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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...

When Sylvester Stallone first pitched up in Oklahoma as Dwight "The General" Manfredi back in season one, there was a novelty to the whole setup. You had an aging mobster straight out of New York trying to figure out how weed dispensaries work while extorting local business owners who looked like they'd never seen a leather jacket in their lives. It was goofy, slightly ridiculous, but fun. By season two, Taylor Sheridan’s TV assembly line was grinding away, pushing the crime network bigger and bringing in more rival factions. Now that season three is available to own now on Blu-ray, the main question is simple: does Dwight’s middle-America mafia empire still have any gas left in the tank? The short answer is yes, mostly because Stallone refuses to let this show drag. At 80 years old, the guy still commands every room he walks into. He knows exactly what kind of performance he's delivering here. It isn't subtle, it isn't groundbreaking drama, but it's wildl...

The folks at Troma have spent fifty years slinging some of the dirtiest, grossest, and most unhinged cinema in North America. You generally know what you’re getting when Lloyd Kaufman attaches his name to something: cheap prosthetic guts, aggressive camp, and a complete refusal to take anything seriously. Every now and then, though, a Troma release pops up that actually cares about its characters amidst the buckets of fake blood. Sweet Meats , directed by and starring Ricky Glore, is one of those rare surprises. It’s a low-budget, country-music horror comedy that essentially takes the core premise of Sweeney Todd or Motel Hell and drags it through a greasy roadside diner in Kentucky. Troma just dropped the physical release on Blu-ray, and while the movie itself runs a little long at a hundred minutes, the package as a whole is a surprisingly charming love letter to DIY filmmaking. The setup is delightfully straightforward. Bobby Sweet (Ricky Glore) is a delusional, wannabe country si...

Look, we all know what Star Trek is at this point. It is baked so deeply into pop culture that even people who have never watched a single full episode can quote "Beam me up, Scotty" or do the Vulcan nerve pinch. But going back and actually watching 1960s Star Trek from start to finish on Blu-ray is a weirdly grounding experience. It is easy to forget that before it became a multi-billion-dollar franchise with dozens of spin-offs and endless corporate branding, it was just a broke television show trying to survive on NBC while getting shuffled around bad time slots. The entire original series is now available to own on Blu-ray, and honestly, holding the whole thing in one hand feels kind of strange given how huge the legacy is. The physical packaging itself is surprisingly clean and simple. They did not bloat it with unnecessary plastic or bulky, awkward digibooks that end up getting crushed on your shelf. It is a sleek set that stores all three seasons neatly without taking ...

Paramount dumped André Øvredal’s Passenger into theaters back in May with almost zero marketing pushing it, mostly because they were banking on bigger summer tentpoles to carry the box office. That usually means a studio knows they have a stink bomb on their hands, but Passenger isn't a bad movie at all. It’s actually a mean, incredibly lean 94-minute ghost story that knows exactly what it wants to do and doesn't waste time trying to be anything else. If you missed its brief theatrical run, this disc is easily the best way to catch up on one of the most underappreciated horror flicks of the year. The setup is pretty simple. Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell) are a young couple six weeks into their grand "van life" adventure. They traded in their cramped New York lives to live out of a customized camper van, driving across the country and posting about it. But right from the opening stretch, you can tell the romanticized illusion of road life is already we...