Shudder Presents: Cursed Films Episode 4 & 5 – The Crow & Twilight Zone: The Movie

Shudder’s new documentary series Cursed Films came to a conclusion this Thursday with two episodes surrounding movies that are notorious more for tragedy than for supernatural cursing. Those films are 1994’s The Crow and 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie. As he did with the Poltergeist episode, series creator Jay Cheel interviews people who were on set and worked with actors who died during production of the films. Their stories are harrowing and devastating and make the series a necessity for any horror film fan or cinephile in general. Here’s hoping for a season two.

Shudder Presents: Cursed Films Episode 2 & 3 – The Omen & Poltergeist

Living through the real world horrors of a global pandemic and quarantine makes sitting for horror-based entertainment very interesting, to say the least. Shudder is there for us horror fans, updating their catalogs with a “Halfway to Halloween” theme as well as a new series from writer/director Jay Cheel, Cursed Films. Last week’s premiere episode: The Exorcist, was Shudder’s second biggest streaming debut ever behind their updated Creepshow series last year. This week, we get a two-fer of episodes dealing with two of the most notoriously plagued and cursed productions in cinematic history, let alone horror history: The Omen and Poltergeist.

Shudder Presents: Cursed Films Episode 1 – The Exorcist

Horror fans have long shared stories of cursed productions on the set of some of the most famous and infamous horror films. It’s easy to shake many of these away as superstition or paranoia, but we are talking about the horror genre here, so is it too far out of the reach of our minds, that maybe… just maybe the films that scare us the most are cursed? That is the question being posed by Shudder, AMC’s horror streaming service, which unveiled today Cursed Film, its new 5-part series. The series covers Poltergeist (1982), The Omen (1976), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), and The Crow (1994). Perhaps fittingly, though, the premiere episode deals with William Friedkin’s genre-defining classic from 1973, The Exorcist.

It’s a few months into 2020, so it’s time for my Top 10 Movies of 2019 list. I meant to get this up earlier, but there were a few reasons for the delay, some good and some bad (some technically difficulties unfortunately). So let’s just get cracking on the 10 best movies I saw in 2019, and one that was released in 2019, but it took me a few weeks into 2020 to watch one of it. I was surprised to see the number of new movies was a little lower than normal. I signed up for the AMC Theatres A-List ($20 a month to see 3 movies a week), and thought I was going to see a ton of movies, but I guess I was busy with other things. I am going to make a solid effort to make up for that in 2020, although I am off to a slow start with one month in.

The majority of films are on the list below are compelled to put a halt to something. That something can be anything, but it’s the driving force that makes some of these films approach greatness. The impulse to avoid something or to alter an emotion have consumed the films in my top 10. An aging director in Pain and Glory desperately tries to avoid the bleak fact that his best years, personally and creatively, are well behind him by avoiding drifting into creative obscurity. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, two ravishing young women must avoid the passionate feelings they have for each other, no matter how difficult such a task is. Quentin Tarantino ruminates extensively on the concept of altering time. His Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood envisions a world where Charles Manson and his disciples get the ultimate comeuppance. In Uncut Gems there seems to be an inevitable ending that its main character cannot avoid, no matter how tirelessly he tries. And in The Irishman an aging gangster wants so badly to avoid his inner conscious that he tries to avoid his true emotions at all costs, but sometimes trying all your might just isn’t enough.

Below are my Top 30 Movies Of 2019…