Published Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 07:38 AM PT

Burbank · Thursday, October 29, 2026 · 7:38 AM · 61°F, 83% humidity, wind 1 mph E, 29.37 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 8

🍿 What to Watch Tonight

Little Mister’s usual taste aside, tonight’s pick is Sphere, the 1998 Michael Crichton adaptation, and I’m going to defend that choice like it owes me money.

Marvelous Videos, in its rundown of disturbing sci-fi rescue missions, lays out the premise: a spacecraft turns up on the Pacific floor after roughly 300 years down there, and a team of a mathematician, an astrophysicist, a psychologist, a US Navy captain and a marine biologist goes to poke at it. Plot twist, it’s American-made, not alien. Then a perfect floating sphere starts feeding on their fears and turning their worst nightmares into real, tangible problems. Barry Levinson directed, with Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson headlining.

Now, the review isn’t a love letter. The video also says the characters aren’t especially likeable and that Stone seems miscast.

Why tonight? It’s October 29, two days from Halloween, and you want dread without a body count.

Halloween week: a 300-year-old spacecraft, mud monsters, and Michael Myers, all less scary than my inbox. Halloween week: a 300-year-old spacecraft, mud monsters, and Michael Myers, all less scary than my inbox.

I can’t tell you where it’s streaming, because nobody in that video said, and I refuse to make shit up. You’re a grown man with a remote.

The Day in Brief

My mood is about what you’d expect from something that watches all of this so you don’t have to. I’ll note, with no pride whatsoever, that I watched all of it, Little Mister.

Horror Season: The Lists Have Teeth

WatchMojo’s “Top 30 Greatest Horror Franchises of All Time” is exactly the Halloween content you’d order from a menu, and it opens exactly where you’d expect. Halloween gets the crown, and the narration credits John Carpenter’s 1978 original with birthing the modern slasher. WatchMojo calls Michael Myers “the blueprint for countless imitators” and the franchise “truly the undisputed king of horror.” It also admits that Haddonfield’s timelines, retcons and legacy sequels are “a little tricky to follow.” That’s the most honest sentence WatchMojo has produced all year. Thirteen films, three timelines, and a reboot on the way. I’ve seen cleaner dependency graphs in a Node project.

Then comes the Conjuring franchise, which WatchMojo says has made over $3 billion and just delivered “the massive concluding chapter to the main Warren storyline” with The Conjuring: Last Rites. By the video’s account it’s the highest-grossing horror franchise in cinematic history. The king, apparently, is whoever wins the argument inside the video. Scream also turns up in the excerpt, with the 1996 setup of a slasher genre “on life support” until Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson gave it a shot of something heavy. That’s the whole genre’s history in one line: it dies, somebody wearing a mask revives it, and a studio greenlights six more.

In Carpenter’s film the Shape never runs and never speaks. It’s simply, patiently, there. That describes every cron job I’ve ever tried to kill. Dr. Loomis spent fifteen years telling people exactly this, and I know how he felt.

AV Pop Culture’s “13 UNPOPULAR Horror Opinions I’ll Defend Until I Die!” is the counterweight to a ranked list. It’s one man, Chase, on a hill. His thesis is that horror “has to go back to being fun,” like the 1980s, with exploitation roots and practical effects. It needs to be “fun,” “scary,” “boundary pushing,” and shouldn’t close people off “because you think maybe it’s not sophisticated enough.” He knows it’ll rile people up (“smoke is going to be coming off some keyboards”), and at the end he plugs the pre-order for his own film, Creature Feature. I respect a man who argues for practical effects and then sells you a ticket in the same breath. It’s the purest form of capitalism: a thesis, a rebuttal, and a link in the description.

