How many times a month do you hold back from complaining? Or muddle through something you really don’t enjoy because speaking up or pushing back feels like more effort than just going with the flow…
Brian Connor
Brian Connor
Originally from Newcastle Upon Tyne but a long-term resident of Alicante, Spain, Brian likes his music loud, his beer cold and his heroes walking away from explosions in slow motion.
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This month sees the 25th anniversary of the release of Men In Black. It also sees the 20th anniversary of Men In Black 2. Which represented one of the biggest drop-offs in quality I’ve ever seen. “Oh yeah,…
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Streaming HorrorStreaming Reviews
‘Revealer’ Brings Some 80s Sass to the Apocalypse
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorIt’s been a boom time for 80s nostalgia over the last few years. Nowhere more so than in the horror genre. It gives you instantly recognizable visual cues to make the audience comfortable and saves…
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I was in an ideal unbiased position to assess Conan the Barbarian on its 40th anniversary. I somehow hadn’t seen it before now. When I revealed this to a friend he reacted with, “Dear god man,…
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HorrorReviews
‘The Innocents’ Is a Scary Kids Eye View of Superpowers
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorKids, eh? Buncha weirdos the lot of ’em. Not yours obviously, they’re lovely. No offense meant. But they can be confusing little blighters at times, something horror movies have used since at least 1960 with…
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The Aviary opens on Jillian (Malin Akerman) and Blair (Lorenza Izzo) stumbling into the pre-dawn desert and looking back at a compound that “looks so small from here.” We quickly learn that they are escaping…
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The internet is all about the best ever or the worst ever, even normally. During awards season it’s even more pronounced. Even on MovieBabble. But not everything can be a terrifying low or a dizzying…
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Toby Poser has acted on screen and stage since her teens. She formed Wonder Wheel Productions a decade ago with her partner John Adams and their sixth film Hellbender arrives on Shudder this week. She took…
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Streaming HorrorStreaming Reviews
‘Hellbender’: Something Witchy This Way Comes
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorHellbender is a family affair, in that it is written, directed, performed, costumed, edited, and probably catered almost entirely by the Adams Family. I’ll get that out of the way early because a lot of…
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We’ve mentioned the Mission: Impossible franchise before in the context of anniversaries. Back in the days when the franchise was hopping from director to director with big stylistic changes from entry to entry. While they…
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Retrospectives
‘The Thing’ and ‘Footloose’ (2011), Or The Do’s and Dont’s of Remakes
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorTen years ago saw the release of remakes of The Thing and Footloose (Prequel, shmequel, you know damn well the 2011 The Thing is a remake really, but we’ll come back to that). Footloose made $63 million…
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Streaming HorrorStreaming Reviews
‘Superhost’: Location, Location, Decapitation
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorSuperhost joins The Rental in the burgeoning, “Using Airbnb will ensure you are horribly murdered, probably while being filmed” genre. Travel vloggers Teddy (Osric Chau) and Claire (Sarah Canning) are looking to revitalize their flagging…
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DocumentaryReviews
‘Lily Topples The World’: Welcome to the Wonderful World of Domino Art
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorThe world of online fame is a strange one. There are people out there with millions of fans, real fans that are actively subscribed to the output of artists and sometimes literally invested in their…
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Streaming HorrorStreaming Reviews
‘Jakob’s Wife’: ‘Til Undeath Do Us Part?
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorAnne (Barbara Crampton) lives in Small Town, USA, and has been married to minister Jakob (Larry Fessenden) for 30 years. It’s clear in that time her life has shrunk so she’s gone from being a…
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Streaming HorrorStreaming Reviews
‘Son’ – The Boy Ain’t Right (Or Is He?)
