Pearl (2023) - Movie Review

The prequel to one of my favourite films from last year in X, Pearl serves as the origin story for that film’s surprisingly sympathetic villain of the same name. After how much X wound up impressing me, both as a straight-forward genre experience and as a multi-faceted treatise on the nature of horror, pornography, and cinema in general, I went into this excited but not necessarily knowing what I was getting myself into. And truth be told, I wound up enjoying this even more than X… but not for the reasons I was expecting.

Pan (2015) - Movie Review

In today’s day and age that everyone likes to think is where the practice of rampant recycling of media to create movies started, said recycling can take different forms. One of these is the oh-so-awesome prequel, easily the least successful of all of them. I mean, when online lists of the ‘best’ film prequels frequently bring up Star Wars, you know that the standards for quality aren’t exactly high amongst this pedigree. An offspring of this is the origin story, a film based around a beloved franchise character and how they became the one that we love to this day. Of course, once again, recent examples of this aren’t too promising: X-Men Origins Wolverine managed to ruin the reputation of more than just the title character, Dumb And Dumberer was about as pointless as you can get and Maleficent, while I personally liked it, was a major flop with critics and audiences. Hell, bring up the words ‘horror movie prequel’ in a crowded room and someone is bound to re-enact one of them using you as the victim; some people take this stuff a little too seriously. With all this in mind, ever since today’s film was announced as an origin story for that legendary Lost Boy Peter Pan, I was immediately sceptical (A shocking development, I know) about how well it would work out. And then I actually saw the thing… oh boy.