Jim Caviezel was a rising star when he was cast in the role of a lifetime. Having starred, to reasonable acclaim, in the swashbuckling epic The Count of Monte Cristo, the devoutly Christian Caviezel was tapped by director Mel Gibson to play Jesus Christ in his controversial tale of the crucifixion, The Passion of the Christ. Wildly controversial, with it ranking as one of the bloodiest films ever made, it was a huge worldwide smash hit, grossing over $600 million worldwide on a $30 million budge...
Jun 16, 2023•20 min
Richard Kelly’s SOUTHLAND TALES had one of the most disastrous film festival premieres on record. Going into the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, everyone figured it would be a masterpiece, as the expectations set by the director’s previous film, DONNIE DARKO, were sky-high. Instead, critics absolutely savaged the film, resulting in a recut and a VFX overhaul that Kelly maintains actually improved the film. Initially a Universal release, the film was sold off to Sony, who opened it in just 63 theatres...
Jun 12, 2023•17 min
Every master of horror has some missteps somewhere in their filmography, and director Wes Craven had his fair share. A film made out of desperation and with ambition greater than its budget, the sequel to The Hills Have Eyes is a clunky Friday The 13th knock-off. And it’s so padded out with flashbacks to the first movie that even the dog has a flashback. So today, we’re going to try to figure out WTF Happened to This Horror Movie?
Jun 09, 2023•17 min
Steve Guttenberg was one of the biggest stars of the 1980s. He broke out with the Police Academy movies and became a famous, light-leading man. He played the ladies' man, Mahoney, in Police Academy 1 through 4, where he got to romance Kim Cattrall and Sharon Stone, among others, but bailed on the series to take on bigger films. Initially, this strategy was widely successful, with him starring in the biggest movie of 1987, Three Men and a Baby. Yet, he could never follow it up with another sizeab...
Jun 05, 2023•18 min
In 1980, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker (ZAZ) took the world by storm with the spoof of disaster films, Airplane. It utterly changed the genre overnight, with the laugh-a-minute style being tremendously influential. Rather than cash in with an Airplane sequel (although Paramount went ahead and did an awful one without them), ZAZ decided to send up old Elvis Presley movies and old-fashioned spy yarns with Top Secret! Starring a then-unknown Val Kilmer as the rock star hero, Nick Rive...
Jun 02, 2023•15 min
American Psycho is a film many do not consider to be a traditional horror film. However, it has so many aspects of the genre, from murders to horrific treatment of people, to feeding a kitten to an ATM – classic, by the way, it can easily be categorized as horror or horror-adjacent. So let's dig into all of it on this episode of WTF Happened To This Horror Movie?
May 29, 2023•14 min
WTF Happened to Kevin Spacey? That's an understatement. Once the most celebrated character actor in Hollywood, who became an unlikely star after winning an Oscar for Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999) following another Oscar for The Usual Suspects (in 1995) and his memorable role in David Fincher's Se7en, Spacey has arguably starred in more classics than many of his contemporaries. In addition to the previously mentioned movies, he also starred in the amazing L.A. Confidential, the underrated Th...
May 26, 2023•22 min
Many people believe that Sylvester Stallone based his screenplay for Rocky on the career of journeyman boxer Chuck Wepner. In fact, a well-received movie with Liev Schreiber, Chuck, was made about this fact, and in this episode of WTF Really Happened to this Movie, we compare the on-screen career of the great Rocky Balboa with his real-life counterpart. In it, we take a look at Wepner’s claim to fame, which is when the “Bayonne Bleeder” lasted fifteen rounds against Muhammad Ali. Stallone would ...
May 22, 2023•15 min
There’s a gold standard that horror hosts are held to. The icons become as popular as the movies that they show. Zacherley, Elvira, and Vampira are some of the names that come to mind, all of them inherently macabre in their own way. Joe Bob is his own sort of creature, a Drive-In Cowboy who loves blood, breasts, and beasts…and goes on long, amazing rants about all the things he has a problem within the world. On this episode, we’re heading to the drive-in, the last drive-in actually, to find ou...
