FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

If you spent any part of the early 2000s in a basement hanging out with horror movie nerds, you probably remember when House of 1000 Corpses finally hit theaters after sitting on a shelf forever. Rob Zombie took a sledgehammer to mainstream studio horror, dragging audiences through greasy gas stations, fried chicken joints, and subterranean murder pits with the unhinged Firefly family. Now, Lionsgate is bundling the whole blood-soaked saga into an 8-disc Firefly Trilogy set arriving October 13, 2026, right in time for Halloween. This set packs in House of 1000 Corpses (2002), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and 3 From Hell (2019) across 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and Digital. The biggest selling point for physical media hoarders is that House of 1000 Corpses is finally getting a 4K transfer in Dolby Vision. All that neon lighting, basement grime, and sticky fake blood should look appropriately filthy in high resolution. Looking back, the three movies map out Zombie's evolution as a director...

Can you believe it’s been 25 years since Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn followed up Swingers with Made? Lionsgate Limited is marking the silver anniversary by releasing the buddy mob comedy on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and Digital on September 15th, available exclusively through the Lionsgate Limited storefront . If you haven't seen it in a while, Made holds up as a wonderfully painful cringe comedy. Favreau, who also wrote and directed, plays Bobby, a deeply average guy just trying to get through a low-level mob assignment in New York without dying of embarrassment. His main obstacle isn't the actual gangsters, though. It's his childhood friend Ricky, played with relentless, obnoxious energy by Vince Vaughn. Ricky is the ultimate loose cannon, constantly dropping hilarious nonsense slang, picking fights with bouncers, and treating a low-stakes errand like he's starring in Goodfellas. The movie works so well because it leans hard into the messy, irritating dynamic of a long-t...

I was sent a 4K copy of Baz Luhrmann's EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert a few days ago. This weekend I popped the disc in, and honestly, I've been wrestling with what to make of it ever since. On paper, it sounds like an easy money grab. Luhrmann takes the leftover archival material, 16mm scraps, and 8mm home videos he dug up while making his 2022 scripted biopic, hands them over to Peter Jackson's restoration wizards at Park Road Post, and packages a 97-minute concert film for home video. You hear "AI audio isolation and restored 1970s footage," and your brain immediately expects a shiny, airbrushed, corporate legacy project meant to sell box sets to baby boomers. It isn't that at all. It's weirder, sweatier, and much more uncomfortably human than I expected, especially sitting on your couch with the lights off while native 4K highlights every single flaw in the original stock. If you've seen Luhrmann's earlier work, you know he's usually incapa...

When word first got around that someone was making a movie called Hungry about a killer hippo terrorizing tourists in the Louisiana bayou, almost everyone assumed we were getting a trashy, tongue-in-cheek B-movie. The internet immediately started making jokes about Hasbro copyright lawsuits and Hungry Hungry Hippos , expecting a schlocky, self-aware creature feature along the lines of Cocaine Bear or Sharknado . Instead, director James Nunn made something surprisingly gloomy, strangely deadpan, and almost completely devoid of wink-at-the-camera humor. Hungry is an 88-minute survival thriller that takes its bizarre premise with absolute, straight-faced seriousness. It does not always work, and it definitely suffers from pacing issues that will test the patience of anyone expecting a non-stop monster rampage, but there is something fascinating about a movie that refuses to give the audience the easy, campy ride they asked for. The setup is basic enough to write on the back of a coaste...

  Welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. I'm your host, and today we are talking about a show that probably sounds like a strange candidate for a modern streaming reboot, until you actually look at how they made it. When Netflix announced a new take on "Little House on the Prairie," a lot of people reasonably expected a soft, nostalgic retread of the 1970s TV series. Instead, the 2026 reboot starring Alice Halsey, Luke Bracey, and Warren Christie dropped last month, and it is a completely different beast. It pulls much closer to the raw, gritty reality of the original books than the old show ever did. It already got picked up for a second season, and a huge reason the series hits the way it does comes down to how it looks. My guest today is cinematographer C. Kim Miles, ASC, CSC, MYSC. He shot four of the eight episodes this season, and he had to deal with absolute chaos to pull it off. We're talking severe prairie weather, tornadoes, ticks, rough terrain, and k...

There is a very specific kind of low-budget horror movie that arrives with modest expectations, spends a little under two hours suffocating you with dread, and leaves you staring at the end credits trying to figure out if you actually loved it or if you were just paralyzed by how creepy it was. Damian McCarthy’s Hokum is exactly that kind of movie. It does not try to hold your hand, it does not bother with a warm opening act, and it definitely does not care if you leave the theater feeling comfortable. The setup follows Ohm Bauman, an embittered, alcoholic horror novelist played by Adam Scott. Ohm is stuck on the ending of his latest book and generally holds a pretty low opinion of everyone around him. He decides Halloween weekend is the ideal time to trek out to the Bilberry Woods Hotel, a damp, fading inn in West Cork, Ireland. His official reason for being there is to scatter his late parents' ashes near a redwood tree from an old photograph of his mother. But almost as soon as ...

John Carney basically spends his entire career remaking the exact same movie, but I cannot bring myself to be mad at him for it. Once was the raw, lo-fi version. Begin Again was the bloated Hollywood version with Keira Knightley and Adam Levine trying way too hard. Then in 2016 he hit the exact sweet spot with Sing Street, a film that takes the dreary, soul-crushing grey of 1985 Dublin and injects it with a lethal dose of cheap hair gel and synth-pop. It is a movie about being fifteen, broke, and so stupidly desperate to impress a cool girl that you accidentally form a surprisingly decent new wave band. The setup is aggressively familiar if you grew up in a house where money was a taboo subject people screamed about behind closed doors. Conor, played by Ferdia Walsh-Peelo in a performance that hits the exact right notes of teenage awkwardness, is watching his parents' marriage fall apart in real time. The Irish economy in the mid-eighties is in the toilet, so to save cash, his pare...

NEON has released the first teaser trailer for Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, offering a neon-soaked look at prolific Japanese auteur Takashi Miike’s entry into the cult crime franchise. The film serves as a standalone sequel to Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Abel Ferrara’s 1992 original Bad Lieutenant. Reuniting Miike with screenwriter Daisuke Tengan, the thriller plunges viewers into Tokyo's corrupt neo-noir underworld. The film stars Shun Oguri as a disgraced Tokyo police officer and compulsive gambler whose spiral into corruption and addiction catches up with him. His chaotic life collides with a high-profile case when a mysterious FBI agent (Lily James) arrives in Japan to investigate the disappearance of a prominent politician's daughter (Liv Morgan). As the duo navigates a maze of local corruption and a vengeful ex-yakuza, a sadistic killer stalks them from the shadows. Following the tradition of previous entries, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is not a dire...

When I first saw the teaser trailer for Exit 8, I was cautiously optimistic; original high-concept films like this scratch a special Cube-shaped itch that I'm a sucker for. But when my teenage son saw it, he immediately recognized it. He pointed out that it was based on The Exit 8, a four-dollar indie tech demo on Steam that went viral on Twitch a while back. He explained the whole concept to me: you walk down the same sterile, yellow-tiled Japanese subway corridor over and over again. If you notice a weird anomaly like a poster expanding, a light flickering, or a creepy guy sprinting at you, you turn around. If everything looks normal, you keep walking until you hit Exit 8. That is the whole thing. It takes about forty minutes to finish, and half the fun for his age group is just watching streamers jump out of their chairs when a door disappears. On paper, taking a four-dollar memory game with zero plot and stretching it into a feature-length film could easily look like a cheap gi...