsetting ending.

Second is a very fun and macabre story concerning the legend of the fish-hag, a grotesque creature which resembles a human woman with backwards feet and sharp fangs. She has followed a lonely young man back to his apartment after he catches a big fish. Through his inner monologue we follow his tense struggle with what amounts to a wild animal locked in a room with him. He can’t take his eyes off of the fish-hag, not even to cook her the fish. Supremely enjoyable.

The third story is perhaps the most ambitious. We find a young couple with relationship issues stemming from rumors backpacking in a remote village where an elderly couple relay various local superstitions and how they came to be. For example, if you don’t take two helpings of food, you’ll drown in the river. Or not to wear your hair down at night. We see each of their mini-stories as marionette plays, both gorgeous and disturbing. Each of the superstitions begins to coagulate into a greater meta fable about the grain of truth in each.

And finally we have the saddest of the stories. A young man still reels after his girlfriend’s death by suicide a year before. At the same time, displaced children begin disappearing after visiting the sea. This leads our central character to learn about the myth of the Call of the Night. Some sea spirit calls to people, beckoning them to join it. As we quickly learn, this spirit—if it exists—has a way to exploit its victim’s guilt.

I absolutely adored Pett Kata Shaw, and I’m thrilled Humayun will soon make a feature film (once the strikes are over, of course) with producer Jordan Peele. He has an eye for what maximizes scariness without ever relying on a jump-scare or leading musical cue. I cannot wait for this to inevitably make it to wide release because every horror fan should see it.

Pett Kata Shaw ⭐ (5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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A few years ago, during the second summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fantasia International Film Festival’s virtual programming gave us Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. This indie from Japanese director Junta Yamaguchi was a one-take time-loop movie which had one of the slickest gimmicks I’d ever seen. Cast of likable people, one small location, and webcams being the gateway to two minutes into the future. So cool and fun. Now, at the 2023 Fantasia Fest, Yamaguchi is back with River, a riff on the same two-minute time loop. Rather than a mobius strip like Beyond, this one is like Groundhog Day, two minutes at a time. It’s just as winning, funny, and adorable.

This time around, the action takes place in the gorgeous and serene Fujiya Inn located in the wintry valley of Kibune in Kyoto. Just as the last guests are preparing to leave for the season and the staff are ready to clean up, Mikoto (Riko Fijutani), one of the inn’s waitresses, takes a moment of self-reflection by the babbling river out back. What then transpires is the next two minutes continue to repeat, over and over and over, without any clear reason why. Each time it cycles back, Mikoto is back at the river. The staff of the inn have to figure out what’s going on, and how to break it to the confused patrons.

While the beginning of the movie has a very traditional feel, once the time loops begin, the camera goes handheld and follows the action, without a cut, until that two-minute loop finishes. It’s a thoroughly impressive feat which many of the cast, having been in Beyond, know very well. As the loops continue, the action expands to more places in and around the inn as the characters learn who is affected and who isn’t. With time essentially stagnated, unspoken hopes, dreams, desires, and frustrations come to the surface for all the different people.

At times River is laugh-out-loud hilarious, as the packed Fantasia audience will attest. The waitresses and proprietor, in traditional Japanese kimonos, have to shuffle as quickly as they can around the grounds of this inn to do whatever they need to do before the time resets. It’s especially funny how long it takes them to be frustrated about it. They’re so pleasant and amenable about the whole thing for awhile. As long as the guests are happy! Even the seemingly more upsetting moments become truly hysterical given the overall vibe and attitude of everyone involved. The cast is outstanding, top to bottom. So good, so funny.

Ultimately the story revolves around Mikoto whose almost-boyfriend Eiji (Yoshifumi Sakai), a trainee chef at the inn. He plans to move to France to study French cuisine and hasn’t told her. Arguing in two minute chunks is very silly, but eventually the two decide to make this loop last as long as it can. They try to run as far as they can get before it loops again. It’s truly one of the more adorable happenings in a movie in recent memory. It speaks to those last moments of youth before adulthood takes over. You try to retain the carefree until you physically can’t anymore.

I adored River. While I can’t say it’s better than Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, it’s a lovely companion piece. The romantic comedy angle, vaguely present in Beyond, comes to the fore in River. The earlier movie has a crime angle at a certain point which worked well enough. Here it’s all about character and I think, while the gimmick is less original, I prefer the character comedy over the sci-fiery.

Definitely seek out River as soon as you can, it’s one you’ll want to watch again and again. Perhaps on a loop.

River ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Fantasia Fest: RIVER Is a Funny, Charming, Life-Affirming Time-Loop Romance appeared first on Nerdist.

As a fan of spooky things, and also fun, I of course love the Disney Parks’ Haunted Mansion rides. I want to go on more of them. I hear the ones in Paris and Shanghai and Tokyo are really cool. For fans of these rides, specifically the Disneyland one, Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion movie has plenty of “Oh hey, it’s that from the ride!” moments. Katie Dippold’s script offers a surprising amount of tragedy to go along with the ghosts, which surprised and delighted. There’s even quite a few scare moments that just stay on the family side of the line. And yet, they felt like it needed to mostly be a weird comedy, too. Some of it worked, some did not.

If you’re someone like my mother, you might have asked “Why would they make another Haunted Mansion movie?” To which I’d reply, “Well, the 2003 Eddie Murphy version was notoriously terrible and people still love the theme park ride.” And it seems like this is the raison d’etre. After years of toying with whether they’d give Guillermo del Toro the keys to the spookiest house in Disney’s neighborhood, the company instead decided to play it very, very safe and effectively just retread a lot of the same ground as the first movie. A family moves in, ghosts haunt them, they have to “find a way out” out of the situation.

The family in question is Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase Dillion) who buy and move into the Gracey Mansion in Louisiana when they find it for cheap on Zillow. Uh oh, it’s very haunted, so they need some help. The seemingly exorbitantly wealthy single mother then assembles a Dream Team of ghost hunters, including the priest Kent (Owen Wilson), psychic medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), and professorial haunted house expert Bruce (Danny DeVito). However, chief among them is physicist-turned-tour guide Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) who had invented a spectral energy camera, prior to a personal tragedy. They have to figure out why the ghosts are so aggressive, and why ghosts follow them home.

In addition to all of these people are some of the ride’s more famous ghosts. We have the psychic-in-a-crystal-ball Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis) who helps them, and the Hat-Box Ghost (Jared Leto) who is the movie’s main villain. Want your Black Widow husband killing ghost? She’s there. The portraits of the two guys killing each other in a duel? Here too. Long hallways, stretching rooms, hitchhiking ghosts, all in attendance. And some of them provide legitimately good scares, the likes of which I wasn’t expecting in a Disney movie.

I’d love to say the movie works all the time. Stanfield gives a remarkably grounded, touching performance as a man dealing with profound grief. All good ghost stories have to have an element of sadness, and this one doesn’t shy away from that. The ghosts are never played for laughs, either, which I think is incredibly smart. The Haunted Mansion ride is fun-spooky. It needs to keep that kind of “ooh!” For the most part, this movie does that. And we learn about the ghosts and their history and how to end this weird curse. The plot and emotion are all there.

However, the biggest issue is they hedged their bets by making it a studio comedy. Haddish, Wilson, and DeVito all have chops for days, and some of what they have to say and do is really funny. Especially Wilson, who has some legitimately funny moments. But did we need them? Did this movie need to be a comedy full of improvised or extended jokes? We also get a number of big-name cameos doing especially silly things. Honestly, it felt like Simien (who directed Bad Hair previously) and Dippold (who wrote 2016’s Ghostbusters) had battling sensibilities that ended up both coming out in the finished film. I know I’m a horror guy first and foremost and others’ mileage may vary, but it just felt unbalanced.

I also need to point out some truly bizarre product placement. Every movie has product placement, but because this movie takes place in an old house, it’s harder to have new products just sitting around. So at various points in the movie, one of the characters will say a store or business by name. I don’t know if I’ve ever noticed it to this degree. It happens at some truly inappropriate times and pulled me right out of the story.

Haunted Mansion is not a train wreck or anything. It’s enjoyable enough. Family horror was something I grew up with and I miss it. I don’t think Hocus Pocus 2 was good at all, and this is much, much better than that. I think it could have been very good if it had let some of the zanier comedy fall by the wayside and embrace the family drama and spooky thrills. Stanfield is doing some amazing work here and I think that alone needs recognition. But I think the movie is not funny enough to warrant so much attempted comedy, especially when the ghost elements work so well on their own. Let the grim, grinning ghosts socialize without lame attempts at comedy getting in the way.

Haunted Mansion ⭐ (3 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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During the kaiju boom of the 1960s in Japan, Godzilla undoubtedly reigned supreme. But he was by no means the only giant creature tromping around Tokyo. Toho had other heavy hitters like Mothra and Ghidorah; Tsuburaya Productions owned TV with their Ultra series; and Daiei Film had the thunderous stone warrior Daimajin and the plucky turtle guardian Gamera. In fact, if any non-Toho kaiju could be said to rival Godzilla for renown, it would be Gamera. Now, the space terrapin, who is friend to all, will return for its own series. Take a look at the trailer for Gamera: Rebirth below.

Gamera: Rebirth will be the first such Gamera project since 2006’s Gamera the Brave. Its official trailer reveals that it will be an animated project. If I had to guess, this won’t be too dissimilar from the series of Godzilla anime films Netflix released from 2017-2018.

