Things just can't go smoothly for poor Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), the earnest young man who just wants to fall in love with the right person -- someone he can protect from all the evil influences that would do them harm, even if it means killing them.

Dynamite has, for quite a while now, been pulling off crossover comic book miniseries with their licensed characters -- most recently in the very entertaining zombie epic, Die!Namite. But with Red Sonja: The Superpowers (in conjunction with Vampirella: Dark Powers), it appears that Dynamite is building up something larger, and much more audacious: they're creating a cohesive multiverse, with Red Sonja a part of it.

The story opens as your typical sword-and-sorcery tale: Red Sonja has been approached and hired to remove an evil wizard who has been subjugating people who don't have the means to fight back. Sonja vows to do the deed, and battles the wizard's henchmen who have been sent to stop her. As she rages her victory cry to the sky, declaring that she is coming for him... things get weird. A strange lightning streaks across the night sky, and Sonja realizes that perhaps this wizard isn't your usual charlatan with tricks.

The cryptid-chasing series Mountain Monsters returns to the Travel Channel, starting out on a somber note. The series went on a bit of a hiatus after the AIMS team leader, Trapper John Tice, passed away back in December 2019, and now the team prepares to move on without him. But though Trapper himself is gone, his leadership and guidance remain, as his daughters pass along to the team his journal, full of a lifetime's worth of information on cryptids and a special note for the hunters: if they want to continue, "Go to the blue marker and take it from there."

Multi-million dollar businesses: Amazon, eBay, and even Harley Davidson all started from a passionate hobby. So it stands to reason that you can also tap into your geeky passion and turn it into a profit. Before you do so, however, you’ll need to know how to make that possible. Here are a few smart moves to turn your geeky passion into an actual business!

The 306th Best Actress in America returns to show she's not just a sexy horror star, or a sexy western star, or a sexy sci-fi star -- she can also be a sexy superhero star! The name that's tanked a thousand ships is back on the screen, fresh from her performance in the widely lauded (as in "My laud, is this movie over yet?") production of Spider-Shark vs. Snake-Bear, as that voluptuous vigiltante of virtuous victory, Violet Vixen!

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina returns to Netflix for a fourth -- and possibly fatal -- season. Following the events of the third season, where Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) faced the dilemma of either becoming Queen of Hell or remaining with her friends, the viewers get to bounce back and forth between two Sabrinas -- Sabrina Spellman and Sabrina Morningstar -- as the teenage witch solved the problem by splitting herself into two bodies. But this throws the cosmos into imbalance, and leads to the return of the Eldritch Terrors as the showrunners deliver up a love letter to Lovecraft.

Crowdfunded Fan Films are gaining traction… and FUNDS! Will Hollywood take notice?

Okay, everybody. You don't need us to tell you that 2020 is a year that belongs in the dustbin of history. We did our best to brighten it once a month with some colorful positivity in the form of cosplay, and we're going to continue that on into this new year, in the hopes that things get better.

Every month the staff at Critical Blast combs the cosplay community for up-and-coming cosplayers who deserve to have a broader audience for their work, taking into account not only costuming skills and spirit, but also how they use that ability in service to others. Through this, we've not only met some talented cosplayers, but also some fine human beings.

So let's get this year started off right! Critical Blast is proud to introduce you one and all to 2021's first...

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

Actually, it was 2020, so scratch that first bit entirely. But as ugly as the past year has been, there were still a few moments that perked things up. So as loath as we may all be to actually look back at this year, we're asking our readers to do so for just one more month as we collect votes from you, our readers, to select the award winners in our BEST OF 2020.

The movie theaters were bereft most of the year, but production companies found ways around that, and many movies went straight to streaming services. Streaming options also presented us with several nominees for our Best Series.

But it was the crowdfunding renaissance in the comic book arena that really shook up the nomination processes this year, shouldering their way past the mainstream giants to stand side-by-side with them for Best Comic, Best Comics Writer and Best Comics Artist.

Once upon a time, there was a genre of Saturday morning cartoon that followed the formula of "teenage rock band fights bad guys." They were usually not real supernatural bad guys like Mystery Inc took on, of course. Josie and the Pussycats usually ended up finding spies or corrupt real estate tycoons. The Neptunes (and Jabberjaw) faced down megamaniacal world beaters. Kidd Video and his crew almost exclusively battled Master Blaster.

THE WRASKLES falls into the category of storytelling, only with anthropomorphic characters. The musical crew of conies is on their way to a battle of the bands when their vehicle mysteriously breaks down at a crossroads. If you know anything at all about musicians and crossroads, you can feel the foreshadowing coming on. And, sure enough, as they sit stranded, they meet up with a mysterious old goat (literally, an old goat) who strikes a deal with them: if they can play a better song than he can, he'll fix their van.

