Posts tagged with #mike

The 10 most important lessons from '80s vampire movies

By Guest Contributor | August 1, 2022

Once seen as dusty, old dental cases in frilly shirts who’d lounge in their coffins and listen to baroque between victims, vampires received a major makeover in the ‘80s. They rocked out to Bauhaus. They invaded high schools and suburbia. They wore an absolute ton of sunglasses. The decade brought a true resurgence and reimagining of the cinematic bloodsucker. For some, these movies were mindless entertainment. But for others—you know, the sort who just might happen to have waterproof roll ca

Every dinosaur in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies — ranked

By Guest Contributor | June 4, 2022

Note: This list was written before and does not include new Dominion dinos. There’s something about dinosaurs that just takes you right back to childhood. Both Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg cited their own childhood fascinations with dinos as what sparked their passion for Jurassic Park. It is pretty incredible after all to think that these beasts—both the gentle giants and not so gentle giants—once ruled the Earth. This summer’s Jurassic World: Dominion explores the tantalizing quest

The top 10 John Hughes movies

By Guest Contributor | May 17, 2022

There are some directors you think of when certain movie genres come up: Alfred Hitchcock mastered the psychological thriller, Akira Kurosawa cornered the market on the samurai epic, Sergio Leone dominated the spaghetti western—and John Hughes wrote the book on movies about teens. Of course, Hughes branched out into other genres too, including films about the holidays and live-action movies where a dog is the main character (it’s a bigger genre than you might think). But he’s definitely best k

Every theatrical Star Wars film — ranked

By Guest Contributor | April 12, 2022

Across four decades, three trilogies, 12 theatrical films, seven animated series, countless theme park rides, a holiday special, all kinds of continuation novels, and enough merchandising deals to fill the belly of a Sarlacc, Star Wars has pervaded pop culture like no film franchise before or since. Like Luke Skywalker looking to the stars and wondering what it would be like to sit in the cockpit of an X-wing, it all began as the dream of one man who thought it would be neat to mash up Akira Ku

Every theatrical Batman film, ranked

By Guest Contributor | March 3, 2022

Whatever name you prefer to call him by—Batman, the Batman, Batsy, the Caped Crusader, the World’s Greatest Detective, the Dark Knight, the Dork Knight, Beloved—Bruce Wayne’s alter ego has taken many forms over the years in his efforts to protect Gotham from clowns, plant ladies, and that one guy who just likes to shoot ketchup and mustard at people. Sometimes he growls incomprehensibly. Sometimes he ice skates. Sometimes he’s actually just LEGO bricks. But he always stands for justice and absol

The top 10 live-action fantasy movies from the ’80s

By Guest Contributor | February 2, 2022

With new advancements in special effects and the success of Star Wars in particular, studios and filmmakers turned their attention as they headed into the 1980s towards a genre of storytelling that has been entertaining audiences since time immemorial: fantasy. With special effects wizards who could now build life-sized dragons and artists who could make actors disappear beneath genuinely organic-looking makeup, the time was ripe for fantasy films to flood the market. Of course, not every fanta

The top 10 representations of nerds in cinema

By Guest Contributor | January 20, 2022

The Nerd has a long history in the movies, one that probably dates back to silent comedian Harold Lloyd and the bespectacled klutz he played in films like Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925). The term “nerd” was apparently first popularized in the mid-seventies by Happy Days when it was applied to literally everyone in the cast who was not the Fonz. The ‘80s turned out to be a kind of heyday for the cinematic nerd, but that may just be because fashion itself was pretty polarizing at the

The top 10 sweetest pads owned by James Bond villains

By Guest Contributor | December 2, 2021

From their laser beam tables to their bionic eyeballs to the fluffy white cats that sometimes follow them around, there’s never been anything subtle about Bond villains. That includes the lairs from which they conduct their dastardly business. In the latest (and last) from Daniel Craig, No Time to Die, Rami Malek’s villain du jour kicks it in a massive concrete island base that’s home to some of the world’s most toxic plants. Sounds like a great place for dispatching henchmen who have failed t

10 music videos that homage classic horror cinema

By Guest Contributor | November 17, 2021

Thanks to directors like David Fincher (Madonna’s “Vogue”), Michel Gondry (Kylie Minogue’s “Come into My World”), and Spike Jonze (Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” and Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”) the music video has been elevated to an art form—one that challenges filmmakers to tell a complete narrative and forcibly remove socks with masterful storyboarding within a mere few minutes. In many cases, music videos have become the fun-sized versions of their big-screen counterparts, and every artist

Top 10 kills of the Jurassic Park films

By Guest Contributor | November 9, 2021

For many, Jurassic Park brings to mind warm, nostalgic memories of graceful long-necked Brachiosaurs munching treetops or the InGen chopper soaring by pristine, green Hawaiian hills as John Williams’ iconic JP theme plays majestically. But as everyone’s favorite cynic Ian Malcolm points out in The Lost World, it’s all “oooh” and “awww” in the first act, and then there’s running and screaming. That’s what this list is about today: the running and screaming. From goat-swallowing T-rexes to ankl

The 10 most underrated films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

By Guest Contributor | November 2, 2021

I’ll admit something feels a bit oxymoronic about a list of the most underrated films of the MCU. From Star Trek to Star Wars, Marvel’s film franchise is about as popular at the moment as any ever has been and doesn’t show any sign of slowing soon. With the releases of the MCU’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Daniel Craig’s final run as 007 in No Time to Die, Marvel Studios has matched the total number of Eon’s James Bond films—and in a fraction of the time. Wherever your allegia

Top 10 spooky movies that are actually set on Halloween

By Classic Nerd | October 7, 2021

Halloween’s a pretty theatrical holiday. Maybe the most theatrical holiday. I mean, we carve faces in pumpkins and light them up with candles, dress our lawns with cardboard tombstones and cotton cobwebs and creaking coffins, and go out in elaborate costumes — or stay in and scare ourselves sleepless with spooky movies. It’s a little surprising therefore that there aren’t more movies that really push the actual holiday itself front and center. Sure, films like Ginger Snaps (2000) or Dark Night

10 movie aliens we wish really existed

By Guest Contributor | June 10, 2021

More often than not, movies depict aliens as monstrous beings out to destroy us, invade us, enslave us, assimilate us, or simply use us in ungodly experiments involving Chihuahuas. No question about it, when it comes to the pictures, aliens tend to get a bad rap. There are, however, those filmmakers who would have us believe something other than pure terror awaits us in the starry heavens. That aliens may even want to help us or teach us something, as opposed to spanning galaxies simply to try

Every Friday the 13th film, ranked

By Guest Contributor | October 19, 2020

There’s something about Friday the 13th… Friday the 13th certainly wasn’t the first of its kind. Well before 1980 you had a long history of slashers and proto-slashers from the likes of Hitchcock, Bava, Fulci, Argento, Canada… Friday the 13th’s writer Victor Miller was even given the explicit order to go to a screening of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and to write that, in the process unknowingly setting in stone just about all of the tropes we know the genre for today. But Friday the 13th

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