The young-adult books of John Bellairs were, above all else, a way for the late author to indulge in his fondness for gothic mystery. Through nearly all of his 15 YA novels, the author installed regal cemeteries, ornate mansions, ancient tomes, and unnatural mist, all in service of eerie supernatural goings-on. These…
Striking the right tone for a family-friendly horror movie is tricky. You want it to be scary enough to freak out the big kids, but not so scary that the little ones cry and have nightmares for months. Steven Spielberg and his Amblin Entertainment banner arguably perfected the formula back in the ’80s with films like …
We’re less than a month away from the release of The House With A Clock In Its Walls, over-the-top horror auteur Eli Roth’s first foray into the world of PG-rated scares. It’s a pretty serious departure from (or, as he’d term it, evolution of) Roth’s signature style, an attempt to translate his love of horror into…
Eli Roth is the last person you’d expect to be directing a family-friendly fantasy adventure whose official description calls it “in the tradition of Amblin classics where fantastical events occur in the most unexpected places,” yet, here we are.
Having caught an advance screening of Death Wish last week out of pure morbid curiosity, we have to ask—did we watch the same movie as Eli Roth did? Because in a new interview with EW, the director of the Death Wish remake—in which Bruce Willis plays a successful Chicago surgeon who gets cucked when his daughter and…
Brian Garfield’s 1972 book Death Wish was written as a challenge to audiences. The impulse behind its premise is understandable, even sympathetic: A man craves revenge after his wife is killed and his daughter raped in a horrific attack. With the NYPD unable to catch the perpetrators and seemingly powerless against…
There’s bad timing, and then there’s releasing a new Death Wish movie right now. This slick, gory remake of the “classic” Charles Bronson vigilante potboiler was originally scheduled to open last November, before someone reasoned that a movie about an aging white dude on a rampage might not play so hot in the…
The Death Wish reboot has been a questionable idea since it was first announced two years ago—the first film of the original franchise might have had some critique of vigilantism nestled within all of the Charles Bronson shootings, but any ostensible message became more obscured with each sequel. At a time when the…
What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s staff and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on movies new and old.
The Death Wish remake moves the vigilante action from New York to Chicago, in what we hope is just a nod to the ending of the first film, and not some Trump fan service. But as we see in this first trailer, many of the original franchise’s markers remain otherwise in place—Paul Kersey’s (Bruce Willis) wife and…
Politics has fully permeated pop culture at this point, inspiring takes and riffs in everything from late night and Saturday Night Live to drawing the ire of a Modern Family writer. We’ve resigned ourselves to the idea that despite the fact that it’s ostensibly feeding the beast, even our wing of the media cannot…
Viewers who were getting ready to learn the Story Of Science Fiction as told by James Cameron will still be able to learn at the feet (or lens) of the Terminator creator, but they’ll now add that course to one of several. AMC’s just announced that Cameron’s docu-series will fall under the umbrella of its new …
This week’s question comes from A.V. Club contributor Mike Vago:
When Joe Carnahan left MGM and Paramount’s remake of the crude ’70s revenge thriller Death Wish, he did it with all the tact and good-neighbor diplomacy of someone calling the studio exec he was dealing with a “gutless turd.” Which is ironic, considering he was trying to bring a more thoughtful and meditative…
Now that ABC has snuffed the life from Uncle Buck with a snap of its fingers, it seems Mike Epps might be looking for a chance to exact some payback. Empire reports the comedian and actor has joined the cast of upcoming revenge-thriller remake Death Wish, possibly hoping director Eli Roth might cast a few network…
So there are a few question marks about this teaser trailer Eli Roth just unveiled on Twitter for a surprise new horror movie set in space that he’s made (is making?). While the idea of a new scary movie set in outer space is great—it’s a pretty small subgenre of horror, despite the long shadow that Alien has cast…
Bringing together two very disparate takes on human violence—one filled to the brim with wackiness, whimsy, and other words that start with “w,” and one so drenched in blood it needs a rusty grate in the floor to let all the viscera drain out—Variety is reporting that Jim Carrey and Eli Roth are teaming up. The duo…
As The A.V. Club’s Vadim Rizov pointed out in his Run The Series feature, the Death Wish movies start off unpleasant, and end up downright icky. Like it or not, it’s not the ’70s anymore, and rebooting a trigger-happy cultural relic like this one is a delicate prospect. What MGM and Paramount need is someone with a…
From YouTube upload to mega-budget superhero movie: That’s the unlikely career arc of writer-director Jon Watts. Before he made his Sundance breakthrough with last year’s Cop Car, and much before he scored the plum gig of helming the next Spider-Man, Watts collaborated with some NYU film-school buddies on a fake…
Horror lover Eli Roth is set to take on a classic horror staple: scary clowns. According to Deadline, Roth has made a new horror feature called Clown, which Weinstein Co./Dimension is rolling out in limited release on June 17. Clown’s origin story goes like this: A fan-made trailer went viral, and Roth saw it and…
Advertisement
