Greg McLean’s sun-baked Aussie nightmare pits tourists against a monstrous saltwater croc in the outback – practical guts, smart CGI restraint, and tension that never lets up thank you to a killer script & direction from the same man!

Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver’s brutal 2001 graphic novel that built the metahuman Alcatraz, birthed Murmur, Double-Down & others, and dragged Wally West’s world into the dark for good & for BETTER!

Disney’s arcade-hopping love letter to 8-bit and 16-bit glory – packed with real cameos, zero condescension, and what we think must be the best depiction of what it actually feels like to live inside a game ever “rendered”.

On the 22nd anniversary week of its release, we rip into Brody Dalle’s masterpiece “Coral Fang” – the divorce-fueled, major-label monster that turned The Distillers from cult heroes into legends!

This week on Coolest Alive, we’re celebrating one of the wildest, weirdest, most unexpectedly enduring franchises of the VHS era: CRITTERS! From the scrappy 1986 original that won over Siskel & Ebert, to the bonkers Easter-egg massacre of Critters 2, to Leonardo DiCaprio’s first film in Critters 3, to the deep-space madness of Critters 4, all the way through SyFy’s Critters Attack!, Shudder’s A New Binge, and the two fan-made shorts keeping the Krite flame alive — we’re covering the entire saga. Horror, comedy, sci-fi, practical effects wizardry, bounty hunters, ham-eating murderballs… It’s all here. If you love creature features, cult classics, or anything truly alive, this is one you DO NOT want to miss.

Listen, I caught Little Shop of Horrors on Broadway (many years ago now) but holy crap, it’s hands-down the greatest musical I’ve ever seen live, the way Howard Ashman’s lyrics and Alan Menken’s tunes explode with that doo-wop soul and razor-sharp wit, turning a cheesy B-movie into this wild, hilarious monster mash of temptation and chaos on stage. The puppetry for Audrey II is always straight-up ingenuity or genius, devouring the set with attitude, while the cast belts out “Suddenly Seymour” and “Feed Me” like they’re possessed, blending laughs, heart, and edge-of-your-seat spectacle that leaves you humming for days NO MATTER WHICH CAST PERFORMS IT! Catch a local production ASAP; it’s pure theatrical fire that demands to be experienced raw.

Bro, if you thought the Monty Python crew peaked with Holy Grail, you gotta hunt down Yellowbeard immediately, this batshit-insane 1983, Graham Chapman-led pirate comedy is basically the unsung fifth Python film, packed with legit Python royalty (Chapman starring, John Cleese, Eric Idle, plus Cheech & Chong, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, and even David Bowie in a cameo). Chapman plays the nastiest, drunkest, most treacherous pirate ever, staggering around looking for his buried treasure while everyone double-crosses everyone in the most unhinged way possible. It’s crude, ridiculous, quotable as hell (“I’m not yellow, I’m just bearded!”), and feels like Life of Brian crashed into a rum barrel. Total cult madness that deserves way more love, fire it up, and thank me when you’re crying laughing.

Yo, dive into Torso if you want a gut-punch of real American horror. Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko’s graphic novel rips open the unsolved Cleveland Torso Murders of the ‘30s, where Eliot Ness swaps bootleggers for a headless-body-dumping psycho, chasing clues through foggy streets and corrupt shadows. Packed with actual crime scene photos, gritty black-and-white art, and that noir vibe that’ll have you flipping pages like a detective on edge, it’s not just a story, it’s a raw homage to Bendis’ hometown that snagged Eisner nods for good reason. If true crime comics get your blood pumping, this unsolved nightmare is mandatory.