It took me literally five watches to get through Evil Dead Rise. In my past hater days, I would have just said something like, “Well, I already saw Demons 2,” but that’s not very productive. Films deserve to be seen, and my mindset did not jibe with what I was watching.

Maybe I’ve finally reached a point where the fifth Evil Dead movie isn’t all that exciting.

The thought filled my heart with dread. What would 16-year-old me, the one who watched Evil Dead II every single day, that a few years later would be one of two people in the theater for Army of Darkness, think?

Maybe I don’t want to grow up. It’s just too confusing.

Lee Cronin, who directed and wrote this movie, also made The Hole In the Ground. His Evil Dead movie came about after a period of great excitement over the reimagining. Fede Álvarez was making a sequel to that movie, Sam and Ivan Raimi were making Evil Dead 4 or Army of Darkness 2, and after all that, the seventh film would bring together Ash Williams and Mia Allen. Then the TV series came along, and when that was canceled by the fourth season, any talk of new movies ended. Until we got this.

And I wasn’t too excited.

But then it kicked off with some teens at the lake, some possessions and a levitating girl decapitating a boy while an incredible title card rose from the bloody water.

Alright, I was in.

Guitar tech Beth (Lily Sullivan) has learned she’s pregnant and needs to be near her family, which includes her tattoo artist single mother sister, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), and her kids, Danny (Morgan Davies), Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). They live in the Monde Apartments, a nearly condemned building in Los Angeles that was rocked by an earthquake that brought a book and three records to the land of the unpossessed. Of course, Danny is a DJ and throws those records on the turntable — Bruce Campbell voiceover cameo alert — and they reveal that a priest was able to bring the Deadites to our world with the Naturom Demonto.

He gets blood all over the book, which we all know isn’t good, as the aftershocks and power outages continue to assault their home. Ellie is soon possessed and tries to kill everyone, but before she dies, she makes Beth promise to protect her children. And then she’s back from the dead and doing anything but.

What follows is a blood-spraying, gore-filled battle between the Deadite-possessed humans — most of the family becomes an intertwined creature — and the survivors, Beth and Kassie. Is there a shotgun? Is there a chainsaw? And is there a wood chipper, too?

Yet this has the same issue every reimagining has. It has the blood, the book, all those elements, but it forgets the anarchy. What’s missing is the weird mix of goofiness and kids in the woods making something with no archetype or rules. We know what will happen every moment, as if it is predestined, with nothing shocking outside of the things engineered to be as such. Much like how the streaming Hellraiser forgot the sex and the streaming Texas Chainsaw Massacre forgot to be frightening, this has a menu of everything that would be on the model kit of an Evil Dead movie, but it’s missing the intangible. There’s no feeling of getting behind the protagonists. Sure, a cheese grater gets used as a weapon, but this film should have the DNA of a film series that spent forty minutes with a man’s own hand punching himself in the face. It should do something that makes us feel something. The absence of this anarchy is a disappointment that’s hard to ignore.

There’s some to like, but I want to love. I want to revel in the lunacy of what this film could be, instead of settling for what it is. This had 1,720 gallons of blood, but not as many ounces of magic as I wanted it to have. Honestly, they could have skipped the records and book, which would have been another possession film.

But would anyone have gone to the theater—yes, this even got out of streaming and into the big time—to see that?

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of this movie has audio commentary with director Lee Cronin and actors Alyssa Sullivan and Lily Sullivan; interviews with Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Anna-Maree Thomas, special make-up effects designer Luke Polti, editor Bryan Shaw, sound designer Peter Albrechtsen, composer Stephen McKeon and Cronin and Albrechtsen by Glenn Kiser, director of the Dolby Institute. There are featurettes, a short directed by Cronin, behind-the-scenes video clips and still gallery, concept artwork gallery, storyboard gallery, a trailer and TV commercials, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Waldemar Witt, a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Waldemar Witt and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Michael Gingold. You can order this from MVD.

Directed by Mike Stasko, who wrote the script with Jakob Skrzypa and Alex Forman, this has appearances by Night of the Living Dead‘s Judith O’Dea, Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, Tim & Eric’s David Liebe Hart and Saw VI’s Simon Reynolds.

Dracula (Craig Gloster) is from space — he has a son, Dylan (Robert Kemeny), too! — and they’ve come back to Earth to kill everyone — all in black and white. He had once attacked the family of Roy MacDowell (Erik Helle) and killed most of them, making the entire town think that Roy is a killer. When Roy’s daughter Susan (Charlotte Bondy) is killed, everyone blames him, but his daughter Mary (Jessica Antovski) is ready to convince Police Chief Ed Clarke (Andrew Bee) that there really are aliens. She joins with Officer James Wallace (Rashaun Baldeo) and local tough guy Wayne (Oliver Georgiou) to save her town.

With an evil council of vampire aliens that includes Coppola’s Dracula (Martin Ouellette), Vampira (O’Dea) and Nosferatu (David Liebe Hart), a store called Ed’s Wood & Hardware, a public jerk off bandit played by Kaufman, tons of gore and a heart that beats right because it’s making fun with, not at, old movies, this is one to find and love.

You can order this on Blu-ray and DVD from MVD.

Back when people thought the internet was a positive thing, this movie generated so much online buzz that New Line Cinema used web feedback to reshoot for 5 days, most of which was spent feeding Samuel Jackson lines with the f-word.

It was also the first movie where Hollywood learned that memes and online chatter do not equal box office, and then, like people getting that Men In Black light to the eyes, they forgot and did it again. And then again. And then some more.

After seeing a gang slaying, there’s no way Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips) is making it to Los Angeles alive. I mean, the guy he’s narcin on, Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson), just set a whole bunch of pheromone-sprayed venomous snakes loose on a plane and then marked everyone with a Hawaii lei to be killed.

