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17 Jan

Se7en (1995) – What Happened to This Horror Movie?

By . FilmTV No Comments

It’s time for another episode of the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? video series, and with this one we’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of the serial killer thriller Se7en (watch it HERE)! To hear all about it, check out the video embedded above.

Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, Se7en – or Seven, if you prefer – has the following synopsis: When retiring police Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) tackles a final case with the aid of newly transferred David Mills (Brad Pitt), they discover a number of elaborate and grizzly murders. They soon realize they are dealing with a serial killer (Kevin Spacey) who is targeting people he thinks represent one of the seven deadly sins. Somerset also befriends Mills’ wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is pregnant and afraid to raise her child in the crime-riddled city.

This is what the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series is all about: Hollywood has had its fair share of historically troubled productions. Whether it was casting changes, actor deaths, fired directors, in-production rewrites, constant delays, budget cuts or studio edits, these films had every intention to be a blockbuster, but were beset with unforeseen disasters. Sometimes huge hits, sometimes box office bombs. Either way, we have to ask: WTF Happened To This Horror Movie?

The Se7en episode of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? was Written, Narrated, and Edited by Tyler Nichols, Produced by Lance Vlcek and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

A couple of the previous episodes of the show can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!

Are you a fan of Se7en? Check out the What Happened to This Horror Movie? episode, then let us know by leaving a comment below.

The post Se7en (1995) – What Happened to This Horror Movie? appeared first on JoBlo.

17 Jan

Alarum Review: Even Stallone Can’t Save This Unoriginal Action Flick

By . FilmTV No Comments

PLOT: Two rogue spies go off-grid, marry, and come under attack at their remote cabin hideaway by various intel agencies seeking a stolen hard drive.

REVIEW: Two spies get married and their bosses aren’t happy about it. Whether it’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith or… well, that’s really the major one, this trope has been tested in the world of cinema and the results can be quite fun. But any tried and true story needs interesting execution to really stand out. Especially with so many films released on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, Alarum would rather meander through moments than excite in any unique or fun way. And the story feels like a mishmash of several other, better films.

Alarum follows Joe and Laura, two spies who have been off the grid for five years. They’ve been living a happily married life but all that changes when a plane crashes in the woods nearby. They find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and other agencies are desperate to recover the hard drive in the crashed plane. There are standoffs, betrayals, and everything else you would expect from an action film. While repetition isn’t a dealbreaker, especially within the action genre, the execution needs to be top-notch to overcome any generalities.

Sylvester Stallone, Willa Fitzgerald, and Scott Eastwood in Alarum (2025).

I’m just not sure I’m convinced that Scott Eastwood is an action lead. I’ve never had a problem with him when he appears as a side character that sometimes doesn’t make it but as a lead, there’s something that just doesn’t click here. He’s not serious enough in moments when he needs to be and his attempts at levity come across as misguided. I can’t tell if they were trying for a Ryan Reynolds-type performance, but it doesn’t work. I liked his interactions with Willa Fitzgerald but that’s because she’s absolutely incredible and could probably have chemistry with a piece of wood. But she gets the short end of the stick in terms of screentime between the two spies.

Mike Colter is having the time of his life and he brings the only tension in the film. He’s such a loose cannon, that the screen comes alive when he’s around. I needed a full movie just based around him causing chaos. I’m sure most expected Sylvester Stallone to be taking more of a backseat here, and don’t get me wrong, he does. But he still has more to do than I expected. It’s a pretty basic part and Stallone doesn’t have a scene partner most of the time, so I’m sure his role was shot very quickly. Even still, he leaves an impact on the film, though I’m sure Stallone fans will be disappointed by his limited screen time.

Scott Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone in Alarum (2025).

There are good ideas at play but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The cinematography can look good one moment but then the blocking is stilted and makes things feel unnatural. I think the key to a good gunfight is making it feel chaotic yet everything always feels contained here. Not to mention the number of times that someone fully exposed their own body to get a shot off made my head start to spin. The action just doesn’t work in any way and, in an era where even TV can have decent shootouts, this is just inexcusable. Alarum feels like multiple spy tropes all rolled into one. There were many times when I felt like they had just aped an idea from a recent Mission: Impossible movie. This isn’t a bad thing in theory, but the execution leaves plenty to be desired as it just has you thinking about better, more accomplished films.