The project’s official Twitter account had the following statement (please excuse the poor Google translation). “From the Showa era to the Heisei era, the production of the new work ‘GAMERA -Rebirth‘ of the giant monster Gamera that has been loved by monster fans all over the world has been decided! Global distribution on Netflix!” Gamera: Rebirth will stream on Netflix worldwide, it will release on September 7. The series will have six episodes.

The Gamera series began in 1965 with Gamera, the Giant Monster, an attempt by Daiei Film to make their own version of Godzilla. However, right away, Daiei chose to focus more on children, thinking they’d be the target audience anyway. So after the first, relatively straight-forward kaiju film, the series shifted to a full-color special effects explosion. Gamera took a new rival kaiju in each film, with kids as the main protagonists. This lasted until 1971 when Daiei Film… filed for bankruptcy. Rival studio Kadokawa Pictures bought Daiei and later relaunched in 2004 as Kadokawa Daiei Studio.

The ’60s and ’70s Gamera films were not everyone’s cup of tea. The effects, though impressive, had a definite handmade charm to them that, even though the movies were much gorier than the Godzilla films, made the series look cheesy. Mystery Science Theater 3000 even featured most of the movies on their show in the ’90s. However, in the mid-’90s, filmmaker Shusuke Kaneko and special effects director Shinji Higuchi made a trilogy of reboot films that are, for my money, the finest kaiju movies ever made.

Kaneko gave the project his blessing in a Twitter post, which indicates he was working on an idea himself. A real eyes-emoji moment there.

When I came up with my own idea for Reiwa Gamera and made a proposal, KADOKAWA has already started a new project, and it’s content that makes me think that’s what happened, so I can expect this too. With that in mind, I would like to support the team from the position of a baseball commentator who has experience as a manager of the Gamera team until they win the championship and pitch again.

Shusuke Kaneko

We’re glad that kaiju-loving Americans now have something to look forward to.

Originally published on November 17, 2022.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Kaiju GAMERA Will Return in a ‘New Work’ From Netflix appeared first on Nerdist.

Five years later and I’m still in awe of how good and complete a Spider-Man story the PlayStation Spider-Man game is. A thorough experience all around, but add the three-part DLC and the spinoff game Miles Morales and you’ve got one of the best Spidey stories in any non-comic medium. Because of that, the hype for the sequel has been off the charts. Happily, we now know the Spider-Man 2 game will officially release on October 20. A story trailer, released at San Diego Comic-Con, shows more of what’s ahead.

The Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 gameplay footage released with the announcement (below) begins with Peter—now sporting a brand new black-goo suit. Hmm, wonder what that can be all about. He tries to stop the Kraven cronies from hunting Dr. Curt Conners, who has become fully, monstrously Lizardish.

We get to see some of Spider-Man’s new Venom skills before we swap to Miles. He now has a very good sense of his own powers. Stealth will still play a part in the new game, and one can hope they’ve upgraded the AI of the thugs to make it a bit more sporting. Not long after, Miles, Peter, and Miles’ friend-and-guy-in-the-chair Ganke control a drone as they chase down Conners and try to keep him (and everyone else in NYC) out of Kraven’s crosshairs.

As with the first Spider-Man game, a large amount of plot and character comes during dialogue during gameplay. Here we learn that Conners’ research is integral to helping with Harry Osborn’s condition. If you’ll remember, the end of the first game showed Harry deep in the throes of a debilitating disease. No way that will turn him into Green Goblin. Can’t imagine it will.

Those of us who know the Spider-Man mythos know the black suit and Peter’s gruffer attitude will lead to some problems for his loved ones. However, he’s not likely to remain John Goo for very long. And while Sony has confirmed the game will not be two-player co-op, we have full faith that Miles Morales will provide the player with plenty of opportunities to save Petey Pie.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will be out on October 20, 2023.

Originally published on May 24, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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I still marvel (word chosen deliberately) at the hype surrounding a biopic about the scientist largely responsible for atomic weapons. And not from awards-hounds, either. Blockbuster fans. That is, of course, mostly down to its writer-director, Christopher Nolan. Nolan’s penchant for dizzying narrative structure, enormous visuals, and heart-pounding tension have made him one of Hollywood’s biggest directors. After 2017’s Dunkirk proved his style could apply to historical epics just as well as genre fare, the cinema community couldn’t be more excited for Oppenheimer. And once you start to vibe with its chaotic approach to the material, it really is a wonderful, troubling film.

You should absolutely not expect Oppenheimer to follow typical biopic structure, pacing, or even character introduction. This is a lengthy movie with loads of moving parts. Characters come in and out of the orbit of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, masterfully underplayed by Cillian Murphy. With a few exceptions where the people involved are names you know—Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr—Nolan relies on casting familiar faces and giving them just enough screen time to know they’re important when they pop up much later.

Not content to present anything in full chronological order, Oppenheimer gives us two frame stories. Each presents a different point of view on times in the man’s life and career. The first, dubbed “Fission,” shows us the controversial 1954 hearing which sought to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance based on his perceived history as a communist sympathizer. The second, “Fusion,” is the Senate confirmation hearing for Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). Strauss had appointed Oppenheimer to the Atomic Energy Commission a few years after WWII. Fission is in color, Fusion in black and white. All the while, we see parts of Oppenheimer’s rise to theoretical quantum physics messiah and his eventually founding and leading of the Los Alamos site development of the atomic bomb which eventually leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The movie is long, and it covers a lot of ground, quite quickly. The music and sound design keep us from ever feeling at ease. Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography wavers between huge closeups and massive landscapes, hammering home the micro and the macro of the story at hand. Oppenheimer struggles with his place in history. The movie doesn’t let him off the hook, either. He is both the genius whose tenacity helped end WWII and “become death, destroyer of worlds.” It puts me in mind, in a completely different tone and style, of Hayao Miyazaki’s previous final film, 2013’s The Wind Rises. That film followed the aeronautics genius who wanted to make airplanes, and did so to create the A6M Zero fighter during WWII. Scientists creating and discovering while knowing their work will kill loads of people.

Oppenheimer also contends with the end of an all-too-brief time when scientists and experts were trusted and listened to not just for technological advancement but for policy and morality. As often happens, however, when the people in power see more power on the horizon, they turn their back on reason. The entire project was in Oppenheimer’s hands, the movie details, only for it to be stripped away by the military, the US government, and eventually the nuclear age the moment it was finished. Just like the Space Race was all about beating the Soviets to the moon, the rise of the A-bomb was all to stick it to the Nazis, who had already surrendered by time the bombs dropped.

Not everything about the movie works. While the movie tries to make Oppenheimer’s romantic and sexual relationships—the man was a notorious womanizer—have weight, they end up as nudity-filled footnotes. Emily Blunt plays Robert’s wife Kitty, who gets a good amount to do, but Florence Pugh as his troubled communist girlfriend seems only there for awkward sex scenes. We see next to nothing about any other woman in the story, save Olivia Thirlby as one of the Los Alamos project’s lone female physicists. She doesn’t have a ton of screen time, but she’s there.

Oppenheimer certainly feels like several movies, but it’s to Nolan’s credit that each works as well as it does. The breathlessness waiting for the Trinity bomb test, even knowing it didn’t, in fact, end the world, is one of the movie’s crowning achievements. But equal tension comes from Oppenheimer realizing what he hath wrought. It’s an amazing feat, making a single event seem both like a triumph and a failure. This movie pulls it off.

Like its central figure, Oppenheimer is a complicated, hectic, but altogether satisfying movie that will give people much to think about. I could list all the performances that merit attention, but that would end up just looking like a cast list. Murphy’s grounded, stoic, heavy performance as one of the most complex figures of the 20th century should, and likely will, receive plaudits. Richly deserved. The movie entirely rests on him, and it’s a career highlight in an already excellent body of work. If this is the film that will give Murphy and Nolan their first Academy Awards, it will be well and truly warranted.

Oppenheimer ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Leave it to Deadpool to give X-Men movie characters a last chance to live. We’re all pretty stoked for the MCU’s first true foray into the Fox-era characters with Deadpool 3. We already know Hugh Jackman will play Wolverine one more time in it (in comics-accurate costumes, no less), and that Jennifer Garner’s Elektra will hop over too. That’s fun! But all this X-nostalgia has made me think once again about the supremely flawed and uneven franchise as it was between 2000 and 2020. Over the course of 13 movies, the series ran the gamut between sublime and stinky. So I’m going to rank them, because I want to!

13. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

The first solo adventure for Hugh Jackman’s Logan came in 2009, and it sure wasn’t good. And look, I know it was fashionable to crap on this movie for its weird pacing, terrible CGI, poor attempts at humor, and nerfing Deadpool, but it’s also accurate. Not a good movie. The one thing it did was prove Hugh Jackman could carry a movie, a thing we already knew by this point. Oh, and don’t get me started on how this movie alone messed up the continuity. Best to just forget this one.

12. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

Following the departure of the franchise’s first super problematic director, they hired another super problematic director to helm the third movie. To say it’s messy is an understatement. They tried to put “The Cure” arc alongside “Dark Phoenix Saga,” and those two stories did not gel at all together. You get a lot of characters standing in a line opposite other characters standing in a line. It killed off Cyclops (sidebar: of all the characters done dirty by this franchise, Cyclops is perhaps the most egregious), completely wasted Angel, and nerfed Mystique. It also is unforgivable that it made the “I’m the Juggernaut, b****!” canon in a movie. So terrible.

