As Easter Sunday approaches this weekend, we thought we’d “die” your eggs a little a differently. That is, we’re on the great hidden treasure hunt for some of the most colorful and delicious horror movie Easter eggs found in some of our favorite titles. But here’s the thing. We aren’t talking about obscure cameos from people that are hard to miss, or even secretive foreshadowing within a single movie, a la the entire Final Destination franchise. Nor are we talking about mere verbal references to other horror movies. Rather, we’re interested in visual crossover clues found one horror movie that pay homage to another, found tucked away in the background or even hidden in plain sight. You see the distinction. Good. Hopefully you haven’t already seen what’s to follow. Happy holiday y’all, here’s our Top 10 Favorite Crossover Horror Movie Easter Eggs!

#10. SILENT HILL/VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

Silent Hill may hold the dubious distinction of being another movie that’s inferior to its videogame inspiration, but one thing the movie got right was its respectful ode to Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned. Just as James Gunn did with the Thing-poking R.J. MacReady funeral home in Slither, the edifice of the Midwich Elementary School building that Alessa attends is an overt reference to the accursed village where alien-like children with glowing eyes and white hair terrorize the citizenry. GET SILENT HILL HERE

#9. PSYCHO/HALLOWEEN H20 

There’s a delicious irony in the fact that golden-era scream queen, Janet Leigh, wanted nothing more than for her daughter to avoid horror movie acting, only to see Jamie Lee Curtis become her own preeminent generational scream queen. The connection between the two is honored in the paltry Halloween H20, in which Janet Leigh is not only cast alongside her daughter, but is further linked to her iconic role of Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Notice the sweet old classic 1957 Ford sedan above that Lee’s flaunting in H20? Yup, that’s the same ride Norman Bates dumped into the swamp after slaughtering Leigh in the shower in Psycho. Same plates an all: NFB 418. GET H20 HERE

#8. SHAUN OF DEAD FULCI/DAWN OF THE DEAD/ZOMBIE 

While most know that one year after redefining the zombie subgenre with Shaun of the Dead, star Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright showed up as rabid zombies in Romero’s Land of the Dead, many may have missed all the subtle visual gags in their own flick. Per the Romero love, take a peek at Pegg’s work-badge. Indeed, that says Foree Electric, as in Ken Foree, star of Romero’s beloved Dawn of the Dead. Further background sight-gags and references can be found, as in the Fulci Restaurant ad spotted in the newspaper directory. Fulci of course helmed Zombie, yet another inspiration behind Shaun of the Dead. GET SHAUN OF THE DEAD HERE

#7. NIGHT OF THE CREEPS/MONSTER SQUAD

Damn I’ve always loved this self-congratulatory shout-out! Do you recall who directed the superb Night of the Creeps? Now do you recount who helmed The Monster Squad one year later? Yessir, Fred Dekker is the man behind both flicks, yet strangely pays homage to a movie of his own that had not even been released yet. “Go Monster Squad!” would make little sense when spotting the clue in 1986, but one year later, the reference makes all the sense in the world. Dekker only directed three films in his career, and these two, both starring Tom Atkins mind you, are some of my all time 80s horror favorites. I’m glad to see Dekker connect the two! GET NIGHT OF THE CREEPS HERE

#6. DEATH PROOF/BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

I’ll admit, this one freaked me the f*ck out. And it’s not that it’s even scary, it’s just that the visual clue is so obviously in plain sight, and yet, having seen the Grindhouse double feature at least five times (as well as being a fan of the movie referenced), I’ve never once noticed it. But there it is folks. Hanging on the wall right above the table is Jack Burton’s tank-top from John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. Of course, the meta-reference is made all the more pertinent due to the fact Death Proof also stars the great Kurt Russell. There are even several shots of Russell in the same frame as the tank-top, making the connection even stronger. GET DEATH PROOF HERE

#5. JASON GOES TO HELL/EVIL DEAD 

In a prop literally shared across both film franchises, Sam Raimi’s Necronomicon, aka the Book of the Dead that is seen throughout the Evil Dead series, makes a brief appearance in Adam Marcus’ Jason Goes to Hell. The tome pops up late in the film, just before Jason is pulled to hell by Freddy Krueger’s glove (another nice nod, but not nearly as clandestine). Our man Voorhees marauds through the dark moldering abode at the end of the film, quickly coming to a table adorned with ancient texts. The one front and center is indeed Raimi’s Deadite scroll, which as you’ll see below, makes Sam one of the most crossed-referenced horror movie Easter egg purveyors of all! GET JASON GOES TO HELL HERE

