What is best in life? Well, let's hope it's watching a bunch of failed franchise starters, because we're kicking off a brand new theme dedicated entirely to films based on the works of legendary pulp author Robert E. Howard. That's right, it's time to hear "The Lamentations of their Winter!" To kick it off, it's 1985's Red Sonja, the first attempt to forge a cinematic franchise out of the fiery red-headed warrior loosely based on a Howard character (but really more based on the comic book character inspired by Howard's character...we know, it's confusing). Serving as a sort of sequel, sort of spin-off to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan series, and even featuring Arnold himself in a supporting role, Red Sonja seemed perfectly poised to be a huge hit and possibly turn debuting star Brigitte Nielsen into a megastar just like Conan the Barbarian did for Arnold. Except, uh...that didn't happen. Why not? We're here to discuss. And since we're kicking off another series with an '80s action film, who better to help us than returning guest Bryan Kristopowitz, author of Not Coming to a Theater Near You!: 50 Great Direct-to-Video Action Flicks of the Early 2000s.

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Buy Bryan's book HERE, titled:
Not Coming to a Theater Near You!: 50 Great Direct-to-Video Action Flicks of the Early 2000s

"FALLure to Franchise" concludes with a very recent movie. One starring two big movie-stars coming off of the biggest hits of their career, directed by one of the filmmakers behind John Wick, and a movie that helped influence a major Academy Award change. So why the heck wasn't 2024's The Fall Guy a hit?? Your guess is as good as ours, but we're here to try to figure it out. Another cinematic adaptation of a classic TV show, The Fall Guy stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in the action-comedy tale of a fallen (hey!) stuntman whose attempted comeback is set back when he becomes embroiled in a mysterious criminal plot. Is the movie an effective adaptation of the source material series? Are the stunts as impressive as they should be in a movie dedicated to honoring stunt performers? Has Chris hallucinated unicorns? Would Ryan Gosling be friends with Trev? We ask all these questions, and more!

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As exciting as the start of a new theme month usually is here at F2F, this time it comes with a little bit of foreboding, as well. That's because we're kicking off September's "FALLure to Franchise" with a return to one of our most dreaded genres...the YA Lit Adaptation! This time, we're looking at 2016's Fallen, which poses the compelling(?) question...what if Twilight, but with angels? Also based on a popular series of books, and with a clear "it's worked before" template to follow, Fallen seemed to have an easy enough path to follow to at least somewhat replicate the Twilight success, but ultimately the movie was barely released and was barely seen or defended by even the books' most passionate fans. So what went wrong? We're here to investigate...and possibly even reconsider how much credit we give the Twilight series in retrospect.

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