11. Dark Phoenix (2019)

The second attempt at adapting the most famous X-Men comics arc is just as disappointing as the first. It’s less messy and more boring, but it still completely bypassed all the build up of what made the Phoenix Force interesting, and what makes the ending so tragic. Also, at this point, the timeline breaking down just makes no sense. Let’s hope they never do the Dark Phoenix Saga ever again. (I know they will.)

10. X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

Mercifully, the final X film from a very problematic director indeed. Despite very good films previous, this one—a third in the First Class timeline, more or less—just threw everything at the wall and hoped it stuck. It’s another enormous, messy hodgepodge of different X-characters and storylines. Oscar Isaac does his very best as the titular ancient mutant, and the new batch of Xavier students are okay, but it just turns into gloop. Another waste of Angel/Archangel; a major waste of Storm. And they had to turn Mystique into a main hero thanks to Jennifer Lawrence’s star power. Not even another frenetic Quicksilver sequence can save it.

9. The New Mutants (2020)

Okay, so here’s where I lose some of you. I didn’t see The New Mutants when they dumped it during the pandemic. Pandemic and all. In fact, I didn’t end up watching it until a month or so ago. And you know what? Yes, it’s hacked to all hell. Yes, the third act poops the woods (Demon Bear joke). But I thought it was pretty fun! Creepy vibe, decent characterization, plus it was just nice to see an X-Men movie that didn’t even try to reference Wolverine. Should have gotten more love, and it’s a shame the planned appearance of Jon Hamm as Mr. Sinister never happened.

8. Deadpool 2 (2018)

I’m gonna be real honest here: I was over Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool schtick pretty soon after the first movie came out. So while I was excited to see the sequel, I was wary of how annoying I found the character. The upsides were that the movie brought in a ton more X characters, and it was a joy to see Josh Brolin as Cable and Zazie Beetz as Domino. I could for sure use more of them in future installments. The downside? I’ve never been a big Deadpool guy and, like the character, the movie seems to think its way funnier than it is. But the X-Force skydiving joke is pretty amazing.

7. X-Men (2000)

Here is an example of a movie that is so much more important than it is still good. It definitely set the stage for the modern superhero movie era and finally gave us some live-action mutants. (Sidebar: yes, I remember the 1996 Generation X TV movie. That doesn’t count.) And the casting is, by and large, really great, with Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and Hugh Jackman all standing out. But for all the good of the first X-Men, there’s always a sense that it’s half-apologizing for comic books being silly. In 2023, it’s just not as revolutionary as it once was.

6. The Wolverine (2013)

After X-Men Origins, I thought there was no way a solo Wolverine movie was going to be good. And then we get director James Mangold. A lot of this movie covers ground in the fan-favorite Frank Miller/Chris Claremont run of Wolverine in the ’80s, with his dealings with the Yakuza in Japan and various romances. I think it almost totally works. The ending is bad, I won’t argue it isn’t, but I think The Wolverine is still upper half of the movies. Jackman rules.

5. Deadpool (2016)

Remember everything I said about the character of Deadpool earlier? That’s still true, but even with that, I cannot deny how good, how funny, how effective, and how fresh the first Deadpool movie felt. After years of development, Ryan Reynolds’ passion project got the go-ahead and made just a ton of money with its heavy violence and foul-mouthed frat humor. This is arguably the best page-to-screen adaptation of any comic book character. And its success is 100% the reason he’s not getting rebooted (really) for the MCU. I won’t hold this movie accountable for the Deadpool-ifying of other superhero movies, though I could.

4. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

The second most famous Uncanny X-Men comics arc (which was only two issues) ended up as one of the very best superhero movies of the era. I love the way this movie utilizes both timelines’ casts and sends the sole superstar character of Wolverine back in time to foil a future where sentinels take over the world. The Quicksilver “Time in a Bottle” sequence is still super great, and the finale where Magneto drops a stadium around Richard Nixon is wild and enormous, but manages to work because the characters are believable. Best use of Mystique in any movie. In my head cannon, this is the end of the franchise (Deadpool and Logan notwithstanding).

3. X2: X-Men United (2003)

I think it’s arguable this and Spider-Man 2 are the reasons superhero movies kept going. They’re not just successful, they’re really good. X2 took what worked about the first movie and focused on it and heightened it. Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler is excellent, Brian Cox as Stryker is really good, and we got maybe McKellen’s best Magneto performance. Wolverine gets center stage here for real and they let him do what he does best (and what he does best isn’t very nice). Just a great example of what the X-Men on screen could be.

2. X-Men: First Class (2011)

Matthew Vaughn’s lone foray into the X-universe really was a fresh start. Not only did it get a whole new cast to portray some of the characters who’ve been around a while, but setting it in the early 1960s, contemporary to when the comics first came out, brought in a new style, a new energy, to the mutants. Young, swaggery Charles Xavier as played by James McAvoy was a great choice to offset Stewart’s austere portrayal. Michael Fassbender’s Magneto was damn cool; could have watched a whole movie of Erik Lensherr, Nazi hunter. Above all, it proved the franchise, which had already gotten a bit stale and silly, could reinvent itself, which proved to be just what it needed to continue for another decade.

1. Logan (2017)

Look, it was never going to be anything else at number one. Logan isn’t just a great X-Men movie. It isn’t just a great comic book movie. It’s a great movie, full stop. What was originally going to be the swansong for both Jackman and Stewart ended up a somber, elegiac reflection on regret and hope as Logan has to tend to a sickly Charles Xavier and try to save young, angry Laura Kinney (Dafne Keen). The action is as brutal as you’d hope with a Wolverine movie, and the story flows to a wonderful, sad conclusion. It’s the superhero movie as western, writ large. Took three goes, but Jackman really did make the best of this franchise.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We love ourselves some Judy Greer here at Nerdist. Put her in more things. Put her in everything! She’s always good. When she was in Halloween (2018)? We loved it! (And subsequently we did not love what happened in Halloween Kills.) Greer takes center stage in Aporia, a new sci-fi thriller which is set to premiere at the 2023 Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. In it, Greer deals with debilitating grief by messing with time. It doesn’t go how she wants. Take a look at the trailer below.

Aporia feels like a mix of Primer and The Butterfly Effect, but completely centered around loss. Greer’s character so badly wants her husband (Edi Gathegi) back that she allows a machine to send a “bullet” through time. The results aren’t just as clean as “yay, my husband’s back!” Wouldn’t be much of a movie if they were, yeah?

The movie comes from writer-director Jared Moshe and also stars Payman Maadi. Gathegi, as you probably recently learned, will play Mister Terrific in James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy. Check out the cool poster below as well.

Aporia will have its world premiere at Fantasia Film Festival on July 27 ahead of the film’s August 11 US theatrical release.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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It’s a tough time to be a DC movie. In the inevitable upheaval involved in the changing of guards, several projects fell by the wayside, greatly underperformed, or, in the case of Batgirl, abruptly stopped production. Many of those decisions came before current co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran took over. Still, with the exception of The Flash and the Aquaman sequel, not many other projects seem certain. That is, of course, with the exception of Blue Beetle. The project began as an HBO Max exclusive movie and got an upgrade to theatrical, in IMAX, no less!

Not only that, but James Gunn confirmed that although Blue Beetle is not a full DCU movie, Blue Beetle, the character, is the first DCU character and Xolo Maridueña will continue to play him in the DCU. Additionally, Blue Beetle‘s director Angel Manuel Soto confirmed that Blue Beetle is “part of the plans that they have been creating for the future installments of the DCU.” And that the director is thinking of Blue Beetle as a trilogy, and aims to create two more movies, at least.

Here’s the first trailer for Blue Beetle, hitting theaters in August.

While a character called Blue Beetle has existed for decades, this iteration—young Jaime Reyes—didn’t appear until 2006. In that relatively short span of time, Jaime has become a standout favorite for comics fans. The movie will, as you might expect, take elements from several different comic runs of the character. As we see at the beginning of the trailer, Jaime (Xolo Maridueña) is a young man working at a resort in the fictional Palmera City. On a fateful day, his friend gives him a carton from Belly Burger containing an alien scarab. Presto chango, the Scarab fuses to Jaime (in a rather Cronenbergian scene) and he’s got a Blue Beetle suit.

One fun aspect of the character in the movie is that he definitely does not have a secret identity, as such. His family, including George Lopez as his uncle, see his first transformation. He’s like the anti-Spider-Man. Everyone he loves knows his secret to begin with. Also, his uncle thinks Batman is a fascist, which is very funny.

We don’t get a huge sense of the larger story of the movie aside from Susan Sarandon wanting the device for herself. The film’s IMDb lists her as Victoria Kord, a character who only first appeared in this current “Graduation Day” comics arc. Ted Kord, of course, is the first Blue Beetle from back in comics’ past.

The synopsis for Blue Beetle is as follows:

Recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it. As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology: the Scarab. When the Scarab suddenly chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, he is bestowed with an incredible suit of armor capable of extraordinary and unpredictable powers, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the Super Hero BLUE BEETLE.

And we won’t have long to wait to see it on very large screens. Blue Beetle, directed by Angel Manuel Soto, will hit theaters and IMAX August 18, 2023.

Originally published on April 3, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a pretty solid entry in the adventure franchise that keeps finding new life. It puts Dr. Henry Jones Jr. (Harrison Ford) on one last quest to find an ancient artifact with untold powers with worldwide evil on his tail. Aside from proving that every odd-numbered Indy movie has to have Nazis, it gave our favorite archaeologist a fitting ending to his now-42-year cinematic journey. But here’s the thing: aside from the Nazi part, they did the same thing 15 years ago.