#4. SAW/DEAD SILENCE/INSIDIOUS

James-I’ve-been-turning- people-Wan with fear for well over decade now sure loves the legacy left behind by Saw, his breakout horror hit. In specific, Wan loves to subtly tuck the sinister visage of Billy Puppet, the maniacal mascot of the entire Saw franchise, into dark corners of his other titles. The first instance can be found in Wan’s Dead Silence, in which, toward the end, characters amble down a dark corridor and pass by Billy Puppet sitting in the right foreground corner. If that wasn’t alarming enough, in Wan’s Insidious, on the chalkboard behind Josh Lambert’s shoulder in his classroom sits an eerie chalk-sketching of Billy, frilly hair, spiral cheeks and all! GET DEAD SILENCE HERE

#3. PREDATOR 2/ALIEN 

Apparently, the murderous merger of two gargantuan horror movie franchises – Alien and Predator – was planted in our collective subconscious as early as 1990. That’s some serious f*cking premarket research right there. Indeed, at the ending of the risibly inferior Predator 2, a trophy case full of collected skeletons includes, for no other reason than to germinate the seeds of a mega-mash-up, a Xenomorph skull. Word is this was director Stephen Hopkins’ idea, as he wanted to pay tribute to the Dark Horse comic already popular Aliens vs. Predator comics. Since Fox owned both properties, a crossover was easy to license, giving round one in the battle to Predator. GET PREDATOR 2 HERE

#2. EVIL DEAD 2/A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

Sam Raimi and Wes Craven had a playful relationship. In Craven’s seminal horror masterpiece, A Nightmare on Elm Street, one of the movies Nancy watches while desperately trying to stay awake is in fact Raimi’s original Evil Dead. Picking up on the nod, Raimi responded in kind three years later in Evil Dead 2 by hanging Freddy Kreuger’s razor-claw glove on the wall of Ash’s toolshed. The glove is a bit difficult to spot in the background, but Raimi is sure to include it in a number of shots as to leave no doubt of the glove’s portentous presence. Of course, Raimi loves his horror movie Easter eggs, which is why he places his trusty Oldsmobile Delta ’88 (seen atop this page)in damn near every one of his films, including Spider-Man and even Ash Vs. Evil Dead. GET EVIL DEAD 2 HERE

#1. EYES WIDE SHUT/THE SHINING 

Well, we’ve arrived at the King of Easter Eggs and encoded subliminal messages. See this shot of Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick’s peerless masterwork Eyes Wide Shut? Notice the address is 237, illuminated by Shining Christmas lights? Coincidence? One might think so until learning this building does not exist, but was manufactured on the soundstage at Elstree studio in England, the façade of which is reused later in the film as the Jason Hotel (notice the three arches). Here’s the point. While there are many far-fetched, conspiracy-laden, tin-foil readings of Kubrick’s work (including the movie Room 237), there’s no doubt that Kubrick has used subliminal imagery in his work as far back as Lolita, when the salacious subject matter forced him to rethink the movie in visual innuendos, as a means of avoiding MPAA penalty. Much has been made about Kubrick’s The Shining as a coded confession of his secret relationship with NASA to film the moon landing. But honestly, more needs to be made about grand gestalt that is Eyes Wide Shut. This movie visually references every single Kubrick movie before it, including The Shining and its infamous room 237 (the hospital in the film is also addressed 237, giving us a twinning effect… more Shining allusions). The level of detail and hidden messaging in Eyes Wide Shut is frightening beyond belief! GET EYES WIDE SHUT HERE

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Another company has escaped the gaping, acquisition-hungry maw that is publisher Embracer Group, as Borderlands developer Gearbox Software has been sold to Take-Two Interactive. This lines up with Kotaku’s previous reporting on the matter in February, in which sources told us Gearbox was nearing a sale. Embracer is…

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Another company has escaped the gaping, acquisition-hungry maw that is publisher Embracer Group, as Borderlands developer Gearbox Software has been sold to Take-Two Interactive. This lines up with Kotaku’s previous reporting on the matter in February, in which sources told us Gearbox was nearing a sale. Embracer is…

Read more…

PAX East was in Boston this past week, and while there were some heavy hitters at the show like Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios and Square Enix showing off Final Fantasy XIV’s Dawntrail expansion, the show didn’t have a ton of big names.

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PAX East was in Boston this past week, and while there were some heavy hitters at the show like Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios and Square Enix showing off Final Fantasy XIV’s Dawntrail expansion, the show didn’t have a ton of big names.

