Borrowing heavily from STAR WARS and the arcade game craze (and pre-dating BACK TO THE FUTURE when it comes to that cool DeLorean-inspired ride), THE LAST STARFIGHTER had all the elements of great 1980s science fiction. A teenaged protagonist seemingly stuck in the middle of nowhere and no chance of leaving; a call to be a hero that he rejects and then has thrust upon him; a victory won against insurmountable odds; a girlfriend, a mentor, a family...everything to deserve remembering as one of the great 1980s films.

Tis the season to lose control of your television to the more sentimental members of the family. So if you're going to watch anything from now through the end of the year, it's going to be a Christmas movie, and it's probably going to be either Lifetime or Hallmark (not that you'll be able to tell the difference). The romantic holiday genre has grown so pervasive that we even had to come up with an alternative a few years back, when we put out our Nine Christmas Movies for Guys Who Hate Christmas Movies.

This year, we may just have to round out that list to ten (or bump one off -- we'd hate to ruin the gestalt of our nine ladies dancing).

From Director Jake Horowitz comes CUP OF CHEER, a slightly bawdy sendup of just about every heartfelt holiday homecoming you've ever watched.

Beth Harmon (The New Mutants' Anya Taylor-Joy) is raised in an orphanage until her younger teens. While there, she and the other girls are regularly given "vitamins" which include tranquilizers, to which 9 year old Beth develops an addiction. Because she is proficient in math and gets her work done early, she is rewarded with the job of cleaning erasers in the basement, where she meets the grumpy janitor, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp), who teaches her how to play chess, a game for which she shows an amazing facility.

No matter the genre of film or TV show, some tropes remain universal. One of these is the fortune-teller or the psychic. Such readers are consulted when characters are stuck. Or indeed when the plot itself doesn’t seem to move forwards. But how effective is the fortune teller as a plot device?

In the world of Peter Milligan's HAPPY HOUR, the government has all but eliminated societies ills and unrest by treating the root cause of unhappiness -- unhappiness itself. A surgical procedure, performed on everyone, makes the brain incapable of feeling sadness, which gives everyone a peppy, optimistic outlook on everything, including terminal cancer.

But when Jerry suffers a head injury in an automobile accident, he awakens to a room of smiling doctors and nurses who tell him his sister is dead. When Jerry is outraged by their lack of appropriate reactions, they realize Jerry's injuries have worked against his surgery -- he's sad about his sister's death, and something has to be done about that.

Thirty-one years ago, two righteous California teens with guitars and a dream had an excellent adventure in a time-traveling phone booth. It was so much fun, they had to do it again, but it ended up being a totally heinous bogus journey.

Along the way, Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) learned they had a destiny. Their band, Wild Stallynz, would create a song that would unite the world. But decades later, the band has fallen apart, but the boys still have the dream, even if they have fallen to playing wedding receptions. Their music skills are actually incredibly well-rounded, in every technique. But what they produce is the result of obviously trying too hard, seeking that special combination that will finally unite the world.

When I say that the music on this CD is fresh as fresh air, I mean that in a much deeper sense than the first thing that may pop into your mind.

In his own words, Paul Winter wanted this album to be a celebration of light. “With the title of Light of the Sun, I intended to embrace the many meanings we attribute to light: light as spirit, love, consciousness, human kindness, serenity, heart, exaltation, fire, the light that is integral to beauty, and the smile that reflects the sunshine in our heart.” Paul continues, saying, “Music is the common medium that can embody both the spiritual and physical aspects of light.”

To that end I feel Paul succeeds in accomplishing that desire, something that many artists hope to achieve in their works but sadly fall short.

THE GREAT is a comedic farce that loosely follows the biography of Catherine the Great. Equal parts BLACK ADDER and CALIGULA, the series goes out of its way to make the profane mundane, with palace life centered completely around copulation and killing.

Elle Fanning plays Catherine, the naive German woman brought to Russia to be a wife to Emperor Peter II (Nicholas Hoult), an overgrown infant with an inferiority complex instilled by his mother and father that he compensates for by doing whatever he pleases. As he is the emperor, who exercises capriciously the right of life over death of any and all of his subjects, nobody dares cross him. Indeed, most of the palace court are too daft to put up anything like an argument. Hoult plays the emperor much like Hugh Laurie's Prince Regent from BLACK ADDER, only with no filter, a leporine libido, and the attention span of a ferret on sugar cubes.

