Tag Archives: horror

“Predator: Badlands”: Yautja, Yutani! Yutani, Yautja!

November 16, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Elle Fanning and guy in Predator costume standing back to back, sternly.

She’s a happy-go-lucky corporate android! He’s a space hunter with a grudge! THEY FIGHT CRIME!

The Predalienator Cinematic Universe is in full effect, or whatever we’re calling it! Fans of the formerly standalone IPs never expected 20th Century Studios would use the two Alien vs. Predator crossover films — one a mediocre slog with a decent Final Boss Battle; the other, amateurish drek — as the foundation of a unified transmedia empire a la Marvel and DC. After both lay fallow for years except in licensed comics, they’ve been called back to active duty and merged into a single science fiction canon through the magical power of Easter eggs.

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Del Toro’s “Frankenstein”: 9 Reasons Why You’ll Need a Bigger Screen

November 7, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Frankenstein Movie Poster 2025 displayed outside a theater at night. The monster is a gangly tatterdemalion behind the logo and the logline "Only Monsters Play God".

Now showing at a theater near few!

Midlife Crisis Crossover Calls Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein One of the Year’s Best Films™!

Once again the Academy Award Winner has collaborated with Netflix after the previous successes of his animated version of Pinocchio, his Cabinet of Curiosities anthology miniseries, and the Trollhunters stuff I never looked into. Frankenstein was clearly one of the highest ranking dream projects on his wish list, fulfilled at last with a noticeably enormous budget, a stellar cast, his most lavish production design ever, and a too-brief theatrical exhibition before the November 7th relegation to its forever-home in the app’s small-screen back-catalog cellar.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “The Invisible Half”

October 13, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Movie poster of a half-Japanese girl with a white baseball bat standing in front of a giant mummy head that has an earbud cord wrapped around it. The earbuds are bloodied.

Funny how wearing lots of bandages always means “scary monster” and not “victim receiving the care they sorely needed”.

It’s that time again! Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. I enjoyed much of what I saw in 2024, though some of my picks have yet to find distribution to this day. Those few that did kinda came and went without much fanfare. The most “prestigious” film I saw, Small Things Like These, at least went well enough for its makers that star Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants reunited for Steve, which just hit Netflix earlier this month. (Highly recommended, by the way.) Numerous other Heartland entries showed up on Oscar ballots, but I failed to catch them at the festival proper. (Eventually I saw Heartland veterans Flow and The Seed of the Sacred Fig, to name a couple.) I’ll be curious to see what happens to this year’s alumni in the months ahead.

Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits. Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry, no matter how big or little. We kick things off with one of the only three horror films in the lineup (a genre HIFF has only opened up to within the past few years), and among this year’s few Asian ones: The Invisible Half, in which we learn Japanese teenagers are no more well-adjusted than ours are.

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“The Long Walk”: The World’s Deadliest Walk-and-Talk

September 27, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Orange, black and white shot of a bunch of guys walking at night, accompanied by military vehicles with bright headlights.

A moonlit stroll with a mounting death toll.

Rare are the harmonic convergences when at least two excellent Stephen King adaptations reach theaters within the same calendar year. I’m still upset everyone slept on the heart-melting sci-fi sweetness of The Life of Chuck (admittedly I’ve skipped The Monkey for now), but I can understand the muted turnout for the survival-horror bloodsport of The Long Walk. If I might understate to a subterranean degree: these past two weeks perhaps weren’t the best time for moviegoers to come out and watch young men be gunned down helplessly before their very eyes.

(Then again, when’s a good time for that anymore?)

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Dragon Con 2025 Photos, Part 10: The Cosplay Parade Is COMING TO GET YOU

September 13, 2025 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Haunted house cosplayer in all-black quasi-canine monster form.

Werewolf or something similar! Among the creatues from Netherworld Haunted House.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In 2019 my wife Anne and I attended our very first Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the longest-running science fiction conventions in America. We once again made the eight-hour drive from Indianapolis and returned for our fourth nonconsecutive Labor Day weekend at that amazing colossal southern spectacle. We can’t conscientiously afford to do D*C every year, but we’ll see how long we can keep up an every-other year schedule before we’re too old or overwhelmed to handle it…

Our belated coverage of Atlanta’s annual Dragon Con Cosplay Parade continues! We amateur enthusiasts took way too many photos that took me too long to sort in between juggling other life aspects (my day job, my streaming stories, and so forth). Rather than continuing to fussily sort them into themed galleries (except for this one being mostly horror, but not just horror), let’s plow through the rest and get these out into the world in case any attendees are still Googling themselves two weeks after showtime. Please let me know if we old folks misidentified any characters. Enjoy again!

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The First Rule of Weapons Club Is You Do Not Talk About “Weapons”

August 24, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Julia Garner peeking through open curtains from outside into a darkened house.

Folks who haven’t seen it yet, peering in through the internet redaction boxes.

How do you discuss a movie without ruining it when its greatest pleasure is the element of surprise? Maybe you just…don’t?

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“Final Destination Bloodlines”: Death Returns to Delete Entire Ancestry.com Pages

May 25, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
tony Todd in the final months of his life, playing coroner William John Bludworth one last time, sitting at his desk at police HQ.

William Bludworth! Kurn, son of Mogh! Candyman! Zoom! Adult Jake Sisko! And more, more, more! R.I.P., good sir.

Once upon a time the original Final Destination was my favorite film I saw in theaters in the year 2000, outranking other notable releases such as the Best Picture-winning Gladiator, the higher-budgeted X-Men, and the even more intricate Chicken Run. Created by screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick and flown to the finish line by the X-Files/Millennium writer/producer team of Glen Morgan and James Wong, the supernatural slasher-flick was more than its novelty of teens being hunted by the voiceless, incorporeal force of Death Itself via ludicrous chain-reaction accidents. Sure, those grotesque executions were more unpredictable than your typical arsenal of cutlery and farming tools, and as a comics fan I took some pride in knowing Rube Goldberg’s work before I saw it and name-checking him for comparison’s sake before everyone else was doing it.