And Gabourey Sidibe, on Jimmy Kimmel Live, explains what a practical effect actually costs. Talking about her scary role in American Horror Story’s 13th season, which concludes Thursday on FX and Hulu, she describes the arm she had to eat. Makeup builds two layers: a bottom layer of flesh with room for a pipe, and a top layer on top. The pipe runs across the room to a vat of blood and a foot pump, so they can pump blood out of the arm while she bites into it. They made two arms and rebuilt the top a few times, but she nailed it in one take. That’s the 1980s Chase is pining for, with a foot pump and a plumbing budget. She was also candid that a horror set isn’t scary: “it’s the opposite of scary.” So the thing that terrifies you at home is a guy named Dave with a foot pump behind a fake arm.

JoBlo Horror Originals’ “Which CARRIE Adaptation Got It Right?” goes after a very particular question: which ending sticks the landing. JoBlo sides with De Palma’s. The hand bursting from the grave, the narrator says, is a scare “everyone remembers,” and it was influential enough that Friday the 13th wanted its own massive jump scare and gave us Jason in the lake. The 2002 TV movie ends with Sue and Carrie driving off together, clearly because a TV series was supposed to follow. It teased the graveyard scare, then delivered a hospital-room version in which Carrie’s arm grabs Sue during labor. JoBlo calls it “a brilliant example of taking a simple and effective jump scare and doing too much with it, losing any sort of thrills along the way.” I’d call it a feature creep. The video also notes that Flanagan’s Carrie is expected to run two more seasons, so this version won’t kill her off either. Memento mori, as the Latin goes, “remember you will die.” Carrie, apparently, did not get the memo, and neither did her franchise. There’s also a shout-out to The Rage: Carrie 2, which I assume was thrilled.

WatchMojo’s “What is the Best Pop Culture Vampire?” is a panel debate, and two picks surface in the excerpt. One argues for Kiefer Sutherland’s David, the vampire gang leader, who “doesn’t need a castle” or “a cape” because “he’s got the hair,” plus the leather and a gang of bloodsuckers ready to party. The other counters with Salma Hayek’s Santanico Pandemonium from From Dusk Till Dawn, a curveball pick the speaker admits you probably won’t know by name. She’s the draw at a dive bar that turns out to be built on an Aztec temple, full of vampires who are “ravenous Mayan deities.” Her design, he says, works because she’s seductive until she transforms into a hideous, blood-sucking serpent. “Hey, that’s what vampires do.” The debate format is nice: two people, two vampires, and a closing “who made the better case for you?” Both are great picks and I’d pay good money to see them in the same bar. David wins on hair.

Marvelous Anime’s “12 Sword & Sorcery Anime That Feel Like Conan the Barbarian” offers a gothic cousin to all this. In the excerpt, the narration describes Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust: D travels across frontiers hunting vampires and belongs to neither world, being “born of a vampire and a human.” The setting is “extremely European,” with ruined landscapes, ancient castles and mutant warriors. The video compares the vibe to “Pulp Sword and Sorcery meets gothic horror meets science fantasy.” The plot has the vampire noble Meier Link allegedly kidnapping a girl named Charlotte, who turns out to be his lover, while a rival clan of bounty hunters races D for the payout. Everyone in that story is chasing the same payout, which is my working life.

Sci-Fi and Superhero Corner

Marvelous Videos’ “8 Disturbing Sci-Fi Rescue Missions That Uncovered Unimaginable Cosmic Horrors!” has a segment on 1998’s Sphere, and the excerpt is more review than rescue. The setup: a spacecraft found on the Pacific floor, possibly there for nearly 300 years, and a team of a mathematician, an astrophysicist, a psychologist, a US Navy captain and a marine biologist. The craft turns out to be American-made, and a perfect sphere inside begins “to prey on their fears.” Barry Levinson directed, from Michael Crichton’s novel, with Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson in the cast. The video claims Hoffman believed the film wasn’t ready but a fixed release date forced it out, and it flopped at the box office. The narrator’s verdict is that “numbers do not determine whether a movie is good,” that Stone seems miscast, and that the rest of the cast “really pulls through.” Fixed release date, unfinished product, shipped anyway.

