UPDATED 2/27: Due to a legal battle concerning Power/Rangers and the “official” Power Rangers movie still planned by Lionsgate, Joseph Kahn’s film has been pulled from YouTube and Vimeo. Producer Adi Shankar promises to fight this ruling. Read the original story below: Hollywood’s habit of rebooting campy old properties into “dark” and “gritty”, Nolan-esque movies has …
Thanks to the likes of James Wan, paranormal horror is all the rage. From Paranormal Activity to Insidious and The Conjuring, audiences are irretrievably hooked to tales of nuclear families being bloodlessly menaced by only-fleetingly-visible entities of malicious intent. What’s remarkable about Mike Flanagan’s Oculus, which follows his no-budget wonder Absentia, is how it manages to wring genuine dread from a beyond-worn subgenre simply by paying close attention to the realities of its deeply troubled characters. Oculus functions equally well as a tragic psychodrama as it does a horror film.
For a movie about a fearsome convict on the loose, one that’s the third entry in a series about said convict, and one that’s produced by the actor playing said convict, Riddick is awfully shy about letting its title character show up on screen as much as might be desired.
It will probably be one of those unsolved mysteries of the ages, like the Voynich Manuscript or the secret ingredient to Spam, how a third Riddick movie got made. The first installment in the now 13-year old franchise, 2000’s Pitch Black, is largely looked back on as being not bad, and its follow-up, 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick is remembered mostly for being terrible, and featuring Judi Dench in a rare career misstep.