Like a lot of you, I’m still pretty well numb with shock over what the hell happened last Tuesday night — and if you’re not, read no further since what I’ve got to say will just piss you off. Will we survive this mess? Do we even deserve to if our country is this fucking stupid? Both are questions none of us can answer right now — but when I ride the train to and from work and see the abject terror on the faces of my fellow Minneapolitans who happen to be Hispanic or Muslim, I know this country has taken a turn for the darker, and it’s going to be up to those of us with a conscience to make sure that our friends, neighbors, and family members all feel both welcome and safe in this new, reactionary America. The angry white males are back in the driver’s…

Let’s be brutally honest — Marvel hasn’t really known what to to with the character of Hawkeye since Matt Fraction and David Aja left the building. Their so-called “Hawkguy” run had it share of critics, to be sure, but by and large readers — myself included — loved the idea of Clint Barton as a street-level “man of the people” hero, and his next series couldn’t duplicate the prior one’s success, eventually succumbing to the twin pressures of both creative/editorial aimlessness and low sales. Another new monthly Hawkeye book is in the works — no shock there — but this one will feature Kate Bishop in the title role, with our guy Clint now at loose ends (and in less than a “good space” mentally) following his murder of Bruce Banner (yes, you read that right) in the pages of Civil War II. Enter writer David F. Walker, penciler…

In the DC Universe, the name “Vigilante” doesn’t signify a specific character so much as it does a handle : sure, Batman, Nightwing, and the like are vigilantes by trade, but the first person to specifically call himself Vigilante was the country-singing “motorcycle cowboy” Greg Saunders all the way back in 1941, and arguably the most well-known costumed crimefighter who adopted the title was district attorney Adrian Chase, a creation of Marv Wolfman and George Perez who took on bad guys who got off the in the courtroom during his off-hours beginning in 1982 and ending, in a stellar moment of inspiration for youthful readers everywhere, with his suicide several years later. Now, though, there’s a new bolo-swinging masked adventurer who’s apparently cut from the Chase cloth : meet failed- NBA-draft-choice-turned-college-campus-maintenance-man Donny Fairchild, who’s making his debut in the pages of Vigilante : Southland #1 just in time for 

Okay, this is it for me. One more sub-micro-budget flick from Hulu’s “horror and suspense” offerings, and I’m done. It’s damn near Halloween, and I’ve got the next couple of days off work and would like to spend them watching good, reliable horror staples that I know will entertain me. Trolling through stuff I’ve never heard of on Hulu in the hopes of finding some hidden gems has yielded decidedly more misses than it has hits, but no matter : it’s been an interesting viewing experiment, and even if I go back to “Netflix Halloween” next year, as is my custom, or give Shudder a go, or do something else altogether, this hasn’t felt like a complete waste of time on the whole.

Unfortunately, the final film I chose to watch as part of “Halloween On Hulu” — writer/director Lou Simon’s 2013 slasher Hazmat — proved to be exactly that.

Hey! Look what I found on Hulu! Another ultra-low-budget “found footage” horror flick about wannabe paranormal investigators! Let’s give writer/director Tedi Sarafian’s 2014 effort Altergeist a go and see if there’s anything that sets it apart from its legion of competitors, shall we?

Right off the bat the setting here is a winner — the purportedly haunted King’s Ransom Winery in northern California is a reasonably original (and equally reasonably atmospheric) one, that’s for sure, but that’s where any “newness” begins and ends with this film, as we’re introduced in fairly short order to the entire cast of highly derivative characters, all portrayed by obviously amateur actors who struggle to one degree or another : the winery’s owner, Ashen Till (played by David Weidoff) only closes down his operation for one weekend out of the year, and he’s agreed to allow our team of ghost hunters — consisting of pregnant…

I probably shouldn’t even try to review this, to be honest.

There’s such a thing, after all, as being too attached to something — and Love And Rockets, arguably the seminal independent comics series of all time,  has been part of my life since I first discovered it at age 12 and allowed brothers Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (heck, third brother Mario was even part of the mix back then) to expand my definition of what comics could both achieve and be well beyond my then-current preconceptions of the medium. And while there have been times when my interest in it has ebbed and flowed, it’s always been there. From its first magazine incarnation to the “solo” series that followed in its wake to its second iteration in standard comic-book format to its most recent version as a series of annual (or thereabouts) graphic novels, I’ve grown up —…

Maybe I’m just beaten down.

Like a stone weathered away to nothing by a constantly-running stream over time, I’ve absorbed so many third-rate “found footage” horror flicks in recent years — particularly in the past few weeks thanks to Hulu’s “horror and suspense” offerings — that anything even slightly more competent than the usual drivel starts to look like a work of comparative cinematic genius.

All of which, I suppose, is my way of saying that I know that writer/director Hunter G. Williams’ 2011 indie offering The Crying Dead (or, as it was known during production, The Whispering Dead — don’t ask me what prompted the last-minute, and frankly rather stupid, title change) really isn’t all that great — but damn, coming after to a lot of the absolute shit I’ve subjected myself to lately, it might as well be Citizen Kane.

Sure, every done-to-death cliche is present and…

One of the more interesting-sounding flicks I stumbled across in the “horror and suspense” section on Hulu right now, at least by my admittedly off-kilter standards, was the ultra-low-budget 2010 Canadian production Dead Genesis, a Romero-esque (minus most of the Master’s skill) socio-/politically- conscious zombie flick shot for 15,000 of those rather funny-looking dollars they use north of the border in and around Barrie, Ontario that admittedly was pre-destined to reek of amateurism but nevertheless seemed to promise more by way of thematic ambition than most essentially homemade numbers of this sort typically have the stones to even attempt, much less actively offer. I was also reliably informed by a handful of sources I trust that the opening scene was a real motherfucker, so what the heck — earlier today I decided to give it a shot.

The first thing worth mentioning, I suppose, is that, yeah —…

I’ll watch anything with Tony Todd in it. Even if he’s just got a few lines, you know they’ll be delivered with a soul-shaking, baritone, horrific gusto. He never half-asses it, our guy Tony, but let’s be honest: particularly in recent years, a number of the low-budget productions he’s been involved with have indeed been half-assed.

Which brings us to our latest “Halloween On Hulu” offering, a 2013-filmed UK number I found in their “horror and suspense” section last night called Dead Of The Nite. And I’m sorry, but this flick is just straight-up atrocious on pretty much every level.

Welcome to another “found footage” paranormal story! A crew of purportedly intrepid “ghost hunters” are off to investigate the infamous Jericho Manor, which has a standard-issue “haunted history,” and once they arrive to roll cameras for their internet “live feed” show, they’re informed by the caretaker (played by…

When a flick offers atmosphere but not much else, then it better offer a hell of a lot of atmosphere in order to rise above simple “well, that was a waste of time” classification. I’ll say right off the bat that 2015’s The Inhabitants — the brainchild or the writer-director tandem of Michael and Shawn Rasmussen — has plenty by way of atmosphere going for it, without question. But I’m not sure it has much to recommend in its favor beyond that — yet I’m not ready to call it a waste of time, either. So I guess it must have — what was that again? — “a hell of a lot of atmosphere,” indeed.

Crucially, that sense of atmosphere isn’t the by-product of accident, but of authenticity. Filmed at the historic Noyes-Parris House in Wayland, Massachusetts, this is a fairly simple tale about a husband and wife named…