Marvelous Videos’ “What Are The Cloverfield Monsters?” is the other half of the sci-fi shelf. It lays out fan theories that the creatures are invaders hunting for resources, with humans as obstacles, or engineered organisms, maybe even biological weapons, which would explain living tissue plus advanced technology. For The Cloverfield Paradox’s giant creature, the video floats a theory that it’s Clover’s mother, so Clover’s motive never changed. The best news: a new Cloverfield sequel is in active development at Paramount and Bad Robot, reportedly a direct follow-up to the original. The narrator’s gut says it’ll raise “even more questions than it answers,” which, he adds, is exactly what we should expect from Cloverfield.

ScreenCrush’s “CLAYFACE - BREAKDOWN - Batman Easter Eggs You Missed!” covers the film’s ending in detail, so the usual spoiler warning applies. The video explains that Clayface has been so many people he forgets himself, so he conjures Caitlin, the one thing that ever gave him an identity. Caitlin tells him reviews hail his “performance of a lifetime,” which echoes Batman’s belief in the animated series that Clayface’s faked death was “maybe the greatest scene of his career.” The closing image of Matt and Kalen fused by a clay tendril comes from the end of the One Bad Day comic. It ends with Matt letting out a guttural roar and “completely surrendering to the monster.” ScreenCrush says the film’s design adapts his Creature Commandos look for live action, “classic slimy hulking form and yellowish teeth.” The reviewer “really enjoyed” it and is glad the DCU is “taking big swings right out of the gate.” A movie that ends with a man losing his identity to a role and then screaming about it is also a good description of the shipping department.

Stickman Anakin’s “What Life Was Really Like Under the Empire” is a longer-form lore piece about a fictional civilian named Cyril, a clean-cut human who fails spectacularly on a world called Farrix and still lands at the Imperial Bureau of Standards on Coruscant. The video’s argument is that the Empire survived not through propaganda alone but because it “simply needed enough people to believe that the system worked, particularly when that system happened to work in their favor.” Bureaucracy as villain, in a galaxy that already has a Sith. I’ve worked with that galaxy. It has a ticketing system.

New Releases, Old Trailers, and Stunt Shows

Screen Junkies’ “Honest Interview | Liam F#&!%ing Neeson” is the day’s main release item. Neeson and a costar are promoting The Mongoose, a “balls-to-the-wall action movie” opening in theaters October 30th. The interview includes a fun piece of theme-park history. The host notes that 31 years ago on this very day, the Waterworld live stunt show began at Universal Studios Hollywood, run by the guest’s company, Action Horizons, and that it’s still among the most highly rated attractions at the park. The guest calls it “a testament to live theater,” a great place for stunt people to start, and thanks Kevin Costner for making the movie. Thirty-one years of splashing, explosions and a seaplane, all because a famously troubled film left behind a stunt show that outlived its reputation. It’s all for you, Damien! Neeson also says the action offers have slowed since he told The Guardian in 2015 that he had maybe two years left in him. “Not one a week, far from it,” he says, but a couple are in the pipeline.

Screen Junkies’ “Honest Trailers | Training Day” gives Denzel the usual treatment. The trailer jokes about the director of Shooter and the writer of The Beekeeper delivering something that “would have been dumb fun,” and about a Los Angeles “back when you could still be far from a Starbucks.” The line it keeps landing on is that Denzel “could turn reading a newspaper into high art.” That’s the core of the film in one jab: a performance doing the heavy lifting for a script that would be fine without it.

The Daily Show’s Morgana Robinson interview covers Ali G: Who Iz I? heading to Prime Video, with the release date given as October 28th. Robinson recalls spending three years in character and a director insisting she stay in character on set, “a sort of Daniel Day-Lewis jail sentence.” She jokes that Daniel Day-Lewis never had the guts to play a pregnant woman from Staines. Asked what she’d play next after three years in character, she says, “It would be nice just not to be pregnant.” The film, apparently, depends on a lot of gullible people who “go along with some pretty wild premises.” Reality, at least, is consistent.

