I’ll be blunt — given what a mess otherwise-celebrated writer Gene Luen Yang made of things during his run on the “main” Superman title recently, I was initially in the “think I’ll pass on that” camp when I heard that his next project for DC would involve chronicling the exploits of the Man of Steel’s new Chinese counterpart/knock-off. The idea of a teenager given super-powers in a clandestine government-funded experiment sounded kind of played-out, as well, and the more I heard about it, the more I thought the book sounded like a loser.

But then a few preview pages began to leak online, and I had to admit that Viktor Bogdanovic’s art looked pretty good. The small sampling of the script we were able to glean from said pages read reasonably well. And hey, who knows? Maybe heavy-handed editorial dictates — always a strong possibility whenever supposedly-“reformed” serial sexual harasser/assaulter…

When it comes to the “found footage” horror genre, there’s really not much you can realistically ask for at this point, is there? 15 years into the ever-dimming past, “scare me” seemed a reasonable enough request; a decade back, “show me something new” would have sufficed;  five years ago, most of us were willing to settle for “at least do what you’re gonna do well.”

Today? Shit, I dunno — speaking personally, I’d say that I’ve been worn down to the point where “just don’t bore me to death” will do the trick. So when something like 2015’s ultra-cheap German “shaky-cam” flick Die Prasenz (or, as you’ll see it listed on Netflix right now should you care to look for it, The Presence — oh, and it’s most likely also available on Blu-ray or DVD depending on which part of the globe you call home) comes along and actually proves…

Late last night my seemingly endless quest to find you, dear reader, the at-least-occasional undiscovered gem among current Netflix horror offerings brought me to a mostly-unassuming, quite-obviously-low-budget Australian indie number from 2015 entitled The Pack (which I’m guessing is probably also available on Blu-ray and DVD if you must go that route), the brainchild of director Nick Robertson and his screenwriter, one Evan Randall Green, that marks yet another entry in the “nature’s fury unleashed, subgenre : wild dogs” category that we see from time to time and that, let’s be brutally honest, probably has nothing especially new, per se, to offer audiences. But hey — that doesn’t mean that it can’t tread its patch of well-worn ground reasonably effectively, does it?

The premise here is about as basic as you’d expect : struggling family farmer Adam Wilson (played with requisite stoicism by Jack Campbell) and his supportive-perhaps-to-a-fault…

Once in awhile a documentary comes along with such a bizarre, out-of-left-field premise that it proves the old adage that reality is, indeed, stranger than fiction, and Tickled, a new one in theaters now that comes our way courtesy of the New Zealand directing tandem of David Farrier (a pop-culture correspondent for an Auckland television station) and Dylan Reeve (a techie-turned- research-guru-and-camera-operator), certainly fits that bill — but it also raises some reasonably thought-provoking questions in the minds of viewers, chief among them being “what, exactly, constitutes something as being pornographic?,” and “how far are some people willing to go in order to fuel their obsessions — and are those with greater financial means in a position to become completely swallowed up by them?”

I freely confess that I’d never heard of the so-called “sport” of — get this — “competitive endurance tickling” before seeing this flick the other…

It’s not every day that you find an unassuming, largely unheralded gem hidden deep in the Netflix horror section, so what the heck — when you do, in fact, stumble across one, it’s probably worth crowing about just a little bit, right? So allow me to introduce you, dear reader, to first-time director Leigh Janiak’s 2014 effort, Honeymoon.

Filmed in rural North Carolina with two British leads (not that you can tell, mind you — their American accents are flawless) for a reported $1 million, this flick is a perfect example of how much you can do with a small cast,  an insular location, a “been there, done that” premise, and what looks to be a rather short filming schedule, as long as you’ve got a director who understands how to build suspense, get great performances from their actors, and keep his or her audience on their proverbial…

Of all our shameful pastimes here in the US — and let’s be honest, there are plenty to choose from — trashing on immigrants has to rank right at or near the very top of the list, and given some of the headlines we’re seeing coming from Europe in recent weeks and months, it appears we’re not alone in being way less welcoming than we should be to our new friends and neighbors. You can toss all the tired arguments at me you want — “these people don’t speak our language,” “they come from a totally different culture,” “they don’t share our customs,” “they don’t understand how we do things here,” etc. — the simple fact is that the exact same thing was said about your Irish, German, Italian, French, etc. ancestors, and I bet that if they knew their family lineage would end up producing the same kind of…

Horror fans everywhere were reasonably enthusiastic at the prospect, first announced a few years ago now, of a newly-“reimagined” version of the classic TV series Tales From The Darkside being developed for the CW network under the creative guidance of up-and-coming author Joe Hill,  and why not? Hill comes from about as distinguished a genre pedigree as one can imagine, after all (in case you didn’t know his full name is Joseph Hillman King), and has some best-selling and critically-acclaimed novels of his own under his belt (one of which, Horns, was adapted by Alexandre Aja into a darn fine feature film), as well as a little comic-book series you just may have heard of called Locke & Key. Surely this would be a pretty good little show whenever it finally hit our screens, right?

Except, of course, it never did. Somewhere along the twisting, winding, perilous…

Question of the day : can an 86-minute movie totally redeem itself in the last 10 minutes? I confess I don’t know the answer myself, but director Eytan Rockaway’s 2015  indie horror The Abandoned (which played the horror film festival circuit, and even “enjoyed” a very limited theatrical run last year, under its original title, The Confines, before undergoing a name-change for Blu-ray/DVD and streaming service release via IFC Midnight) certainly comes pretty close. It gathers up a few too many strikes against it in the early going to completely pull its metaphorical fat out of the fire, it’s true, but if you do decide to stick it out to the end, you’ll at least give yourself the opportunity to see the best part, and who knows? Maybe you won’t walk away from it feeling your time was completely wasted.

I gave Rockaway’s obviously-low-budget little opus a go on…

Like you, I’m sure, I’ve learned to become more than suspicious of the Netflix “Recommended For You” list, and more often than not find myself wondering if whatever algorithm comes up with it really takes into consideration my prior viewing habits at all. Once in awhile, though — just once in awhile — the damn thing comes up trumps and scuttles my plans to quit paying attention to it altogether for at least a little bit longer. Last night was just such an occasion, as a 2015 indie horror flick from a director I’ve never heard of named Mike Testin found its way to the top of my recommendations and, having nothing else and/or better to do, I decided to give it a go, only to walk away from it 90 minutes later pleasantly surprised by the whole thing and reasonably eager to get off my ass and tell you…