If you recall, in 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, while fighting Soviets to get at a transdimensional being’s skull, Indiana Jones meets his son, Mutt, and reconnects with Marion Ravenwood, his long-lost love. So why, then, is Indy alone and sad at the beginning of The Dial of Destiny?

We learn through the course of the movie that Mutt has died. He enlisted (presumably to go fight in the early days of the Vietnam War) and was killed in action. The grief of this loss drove a wedge between Indy and Marion and she eventually moved out. Indy subsequently has to deal with his own grief through the adventure, chasing Helena around the globe.

What, then, was the point of the happy ending in the last movie? Why so quick to so tragically removed before the next? Naturally, we have some real-world issues pertaining to members of cast which I won’t get in to here. But even if Mutt wasn’t going to be in the movie, did they have to bring Dr. Jones to such a low point? And, though nice to see him reconcile with Marion at the very end of Dial, it’s just a shorter, less impactful version of what happened in Skull. It’s bittersweet rather than regular sweet.

I think Dial of Destiny is a better movie than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. However, it also cheapens what is otherwise a very positive moment from the earlier movie. I wish they had not done that. Killing characters or breaking up relationships off-screen is too easy. I’m all for heartstring-pulling, but this was a sour note in an otherwise enjoyable movie.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Pluto TV, the free, ad-supported streaming service, has made its name on hyper-specific, 24-hour channels made up of shows and movies on repeat. They have a Mystery Science Theater 3000 channel, for example. They were the first FAST service to have a tokusatsu channel, to my knowledge. It’s good fun, and you’re likely to find stuff there you want to see. Add to that, on July 1, Pluto TV will debut its Godzilla channel, which, among its 30 film library, will have two movies that have been hard to find in North America for a very long time.

The Showa-era Godzilla movies—which span from 1954-1975—are pretty readily available in the USA. Hell, Criterion put out a whole box set of them. But the Heisei-era movies—spanning 1985-1995—have been a bit spottier. A few have gotten disc releases; even fewer have been on streaming. But Pluto TV will include both 1989’s Godzilla vs. Biollante and 1991’s Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, which have been wholly unavailable here for ages. Both movies come from director Kazuki Omori.

Godzilla vs. Biollante, came a few years after the Heisei-era kickoff The Return of Godzilla. For my money, it’s one of the best in the whole series. It follows a scientist working for the government who has to try to make a creature capable of fighting the dangerous king of the monsters should he return. The scientist combines found Godzilla cells with cells of both a carnivorous plant and his own daughter to create a rapidly metamorphosing creature, dubbed Biollante. Biollante’s final form looks kind of like Audrey II with a crocodile head. It’s rad.

The follow-up movie, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, is an all-out fantasy adventure. With time travel! It features a team of scientists, military guys, and a psychic woman (who recurs throughout the series) who go back in time to WWII where they discover a living dinosaur that, once hit with the atom bomb, became Godzilla. Unfortunately, the Futurians, a group of people who brought the time machine to our heroes in the first place, create a kaiju of their own—King Ghidorah—to subjugate Earth.

These movies are definitely of their time, in a good way. If you’ve only ever seen the OG movies in the series, you may be surprised at the high quality of the effects. Toho did not skimp on the model work here. While my personal preference is for Biollante, both movies deliver on loads of great monster fighting and compelling personal narratives.

Pluto TV’s Godzilla channel will launch July 1. In addition to the 30 aforementioned movies, it will also have the whole 1998-2000 animated Godzilla: The Series. That cartoon, while a spinoff of the ’98 Roland Emmerich movie, is actually very good. Enjoy big lizards and destroyed scale models this July 4 weekend!

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Hard-boiled noir fiction doesn’t get much softer or brighter than Nintendo’s Detective Pikachu, a game which saw a behatted, chatty Pikachu solve Pokemon mysteries in Ryme City with his trusty human sidekick, Tim Goodman. That game, a major departure from the regular “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” narrative, was popular enough to branch out into a feature film. Now, as part of this week’s Nintendo Direct, we know the adventures in the game world won’t end. Check out the trailer for the aptly named sequel Detective Pikachu Returns.

Pikachu, who makes sure to tell everyone he’s a great detective, finds himself on several new mysterious trails in the game. We don’t know exactly what, but we see tons of different Pokémon that could easily be in trouble and/or evil. Mewtwo also rears his purple head in the Detective Pikachu Returns trailer. If Mewtwo is around, trouble can’t be far behind. Luckily, Detective Pikachu has Tim again, in his “iconic red hoodie.” You didn’t know a hoodie could be iconic, eh? But it is.

Pokémon is one of the most recognizable and popular video game brands in the entire world, and I love that it isn’t content to stay in its one lane. The first Detective Pikachu offered fans a look into the world of the pocket monsters they’d never gotten before. This new game seems to be more of that, and that is definitely not a bad thing.

Detective Pikachu Returns will hit the Nintendo Switch on October 6, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Not too long ago, James Gunn dropped a number of bombs with regard to the brand new, revamped DCU. (First, it’s no longer the DCEU) Among the things he said were movies like Matt Reeves’ The Batman sequel and Joker: Folie a Deux will get a clear “Elseworlds” label to let people know—much like in the comics—that they are not connected to the overarching DCU. Gunn also gave us a huge list of movies and shows coming to our screens. One of those will be the DCU’s new Batman, a feature film titled The Brave and the Bold. And this Batman movie will have a familiar director at the helm.

The Flash‘s Andy Muschietti Will Direct the DCU’s Batman Movie

Speaking to Variety, James Gunn revealed that Andy Muschietti will direct the DCU’s The Brave and the Bold Batman movie. Gunn noted:

We saw The Flash; even before taking the reins at DC Studios, and knew we were in the hands of not only a visionary director but a massive DC fan. It’s a magnificent film – funny, emotional, thrilling – and Andy’s affinity and passion for these characters and this world just resonates through every frame. So, when it came time to find a director for The Brave and the Bold, there was really only one choice. Luckily, Andy said yes. Barbara signed on to produce with us and we were on our way. They’re an extraordinary team, and we couldn’t have better or more inspiring partners as we embark on this thrilling new adventure in the DCU.

Of course, Muschietti already directed Batman or two in The Flash, Michael Keaton’s Batman and Ben Affleck’s Batman, to be specific. But there’s no telling yet how similar or different the DCU’s Batman will be when he arrives. Still, experience is never a bad thing.

The Brave and the Bold in DC Comics

Traditionally, The Brave and the Bold at DC Comics pointed to any number of team-ups, usually involving heroes who wouldn’t normally work together. The Silver Age was the big heyday for this title. Beginning in issue #59 the title shifted to almost exclusively a Caped Crusader book, owing to the popularity of the Adam West Batman TV series. While the movie Gunn announced will feature Batman and Robin, it won’t be the familiar dynamic duo most fans know.

The movie will adapt Grant Morrison’s run of Batman comics from the mid-2000s. Morrison took Batman all over the place, killed him off, sent him through time, and then franchised him across the globe. But in specific, Gunn said The Brave and the Bold will focus on Bruce Wayne’s Batman and perhaps Morrison and artist Andy Kubert’s most important contribution to Bat Family canon, his adolescent son Damian Wayne. Damian is Batman’s son with Talia al Ghul, whom Talia and Ra’s al Ghul raised as an assassin.

As Gunn says, the movie will follow Batman’s journey to take the violent nightmare child Damian under his (bat)wing and teach him how to be Robin. While Morrison’s run proved incredibly dark, with new villains like the terrifying Professor Pyg, it was also quite funny.

DC films have long shied away from the idea of Robin, entirely because of the campiness of the Schumacher films. However, Robin is a huge part of the Batman lore. Perhaps using Damian, a darker version, will be a good gateway for people. And Gunn said it will introduce the “Bat Family,” so we might even see a grown up Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, and Barbara Gordon in the film too.

No word yet on casting, but we are, as with all of these announcements, we are jazzed to all heck.

Originally published on January 31, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Wes Anderson is a vibe. People always know what they’re going to get with a Wes Anderson movie, and a lot of people like to slag him off because of that. But what’s wrong with having a distinct style? Why shouldn’t filmmakers have their thing to make them stand apart? Almost since his very first film, 1996’s Bottle Rocket, he’s played with the inherently artificial nature of cinema as an artform. In the course of his next 10 films—and 27 years—Anderson’s filmography has gone ever further away from “realism,” into stories, performances, and aesthetic wholly borne out of finding the believable heart at the center of the weirdest of premises.

His latest film, Asteroid City, is not your typical Wes Anderson film. Or, maybe more accurately, it’s the most Wes Anderson film. It hides the real story under layers and layers of artifice and distance to give us a treatise on the American Theatre, UFO culture, and mid-century emotional stunting. It’s also super goofy and plays like a greatest hits of previous Anderson films.

Asteroid City has probably the most packed cast Anderson has ever worked with. His movies always draw attention to their star-studded ensembles. In this movie, he draws your attention to these stars who play characters within characters within framing stories within deliberate obfuscations. Asteroid City is not merely a movie; it’s a documentary about reenactments of behind-the-scenes stories of putting on a stage play called Asteroid City, which we then get to watch in a massive, real outdoor landscape set that couldn’t possibly exist on a stage. Get it?

Ostensibly, the story finds a number of families arriving in the impossibly tiny desert town Asteroid City for a special presentation for scientifically gifted youngsters. Among these families include Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck, a grizzled war photographer who recently lost his wife, his genius son (Jake Ryan), and trio of blonde hellion girls. We also have screen star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her genius daughter (Grace Edwards). Tilda Swinton plays a scientist, Jeffrey Wright a military general, Steve Carell an enterprising motel manager, Matt Dillon a mechanic. Tom Hanks takes on what would probably be the Bill Murray role as Augie’s rich father-in-law.