May 19, 2023•16 min
The Phantasm films have had a rough go of it over the years. Never properly getting the respect it deserves, it may pain you to find out that we were close to getting a new Phantasm entry from an Oscar Winner. Not only that, but even Bruce Campbell was bandied about for a role! We'll get into all of this and more as we dive into the unmade movie featuring the Tall Man, Roger Avary's Phantasm 1999.
May 15, 2023•9 min
When Night of the Living Dead released in 1968, it spawned two very different zombie series. First, was director George A. Romero's Dead franchise, which continued with Dawn, Day and Land (amongst others we won't mention here out fear of them being remembered). Then the other writer of Night, John Russo, had a series of his own that would fall under the Living Dead moniker. While his involvement lessened by the time the movie was actually made, we were left with an insane comedy/horror hybrid. S...
May 12, 2023•13 min
For our money, Whoopi Goldberg ranks as one of the greatest actresses of her generation. If you were born after a certain date, you might most know her as a host on The View, but she was breaking down walls and winning Oscars long before that. Her list of credits inspires awe. There’s Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, Ghost (she won the Oscar for that one), Sister Act, which was so good that it got a sequel, Jumping Jack Flash, and many more. Heck, she even made a more than credible action he...
May 08, 2023•17 min
John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) is the movie that made Kurt Russell a badass. Going into this film, Russell was best known for a run of Disney films, such as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, The World’s Strongest Man and more. However, all of that changed in 1979 when Russell teamed up with Carpenter to do 1979’s Elvis, a T.V. biopic that earned rave reviews and a theatrical run overseas. Carpenter, who was looking to launch an all-new action hero named Snake Plissken in his film Esc...
May 05, 2023•18 min
It was the late 1990s, horror remakes were gaining steam, and horror films, in general, were making bank at the box office. Along came Dark Castle Entertainment, a production company whose initial goal was remaking the horror films of William Castle. So today on WTF Happened To This Horror Movie, we delve into House On Haunted Hill.
May 01, 2023•12 min
To say Colin Farrell’s career has been unique is an understatement. He was famously discovered by Joel Schumacher, who cast him in 2000’s Tigerland; his good looks landed him a place at the top of Hollywood’s A-list, starring in Minority Report, S.W.A.T, The Recruit and more. But, it was his acting that made him a favorite of directors like Michael Mann (Miami Vice), Terrence Malick (The New World), Oliver Stone (Alexander), Woody Allen (Cassandra’s Dream) and more. As far as his stardom went, t...
Apr 28, 2023•20 min
Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987) is one of the greatest films of the 1980s. You may be wondering why we’re covering it on WTF, but the fact is, as good as the finished product ended up being, the production itself was a complicated one, with too many great stories from the set not to share. In this episode, we dig into star Peter Weller’s experience inside the (very uncomfortable Robocop suit), some near misses with casting. Rutger Hauer, Michael Ironside and many others were considered to play A...
Apr 24, 2023•16 min
Today we find out what happens when a filmmaker best known for comedy decides to delve into darker territory with writer/director Kevin Smith's 2011 film Red State!
Apr 21, 2023•14 min
With Brendan Fraser back in the limelight following his Oscar win for The Whale, many are hoping that the beloved actor returns for one final instalment of the franchise that made him a star, The Mummy. Indeed, there were plans many years ago for a fourth film, which was to be called The Mummy: Rise of the Aztec, but those plans quickly evaporated when The Mummy: Tomb of the Golden Emperor, flopped at the box office. The film, had it happened, might have starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titu...
Apr 17, 2023•14 min
In 1991, young Edward Furlong was on top of the world. Making a big splash as John Connor opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger & Linda Hamilton in James Cameron's TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY, for a few years he was everywhere, starring opposite Jeff Bridges in American Heart, leading Pet Sematary II and even cutting an album (for real). However, after a promising move into leading roles as an older teen/young adult with John Waters' Pecker and American History X, his career cooled, and he became m...
Apr 14, 2023•24 min
Matt Reeves’s gritty take on The Batman is currently cleaning up at the box office, with critics and audiences praising the director and star Robert Pattinson’s new approach to the Caped Crusader. It’s worth mentioning, though, that even before the franchise was ultra-successfully rebooted by Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale, there were many other proposed Batman films pitched at Warner Bros in the wake of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin. One that got close to happening was Darren ...
