Fede Alvarez | the m0vie blog

388. Alien: Romulus (#—)

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Jess Dunne, this week with special guest Ethan Shattock, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

This week, Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus.

On a backwater world, a group of young people make a desperate bid to escape the drudgery of their dreary lives. Identifying a seemingly abandoned corporate facility in orbit, the group decides to steal some equipment to help them journey to another system. Unfortunately, once they board the mysterious space station known only as “Romulus“, the gang discovers that they are not alone in the darkness.

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best television shows of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: alien, Darkness, Fede Alvarez, franchise, horror, imdb, jess dunne, light, Movie, nostalgia, podcast, slasher, space, The 250, violence, xenomorph | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Evil Dead (2013)

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Darren

Evil Dead does has a bit of a quirky charm to it, serving as perhaps the best-made horror throwback I’ve seen in quite some time, much more effective than most of the recent splurge of exorcism movies. As far as competent execution of classic horror movie tropes go, complete with the sense of “something gruesome’s gonna happen” dread and a healthy amount of gore, Evil Dead succeeds admirably. There are some issues in the final act, but Evil Dead checks all the necessary boxes, and does so with a minimum amount of fuss or pretension, which makes it a surprising enjoyable watch for those looking to enjoy a good old-fashioned video nasty.

That said, it can’t help but feel a little awkward, through no fault of its own. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead was a genre classic which worked in a large part because it eschewed all but the most basic tropes of horror storytelling, refusing to dress a video nasty in anything too fancy. The movie came to embody a particular subgenre of horror, and it wore its grotesqueness on its sleeve. Last year, Cabin in the Woods offered a fitting follow-up, a capstone to that approach to horror. As such, through no fault of its own, this version of Evil Dead feels like it arrived a little late.