Image Credit: Everett CollectionWe’re here! It’s a week before Halloween, but the release of Paranormal Activity 2: Electric Boo!-galoo seemed like the perfect occasion to watch the 1982 ghosts-in-suburbia film Poltergeist. About a family being terrorized by a specter older than Arlen and scarier than Phil, the flick has given birth to endless quotable lines, childhood nightmares, and rumors of a curse. Directed by Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper, but kinda maybe really directed by 1941’s Steven Spielberg, it remains a classic of the genre and a good warning not to let your kids sit too close to the TV.
Darren Franich: The first 20 minutes are all slow-building suspense. There are dozens of perfect little details about family life, like the dad convincing the kids that the lightning isn’t so scary, or the wife smoking a joint while her husband reads a book about Ronald Reagan. Then these very subtle spooky things happen. Chairs move. A glass breaks. It feels like a movie powered by spooky suggestion — very Paranormal Activity-ish, in fact. And then a tree smashes through a window, grabs the young son, and tries to eat him. End of subtly terrifying portion of the film. READ FULL STORY »
What does it take to be the greatest film of all time? 
Sure, he was dating Madonna, but Warren Beatty’s life wasn’t perfect. The year was 1990. Beatty was coming off of Ishtar, a mega-flop and a rare misstep in a glorious career. The famous ladies’ man was still the portrait of Hollywood glamour — again, dating Madonna — but before Ishtar, he hadn’t made a film since 1981′s epic Reds. He turned to a curious labor of love: an adaptation of Dick Tracy, a 60-year-old comic strip about a lantern-jawed detective who fights magnificently ugly criminals. The timing was perfect: Tim Burton’s Batman came out the year before Tracy, and set a gold standard for comic book adaptations, merchandising, blockbuster promotion, and generally making a boatload of money off of comic-based movie with a tweaked approach to set design. Lest you doubt the connection, the two movies share a nearly identical Danny Elfman score. (Seriously, the dude just Xeroxed his Batman sheet music and made a couple changes.) With all this in mind, and in honor of this week’s release of two other movies directed by actors (Ben Affleck’s The Town and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Jack Goes Boating), we discuss that crime-busting, yellow-coated man with the two-way radio watch, Dick Tracy.
Kids, we’re going to the happiest place on earth: Tijuana! The year is 1965. The music is nonstop incredible. And the mission is simple: Losin’ It. There have been many comedies about teenagers desperately seeking sex — Porky’s, American Pie, this week’s new release 
George Clooney. Oscar winner, former People‘s Sexiest Man Alive, international superstar with a new movie in theaters, and, finally, star of the sequel to a no-budget movie about evil tomatoes that try to take over the world. Perhaps Clooney would like to forget that last title, or at least the mullet he sported for it, but we sure won’t let him. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the produce aisle, this week we’re taking a look back at one of the craziest and schlockiest horror-comedies of the 1980s, 1988′s Return of the Killer Tomatoes! Whether they’re vegetables or fruit, it’s pretty clear this film’s a bomb. But a bomb filled with mad scientists, product placement, sexy plant women, and vine-ripened hilariousness.
Surfers are dangerous. They have their own language. They carry automatic weapons. They look like the grunge-rock children of hippie communists. They do a mean Reagan impression. These are but a few of the lessons learned in Point Break, this week’s video-store necessity. (We are discussing it in honor of 
