Dan Says its Alright

  Insidious has always been a fairly low tier horror franchise. The Conjuring's budget cousin, if you will. If you look at it that way then Insidious: Out of the Further is actually fairly good. It's certainly the most entertaining the series has been since the first instalment. Like that first breakout hit from back in 2010, Out of the Further has a much stronger first half than it does second. We start with a fairly harrowing scene of a young girl named Gemma witnessing the grisly death of her erratically behaving mother. We then fast forward a couple of decades to find the adult Gemma working as a dentist while raising a young girl of her own, yet still living in her childhood home. Spooky things begin to happen as some unfriendly OAPs start stalking the neighbourhood and Gemma tries to keep her daughter safe while worrying she is becoming like her mother. In typical Insidious fashion, things become more silly than scary as the plot is revealed and we build towards a ludicr...

Everybody has their own version of Robin Hood, whether it's Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner or a dashing cartoon fox. There have also been attempts at taking the tale in a more grounded direction, most notably from Ridley Scott and Russel Crowe in 2010, but nobody has shot an arrow through the neck of the legend quite like Michael Sarnoski does with The Death of Robin Hood.  The film begins with an ageing Robin (Hugh Jackman) tormented by false stories of his own making and filling up his own personal graveyard with the bodies of would be assassins. When the last surviving member of his outlaw band, Little John (a typically chameleonic Bill Skarsgard) asks for his help in reclaiming a stolen farm, he senses the chance to finally receive his "good" death. Instead, he ends up gravely injured and in the care of Jodie Comer's healing Prioress.  Many films have done "realistic" medical violence but the opening act here is on a whole other level. Within minutes of the ...

Coyote vs. Acme was originally scheduled for release way back in 2023 (in the theatrical slot that eventually went to Barbie, no less) but a change of leadership at Warner Bros led to them deciding to scrap the film, figuring a tax break was preferable to releasing a complete movie that hundreds of people had worked on. A combination of public outcry and tenacity from independent distributor Ketchup Entertainment has led to the film finally getting its day in cinemas. Congratulations are in order as the live-action/animated combination comedy is one of the most entertaining family movies of the year. After faulty ACME products foil yet another of his attempts to capture Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote sees an advert on TV by Will Forte's lazy lawyer Kevin in which he promises a payout for faulty ACME goods. In reality Kevin is a bottom feeder who has made a career out of settling lawsuits against the corporate giants for peanuts, but Wile E. forces him to engage in the trial of the cen...

The plot of The End of Oak Street sees an early 80s suburban family, and their entire neighbourhood suddenly transported back to prehistoric times. There's some talk of solar flares and time bubbles by way of an explanation but it's all nonsense in service of one central idea: dinosaurs in suburbia. Turns out this idea is so good it not only sustains the film but leaves you wondering why nobody has done it before. The central family consists of Anne Hathaway's frustrated novelist Denise Platt and her pizza delivering husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), along with their children Audrey (Daisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). While Dad and the kids are exactly the type of characters you would have expected to see in an 80s family adventure but Denise is a more modern female lead. She wants to achieve more than simply being a mother and is unhappy with her simple suburban life. Add in the fact she plays the realist when things kick off and her constant negative vibe can mean ...

Tony opens with a quote from the late chef, and subject of this semi-biopic, Anthony Bourdain's memoir. It goes: "I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking." He's not wrong. The Tony (he's much too cool to let people call him Anthony) we meet at the beginning of the film is an insufferable blowhard. He tells anyone who'll listen about his great future as a writer, despite seemingly having an aversion to doing any actual writing. He assumes the panel awarding a prestigious scholarship is too stupid to see his pitch is nonsense bravado. He condescendingly explains the meaning of what he thinks are obscure words, despite not always knowing himself. While he does change over the course of the film, it's hard to map an actual character journey. That's because more than a biopic or chef's origin story, Tony is a summer vibes hangout movie. The story take...

Note before the review: It has emerged that generative AI featured in the making of Ice Cream Man and the filmmakers appear to have been less than 100% honest with how much it was used. I have reviewed the film as I saw it and have not taken the way it was made into account. If you (understandably) want nothing to do with a movie that used generative AI then give this one a miss. "The kids have gone fucking insane" screams a father just before his son and daughter, having already mangled his hand in the garbage disposal, set fire to him. How you feel about the idea of that scene pretty much tells you what you will think about the whole of Ice Cream Man, the latest bloodstained offering from gore hound Eli Roth. The premise is a basic one: a quite overtly sinister ice cream man comes to town and, the day after he hands out his freezer based treats, any child who consumed them turns into little murder bots and begin dismembering the local adults. A couple of kids who didn...