News

Killer Collectibles highlights five of the most exciting new horror products announced each and every week, from toys and apparel to artwork, records, and much more.

Here are the coolest horror collectibles unveiled this week!

Matinee 4K Uhd from Shout Select

Shout Select proudly presents Matinee on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on June 25. The 1993 comedy has been newly restored in 4K from the original negative, supervised by director Joe Dante, with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos sound.

John Goodman stars as a filmmaker loosely based on B-movie legend William Castle. Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz, Kellie Martin, and Lisa Jakub round out the cast. Charles S. Haas (Gremlins 2: The New Batch) penned the script.

Special features include: a new commentary by film critics Drew McWeeny and Eric Vespe; new interviews with Martin and David Clennon; interviews with Dante, Moriarty, Jakub, production designer Steven Legler, editor Marshall Harvey, and...

A remake of Little Shop Of Horrors is in the works with director Joe Dante and original creator Roger Corman.

The last update we had on a remake of Little Shop Of Horrors was back in 2020, when it was reported that Taron Egerton, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans were set to star, with Greg Berlanti directing from a script by Matthew Robinson.

It now appears those plans have been abandoned in favour of a different creative team. Described as a “reimagining intended to jumpstart a new franchise”, Little Shop Of Halloween Horrors will be directed by Joe Dante, according to Deadline.

Charles S Haas, who previously collaborated with Dante on Gremlins 2: The New Batch, will write the screenplay. Roger Corman will co-produce with Brad Krevoy.

The story originated as low-budget film directed by Corman and co-starring a young Jack Nicholson. Little Shop Of Horrors quickly cemented itself as a...

Get in, loser, we're bringing back the horror/comedy. Recent attempts to find our next great, mainstream-friendly horror franchise have mostly involved such uninspired efforts as Disney's "Haunted Mansion" remake and, most recently, the news that Hollywood is giving "The Blob" another shot. This time, however, no lesser talents than horror legends Joe Dante and Roger Corman are teaming up to reboot the classic 1960 film "The Little Shop of Horrors." Even the most ardently anti-remake fan out there would have to admit that this feels like a win-win.

The exciting news comes courtesy of Deadline, which reports that this "reimagining" is meant to kickstart a whole new franchise, a phrase that would surely cause a shiver to run down the spine of anyone who witnessed something like Universal's "Dark Universe" gambit flame out in spectacular fashion ... if it weren't for the filmmakers involved on this project, that is. Dante will direct the reboot,...

Tonight, Shudder and AMC+ will be airing a special edition of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs that serves as a tribute to legendary producer Roger Corman – so it seems fitting that we have some Corman news to report today. Deadline has revealed that Corman and Brad Krevoy, CEO of Mpca, are teaming up to produce a reboot of Corman’s 1960 classic The Little Shop of Horrors called Little Shop of Halloween Horrors, with Joe Dante on board to direct!

Dante’s previous directing credits include Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins, Innerspace, The ‘Burbs, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Matinee, Small Soldiers, and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Gremlins 2 and Matinee writer Charles S. Haas has written the screenplay for Little Shop of Halloween Horrors, but plot details have not been revealed. The Little Shop of Horrors, which received a very popular musical adaptation (that was turned into a...

Horror master Joe Dante is returning to the director’s chair for Little Shop of Halloween Horrors, Deadline reports this afternoon.

Joe Dante is directing with the legendary Roger Corman producing, and the film is said to be “a reboot of Corman’s famed 1960 horror comedy, Little Shop of Horrors.”

Even cooler? Charles S. Haas (Gremlins 2: The New Batch) wrote the film!

The site notes that Little Shop of Halloween Horrors is “intended to jumpstart a new franchise.”

Corman and Brad Krevoy are co-producing the upcoming film.

The Little Shop of Horrors began as a Roger Corman-directed movie back in 1960, which later became an Off-Broadway musical and then the 1986 movie Little Shop of Horrors.

In the classic tale, “Meek flower shop assistant Seymour pines for co-worker Audrey. During a total eclipse, he discovers an unusual plant he names Audrey II, which feeds only on human flesh and blood. The...

Exclusive: Iconic filmmakers Joe Dante and Roger Corman are teaming with Emmy-nominated veteran producer Brad Krevoy, CEO of Mpca, on Little Shop of Halloween Horrors, a reboot of Corman’s famed 1960 horror comedy, Little Shop of Horrors.

A reimagining intended to jumpstart a new franchise, Little Shop of Halloween Horrors will be directed by Dante, from a script by Charles S. Haas (Gremlins 2: The New Batch), with Corman and Krevoy co-producing. Also joining the project is independent producer Charles Cohen, who previously worked at T-Street, where he oversaw and executive produced the Republic Pictures release Snack Shack, in addition to developing other projects for the company.

