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I really hope that Tyson is getting a hefty sum for this series. It is the only justification I can come up with for him being part of a series that does not cast his intelligence in the best light. A cross between Scooby and Family Guy in my opinion, Tyson leads a cast that includes his adopted Asian daughter, a ghost (and that’s not the weirdest member), and a talking pigeon as he travels around the world solving mysteries. Yes, you read correctly, mysteries. When it comes to needing a mystery solved, Tyson is not the first name to come to mind, but I suppose that was the point.

Based on what I gathered from the first episode, former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson (voiced by the champ himself) forsakes the boxing gloves after being approached by a ghost who advises him to give up violence and dedicate himself to helping those in need. I cannot make this up. Tyson receives messages via carrier pigeons from citizens that need help solving mysteries. With the help of his adopted Asian daughter, the ghost, and an alcoholic pigeon who used to be a man but was cursed after cheating on his ex-wife who was also a witch, Tyson attempts (and I stress...he attempts) to help everyday citizens. I will allow a moment of silence to allow you to absorb everything I have just imparted to you.

There is something to be said about cult celebrities: if you are a fan, you will watch any movie in which they have a role. In the case of 4Got10, you get Danny Trejo and Dolph Lundgren.  In addition to these cult giants, you have the prolific Johnny Messner (Tears of the Sun, Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid) delivering a strong performance in the lead role. If you are a fan of action thrillers, this film is already off to a great start. A man named Brian (Messner) wakes up in the middle of the desert with no recollection of how he arrived there. Soon there after, he finds himself in a web of lies and vengeance involving a ruthless drug lord (Trejo) and a tenacious DEA agent (Lundgren). As the film progresses, Brian slowly regains his memory, revealing that things may not be as they seem.

4Got10’s strengths are in acting and the complexity of its story. Trejo playing the part of a Mexican drug lord is not uncommon, but I’d like to talk a little bit about Lundgren’s portrayal of a DEA agent. At first, I was a little skeptical of this role. Lundgren, to me, has always been the fully-armed hero of cheesy 80’s action films. To see him as a refined and collected older man was a little off-putting at first, but his demeanor eventually won me over. Johnny Messner’s portrayal of an amnesiac was quite believable, and more importantly, identifiable.

by Dustin P. Anderson

Our story follows a sexually confused young girl, Lydia, who is going to an all-girls school in Britain. Lidia has a strong relationship with a girl named Abbie, to the point where the girls are rarely seen apart. Abbie discovers that she is pregnant and starts fainting at random points throughout her day. After the two girls act out in class they both wind up in detention, but the girls must be excused because Lydia is not feeling well. Lydia dies on their way out of detention. The school starts mourning the loss of Lydia, but everyone begins worrying when Abbie starts having fainting spells like Lydia did before she died.

The Gallows starts off with a camcorder video shot of a high school play from 1993 in which a horrible accident occurs. It is immediately followed by video footage from 2013 that is labeled police evidence. That tips us off, if we didn't know, that this is found-footage material. The found footage genre has grown substantially since the phenomenally success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999. One of the reasons that The Blair Witch Project was so successful is that the concept was fresh at the time. It isn't any longer. It also made the actors genuinely confused and terrified during the process of filming. I don't think actors fall for that any more, but they often pretend they're terrified. Maybe they should pretend to act in the first place. The stars of The Gallows are all unknowns with the possible exception of Cassidy Gifford as Cassidy Spilker. If you used to watch Live with Regis and Kathie Lee before it became Live with Kelly and Michael, you would occasionally see the daughter of Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford show up on the set with her brother, Cody (or maybe you caught her on the fourth hour of The Today Show where Kathie Lee holds court lately). She is actually one of the best things in The Gallows and might have some potential in the future. I'm not saying she's great, but with a little work in a better movie, Cassidy might have something. The rest of the cast aren't terrible, but they're not experienced enough to be very good. That could be said of the writer directors, Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing. In the extras they seem very excited about coming up with a new kind of horror villain, the Hangman. I wish it was that simple to create a memorable character. They may be right that hanging hasn't been used often in horror films, but if they had plans to do something memorable they failed.

The movie is not long, but it is monotonous. It starts out with an obnoxious, homophobic jock making his buddy's life miserable because he's doing a play and hanging out with theater geeks. Eventually the obnoxious jerk convinces his so-called friend that he's a lousy actor and he needs to sneak in to the theater that night to destroy the set. Supposedly this will get him out of being in the play. The obnoxious jerk (Ryan Shoos as Ryan Shoos), the friend (Reese Mishler as Reese Houser), the jerk's girlfriend (Cassidy Gifford as Cassidy Spilker), and the star of the show (Pfeifer Brown as Pfeifer Ross) all get trapped in the school, and terrible things start happening. Basically the whole movie takes place in the dark school filmed by cell phones and one garbage camera. Half of the movie is basically screaming and really dark and chaotic footage. There are a couple of twists in the plot that are given brief attention before going back to the incoherent footage.

At first, Eaters looks like a pretty fun horror film. The cover depicts a well-dressed figure in a scarecrow-like mask and a bowler hat. Above him in typical horror font, the title is displayed, followed by a tagline that reads: “Prepare to meet a new breed of killer”. First impressions are everything, and this is promising a lot. After watching the film, I’ve come to realize that the title, Eaters, is very misleading. In fact, I’m almost positive that not a single person ate anything in the entire film. The film follows a group of five young adults taking a road trip through the desert. Complications arise at a rest stop, where one of the young women goes missing after running into a gang of drug-smuggling bikers. The group gathers enough courage to confront the bikers, only to be met with conflict. The group of friends talks their way out of the confrontation and end up in a seemingly deserted town occupied by a community of masked murderers.

