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It’s Alive! Blockbuster Video Still Lives Among Us

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If you grew up in the 1990’s you remember begging your parents to take you to the local Blockbuster Video every Friday night to rent a movie.  On nothing more than a wing and a prayer, and you’re allowance money, you hope that one special movie is still on the shelf.

Pacing down the aisles your laminated membership card is getting sweatier and sweatier by the second in your palm.  As you pray to everything holy there is a copy of that special movie left behind the Styrofoam stuffed VHS case you reach out to the shelf, hand trembling, you push the cardboard VHS case aside and… success!  One white, blue, and yellow clamshell video case remains!

Don’t you miss those memories of stalking the horror aisle, breathing in the scent of the plastic VHS cases and paying $4.99 for a three day rental?  Oh, and don’t forget that $0.99 charge for each day you’re late!  Well lament no longer, fellow thirty-somethings!  Your dreams of walking that royal blue musty carpet is just a hop, skip, and a jump away… in Alaska!

That’s right!  There is still a Blockbuster Video alive and well in the Last Frontier of Anchorage, Alaska!  While the franchise finished closing its doors to nearly 9,000 stores worldwide in 2013, franchise owner Alan Payne decided to keep his doors open.  In fact, he owns nine Blockbuster Video stores of the twelve that remain today.


While most movie lovers get their flicks from an automated machine or download it online, video store owner Payne offers the experience many younglings born after 2000 will never get to experience.  While the movies have no doubt moved over from VHS to DVD and Blu Ray, making the “Be Kind, Rewind” stickers obsolete, you can still physically browse the aisles and read the back of the cases to obtain the synopsis.

You can also enjoy the experience of candy, popcorn, and soda impulse buys in the line queue, as well as asking to keep the poster from the wall once it was taken down.  I can’t be the only one who did this… am I?  Not to mention embracing the feeling of disappointment when you find out they don’t have a copy of the movie you anticipated watching all day long.  Yet hope can be restored as you quickly walk to the front of the store and ask the clerk if a customer has recently returned said movie, and perhaps they just haven’t had the chance to return it to its proper home on the shelf yet.

All jokes aside, the video stores in Alaska are a very important corner stone to the community.  Unbeknownst to those who don’t reside in the snowy North, access to the Internet is quite expensive.  Even though the prices seem expensive in comparison to your local Red Box, they are reasonable in comparison to the prices of gigabytes.

Another benefit is, as odd as it sounds, the video store serves as a place of gathering.  In a place that has long, cold, and dark winters, it’s nice to have a place to go and socialize with other people.  In fact, this is something we have lost as a culture when looking for videos.  I can’t tell you how many times I spoke to other horror fans in the horror aisle and received great recommendations… as well as some not so great.  I don’t know where you are Blockbuster Video patron, but I Still Know What you Did Last Summer is not a scary movie!

 

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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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