Apr 10, 2023•13 min
Eraserhead is not a horror movie in the classic sense of the term, but this dark, surreal trip into an industrial landscape and the existential horror found within provided plenty of nightmare fuel for generations of movie fans since its release in 1977. So with the inevitable ball-busting comments out of the way, let's get into the wild mind of Mr. David Lynch with his debut film.
Apr 07, 2023•11 min
For a time in the 2000s, Ben Stiller dominated big-screen comedy. As a charter member of the "Frat Pack," along with people such as Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, and Will Ferrell, Stiller had an incredible string of blockbuster hits, including Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Meet the Parents, and the Night at the Museum franchise. In recent years, Stiller's stepped away from comedy, moving behind the camera to helm acclaimed limited series such as Escape at Dannemo...
Apr 03, 2023•19 min
In the late eighties, the rise of video games took the entertainment industry by storm. Suddenly, they were losing money at the box office because kids stayed home and played their Nintendo. So what was a studio to do? The obvious answer, or so it seemed, was to take some of these popular video game characters and make them into movies. Alas, that was easier said than done, with the earliest examples, 1993's Super Mario Bros and 1994's Double Dragon, being massive flops. Suddenly the term "video...
Mar 31, 2023•16 min
Johnny Depp hasn't been in the news for anything lately has he? Well back when he seemed untouchable, Depp took part in this little comic book adaptation about the Jack the Ripper murders. But it hasn't been the most well received, especially by the book's creator. So join us as we find out what happened to From Hell.
Mar 27, 2023•11 min
Jessica Biel is often underrated. While she never quite broke onto the A-list in the way she seemed poised to about a decade ago, on the small screen, she's been doing some incredible acting, with her role on The Sinner a particular highlight. In this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity, we take a look at Biel's career, from her early days on 7th Heaven to becoming something of a sex symbol in movies like The Rules of Attraction, the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blade Trinity. She then...
Mar 24, 2023•20 min
This week sees the release of DC and Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which is getting some of the best reviews ever gotten by a superhero film. Indeed, the genre has become dominant, with it seemingly being propelled to new heights with each new entry. But, there was a time, in the years following 2000’s X-Men and 2002’s Spider-Man, and before 2005’s Batman Begins, that Hollywood wasn’t quite sure how to properly mount a superhero movie. Nowhere was this more evident than in 2004’s misbegotten Catwoman...
Mar 20, 2023•12 min
When Sleepaway Camp II went into production, the producers felt so good about how it was going that they announced that they would film part three as soon as it wrapped. That means Sleepaway Camp III had to be written, cast, and set up while part two was still shooting. So knowing that, let's find out what exactly went down with Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland here on WTF Happened To This Horror Movie?
Mar 17, 2023•10 min
There was a time in the early 2000s when it looked like Rob Schneider was going to be the next Adam Sandler. A fellow Saturday Night Live vet, Schneider stole scenes in a few Happy Madison comedies, particularly The Waterboy (“you can do it!”) and his solo star vehicle debut, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, was a smash, raking in over 90 million dollars worldwide. His follow-ups, including The Animal, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, The Benchwarmers and The Hot Chick (where he memorably switched bod...
Mar 13, 2023•32 min
For many of us, 1993’s Tombstone remains the definitive Wyatt Earp movie. The film had a tortured production history, which included the sacking of the original director Kevin Jarre and Kurt Russell’s controversial claim that it was him, not credited director George Pan Cosmatos who called the shots on the finished film. Still, we already dug into that in another episode of WTF. In this one, we’re going to look at the history that inspired the film, namely Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, the Clanton’s...
Mar 10, 2023•17 min
Suave horror. That's a term I made up to describe some of my favorite characters and actors in the history of horror films. Guys like Vincent Price epitomized the term. It's a select group of actors who are able to bring a level of class and sophistication to movies with the way they talk, act, and simply ooze charisma. A few modern actors can claim that moniker of suave horror, but one of my favorites is the subject of today's What in The Horror Happened To episode. So Let's delve into the midn...
Mar 06, 2023•22 min
