The Ice Cream Man: Eli Roth Is Back On Form

Summary: an evil ice cream man is giving kids ice cream that makes them kill their parents.

Thanksgiving was a good film, but it has been a while since we last heard from Eli Roth so expectations were high for this film and for the most part he delivered.

Now there is a hullabaloo about oh no the film uses AI, to that we say grow up most films do and just don’t tell you, see Supergirl. If you think the effects shots in Brand New Day didn’t have any AI involvement then you need to put the beverage down and get serious.

The thing that is perhaps the hardest to understand is what the tone is, as the film is both very dark and also very silly, you could argue it is a comedy horror perhaps. Once you adjust to it it’s okay.

The film feels both fresh but also like it is calling back to A Nightmare On Elm Street in one key way.

The best thing the film does is how it ends, it ends in a way not typical at all for horror films, as the villain basically wins, most films have the killer stopped, the demon exorcised, the ghost sent on etc, this does not.

One thing that was not so good about the film was a line of dialogue where a 12 year old girl says “I’m a 12 year old girl of course I know how to make myself sick”. Bulimia is a very serious condition and it should not be made light off particularly with teens who are often prone to eating disorders and suicidality. It’s a throwaway line it’s not like they dwell on it but it’s a clumsy line that harms an otherwise good film.

4/5

Pros.

The ending

The gore

The tone once you adjust

The Ice Cream Man

Cons.

The Bulimia line

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Cinema Issues: The Death Of Marvel’s Disney + Dreams

News has broken that other than Daredevil Born Again no other series will be returning to Disney +, despite all those fake leaker accounts promising Hawkeye season 2. There’ll be some one offs and mini series, but by and large the focus will shift to animation as it is cheaper and easier to do.

As you can imagine people are upset, why won’t we get another season of Wonder Man despite the fact it flopped. However, this move is great for Marvel, you shouldn’t have to watch a 6 hours series in order to understand a film you want to watch as such stopping it is for the best.

Moreover, a hell of a lot of the things that happened in the Disney + shows either were never referenced again or were just written out, looking at you Hulk’s son and Kingpin losing an eye. The fact is a lot of these series just weren’t good at all, and so it makes sense to cast them off. When they did mix in with the proper MCU films it was generally in so much as providing a supporting character or explaining a motive, they just weren’t needed.

There are also a lot of reasons why Disney and marvel as a brand want to remove themselves from Marvel’s Disney + offerings and a lot of this comes down to politics. Both Tatiana Maslany and Oscar Issac have publicly attacked Disney in the press and online and as such She Hulk and Moon Knight died there and then, She Hulk has been heavily ignored and vast parts of it simply seem to be non-canon now.

In many ways Disney leaving this arena whilst they still have some of their credibility left is a win, let’s hope Wonder Man, Riri Williams, She Hulk and the rest stay buried forever and don’t pop up for a jump scare in the next Avengers film.

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Paw Patrol The Dino Movie: Brain Rot For Kids

Summary: the animals find other older animals.

This is soulless if this is what constitutes animation these days then the practice should be shelved permanently. There is no depth in the characters or their bonds, or their dialogue, it is just the most obvious vapid platitudes.

This feels like a glorified advert with the animals needing to get new vehicles and have the disabled dog who was already riding a t-rex, have it upgraded to sell more toys. It was incredibly cynical.

The villain is maybe on screen for about 5 minutes and is just silly without any real motivation, they are also stopped incredibly easily showing no real stakes at all in that.

When you look at a film like Minons and Monsters and compare it to this you can see the difference, one is designed to sell toys and to rot kids brains the other goes a bit deeper, has characters and has a story to tell.

Overall, the series and films need to stop.

0.5/5

Pros.

It has a few unintentionally funny moments

Cons.

It’s shallow and vapid

It doesn’t have characters it has a tick box list of traits

The villain is weak

The pacing is awful

It is just an advert

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Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma: The Musings Of A Pervert

Summary: everything wrong with modern horror.

Where to start, one could start with the filmmaker who made this made I Thought I Saw The TV Glow one of the most unwell horror films ever made that made trans people look bad. He is not a filmmaker that should have been given a bigger budget to make another film.

You could mention how Gillan Anderson has exploited the LGBTQ+ market for years, pretending that she is Bi-Sexual when she only ever dates men, but won’t say that as then she’ll lose gigs like this.

You could also mention Hannah Einbinder and her hate filled views about Israel and the Jews and how she embodies the very worst of modern progressive values.

Much like with many modern progressives the director of this film has to make his personal identity central to it. The film heavily features trans messages, the Jason stand in, is claimed to be both a boy and a girl, you can only be one or the other, and dies due to the camp councillors being bigots. The eye roll is real.