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorKids. Love ’em or hate ’em, we can all agree they’re emissaries of Satan sent to destroy the Earth, amirite? Or possibly vampires. Or something that isn’t right. At least that’s the case for young mother Laura…
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HorrorReviews
A Horror Critic Encounters a Serial Killer Support Group in ‘Vicious Fun’
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorAhh, the 1980s. Season of mixtapes and mellow Rubik’s cubes. Ripe for nostalgia adjacent movies and TV like The Goldbergs and WW84, they’ve recently been a goldmine for horror makers. Boosted in particular by the…
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Streaming Action/AdventureStreaming Reviews
‘Xtreme’ Might Be the Start of Something Special
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorGather ’round children, an old man is going to tell you about ye olde action movies. Let me take you back to a time when Chuck Norris headlined films. When Michael Dudikoff had a career.…
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Emerging as part of the “Splat Pack””in 2002 with the cult classic Dog Soldiers, UK director Neil Marshall followed that with the classic horror The Descent before branching out into post-apocalyptic action, Roman-era violence, Sci-fi… It’s been…
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HorrorReviews
Neil Marshall Returns to Small-Scale Horror in ‘The Reckoning’
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorPlagues Used to be Even Less Fun The Great Plague of 1665 ripped a deadly swath through England, killing tens of thousands and destabilizing a country still recovering from the civil war a decade earlier.…
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ComedyReviews
’15 Things You Didn’t Know About Bigfoot’ Knows More Than a Few Things About Comedy
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorIf You Go Down to the Woods Today Vlogger Brian is losing his mojo. Reporting for Vice Compound, a website with an extremely familiar-looking logo and modus operandi, he´s tired of covering the stupidest of modern…
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Retrospectives
It’s Time You Joined the Cult of ‘Josie and the Pussycats’
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorDonnie Darko, Fight Club, The Thing… all ‘cult’ films that made the square root of nada at the box office but have been critically vindicated since. 20 years ago, Josie and the Pussycats joined this hallowed…
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ReviewsThriller
‘Safer at Home’ Would Have Been Better Left on the Drawing Board
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorA sub-genre of the “found footage” films, computer screen films have been less prevalent than their Blair Witch-related cousins but can, as in the case of Searching or the Unfriended movies, be surprisingly effective. If they’re…
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ReviewsScience Fiction
‘The Wanting Mare’ Is a Dreamlike Film, for Better or Worse
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorThe Wanting Mare opens with text informing the audience that, in the city of Whithren on the world of Anmaere, citizens are desperate to travel to the wintry land of Levithen on the once-a-year ship…
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The Allyn brothers’ biggest collaboration to date, No Man’s Land, begins with the lines, “The U.S. and Mexico share one of the world’s longest borders. In Texas, border fences often lie far north of the…
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Streaming ReviewsStreaming Science Fiction
‘The Midnight Sky’ Reaches for the Stars But Falls Short
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorWhat Does Hollywood Have Against 2049? 2049 and three weeks after what is referred to as “The Event”, humanity faces extinction, except for the extravagantly named Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), who has remained at his…
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Norwegian psychotherapist Finn Skårderud once posited the idea that humans are too sober. He believed the ideal running level for mankind was a blood alcohol level of 0.05%. (Interestingly, fellow noted scientist Elizabeth Hurley had…
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DocumentaryReviews
‘The Mystery Of D.B. Cooper’ Tells an American Outlaw Tale
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorOn November 24, 1971, D.B. Cooper jumped out of a plane with two hundred thousand dollars in ransom money and disappeared. Now, the phrase “living the dream” is thrown around a lot these days, but……
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Streaming DramaStreaming Reviews
‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Is Everything Wrong with Oscar Bait
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorI Am Sam, Grace Of Monaco, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. All made with the express purpose of winning Oscars. All absolute garbage. Joining this lackluster group is Ron Howard’s latest Hillbilly Elegy. A lifeless, hacky…
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Night Of The Living Dead. Paranormal Activity. The Blair Witch Project. All micro-budget horror films that made an absolute fortune at the box office. Which, unfortunately, leads hundreds of people to think making a horror film…
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DocumentaryReviews
‘J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius’ Is a Guide To a Fun Kind of Weird
by Brian Connorby Brian ConnorAmerica has always been a fertile ground for new movements and splinter groups. Heck, the Pilgrims were basically a church looking to — in the words of Bender Bending Rodriguez — start their own colony,…