13 Days of First-Time Frights: Near Dark Review

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #11: Near Dark

She's most well-known in the modern era for the kind of gritty dramas that led her to become the first woman ever to direct a Best Picture-winning movie (not to mention becoming the first woman to win Best Director), Kathryn Bigelow got her start as a filmmaker in the world of genre cinema. Thrillers, science-fiction fare, cop dramas, Bigelow did it all and in the process created a number of iconic movies, including Point Break. Her second ever directorial effort was Near Dark, a vampire Western horror film that also stands as one of her most stylized features even among her unabashedly over-the-top genre movie repertoire.

Predator 2 Is A Downgrade From Its Predecessor With Brief Bursts Of Delightful Goofiness

Each of the three Predator movies has been firmly set in the universe of the original Predator feature from 1986, but they've also all tried to go in their own different direction with brand new aesthetics and none of them retain characters from prior movies. That makes Predator an odd outlier in the world of Hollywood franchises that typically either constantly reboot things or cling onto mythology like there's no tomorrow. The film that established this as the go-to pattern for Predator sequels was 1990's Predator 2, which traded in Arnold Schwarzenegger for Danny Glover and moved the action from a remote jungle to the city of Los Angeles in the then-future year of 1997. 

Ya Can't Help But Believe In Aliens

James Cameron is about to spend the next eight years immersed in the world of Pandora creating four Avatar sequels, which, considering they just cast Cliff Curtis in a major role in said sequels, means it looks like these Avatar follow-ups are actually finally happening after nearly a decade of development. Cameron himself is no stranger to sequels having started his entire directorial career with Pirhana 2: The Spawning, a cheapie 1981 horror movie he directed with Ovidio G. Assonitis. A decade later he would helm Terminator 2: Judgement Day which is widely considered to be one of the best blockbusters of the 1990's. In between those two sequels though came Aliens, a direct follow-up to Ridley Scott's earlier Alien film.

Agents Of SHIELD: 5 Things I Like, 5 Things I Want Changed (The List!!!)

Spoilers for the first season of Agents of SHIELD, as well as Captain America: The Winter Soldier follow. 

Agents of SHIELD sure was a peculiar beast last season wasn't it? It entered the 2013-2014 Fall TV season with massive amounts of hype and debuting to gargantuan ratings. But ratings soon stabilized, and it wasn't hard to see why; moderately entertaining episodes started the show off, but soon the program became boring, infuriating and just plain dumb. Thankfully, the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier helped boost some energy into the show, and the episodes that followed that movie got progressively better and better, to the point where the season finale was a fantastic creation.

Still, the second season, which debuts on ABC this Tuesday, has a lot to do to prove that that season finale was no fluke. But I also don't want to be too much of a negative Nelly. So I've compiled a list of five things I do like about the show, but five things that need improving, stat!

Edge of Tomorrow Review

Those Mech-Suits they're wearing are awesome by the way

Few times in my life have I been more surprised then when I heard the good buzz for Edge of Tomorrow. Critics were loving the film, which looked like a Source Code knockoff. And yet, the buzz kept mounting, making its disappointing American box office all the more surprising (internationally, it's in much better shape) Plopping into my seat of my Monday night screening of the film, I was intrigued; would the film truly live up to it's lofty reputation?