ALARUM will be in Theaters, On Digital and On Demand January 17, 2025.

Related


Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Washington and more of our favorite celebs give JoBlo a Shout-Out!


Sylvester Stallone

NOT GOOD

4

The post Alarum Review: Even Stallone Can’t Save This Unoriginal Action Flick appeared first on JoBlo.

17 Jan

Greta Gerwig’s Narnia movie is set to release in IMAX for Thanksgiving 2026 with a limited two-week run

By . FilmTV No Comments
greta gerwig, narnia

Just as Barbie was getting great buzz, it was announced that Greta Gerwig would be helming an adaptation of The Chronicle of Narnia for Netflix. The streamer has been eyeing this epic adaptation to be one of their releases for Christmas in 2026. There has been talk that Gerwig would naturally be hoping for her new film to have a theatrical release. Perhaps it was when Barbie became the juggernaut hit of 2023 that influenced their decision, but Netflix is now giving Gerwig what she wished for. Sort of.

According to Deadline, Netflix is now set to release Gerwig’s Narnia adaptation in IMAX globally for Thanksgiving on November 26, 2026. However, the movie would be released in a limited two-week window before ultimately streaming on the platform on Christmas Day. This plan is similar to when Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery was given a short theater run before streaming on Christmas of 2022. Glass Onion would actually go on to outperform other theater releases in its limited screenings.

Actor Jason Issacs may have let it slip that the book that Gerwig is adapting will be The Magician’s Nephew, which is a prequel. Issacs would say, “I loved all the Narnia books as a kid. When Peter was told he wouldn’t be coming back, I understood something devastating about mortality. I picked this one because Greta Gerwig is about to make a film of it, which I can’t wait to see.“

Netflix acquired the rights to C.S. Lewis’ series of Narnia novels way back in 2018. There are seven novels in the series: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew, and The Last Battle. The first four books have received multiple television adaptations over the decades since they were published in the 1950s. Walden Media made two big screen adaptations with Disney. The first, Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, was an enormous hit in 2005, grossing over $745 million worldwide, but the 2008 sequel Prince Caspian, made significantly less, $419 million. So Walden Media had to go to Fox to get a third movie made, 2010’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. That one made about as much as Prince Caspian.

If Gerwig is indeed making The Magician’s Nephew, the description of the book’s story reads, “Narnia… a land frozen in eternal winter… a country waiting to be set free. On a daring quest to save a life, two friends are hurled into another world, where an evil sorceress seeks to enslave them. But then the lion Aslan’s song weaves itself into the fabric of a new land, a land that will be known as Narnia. And in Narnia, all things are possible.”

The post Greta Gerwig’s Narnia movie is set to release in IMAX for Thanksgiving 2026 with a limited two-week run appeared first on JoBlo.

17 Jan

Joan Plowright, acclaimed British actress and widow to Laurence Olivier, dies

By . FilmTV No Comments
Joan plowright

Joan Plowright, the heralded actress of stage and screen who was also the widow to Laurence Olivier, has passed away. Dame Joan Plowright was 95.

A native of Lincolnshire, England, Joan Plowright – who studied at the famed Bristol Old Vic Theatre School – first made her London stage debut in the mid-’50s. Soon after, she was working alongside Laurence Olivier, then already a well-established icon of the stage and screen himself, having combined these talents in an almost unprecedented way with Henry V and Hamlet. (He was also fresh off of his divorce from Vivien Leigh.) 

The month after Joan Plowright married Olivier, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for A Taste of Honey. Plowright remained committed to the stage, steadily appearing in productions into the early ‘90s. Some key productions include The Crucible; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; Saturday, Sunday, Monday; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; and The House of Bernarda Alba.