Originating as a low-budget genre flick directed by Corman and co-starring a young Jack Nicholson, the first Little Shop of Horrors quickly cemented itself as a cult classic following its release in 1960. Shot on a shoestring budget, pic tells the...

A scary monster movie comes to Key West just as a nuclear crisis breaks out! Joe Dante’s incomparable paean to monster kid culture has finally arrived on Region A Blu-ray, with the great extras we expect from every Dante-involved home video offering. The picture only gets more charming and funny with time, from its great cast of teens to the perfect pitch of John Goodman and Cathy Moriarty’s bigger-than-life characters.

Matinee

Blu-ray

Shout Select

1993 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 99 min. / Street Date January 16, 2018 / 34.93

Starring John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz, Lisa Jakub, Kellie Martin, Jesse Lee, Lucinda Jenney, James Villemaire, Robert Picardo, Jesse White, Dick Miller, John Sayles, David Clennon, Belinda Balaski, Naomi Watts, Robert Cornthwaite, Kevin McCarthy, William Schallert.

Cinematography John Hora

Film Editor Marshall Harvey

Original Music Jerry Goldsmith

Written by Charles S. Haas, story by Haas & Jerico.

Produced by Michael Finnell

Directed by Joe Dante...

“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater where movie love was first concentrated and consecrated. (But even in the “good old days,” movies were often only part of an evening’s entertainment that came complete with vaudeville acts and bank nights). For all this, moviegoing still means what it always meant, joining a community, forming an audience and participating in a collective dream.” –

From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”

Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”

The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.

Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.

Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:

“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”

Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”

“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:

“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.

But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:

“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”

Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)

Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.

Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.

***************************************

The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.

But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.

Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).

One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”

Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.

Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)

And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).

(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)

******************************************

(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)

*******************************************

Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).

WWE.com

The professional wrestling world lost another member over this past weekend, as former WWE (then WWF) superstar “Iron” Mike Sharpe passed away. He was 64 years old.

WWE.com confirmed the news Monday.

Sharpe, whose father and uncle wrestled professionally as a tag team in the 50s, began training at the age of 25, under Dewey Robertson, and made his debut back in 1973. The Hamilton, Ontario native would wrestle for numerous Canadian promotions including Gene Kiniski’s Nwa All-Star Wrestling, and also appeared in Mid-South wrestling, winning a couple of belts after moving to Louisiana.

He signed with the then-wwf in 1983, calling himself “Canada’s Greatest Athlete” and wearing a trademark black arm brace supposedly covering up an injury that just never seemed to heal – and which doubled as a hiding spot for foreign objects he could then sneak into matches.

Sharpe actually fought for the World Wrestling Federation championship...

[Originally published in the December 2014 issue of Deadly Magazine] A little over thirty years ago, an inventor named Randall Peltzer walked into a tucked away antique shop in Chinatown in search of a memorable present for his son, Billy. Amidst the store’s candlelit relics, Randall discovered a cute critter known as a Mogwai. Against the owner’s wishes, he bought the Mogwai and later named him Gizmo, bringing him home to become a part of the family.

When Billy unwrapped Gizmo in the glow of the fireplace’s flickering flames, he became fast friends with the furry brown-and-white creature. Gizmo provided escapism to Billy, an aspiring cartoonist working at the local bank to help support his mom and dad. But the creature would unintentionally unleash manic mayhem on the tiny town of Kingston Falls, leading to a Christmas Eve nobody would forget… if they survived.

The star of the dark comedy creature feature, Zach Galligan, chatted with us...

WWE.com

While WWE fans may have been rejoicing when the Dudley Boys returned to WWE for the first time in a decade last month on Raw, it seems as though some of Bubba Ray’s former colleagues are not marking out with them.

Earlier this week Rene Dupree claimed that Bubba was unnecessarily stiff when working with La Resistance in 2003 and that the veteran gave him ‘half a dozen’ concussions, adding that Bubba punched Sylvain Grenier full force in the face (twice). It is not the first time that accusations have been levelled against Bubba, who had a reputation for being a bit of a bully back in the day.

And now former WWE star Rico, who worked for the company between 2001-2004, has come out and made similar claims. During an interview with the Pancakes and Powerslams show, Billy and Chuck’s stylist talked about his issues when working with Bubba.

Cinema’s Hidden Pearls – Part I

By Alex Simon

One of nature’s rarest items, a pearl is produced within the soft tissue (specifically the mantle) of a living shelled mollusk. Just like the shell of a clam, a pearl is composed of calcium carbonate in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers. Truly flawless pearls are infrequently produced in nature, and as a result, the pearl has become a metaphor for something rare, fine, admirable and valuable. Hidden pearls exist in the world of movies, as well: films that, in spite of being brilliantly crafted and executed, never got the audience they deserved beyond a cult following.

