FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

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...

Long before college movies devolved strictly into crude beer-pong comedies and frat house chaos, there was TAG: The Assassination Game. Released in 1982, this low-budget noir-thriller took a surprisingly dark look at campus life, and Synapse Films is finally giving it the revival it deserves. Restored in 2K directly from the original 35mm archival vault materials, this retro suspense piece lands on Blu-ray on September 9, 2026. The premise is brilliant in its simplicity. A group of college kids play a campus-wide game of assassin, using rubber-tipped dart guns to eliminate each other until only one player stands. It is the kind of game that absolutely would not fly on a college campus today. Things get messy when one bitter competitor decides he hates losing so much that he starts swapping out the toy darts for real bullets. The movie was written and directed by Nick Castle, who most horror fans know as the man inside the Michael Myers suit in John Carpenter's 1978 original Hallowe...

When you look back at Jean-Claude Van Damme's golden run in the late eighties and early nineties, Lionheart occupies a very specific, weirdly emotional space. Coming right off the back of Bloodsport and Kickboxer , this was the movie where someone at Universal apparently said, "What if we take the guy who does the fancy spin kicks, but we make him cry every twenty minutes?" The result is a bizarre mix of brutal bare-knuckle violence and soap opera melodrama that shouldn't work at all, yet somehow remains one of the most enjoyable things JCVD ever put on film. The premise is pure 1990 straight-to-video gold, even though it got a full theatrical release. Van Damme plays Lyon Gaultier, a French Foreign Legionnaire stationed in a remote outpost in Djibouti. Right at the start, he gets a letter from his sister-in-law back in Los Angeles. His brother, a street-level drug dealer, was set on fire in a bad deal and is lying in a hospital bed calling out for Lyon. Lyon asks h...

Long before Neil Armstrong uttered his historic words on the dusty plains of the Sea of Tranquility, and nearly two decades before Stanley Kubrick redefined the cosmos with his masterpiece, a small independent film did something truly revolutionary. It treated space travel not as a setting for ray-gun gothic fantasies or alien monster invasions, but as a hard, sober engineering challenge. Released in 1950, Destination Moon, which was directed by Irving Pichel and produced by the legendary George Pal, was the first major American film to trade in the pulp of the era for the cold, precise calculations of real-world physics. While modern audiences might look back at its slow pacing, wooden dialogue, and bold Technicolor palette with a sense of quaint nostalgia, viewing the film today requires a different lens. It is a cinematic time capsule, a blueprint of human ambition drafted at the dawn of the Cold War, functioning as both an impressive technical milestone and a fascinating ideologica...

The 1971 international co-production Red Sun (released in Europe as Soleil rouge ) remains one of the most fascinating anomalies in global cinema. Directed by Terence Young, the British filmmaker who essentially built the cinematic blueprint for James Bond in Dr. No and From Russia with Love , the movie is an ambitious, genre-blurring hybrid. It marries the cynical, sun-baked landscape of the Spaghetti Western with the rigid, honor-bound traditions of the Japanese chambara, or samurai film. Shot in the rugged deserts of Almería, Spain, the production brought together an almost unbelievable international quartet of stars: American tough guy Charles Bronson, Japanese screen icon Toshirō Mifune, French hearthrob Alain Delon, and Swiss starlet Ursula Andress. On paper, this cross-cultural melting pot sounds like a blatant studio gimmick cooked up to appease multiple global box offices at once. In execution, however, it delivers a remarkably cohesive, tonally unique action-adventure that ...

The history of independent cinema is cluttered with odd, forgotten mutations that exist at the exact crossroads of high art and low trash. One of the most fascinating artifacts from this twilight zone is Sugar Cookies, a 1973 psychosexual thriller that eventually found a unexpected home in the Troma Entertainment library. Long before Troma became synonymous with toxic mutants, exploding vehicles, and hyper-kinetic slapstick gore, the company’s co-founder, Lloyd Kaufman, was cutting his teeth on a completely different style of counterculture filmmaking. Co-written by Kaufman and director Theodore Gershuny, Sugar Cookies is a sleek, seedy, and surprisingly layered exploration of grief, exploitation, and identity. Originally slapped with an X rating before being re-edited, it stands out as a unique cinematic anomaly: an erotic B-movie that behaves like an art-house homage to Alfred Hitchcock. At the center of this sordid tale is Max Pavell, played with a greasy, manipulative charm by Geor...

The mid-1990s marked a historic, high-stakes turning point for martial arts cinema as Hong Kong’s ultimate action auteur and global icon, Jackie Chan, successfully engineered a definitive crossover into the mainstream Western market. For decades, the Western box office had attempted to compress Chan's unique kinetic style into the rigid, humorless molds of traditional Hollywood action. It was not until Chan and his legendary collaborators, including directors Stanley Tong, Sammo Hung, and Lau Kar-leung, brought the raw, physics-defying brilliance of Hong Kong stunt design directly onto international soil that the global cinematic landscape was permanently reshaped. This golden era represents a flawless synchronization of classical martial arts purity, grand-scale international ambition, and breathtaking physical sacrifice. To truly appreciate this cinematic trajectory, one must examine these landmark films through a fascinating dual lens. As these productions traveled across the gl...

In the summer of 1995, video game adaptations in Hollywood were widely considered a death sentence. The industry was still reeling from the critical disasters of Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter , making the prospect of translating a controversial, ultra-violent arcade fighter into a mainstream film seem nearly impossible. Enter a young British director named Paul W.S. Anderson. Armed with a modest budget, a dedication to practical Thai locations, and a legendary techno soundtrack, Anderson accomplished what few thought possible. He crafted a cinematic experience that respected its source material, bypassed the curse of the genre, and captured the raw, unadulterated energy of nineties arcade culture. The primary reason Mortal Kombat succeeds where other adaptations fail is its structural simplicity. Instead of overcomplicating the narrative or drowning the audience in dense mythology, the film lifts its plot straight from the tournament structure of the original 1992 game, drawin...

The year 1978 changed martial arts cinema forever. It was the exact moment Jackie Chan broke free from the shadow of Bruce Lee to redefine the genre with Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master. Right on the cusp of that creative revolution lay one final artifact of his transitional period with director Lo Wei: Magnificent Bodyguards. As the very first Hong Kong martial arts film shot natively in 3D, it has long been treated as a legendary curio. For decades, poor home video transfers stripped the film of its technical hook, leaving audiences with a flat kung fu slog accompanied by a stolen soundtrack. With modern restoration efforts rescuing the film's original identity from obscurity, it can finally be evaluated through its intended stereoscopic presentation. Magnificent Bodyguards emerges not as a masterpiece of narrative depth, but as a wild, gimmicky piece of late-70s exploitation showmanship that demands to be viewed in all its three-dimensional absurdity. At its c...