A month or so ago, Universal paid a steep multi-million dollar penalty and wiped its ass with their contract with toy manufacturer Hasbro. No sensible human being saw anything great coming from the partnership, which was signed back in 2008 when I was 30 pounds lighter. For years, family-friendly projects like Stretch Armstrong, Ouija, and Monopoly were thrown around with different producers and directors attached – remember Ridley Scott’s Monopoly hurrrr? A few days before Universal washed their hands clean of Hasbro, rival Sony Pictures snatched up Candy Land to use as an Adam Sandler vehicle. Meaning they’re going to make a boatload of money.

The only film actually coming out of the doomed contract is Peter Berg’s Battleship, in which Rihanna and Tim Riggins fight aliens. There’s really no connection to the board game except the battleships and it’s almost certain someone will begrudgingly say “You sunk my battleship” and then immediately feel like a tool. But amidst all the backlash, let us never forget that in 1985 the first and best board game adaptation was released.

Clue is a madcap murder mystery hated by some and loved by many. Critically spat upon in its initial release, it’s since developed a well deserved cult following. Universal was planning on remaking it with Gore Verbinski to direct, but that’s obviously fallen through. Good riddance, I say. The original Clue is super fun and has everything from lo-brow poop jokes to jabs at McCarthyism. It’s worth revisiting if you haven’t in a while. Here’s six reasons why Clue is and will always be the best movie based on a board game.

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One of the screeners they sent out to press prior to last year’s Fantastic Fest was the Canadian sci fi thriller The Corridor. I loved the hell out of it but never got around to writing about it because I’m only one man and I saw a lot of movies the month of the festival. Get off my back. This month the film is being released by IFC, so I figured I’d show it some proper OL love.

The debut feature from Canucks Evan Kelly and Josh MacDonald, The Corridor is a smart and wholly original trip into sci fi paranoid madness. Recovering from a psychotic breakdown after the death of his mother, Tyler Crawley heads to a remote cabin in the woods of Nova Scotia. As everyone knows, cabins in woods always lead to some sick shit. When Tyler suffered his homicidal burst of madness, he sort of tried to murder his friends – slashing one n the face and stabbing another through the hand. So what better way to make amends than with a little getaway in the woods?

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One movie I’ve been hearing heaps of ridiculously positive buzz about for a year now is Gareth Huw Evans’ The Raid out of Indonesia. Everyone I know who has seen it had their faces blown off by it and I cannot wait until it’s gets a wide release later this year.

FYI: Evans’ previous Indonesian action flick Merantau is now available on Netflix Watch Instantly.

It was really hard for me to get past the dialogue in The FP. 75 percent of the time it’s downright atrocious. It’s like listening to someone who learned how to talk from watching Katt Williams stand-up. I understand it’s tongue-in-cheek but that didn’t make it any easier to sit through. It sucks too because apart from the party-pooping dialogue, I really dug everything else about Jason and Brandon Trost’s bizarro Dance-Dance Revolution dystopian gang film. The film is a great example of really talented people taking a totally ridiculous and silly concept, playing it straight the entire way through, and coming out the other end with a distribution deal and mountains of word-of-mouth hype. If only every other word out of those mouths wasn’t “…and shit” or “nigga” then I would have enjoyed The FP a bit more.

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How do you like your post-apocalypse? A wasteland pregnant with zombies? A nuclear winter starring roving bands of leather-clad bastards? I’m tired of all those tripes too. Thankfully, I happened to pick up Ryan Boudinot’s dystopian novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife (published last month), on a whim and was treated to a fresh, complex look at a post-apoc. America. Equal parts Philip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett, and Palahniuk, Blueprints is a time-slipping, anti-corporate tale of survivors just trying to figure shit out. No epic travels across blackened Earth or raids on supply depots. Just people trying to figure out how things got so fucked up.

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At its worst, science fiction (or just speculative fiction) is a Hollywood CGI robot punch to the balls. At its best, it’s Black Mirror. Last weekend a friend of mine from the UK recommended Black Mirror to me and the next day, I sat through all three episodes of the miniseries while experiencing a revolving series of reactions: shock, nervous laughter, welling up, and cursing our society for the hubristic turds we are. Black Mirror also renewed a bit of my hope that clever, original sci-fi can be done on television again (albeit overseas) without taking the ideas and simply injecting giant action set pieces.

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Last weekend, my girlfriend took part in a short film contest called Campus Movie Fest. Sounds like a gas, right? The outcome is The Physical, based on a short film I came up with about six years ago. Starring Mike Downes, Carol Finn, and me, the story revolves around a young man with hopes of immigrating to Mars to join Earth’s first colony there. But first he has to pass his physical… (dun DUN).

I won’t spoil the ending, but prepare to have your face melted off! Or not, but I hope you like it, share it, live it, love it.

PS: I’m a terrible actor and I hate being in front of a camera, so I came up with a character called Snowblind. He’s blind, so I got to keep my eyes closed. Don’t ask me why a blind man wears prescription glasses.

British filmmaker Ben Wheatley gave audiences a look behind the suburban crime curtain with his strong 2009 debut Down Terrace. Wheatley’s latest film, Kill List, takes another look at the delicate intricacies of domestic life then burns the house down. By the time the end credits started rolling I was reeling – damn near suffocated by the smothering atmosphere of pure dread. Over its 90 minutes, the Kill List shifts from a Mike Leigh-style family drama to terrifying folk horror that left me shivering. You’ll never guess how it ends as the film’s beginning is made up of the marital bickering of middle class Englanders Jay (Neil Maskell) and Shel (MyAnna Buring).

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Spielberg, where you been, man? The last time you thrilled me out of my seat was with Minority Report way back in 2002. Since then you’ve made some great flicks, but that Crystal Skull trick you tried to pull for your last movie was garbage. You’re back in one big way with a whirlwind of a movie: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. You’ve brought some friends with you too: Peter Jackson as producer and Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish as writers. I wasn’t scared off by WETA’s motion-capture animation either, which is usually terrifying and gives humans cold, soulless eyes. Tintin is a balls-out action adventure mystery thrill ride form beginning to end. Take your War Horse and shove it, Tintin’s running this show.

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Stieg Larsson’s international bestseller (meaning they sell it at Target) “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was tailor-made to be adapted by David Fincher. The man cut his teeth on a lot of Dragon‘s core elements: a capable female lead (Alien 3, Panic Room), a serial killer (Seven, Zodiac), and a locale drowning in atmosphere. Dragon‘s a crowd-pleaser that works with Fincher’s sensibilities, but it’s also disappointingly conventional and pretty dumb in some parts. Fincher sets up a complex investigation about an island of ex-Nazi scumbags then sits at a Mac and flips through old photos for two hours. Most boring investigation ever.

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