If you’re like us, you savor and dread the advent of another Halloween season. Halloween traditions like dressing up in macabre attire, finding excuses to watch Evil Dead II on VHS and eating mountains of candy are great, but the ones that involve running down a darkened corridor from a…
Believe it or not, there was a time when our politics didn’t splinter us into humorless cliques, as jokes about “us versus them” weren’t an affront to the human ego. Writers like the political firebrand Molly Ivins could call a state representative as someone who “runs on all fours and…
One of the first attempts to make the movie-going experience more interactive happened way back in 1995 with a film called Mr. Payback. The experience put audiences in control of a robot named Payton Bach (get it?) designed to exact revenge on the world’s biggest jerks like bike thieves and…
A disturbing Instagram video that went viral over the weekend caught the attention of the Dallas and Lewisville police departments. A live stream of an unidentified female juvenile putting a small, white dog in a dryer, and laughing as the dog is tossed around inside it, received a massive amount…
Actress and businesswoman Claudia Wells gets recognized a lot for her small but memorable role as Jennifer Parker in the blockbuster 1985 sci-fi comedy Back to the Future. Wells appeared in the beginning and end of the film, bookending the time-traveling comedy as the loving girlfriend of Marty, played by…
A party card game called Trial By Trolley is now in development by Explosm Entertainment, the Richardson studio behind the dark cartoon comedy universe Cyanide & Happiness. It has become another lode of board game gold for Explosm and Skybound Entertainment, the comic, TV show and game making powerhouse behind the…
Scottish-born comedian Daniel Sloss can brag about the rare distinction of being one of the few comics to release two comedy specials on Netflix at once –including the ironically titled Dark and the deeply personal Jigsaw– a claim only reserved for a handful of comedians, like James Acaster, Chris Rock and…
25 years ago, id Software released DOOM, a bloody, unrelenting and challenging first-person shooter game which would change the video game industry and set a very high bar for future generations of programmers and game designers. The concept seemed simple but became far more complex after every grisly character death…
DOOM took up the most time and real estate at this year’s QuakeCon gathering at the Gaylord Texan Convention Center because of the iconic first-person shooter’s 25th anniversary. But it wasn’t the only game with a new or impending release on digital and retail store shelves. The Dallas-based game studios…
Just under thirty years ago, the first person shooter DOOM blasted its way into the early days of PC gaming with both barrels and left some noticeably bloody marks on the industry. Id Software, the Dallas gaming studio that built the iconic game franchise including DOOM, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D as…
Arlington has found another 1-up in the esports industry by landing the next Esports Awards ceremony for the city’s massive esports stadium. The 2019 Esports Awards, a 3-year-old annual event that honors the work of teams, coaches, video game developers and many others in the esports industry, will hold its…
The Try Guys have tried a lot of insane things in their highly popular Buzzfeed and YouTube series, such as simulating pregnancy pains, wearing crop tops for an entire day and eating the entire Panda Express menu. Those moments in their long history of viral video infamy pale in comparison…
Plano is the latest city in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to host a new film festival this September. The Dallas film nonprofit group that runs the Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF) recently announced the creation of the North Texas Film Festival (NTXFF). The new festival runs Thursday-Sunday, Sept. 26-29, and…
Actor Jeff Goldblum is the beer of movie stars. There’s nothing that either can’t improve. The star of Hollywood blockbusters and beloved classics like Jurassic Park, The Big Chill, The Grand Budapest Hotel and director David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly will perform with the jazz quintet The Mildred Snitzer…
If you’ve watched one of Christopher Titus’s last eight comedy specials, listened to his podcast or seen even a single episode of his self-titled, criminally canceled Fox show, then you know about the troubled, dark and potentially life-scarring life story of this seasoned stand-up comedian and storyteller. Apparently, however, having…
The Addison Improv has booked four shows for comedian Louis C.K. next week and some members of the North Texas comedy community aren’t happy about it. “As soon as I found out he was coming (no pun intended) my stomach completely twisted on itself,” says comedian Ruth Banks who regularly…
The slapstick comedy The Play That Goes Wrong does exactly what it says in the title. So what happens when something actually goes wrong? The cast and audience attending the final performance of The Play That Goes Wrong’s national tour this month found out when an alarm went off during the…
There have been a lot of angry messages sent to my various inboxes and social media accounts in response to my stories over the years. Some were fair, polite and well reasoned. Others not so much, but still had a semblance of a point from an often useful perspective other…
Every summer, ventriloquist, comedian and Richardson product Jeff Dunham would work at a summer camp in Van. In the spring of 1980, after he auditioned in an open call for performers at Six Flags Over Texas, he put in his notice. He had just turned 18, and was doing shows…
The first time Frisco native Maelyn Jarmon stepped on the shined obsidian floor of NBC’s reality singing show The Voice, she faced the backs of four chairs, where four of the music industry’s most famous faces and voices waited to hear what she could do with her vocal chords. Jarmon…
You know the saying, “Everyone knows that.” The fact that Earth is a three-dimensional oblong spheroid no longer applies to that idiom. There are people in this almost perfect sphere of a world who believe the earth is a flat surface surrounded by a wall of ice (and wait, that’s…
Drive-in movie critic and Grapevine’s favorite son Joe Bob Briggs might want to think about changing the name of The Last Drive-In, his horror-movie showcase show on the streaming movie channel Shudder. The network announced that Briggs’ popular program will return for a second season on Shudder. Shudder general manager…