In addition to all of these characters, these actors also play the actors playing these characters. Remember, this is meant to be a play from the mid-20th century. So we throughout see these people as the “real” versions of themselves. Unlike the actual play, which is in color and widescreen, the behind-the-scenes stories look more like stage play scenes, in black-and-white, and in Academy ratio. Additionally, people like Adrien Brody appear as the play’s beleaguered director, and Edward Norton as its ascot-adorned scribe. All of this comes with Bryan Cranston as a Rod Serling-esque narrator popping in and out to set various scenes.

Each of these different levels of unreality have their own narratives and character arcs. They overlap each other, vying for importance. It’s clear Anderson is playing with the ’50s Actor’s Studio-style living theatre stuff. We have a Thornton Wilder or Tennessee Williams playwright and an Elia Kazan-inspired director. Willem Dafoe plays the analog to a Lee Strasberg-esque acting teacher. These feel less like their own full movie and more like snapshots of the era to give you an understanding of and commentary on the “play” at the center. The way Anderson weaves these stories and characters and layers of reality together constantly reminds you, none of this is real.

And this is why I think, days later, I’m still thinking so much about Asteroid City. I keep thinking this movie will put off people with just how not-real the story at the center is. But that’s entirely the point. Narrative cinema is not real life. It’s fiction. The people in the story are actors. Why should we accept Scarlett Johansson playing Natasha Romanoff but get annoyed that she’s playing a character playing a character in this?

The movie constantly keeps us at arm’s length. It almost dares us to connect with the characters within the play Asteroid City as if they were just people in Asteroid City, even when outlandish things happen. Yet I still did care about the conversations they had, the hopes and dreams and fears. In spite of everything Anderson threw at me to make me not connect, I still did.

So, will Asteroid City work for you? I guess it depends how much you get on board with Anderson’s schtick of late. This seems a natural progression in his live-action work. It’s not just a fake-looking movie with weird characters; it’s a fake-looking movie with weird characters about a fake-looking movie with weird characters. Some people will find it insufferable, some will find it fascinating, others might get something more. But at the very least, you owe it to yourself to see how he peels this particular onion.

Asteroid City ⭐ (4 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Look, nobody wants to be shipwrecked anywhere. If it’s a Cast Away situation, you end up talking to a volleyball. In a Swiss Family Robinson scenario, you have build treehouses and stuff. Who wants to do that! But if you end up on Skull Island, as the characters do in Skull Island, you have to contend with giant, bloodthirsty beasts. And you better hope Kong is in a benevolent mood that day. The new Netflix series from Powerhouse Animation will debut on June 22, but the streamer has just released a full-length trailer. Take a look!

The series takes viewers on a thrilling adventure as a group of kind-hearted explorers rescues Annie (Mae Whitman) from the ocean, unaware that their act of heroism will lead them to the treacherous Skull Island. This enigmatic place is home to bizarre creatures and terrifying monsters, including the mighty titan himself, Kong. As the trailer shows, the idea was always to go to Skull Island, but certainly not to strand themselves there. And it seems as though Annie isn’t as helpless as they initially feared.

Skull Island, from Legendary Television, is created, written, and produced by Brian Duffield. The series boasts an impressive ensemble cast, with Nicolas Cantu (Dragons Rescue Riders: Heroes of the Sky, The Fabelmans) lending his voice to the protagonist, Charlie. Joining him are talented voice actors Mae Whitman (Family Guy, DC Super Hero Girls) as Annie; Darren Barnet (Never Have I Ever, Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles) as Mike; Benjamin Bratt (Poker Face, Coco) as Cap; and Betty Gilpin (Mrs. Davis, Glow) as Irene.

Skull Island‘s eight-episode first season will drop June 22 on Netflix.

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The following is less a spoiler for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and more a spoiler for future movies.

Early on in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, we learn Noah Diaz—the lead human character, played by Anthony Ramos—is a former soldier. Though just a private, we learn how highly decorated he was. He was forced to leave the Army because of his sick little brother. I wondered if this was just because of the rampant military propaganda present in the Transformers movies. It never seemed to matter too much in the movie; he definitely didn’t need to be a soldier to be brave enough to save the day. However, the end of the movie explained things a bit.

The final scene finds Noah going to another job interview for a security job. This one takes him to a seemingly normal shipping and/or laundry business. He goes into the back room for the interview, where he meets a character played by Michael Kelly (House of Cards). This character asks him about his thin resume and gets Noah to describe the work he recently did in South America. This guy reveals he knows all about Noah teaming up with the Transformers in Peru. He’s impressed.

So this guy, it turns out, works for a secret government agency and wants Noah to join. The normal-looking conference room then opens up and we see a massive hangar full of high-tech vehicles. The man hands Noah his card. On the front we see the name Agent Burke and when Noah flips it over we see the very familiar brand logo of G.I. Joe.

Following the release of the film, EW revealed quotes from producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura about the surprise crossover. “We’re introducing Joe characters into the world that we’re dealing with, on whatever our characters are gonna go do,” Di Bonaventura tells EW of the next planned film. “We’re also not through with the Maximals, so I imagine in the next movie we’ll have Maximals, Autobots, and Joes.”

“The idea of trying to do the whole Joe world at the same time is a little daunting,” Di Bonaventure confirms. “This is a way to bring them into our world, remind people of who they are, and they’ll have a role in the plot.”

Now this is both surprising and not at all surprising. Hasbro and Paramount have long desired to create a proper cinematic universe for its many toy properties. While three live-action G.I. Joe movies have come out in the past 14 years, none have even approached the success of the Transformers. So, establishing that G.I. Joe not only exists in the Transformers universe, but is the S.H.I.E.L.D.-esque agency which investigates the weirder entities makes a lot of sense. Talk for years has speculated that MASK, ROM, and Visionaries would join Transformers and Joe in a cinematic universe.

So, we now have not only a new G.I. Joe organization but evidently a new, more senior Duke leading the team. In the ’90s, too, since Rise of the Beasts takes place in 1994. We shall see where all of this goes!

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post The Crossover Ending of TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS, Explained appeared first on Nerdist.

Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival is one of the best genre film festivals in North America. Its weeks-long celebration of international horror, sci-fi, action, and more will present its 27th such offering this July. The first wave of titles it’ll screen hit us last month. Among those films are vampire reinvention movie Empire V, time-bending sci-fi drama Aporia, and Larry Fessenden’s werewolf romp Blackout. Now Fantasia has its second wave of titles and they include a steampunk anime, a body-swapping romance, and Nicolas Cage! Here are some of our favorite standouts from this second list.

The festival’s opening night movie will be the North American premiere of Red Rooms from Quebec filmmaker Pascal Plante. The story follows the high-profile case of serial killer Ludovic Chevalier, which has just gone to trial. Kelly-Anne is obsessed. When reality blurs with her morbid fantasies, she goes down a dark path to seek the final piece of the case’s puzzle.

Next up, we have Sympathy for the Devil, which has Nic Cage opposite Joel Kinnaman from director Yuval Adler. The festival info says it’s one of Cage’s “most intense performances,” which is quite a claim. After being forced to drive a mysterious passenger at gunpoint, a man finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse where nothing is as it seems.

The aforementioned steampunk anime is Kurayukaba. Equal parts crazy cartoon caper, shadowy film noir, nostalgic escapade, and steampunk fantasy, the movie is a retro-flavored anime reimagining of the freewheeling Taisho era, Japan’s equivalent of the Roaring Twenties.

Filmmaker Zach Clark brings the fascinating, lo-fi sci-fi comedy The Becomers. This movie is a romantic tale of two body-swapping aliens trying to find their place on this big, dumb planet. As much a love story as a dark comedy satire on American life. Our favorite!

One of my very favorite Fantasia movies from 2021 was Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, a one-take time-loop comedy. It really blew me away both with its ingenuity and its heart. He revisits the concept in River, which culminates into a multifaceted portrait of a place as the various guests, employees, and hosts band together to solve the mystery of the valley stuck in time.

I’ve become a huge fan of folk horror from around the world. This is why I’m so stoked to see the Bangladeshi folk horror movie Pett Kata Shaw. The movie is an anthology of stories of Bangladesh’s ghosts and unforgiving spirits, all tied to the country’s history of injustice and societal dread. Relatable, innit?

Filmmaker Joe Lynch (Mayhem) will pay tribute to the late, great Stuart Gordon with an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation featuring actress Barbara Crampton, producer Brian Yuzna and writer Stuart Paoli. Gordon had a trio of excellent Lovecraft movies with Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon. Lynch’s Suitable Flesh will adapt Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” starring Heather Graham and Judah Lewis. A psychiatrist falls into a downward spiral of sex, possession, and death when a young patient shows up at her door with symptoms that are of another world. This will be the Canadian premiere of the movie.

To see the rest of the second-wave titles for the film festival, check out Fantasia’s website. The festival will run from July 20 to August 9, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Fantasia International Film Festival Releases Second Wave of 2023 Titles appeared first on Nerdist.

With the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who less than six months away, the production seems ready to pull out all the stops. Not only will David Tennant and Catherine Tate come back for a trio of specials—not to mention a host of cool guest stars—but another legacy companion will return to the series. The BBC today announced Bonnie Langford, who portrayed the Sixth and Seventh Doctor’s companion Melanie Bush in the 1980s, will come back to act alongside Ncuti Gatwa in the next full series.

