Water You Waiting For? Go See The Thoughtful And Engrossing Romantic Monster Movie Drama The Shape of Water

Fairy tales have always been used to impart larger ideas regarding the societies they originated in within the confines of something palatable to the general public and Guillermo Del Toro, a fellow whose filmography clearly indicates a love for fairy tales, has used his movies that are heavily informed by fairy tales of old as ways to explore all kinds of weighty ideas or societally relevant concepts. The Devil's Backbone is ostensibly a ghost story but it's also a tale of how people show off their true selves in times of war while his project most explicitly evocative of fairy tales, Pan's Labyrinth, is set in the real world conflict of the Spanish Civil War. Even his movies about robot and monsters punching each other takes time to demonstrate how walls dividing countries only create more problems, a concept that's become all the more relevant as the years go by.

The Scares Never Show Up In The Bye Bye Man And Neither Do Any Actual Positive Qualities

2017 has been "the best of times...the worst of times" for horror movies it seems. For every Get Out, It Comes At Night and It, we've also gotten utter dreck like Rings and Wish Upon. I foolishly thought those two films couldn't be beaten in terms of lowering the bar for horror cinema in 2017, but The Bye Bye Man somehow beats out a snooze-inducing Rings sequel to become the worst horror film of the year and possibly the worst 2017 movie that isn't 9/11. Not only is this a terrible motion picture but it's bad in amateurish ways that aren't particularly common among conventional theatrical releases in 2017.

Journey To A Captivating World In Pan's Labyrinth

Despite being a massive Guillermo Del Toro fanboy, I've never seen his 2006 feature film Pan's Labyrinth before, which I suppose is akin to being a massive fan of The Beatles while thinking Abbey Road is solely a road in London. Anywho, sitting down to watch this one was a fascinating experience in terms of placing it in the larger picture Del Toro's filmography, as his later films would carry over certain elements of Pan's Labyrinth, such as a period era setting that plays heavily into the story (Crimson Peak) and the heavy use of mythic fairy tale characters (Hellboy II: The Golden Army). It's apparent that the experience of Pan's Labyrinth left a profound impact on Guillermo Del Toro as a director.

Franchise Frenzy: Hellboy

In a recent Reddit AMA (that stands for Ask Me Anything), one of my favorite directors of all-time, Guillermo Del Toro, finally threw in the towel. He finally admitted Hellboy 3 wasn't happening. The reason wasn't for lack of trying, oh goodness no. The problem was that no studio was willing to finance the project, which required a massive budget to depict the apocalyptic scenarios that occured in Del Toro's proposed story for it.