Brian Collins's blog

Over the past decade, there has been a welcome shift in the use of CGI when it comes to low budget/independent genre films. As these tools got cheaper and easier to use, there was an unfortunate period where digital beasties were cropping up in productions that didn’t exactly have the resources to let them compete with the likes of ILM, but I’m happy to see that those sorry examples are becoming rarer.

Ever since Ridley Scott made the unprecedented decision to replace Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in All The Money in the World (just three weeks before the film premiered!), there have been countless jokes about the latter filling in for whatever performer was being unceremoniously removed from this or that film. Like most things, Twitter ran it into the ground, but it was still amusing in small doses; in fact it was only a week or so ago that someone joked he could replace Marilyn Manson on an episode of Creepshow.

Jamie Lee Curtis made three slasher films immediately after HALLOWEEN'S success in 1978 and 1979. The first was PROM NIGHT, a very dated and poorly paced movie that has more ironic fans (thanks, disco dancing Leslie Nielsen!) than legitimate ones. The most famous is probably 1981's HALLOWEEN II, which picked up directly after the events of the first film, which meant she spent most of the movie in a hospital bed. And then in the middle is TERROR TRAIN, probably the least seen of the trio but also - in my opinion - the best of them as well.

No one expects much out of a movie based on a video game, and even fewer would expect any such film to become a major franchise with almost as many entries as the game series that inspired it. But the Resident Evil films did just that; Paul WS Anderson and Milla Jovovich joined forces six times from 2002 to 2017, presenting an ever-escalating story about Alice (Jovovich) and her endless battles with zombies and other monsters that were spawned by the evil Umbrella corporation.

Horror fans like to laugh at the wacky turns taken in the Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises, with constant resets and retcons that have turned them into "Choose Your Own Adventure" style journeys. The truth is, neither of them have anything on the Amityville series, which consists of nearly thirty (!) official and unofficial films that have little to nothing to do with one another.