Hate Watching with Dan and Tony

Send us Fan Mail A movie can look amazing and still feel weirdly empty, and Super 8 is our favorite kind of argument because it sits right on that line. We are supposed to be doing Halloween movies, but we take a detour into the mind of J.J. Abrams and pick apart why his Spielberg-style nostalgia machine works in flashes, then falls apart the second you ask it to make sense. We talk through the big comparisons everyone makes: Super 8 versus Stranger Things, and why “kids on bikes” stories on...

Send us Fan Mail A quiet Midwest suburb in 1982 gets cut out of the world and dropped into dinosaur times. That pitch should print money. Instead, we spend this conversation picking apart why a great high concept can still collapse when the movie refuses to build clear geography, believable survival behavior, or any meaningful setup and payoff. We keep it spoiler-heavy, because the details are the whole point: the “two-mile perimeter,” the random wandering, the missing sense of destination, a...

Send us Fan Mail A castle in the Carpathians. Edgar Allan Poe name-drops. Secret doors, earthquakes, torture devices, and a title that promises haunted hills. So why does Elvira’s Haunted Hills feel like it forgot to include a story, or even a consistent joke? We put on our bad movie review hats and hate-watch our way through the 2002 horror comedy, calling out the dead-air pacing, bits that vanish for an hour, and scenes that play like everyone is waiting for their turn instead of actually p...

Send us Fan Mail One tiny detail can reveal everything that is broken about a movie, and for us it is this: the film cannot decide whether it lives in “Raccoon City” or the “City of Raccoon.” From there, we hit the gas and speed run Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), the franchise reboot that aims for faithful video game adaptation and lands in a weird limbo where the references are loud but the storytelling is missing. We walk through the orphanage setup, Claire’s return, the hi...

Send us Fan Mail M3GAN 2.0 should be an easy win: take a killer doll with attitude, push the horror, sharpen the satire, and give us a few scenes that people quote for years. Instead, we walk straight into a sequel that feels like it’s chasing a totally different movie, swapping dread for generic action beats and then forgetting to make those action beats exciting. We’re Dan and Tony, and we spend this one doing what the film refuses to do: actually look at what makes M3GAN fun, what makes a ...