Read more…

Plot: Asphalt City follows Ollie Cross, a young paramedic assigned to the NYC night shift with an uncompromising and seasoned partner Gene Rutkovsky. The dark nights reveal a city in crisis; Rutkovsky guides Cross, as each 911 call is often dangerous and uncertain, putting their lives on the line every day to help others. Cross soon discovers firsthand the chaos and awe of a job that careens from harrowing to heartfelt, testing his relationship with Rutkovsky and the ethical ambiguity that can be the difference between life and death.

Review: Stories about first responders, specifically EMTs, are often material depicted on small-screen procedurals and dramas like 9-1-1 and Chicago Med. Doctors tend to get all the glory on the big screen, except for Martin Scorsese’s haunting 1999 film Bringing Out The Dead. Where that film went down a horror-tinged rabbit hole reminiscent of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, it managed to evoke the brutality that paramedics face night after night in the sprawl of New York City. Following in the footsteps of Nicolas Cage’s film, Asphalt City is a hard-to-watch look at paramedics’ intense job and its consequences on their psyches. Featuring multiple sequences that some viewers will have difficulty watching, Asphalt City is a film you cannot walk away from without it lingering in your memory.

Asphalt City follows Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan), a medical student who gets assigned a rotation working as a paramedic during the night shift in a rough part of New York City. Living in a rundown tenement in Chinatown to save money for medical school, Cross is immediately shocked by the brutality of the emergencies he and his partner, Gene Rutkovsky (Sean Penn), encounter night after night. From drug addicts to homeless people, gangsters, and more, Ollie must endure the fact that not everyone is happy when the first responders arrive, nor can they always save the patient. The grind of what Ollie and Gene encounter night after night forces the young man to find outlets for his rage, gradually reaching a breaking point. Over the two-hour running time, Asphalt City pulls no punches and filters almost nothing as we endure what Ollie endures.

Originally released under the title Black Flies, Asphalt City competed for the Palm d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Vying for that esteemed prize usually indicates something special in a film that sets it apart from everything else out there. Asphalt City does not reinvent the genre by showing us anything we have not seen in Bringing Out The Dead or Taxi Driver. There is clearly an influence from Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese in the look and feel of Asphalt City, almost to the point of homage. This film desperately wants to send a message about EMTs’ grueling and nihilistic lives and how they cope with one of the most demanding and challenging jobs out there. Still, it does so by repeating the formulaic storytelling we have seen before. Tye Sheridan is a solid actor, but he spends so much of this film looking broken and angry, while Sean Penn barely raises the temperature of his performance above a grumble.

So much of Asphalt City centers on Sheridan and Penn that every other actor barely registers. Most of the cast features people who look like the filmmakers picked them up right off the street, and almost every scene has a new face as the EMTs roll from one call to the next. This makes the actual recognizable talent in the film feel fleeting as well. The most substantial supporting role is Michael Pitt as a rival EMT with whom Ollie does not get along. Mike Tyson portrays Chief Burroughs in a total of three scenes in which he barely has any dialogue. Gbenga Akinnagbe and Katherine Waterston show up for a couple of scenes that seem unnecessarily added. True Detective: Night Country star Kali Reis shows up in a pivotal but minor role, while Raquel Nave is seen throughout in fully nude sex scenes with Tye Sheridan that are meant to be provocative but instead feel tacked on. In many cases, the non-famous supporting cast helped make this feel more authentic, while the famous actors pulled me out of the story.

Directed by Jean-Stephane Sauvaire, Asphalt City has a European aesthetic despite the New York City setting. With manic editing by Saar Klein and Katherine McQuerrey, Sauvaire, and cinematographer David Ungaro try to blend a documentary-like realism to the medical sequences with an ethereal and dream-like tone. The issue is that so much of the visual approach feels like it has been done countless times before, and it cannot help but feel a bit derivative. The screenplay from Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown keeps the realistic medical elements from Shannon Burke’s novel on which this is based. Still, it cannot help but feel watered down when cliche moments like Ollie screaming but with no sound or the requisite mentor taking the fall sequence. That does not discount the handful of disturbing scenes in this film, which will be a challenge for any viewers sensitive to realistic depictions of dead bodies. It also does not help that the title does not make much sense, whereas the original name, Black Flies, is a recurring motif throughout the movie.

