Tag Archives: vampires

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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My 2024 at the Movies, Part 2 of 2: The Top 10

January 11, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tiny blond witch holds large ugly witch's hat.

Everyone don your sorting hats!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. I saw 29 films in theaters in 2024 that were actually released in 2024. Seven were screenings at the 33nd annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. In young-adulthood I used to scoff at critics who’d fill their year-end Top 10s with films they saw at festivals that none of their readers would be able to watch for another few months, if ever. Now that I’ve participated in a festival these past two years, those seven totally count and I’m not cheating by including them. This is, like, just different.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2024. Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference…

On with the better end of the countdown!

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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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“Abigail”: Bunhead of Blood

May 23, 2024 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tween vampire ballerina bursts through a white door, large wood fragments flying, murder in her eyes.

Black Swan but with slightly less agony.

Horror hasn’t been a primary go-to genre for me as I’ve aged, but I’ll check out a given work in just about any genre if it can sink a hook into the elusive target that is my set of aesthetic peculiarities. (And by “hook” I do not mean I award imaginary brownie points for use of the empty “elevated horror” label.) In the wake of the Hollywood-wide restart after last year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, some 7,000 new, quick-bake horror flicks will be coming to theaters over the next several months as studios catch up on their precious blockbuster assembly-line schedules. Amid the flood of recent blood-soaked trailers — from high-concept to lowbrow to “the plot is a spoiler!” — one pitch spoke to me from the fray: “From the directors of the last two Scream movies!”

If the preceding sentences sound familiar, it’s because they’re largely lifted from my previous write-up of Late Night with the Devil. If horror flicks have taught me anything, it’s that recycling is cool. Sometimes old parts can be reused in a new contraption without collapsing. Sometimes the contraption is pretty nifty, like folding a newspaper into a sailboat, or making an omelet with leftover taco filling, or lifting the one-line concept from an old Universal monster movie but throwing away the rest of the movie because no one remembers it anyway.

Hence, directors Matt Bellinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (d/b/a the team “Radio Silence”) present Abigail. The 1936 work that inspired it is a spoiler. Its entire trailer is a spoiler. Fortunately it doesn’t spoil the whole runtime, as more twists abound and a crack ensemble makes up the difference in their performances whenever the writing withholds too much.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During the “Morbius” End Credits

April 3, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Morbius!

The Matrix Resurrections skewered the whole “bullet-time” fad, yet here we go again.

I thought Morbius the Living Vampire was scary when I was 6 or 7 and he showed up in a 1977 comic I picked up at the toy store. In a time when the Comics Code Authority was still touchy about allowing comics to show the undead because they might turn young readers into rampaging juvenile delinquents, Morbius exploited a loophole with an origin that revealed him as not an actual vampire, but as a scientist who conducted questionable experiments to cure his own rare blood disease, which went awry and turned him into a science vampire, with many vampiric powers and few-if-any vampiric weaknesses. He was a forerunner of the irritating horror sub-subgenre Vampires Who Ignore Vampire Rules and Who Therefore Aren’t Vampires by Definition So Maybe the Writer Should’ve Made Up Their Own Monster Instead of Misusing the Word “Vampire”.

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