******UNSETTLING SPOILERS!****** Made on a sub-shoestring budget between $750,000 (yes, thousand) and $1 million, the Universal-Blumhouse distributed “Obsession” debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last year, and was a huge hit. When it was released in the United States this past March, it did incredible business, making over 400 times its production budget, and becoming…
Month: July 2026
Remembering Sam Neill (1947-2026), an actor who effortlessly traversed between darkness and light…
After a wonderful weekend celebrating pop culture at a horror convention this past weekend, I woke up this morning to the terrible news that actor Sam Neill, whose work I’ve long admired over at least five decades, has passed away at age 78–an age that seems terribly young to me these days as I tentatively…
CreepIE Aftermath 2026 brings a Halloween chill to a warm summer…
Trick or Heat In 2022 a new horror convention called CreepIEcon came to the Inland Empire of SoCal (hence the capitalized “I.E”), and it was small but attracted a decent enough crowd to warrant a second show, called CreepIE Aftermath, in September of 2023. Now both shows have evolved to attract a larger talent pool,…
An X-ray look into “Superman Returns,” 20 years later …
******SUPER-SPOILERS!****** Growing up in the 1970s reading random Marvel comics books (“SpiderMan,” “The Fantastic Four,” “The Hulk”), I wasn’t much of a DC kid. Despite being old enough to have seen TV’s “Adventures of Superman” (1952-1958) in reruns (as did friends of mine), I never really got into it, and the only reasons younger-me ever…
Movie night in a historic 97 year-old SoCal theater…
“26 Miles Away…” In 1999, my wife and I honeymooned on Catalina Island off the Southern California coast, and we still have near-annual getaways there to celebrate anniversaries since. The island was sold to the Wrigley family (the chewing gum magnates) back in 1919, and was quickly turned into a famed movie location as well…
Personal Log: Telling it to the Mountain…
This column will not be a review or deep dive of a movie or TV series, but I wanted to give a heads-up to longtime readers that there’s going to be a minor change going forward with regards to reviewing content from Paramount+. This includes nearly all of the Star Trek TV shows and movies,…