This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. John Jackson Miller watched 1989’s Batman 12 times in the theater. As a reviewer for his college paper, Miller went into the film with low expectations, burned by the poor adaptations of the past, but was thrilled to find a movie that reflected the richness of the comics he loved. And yet, there was one nagging issue he couldn’t get over, one moment that just didn’t make sense, no matter how many times he revisited Batman. “Hey, bat-brain, I was a kid…

This post contains spoilers for Terrifier 3. Terrifier 3 is often a joyful movie, and not just because of its Christmas trappings! That might strike some as a surprising statement. After all, writer/director Damien Leone begins his film with Art the Clown, dressed as Santa Claus, murdering a little girl’s family with an axe. Another sequence climaxes with Art using explosive gifts to blow up a bunch of kids. Yet another is a prolonged sequence of Art spraying an older, good-natured store Santa with liquid nitrogen and then battering away at his body parts. And yet, Terrifier 3 is joyful,…

Russian toughs are scary most of the time. You know the look: big muscles, hard stares, and often a faint suggestion that they’re connected to something while strutting around the boardwalks of Brighton Beach. In most American movies, this kind of typecasting is a visual shorthand for intimidation and menace. But not in Anora, and not next to Mikey Madison. Five-foot nothing, petite, and buried beneath a forest of raven hair, Madison is dismissed as “just a little girl” by Toros (Karren Karagulian), an Eastern European middle manager who is attempting to put the fear of Ivan the Terrible into…

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. Bathed in light and shadow, past and present, the castle looming over Robert Eggers and his companions is haunted by its history. It was here, at Pernštejn Castle, that Werner Herzog filmed his reimagining of the German Expressionist classic Nosferatu (1922), and it is here again, more than a hundred years after the original F.W. Murnau masterpiece, that Eggers is attempting to make the most famous vampire story his own. In a location that actor Nicholas Hoult describes as “cold in terms…

Even from the first film, Joker has only had the thinnest veneer of being a film about the criminal clown who fights Batman. It was, first and foremost, an homage to Martin Scorsese’s films The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, with some comic book signifiers to guarantee a wider audience and studio funding. So when Joker: Folie à Deux announced that it was going to introduce Joker’s on/off girlfriend, Harley Quinzel (played by Lady Gaga), it should not have been a surprise the character was going to see some reworking. In an interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips revealed,…

Sometimes a horror icon is born right out of the box. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Ghostface had the zeitgeist by the throat pretty much from the moment Drew Barrymore picked up that phone. Other movie monsters, though, take a little time to catch on. While Craven’s own Freddy Krueger was pretty iconic in the ‘80s following A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Robert Englund baddie didn’t turn into a strange kind of folk hero in pop culture until he interrupted Zsa Zsa Gabor in the third Nightmare flick and said, “Who gives a f*ck what you think?!” Well, Terrifier…

For Jason Reitman, many of the iconic faces that compose Saturday Night Live’s earliest, and oft-glorified, years are more than just comedy legends. They’re friends of the family—or at least work acquaintances. Long before this weekend’s real-time dramedy about SNL’s origin story, Jason’s father Ivan Reitman directed several of the “Not Ready for Primetime Players” in films like Ghostbusters (1984) and Stripes (1981). In fact, Ivan knew many of them as how they are introduced in Jason’s Saturday Night film: hungry no-name comedians scrounging around New York City, looking for a break. “My father directed the National Lampoon Show, which…

Has any single person had a greater impact on horror this century than Jason Blum? The one-time Miramax executive struck out on his own in the 2000s when he founded Blumhouse Productions, a company where he remains the CEO. And in the ensuing years, Blum’s production label would define, and redefine again, the trends of horror movies and thrillers. Operating on the philosophy that a horror film with a micro-budget will almost always turn a profit, Blum frequently allows directors broad freedom to make what they want within the genre, and in the process has kept multiplexes perpetually spooky. In…

Earlier this year, Universal Orlando Resort revealed that 2025 will see the long-awaited opening of Dark Universe: a theme park dedicated entirely to classic Universal Monsters like The Wolf Man, Dracula, and Frankenstein’s Monster. It’s a fitting and long-awaited tribute to the creatures that have come to define an almost timeless idea of horror movies that transcends generations.  For as celebrated as those monsters and movies are, quite a lot about them has been lost to time. That’s due to both their extreme age (not all who know about those monsters have actually seen their original movies) and the generally…

Ten years ago, The Lego Movie shocked the world. What was once considered a cynical corporate cash grab preying on consumers’ goodwill for a recognizable brand became a revered animated feature. The film’s lightning pace, zany humor, unrelenting catchy songs, and eccentric characters cemented The Lego Movie a place in the pop culture zeitgeist. Yielding desirable returns on their financial investment, Warner Bros. expedited the inception of a franchise, with three spinoffs/sequels arriving in the following five years. However, the studio proceeded to see diminishing box office returns, resulting in the franchise going dark after the disappointment of 2019’s The…

