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Movie Review: All American Bully (Starring Friday the 13th’s Adrienne King)

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All American Bully was recently released to DVD and VOD. The title fits the narrative a lot more than the description and the cover art do:

Wild Eye Releasing has put a famous face to the ever-present topic of bullying in schools.  Adrienne King (Friday the 13th) makes a rare appearance on the screen as a tyrannical principal with a secret…Three friends try to cope after one of them is victimized by a bully, and their lives are slowly torn apart as the they fall deeper into a twisted web of buried secrets, ignorance, and revenge.  Through it all, Principal Kane (King) rules her small town high school with an iron fist, teaching harsh lessons to students and faculty alike.  The vicious cycle leads to a disturbing and violent conclusion where it turns out no one is truly innocent.

all-american-bully

This is a prime example of where marketing has the potential to negatively impact the viewer’s experience. Despite being marketed to horror fans, All American Bully is more like an R-rated after school special than a traditional horror movie. That’s not to say it doesn’t get dark, but you should know right up front that you’re not exactly getting the movie you might be inclined to expect. You should also know that it has essentially a DIY-budget feel to it. I don’t say any of this to keep you from watching it, but they’re things worth knowing before deciding whether or not to take the plunge.

Now, none of this is a knock on the film itself. I actually found myself quite engaged throughout. The acting, for the most part, was better than expected, and plenty of time is dedicated to developing the characters to ensure that we do care about them. At least some of them. In fact, it’s those that aren’t developed enough that become the movie’s main flaw as it gets closer to its conclusion. Ironically, that includes the very character that the marketing has used as the film’s selling point.

I’m referring of course to the role played by Adrienne King. All American Bully has been marketed as a return to the screen for King, and it’s not hard to understand why. She’s the only well-known name in the cast and everybody loves her (myself included). Her performance in All American Bully is just as good as we would expect from her too, and I was happy to see that she was attached to a film with some level of integrity as we often see so-called horror icons appear in numerous embarrassments. The problem is that her part in the story feels entirely incomplete. It’s almost as if they ran out of time to finish her scenes and just finished the movie without some of them.

Scenes with King and related characters are fine, and seem to be part of the overall plot until the movie just kind of leaves that part of the story behind, and never bothers to give it any kind of resolution or connection to the larger story that the viewer is expecting.

Despite this flaw, there is enough going on with the other characters and the central story to have kept me interested until the end, and quite frankly, I’ve got to respect just about anything that manages to do that.

All American Bully is a multi-layered look at small town bullying, which is a never-ending plague to teenagers from generation to generation. It’s a familiar message, but one that resonates nevertheless. Despite some flaws and the aforementioned caveats, I’d say it’s worth a watch for those not expecting a blood-soaked chiller. That’s just not what All American Bully is.

This trailer gives you a better idea of what to expect:

[youtube id=”adbU5tSXTVM” align=”center” mode=”normal”]

You can probably tell from that whether or not this movie is for you. Ignore the completely misleading cover art.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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