Magellans at the Movies

Everyone knows that zombies aren’t what they used to be. If anything, a decaying, shambolic corpse is probably the perfect metaphor for the genre as it exists right now: decrepit, feeble, and limping slowly towards nowhere in particular. There was a time, however, when zombie fiction was almost as popular as movie westerns were in their day, and that time, of course, was the early 2000s, inarguabl...

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Power, oh man don’t you wish you just had some? Power, in whatever form be it political, cultural, or laser eyes, gives you access to neat stuff like respect, authority, and cheat codes to the legal system. Even in lower stakes arenas like the professional music scene power can unlock lots of doors for you, many of them leading to places of murky ethics. I’m not just talking about forcing your orc...

Everyone needs friends to get through life, that’s why I’m so miserable all the time. Friends lift us up when we’re low and congratulate us when we’re high (or give us a ride home). Fickle friends, best friends, old friends, new friends, the varieties of companions are endless, but what happens when one of those friends decides to dissolve their partnership and go their separate ways to the great...

If you like dysentery, the old west is for you. If you like filth, the old west is for you. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live utterly at the mercy of the elements and corrupt lawmen while you work your tenant field of sorghum for two cents a day that you can spend on bathtub whiskey at the local saloon, then your only option is to somehow travel back in time to live in the old...

There truly is nothing like crime to bring a family together. Why are criminal organizations organized by families? Why do family businesses that get big also commit massive fraud? The answer is obvious: taking stuff that doesn’t belong to you is just the spit shine that your fraying familial ties are in need of. After all, it’s by embezzling listener donations that Elliot and Nathan fund their wi...

As the month of wraiths draws to a close and we all look forward to the far calmer, gentler event of the American election day, stay just a little bit longer in the spooky season with Magellans at the Movies. And what better way to commemorate the holiday of Halloween than reviewing the 1978 John Carpenter directed slasher film for which it was named? This is the movie that popularized the masked,...

To be a spy is to live in the terrible knowledge that some day, somehow, someone is going to get a bizarre and destructive notion in their head to blow up the sun so that their coal stocks increase in worth or something. Thankfully, the brave men and women of the world’s intelligence agencies train every day for just such occasions, but have you ever wondered how it all gets started? Have you ever...

Ah, to be alive in the 2000s. A time when you could enjoy . . . uh . . . roller blading? Look, I won’t lie to you: humanity has had better decades. The 2000s saw the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11, followed by the forever wars in the Middle East that made Vietnam look like a brief spat between friendly neighbors. Still, they continued to make movies during this period of uncertainty and unrest, and a...

Jokes, we all love ‘em! They make us laugh, they make us think, on certain days they can be exchanged for candy, but as every self important comedian will tell you if you're trapped in a conversation with them, jokes can be a vehicle for scathing social criticism in deft hands. In, uh, slightly less deft hands, however, sometimes the best you can hope for is comedy that boils down to an unironic i...

Ghosts. Surely the most logistically puzzling of supernatural fiends, the mechanics of ghosts, their creation and destruction, and their predilection for mostly just knocking stuff off tables or opening and closing doors in grainy camcorder footage are all questions people have asked about our phantasmic friends, but answers remain sparse. Fortunately, when you’re making a movie you can just make...

Avatar was made in 2009 by perennially smug not-eur James Cameron and we’re reviewing it. Yay. Contact us/Requests/Questions: MagellansMovies@gmail.com Donate: https://paypal.me/magellensmovies?country.x=US&locale.x=en_US Check out our blog for more reviews and movie content!!! https://magellansatthemoviesblog.blogspot.com/

Family. Probably best known for sponsoring the Fast and the Furious movies, family is an important part of many global cultures, so it’s no surprise that it’s an important part of many movies. From the Sawyers to the Parrs, movies are constantly centering groups of people related by blood and bound to each other by love to the delight of audiences everywhere. Of course, family isn’t always chainsa...

