What would National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation look like if Clark and his family had to fight a bunch of killer elves? You can get a very, very close approximation in the new movie There’s Something in the Barn. It stars Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks, Silicon Valley) as a happy-go-lucky father who moves his family to Norway only to find that an actual elf lives in their barn. The elf is cool with the family being there... until they start breaking his rules. Then all hell breaks loose.

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And, as it seems we haven't yet mentioned the previously most recent Nic Cage Comedy +.genre film....

In this modern monster tale of Dracula's loyal servant, Renfield, the tortured aide to history's most narcissistic boss is forced to procure his master's prey and do his every bidding, no matter how debased. But now, after centuries of servitude, Renfield is ready to see if there's a life outside the shadow of The Prince of Darkness. If only he can figure out how to end his codependency.

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More Cage antics:

Dave Lizewski is an unnoticed high school student and comic book fan with a few friends and who lives alone with his father. His life is not very difficult and his personal trials not that overwhelming; however, one day he makes the simple decision to become a super-hero, even though he has no powers or training.

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More Nic Cage Comedy + genre outings:

A quiet drifter is tricked into a janitorial job at the now condemned Willy's Wonderland. The mundane tasks suddenly become an all-out fight for survival against wave after wave of demonic animatronics. Fists fly, kicks land, titans clash -- and only one side will make it out alive.

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In this delirious dark comedy, Nicolas Cage and director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself) take us down a rabbit hole, with the eccentric, unclassifiable star ideally paired to a filmmaker with a wonderfully mordant imagination. Cage plays Paul, a nondescript professor who, for no reason, starts popping up in other people's dreams – first his family's, then his students' and strangers' all over the world.

...

Paul basks in the viral fame that comes from being a benign, passive presence in the background of everyone's dreams until he starts turning up in violent nightmares, leaving people as terrified of him in life as if he really were Freddy Krueger. That is revealed in the film's trailer, but Borgli also drops a huge clue when the film opens with ominous, horror-movie sound effects and images flashing on screen of an apparently ordinary scene by the family's pool that turns out to be anything but. He deftly signals that something in this film's world is abnormal.

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The Nic Cage Comedy + genre "season" continues with Mom and Dad:

Something terrible is definitely happening in the a peaceful suburban community as, day by day, former caring parents mysteriously turn into ravenous carriers of an unfathomable pandemic that targets their offspring. Suddenly, like every son and daughter in the entire nation, teenage Carly and Josh Ryan must run for their lives, as the rage-filled murderous intent is as unstoppable as it is inexplicable. Before long, the Ryans' usual simmering familial tensions take on a completely different meaning. Kids, stop hiding. Mom and Dad love you so much.

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After an encounter with a neck-biter, a publishing executive thinks that he's turning into a vampire.

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Hell-bent on rescuing his brutally slaughtered daughter's infant from the clutches of the demon-worshipper, Jonah King, and his occultist minions, the eternally condemned sinner, John Milton, breaks out of the nightmarish netherworld. Having less than three days before the next full moon to avert the unholy offering, Milton and the no-nonsense barmaid, Piper, set off on a desperate mission to save our world from everlasting damnation, in a fast 1969 Dodge Charger. Now, with the police hot on their trail, John and Piper must work fast against the clock to save the innocent baby, as a mysterious and powerful henchman known only as the "Accountant" will stop at nothing to put the insolent fugitive back where he belongs. Who steals from the Prince of Darkness?

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“Genie” was written by Richard Curtis (it’s a remake of his 1991 British television film “Bernard and the Genie”), but the movie, while set in New York at Christmastime, is no “Love Actually.” It’s more like “Elf” crossed with “Love Sort Of.” When Flora, whose full name is Flora Gwendolyn Lockheed Firepit McCallister, says those magic words “Your wish is my command,” she’s speaking to Bernard (Paapa Essiedu), who accidentally summoned her out of that box. He’s a transplanted Brit who works at a tony Manhattan art auction house — or did, until he was fired, only to come home having missed his daughter’s eighth birthday celebration. That’s the last straw for his wife, Julie (Denée Benton), who announces that she’s going to be taking some time away from him.

...

The way all this plays out is lighter than balsa wood. Richard Curtis made his name investing romantic comedy with a surprise spark of humanity (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill”), but “Genie” really is a glorified sitcom — or, more to the point, a genie-out-of-water comedy.

The BBC's Mark Kermode, another Howard the Duck champion, argues that it's not a "great" movie, but remains "a really, really funny weird, subversive film." Since it was too weird to be embraced by the mainstream, but also too entertainingly off-kilter to forget, Kermode has argued for Howard the Duck as basically the definition of a cult classic. It's worth noting that Katz and Huyck began their creative collaboration with a legitimate cult film: the surreal horror masterpiece Messiah of Evil. I would love to see those two bonkers movies on a double bill (OK, pun intended).

For me, the real revelation of Howard the Duck was the last hour, in which the film suddenly becomes a body horror comedy. Howard and Beverley are stuck with a gnarly possessed scientist (played by Jeffrey Jones, one thing about the film that hasn't aged well) playing host to one of the hideous "Dark Overlords of the Universe" that want to destroy this world. Sure, I had already seen Halloween and The Thing at that age. But I did so through my fingers, as they were meant to scare the daylights out of you — and succeeded. Ghostbusters, meanwhile, just seemed silly to me.