For me, the film’s biggest flaw is in distribution: The cover is a little too enticing. It promises so many things that aren’t in the film at all. There is an implication that this “new breed of killer” eats their victims, but aside from that, there is no cannibalism. While the scene of a masked butcher chopping up his victim is very well crafted, the concept is nothing that I haven’t seen before. Unless the “new breed of killer” is a group of cannibals that die of starvation because they forget to eat, I’m not quite sure the film’s marketers even sat in on a screening.

All right, my first addition for this year’s 31 Nights of Terror. Always a very exciting time, as ‘tis the season to jump out of your shoes. Unfortunately, that is not the case with The Invoking 2. I know it is bad form to jump into a franchise (assuming that two films can make a franchise) without seeing the film that came before it, sort of like beginning a novel in the middle instead of at the beginning. Have no fear, though, as I suspect that watching its predecessor is not a prerequisite for the watching of this disc. Clearly an anthology series, the runtime is made up of several different tales of death that give off sort of a campfire-ghost-tale vibe. So the premise of this collection is very fitting; it is not, however, scary.

The trouble with anthologies is that they all only have a set amount of time to conclude their story which makes building suspense a bit of a non-starter to say the least. That right there hardens my resolve against the collection; I do so enjoy suspense. Suspense is a much-needed addition in order to play on the audience’s fear. I needed time to let my imagination assume the worst, but with most of the stories told in this film, the conclusion came before my mind could even begin to wonder what was going to happen next. Always I was not very receptive to the varieties of tales that were told. A few showed potential such as the ones that dealt with psychosis. One in particular where the only person feature on screen was one woman, but the story did a good job of prolonging the revelation that she was her own worst enemy.

“Before we start, I want you to know something...I'm not a rat.”

I could get into *a lot* of trouble if anybody found out I was talking to you. After all, there is absolutely, positively nothing worse than a rat, a point that is made crystal clear in Black Mass. But I'm putting my neck on the line here because I figured you'd want to know this fact-based crime drama marks the welcome return of Johnny Depp, who has spent the better part of the past decade in the Magic Kingdom loony wilderness.

What a great time it was to be a teen in the late 1970’s. No, I’m not referring to disco music. It was a great time to go to the movies. It was the culmination of the perfect date, and Hollywood was riding the beginning of a trend that remains alive and healthy today. I’m talking, of course, about the slasher film. You could argue that Hitchcock started the ball rolling in 1961 with Psycho, but it would be decades before that film would find its true audience and plethora of imitators. Although The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween came before Friday The 13^th, can it be argued that any horror film franchise is as widely known? The truth is that even the man behind the film, Sean Cunningham, never really knew what it was that he had. It was never his intent to follow the film with a barrage of sequels. He also scoffed at the idea that Jason could become the centerpiece for future films. By now Jason has become such an iconic character that there is an entire generation out there that doesn’t know that Jason wasn’t the culprit in the first film. Jason’s stature has reached the heights of the classic monsters of the Universal days. While some of us hesitate to put his name and hockey mask up there with the likes of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, and The Mummy, the recognition and sheer dollars generated make it difficult not to. By the beginning of the 1980’s names like Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers would be scaring audiences around the world, rendering the classics somewhat silly in the eyes of a more visceral generation of teens.

Here we are 35 years removed from that first Friday The 13th film and the franchise has racked up nine sequels, one remake, a television series, and a team-up film with Freddy Krueger...oh my. Of course, not all Friday The 13th projects are created equal, and the debate rages on as to what constitutes official canon for the franchise. Certainly the television series can be discounted, because it had really nothing to do with the films at all. The title was merely used to cash in on the fans. Still, it managed to last three years and has developed a somewhat cult following of its own. But whatever you consider part of the "true" franchise, it's all found in one place.

by Dustin P. Anderson

This is a documentary on the growing concern for the rising number of African-American children being born into unwed households. The film’s title 72% is a statistic of how many African-American single mothers are currently living in America. The documentary asks scholars and television personalities for their take on the growing crisis among the community. I feel I must make this quick addendum: as a white male I can only take this movie for how I saw it and how it made me feel. I am aware that I am not necessarily the target audience intended for this documentary, but it was a good watch besides.

I remember seeing a trailer for this movie a few months back and feeling underwhelmed. It was one of those experiences where you see a trailer and feel like through that contact alone that you can determine the entire course of the movie. Fortunately, I have no trouble admitting when I am wrong, and that was the case for Clouds of Sils Maria. I didn’t have any clue what I was in for, and though slow pace of the film and the ever-changing landscape did get a bit tedious at times, the film possessed a story that I can only describe as life imitating art. Ironic, given that the film covers the story of a renowned actress being asked to return to a play that made her famous but this time in an older role, another once upon a time playing the younger one.

Juliette Binoche is the renowned actress Maria Enders; Kristen Stewart plays her assistant Val, and like a good assistant she runs every facet of Binoche’s life. The dynamic between these two women is the driving force behind the entire movie. Stewart’s character is the main reason that Enders decides to do the play, and most of what we learn about the play comes from these two rehearsing the lines. The relationship between these two is very close, and my assumption was that the dynamic was moving towards one forgone conclusion; however, as it turns out I was wrong as they sidestep the obvious pitfall, equally surprising and disappointing me. The chemistry between these two characters is obvious right off the bat; both actresses bring their A game without question as they laugh together and equally challenge one another.