When Vikings Season 1 first arrived, I have to admit I was pretty excited. I was particularly eager to see footage from their very first game. Fran Tarkenton came off the bench, and the Vikings went on to become the first expansion team ever to win their very first game. OK, as Baby, our Shepherd/Chow mix dog film reviewer would say: I made that last part up. You'd have to have been living under a pretty isolated rock to have missed all of the buzz over The History Channel's epic new drama series Vikings.

It’s hard to believe that once if you said the word Google, there is a good chance no one would have known what you were blabbering about.  Now the internet search database is the largest search engine on the web and is a dominating company that is given the same reverence Steve Jobs and Apple receive.  Because of Google, the days of hitting the books to find information and the Dewey decimal system are all but things of the past.  But technology and growth are a part of life.

There are five clans of Vampires that are secretly living amongst humans. Said secret is maintained by a code of conduct called the “Masquerade” which states that vampires can never reveal themselves to a human; nor can they “embrace” (bite and convert) a human without approval from the highest council. Defying this means that your lengthy life is forfeit. A detective discovers the truth about the Masquerade when his girlfriend loses her life after defying these very rules, and he sets out to reveal the entire realm of vampires in San Francisco.

The world of Bounty Killer is a barren wasteland that has been decimated by the unchecked greed of nefarious corporations. In other words, I can’t believe this movie is only set 20 years in the future! I’m not the kind of guy who uses exclamation points very often, so the fact that I threw one at the end of the previous sentence wasn’t an accident. This silly, stylish, thoroughly enjoyable revenge fantasy/satiric action flick is basically one giant exclamation point in movie form.

The boys are back, and I only have one question. What the heck took so long? I have a lot of respect for Pixar and the groundbreaking films they've created over the last couple of decades, but I have to question someone's marketing good sense when they get a sequel to Cars out before anyone bothered to look towards what is arguably the studio’s best creation to date. For me it's all about Monsters, Inc. I hadn't fallen so hard for an animated film since The Lion King, and so I was thrilled when I got the invitation to graduate early from Monsters University.

Every once in a while a film comes along that looks like it could be interesting, but you don’t really expect to like it all that much. It’s simply meant to be filler, something to kill time until something better comes along, but somehow you get drawn in and become so engrossed in the story that you forget everything else. That is the most apt description of my experience with The Way, Way Back, a socially awkward dramedy with a ton of heart featuring Steve Carrell, Sam Rockwell, Toni Collette, Liam James, and many more.

Independent films can be about just about anything. Usually if it's about something you have never seen before, that can be a good thing. In this case, I'm not so sure. Free Samples is a movie that takes place almost entirely in and around a crappy little van giving away a cup of either chocolate or vanilla ice cream or at least something that resembles ice cream as far as we know. Free Samples is an existential comedy about the search for meaning when you step away from a future that looked very bright in search of who knows what. 

The following cautionary tale is brought to you by the folks at Fox and American Horror Story:Asylum out on DVD/Blu-ray.

Whilst the criminally insane remain under the care of sadistic medical staff in the second chapter of the Emmy winning series, American Horror Story: Asylum, released this week, we are going to look at our favorite medical villains who prescribe the maximum dose of patient dread and suffering. Are you sure you want that warm sponge-bath sir …?

Those of us who love horror movies can remember the first great scare we ever got. (To be fair, those of you who hate horror movies probably remember the first scare you ever got too, since it’s probably why you stopped watching them.) Stephen King’s It wasn’t my first scary flick, but the image of Tim Curry’s Pennywise coaxing poor Georgie into the storm drain seared itself into my brain and became my original childhood freak-out. What I enjoyed most about All Hallows’ Eve is that it tapped into the unique impact a genuinely scary clown movie can have.

With Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness and Dragons: Riders of Berk, it would seem only fitting that Monsters vs. Aliens would get an animated series of its own as well.  Nickelodeon seems to know what they are doing by mass producing these hit DreamWorks animated films and bringing them to the small screen.  The biggest shock is that in doing so they’ve managed to maintain the quality on a story level as well as animation level while under the budget constraints of having to produce multiple episodes as compared to one feature film.