Langford was a big stage actor prior to her casting in Doctor Who and continued to be so afterward. Mel was an interesting companion. Her first onscreen episode, as part of the season-long “Trial of a Time Lord” arc was not actually her first canonical story. That one never ended up on screen. After six episodes with the Sixth Doctor, she continued on as the Seventh Doctor’s first companion but left at the end of season 24. Her departure gave way to Ace, one of the most beloved companions of all time.

Langford reprised her role of Mel over the years in various Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays. She also appeared briefly on screen in “The Power of the Doctor,” the Thirteenth Doctor’s final story. That special also saw Ace, Tegan, Ian Chesterton, Jo Grant, and more companions return.

The actress said of her Doctor Who return as Mel:

I am absolutely thrilled to be bringing Melanie Bush back. To be part of the exceptional cast, crew and production team led by the force of nature that is Russell T Davies is a career highlight. I’m so privileged and proud to have been a member of the Doctor Who family since the classic era and to be included in the new generation is phenomenal.

Showrunner Russell T Davies added the following:

Open those TARDIS doors wide, because Bonnie’s back! What an honour, delight and hoot to welcome back the character of Melanie, after too long away. And this isn’t just a cameo, Bonnie is right in the thick of the action, battling monsters and chaos and cliffhangers, right at the Doctor’s side, just like the old days.

The Doctor Who 60th-anniversary celebration will begin in November. It airs exclusively on Disney+ outside of the UK and Ireland and on the BBC in those territories.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The novelty of seeing robots turning into cars and vice-versa on the big screen doesn’t seem to have worn off for people in the 16 years since the first Transformers movie. Despite the subsequent four movies having pretty paltry critical and audience appreciation, they still made grips of money for Paramount and Hasbro. They are toy commercials after all, so literally seeing toys fighting each other on screen seemed to be all they needed. 2018’s Bumblebee was a shot in the arm the franchise needed. While the five Michael Bay-directed movies got bigger and louder, Bumblebee made it smaller, and gave it more heart.

Now, for the seventh movie, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, they seem to try to split the difference a bit. It takes bits of what worked in Bumblebee and gives us another loud, Earth-ending plot. And the result is fine. It’s enjoyable enough; it’s a lot more of the same. But if you had hoped for either more of Bumblebee‘s tone, or a proper rise of Maximals, you will find yourself a bit disappointed.

The movie takes place in 1994, seven years after Bumblebee. Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is a former decorated soldier who quit the Army when his little brother got sick. Now he’s having trouble paying medical bills and can’t catch a break in the job department. He finally agrees to help his lowlife friend Reek (Tobe Nwigwe) steal a fancy car. That car, a Porsche, happens to be a Transformer. Mirage, to be exact, who sounds exactly like Pete Davidson. New Yawwwwwk.

Seems the Autobots (Optimus, Bumblebee, and Arcee) have a problem. They need to find a way home and a beacon, recently uncovered by a museum intern named Elena (Dominique Fishback), is their key. Unfortunately, it’s literally a key to bring Unicron—the planet-eating Transformer—to Earth. Unicron’s number-one, Scourge (Peter Dinklage) has come to collect, and seems more than a match for the Autobots. Fortunately for them, Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), a Maximal, comes to aid. Together, all the goodies go to Peru to meet the other Maximals and try to thwart Scourge and Unicron.

Lotta names, lotta MacGuffins. It even has a big laser thing shooting up toward the sky. It’s all done well enough, with loads of action and destruction and most of the time enough focus on the characters so you can actually see what’s going on. We get to know a fair amount about our human characters, which I’m sure comes from director Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II). The Maximals, on the other hand, the titular beasts? They don’t factor in much at all. This is still an Autobot movie, for better or worse.

The biggest issues I had with Rise of the Beasts came down to clashes in focus. The movie seems to think the central relationship is Noah and his little brother; it also thinks it’s Noah and Mirage becoming buds. But then it also wants us to care about Noah and Elena, and Noah and Optimus, and Elena and Airazor kind of? None of them really seem to land aside from that first one.

The second biggest issue is that Pete Davidson is very prominent in the movie and just doing his usual schtick but this time as a big car robot. Mirage is a neat enough character, but making him a bro with a questionable romantic history was a strange choice. (Part of that is not in the movie.) And the third biggest issue, for me, a big fan of 1996’s Beast Wars, is just how little the movie actually has for the Maximals to do. Airazor is the exposition, and Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) offers his namesake a different view on humanity. Other than that, they barely feature. Cheetor and Rhinox might as well not have been there at all. Also Unicron. It’s weird Unicron is in this.

Ultimately, I can’t be too mad at a Hasbro movie made to sell Hasbro stuff. It was probably a little much to ask for a ton of Beast Wars continuity, anyway. So Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is definitely not the worst Transformers movie. I had fun watching it, even if the final act devolves into a robot punch orgy. The soundtrack, made up of ’90s and late-’80s hip-hop absolutely rules. Ramos is good (too good, if I’m being honest) and your kids or younger relatives will have fun. And there’s no oil pee or car farting or whatever, so that’s a step in the right direction. Have I talked myself into liking it? Not really. I’m gonna go have a sandwich.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts ⭐ (2.7 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS Didn’t Rise Very High appeared first on Nerdist.

We knew Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was going to have a lot of Spider-people. That much we saw in the trailers. What we didn’t know is exactly how many were going to be there. Nor did we know in what dimension they’d exist. Not alternate dimensions; physical ones. While the movie as a whole is gorgeously animated, utilizing a number of different styles and types as Into the Spider-Verse did, some Spider-Man cameos are even not animated. Have I been vague enough yet?

Okay, so there are real human people in this movie. Like live-action, real people. One of the pre-release marketing bits revealed the Spot (Jason Schwartzman) popping up in the convenience store from Venom. That’s pretty fun, but without Tom Hardy in it, it’s little more than that. Later, when Miguel O’Hara is trying to convince Miles about the tragedy necessary for timelines to exist properly, we see flashes of various Spider-peoples crying over Uncle Bens or Captain Stacys. This allows the movie to show both Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield clips in Across the Spider-Verse. No new footage appears, though, just clips from their respective movies.

But, the biggest, most fun, and potentially universe-collapsing human cameo comes when Miles sees the tubes of villains who’ve hopped dimensions. In one of them, we see a version of the Prowler, aka Miles’ uncle Aaron. Except this one is Donald Glover, the Childish Gambino himself. Yes, Donald Glover appears as a live-action Prowler in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Let’s unpack.

This is fun for myriad reasons. First, it hearkens back to the initial groundswell of internet support for Glover to play a live-action Miles Morales several years ago. He’s obviously a bit too old now, but during the Community heyday, he was a favorite. That didn’t come to pass, obviously, but it did eventually lead to Donald Glover’s appearance in a Spider-Man movie. He played an unwilling informant in Spider-Man: Homecoming, named Aaron Davis. Yeah, the Prowler!

So when it comes to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, you may have noticed, while a lot of different depictions of Spider-Man appear, we only ever get a passing mention of the Tom Holland one and what he did with Doctor Strange. This is, of course, a reference to Spider-Man: No Way Home. This is due to the very weird Marvel Studios/Sony deal. Sony owns Spider-Man film rights, but had to strike a specific deal to have Spider-Man in the MCU. Even the Sony-co-produced movies within the MCU have special dispensation to use the villains. Because Sony owns the rights to the villains and ancillary characters.

The Vulture, as seen in Homecoming, had to hop universes to appear in Morbius. This effectively cuts him off from appearing in further MCU movies. Or at least until it doesn’t anymore. So is the Donald Glover Prowler actually the same Aaron Davis from the MCU’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, or is it just a fun nod to that? The truth is, it doesn’t entirely matter. Donald Glover represents the MCU and the actor’s history with Miles Morales. We know Sony wants to make a Miles Morales live-action Spider-Man movie, so could Glover appear there? Only time and Amy Pascal can say for sure.

In any case, seeing Glover as the Prowler was one of the most enjoyable surprises in Across the Spider-Verse. It was right up there with seeing animated Spectacular Spider-Man and the one from the Insomniac video game universe. One can only imagine what kind of surprises we’ll get in the next movie next year.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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I was inordinately excited for Hideaki Anno’s very long-awaited Shin Kamen Rider. Not only a 50th anniversary tribute to the 1971 original Kamen Rider series—delayed because of the darn pandemic—but another entry in the writer-producer’s reimaginings of Japanese pop culture legends. Shin Godzilla, which he co-directed with Shinji Higuchi, was the first truly singular Japanese Godzilla movie in decades. Shin Ultraman, which Higuchi solo directed, was a lovely and touching update of the 1966 original series. So a new take on the o.g. Kamen Rider, of which I’m a big fan, made me hope it would be the best yet. It isn’t. It’s not bad; but if you’re looking to get into Kamen Rider, or even see what it’s all about, this ain’t it.

The legendary mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori created Kamen Rider for TV in the early ’70s. During its initial 98-episode run, the style and tone changed pretty drastically. Starting as a dark, moody horror-inspired superhero show, it eventually lightened up considerably. The lead character changed, then changed back, and the legend of cybernetic, insect-themed motorcyclist grew. Anno tried to squeeze too much of that into a single two-hour film. The pace is about 20 mph over breakneck. As a result, the movie loses a lot of nuance, especially in the baddie department.

