The first issue of Briar feels like something inspired by Fables or Once Upon a Time, however things take a decidedly dark turn. The idea is simple, what if Sleeping Beauty never woke up? Prince Charming married the sleeping princess for control of the kingdom and decades (centuries?) later the princess was awoken by a thief stealing whatever was left in the shambles of the castle.
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Not diverting too much from the formula of the original, Hocus Pocus 2 returns the Sanderson sisters (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy) back to Salem when someone lights a candle on Halloween. The movie plays fast and loose with the events of the previous film in what characters remember, playing up the same shock of the witches to the modern world as in the first film. The film focuses on the three actresses hamming it up again on-screen while a small population of the town becomes aware of them (despite their mass cursing and flying around all night).
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After picking up the pace and finally beginning the main story in the previous episode, Andor slows to a crawl again as we spend another full episode waiting for the mission to begin. The season’s fifth episode also spends more time with Mon Mothma‘s (Genevieve O’Reilly) family and with the disgraced Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) without advancing, or yet justifying, either of those subplots. We also check in with Imperial Security Bureau Supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) despite no progress being made in her investigation. If you are looking for the definition of a filler episode, you’ve found one.
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I’m not sure exactly how a low-budget horror flick about a puzzle box from Hell spawns a franchise of more than ten films, but here we are. Without the input of franchise creator Clive Barker, but still based on his 1986 novella, the 1987 film gets a reboot introducing Goran Visnjic as the rich douchebag attempting to use the box to achieve his dreams, with ghastly results, and a group of dumb and unlikable twenty-somethings (Odessa A’zion, Adam Faison, Drew Starkey, Brandon Flynn, and Aoife Hinds) who the box falls to six years later with equally horrific results (at least for the audience).
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Although both a critical and commercial failure during its initial release in the summer of 1993, Hocus Focus has earned a cult status on home video eventually spawning a 25th Anniversary Special in 2018 and a new sequel released on Disney+ in 2022. The goofy family-friendly Halloween tale features Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy hamming it up as sister witches accidentally resurrected one-hundred years later by a teen (Omri Katz) who didn’t believe in magic.
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