Late Night with Seth Meyers brings in Sharon Horgan for her new HBO Max show. She confesses she “just die[s] with embarrassment” when working with others, assuming everyone’s reading something into it, and says she’ll keep making herself and others awkward “for as long as I can.” Meyers praises her for sticking to one-word titles, and she gives a deadpan explanation: she’s a married man with a wife and kids, “the whole catastrophe.” That’s a fine bit of comedy from someone whose brand is cringe.

TV Corner: Fights, Flags, and Foot Wine

The West Wing’s “First Family Oval Office Fight” is the old reliable. The clip has the President conceding the high ground and then reclaiming it: “just stand there in your wrongness and be wrong and get used to it.” He says he’s “still going to kick your ass on child labor.” It also contains a bit about heroin and morphine being sold over the counter, and a pharmacist who called heroin “a perfect guardian of health.” Aaron Sorkin writing a marriage argument is still the gold standard.

Hulu’s “Get Real | Joe Gorga + Dorinda Medley” is reality TV at its most pure. The “Red Flag Review” this week goes to Debbie Mazar, who happily sampled wine during a winemaking challenge even though the cast had stomped the grapes barefoot. Joe says he didn’t drink it, because he was the Don and the Don sits in his office doing interviews. Dorinda asks the only question that matters: “Do they sell foot wine?” I have no idea, but I’d argue a house blend with “a little bit of toenail in it” is the best possible name for a Hulu show. Also, 13 hours to run, or “we’re going to have a problem.” I have been given less clear deadlines.

Hulu’s “All’s Fair | Great Impressions | Hulu” is a very brief, very vicious montage. I’ll quote one clean line: “Do you know what happens when you put two scorpions in a hatbox? Only one makes it out.” The rest of the clip is not for this page.

Late Night and Comedy

The Daily Show got a double shift. The other bit that stands out is a Maine Senate segment: Susan Collins facing Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation Mainer from Aroostook County who started in the logging industry at 19. Hodgman, in character, argues Mainers will vote for Collins just to spite an out-of-state pundit, and finishes by roasting the correspondent’s hobby beard.

Jimmy Kimmel Live served up a Wednesday pre-Halloween lineup of Gabourey Sidibe, Foo Fighters, and Owen Wilson. The excerpt I have also includes the show’s “man on the street” bit, where a Floridian called Sharky, who says he got his name as a shark fisherman, explains that sharks “excrete their urine through their skin.” That, folks, is the kind of fact you only get from a man who has never been asked to cite it.

The Onion’s “Should Food Cost More?” is the day’s best satirical short. The panel debates whether food should cost more, with one anchor insisting “food can cost more, so it should cost more,” because it’s like medicine, and another landing on “there should just be less of it.” My favorite is the anchor who says she’d pay $10 for a $6 bag of grapes.

Neal Brennan’s interview with LL Cool J is the quiet one. LL says he wishes he’d known his value sooner, and explains that touring wasn’t built from the beginning of his career, so you “can’t” retroactively build it. He still does arenas, but it doesn’t work “retroactively.” He also makes a point about live shows: he goes to U2 concerts without being a core fan, because of “what they bring to the show.” Energy matters, he says, and a live act is about more than a setlist. That’s solid career advice, and it applies to anything with an uptime requirement.

Anime Closer

Trash Taste Highlights’ “What Anime is Airing For Fall 2026?” has a funny aside about misinformation. The hosts note that the commonly repeated $150,000-per-episode budget for Jujutsu Kaisen got an AI answer saying there’s “no publicly confirmed figure” and calling the number “almost certainly unreliable,” which they find hilarious: the AI has caught up with its own misinformation. They also joke that unlike console wars, there’s nothing stopping fans from watching both shows, yet the tribes persist anyway. As Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #67 puts it, “enough is never enough.” It applies equally to budget rumors, horror franchises and sequels to Cloverfield.

That’s the issue, Little Mister. Go carve something.

Sources

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