At times the film would almost be funny if viewed as a parody but it just inst that. Einbinder’s character is brought in to update his horror franchise and make it less transphobic, again it borders on parody.

Anderson’s character is in a polygamous relationship she doesn’t like, but no doubt it is still better than monogamy as God forbid you conform. Anderson can only climax if she thinks she’s being watched by the killer from her old slasher franchise and then has age inappropriate sex with a much younger Einbinder.

Einbinder character creates a new version of the slasher franchise wherein the killer kills her parents, agent and superiors, one wonders what the incredibly on the nose message the director/writer wants us to see here. She then later dies in the film within a film by being stabbed with a spear as she orgasms during sex. There is something deeply sick and perverse about this film.

Overall, this film shouldn’t be made and the director should not work again.

The film is flopping even on a tiny budget

0/5

Cons.

The age inappropriate relationship

It makes lesbians and the broader LGBTQ+community look bad, as they only seem to have dark fetish sex

It is badly paced

It borders on parody

It is entirely disconnected from reality of any kind

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Cinema Issues Spider-Man Brand New Day And Superhero Fatigue

Just like the success of the Odyssey doesn’t prove that woke films are back in vogue, Spider-Man Brand New Day’s success doesn’t change the fact Superheroes are on the way out.

One only needs to look at recent Superhero box office failures such as Captain America Brave New World, Thunderbolts, Fantastic Four or Supergirl or consider the bad viewing numbers of many of the streaming shows.

Folks will always watch Spider-Man he’s a popular character just like folks will watch the Avengers films but just wait for the next B level character and see how few people turn out for it. The fatigue hasn’t gone away it just never applied to the big characters people care about.

Nolan could pull off woke as he’s is Christopher Nolan and sold the experience of seeing his film, another director couldn’t do that, likewise the Marvels 2 wouldn’t be able to be profitable simply because Brand New Day was as no one cares about those characters.

Some say it is bad movie fatigue we say it is bad character fatigue.

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Batman Caped Crusader Season 2 Overview: They Continue To Ruin The Batman Mythos

Why not have the Riddler as just another thug, it destroys his character but why not, why not gender flip more classic Batman villains like The Mad Hatter rather than bringing in actual female villains like Lady Shiva.

They make Harley Quinn a girlboss, she breaks from the Joker far too early and easily and it really damages the overall relationship there in terms of dynamics and how that plays out. As well as this they introduce The Dark Knight Returns Robin rather than you know any of the other more well known ones. Again all of this is a choice.

When you look at something like Invincible and yes it does make changes from the comics but it also replicates things as well pretty 1:1 at times, this just seems like vandalism.

Overall: lots of people already aren’t watching this but you shouldn’t either.

1/5

Pros.

There are a couple of cool fights

Cons.

The gender swaps

The lore ruining moments

The girlbosses

The animation itself

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Cinema Issues: The Recovery Of The Box Office?

So we were originally going to write a post about the slaughter that has been the summer box office with some films doing really well and everything else flopping. However, we decided to retool that into a conversation on the fact that we are in July 2026 and have already had 3 billion dollar films, with more likely to come meaning that from a box office perspective we have had a much better year than we have had in post-pandemic history. However, within that there is a caveat.

As of right now Michael, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Toy Story 4 are all sitting at 1 billion, with the Odyssey, and likely Spider-Man Brand New Day set to join it. Whilst on paper this is great news for the box office it is also painting a picture of instability, as whilst there are more high profile hits there are also a lot more high profile misses.

As the summer season has shown films like Minions 3 have struggled to connect and films like Supergirl and Moana have outright flopped, this is showing that cinema is becoming an all or nothing bloodsport. There are far fewer films that do middling, and the remaining strength of the box office is being channeled into a few specific types of film, directors, or franchises this makes the box office lob sided and reduces chances taken on projects.

This seems to be the new reality people either come out in force and a film makes lots of money or no one goes and it dies on the vine. People may say it has always been this way but that is not true there were often middling cases and a middle ground between hits and flops but increasingly that has withered away.

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Spider-Man Brand New Day: Spider-Man Is Depressed

Summary Jean Grey shows up for no reason and decides to act like a villain. Spider-Man pines over his girlfriend.

Let’s get one thing right off the bat as our article from a few days ago said putting Jean Grey into the MCU sans X-Men is dumb as hell. Jean does not behave like herself here, and her backstory around her missing sister etc would have fit very well into a gritty X-Men film but without the light hearted world of a Spider-Man film it really sticks out. If you removed her entirely from the plot and just had it be Spidey working with and then going up against the leader of Damage Control it would have been much better.

