2.5 Razors

Basic Instinct

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Basic Instinct
  • IMDb: link

It’s hard to describe how big director Paul Verhoeven‘s stylish neo-noir was when it hit theaters in 1992. Splitting audience and critics, the controversial erotic thriller cashed in big at the box office (providing a boom for the genre that was never quite duplicated, despite many imitators) while stirring up controversy for from both the left, for its depiction of a bisexual woman as a nymphomaniac serial killer, and right with the kind of explicit sexuality usually reserved for softcore porn shown late at night on Cinemax. The film made Sharon Stone a star moving her on to bigger and better projects including being the rare woman to headline a western in The Quick and the Dead and a supporting role in Casino both just three years later.

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Final Destination

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Final Destination
  • IMDb: link

Flashback Friday takes us back 25 years to Final Destination. Filled with young stars of the moment, some of whose careers have turned out better than others, but not great dialogue nor acting, the 2000 horror film is nevertheless notable for its premise. At a time where slashers and monsters still owned the horror market, Final Destination offered something new with victims who escaped death, but still being marked for it, are attacked through elaborate sequences of inanimate objects moving themselves into a position to lead to to a grizzly end.

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Scream 4

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Scream 4
  • IMDb: link

Scream Sunday takes us back to the world of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in the worst movie (at least so far) of the 30 year-old franchise. The characters feel far too long-in-the tooth at this point as the film goes extra-hard with Stab parody sequel cameos (featuring the likes of Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell, Shenae Grimes, and Lucy Hale) and new Ghostface killings (this time with the killer filming their own murders) while limping to an unsatisfying twist ending that ties in social media feeding narcissism and fame-seeking without delivering a satisfying conclusion.

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Wonder Woman #19

/ / Comics

For the first time in this extended run pitting the Sovereign against Wonder Woman, other than the unnecessary Absolute Power tie-in,  it feels as Tom King and Daniel Sampere have made a misstep. Everything has led to this “conclusion” (which it turns out isn’t a conclusion at all) leading Diana to the White House and her confrontation with the man who has attempted to take everything from her. Although we get that scene, eventually, it’s not the focus of the issue in an oddly structured comic that just feels “off: from the get-go.

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Scream 3

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Scream 3
  • IMDb: link

Scream Sunday takes us back to when the franchise first hit its rough patch. Rather than offer another sequel, Scream 3 attempts to reshape the three Scream films into a cohesive trilogy retroactively allowing for the film to dive into new rules to abide and reframing the events of the original Scream to reveal a hidden backstory for Maureen Prescott with ties to all the murders. The film brings Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) out of seclusion to the set of Stab 3 (a movie supposedly about the Woodsboro murders making you wonder how the previous two movies, also about those events, didn’t already cover all of this?) where a new Ghostface (Roger Jackson) is killing victims in part to draw Sidney out into the open.

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