Picked Clean: Reviews from The Realm of The Carrion Crow

By Stephen Pytak It pays homage to the films in the "Alien" franchise, John Carpenter's masterpiece "The Thing (1982)," and video games like "Dead Space." But "Ash (2025)" is also a decent horror sci-fi flick in its own right. Like "Strange Darling (2024)," its plot is not rolled out in A-B-C order. It's structured in such a way so as to maximize suspense. And for the most part, it works. The lead character is an astronaut named "Riya (played by Eiza González)." Her story takes place in the future, year unknown.  She is assigned to a space station on a distant planet.  The air is breathable, but alien-crafted holes in the ground send bursts of debris into the air from time to time. Sometimes it looks like it's snowing. The crew nicknamed the place "Ash."  Earth is in need of resources. And she is a member of a crew of interstellar explorers looking for anything out there which can help the human race. Whe...

By Stephen Pytak The cinematic experience with the tagline "The Night HE Came Home" has always been my favorite John Carpenter film. "Halloween (1978)" is a taut thriller with well-timed scares, one of the most effective musical scores ever composed and one of the greatest villains of all time. While it has spawned numerous sequels, a remake and a requel (or two) and countless imitators, I consider this 1-hour-and-31-minute shocker a one-shot, a stand-alone film, a work of art.  It delivers the goods and gives the audience something to think about just before the credits start to roll, leaving both the proletariat and the aristocrats with the sense that what they saw was something more than your average Saturday afternoon matinee.  If you saw it in a theater when it was released in 1978, you know what I'm taking about. Like "Black Christmas (1974)" the ending wasn't an ending necessarily. The story wasn't neatly wrapped up.  The threat was st...