There’s a reason so many of our most reviled and infamous villains are clowns. The Joker, that one Final Fantasy antagonist, Krusty the Klown, and many other dastardly jesters that plot world mass murder, world domination, or subpar jokes have terrified audiences for years thanks to the simple fact that a man in chalk white makeup embellished by garish reds and greens and a hideous grin is far mor...

Teenagers. Normally, they're the last demographic you'd want to arm with deadly weapons and a thorough knowledge of martial arts, what with their unstable hormones and abysmal decision making. Now hold on a minute, Boomer, I hear you say. What if the teenagers in question weren't just young folks from the ages of thirteen to nineteen, but a group of mutant turtles age thirteen to nineteen? Why my...

How come we don’t hear that much about serial killers these days? I like to think it’s because the global spirit of human brotherhood has just grown too powerful for even the most depraved of violent urges to be fulfilled. Either that or the advancement of forensic technology coupled with a host of societal and cultural factors has made serial murder both less appealing and the prospect of success...

Aliens! They may have already visited our home in the solar system, but if so, then they seem to have mainly come here for tourist reasons and to appear in grainy footage shot by air force pilots and people who don’t have anything better to do than point active cameras at the sky in the middle of the night. Whatever the truth of the various historical and modern UAP sightings may be, the fact is t...

If war is hell, then I suppose it makes some ironic sense that filming a movie about war would be hellish, too. In case you hadn’t heard, wars are messy, noisy, dangerous things for all involved and recreating them can be tricky as well, especially if you’re a slightly eccentric perfectionist director deep in the jungles of Asia trying to make a movie about one of the most chaotic and unpopular wa...

Ah the halcyon days of the 2010s. The era when video games began emerging as the cultural powerhouse they have evolved into, the world was recovering from the Great Recovery, and Covid-19 was just a glint in virology’s eye. It was also a time of movies, and lots of them. Good movies, bad movies, and everything in between. Marvel movies got their start, and with their ascent came the great (and sho...

Japan has given us many amazing things: body pillows of questionably aged characters, plumbers who seem to do stunningly small amounts of plumbing, and the best method to find out which of your friends sing best when they are drunk. But all those things have nothing to do with cinema, of which Japan's greatest contribution is arguably Akira Kurosawa. This legendary director influenced much of Amer...

It’s hardly revolutionary to say that the superhero genre is on the decline these days. In terms of both review scores and box office returns, movies featuring men and women in brightly colored outfits throwing CGI monsters through CGI cityscapes with the aid of their CGI powers have become little more than fodder for less than favorable memes and a literally endless stream of articles with titles...

Ah, snobbery. It’s so often a mask for the discouraged, the downtrodden, the defeated. To puff yourself up over some esoteric details only you and five other people know about is to appear large and confident when we are in fact small and meek. But enough about me, let’s talk about Sideways , a 2004 drama based on the book by Rex Pickett. Sideways centers on that rarest of snobs: wine snobs, but s...

When you get knocked down, you simply must get back up again. Surely one of the most worn of all the many self-help cliches, basically just keep on keeping on for the less earthy among us. Still, sometimes a classic is just what the doctor ordered, and for a dejected and apathetic Bruce Wayne who’s lost his kind of girlfriend and his kind of work friend to a nihilistic mass murdering clown, doctor...

Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be a super genius. While some synaptically blessed individuals carve their names into the face of history with their achievements in advanced particle physics and beating all of the Dark Souls games without getting hit, the best us dumb losers can hope for is third place at Dusty Steve’s general trivia night. Thankfully, movies allow us to live vicariously t...

Do you miss your dead wife? Are you worried about your young son finding his own way in the apocalypse? Do you find the drudgery of the daily struggle for survival is just getting you down? Then you, my friend, are in need of a genuine, rejuvenating, individualized Cormac McCarthy road trip! On our world famous route through the blasted remains of North America you’ll be treated to only the most t...