Entertainment
The Thrilling Die Hard Homage That Made Scream VII's Star
By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
Actress Isabel May is starring in Scream VII as Sidney’s daughter Tatum, a role that puts her character in the vicinity of her famous mother and therefore in danger from Ghostface. May isn’t a stranger to playing characters whose lives are in danger, as she was also the star of the Daily Wire thriller Run Hide Fight. Between the Scream movie and recent news events, this 2020 film about a high school shooter has resurfaced on social media.
Run Hide Fight is about an angry teen named Zoe Hull, who is still grieving the death of her mother, making things not so good at home with her ex-military and outdoorsman father, Todd. Typical teenage concerns abound: prom is coming up, and Zoe’s friend Lewis wants to ask her to it, while Vernon Central High School is having its “senior prank day,” resulting in rooms filled with balloons and a sloped hallway doused in vegetable oil.
But the joke is over when four of Zoe’s classmates, led by psychopath Tristan, ram into the school in a giant white van and start shooting. He and his friends aren’t just out to kill their classmates, but also to livestream it on social media and become famous. Zoe manages to escape detection, but can a single 17-year-old girl save an entire school?
Die Hard In High School Doesn’t Cover It
The movie has been described as “Die Hard in a high school,” and that’s a fair assessment of its basic plot, but it sells short the intricacy and psychological warfare that is woven into the script by director Kyle Rankin. Various powers collide as the hostage situation unfolds, as the school’s administrators and teachers, the police, the media, and the students themselves scramble to deal with the crisis in various ways. There is so much going on in this movie that I took three pages of notes to write this review.
While there’s plenty of action, it’s not really an action movie but a thriller. Zoe is on a hero’s journey that includes her own grief as she talks to her mother, played by Radha Mitchell, throughout the hostage situation. Tension is high even when characters are just talking to each other, because you never know when someone with a gun might burst into the room. The movie’s plot moves through the phases suggested by its title and mirrored in the phases of Tristan’s plan.
Zoe is also not invincible. She’s a scrappy teen, not a Navy SEAL, and she takes some injuries as she tries to help her classmates escape. Unlike John McClane, she’s not looking for a fight; she’s looking to survive, and all she has is her wits. She is also suffering: her mother appears as a hallucination whose appearance documents Zoe’s grief. Isabel May puts on a wrenching performance, not just in her dialogue but in her expressions of deeply conflicting emotions in the face of terror.
With so many characters and so much going on, the action is emphasized in short, staccato scenes that allow the plot to unfold organically. It has the frenetic pacing of up-to-the-minute news, creating a livestream effect that underscores Tristan’s plan, but it also knows when to slow down, giving us time to care about the characters and their survival. Treat Williams, who plays the sheriff managing this crisis, dominates almost all his scenes with charismatic energy.
Great Writing Makes Run Fight Hide a Must-See
Daily Wire+ has a mature warning on Run Hide Fight because of violence, but we are only given enough violence to emphasize the severity of the situation. These scenes are very impactful, especially as the students are forced to livestream the carnage and Tristan’s posturing. The technique of using phones to record for social media is always present, as it connects all the characters inside the school to the police and parents outside the school.
The true strength of this movie lies in its script, which doesn’t shy away from its numerous themes. There is humor in the dialogue, and the characters are fleshed out well. The film draws viewers enough into the school that it’s easy to triumph when they do and to be afraid for their survival. The threads of plot and theme are so well executed that they wrap the story into a neat package, from its cold open to its chilling resolution.
It is difficult these days to write a story about school shootings, and you’re not supposed to enjoy that, though that’s what’s happening during this one. The script never asks for it any more than Zoe asks to be a heroine. That makes it all the more worth watching.
Run Hide Fight is Isabel May’s first dramatic role and paved the way for her to star first in the Yellowstone spin-offs and now in Scream VII. Even though she plays a teenager, this movie marked her transition from teen roles to more mature ones. Many people ignore or dismiss it because it is a Daily Wire production, but Run Hide Fight represents a successful early effort by the streamer to create quality fictional content.
Run Hide Fight is streaming on Daily Wire+. Scream VII is currently in theaters.
Entertainment
This $43 bundle quietly upgrades your entire PC experience
TL;DR: This rare Microsoft bundle deal gives you a lifetime license to Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows and Windows 11 Pro for only $42.97 (reg. $418.99) through May 17.
$42.97
$418.99
Save $376.02
Looking for an affordable way to make your old PC feel new again? If you don’t have the funds to buy a brand new computer, don’t worry. The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows lifetime license and Windows 11 Pro Bundle is the next best thing, offering your computer a total upgrade for only $42.97 through May 17.
Don’t count out your dusty old PC. This Microsoft bundle is here to give it a total facelift for less than $50. It kicks off with a lifetime license to some of the brand’s most popular tools — Microsoft Office, which you’ll pay for once and enjoy without any subscription fees.
Mashable Deals
You’ll get permanent access to a suite of eight helpful apps with Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows. It includes staples that have been around for decades, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. You’ll also get newer favorites like Teams, OneNote, Access, and Publisher.
Once you’ve loaded the apps onto your device, you can upgrade your OS to Windows 11 Pro. It’s an operating system made for modern professionals, with tools that support your workflow. Enjoy a more powerful search experience, improved voice typing, a seamless interface, snap layouts, and much more.
You can rest easy knowing Windows 11 Pro takes your cybersecurity seriously. You’ll have biometric logins, encrypted authentication, and advanced antivirus defenses to keep your data secure.
Mashable Deals
Show your PC some love with the Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows and Windows 11 Pro bundle for only $42.97 (reg. $418.99) now until May 17.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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Angels activate OF/DH Jorge Soler from four-game suspension
