Cinefantastique Online

News, reviews, interviews, retrospectives, and editorials that take you behind the scenes of horror, fantasy, and science fiction films

It’s the minions’ world, we just live in it… Gru’s rocky road to niceness… Never date the daughter of a supervillain…

From the luxurious Cinefantastique Online studios in NYC, Dan Persons brings you up-to-date on what’s happening in the world of genre media.

A quick fix for hardcore horror junkies, but not a sustained high
Despite initial reviews suggesting that V/H/S 2 had perfected the found-footage-anthology format pioneered by V/H/S, the sequel turns out to be mostly more of the same, offering only slight improvement over its predecessor, mostly in the form of reduced sexploitation. Once again, expert [...]

This low-budget 2012 horror film seeks to squeeze a few more pixels out of the “found footage” style by combining it with the anthology format. The result is consistently intense but inconsistently satisfying: the film-making is impressive, even innovative in its attempt to pack relentlessly downbeat horror into 20-minute packages, but the consequence is a narrative [...]

If you think that being trapped with  a bunch of guys telling dick jokes would the equivalent of Hell on Earth – well, according to THIS IS THE END, you are more right than you think – perhaps literally so. The vulgar humor of young guys who have yet to outgrow adolescence is shoved in [...]

Nolan, Snyder, and Goyer ground Superman in reality. But when something is grounded, can you expect it to soar?
If you want to know all you need to know about MAN OF STEEL in just over three minutes, Hans Zimmer’s theme music is a perfect synecdoche – a small part that effectively stands for the whole. [...]

Joanna Cassidy’s acting career has been long and diverse, encompassing a bit part in BULLITT, trading barbs with Dabney Coleman on BUFFALO BILL, and presently playing the overbearing mother of Dana Delany on BODY OF PROOF. But for most genre fans, she will always be Zhora, the snake-loving assassin/exotic dancer/replicant of BLADE RUNNER, as well [...]

THE PURGE is a tense thriller with a novel if incredible premise that combines bits of THE STRANGERS, PANIC ROOM, STRAW DOGS, the STAR TREK episode “Return of the Archons,” and Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (or at least an echo of the short story’s underlying concept, as inspired by [...]

Paul Naschy returns for his third outing as Waldemary Daninsky, the unfortunate aristocrat afflicted with the curse of lycanthropy. You have to give the old ghoul credit for trying so hard to squeeze a little more blood out of the rapidly shriveling corpse. THE WEREWOLF VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMAN (known as LA NOCHE DE WALPURGIS [...]

For close to forty years, the New York-based studio Troma has been a perverse, gory thumb in the eye of all that’s staid and safe in mainstream Hollywood. It’s co-founder Lloyd Kaufman has built a fan-base by directing such twisted, low-budget epics as THE TOXIC AVENGER, CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH, TROMEO AND JULIET and [...]

An extended “Unrated Edition” and a single bonus feature (30 minutes of “Recovered Files”) do little to enhance a sequel that seems to have given up the ghost.
When PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 appeared in theatres last year, it suggested that the franchise’s modus operandi had shifted from formula to template: whereas a formula allows for varying [...]

At first glance, it might seem touching that Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith would produce a movie in order to turn their son into a star; after all, what parent does not want a child to follow in his/her footsteps? On closer inspection, however, AFTER EARTH borders on child abuse. Expected to exude macho [...]

2013 is turning out to be quite the break-out year for actress Tatiana Maslany: Not six months into the thing, she’s already got several notable roles to her name. Of course, most of them are on the BBC America series ORPHAN BLACK, where she plays multiple clones, all with very different personalities and all of [...]

If you have never heard of KING OF THE LOST WORLD, you’re lucky – or at least you were, until you started reading this review. Sorry about that, but if I had to suffer through watching this movie, the least you can do is suffer the knowledge of the film’s existence. Just be thankful I [...]