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Bar-Bar-Bar-Barbarian Another day, another directorial debut. Today, I'm talking about Zach Creggar's  Barbarian , a truly scary thriller that successfully resurrects many of the tropes found in 1970's grindhouse cinema. Creggar, co-founder of the comedy sketch series, The Whitest Kids U' Know , also acted in TV sitcoms Friends with Benefits , Guys with Kids and Wrecked before switching gears in 2022, when he wrote and directed what proved to be his breakout film, Barbarian . An unlikely director of horror, Creggar has gone on to even greater success with the hits  Weapons (see my August 15, 2025 post ) and Resident Evil (released nationwide this past September).  Much like Weapons , in fact, the plot of  Barbarian  unfolds through the eyes of three very different characters. On a dark and stormy night (cue organ music), a young woman named Tess arrives in a sketchy suburban enclave of Detroit where she has booked an Airbnb the night before a major job inter...
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Maleficent Obsession  It is that time of year again and after jumping ahead to the spooky season with last week's post, I'm ready for a rip-roaring month of witches, ghosts, goblins and all-around weirdness. Today, I'm starting off with another young director's debut feature film, Obsession , released in theaters last May, and grossing a whopping $519m at the worldwide box office so far. 27-year-old Curry Barker, like Kane Parsons in my previous post, also began his career on YouTube. After moving on from his sketch comedy channel, Barker wrote and directed the 62-minute horror thriller  Milk and Serial in 2024 for a grand total of $800. Failing to find a studio willing to distribute his film, Barker uploaded it to YouTube where you can still view it for free. After going viral,  Milk and Serial garnered significant attention from Hollywood and, thus, led to the movie we're discussing today.   Owing a major debt to W.W. Jacob's 1902 short story, The Monkey'...
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Backrooms A little background on today's subject: Kane Parsons is a 21-year-old independent film director whose debut, Backrooms , skyrocketed to #1 at the box office when it opened this past May. As of this writing, the movie has grossed more than $400m since its release. Originally developed as a YouTube series (when Parsons was 17), Backrooms  quickly went viral, attracting the attention of several movie studio executives and industry luminaries, including Osgood Perkins (film director, and son of Anthony) and James Wan (architect of the Saw , Conjuring , and Insidious franchises), who signed on as producers of the film.  Initially I wasn't certain if I even wanted to write about Backrooms after viewing it. For one thing, I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about it. I'm still not 100% sure but I've somewhat come around in the past couple of days, now that I've had time to think about it. So, there is no "in-a-nutshell" way of breaking down what thi...
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The Shards According to Ryan Murphy   Oof! That was a rough one. After spending the last 5 weeks hatewatching Ryan Murphy's bastardization of The Shards ,  I have finally reached the conclusion of this limited series. Or maybe I haven't, who knows?  But we'll get to that later. First, let's get the obvious out of the way right up front: FX should have retitled this The Sharts  lest any unsuspecting viewers get the idea that it's a straightforward adaptation of Bret Eason Ellis's 2022 bestseller. It is not. In the Murphyverse, the book and the series are a mix-and-match mashup that is rarely harmonious.  Just a few years ago, I was praising the virtues of Bret Easton Ellis's new novel, The Shards    His magnum opus , I declared, a true masterpiece!   One of the 10 best books of 2022  ( see my post from Feb. 22, 2023) ! Receiving widespread critical acclaim at the time of its release, the novel is a sort of coming-of-age thriller about a...
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