Here are a few of our favorite hidden pearls in the world of film:

1. Night Moves (1975)

Director Arthur Penn hit three home runs in a row with the trifecta of Bonnie & Clyde, Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man,...

If you were heartbroken to hear that Joe Dante's seminal holiday horror comedy Gremlins (1984) was on the track to being remade, you can cling to some hope that characters from the original film (perhaps both human and otherwise) will be involved in the new entry to the beloved franchise. In a recent interview, Chris Columbus—who wrote the original Gremlins and will produce the new film—shared details that hint at the Gremlins reboot being more along the lines of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek films and upcoming Star Wars movie in terms of mixing familiar faces with new characters. It sounds like this new Gremlins film could be more of a sequel than a remake.

Collider spoke with Columbus at CinemaCon about the Gremlins reboot, a project Warner Bros. recently hired Carl Ellsworth (Goosebumps movie, Disturbia, Red Eye) to write. Columbus discussed revisiting the idea of a Gremlins...

WWE.com

Three former WWE employees have launched a class action suit against the professional wrestling promotion, claiming that the world’s largest pro wrestling organization, has been engaging in “egregious mistreatment” of its workers and that “the WWE has known for years …the brutality in the ring has resulted in dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and a lot more.”

Further claims state that the WWE has withheld medical research and other evidence related to traumatic brain injuries suffered by WWE wrestlers.

The suit, filed by Russ McCullough, Ryan Sakoda, and Matt Wiese (Luther Reigns), represents workers past and present, and as with the recently filed class action lawsuit against the Ufc, it’s possible that other professional wrestlers past and present could join in.

For those who aren’t familiar with the initial three names attached to the suit, who are represented by Michael McShane and Jonas P. Mann of Audet & Partners Llp,...

Youtube

Santino Marella & Tamina Smuka. Eve Torres & Chris Masters. Charlie Haas & Maria Kanellis. Mickie James & The Great Khali. Mark Henry & Mae Young. Randy Orton & Stephanie McMahon and Kaitlyn & Hornswoggle.

These are but a simple seven of the enormous plethora of pairs whom have locked lips for a ratings pop in their WWE careers. Sometimes for romance, sometimes for comedy, occasionally out of a genuine real-life affection, the kiss has become a recurring image in the pro-wrestling universe, so much so it’s become a bit clichéd.

There have been some absolutely awkward and pointless kisses over the years in WWE, some of which you’ll find in the opening paragraph. However, on occasion, WWE has paired two performers together on-screen with a genuine chemistry. Whether as a one-shot deal or a recurring relationship, they’ve produced a selection of kisses that were genuinely hot, leading to folks in the arena...

WWE.com

A lot of people have been talking about Benjamin Morris’ 538 piece, “Are Pro Wrestlers Dying at an Unusual Rate?”

Like Morris, I am neither an actuarial scientist nor a demographer. So, our interpretations of the data should be taken with a grain of salt. My results were somewhat different from Morris’ due to a difference data set and changes in how we calculated actuarial predictions.

Differences in methodology from Morris

I also used Social Security Actuarial Life Tables, but my “expected mortality rates” for the age groups were not the same as Morris’. For each wrestler, I calculated what their age would have been as of today. Then, based on gender, I looked up the number of lives (out of 100,000) that were expected to still be alive and converted that to a percentage. His analysis looked at wrestlers who were on 20+ WWF PPVs through 2002. I went with a...

Last week, we took a look back at the first Gremlins movie. This week, it’s on to Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Although I had not watched the movie in nearly two decades, there were a few things I remembered about the sequel before sitting down to rewatch. For starters, as a kid, it was a more fun movie than the original film. “The new batch” had powers. When you’re a kid, powers are all the rage. I remembered that at least one Gremlin could talk perfect English, while another darted around the screen like it had the powers of Electro (an Amazing Spider-Man villain from Marvel Comics). I also recalled the story taking place in New York and Gizmo wearing a red bandana – though I couldn’t for the life of me remember why Gizmo would be wearing gang colors.

Gremlins 2 begins similar to Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

Chicago – The generation raised on movies of the ’80s is now the one that buys the most Blu-rays. And so it makes sense that more and more of the films of our youth are hitting the format. Again. And again. Lionsgate has turned releasing and re-releasing “Dirty Dancing” into an art form (and would never pass up the 25th anniversary without another re-release). And Warner Bros. has finally given both “Gremlins” and “Gremlins 2” an HD polish although one wishes they had given more care and love to Joe Dante’s gems. Oh yeah, you can also now own “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights” on Blu-ray if there’s anyone out there who considers that valuable information.