The arc they give Peter is probably the best of the MCU, he is broken as Peter but on top of the world as Spider-Man he has lost everyone and needs to learn to trust and let people in again. This is a serious and grown up Spider-Man, we wouldn’t be surprised if kids like this one a bit less as it’s far less about dances and curfews and far more about loneliness, sadness and trauma. Seeing Spider-Man at a low ebb is kind of what the character is all about though.

You’d argue that the supporting cast does a lot of the heavy lifting here, John Bernthal is wonderful as the Punisher and you really see how much he cares about Peter. Yelana is funny and steals the scenes she isn’t in. However, the star of the side cast is arguably Zendaya. Now a number of the contributors to this magazine do not have a high opinion of Zendaya however, here she is the emotional core of the film. The fact that she can’t remember anything about Peter and that they don’t get back together in the end is incredibly mature and grown up.

There is a real sense of transition with this film not the least due to the changes happening to Peter with his Spider DNA but because it shifts from being a children’s film to something much more serious and grown up.

3.5/5

Pros.

Peter and MJ

Frank

The action and the go pro scenes

The humour

Cons.

The stuff with Jean Grey

The end credits tease isn’t good

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Together: Holly Willoughby’s Big Comeback

Summary: we won’t be covering every episode of this or setting a precedent for reviewing YouTube Shows, however as Holly Willoughby is a big entertainment figure in Europe and as we have talked about Love Meghan which is an analogue to this show we thought we’d write something up.

For those of you who don’t know Holly Willoughby was a model, then a risky comedian, then a presenter on UK TV she was damaged in her co-presenters fall from grace, if like the writer of this piece you are American Wikipedia has all you need to know. This was supposed to be her big comeback.

It is one of the most poorly thought out shows ever made, it presents as a woman looking down 50 who does not understand how the internet works. Rather than being her talking into a camera or maybe a couple of cameras in terms of set up, she has a whole production crew, again this ain’t a Netflix show this is a YouTube show.

She hosts Stanley Tucci as her first guest, why he agreed to do it is anyone’s guess, he keeps the show running and does things like read out the ingredients in different British foods, incredibly interesting stuff folks (not). The show feels like it’s on for far too long and it feels desperate throughout, it feels very much like Willoughby would rather be anywhere else.

She does an ad read not from Raid Shadow Legends which would actually have been funny but rather from a weight loss jab company, because of course she wants to push that toxic narrative from day one. It’s worse than an ad read it’s in the title of the episode.

There is this attempt to make it an edgy YouTube show as she is swearing and drinking wine and all this just the wine glass never really goes down and it all just adds to the desperation.

Honestly if this is the way of Willoughby’s career how long before the Only Fans? One would guess not long.

Overall, one of the most cringe career pivots of recent memory.

1/5

Pros.

Unintentionally funny

Cons.

It’s stiff

It is desperate

There is no chemistry between the guest and host

It’s trying too hard

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Cinema Issues: The Jean Grey Issue Spider-Man Brand New Day

At the time of writing we do not know if Jean Grey is in Spider-Man 4 and if it is Sadie Sink’s mysterious role however a lot of online speculation says that’s the case.

If it is then it is a terrible terrible decision for multiple reasons, let’s get into it.

1- It introduces her first as a villain: Jean Grey of the X-Men outside of her Phoenix possessions is a good guy, however, a lot of the rumours linking Grey to this film say that she is the villain pulling the strings behind the scenes. Why would she be doing this? It would be incredibly against the character and make very little sense.

2- It cheapens the idea of introducing the MCU’s own X-Men at a later date: we know the X-Men are coming however, the drips and drabs strategy we have been getting isn’t working. The idea was to have an X-Men film pretty immediately after Secret Wars when the universe will be reset why would it make sense to have just Jean Grey introduced early here rather than alongside her fellow X-Men there, it wouldn’t.

3- Spider-Man is still not able to hold his own film: under the MCU there seems to be an idea that you can’t just have a Spider-Man film, like Sony did for years. You need Iron Man, you need the multiverse, you need an X-Man. Repeatedly it seems like Peter cannot just have his own adventure and this film is already crowded with the likes of the Hulk and the Punisher showing up for some reason, now they have to put Jean Grey in as well, it’s just stupid. People want grounded, focused stories not cameo fests.

We long hoped that she is Firestar a different mutant character but one that would be a much more organic fit for the film, however, it would not explain the seeming mind control elements of the plot.

If it is Jean Grey it is a poorly thought through desperate move.

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