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Every decade or so, Hollywood decides the time is right to reinvent the absurd vehicle comedy. We've had runaway buses and subways and now we have Stop! That! Train!, a movie which takes an absurd premise so ludicrous a five year old could make up on the spot while eating sugary cereal and stretches it to a full ninety-eight minutes! Directed by Adam Shankman is the precise type of mid-budget studio comedy that used to dominate multiplexes on a random Friday in April. It does not attempt to rewrite the rules of high cinema, but rather to toss a wacked out mix of recognizable comic actors and fabulous drag performers onto a train going too fast and see who sweats off their makeup first before the end credits roll. The premise is as hilariously straightforward as you'd expect. We follow a disgraced former transit authority engineer who happens to be riding a commuter train on the exact day which a bizarre computer glitch or disgruntled villain sabotage renders the breaking system...

There was a period in the early 1980s when college campuses in movies were lawless microcosms; before every square inch of a university was watched over by omnipresent surveillance or bogged down by hyper-connected modern anxiety, you could run around a quad at two in the morning playing elaborate live-action assassination games with dart guns without instantly getting swatted. TAG: The Assassination Game (1982) encapsulates that period, it is not a pretentious cinematic statement and it is certainly not an transformative work, rather it is a slightly goofy, surprisingly tense budget thriller about kids taking a silly game too seriously until one of them snaps and starts using real bullets. The movie was directed by Nick Castle who most horror fans know best as the physical presence behind Michael Myers in John Carpenter's original Halloween, but you can see he learned a lot while working on set and understands how to use shadows, how to frame a hallway to look threatening and how ...

If you spent any reasonable amount of time lurking in the horror aisles of mom-and-pop video stores back in the VHS era, you definitely know the original cover art for Graduation Day. It had that wild, arresting close-up of a terrified woman's face with an axe shattering right through glass, anchored by that bold red title text. It was pure slasher gold, the exact kind of sleeve art that practically begged a bored teenager on a Friday night to shell out three bucks. The actual movie, as is often the case with early 80s regional schlock, doesn't quite match the insane intensity implied on the box, but it's got a weird, chaotic charm that makes it hard to completely dismiss. Released in 1981, right in the thick of the post-Halloween gold rush, Graduation Day tries to do a few different things at once and mostly stumbles through all of them. The setup is straightforward enough: a high school track star named Laura suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack right after winning a 100-...

Jon Favreau’s 2001 directorial debut Made belongs to a very specific niche of early 2000s independent cinema. With the massive success of Swingers five years earlier, expectations from distributors and viewers alike were set to a completely different level: a Swingers 2, featuring even more rapid-fire Vince Vaughn and hyper-specific Los Angeles slang. What Favreau delivered was almost an anti-buddy comedy, a cringy, stressful, and utterly hilarious experience of two lowly henchmen attempting to act like big-time mobsters in New York City. Made is a prime example of the collaboration between Favreau and Vaughn before both became mega-stars, getting absorbed by massive studio franchises. It is a slightly crude, occasionally infuriating, but ultimately hilarious slice-of-life comedy about friendship and the unwillingness of one half of it to grow up. The Film Made is a relatively simple story. Bobby (Jon Favreau), an amateurish boxer and lowly enforcer for the local Los Angeles crime boss...

  Welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. On this episode, I’m sitting down with director Todd Stephens to talk about Gypsy 83: The Director’s Cut, which is back in select theaters right now for its 25th anniversary. If you grew up in the late 90s or early 2000s, there's a good chance this one has a special place on your shelf. The story centers on two Sandusky, Ohio goth misfits and massive Stevie Nicks superfans: Gypsy Vale, played by Sara Rue, and her younger, queer best friend Clive Webb, played by Birkett Turton. When they hear about a "Night of 1000 Stevies" event happening at a club in New York City, they pack up their black eyeliner and hit the road, fully convinced this is Gypsy’s big break. The film co-stars John Doe from the legendary punk band X, plus the iconic Karen Black playing a washed-up lounge singer. Todd Stephens basically took the standard coming-of-age road trip formula, flipped it on its head, and handed it over to the weird kids and outsiders...

On the surface, Daniel DelPurgatorio’s feature debut Marshmallow looks like every other 1980s summer camp horror flick you grew up watching on worn-out VHS tapes. Writer Andy Greskoviak loads the front end with familiar comfort food: pine woods bathed in late afternoon sun, counselors who vanish the exact second trouble starts, awkward kid rivalries, timid crushes, and the mandatory creepy urban legend told around a crackling campfire. We follow Morgan, played by Kue Lawrence, a quiet kid burdened with an awful bowl cut, fresh family grief, and a total terror of deep water. He gets dumped at Camp Whispering Pines for the summer and immediately becomes an easy target for the local camp bullies. His only real allies are Pilar, played by Kai Cech, and Dirk, played by Max Malas, two fellow outcasts just trying to make it to September without getting stuffed into a locker or pushed off the dock. Things take a dark turn when the counselors share the local legend of "The Doctor," a...

Following up a masterclass in claustrophobic horror like Neil Marshall's 2005 The Descent is pretty much an impossible task. The original built such a perfect pressure cooker of paranoia, grief, and creature terror that any follow-up was always going to face an uphill climb. But 2009's The Descent Part 2 , directed by The   Descent editor Jon Harris, doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it leans into being a fast-paced, highly entertaining monster movie that doubles down on the gore and tense underground action. For fans of the original looking for another ride through the dark, it delivers a surprisingly fun time, especially on this gorgeous new 4K UHD release. The Story picks up right where things left off. Sarah, played again by Shauna Macdonald, stumbles out of the Appalachian cave system shell-shocked, covered in blood, and missing her memories of the nightmare below. The local sheriff, Vaines, played with incredible arrogance by Gavan O'Herlihy, wastes ze...

If you grew up hanging out in video rental stores in the mid-90s, chances are the box art for the original 1991 The Guyver movie caught your eye. It had Mark Hamill on the cover, a slick alien suit, and promised a crazy live-action anime adaptation. Then you took it home and realized Hamill turned into a giant cockroach monster, the tone was goofy camp, and the fighting felt completely muted. It was a letdown, plain and simple. But three years later, director Steve Wang came back to direct the sequel, Guyver: Dark Hero , on a shoestring budget without Hollywood execs breathing down his neck. He ended up making one of the most unapologetically cool creature-feature action movies of the entire decade. Now we finally have the film making its Blu-ray debut with a brand new master transferred from the best surviving film elements. It is a physical media release that cult movie nerds have been waiting years to get their hands on. It strips away the PG-13 silliness of the first movie and goe...

There is a specific kind of low-stakes joy in picking up a physical media release, putting the disc in, and getting straight down to business. Paramount put out the first season of Mobland on DVD recently, and while it does not contain a single special feature, the show itself delivers a noisy, bloody, stubborn piece of crime television that knows exactly what it wants to be and doesn't waste a single frame trying to apologize for it. The overall narrative setup is about as old as the crime genre itself, but it works because the show understands the fundamental engine of mafia storytelling: power creates paranoia, and paranoia makes people stupid. You have two rival crime syndicates operating across London: the Harrigan family, who are established, wealthy, and decaying from the inside, and the Stevenson gang, who are reckless, violent, and desperate to carve out a bigger piece of the city for themselves. Sitting right in the middle of this escalating disaster is Harry Da Souza, p...