VERN'S REVIEWS on the FILMS of CINEMA
home of Vern, critic and author
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Latest posts
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A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (39th anniversary revisit)
To quote Bushwick Bill, this year Halloween fell on a weekend. I’m sorry that I’m a few days late on my annual essay, but it’s like I always say: the veil should logically be just as thin a couple days after Halloween as it was a couple days before. So if we’re celebrating all…
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Silent Hill (20 years later)
For two decades, as a non-gamer, I have believed that Christophe Gans’s SILENT HILL is the best video game movie. I have a friend who likes the games and thinks it’s a good adaptation, but that was never a factor for me. I just thought that whatever they were doing as far as…
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Wildwood
I’m sorry to interrupt the Halloween week horror programming, but it would be negligent not to write about a unique theatrical experience that may pass you by soon: the extravagant stop motion fantasy WILDWOOD. Director Travis Knight (KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS), writer Chris…
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Clayface
CLAYFACE is the latest motion picture from the Detective Comics movie universe. It’s set mostly in Gotham City, retelling the origin of one of the great Batman villains, but it’s R-rated horror, and not much like a comic book movie, for good and bad. The good – it stands…
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Blood Frenzy
BLOOD FRENZY (1987) was a perfect Slasher Search suggestion from Mr. Majestyk. It’s exactly the type of movie I was digging through for years and I don’t know how I missed it, since it’s one of the remaining VHS tapes in the “Stalkers and Slashers” section at Scarecrow Video. My…
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Street Fighter (2026)
STREET FIGHTER (2026) is the new film based on the Street Fighter video game franchise. I have less of an affinity for Street Fighter than Mortal Kombat since it’s not one of the few games I’ve played, but come on. Larger-than-life characters who live to engage in martial arts…
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Hallowarrior / Bloody Tennis
As usual October is passing me by and I feel like I’ve barely started with the horror movies. But also as usual I’m gonna watch them year ‘round anyway so what am I worried about? Stay tuned for many more, but today I’m dipping into two new releases on Shudder. I wanted to watch…
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Pulse (2001)
I finally watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film PULSE (Kairo). I don’t think I’ve seen any of this acclaimed director’s 30+ films, but this is the one people seem to mention most. And I get it now. There’s something very distinct about the potency of its forlorn, foreboding mood…
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Psycho Killer
PSYCHO KILLER (2026) was written by Andrew Kevin Walker (BRAINSCAN, David Fincher’s THE KILLER), so obviously it was advertised as “FROM THE WRITER OF SE7EN.” But it’s not that type of movie. It reminded me more of HIGHWAYMEN – an odd, mostly quiet, sometimes audacious serial…
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V/H/S/Mixtape
The V/H/S brand property franchise has been going for 14 years now. Its previous entries are V/H/S, V/H/S/2, V/H/S: VIRAL, V/H/S/94, V/H/S/99, V/H/S/85, V/H/S/BEYOND, V/H/S/HALLOWEEN, and also a “Snapchat-released miniseries” called V/H/S: VIDEO HORROR SHORTS. But until the new…
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Office Killer
Cindy Sherman is an artist known for her photographic self portraits. A bio on the Museum of Modern Art websight calls her “among the most significant artists of the Picture Generation, who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with…
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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
“What the fuck was our daughter doing in a 3,000 year old sarcophagus!?” Yeah, I know, it’s real funny that LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY is called LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY. I’m not normal, so I saw that title and knew Lee Cronin was the director of an okay movie called THE HOLE IN THE…
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Ogroff
Here we go with another October, and another struggle to continue the tradition of Slasher Search in some way. The shadowy corners of the shelves have been excavated, the bottoms of the barrels have been scraped squeaky clean, and I don’t know where else to look for vintage…
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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
The unanswerable question: is it called READY OR NOT: HERE I COME, or READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME? Depends if you ask the opening credits or the closing credits. I guess we get to pick. Would you believe there was a seven year gap between this sequel and the first READY OR NOT?…
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M.F.A.
M.F.A. has a series of murders in it, but it doesn’t have the atmosphere of a horror movie like I would usually review this time of year. I’d say it’s closer to a thriller. It came out in 2017, I’ve been meaning to see it for a while, and unfortunately I was reminded of it […]…
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Backrooms
When BACKROOMS came out in May, I was annoyed by the hype. I kept seeing articles about the rise of “liminal horror” which, as far as I could tell, boiled down to people pretending to be afraid of hallways and empty malls. Like so many annoying things it was born on the internet…
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Obsession
Hey guys, just arrived at the OBSESSION discussion. Got held up by traffic. Is anybody still here? Hello? Yeah, this movie made by some fresh-faced twenty-something Youtube guy named Curry Barker for less than a million dollars made $519 million in theaters alone. Stuck around…
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Fly Away Home (30th anniversary revisit)
FLY AWAY HOME is one of the great PG-rated movies of 1996, and a true family film as opposed to one for kids. It’s for all ages, because it’s about cute animals, but also a 13-year-old girl trying to find herself after life-shattering loss, but also an eccentric adult trying to…
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The Surfer
THE SURFER is one of the movies from recent years that I’ve meant to get around to because it seemed like a promising Nicolas Cage role. It’s from the Irish director Lorcan Finnegan (VIVARIUM) and writer Thomas Martin, set and filmed in Australia, and Cage plays a guy who grew…
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She Rides Shotgun
A classic scenario: dangerous man and innocent kid on the road, her presence eventually reveals his soft side, as much as he tries to hide it. He learns from her and finds a purpose in protecting her. Some shit goes down and he tries to find redemption and we have a hard time…