It may say something about the war of the sexes but I imagine more men would choose the “Gremlins” 2-pack and more women would lean toward the “Dirty Dancing” 2-film collection on the new releases shelf.

That rhyming headline is bad, but the exclamation is real!

Almost missed this one, but Gremlins 2 has finally arrived on Blu-Ray.

Sure, there aren’t any new bonus features from the 2001 DVD. But, the transfer is all new. Haven’t gotten a look at it myself*, but Our Fearless Leader, when prompted, assured me that it looks, and I quote, “super good.” (Mr. Fearless Leader oversaw the transfer himself.) If you haven’t revisited Gremlins 2 in the last few years, now is the perfect time. The movie is splendid. (Actually, more than splendid; it’s splendidly unhinged!) Here’s a pretty glowing assessment from, of all places, Gawker!

Dante, Finnell and their screenwriter Charlie Haas had the studio by the balls and then kicked their movie in them for 107 minutes. Empowered by carte blanche, the team “ragged mercilessly” (Dante’s words from the commentary) on Gremlins in a blur of mocking references.

*full disclosure: a blu-ray copy of this film was provided by Warner Bros. for review. Director: Joe Dante. Writer: Charlie Haas. Cast: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, John Glover, Robert Prosky, Robert Picardo, Christopher Lee, Haviland Morris, Marla Bloodstone, Dick Miller, Jackie Joseph, and Gedde Watanabe. Warner Bros. is set to release Joe Dante's gremlins on New York City once again. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is releasing on Blu-Ray for the first time May 8th and comedy fans might want to take notice. Many of the characters from the original film such as Gizmo, Billy (Zach Galligan) and Phoebe (Kate Beringer) return for this sequel. This time they are in New York with new jobs and new problems. Gizmo releases more monsters after getting wet and the chaos begins once again! The story here follows the original film's rules: do not get the mogwais wet, do not feed them...

Today, people, is a very good day. A day we've been anticipating for quite some time. Warner Brothers has officially unleashed the madness and mayhem of both Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch on Blu-ray, and we have a couple of clips and the skinny on the extras. Dig it!

“Gremlins is a wildly original roller-coaster ride of hilarious mischief. One minute your hair will stand on end, the next you’ll hold your sides with laughter at the havoc these supposedly gentle furballs create when the rules surrounding their care and feeding are inadvertently broken one fateful Christmas. Written by Chris Columbus and directed by Joe Dante, Gremlins unleashes special effects that dazzle and enchant and merriment that lingers in the memory. And isn’t that “what superior popular moviemaking is all about” (Richard Corliss, Time).”

Gremlins Special Features

Audio commentary with director Joe Dante and stars Phoebe Cates,...

Gremlins was a big part of, what I’ll assume is most of our childhood movie memories. It’s a horror movie, yet easily accessible by fans of all ages. It’s scary, but contains just the right amount of comic relief to perfectly straddle the line between intense, and entertaining. It’s also credited with playing a key role in the creation of the PG-13 MPAA rating. A few years ago, Gremlins was released for the first time on the Blu Ray format. Being available in the best possible format for the perfect home movie viewing experience, will make the yearly holiday ritual of re-watching the movie, better than it ever was.

At that point in time, only the original film was released to Blu Ray. That is, until now. On May 8th, Warner Brothers will finally be releasing the meta sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch to Blu Ray.

Forgotten Films [1] is a semi-regular feature on Film Junk where we explore interesting movies that have fallen off the radar or slipped through the cracks over the years. There aren't many filmmakers who have shaped the culture of an entire generation quite like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas did back in the '80s, but the truth is, they weren't alone. There is a whole second string of directors from the same era who followed their lead in creating iconic family adventure films, and Joe Dante would certainly be counted among them. From successful films like Gremlins and Explorers to quirky comedies like The Burbs and Innerspace, he brought his genre roots and special effects know-how to create some mainstream hits that almost everyone has seen. But if Dante was such a big presence in the '80s, then why has he faded from the public eye since then? The...

It’s rare to see a 56-year-old publishing a debut novel, but Charlie Haas has obviously gained a lot from his years as a journalist and screenwriter. He’s probably best known for his 1979 cult favorite Over The Edge, where suburbs drive the kids nuts, so it’s no surprise his first book starts in a similar setting. But The Enthusiast—while often very funny—is sneakily ambitious, spanning at least 20 years while pretending it’s up to nothing. The book has its flaws—liberated from the usual tight demands of screenwriting, Haas completely throws away any pacing ...