urban legends


Speaking as someone who has been on this earth since the early 1970s, I can attest to the fact that some movies often behave like wine. They may be novel when they first come out, but after a few years they become bland. However, if you let them age long enough, they become good again, often times embodying a nostalgia factor that makes their imperfections seem endearing. This process takes about 20 years for the effects to be initially felt, which is why nostalgia often runs in 20 year cycles, which coincide with a person in his or her 20s looking back fondly at what they watched as a child, and major movie studios remaking beloved titles old enough to drink. Because of this, the films of the 90s are starting to look more and more vintage. Yeah, there’s that bump in the middle of the decade with really bad CGI that will always hamper films like Spawn and Species, but the movies from the earlier part of that decade seemed to have escaped that. Such is the case with the 1992 horror film Candyman. Candyman took on the subject of urban legends when they were gaining popularity, and it started its own legends about the now iconic monster. Case in point, I saw it as a college preview back in 1992, and I knew plenty of people who immediately went home and said the name five times in the mirror. (My sister, who was often affected like this from […]


Junkfood Cinema - Large

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; our bubblegum is teeming with spider eggs. Legend tells of a bad movie column that resides in the darkest, stormiest parts of the internet. They say on this very day many years ago, a bad movie was murdered in this column. It was mocked mercilessly for all of its innumerable faults in what was supposed to be a prank, but things got out of hand. The perpetrator, JFC, tried to bury the evidence (i.e. their love for the movie), but it came back. When it comes to schlocky movies, like a car door handle at the end of a particularly silly 50s cautionary tale, JFC is hooked.  That affinity for awfulness should serve as warning to others…that we have an affinity for awful. To celebrate our addiction, we will guzzle down all the pop rocks and soda we can find, or some other snack food themed to the film that won’t dissolve our insides…quite as quickly. There are plenty of myths and tall tales swirling about the collective human consciousness, this one however is horrifyingly true. It occurred in the ancient era, in the time before time: September, 1998. According to the elders, it was a strange time to be alive. A man called William the Clinton was ruling our land, diamondbacks and devil rays were added to the field of professional baseball, and humankind was presented with the unfortunate task of choosing between Armageddon and Deep Impact. As the story goes, autumn’s arrival was […]

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published: 12.23.2014
published: 12.22.2014
published: 12.19.2014

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