Even still, Joan Plowright was quite prominent on the screen, too. She earned a BAFTA nomination early on for Most Promising Newcomer for The Entertainer, later earning another nod for Best Supporting Actress for Equus. She would work with Barry Levinson in Avalon, play a charming opposite to Walter Matthau in Dennis the Menace and turn up in The Spiderwick Chronicles. The most acclaim she received, however, came with 1991’s Enchanted April, for which she earned her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. She would win the latter and again win a statue for television movie Stalin, a role that also landed her an Emmy nomination.

In a statement via BBC, Plowright’s surviving family members wrote, “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on January 16 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95. She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire. She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories.”

Leave your condolences for the great Dame Joan Plowright in the comments section below.

The post Joan Plowright, acclaimed British actress and widow to Laurence Olivier, dies appeared first on JoBlo.

17 Jan

Wolf Man review – a bit of a howler

By . FilmTV No Comments

Horror buffs and the perennially online will no doubt recall the now-infamous cast photo from 2017 which was supposed to herald the dawn of Universal’s “Dark Universe”. Featuring four of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time (and Sofia Boutella), the cursed image endures as a memento mori of the studio’s ambitious plans to unite its classic monster movies under a single blockbuster umbrella. Following The Mummy’s rude reawakening later that year, the project was hastily shelved, destined never to see the light of day.

Three years later, however, Universal teamed up with Blumhouse – a production company renowned for making mass-appeal, high-concept horror on the cheap – and Australian director Leigh Whannell to revive one of the OG monster squad. Putting a modern twist on HG Wells’ ‘The Invisible Man’ by revealing the real monster to be toxic masculinity, Whannell’s 2020 film of the same name signalled a shift toward a more independent-minded, filmmaker-driven approach. So, can Whannell do for the Wolf Man what he did for his stealthy stablemate?

First off, it’s worth noting that Wolf Man 2025 bears no relation whatsoever to Universal’s last ill-fated attempt at bringing this particular beast back to life on the big screen: 2010’s The Wolfman, which is, by every conceivable measure, a diabolical movie. You know, aside from the obvious fact that it’s also about a man who gets bitten by, and subsequently turns into, a wolf.

This is not your typical gothic werewolf tale, then, but a dour domestic drama in wolf’s clothing. Set primarily in the dense pine forests of the Pacific Northwest, Whannell’s film owes more to John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, Mike Nichols’ Wolf and Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers than anything the great Lon Chaney Jr put his name to. Indeed, there’s more than a hint of Griffin Dunne about Wolf Man star Christopher Abbott here.

He plays Blake, a doting father and passive-aggressive husband who is determined to be a better family man than his own emotionally distant and overbearing dad ever was. To this end, Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck, though evidently well-versed in the tropes of this specific horror subgenre, are chiefly concerned with using werewolf lore as a metaphor for becoming the thing you hate most. Frankly, it’s a bit on the nose.

Returning to the scene of his childhood trauma, Blake whisks wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) away from their comfortable life in San Francisco to his father’s isolated farmhouse in rural Oregon, where a local legend tells of a strange and dangerous creature lurking in the woods. But before they even reach the farm, all hell breaks loose. Suddenly, Blake is forced to reckon with the brutal realisation that his promise to Ginger – that he will always keep her safe – may come back to bite him – or, more accurately, her.

The violent ambush that instantly derails the family’s quiet getaway is genuinely nerve-racking – Whannell proving himself adept at crafting an effective, not to mention expensive-looking, set piece – but it’s also the moment when the film’s bite starts to weaken. With the emotional stakes having been spelled out in giant, razor-sharp claw marks, all that’s left to do is squirm at Blake’s slow, agonising change and wait for the inevitable to happen.

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ANTICIPATION.

Will Whannell drop a lupine fiasco?
3

ENJOYMENT.

Heavy going, with some nifty practical effects.
2

IN RETROSPECT.


All told, a bit of a howler.
2

Directed by



Leigh Whannell

Starring



Julia Garner,

Christopher Abbott,

Sam Jaeger

The post Wolf Man review – a bit of a howler appeared first on Little White Lies.

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