October 2025

Like the other films in the franchise, The First Purge’s clear polemical ambitions are paved over by commercial ones. But this one’s blaxploitation revival is a bigger missed opportunity, because it might have really had something to say.

At the top, a montage of TV news talking heads gives us a cursory history of the rise of the New Founding Fathers of America, an autocratic political party whose introduction of the Purge, an annual… See more →

Gotta print some zines. Off to FedEx I go. The self-service printer/copier takes credit cards. I’m prompted to pre-authorize a payment amount. Look at the sticker on the machine with the printing rates. Recall my document’s page count and how many copies I want. Do the math in my head. Select an amount from the preset options. Pop my thumb drive into the machine. It won’t read. No problem, I have a backup. But that…

I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not.

There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her home, and it just so happens the head of her security detail is Leo Barnes (Frank… See more →

I couldn’t find any indication that Jello Biafra was offered a cameo in The Purge: Anarchy, which seems like an injustice given that it’s essentially a film adaptation of Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor,” albeit an adaptation whose 104-minute runtime is markedly less incisive than what the DK song manages to say in a mere 180 seconds.

Still, Anarchy is an unqualified improvement over the first Purge film, whose one-note home-invasion plot Anarchy upgrades to… See more →

I was once again unable to make it to the animation festival in Ottawa this year, and the Philadelphia Film Festival once again filled some of that gap with a well-curated program of shorts. I’m feeling pretty raw lately about a variety of big things both personal and global, and several of these films collectively poked at all those things, so while I don’t regret attending, I did come away from the screening more emotionally… See more →

In keeping with this year’s ad hoc and mostly lowbrow Robtober, and since most of the Purge movies are available on streaming services I currently have access to, I’m reluctantly giving them a go. I didn’t hate this one any less than the first time I saw it; it’s perhaps the low-water mark of boneheaded Blumhouse mediocrity, with a kindergarten-level attempt at social commentary, cut-rate cinematography, and the most irritating villain this side of Martin… See more →

Two and a half years ago, I came away from Kinference 2023 disappointed that more of my peers weren’t as put off as I was by the current state of tech’s dominant preoccupations. My experience wasn’t much different this time, except that in the intervening years, Web3 enthusiasm has fashionably given way to AI enthusiasm. This isn’t to say all the speakers were doing PR for LLMs, and among those intermittently expressing guarded misgivings, Frank… See more →

So I thought I knew as much as I needed to know about the HTML <video> element, and as usual, I was wrong. I knew I could specify a source file with a src attribute on either <video> or a nested <source> element. I knew what to expect from a bunch of other attributes, like autoplay, controls, loop, muted, and the obvious height and width. I knew the poster attribute gave me control over the… See more →

We’ve reached the “am I the asshole” stage of my reproachful trudge through this franchise, as Terrifier 3 ostensibly comes ever closer to the sort of 1980s genre trash that’s always warmed my contaminated heart. Its Silent Night, Deadly Night homage is unmistakable, its anamorphic cinematography nails the era’s unpolished 35mm aesthetic, and its uninhibited gore gleefully actualizes what all those VHS boxes on my local West Coast Video’s horror shelves always promised but rarely… See more →

Adam Stoddard recently found common cause with the enthusiastic craftsmanship of lowrider culture, and I found myself nodding along vigorously:

The thing is, this particular brand of “functional absolutism” that’s widely held in tech circles is a bankrupt philosophy. It leaves no room for beauty, no room for expression, no room for investing time and care in something for no other reason than you find it satisfying to do so.

Should every website be the subject… See more →

In “Homie the Clown,” a fan-favorite Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson goes to clown college. The lessons he receives in baggy pants, balloon animals, and tiny bicycles were probably not drawn directly from the curriculum of an existing clown college, but they at least evince an awareness that such institutions actually exist.

In an adjacent hemisphere of the late 20th century entertainment world, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a gonzo B-movie throwback, mines campy scares from… See more →

Look at this super-fun microsite Jason Santa Maria designed for DJR’s super-fun font, Megazoid!

Another practical effects showreel barely disguised as a movie featuring the maniacal killer Art the Clown, a try-hard whose yearning to be a horror icon is as plain (and plainly mortifying) as our Commander in Chief’s yearning for a Nobel Prize. Despite the fact that Art, after being introduced gearing up Rambo-style in an unearned montage, indulges in some hacksaw shenanigans nasty enough to arouse the kind of guy who owns more than one Cannibal… See more →

It seems as though Terrifier is the slasher franchise of the moment, with 2024’s third installment reportedly becoming the highest grossing unrated film of all time, so it’s time once again for me to hold my nose and commune with the zeitgeist.

You’d be forgiven for assuming Terrifier’s stabby antihero, Art the Clown, was the product of an 11-year-old Fangoria subscriber’s very first ChatGPT prompt, but Art actually made his debut in a 2008… See more →