Shin Kamen Rider begins literally in the middle of a chase. Ruriko Midorikawa (Minami Hamabe) and Hongo Takeshi (Sôsuke Ikematsu) speed away on a motorcycle away from big semi-trucks. Only after they get away to a safehouse do we, and Hongo, get a sense of what’s going on. Ruriko is the daughter of Professor Hiroshi Midorikawa (cult filmmaker Shin’ya Tsukamoto). The professor is a scientist working for the SHOCKER organization, who had promised to help humanity but, go figure, are actually plotting to steal humanity’s life force via human cyborgs with animal themes.

Midorikawa and Ruriko have decided to thwart SHOCKER and designed the latest cyborg, Hongo, to fight them as the Masked Rider. From there, we begin a succession of Hongo and Ruriko attempting to fight the various other “Augs” with beast themes. These follow roughly the same order as the first 13 episodes of the series. A spider, bat, scorpion, chameleon, mantis, and wasp all trek through quickly. All the while, the pair get closer without ever really speaking above a low monotone.

Part-way through the movie, we meet Ichimonji Hayato (Tasuku Emoto), a second grasshopper-themed cyborg whom SHOCKER has successfully brainwashed. People who know the original series will know that he doesn’t remain brainwashed for long.

It’s entirely possible that via reading this you’ve realized one of the major problems with Shin Kamen Rider: way too much plot but almost no story. It’s just learning about the evils of SHOCKER, quick banter with the various kaijin one-by-one, a high-velocity fight sequence, rinse, repeat. On the surface, this is not entirely a bad way to do it, but this outline totally misses some of the best parts of every Kamen Rider episodes. The build up to the showdown, seeing the villain do villainous things is more than half the fun. Yes, the show hangs its hat on its hand-to-hand fight sequences, its monster designs, and the visceral thrill of seeing Kamen Rider in action. But we need to know the stakes and care about the characters for any of it to matter.

I don’t want to compare Shin Kamen Rider to Shin Godzilla or Shin Ultraman too much, but I think the other major problem is entirely down to them. This movie uses the same cinematographers as the previous two movies and has largely the same style of shooting. Government types sit around computers or talk in rooms while big monsters attack and/or a big alien hero fights them.

As a property, Kamen Rider does not lend itself to this type of depiction at all. The action sequences work decently, but are way too dependent on CGI rather than the hallmark of the franchise, which is martial arts battles heightened to a ridiculous degree. Hongo even finds himself tentatively working with anti-SHOCKER government types, which simply does not fit. The surveillance-style shooting that worked so well for Godzilla and Ultraman just doesn’t work here. We need more atmosphere, we need passion and scares. We need some kind of heart! It felt surprisingly cold.

This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it at all. The redesigns of the suits are excellent, the sounds and music are all spot-on. I really like the subtle way the beginning of the movie focuses on extreme violence and slowly it becomes less monstrous by the end, much the same way the show did. And moments certainly made the rabid fans I saw it with cheer. References and allusions to the classic series (and other Ishinomori creations) are fun for those who get them. Would it matter at all to anyone who doesn’t?

And maybe that’s ultimately the reason Shin Ultraman spent a year in the festival circuit before becoming a Fathom Event while Shin Kamen Rider bypassed festivals entirely. This isn’t the kind of movie that encapsulates the ethos of the show while replicating some of the best episodes. This movie is for people who know Kamen Rider already and just want to see people put on and take off helmets 500 times while punching viscera out of thugs like so many juiced memberberries.

Shin Kamen Rider ⭐ (2.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post SHIN KAMEN RIDER Is a Fun Time for Fans, But Might Not Make Any New Ones appeared first on Nerdist.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse stars Shameik Moore (Miles Morales), Hailee Steinfeld (Gwen Stacy), and Daniel Kaluuya (Hobart ‘Hobie’ Brown) sit down with John Pirruccello ( @Johnny2Cellos ) to discuss the new film, preparing for their roles, and what they would do if they woke up with spider-powers on today’s episode of Nerdist Now!

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Stephen King’s short stories are some of the bleakest, most upsetting horror fiction of his career. And that’s really saying something. In the same stretch of the early ’70s that saw publication of some of his most celebrated, including “Trucks,” “The Mangler,” and “Battleground,” King gave us “The Boogeyman,” a riff on perhaps the classic nightmare monster. The story is excellent, depicting the titular menace attacking a family and picking it apart person by person. It’s a nasty, fun little story. Adapting it to a feature film, director Rob Savage (Host) keeps some of that, but not quite enough to make it stand out.

Story goes, in 2018 A Quiet Place screenwriting partners Scott Beck and Bryan Woods optioned the King story. After loads of Hollywood production nonsense, which saw other writers come on and leave, the eventual script comes to us from Beck, Woods, and Mark Heyman whose previous feature films are co-writing 2010’s Black Swan and co-writing 2014’s The Skeleton Twins. End of list. Directing duties fell to Rob Savage, the British filmmaker who made a splash in 2020 with the hour-long, shot-on-Zoom horror movie Host. The result feels a bit like A Quiet Place but in a house, with a bit of mental health stuff thrown in.

The movie follows the Harper family; father Will Harper (Chris Messina), a psychiatrist, is trying to solo parent his teenage daughter Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and elementary-age daughter Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) following the sudden death of their mother. Will has, as yet, been unable to open up to Sadie about his feelings, leaving her to mostly cope alone. One day, a disturbed man named Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) comes into Harper’s home office and wants to tell him about the deaths of his children, seemingly at the hands of an unseen shadow force. Oops, now the monster wants the Harper family! Dang it, Lester!

The Boogeyman boasts some solid jump scare moments and a wholly otherworldly monster. It definitely feels more alien than demonic, and it has a similar long-arm-crawly thing that the Quiet Place aliens do. Except instead of attraction to sound, this guy has aversion to light. Savage handles the tension and thing-in-the-dark chills quite adeptly. We never fully get a sense of how this creature operates, but its methods—including warping the sound of loved one’s voices—works in the mix.

The problem is the story. It takes no chances at all in the Harper family drama. We’ve seen this a million times before. Following the death of a parent, the other parent closes off while the eldest child has to be the grown up and the youngest child has nightmares. It’s Horror Movie Setup 101. As good as the actors are, the plot follows such a rote path without taking risks or adding wrinkles. Dad doesn’t believe there’s a monster, so eldest daughter has to try to save the day.

For those who haven’t read the short story, it entirely focuses on Billings relaying the horrifying events to the psychiatrist. That’s where all the horror truly lies as it sees a man forced to watch his children succumb to this monster. That portion of the movie is incredibly brief and the rest feels so underwhelming. It’s like a bit of Insidious; a scosh of Poltergeist; even a little Haunting of Hill House. It never branches out into its own thing.

And I think its biggest failing is it doesn’t go as hard as last year’s Smile which attacked the mixture of demonic curse and mental health/trauma so much more effectively. The Boogeyman isn’t bad, it’s fine. It has a couple of nifty sequences, some good scares. It’s just nothing like as scary as it ought to be. It pulls too many punches, tries to explain too much and not enough. The monster in the closet, under the bed, in the basement—we’ve seen it all before. Without the punch of King’s original prose or macabre sensibility, it’s little more than a passing shiver.

The Boogeyman hits theaters on June 2.

The Boogeyman (PG-13) ⭐ (2.7 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post THE BOOGEYMAN Gives the Requisite Family Angst and Jump Scares, Not Much Else appeared first on Nerdist.

2017 gave fans their first trip to Skull Island in the aptly titled Kong: Skull Island. The strange land introduced us to monsters of all varieties in a lush and mysterious jungle setting. Dangers? Oh of course there were dangers! But there was also the mighty titan Kong, there to protect his home and, eventually, the humans who arrived. Now viewers get to go back to the land that time forgot in the new Netflix animated series Skull Island from Powerhouse Animation, the folks behind Castlevania. Check out the first teaser.

The series, which will debut June 22, will take audiences to a whole new world of thrills and dangers. The story follows a group of kind-hearted explorers who rescue Annie (Mae Whitman) from the ocean, unaware that their act of heroism will lead them to the treacherous Skull Island. The rest of the star-studded cast includes: Darren Barnet (Never Have I Ever, Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles) as Mike; Benjamin Bratt (Poker Face, Coco) as Cap; and Betty Gilpin (Mrs. Davis, Glow) as Irene. Together, they bring these vibrant characters to life and embark on a captivating journey.

The show’s poster art showcases not just Kong but many other giant monsters the crew will have to deal with. Everybody’s old pal the skull crawler is there, naturally; we also get giant lizards, birds, crabs, and what looks like a cute dog of some kind. Unclear. Either way, we can’t wait to check out Skull Island to see what adventures Kong and Co. get up to next.

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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If ever you needed to know how influential Hideaki Anno is in Japan, look no further. The creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion and its many reboots has more recently ushered in a new, unprecedented collaboration from some of Japan’s most popular cultural icons. Following the success of Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla in 2016, he produced and wrote Shin Ultraman and wrote, produced, and directed Shin Kamen Rider. The three of them, along with EVA Unit 1, the iconic main mech from Evangelion, formed the Shin Japan Heroes Project with Bandai.

Now the most ridiculous mashup you could imagine is here, which we first saw on Gizmodo. All four come together like a Megazord to fight a giant alien threat. Even though, chiefly, three of them are already giant sized and one of them is a tiny dude on a motorcycle. I… I haven’t the words.

That’s right; not only is this weird and silly, it’s also a toy advert. This tells you how much money Japan puts into toy advertisements in 2023. At any rate, seeing Godzilla fold open into a torso is breathtakingly strange. For most of the transformation sequence I was thinking “What is Kamen Rider going to do?” Then the Cyclone (his motorcycle) turns into the mecha’s head, and the man himself sits atop it might some kind of cybernetic Paul Atreides. Delightfully ridiculous.

