FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

So, Scary Movie is back. Not that it was ever really gone, just quietly buried under a heap of cheap direct-to-video sequels and PG-13 rated cash grabs. This latest incarnation is properly a theatrical release, however, and it sent the Wayans brothers back to their old stomping grounds. Depending on how nostalgic you are for the crude, lewd, and generally ill-advised late ’90s/early 2000s era comedies, this news either thrilled you or made you groan in existential dread. Either way, this particular iteration of Scary Movie has already seen its theatrical run and has since become available on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. I have to admit that hearing about this reboot made me skeptical. The horror parody subgenre has long since dried up and blown away with the tailwinds of the Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans era. The very concept of a “modern” horror movie is now one of those painfully self-indulgent pop culture touchstones which makes anyone who grew up during its peak cringe with every new en...

If you followed the hype building up to the release of Boots Riley's I Love Boosters, you already knew what you were getting in or out of at least; Riley doesn't make polite films that politely sit inside their shelf while he folds laundry. Just as Sorry to Bother You, this film is loud, angry, ridiculous, and uncompromising. Now that NEON has announced the official 4K UHD release, we have a chance to see how the home video package fares. Physical media collectors can be reassured by how NEON has dedicated itself to the audiovisual presentation and disc bonuses. The plot summary as seen on paper is simple enough. Riley, the film's main attraction, takes it into some strange and specific direction that involves professional shoplifters known as boosters. These boosters aren't boosting groceries from big box grocery chains to afford a home. They systematically steal pieces from luxury fashion houses, and then resell them along underground networks. It takes a turn for the...

  If you grew up in the eighties, the smell of plastic action figures stuck to your childhood. When Cannon Films decided to bring He-Man to the big screen in 1987, they were left making a ton of weird choices fueled by a shoestring budget, and an insane ambition. The result, Masters of the Universe, became an endearing, hilarious, and oddly charming hybrid of Star Wars, Jack Kirby comics, and eighties high school soap opera. Masters of the Universe was a box office disaster upon initial release, but it's since acquired a devoted cult following, and this 4K Blu-ray debut finally gives the film the physical media attention it needs. Packed with surprising special features, this disc gives the film the proper respect it's due for almost bankrupting the studio that released it. For first time viewers, or those that somehow missed it the first time around, Masters of the Universe jumps right into the action with the mad villain Skeletor (played with Shakespearean flair by Frank Lang...

Today on the show, I’m talking with director Padraic McKinley about his new film, The Weight, which lands in theaters nationwide starting today. The setup is pretty grim. It’s 1933 in Oregon, and a guy named Samuel Murphy, played by Ethan Hawke, gets ripped away from his daughter and tossed into a brutal work camp. The warden, played by Russell Crowe, offers him a way out: smuggle a haul of gold through a completely deadly stretch of wilderness for an early release. Naturally, the crew he's stuck with starts rotting from the inside with betrayal, and Murphy has to figure out just how much of his own humanity he's willing to trade off to actually see his kid again. It’s a desperate, messy story about desperate people, and Padraic and I break down how it all came together. Here is my conversation with Padraic McKinley.

Every decade or so, Hollywood decides the time is right to reinvent the absurd vehicle comedy. We've had runaway buses and subways and now we have Stop! That! Train!, a movie which takes an absurd premise so ludicrous a five year old could make up on the spot while eating sugary cereal and stretches it to a full ninety-eight minutes! Directed by Adam Shankman is the precise type of mid-budget studio comedy that used to dominate multiplexes on a random Friday in April. It does not attempt to rewrite the rules of high cinema, but rather to toss a wacked out mix of recognizable comic actors and fabulous drag performers onto a train going too fast and see who sweats off their makeup first before the end credits roll. The premise is as hilariously straightforward as you'd expect. We follow a disgraced former transit authority engineer who happens to be riding a commuter train on the exact day which a bizarre computer glitch or disgruntled villain sabotage renders the breaking system...

There was a period in the early 1980s when college campuses in movies were lawless microcosms; before every square inch of a university was watched over by omnipresent surveillance or bogged down by hyper-connected modern anxiety, you could run around a quad at two in the morning playing elaborate live-action assassination games with dart guns without instantly getting swatted. TAG: The Assassination Game (1982) encapsulates that period, it is not a pretentious cinematic statement and it is certainly not an transformative work, rather it is a slightly goofy, surprisingly tense budget thriller about kids taking a silly game too seriously until one of them snaps and starts using real bullets. The movie was directed by Nick Castle who most horror fans know best as the physical presence behind Michael Myers in John Carpenter's original Halloween, but you can see he learned a lot while working on set and understands how to use shadows, how to frame a hallway to look threatening and how ...

If you spent any reasonable amount of time lurking in the horror aisles of mom-and-pop video stores back in the VHS era, you definitely know the original cover art for Graduation Day. It had that wild, arresting close-up of a terrified woman's face with an axe shattering right through glass, anchored by that bold red title text. It was pure slasher gold, the exact kind of sleeve art that practically begged a bored teenager on a Friday night to shell out three bucks. The actual movie, as is often the case with early 80s regional schlock, doesn't quite match the insane intensity implied on the box, but it's got a weird, chaotic charm that makes it hard to completely dismiss. Released in 1981, right in the thick of the post-Halloween gold rush, Graduation Day tries to do a few different things at once and mostly stumbles through all of them. The setup is straightforward enough: a high school track star named Laura suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack right after winning a 100-...

Jon Favreau’s 2001 directorial debut Made belongs to a very specific niche of early 2000s independent cinema. With the massive success of Swingers five years earlier, expectations from distributors and viewers alike were set to a completely different level: a Swingers 2, featuring even more rapid-fire Vince Vaughn and hyper-specific Los Angeles slang. What Favreau delivered was almost an anti-buddy comedy, a cringy, stressful, and utterly hilarious experience of two lowly henchmen attempting to act like big-time mobsters in New York City. Made is a prime example of the collaboration between Favreau and Vaughn before both became mega-stars, getting absorbed by massive studio franchises. It is a slightly crude, occasionally infuriating, but ultimately hilarious slice-of-life comedy about friendship and the unwillingness of one half of it to grow up. The Film Made is a relatively simple story. Bobby (Jon Favreau), an amateurish boxer and lowly enforcer for the local Los Angeles crime boss...

  Welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. On this episode, I’m sitting down with director Todd Stephens to talk about Gypsy 83: The Director’s Cut, which is back in select theaters right now for its 25th anniversary. If you grew up in the late 90s or early 2000s, there's a good chance this one has a special place on your shelf. The story centers on two Sandusky, Ohio goth misfits and massive Stevie Nicks superfans: Gypsy Vale, played by Sara Rue, and her younger, queer best friend Clive Webb, played by Birkett Turton. When they hear about a "Night of 1000 Stevies" event happening at a club in New York City, they pack up their black eyeliner and hit the road, fully convinced this is Gypsy’s big break. The film co-stars John Doe from the legendary punk band X, plus the iconic Karen Black playing a washed-up lounge singer. Todd Stephens basically took the standard coming-of-age road trip formula, flipped it on its head, and handed it over to the weird kids and outsiders...