Sometimes when an actor finishes a film, he or she retains a prop of some kind, a souvenir or memento they can look to in the future for a conversation piece.

Zachary Levi seems to have come away from his stint on SHAZAM with the coolest and most valuable vestige ever: The Wisdom of Solomon. (The superhero character more commonly known as Captain Marvel gains his powers by shouting out an acronym, which gains him the combined powers of Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury.)

During the trying and tiring time of the last few days, as votes were being tabulated with deliberation and states were switching colors more slowly than leaves in autumn, Levi interected a thought onto Twitter -- a place designed ostensibly just for that purpose but, ironically, in abject opposition to the ideal on most days.

I've been fascinated with the paranormal almost since I knew how to read. Early influences on me were the television movie of the week that told the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story, and films like THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK (not to mention the few appearances of Bigfoot on THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN). I clipped articles from the World Weekly News like it was gospel.

I'm pretty sure Bat-Boy isn't still out there waiting to attack, but I remain fascinated with UFOs and cryptids. And while the media has become suffused of late with multiple Bigfoot hunting series, they skew strongly to "reality entertainment" than anything remotely investigatory. If you need to do a CGI recreation of your Bigfoot encounter, I really don't ned to see it.

That's what makes Darcy Weir's SASQUATCH AMONG WILDMEN stand apart from this crowd. It's a true documentary, eschewing any sensationalism or fakery. 

Presidents have been featured, satirized, and flat-out lampooned in comics for as long as there have been Presidents and free speech. Superboy and Superman both managed to meet President Kennedy. Spider-Man met President Obama. President Roosevelt was nearly a junior member of the All-Star Squadron.

But unless my comics memory is failing (it could be -- I'm getting older, and I've read comics for a long, long time), there hasn't been a deluge of praise-and-parody comic books such as that which has been unleashed following the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. From Antarctic Press's TREMENDOUS TRUMP and TRUMP'S SPACE FORCE, Keenspot's TRUMP'S TITANS, and a cascade of others, Trump comics has become a cottage industry over the past four years.

Fifty years ago, JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS jumped out of the comic books and into our televisions, where every Saturday morning they would put on another show and run into another dastardly villain seeking to take over the world or enrich themselves at the expense of others. Josie, Valerie, and Melody (with their friends Alexander, Alexandria, and Alan M.) travel the globe from one exotic locale to another, making music and stopping bad guys.

Now you can own the complete series on Blu-ray, including the excellent documentary featuring the charming Dan DeCarlo, the man who created Josie.

There are plenty of ways to enter this contest, and you don't have to pick just one. Pick them all and maximize your chances of winning this trip down animated memory lane! Be sure to check out our Rules & Regulations page, and then get ready to rock out with this talented voice cast.

Alright, so the first issue of Dynamite's multi-world zombie adventure, DIE! NAMITE, was pretty much living up to expectations. We've seen Vampirella and Red Sonja cross paths so many times, with so many variations, they're veritably sorority sisters. And while we didn't see Dejah Thoris, we did see the brief return of John Carter. But the first inkling that this had the potential to over-deliver came at the end when Red Sonja encountered the least likely character of all -- Evil Ernie's possessed happy-face button, Smiley. That made me sit up and take notice.

This second issue, however, pulls out all the stops, and brings in a lot of new characters that go in uniquely unexpected directions. We'll get to them in a minute.

When I was a middle schooler in the late 70s and early 80s, there were two books that would publish new editions which were required reading (three for me, if you count the Overstreet Price Guide to Comic Books): The GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS and THE BOOK OF LISTS. Both were filled with intriguing facts and figures that could keep me engaged for many an afternoon.

The STAR WARS BOOK OF LISTS tries to capture that same attention in a very handsomely bound hardcover with gold leaf imprinted on the cover. If you're a Star Wars fan, you'll pick this up immediately. However, you may also get disappointed quickly at what qualifies as 'trivia' in this compendium. For instance, "Caped Crusaders: Characters Who Rock Capes and Cloaks," which is immediately followed by "It's A Deal: Negotiations and Deals Made for Parts, Droids, and Information," are, kindly put, uninteresting. It screams out "I have to find 100 different lists to make from a finite set of films!"