The toy is a premium Bandai number, which will retail for 23,100 Yen. Don’t mortgage your house; that’s only about $170 US.

Very unlikely we’ll ever see this in a real movie, but it is fun to see. Shin Ultraman played the festival circuit last year and will get a Blu-ray release in North America later this summer. Meanwhile the long-awaited Shin Kamen Rider will play as a one-night-only Fathom Event on May 31. After that? Who knows! So soak in the Anno weirdness whilst you can.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Jan De Bont’s movie Twister is, by anyone’s estimation, an old movie. Is 27 years old for a person? No. But for a special effects movie? You betcha. Twister—which was a big disaster movie about tornado chasers—has the honor of being the very first movie ever on DVD. I haven’t thought about Twister in who knows how long. Until today, of course, when Deadline reports a sequel is on the way starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones. The name of the sequel? Why, Twisters, naturally.

Directing this new take will be Lee Isaac Chung, director of Minari and episode three of this season of The Mandalorian. (The Dr. Pershing one.) Writing the screenplay this go-around is Mark L. Smith, whose previous credits include The Revenant and Overlord. Per Variety, Anthony Ramos and Nope‘s Brandon Perea have also joined the cast of Twisters. The cast rounds out with Maura Tierney, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sasha Lane, Kiernan Shipka, Nik Dodani, David Corenswet, Tunde Adebimpe, and Katy O’Brian.

The original movie was an enormous hit in 1996, wracking up almost $500 million at the box office. The special effects at the time were groundbreaking, giving moviegoers the most impressive sense of scale of any CGI to date. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt starred as a pair of divorced storm-chasers who reconnect amidst what we can only describe as the most act-of-godlike week of weather Kansas has ever seen. No word on if Hunt will appear in the movie. Paxton, sadly, passed away in 2017.

Powell is having a hell of a year, following the massive success of Top Gun: Maverick. He’ll next appear in Richard Linklater’s comedy Hitman (no relation to the popular game series). Edgar-Jones, meanwhile, has starred in the series Normal People as well as the movies Where the Crawdad Sings and Fresh.

Twisters will hit theaters once they make it.

Originally published on April 14, 2023.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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In the 15 years since Iron Man came out, ushering in the behemoth that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we’ve had roughly four full phases, 32 feature films, around 20 TV shows (some de-canonized), and a veritable bord of smorgas of characters. It’s been a lot, folks. Some franchises are lucky to get to three movies, but the MCU is so vast it contains a number of trilogies in and of itself. But with another trio of movies recently wrapping, which of the MCU’s reigns supreme?

Below I’ve ranked the Marvel Cinematic Universe trilogies from worst (or my least favorite) to the best (or most favorite). But first, some ground rules.

• This will only be the trilogies (tetralogy in one case) pertaining to one character or separate team. Basically, I’m not counting the Avengers movies since they depend so much on all the other sub-franchises.
• I’m weighing each trilogy as a whole rather than which trilogy has the best individual film. So one might have a single movie that’s top three MCU, but if the other movies in the franchise don’t measure up, the average goes down.

Everybody ready? Then here we go!

6. Thor

I feel like people have already begun to draft their angry missives toward me. But listen. Look. Wait. Will ya wait? Just wait. Yes, 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok is outstanding. It reinvented the character of the Asgardian hammer god into the true God of Thunder. Taika Waititi allowed Chris Hemsworth to play to his strengths, offered up some of Mark Ruffalo’s best Hulk/Banner work, and paved the way for Loki’s redemption. But. The Thor series has four movies, doesn’t?

The rest of the Thor movies are just so much lesser. The first movie is fine; the second movie has its defenders but suffers, as many did, from having a lackluster villain. Then we had Ragnarok which was great, and set up Infinity War and Endgame in an amazing way. And then we come to Love and Thunder which proved even Waititi couldn’t do it again.

As a whole, the Thor tetralogy (not “quadrilogy,” which isn’t a word) is way too all-over-the-place to be really effective.

5. Ant-Man

The one thing the Ant-Man movies have over the Thor movies, in my view, is consistency. They are consistently fair-to-middling. A lot of fun to be had, certainly, but nothing super special. The first movie has a goofy charm to it that plays to Paul Rudd’s charms, though the plot and narrative kept it feeling rote. The second movie, 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, perhaps because it aimed a bit lower than a lot of Phase Three movies, was a fun little movie, but again, hampered by a boring villain and some needless messiness.

Wanna talk about messiness? Let’s talk about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This movie could not decide what the hell kind of thing it was. Sure, for comic dorks who follow the MCU for its universe-expanding, the Kang stuff was very exciting. But did it need to be an Ant-Man movie? Aside from a couple decent effects sequences, did this do much to further Scott Lang’s story? It sure as heck didn’t further Hope Van Dyne’s.

Ultimately, the Ant-Man movies are a pleasant diversion at best.

4. Iron Man

The one that started it all! We cannot overstate just how much of a watershed moment in superhero movies Iron Man was in 2008. It’s not even that it’s a perfect movie or even Robert Downey Jr.’s finest hour as Tony Stark; more, it let us know this would be a franchise made of franchises. The Marvel Cinematic Universe exists because Iron Man did it right. And because of that, Iron Man was the unofficial (maybe even official) main character of the MCU. He got his trilogy first.

But here’s the thing about this trilogy. While it’s arguably the most cohesive, it also started too fast. Iron Man 2 came out before the first Thor or Captain America. It felt a lot like a “okay, we need to hedge our bets a bit before we dive in.” Probably a smart move. But as a result, Iron Man 2 doesn’t feel like it does a whole hell of a lot. It gives us Tony stuff, naturally, and it has him deal with some of his daddy issues, but it feels pretty pedestrian—aside from introducing War Machine, of course.

And I’m one of the weirdos who thinks Iron Man 3 is pretty good. It’s not amazing, but it’s fun and it has a lot to say about PTSD which I think is perfect for Tony, post-The Avengers. All in all, the first movie is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but it still works very well as a trilogy.

3. Spider-Man

Okay, so here’s the thing about the MCU Spider-Man trilogy: they very rarely let Spider-Man be Spider-Man. Really, only No Way Home puts Spidey at the forefront, but it’s because it has all the previous versions’ villains and leads. It’s about Spider-Man as a franchise, not this Peter Parker. The first two movies are way too contingent on Tony Stark and his shadow over the whole thing.

That said, the overall quality of these movies, and especially Tom Holland’s amazingly winning performance, makes them worthy of this high ranking on the list. He manages, most of the time, to transcend the messy Sony-versus-Marvel-Studios-ness of the whole thing, and has very good repartee with the movies’ respective villains. Homecoming has Michael Keaton as a supremely sinister take on Vulture; Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio is a fresh and fascinating take on the character; and look, Holland somehow manages to go toe-to-toe with the best baddies in superhero history in Dafoe and Molina.

I’m looking forward to the next Spider-Man trilogy, one after all the shoe leather of making him Spider-Man. But as it stands, the “Home” saga is a ton of fun and full of heart. (Far from Home is by far my least favorite of the three, for the record.)

2. Captain America

I’m a Cap guy, I’ll admit it. While RDJ’s Tony Stark takes a lot of the spotlight for the MCU, it wouldn’t work nearly as well if it didn’t have a true, stalwart hero at the center. Chris Evans rules, playing Steve Rogers with a mix of “aw shucks” and “don’t you effing dare” that is perfect for Captain America. The entire trilogy of his, plus the first Avengers movie, feels like explorations of the themes of the past versus the future. Literally a man out of time has to learn, not only about technology, but the complicated political and societal issues that were seemingly much simpler in WWII.

I very much love Captain America: The First Avenger, even though it feels the least in keeping with the rest of the MCU. I just dig that whole 1940s vibe. They got the director of The Rocketeer for a reason! It’s a blast. Red Skull, we hardly knew ye. Then we go in a completely different direction with The Winter Soldier, for a while my favorite MCU movie. The hard-hitting spy story with complicated political intrigue was one of the best action movies I’d seen in years. It still holds up amazingly well.

If Steve’s first two movies were about learning things are worse than Nazis, and the government isn’t to be trusted, by the time of Captain America: Civil War, he’s lost all hope. With Peggy dying, he has one piece of his former life around, and it’s his formerly brainwashed best friend. He’d do anything to protect him, even if it means fighting other heroes and ruining his good standing with Tony to do it. How easy it was for Baron Zemo to sow discord. Superb trilogy all around.

1. Guardians of the Galaxy

Did you think it would be something else? Did you maybe think I hadn’t concocted this whole article because I loved Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and how it pulled everything off? I know the third installment has its detractors—and certainly it’s much grimmer than the other two—but as a saga about these misfits learning to be both a team and a family, and fighting some huge cosmic threats, it succeeds in almost every department.

We’ve already written a lot on this site about paying off the character arcs, but all three Guardians movies—plus Infinity War and Endgame—make the case that these are the best written and realized of all the MCU figures. Certainly the most consistent (Angry Quill ruining the universe notwithstanding). Aside from the Ant-Man movies, this is the only trilogy to have the same director throughout. But more than that, this feels like we got James Gunn’s full vision on display. I doubt we’ll see the like of it again.

So yeah. Hands down, far-and-away, the Guardians of the Galaxy is the best trilogy (so far, he says knowing six million more movies are on the way) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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