Howard the Duck managed to hit the sweet spot between gross-out tentacled latex monsters and fun adventure comedy. It was the kind of "scary" an 11-year-old could enjoy without fear and showed me that horror flicks could be more like a roller coaster ride than a grueling night in a haunted house. It set me up for teenage years spent reading Fangoria magazines, making latex masks in the basement, and laughing at every Freddy Krueger punchline, no matter how cheesy.

And now, with the MCU an established film phenomenon and Howard popping up in Guardians of the Galaxy films, maybe we'll finally get a sequel.

When the holiday season's hottest new toy, the Tickle-Me Wiggly, hits the shelves, the city of Hatchetfield goes mad for it, literally. That's when Tom Houston, Lex Foster, Becky Barnes and a few familiar faces, must fight through a sea of murderous mall-goers to save humanity from an inter dimensional being with a taste for chaos. When Wiggly comes to town, will the world survive Black Friday.

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On Thanksgiving night, a group of disgruntled toy store employees begrudgingly arrive for work to open the store at midnight for the busiest shopping day of the year. Meanwhile, an alien parasite crashes to Earth in a meteor. This group of misfits led by store manager Jonathan and longtime employee Ken soon find themselves battling against hordes of holiday shoppers who have been turned into monstrous creatures hellbent on a murderous rampage on Black Friday.

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Surprise Thanksgiving film as it's about chickens but then, that's Troma for you.

When the American Chicken Bunker, a military-themed fried-chicken chain, builds a restaurant on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, local protesters aren't the only ones crying fowl! The previous tenants, fueled by a supernatural force, take "possession" of the food and those who eat it, and the survivors discover that they must band together before they themselves become the other white meat! Film lovers have been starved for sustenance. The relentless diet of predictability and pretense Hollywood has been serving up just doesn't cut it. Poultrygeist is hearty food for thought. In Poultrygeist, Troma takes on the the fast-food industry-skewering the soulless restaurateurs-in the world's first horror-comedy film to feature zombie chickens, American Indians and a bit of singing and dancing! It's Poultrygeist!

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Full movie on the Internet Archive

Another Thanksgiving movie:

When a dysfunctional family goes to their recently widowed grandmother's cabin for Thanksgiving, they find out that their grandmother is actually a werewolf.

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Full movie thanks to the director

Happy ThanksKilling everyone!

A homicidal turkey axes off college kids during Thanksgiving break.

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Adapted into a musical.

There is a sequel:

• ThanksKilling 3

And, yes, they skipped ThanksKilling 2 because... well it's complicated.

After scaring up $18 million in theaters earlier this year, horror-comedy The Blackening is getting a sequel from Lionsgate, Variety has exclusively announced this afternoon.

Variety notes, “producer MRC and domestic distributor Lionsgate have entered into talks with Dewayne Perkins, Tracy Oliver and producer E. Brian Dobbins to develop a follow-up film.”

The first film was made on a production budget of just $5 million, so there’s needless to say lots of potential for this to become a profitable Scary Movie-type horror franchise.

A homicidal car tire, discovering it has destructive psionic power, sets its sights on a desert town once a mysterious woman becomes its obsession.

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"I've heard some rumors about it," he tells us of a potential follow-up. "But I don't know anything yet. But I feel pretty confident that it may happen." When we ask if he'd be happy to return, Pine responds: "Absolutely."

The MVD Rewind Collection is preparing a Blu-ray release of Ernie Fosselius's Hardware Wars (1978). The release is scheduled to arrive on the market on February 20.

Descriptin: In 1978 writer / director Ernie Fosselius (former member of "The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo") created the very first "Star Wars" parody, HARDWARE WARS. Complete with cardboard sets and visible wires (holding up ships which were various household appliances), the film was shot over four days with a budget of around $8,000. Now, nearly 50 years later, the original version of this classic short that George Lucas called his "favorite Star Wars parody" (in a 1999 interview on the UK's The Big Breakfast TV show) has been restored in High Definition for a whole new generation of cult movie fans to discover!

Tech specs: Blu-ray.com

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In screenwriter Michael Kennedy’s newest project, It’s a Wonderful Knife, a teen girl who wishes she had never been born sees visions of an alternate reality in which the serial killer she stopped is allowed to run rampant through the town. It’s a Wonderful Knife takes obvious inspiration from the high-concept classic It’s a Wonderful Life, Just as Happy Death Day does with Groundhog Day and Freaky does with Freaky Friday. The planned Happy Death Day and Freaky crossover may no longer be happening, but with It’s a Wonderful Knife, Kennedy is delivering a worthy successor and capping off an unofficial trilogy of high-concept slasher retellings.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8307627

Cohen the Barbarian was angry. Angry that he never died in battle, angry that the world had forgotten him, and angry that his knees were starting to play up in the cold.

He was also angry that his faithful mount had been gifted the ability of magical speech. The horse was insisting that they had made a wrong turn back at Slice.

He was also angry that the horse was probably right.

This was not how it was supposed to end for the barbarian. This was not how the Discworld’s greatest hero imagined it at all.

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TROLL BRIDGE is a love-letter to Terry Pratchett and Discworld. It exists because an awful lot of people thought it ought to.

The film is adapted from the short story 'Troll Bridge', published in the anthology 'A Blink of the Screen': https://discworld.com/?s=blink+of+the+screen

Special thanks to The Pratchett Estate, Discworld.com, The Foundry, Shotgun Software, GarageFarm.NET Render Farm, Golaem, our 300 volunteers, and over 4,500 backers. Every frame pressed with love – this is your production.

Official Website: https://www.trollbridge.film