Zach Cregger, the guy from the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know who suddenly became a horror auteur with BARBARIAN (2022), is back with his ambitious followup. Cregger has mentioned being inspired by MAGNOLIA when trying to explain what he’s doing here, which might sound kind of ridiculous, but it makes it fitting that it’s New Line Cinema putting a whole lot of faith in a promising new director. Pretty big budget, final cut, advertising based on mystery and “from the director of BARBARIAN,” and they even gave it an IMAX release! But I think their confidence is warranted.
The only thing we really knew about from the somewhat cryptic trailers is a mysterious event explained in the opening by a child narrator (reminded me of SHOGUN ASSASSIN). One night at 2:17 AM in the small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, seventeen kids get up out of bed, run out their front door into the night and don’t come back. The weirdest part is that they’re all in the same class, taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE). So when she comes to school the next day only one kid is there, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). Since nobody can figure out what the fuck happened some of the parents, especially Archer Graff (Josh Brolin, THRASHIN’), assume Justine had something to do with it. She’s getting harassing phone calls, threatening knocks on the door at night, her car vandalized, and she has no teaching to do. Things are not going great for her. (read the rest of this shit…)
So far I have watched all the Marvelous Cinematical Unabomber motion pictures and related Disney+ streaming television works, and I have enjoyed the majority of them. But fuck all that. What’s important here is that DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS is the first movie Sam Raimi has directed since OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL nine years ago. I liked it quite a bit more than that last one, but my feeling about it is kind of similar: it’s just fun to see him working on a giant canvas, putting his spookablastian spin on this other thing, even though I’d much rather see him working with his own creations.
MCU movie #28 with Raimi’s fingerprints all over it is not as good as, say, an original western with Raimi’s fingerprints all over it, let alone an original comic-book-inspired character he made up, but it is, at times, thrilling. MULTIVERSE opens mid-battle as ex-surgeon-turned-ex-Sorcerer-Supreme Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, the guy in the dragon costume in THE HOBBIT) and a teenage girl named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez, SHADOW WOLVES) are super-leaping across chunks of debris floating in space while a tendril-covered demon blocks access to a pedestal holding a magic book called the Book of Vishanti. It’s the good counterpart to the evil Darkhold, which in this context suddenly I realize is the MCU equivalent of the Necronomicon. They’re leap-frogging and parkouring and the camera is deftly moving around them in impossible ways, a natural evolution of all the groundbreaking web-slinging sequences in Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN trilogy. (read the rest of this shit…)
RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON is the new Disney animated feature – the computer animated type they’ve been doing since TANGLED. This one is certainly in the Disney mold, and technically about a princess, I guess, but it’s not a musical. It’s a fantasy action adventure set in a mythical ancient kingdom called Kumandra.
Raya (Kelly Marie Tran, THE LAST JEDI) narrates a prologue explaining the whole deal. People and dragons used to live together in Kumandra (cool!) until these fucking pricks called the Druun, who are basically whirlwinds of smoke and chaos, rolled in and turned all the people to stone. The dragons used their magic to create an orb that saved the humans and expelled the Druun, but that turned all the dragons to stone. The humans were saved but fought over the orb and divided into trabies called Fang, Heart, Spine, Talon and Tail, named after their respective regions along a dragon-shaped river.
500 years later young Raya’s dad Benja (Daniel Dae Kim, HELLBOY), the chief of the Heart tribe, trains her in martial arts and acrobatics to protect the orb. She also has an adorable animal pal called Tuk Tuk (voice of Alan Tudyk I, ROBOT, but don’t worry, he doesn’t talk) who’s like a cross between some furry marsupial and a potato bug – he folds into a ball and rolls around to help her. (read the rest of this shit…)
GEMINI MAN is your traditional “the greatest assassin anybody ever saw decides to retire and then god damn it I thought they loved me but they’re sending a guy to kill me what the fuck” type scenario. The gimmick is that the guy they send after him is a younger version of himself created through the miracle of cloning. He figures this out a good third or more into the movie, but we know from frame one because of the studio’s decision to advertise the film.
Will Smith (“Nightmare On My Street”) plays both extreme retiree Henry Brogan and the facial expressions of the very advanced digital animation character playing his clone. Junior, as he’s called, gets dispatched after Henry’s Old Buddy From the Marines Jack (Douglas Hodge, THE DESCENT PART 2) and Russian operative Yuri (Ilia Volok, AIR FORCE ONE) tell him that that last guy they had him kill, the terrorist, was actually an innocent scientist being eliminated as part of a cover-up. When Henry hears this information he looks up to the clouds just as the lite on a satellite blinks, but it’s only to tell us someone heard this. He doesn’t seem to figure it out himself.
