The Academy Awards. That time of the year when everyone debates what movies are truly the best and there is never a consensus and no one is ever happy. A movie can be incredibly popular and then it wins a bunch of Oscars and suddenly it's overrated and not very good or downright bad. It happens every year. But for the month of April let's take a look at those films that had Oscars on their mind and instead fell flat on their faces. Now Oscar Bait is a term that can also be applied to winners or films that did score a bunch of nominations. For example Bradley Cooper's film Maestro is very much an Oscar Bait movie even though it had a decent awards season. I want to talk about the films that did nothing. That were early contenders then either faded away eventually or just plain crashed and burned. Oscar Bait's biggest failures. What wrong here with these? Was the movie poor? Did something else just have a dominant run? Or were politics involved? Maybe all of the above. S...
A retrospective by Brooks Rich Let's kick off the spooky season with a bona fide classic. I love the horror genre, but not much really scares or creeps me out. Most horror films I just watch and enjoy. However, 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' is one of those that really gets under my skin, and not just because the Sawyer family are eating people. The way Tobe Hooper shoots the film gives it an almost documentary feel. If you have never seen 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre,' you should probably fix that immediately. Do I need to explain what it's about? A group of '70s kids is driving across Texas in a van and runs afoul of the Sawyer family, including the man himself, Leatherface. It's a classic of the horror genre and one of the pioneers of the '70s and '80s horror boom. The film has a reputation for being sickeningly bloody and violent, but that is not true. It's essentially a bloodless film, which makes it even more horrifying. Most of the violence...