Asphalt City is a tough watch. The message at the center of the film lacks subtlety as it drives home that being a paramedic in New York City is a thankless job fraught with challenges. This is not a film that pulls any punches and would likely dissuade more people from pursuing a career in medicine than it would inspire. Nevertheless, while this movie is tough to watch from a visceral standpoint, it is also not easy to get through because of how familiar it feels. Asphalt City does not tread any ground we have not seen on screen before; instead, it shows us more disturbing twists. While Tye Sheridan and Sean Penn are good, they cannot overcome the weakness of a film that is so weighed down by its own horrors.

Asphalt City

AVERAGE

6

The post Asphalt City Review appeared first on JoBlo.

Back in 2015, HBO aired Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling, and Zac Stuart-Pontier’s six episode true crime docu-series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, which focused on real estate heir Robert Durst and investigated “the unsolved 1982 disappearance of Durst’s wife, Kathie McCormack, the 2000 execution-style killing of his longtime friend Susan Berman, and the 2001 death and dismemberment of his neighbor Morris Black”, in Galveston, Texas.” During the making of that docu-series, Durst was caught on tape saying “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” While he had been acquitted of murdering Black in 2003, Durst was arrested the day before the series finale aired and charged with first degree murder in the death of Berman. While the case went to trial, the documentarians kept digging into the Durst story, gathering material for the follow-up series The Jinx: Part Two. The new trailer for the second part has just dropped. The Jinx: Part Two (which will also consist of six episodes) will begin airing on HBO on April 21.

The Jinx: Part Two covers the next eight years of investigations against Durst. The filmmakers continued their investigation, uncovering hidden material, Durst’s prison calls, and interviews with people who had never before come forward.

Jarecki directed the docu-series and executive produced with Zac Stuart-Pontier and Kyle Martin as well as HBO’s Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, Sara Rodriguez.

If you don’t want to know what happened to Durst after The Jinx, don’t read beyond this line because there are SPOILERS below:

The Jinx: Part Two will undoubtedly cover the fact that Durst was convicted of murdering Berman and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. After he received that sentence, he was also charged in the disappearance of McCormack – but he passed away in 2022 at the age of 78 before that case could go to trial. Authorities also suspected Durst of committing other murders, but their suspicions were never confirmed.

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I’m filling in some gaps in my RPG history. I’ve been playing series like Final Fantasy since I was a kid, but there are countless other landmark RPGs I’ve rarely touched, including the fantasy RPG Mana series, which splintered off of Final Fantasy Adventure in 1991. The only installment in the long-running franchise…

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I’m filling in some gaps in my RPG history. I’ve been playing series like Final Fantasy since I was a kid, but there are countless other landmark RPGs I’ve rarely touched, including the fantasy RPG Mana series, which splintered off of Final Fantasy Adventure in 1991. The only installment in the long-running franchise…

Read more…

With cameras rolling on James Gunn’s Superman, the director took to social media to share a special moment and show off a pretty cool gift from people tied directly to the legacy of the character.

James Gunn posted a photo of himself with the grandsons of Jerry Siegel – the famed co-creator (along with Joe Shuster) of Superman – who gifted him an edition of Action Comics #1, where the Man of Steel was first introduced. “A gift from Jerry Siegel’s grandsons Michael and James Larson – a reprint of the first issue of Action Comics signed by Jerry. It’s been great having Mike and Jim around keeping Jerry’s spirit alive in the birth of the DCU! Here we all were on the day of the cast read through.” That’s a nice gesture from the fellas and shows that there is faith within the family for the project and future of DC. Here’s hoping that the gift being a reprint and not an original isn’t a bad omen…

Formerly titled Superman: Legacy, Gunn’s Superman will take on the heroic task of helping DC “reset” their cinematic brand after an extensive streak of fare that either bombed, tanked with critics or were just too damn dark to even see what was going on! Chapter One of the DC Universe, dubbed “Gods and Monsters”, will also host The Authority, The Brave and the Bold, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and James Mangold’s Swamp Thing, none of which have official release dates yet.

James Gunn’s Superman is one of the biggest projects lined up by a major studio, with a summer 2025 release on the calendar. And it’s no doubt a huge gamble. While Gunn has disputed the rumored $360+ million budget, much is on the line elsewhere, as the DC co-CEO has a monumental task in turning around the studio’s reputation. With Marvel flailing about and trying to recapture their glory days, this might be the best time for DC to swoop in and save their own day. Superman will be James Gunn’s first directorial effort since leaving Marvel, having bid farewell with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

A copy of Action Comics #1 is up for auction next month and is expected to set a new record for the highest-priced comic book ever.

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