Taking a peculiar place in the post-Scream slasher revival, the imaginative precursor to 1000 Ways to Die posed a loftier pretension than psychopathic B-movie slaughter. Death’s unspoken yet swiftly inferred motive for its Most Dangerous Game kill-spree was, arguably in the strictest sense, not motivated by pure or even petty evil. From a higher plane of perspective, the entire cast was “supposed” to die in the first twenty minutes, which would’ve made for a fairly pointless short. As the students who escaped the opening plane disaster soon find themselves perishing one by one, their increasingly frantic debates and rationalizations explore the time-honored thematic conflict of destiny versus free will — the integrity of maintaining The Grand Scheme of Things versus the Terminator series’ philosophy of “There is no fate but what we make”, which in turn was backstabbed by Terminator 3‘s contrarian stance that some catastrophes are a fixed point in time, no matter how hard we push back.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Sinners” End Credits

May 2, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Michael B. Jordan in dual roles as 1932 gangsters, one with a red hat and one with a blue hat.

Thankfully it’s easy to tell which one’s Raphael and which one’s Leonardo.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Ryan Coogler rules! The writer/director/producer’s film career began a year after I launched this blog in 2012. I’ve seen them all in theaters and written about them along the way. His devastating indie debut Fruitvale Station was my favorite film that year (back when Coogler was still on Twitter and tossed me a Like for my efforts!). The legacy sequel Creed thoroughly wrecked me at the end. The Academy Award-Winning Black Panther is still one of the MCU’s best entries despite some janky CG in the underground-railroad climax. Its sequel Wakanda Forever is — microscopically splitting hairs — his least-best to date despite that powerful prologue, a worldwide wake for the late Chadwick Boseman. It’s still streets ahead of most Marvel films that followed in its shadow, but it buckled under the weight of the company’s self-perpetuating marketing plans.

With only four films grossing almost a combined $2.5 billion in international box office (well, now he’s passed that mark), the auteur stepped back from work-for-hire and threw some earned clout toward a project of his own, the very first to feature characters of his own creation without shouldering any inherited IP mantles. With that creative control Coogler scores another win in Sinners, once again collaborating with actor Michael B. Jordan, who’s been in all his films to date (erm, light Wakanda Forever spoilers, sorry) and who’s one of this blog’s frequent excuses to name-check The Wire whenever gratuitously possible. (We will never forget Wallace. NEVER.) It defies easy pigeonholing as a vampire survival-horror period-piece musical that demands a 21st-century Black Cinema Renaissance rise up and keep up with him. For anyone who thought the Panther films were still a liiittle bit white at heart, Sinners is here for you.

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“Wolf Man”: The Entropy of Lycanthropy

January 26, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Woman with pricey hairdo and flannel shirt in a dark room viewed through a werewolf's perspective so the colors are weirdly red and blue around the shadows.

Life viewed through the eyes of a werewolf — warped colors and very few survivors.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Leigh Whannell’s reinvention of The Invisible Man was my favorite of the four whole films I saw in theaters in 2020 and smartly updated James Whale’s original mad scientist into a millennial tech-bro stalker who just wanted to dominate a single fed-up ex rather than the whole unwieldy world. Though Universal Pictures claims they’ve given up on their plan to reboot their classic monsters in an all-new shared universe (with or without a vaudeville act to string them together again), it wasn’t exactly counterevidential when they let Whannell take another crack at the catalog.

The next title on his checklist is The Wolf Man, but he’s dropped the “the” (it’s cleaner!) and adapted it to another modern metaphor rather than perpetuate the whole “gypsy curse” origin that would invite the wrath of the Romani on social media. The metaphor suits a smaller, more intimate thriller, a phrase that might not appeal to the millions who love their Universal Monsters big ‘n’ broad, or to fans of Twilight or Underworld who were hoping to see an entire team of vulpine antiheroes fighting a horror-fantasy gang war.

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“Nosferatu” 102 Years Later

December 29, 2024 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Young 19th-century woman's frightened face in darkness, with gnarly vampire hand around her neck.

PROTECT YA NECK, KID!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: with three films writer/director Robert Eggers claimed a neglected niche as an artisanal horror scenographer, creating unique environments with an obsessive fastidiousness that surely frightens and confuses any execs used to funding facsimiles of other films. At first The Witch disoriented the unsuspecting viewer with stylized Puritanical dialect before plunging them into a malevolent maelstrom of what Salem might’ve looked like if the witch-hunters hadn’t been making it all up. The Lighthouse was an intensely claustrophobic, black-and-white duel over Mellvillian obsession and 19th-century on-the-job training. As if those weren’t harrowing enough, The Northman retold the tale of the turn-of-the-ninth-century Jutland prince Amleth (you may recall Shakespeare’s watered-down adaptation called Hamlet) as a visceral, deafening Dolby Cinema experience in which its antihero, a doubt-free rage-monster, waged relentless revenge atop a sonic tsunami of pummeling war drums. Such are the hypperrealities that Eggers, diviner of realms unseen, has dared us to watch.

Whereas The Northman was less a do-over of existing material than a savage interpretation of the historical record, Eggers’ latest is his first total remake — a full-throated cover of the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that took on a life of its own despite the ensuing lawsuit. Eggers’ Nosferatu has no subtitle and is twice the runtime, and follows in the footsteps of other movie-monster aficionados-turned-pros such as Guillermo del Toro and Leigh Whannell, but as one might expect, it’s no ordinary Dracula flick to throw on the ever-mounting pile.

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