zombie

It took 33 years, but it finally has happened. Thanks to high-definition video technology, Jaws 3 can at last be seen in the way it was originally meant to be seen, courtesy of Universal's recent release of the sequel on Blu-ray. Click below to read my full review. I've lost track of how many times I've seen Jaws and Jaws 2 , but I've only seen Jaws 3 twice in 2D. Every other time I've seen it after that was in a different 3D format--anaglyph, field sequential, and in the theater --to figure out which one was the best. Based on what I've seen before, the 3D version included in the new Jaws 3 Blu-ray is the best of the bunch. There's very little shadowing and most of the pop-out effects work beautifully; it even looks sharper, more colorful and less grainy than the 2D version that's on the same disc. Unfortunately, the notorious shark-through-the-window shot from the film's climax still doesn't look right, and I doubt it ever will until someon...

Since I've been a fan of the Star Wars franchise since its debut in 1977, it was my personal responsibility (or perhaps a mandatory requirement in my Lifetime Commitment to Geekery contract) to see the latest installment, The Force Awakens (a.k.a. Episode VII ), as soon as possible after it was released last month. So far, I've seen it twice already--once on a regular movie screen and once in the IMAX format--and while it's a fun movie, it's the only Star Wars film that left me feeling underwhelmed. Lucas may have felt that Disney would be an ideal home for his franchise after he sold it back in 2012, but its latest live-action contribution to the saga felt like it lost its spirit of fantasy when compared to the other movies. This post isn't a review of Force Awakens as much as it is a look back at Star Wars as a whole, what the new movie means in that context, and speculation of what Disney era of the franchise will look like in the years to come. Read on ... At ...

Way back in 2001, Japanese horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa released a film called Kairo (a.k.a. Pulse ). An apocalyptic story, Kairo told the tale of a group of Japanese college students who are investigating the death of their friend and its connection to a mysterious Web site that promised the change for the living to communicate with the dead. As the movie unfolds, it turns out that the site is allowing hordes of dead spirits to invade the world of the living, which in turn causes people to either commit suicide or simply vanish, leaving behind nothing but a shadow-shaped arrangements of ash. The heavy-handed message of Kairo was its metaphorical prediction that the Internet would inevitably cause people's sense of community to collapse. This would lead to an epidemic of depression and dispair as more and more individuals become separated from their fellow human beings because of too much technology invading our lives. Well, it's 2015, the Internet is as popular as ever,...

The plot device of time travel most commonly appears within the science fiction genre, imagining the possibility of a technology that would allow people to freely move forward and backwards through time. Yet when time travel appears in the horror genre in films such as Donnie Darko (2001) and Triangle (2009), the story sometimes ignores the technology idea and instead depicts a reality where warps in time are just random events that happen to hapless, unsuspecting victims. Such a view is a very unnerving one, that something as inescapable and inexorable as time can also be inconceivably unstable and that people can be sucked into parallel timelines or never-ending time loops without anyone else noticing. In the case of The Caller , a 2011 thriller directed by Matthew Parkhill, the story of horrible, unexpected things that can happen when the present unwittingly shares information with the past. The Caller focuses on Mary Kee (Rachelle Lefevre), a woman who just divorced her abusive ...

In case you've been ignoring American film releases since the beginning of the year, a horror film called It Follows became quite the hit among film critics when it was released last March, scoring a high 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes . I finally got the chance to see it last weekend and while I can see why critics were impressed by this film, I felt that the end result was less than the sum of its parts. Read on for my complete review. The plot of It Follows begins with teenage college student Jay (Maika Monroe) and the budding romance with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary). Shortly after their first sexual experience with each other, Hugh tells Jay that she has received from him a curse in the form of a supernatural, shape-shifting monster that will stalk her until it kills her. Relying on her friends for help, Jay is faced with a crucial decision: Does she spread the curse to someone else by finding a new sex partner, or does she confront the monster that is following her to see...