The old adage goes, "Vote for the best man for the job. And someday, the best man for the job might actually run."

While Americans across the country are beating their chests or holding their noses to pick from among the current slate of candidates, Reviews.org asked Americans to select a Commander-in-Chief from among a select group of those whose track records we are more intimately familiar with -- the fictional Presidents of movies and television shows.

The report finds that, if we were using the electoral college system, the winner by a plurality would be AIR FORCE ONE's James Marshall (played by Harrison Ford, who knows a thing or three about walking away from landings) with 171 electoral votes. Following closely behind him is Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman) of INDEPENDENCE DAY with 124.

Everyone else was left in the dust.

Those loveable orphans from THE GOON get a one-shot adventure in time when a mysterious man from the future hires a time-traveling mercenary to retrieve an object from the past. At stake is the last of the Squeaky Air Breakers bicycles.

Guess who has one. That's right, the Unholy Bastards themselves, and they leave it behind when they run off to see old Mrs. McGreg having a deranged battle with the mailman. But they quickly follow after it when it gets stolen, leaping throug the open time warp and finding themselves in the prehistoric era before finally making their way to the future -- a future where the orphanage is run by Mrs. McGreg clones and the children are in need of a violent liberation.

Tom Sniegoski, steve Mannion, and Scott Brown collaborate on this moral parable, delivered by The Goon and Franky themselves. Expertly drawn and irreverently written, these rotten little kids will capture your heart -- and then put it in a jar and pee on it.

“…When he captured Friola he ordered a massacre accompanied by torture. Everybody was to be blinded, have their noses removed and have arms and legs chopped off. After this, they were left to die in the open. He walled up a whole family of his enemies in their castle and left them to starve to death…”

Humankind has a macabre fascination with atrocity. From the above description of the thirteenth century Italian warlord Ezzelino de Romano to Eli Roth’s Hostel films, each of us possess a morbid voyeurism that easily explains the undying allure of horror cinema, and there’s a direct link between lurid tales of medieval torture and the depravity of movies like Tokyo Home Stay Massacre, the latest release from Tokyo Bay Films Entertainment.

The road to Hell, so the saying goes, is paved with good intentions. Nowhere is this more apparent than the world of cinema, which is littered with the corpses of well-meaning mega-buck misfires, inane studio fare and independent duds alike. Nothing leaves a bad taste in a collective audience’s mouth more than a movie marred by shabby directing, faulty performances or bland pacing when there was ample opportunity for success. Yet there are two strains of bad film: those that are of unintentional poor quality, and those that are not. For every hundred Plan 9 From Outer Space and Waterworld that aspires to greatness and fails, a Rocky Horror Picture Show (or, indeed, a Bad Taste) rises from the depths to celebrate its own campiness with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Don Diego de la Vega -- aristocratic playboy son of a wealthy aristocrat, in the infant days of La Reina de los Angeles, which would one day become the city of Los Angeles. In his daily life, he has access to information about the ruling class and their unfair, ruthless treatment of the peasantry. In secret, he adopts the costumed identity of El Zorro, "The Fox," to fight those abusing their power with his whip and his blade.

The impact of Zorro is felt across the entirety of the spectrum of the comic book industry, The Zorro movie has been made a seminal part of the Batman mythos itself, so influential it is.

BUTCHER QUEEN is set in a future seen through the eyes of Rutger Hauer sci-fi films. It's focus is on Syd Kiowa, a former police detective on the outs and on the run who has banded together with a rag-tag group of bounty hunters composed of a few aliens and a synthezoid cybernetic.

This latest issue from creators Jim Ousley and Ben Sawyer, PLANET OF THE DEAD, finds her and her crew being sought out by the Interdimensional Task Force for an assignment she is uniquely qualified for. The existence of multiple dimensions has been recently discovered, and one of those alternate Earths is looking to make colonization inroads to Syd's Earth. But the man behind it is the alternate-version of a criminal Syd has faced before when she was on the force.