On its own, New York Ninja is plenty crazy. A bonkers-ass 1980s action movie that’s cheap and campy and utterly absurd at every turn, it’s the type of artifact many people stumbled across on late night cable as kids and were like, “Hell yeah, this freakin’ rules.” And it’s does rule, and we’ll get back to that. But the story behind how this movie actually came to be released is even more unbelievable than the plot of the film. Well, maybe, New York Ninja itself often defies belief.
Sometimes it’s easy to pinpoint precisely why a movie does or doesn’t work. Other times it’s more nebulous and harder to determine exactly what went wrong. Such is the case of Aharon Keshales’ crime thriller South of Heaven. The pieces are in place for an interesting film, but it absolutely does not come together in any satisfactory way.
By now you know no horror franchise ever truly dies, no matter how much time passes. It’s been ten years since we’ve visited Woodsboro, but don’t worry, there’s a new Scream on the way. (And, of course, when horror franchises re-launch after years, they also jump back to the original title.) Scream 5 drops early next year, but the first trailer is here with Ghostface, a bunch of familiar faces who somehow survived the previous four movies, and tons of new potential victims. Check it out below.
For most of the 106-minute runtime of Valdimar Johannsson’s directorial debut, Lamb, the film plays its bizarre concept entirely straight. But there’s a moment where the surreal conceit at the center of the story just becomes silly. Watching it, at a certain point, I thought this has to be intentional, they have to know what they’re doing, this is a comedy, right? But I honestly don’t know.
