Conventional wisdom would have you believe that the word “sucker” is spelled S-U-C-K-E-R, but I’m here to tell you, friends, that simply isn’t the case. “Sucker,” you see, is actually spelled R-Y-A-N.

Honestly, I have no one to blame but myself : when a new foreign “found footage” horror flick — from Ireland, in this case — shows up on Netflix, my instinct compels me to give it a shot even though I know that it’ll probably suck. We all have our unhealthy obsessions, and these sorts of films are mine — which would cause any reasonable person to conclude that I must be a glutton for punishment, I suppose, but in my own defense, once in awhile a Die Prasenz comes along that makes enduring all the Archivo 253s and what have you worth it. Unfortunately, 2015’s Invoked, which I just caught last night (and is also…

Question : you’re a comic book publisher and you’ve got yourself a high-profile “superfan.” What should you do about it?

Answer : if you’re DC, and said fan is Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance fame — who interned at your offices and was planning on pursuing a career as a writer and/or artist on your books before his band went and got famous — you give him not just a series, but an entire fucking line. For developmental guidance you pair him with veteran Vertigo editor Shelly Bond (who has since, sadly, left the building), but by and large you leave him to his own devices and let him come up with whatever it is that he comes up with. The end result? A new imprint semi-mysteriously called DC’s Young Animal. Its first title? A(nother) re-imagined take on the original misfit super-team : the one, the only — 

Truth be told, I almost passed on this one when I saw it on the new release shelves last week. Image Comics first issues are a dime a dozen these days, as anyone can tell you, and while I’m marginally familiar with the work of writer Jim Zub, artist Djibril Morissette Pham is a name that’s entirely new to me. It was the pull quote from former Vertigo head honcho Karen Berger on the back cover of Glitterbomb #1 that convinced me to give it a whirl — after all, if it’s good enough for Ms. Berger, it should be good enough for me, right? Well, I’m glad I took her advice, because this book is considerably more than “good enough.”

Hollywood is always a target ripe for commentary of the seething and hard-hitting variety, vacuous wasteland of the talentless and over-privileged that it is, and Zub’s aim here appears…

By and large, most of the horror offerings to come out of Spain in the wake of that country’s post –[REC] genre boom have been hit-or-miss affairs in and of themselves that tend to offer more by way of visual and thematic than actual storytelling interest, but stripping things away and getting back to basics can sometimes yield interesting results, and it doesn’t get much more basic than the set-up offered by director Rafa Martinez (who also co-wrote the script along with Angel Agudo) for his 2015 low-budgeter, Sweet Home (now available via Netflix streaming; no word yet, at least that I know of, on a Blu-ray and/or DVD release in the US) : young real estate agent Alicia (played by Ingrid Garcia Jonsson) happens upon a seemingly-abandoned apartment building and plans a romantic late-night rendezvous there with her boyfriend, Simon (Bruno Sevilla). What they don’t know, though, is…

I admit, when I first saw 2016’s The Curse Of Sleeping Beauty in the Netflix horror streaming queue (it’s not yet available on Blu-ray or DVD but did, at least according to the poster, receive a theatrical release — somewhere), I assumed it was a product of The Asylum, given that they have a penchant for cranking out low-budget Brothers Grimm-based crap. They’re not the only ones doing so these days, however, and it turns out they’re innocent of the charge of having anything to do with this one, as well — which is, believe it or not, kind of a pity, since then it would have had a chance to be of the “so bad it’s good” variety. Instead, this filmed-on-the-cheap-in-the-Philippines snoozer from director/co-writer (along with Josh Nadler) Pearry Reginald Teo doesn’t manage to pass “go” and collect its $200 and remains firmly in the “so bad it’s still…

When a horror flick advertises the fact that its writer/director tandem (Jay Lender and Micah Wright, if you must know) has previously worked on Call Of Duty : Black Ops II and Spongebob Squarepants  you know you might be in for something a little bit different, I suppose, and 2016’s They’re Watching (now streaming on Netflix and coming next month on Blu-ray and DVD), despite being yet another entry in the “found footage” genre, is certainly that. Lender and Wright both have a background in comic books, animation, and video games, and bring a definite comedic and OTT sensibility to the proceedings here, but be forewarned — if you’re looking for a traditional scare flick, this is anything but.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Despite some questionable tonal shifts and beyond-dodgy FX work, I found Lender and Wright’s low-budget opus to be reasonably entertaining throughout and a solid send-up…