Monday, March 18, 2024

Tag: action

Saloum
While American horror movies from Black creatives have gained a reputation in recent years (thanks in no small part to Jordan Peele) for incorporating racial and social commentary, the same can be said for black horror from around the globe. After all, black folks the world over have plenty...
Day Shift
I have selfish reasons for wanting to see Day Shift. Yeah, it’s a movie about a black vampire hunter and all, but it was also filmed in my stomping ground of the San Fernando Valley -- something I became acutely aware of months before its release when production shut...
Spawn movie poster
I've never read the Spawn comic books, but I remember that when the movie adaptation came out in 1997, I felt a sense of eager anticipation because it was a black superhero film that wasn’t a cheesy kids flick like The Meteor Man, a silly spoof like Blankman and,...
The Clearing
It wasn’t too long ago (2013, to be exact) that a Cheerios commercial entitled “Just Checking” made national headlines for sparking a torrent of racial hatred online over its portrayal of an interracial (READ: BLACK AND WHITE) couple and their daughter. While it would be tough to say that...
Inhumanity
What Inhumanity lacks in budget, it makes up for in reckless ambition. With a sprawling slasher-thriller-action-sci fi-mystery-suspense story that incorporates serial killers, police corruption, medical experimentation, an international crime ring, a murder whodunit, a love triangle and a myriad of crosses, double-crosses and plot twists, it admirably aims for...
The First Purge
Every movie in the Purge franchise has been more overtly sociopolitical than the one before it, and The First Purge takes the series to new, gloriously radical heights in a powerful, if unsubtle, expression of the fear, frustration and anger of people of color in the United States. It's...
An unspecified amount of time after The Purge: Anarchy, Leo (Frank Grillo) is working as head of a security team guarding independent presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell). Roan has based her campaign around opposing the annual Purge, a cause that Leo can get behind -- or in...
The Purge: Anarchy
A year after the events of The Purge, The Purge: Anarchy focuses on a group of disparate individuals in downtown Los Angeles on the night of the Purge of 2023. Shane (Zach Gilford) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez) are a couple on the verge of separating who are heading to...
The Recall
There comes a point when the careers of most action movie stars take a downturn, relegating them to direct-to-video drivel struggling to recapture even a fraction of their former glory, but in the case of Wesley Snipes, it feels more depressing because he can actually act. He didn't HAVE...
Kong: Skull Island
It should go without saying that portrayals of black characters in horror movies can stand to improve, but on the bright side, they aren't as bad as they've been in the past. Compare the original King Kong to 2017's Kong: Skull Island, for instance (acknowledging that films like these...