He does catch on that the new manager at the docks where he keeps his boat is really a D.I.A. agent sent to keep tabs on him. He asks Dani (Mary Elizabeth Lucy McClane Winstead, BOBBY) on a date, maybe just to get her to admit she’s spying on him and convince her he’s not a threat. But when some dudes try to kill both of them they end up on the run together. They head to Colombia to meet up with his Old Agency Friend turned small plane pilot Baron (Benedict Wong, LARGO WINCH). (read the rest of this shit…)
In his latest vehicle, the King of DTV Action Scott Adkins plays “Lucian / Strong Zealot,” the right (or possibly left) hand man to a dark master of mystical world-bending sorcery magic spell power beams named Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen, VALHALLA RISING). Kaecilius was once a student of The Ancient One (international martial arts superstar Tilda Swinton, CONSTANTINE) but now suspects she is siphoning dark magic to extend her life and therefore steals a magic ritual from a special book of ancient something something, etc. So Lucian / Strong Zealot and another person are sent after The Ancient One’s new student Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, WAR HORSE) to try to destroy his magic apartment in New York and they have a fight in a hospital where they’re both ghosts but it’s kind of weird because (SPOILER IN FIRST PARAGRAPH OF REVIEW) Benedict Cumberbatch defeats Scott Adkins.
And Scott Adkins as “the ghost of one of the minions.”
Okay, the truth is this is not a Scott Adkins movie. His character is small enough that when his big scene is described in an Entertainment Weekly article they don’t bother to credit him. It’s weird that as Marvel Studios continue to build this vast universe of re-usable characters they chose to use
1) Idris fucking Elba as “magic bridge operator”
2) Ray god damn Stevenson as “one of Thor’s friends that he has back home”
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Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
The Allusionist on Deathstalker (2025): “The Astron-6 guys have been pretty hit or miss for me, but I was surprised to find myself enjoying this…” Nov 28, 19:01
Inspector Hammer Boudreaux on Deathstalker (2025): “IMHO all five of the Deathstalker movies are in continuity, and it’s all the same character with a new actor…” Nov 28, 12:13
Steven E on Deathstalker (2025): “@ben If you’re on a Conan rip off kick, have you seen Fulci’s CONQUEST? Watched a low res YouTube rip…” Nov 28, 03:39
Ben on Deathstalker (2025): “This movie has gotten me to go back and watch some of the old conan rip off fantasy movies like…” Nov 28, 00:19
juicywoowoo on One Battle After Another: “So first off, I stumbled on your site a couple hours ago for the first time and have been happily…” Nov 27, 19:26
Steven E on Deathstalker (2025): “Can’t agree it is better than Deathstalker 2 – but for me D2 is a perfect movie. It makes me…” Nov 27, 16:02
Miguel Hombre on Frankenstein (the 2025 Guillermo del Toro one): “A bit of early Christmas news: apparently GTD has confirmed on Twitter (a strict no go zone for me) that…” Nov 27, 08:51
Muh on Deathstalker (2025): “This is fun stuff. I wonder what the budget was…it’s clearly lower budget in terms of Hollywood movies, but like…” Nov 27, 06:45
Max K. on Deathstalker (2025): “Yeah, I liked this a lot. A put-upon badass in a fantasy setting is actually pretty original and Bernhardt really…” Nov 26, 23:20
Max K. on Christy (2025): “The armchair analysis on so many film’s financial prospects, well, it’s rarely ever conducive to any sort of good insight…” Nov 26, 23:03
Steven Edmondson on Sisu: Road to Revenge: “Wish I vibed with these but it doesn’t work for me. There’s something missing, I think the drama doesn’t connect.…” Nov 26, 14:34
Martijn on Ghost Killer: “I saw this at the Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam last year. It’s so much fun! Seeing her bicker with…” Nov 26, 11:58
Birch on Sisu: Road to Revenge: “I thought the first one was alright but the festival buzz was enough to get me to see this. I…” Nov 24, 17:02
Stu on Sisu: Road to Revenge: “Just got back from seeing it and I had a great time. The ratio of wincing at the violence to…” Nov 24, 16:10
Zach Cregger, the guy from the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know who suddenly became a horror auteur with BARBARIAN (2022), is back with his ambitious followup. Cregger has mentioned being inspired by MAGNOLIA when trying to explain what he’s doing here, which might sound kind of ridiculous, but it makes it fitting that it’s New Line Cinema putting a whole lot of faith in a promising new director. Pretty big budget, final cut, advertising based on mystery and “from the director of BARBARIAN,” and they even gave it an IMAX release! But I think their confidence is warranted.
So far I have watched all the Marvelous Cinematical Unabomber motion pictures and related Disney+ streaming television works, and I have enjoyed the majority of them. But fuck all that. What’s important here is that DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS is the first movie Sam Raimi has directed since 
RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON is the new Disney animated feature – the computer animated type they’ve been doing since TANGLED. This one is certainly in the Disney mold, and technically about a princess, I guess, but it’s not a musical. It’s a fantasy action adventure set in a mythical ancient kingdom called Kumandra.
GEMINI MAN is your traditional “the greatest assassin anybody ever saw decides to retire and then god damn it I thought they loved me but they’re sending a guy to kill me what the fuck” type scenario. The gimmick is that the guy they send after him is a younger version of himself created through the miracle of cloning. He figures this out a good third or more into the movie, but we know from frame one because of the studio’s decision to advertise the film.
In his latest vehicle, the King of DTV Action Scott Adkins plays “Lucian / Strong Zealot,” the right (or possibly left) hand man to a dark master of mystical world-bending sorcery magic spell power beams named Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen, 