FBI agents Neville Flynn and John Sanders (Jackson and Mark Houghton) are going to try and protected everyone on the plane, from flight attendant Claire Miller (Julianna Margulies)  and rapper Clarence “Three Gs” Dewey to Mercedes Harbont (Rachel Blanchard), her dog Mary-Kate, senior light attendant Grace (Lin Shaye) and, well, everybody on this plane once those snakes come on our and start biting faces.

David Dalessandro is a University of Pittsburgh associate vice chancellor of university development who found the time to write this script back in 1992 based on an article he read about Indonesian brown tree snakes climbing into planes during World War II.

Initially, this was going to be directed by Ronny Yu before David R. Ellis (Final Destination 2, Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco) took over.

Even though the movie features 450 snakes from 30 different species, most of the ones in principal moments are either animatronic or CGI. That’s because real snakes don’t move around that much and aren’t that fast.

The best part? If you watch this on basic cable, Samuel Jackson yells, “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane!” And here you thought it would be the on-the-nose use of Cobra Starship for this movie’s theme.

The Arrow 4K UHD releaseof this film has a new 4K restoration by Arrow Films; new audio commentary by critics Max Evry and Bryan Reesman; an archival cast and crew audio commentary, featuring director David R. Ellis, actor Samuel L. Jackson, producer Craig Berenson, associate producer Tawny Ellis, VFX supervisor Eric Henry and second unit director Freddie Hice; Snakes on a Page, a brand new mini-documentary exploring the movie tie-in novelization phenomenon, featuring publisher Mark Miller, historian David Spencer and Christa Faust, author of the Snakes on a Plane novelization; archival features; a music video; a gag reel and easter eggs; trailers and TV ads; an image gallery; a South Pacific Airlines safety instruction card; a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing by Daniel Burnett and Charlie Brigden.

You can get this on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from MVD.

Neo-noir dystopian science fiction? Sure. But also giallo.

Strange Days was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks. At once 20 minutes into the future and thirty years in the past, it still feels remarkably vital.

Criminals are committing crimes and making SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device) discs that allow people to relive their murders and assaults. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) was once an LAPD officer, but now he works the black market, selling these memories. 

Meanwhile, Burton Steckler (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Dwayne Engelman (William Fichtner) track Iris (Brigitte Bako), who is wearing a SQUID helmet. She takes whatever she filmed and hides it in Lenny’s car, all while he pines over her best friend — and his lost love — rock star Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis), who has landed a new man, record industry boss Philo Gant (Michael Wincott).

While his car is being towed, Lenny is drinking away his pain with his only friends, detective Max Peltier (Tom Sizemore) and limousine driver and bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett). When Lenny is given another disk, it shows him Iris being assaulted and killed. More than that, he lives through it. He goes on the run with Mace, as whatever he has on that disk she left in his car is enough to send Steckler and Engelman after him.

It’s all tied to rapper Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), who was with Iris when he was pulled over by Steckler and Engelman and shot in the streets, killed over the anti-police lyrics in his songs. Philo has been recording his own people using the SQUID hardware with women. Lenny finds him dead, killed by Max, who has been with Faith. As if that’s not enough stabbing in the back, Max literally knifes Lenny, who removes it just in time to send his former friend hurtling to the pavement. He leaves Faith alone, heading back to Mace, who has been in love with him for a long time.

Mayor Palmer Strickland (Josef Sommer) is given all the info and stops a near-riot just moments before Mace and Lenny share a kiss at midnight. 

Wikipedia refers to this as a techno-thriller, tech-noir, and a futuristic erotic thriller. Or, like I said, giallo with bullshit giallo science. It has a gorgeous femme fatale with Lewis — who sang for real — and a protagonist obsessed with seeing her one more time, even if it’s past sex recorded and lived through, even if that feels empty.

I wear yellow glasses, and when I have them on, terms like adult thriller and neo-noir appear as they should: giallo.

Back in 1948, Margaret Strauss (Emma Thompson) is killed during a robbery, and her husband, Roman (Kenneth Branagh, who also directed this movie), is executed for the crime, but not before he whispers something to Gray Baker (Andy Garcia), a reporter.

In 1991, private detective Mike Church (Branagh) is looking into the identity of a woman whom he names Grace (also Thompson), who has appeared– mute, amnesiac and with nightmares — at the orphanage that raised him. Mike asks his friend Pete Dugan (Wayne Knight) to publish her info in the paper, while hypnotist Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi) tries to use his skills to bring her mind back. She doesn’t, but does remember a lot about the lives of Margaret and Roman. And oh yeah — Franklyn is really Frankie, the son of Margaret and Roman’s housekeeper Inga (Hanna Schygulla), Grace is artist Amanda Sharp who paints scissor-themed photos and — man, is this an exposition dump? — Frankie killed Margaret with scissors when Roman rebuffed his mother’s love. The scissors were put in Roman’s hand, and that brings us to now, as Franklyn tries the same thing on Mike and Amanda.

Roger Ebert said that this was similar to the works of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, saying, “Dead Again is Kenneth Branagh once again demonstrating that he has a natural flair for bold theatrical gesture. If Henry V, the first film he directed and starred in, caused people to compare him to Olivier, Dead Again will inspire comparisons to Welles and Hitchcock — and the Olivier of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I do not suggest Branagh is already as great a director as Welles and Hitchcock, although he has a good start in that direction. What I mean is that his spirit, his daring, is in the same league. He is not interested in making timid movies.”

But hey, that ending, where — spoilers — a scissor sculpture kills the killer? Ever seen Tenebre? That said, I do like the twist that Mike was actually Margaret and Grace was Roman.