This article contains spoilers for The Apprentice. Before we ever see Sebastian Stan in a slicked back blond wig and long red tie, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice reveals its hand by focusing on an entirely different Republican president—and the only other who was seriously threatened with impeachment. In infamous archival footage, a sweaty and defensive Richard Nixon stands behind a lectern marked by the presidential seal while denying, denying, and denying he did anything improper regarding the Watergate break-in. Nestled in amongst his most immortalized defense—“I am not a crook”—Nixon also said something especially salient to Abbasi’s new film. “People…

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. Pharrell Williams is a legend. He’s one of the most influential artists of his generation, has had countless hits either as a performer or as a producer, has worked with an incredible roster of top music talent, won armfuls of awards, launched a fashion brand, and has even been nominated for two Oscars. And now he’s a Lego figure. Director Morgan Neville has also won a boatload of awards, including an Oscar for the documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. He has a…

Saturday Night Live is so old that it predates being called “Saturday Night Live.” Originally, the show was known simply as Saturday Night. That’s a half-forgotten factoid which Jason Reitman’s new film—also simply Saturday Night—leans into when a young and sharply dressed antihero named Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) tells an incredulous NBC security guard that he’s the producer of Saturday Night. “The whole night?” the guard asks with more than a hint of condescension. It’s this early scene in Reitman’s new movie which forces every viewer below the age of 60 in a strange place: a world where SNL was…

“Next, it’s your turn.” Four movies in, My Hero Academia has its feature film installments down to a science and the anime’s continued success makes it no surprise why they continue to turn out these extra special cinematic celebrations.  There’s a similar quality, structure, and tone to all four My Hero Academia movies where a grandiose villain with radical motivations causes wide-scale chaos. It’s interesting to note that there’s been a larger wait between each My Hero Academia movie as they’re not creatively hollow endeavors that are being rushed out for an easy cash grab. There’s clearly a lot of…

Believe it or not, the Joker wasn’t always an A-list comic book villain. Inspired by Conrad Veidt’s character in the silent tragedy The Man Who Laughs, the Joker first plagued Gotham City in 1940’s Batman #1. According to behind-the-scenes legends, creators Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, and Bob Kane intended the Joker to die at the end of his first story, but they eventually realized what a special character they had on their hands and kept him alive. Even then, the Joker was just one of Batman’s many nemeses and dropped from regular rotation after the 1960s TV show perhaps overexposed…

According to Hollywood legend, Will Smith went from innocuous rapper to full-on movie star when he and director Michael Bay reached a compromise while shooting the original Bad Boys. Bay wanted Smith to go shirtless during a running scene, but Smith felt embarrassed by the idea. So they agreed to let him keep the shirt on but unbuttoned for the shot. Sure enough, the shot looked amazing, with the shirt flapping like a cape as Smith hurled himself toward the camera. He became a viable movie star. Now in his mid 50s, Smith does not go shirtless for a running…

Sometimes a horror movie can be so successful that the studio will insist on just going full throttle and releasing sequel after sequel. Give it enough time, and you’ll get prequels and reboots. While there may be follow-ups that really improve on what the original gave us, a lot of the time, the franchise starts to fall apart somewhere around the third installment. Writing gets lazy and repetitive, or goes to the other extreme by being too off-brand in a bad way. Budgets shrink and the actors and directors who made things work would rather keep their distance. You end…

When James Gunn and Peter Safran were named in 2022 as co-presidents of DC Studios by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, early indications from the pair were that at least some of the characters and actors from the previous DC film incarnation, aka the DC Extended Universe, might survive the reboot to fight another day. And of all the characters from the prior sequence of films, it was widely believed that Wonder Woman, a beloved fan favorite played by Gal Gadot, was perhaps the only major member of the Justice League that could make the cut. It was not,…

This article contains major spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux. It is the ending which has left some fans upset and others…. still upset but also at least curious about the seeming wink, easter egg, or allusion to another, much better loved sequel. Arthur Fleck, Joaquin Phoenix’s eternally put-upon sad clown at the center of two Todd Phillips Joker movies, is dead. On a concrete floor in Arkham Asylum, he dies unloved, unhappy, and unprotected. Meanwhile just vaguely out of focus, and partially out of frame, his murderer laughs maniacally as he begins carving his own face into a so-called…

This article contains multitudes of Joker : Folie à Deux spoilers. Joker: Folie à Deux ends with the death of the Joker. Okay, more accurately, it ends with the death of Arthur Fleck, the sad-sack comedian-turned-murderer played by Joaquin Phoenix. Furthermore, the movie closes with Fleck’s killer (Connor Storrie) turning the knife on himself to carve some Heath Ledger-esque scars. So the truer statement is Joker: Folie à Deux should end with the death of the Joker. Not just Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in the Todd Phillips films, but all of them: Cesar Romero’s boisterous Joker, Jack Nicholson’s performance artist Joker, Mark…