If you are keen on winning more at a casino, you will find our team's analysis quite useful and helpful.

For millennia the nature of existence has both intrigued and terrified humankind; philosophers, alchemists and the religiously inclined have written inexhaustible volumes about their quests to understand the totality of the universe we inhabit and our place in it. Within our modern age artistic expression has often served as the primary engine for those of thoughtful disposition to pose questions regarding reality in ways that not only provoke but entertain.

“Everyone who comes here has a secret,” one character steadfastly states halfway through Uncork’d Entertainment’s latest enigmatic offering, Bright Hill Road, and the mysteries offered in the film’s slow burn, are the exact kind those same philosophers of yore propounded: Where are we and why, exactly, are we there?

She's the 306th best actress in America, blessed to work with some of the top talents in the country on films that... well, don't exactly get screened for members of The Academy. She's Sonya Devereaux, and through a crowdfunded effort on Indiegogo, fans -- and those about to become fans -- can see her in all her glory (tastefully, of course, and only when it serves the plot) in this marvelous collection of distinguished classics, collected for the first time anywhere in trade paperback.

From directors Todd Livingston and Nick Capetanakis, from a grant made possible by American Mythology, come four of Sonya's most beloved films.

Some days the eyes roll so hard the pull at the optic nerve and make them just ache. Today is one of those days.

The Star Wars fandom has been split of the idea of Rey ever since The Force Awakens debuted in theaters. It's one of those debates that's never going to be settled, never going to have a substantial closure, because it's a matter of taste. You can't convince a person they don't like something that they do, and vice versa.

In what may turn out to be a lump of coal in the stockings of supporters of the Comicsgate movement, Richard C. Meyer and Mark Waid announced jointly on their social media platforms that the litigation against Waid for tortious interference had been dropped, citing the independent success of Meyer's graphic novel, Jawbreakers, which had been at the center of the tort, as well as the unexpected impact of COVID-19 on, well, everything.

Here's the thing about streaks: When you're on one, it's increasingly harder to stay on it. Eventually -- inevitably -- there will come a moment when that streak sputters, stalls, and ends.

For the publishers at Hero Tomorrow, PUNCHLINE AND THE VAUDE-VILLAINS #1... ain't that moment.

When I sat to watch this third season of Yellowstone, it was without the benefit of having seen what had come before. I duly brought up the pilot on my Spectrum on-demand screen, and my initial impression was that this was going to be a show to fill the void for those few fans of Dallas that were left, wanting to see business men in cowboy hats and pretend it was a western.

Boy, howdy, was I ever wrong. While it may take a bit for this third season to warm up, the heat keeps getting turned up by degrees until you are simply riveted to this story of feuds, infighting, intrigue, and the pride that comes with land ownership. Especially the ownership of lots and lots of land, such as the Yellowstone Ranch owned by John Dutton (Kevin Costner) and his family -- Kayce (Luke Grimes), Jamie (Wes Bentley) and Beth (Kelly Reilly), scions of an empire that may be seeing its last hurrah.

We've seen movies like LOVE AND MONSTERS before. At least, that's the first impression one gets when first meeting Joel, played by Joel: Dylan O'Brien (Teen Wolf, Bumblebee). He's a bit of a lovable loser living in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by giant monsters created by a bizarre radiation fallout. He lives with a small underground colony of hunters and gatherers, where he serves as the cook because he freezes up when danger threatens. Right then, you know that this is going to be Joel's personality throughout the show, and he's going to luck his way into some kind of victory using his one unique skill that only he could pull off. And you couldn't be more wrong. First off, despite his lack of skill as a fighter, the colony loves him. They all want to protect him and watch out for him.

The gritty, post-Vietnam period of the 1970’s made an indelible mark on horror cinema. Long gone were the gothic icons of the Universal pantheon and the B-Movie buffoonery of the Eisenhower years--a new wave of unflinching realism took hold that examined and, more often, confronted, a world numb from war and economic instability, drugs, sexual promiscuity and mistrust, and films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Rabid, Martin and Blue Sunshine were awash in the decade’s heady experimental attitude.

Christopher Nolan's TENET is nothing if not ambitious in its attempt to reconcile conflicting flows of causality. The concept of two physical objects existing in the same space but inverted in time, such that bullets fly out of walls and into guns, makes for some challenging camera work and a few "ooh" and "ah" moments with the audience.

But after going out of your way to explain how everything operates in the "Looking Glass Land" of the film, we start to pay attention and see that it really only operates that way whenever the director wants to pull off an effect. "Wear a full body SCUBA suit with your own oxygen because your inverted lungs won't be able to process the air -- but put on swimming attire and impersonate yourself on the deck of a boat when necessary." The conflicts simply become too numerous and too blatant, and eventually the audience is pulled from the idea of this being an effect-driven movie and begins to pay attention to the plot -- and finding none.