Here’s the deal. I just realized I got all my requirements in for this year’s Hooptober by review #29. So rather than watch films I thought I needed, I picked two films I needed. As in, “my stress level is so high I just need some FUN” needed. And so I jumped in on something a lot of us who love this genre have been waiting literal years for: Macon Blair’s remake of the Troma classic The Toxic Avenger. Maybe it’s impossible for a film with such a history behind its troubled journey to the screen to live up to expectations, but you know what? I dug the hell out of it. Blair has written and directed not only a film that lives up to the original’s over-the-top squishy gooey effects and story, but it also pays beautiful homage in its style to the studio and its uniquely skewed perceptive.

Reviews

Hooptober 12.0 – Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)

Being Film #10 for Hooptober 2025

I typically don’t hold out a lot of hope for sequels, especially 80s sequels to 80s movies that were themselves comedic reboots of older films. But somehow despite the loss of Dan O’Bannon Return Of The Living Dead Part II not only works as a worthy successor, it leans into the ridiculous in such a way that I was laughing out loud when I wasn’t outright groaning. But even those groans were good-natured, making me nostalgic for a time when seemingly every 80s film looked and sounded like this one. How do you get nostalgic watching a film you’ve never seen? Because I’ve seen a variation of this films dozens, hundreds of times in my childhood. So sure, this might be technically worse than a lot of other films I may see this marathon. But it’s also guaranteed to have been more fun, too.

ChrisSeptember 22, 2025Leave a comment

Features, Reviews

Criterion Catch-Up: The Awful Truth (1937)

Watching Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth I was brought back to those weekends with my dad. He passed down to me my love for Cary Grant, watching films like Father Goose and Mr. Lucky and North By Northwest. We had nothing else in common, so I clung to those stars and movies and absorbed them like a sponge, hunting them out so I could ask … Continue reading Criterion Catch-Up: The Awful Truth (1937)

ChrisJanuary 16, 2022November 6, 2022Leave a comment

Cinema Dual (TEST SITE)

Examining a life through the media we consume. In other words, I’m reviewing all of my physical music media in alphabetical order, one day at at a time. Except when I don’t, as has been the case for the past few years. Still, we march onwards…Coffee essential, but not mandatory

Tag: comedy

Hooptober 12.0 – The Toxic Avenger (2023)

Hooptober 12.0 – Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)

Criterion Catch-Up: The Awful Truth (1937)