Entertainment
Creative Assembly drops first look at the Alien: Isolation sequel
Twelve years after the original Alien: Isolation game was released across platforms, on the official “Alien Day” meant to celebrate the beloved franchise, game developers Creative Assembly are returning to the world of xenomorphs and unreliable robots to once again terrify the living daylights out of us.
The teaser trailer, aptly titled “False Sense of Security,” does a lot with very little, from the flashing red light in a poorly lit room to the ominous background music and eventual close-up of what looks to be a payphone, with the word “Emergency” appropriately backlit.
As you might expect from the makers of the original game, Creative Assembly is clearly reluctant to over-share, relying on atmosphere and sound to do the heavy lifting, but the brief glimpse we get of the background when the door opens suggests the possibility that, unlike the first game, the sequel might also take place on a planet’s surface, perhaps hinting at a much larger game world.
Needless to say, we’ll be covering more details about the game’s development and progress as they emerge.
Entertainment
T-Mobile is giving away the Apple iPhone 17 for free — how to get yours
TL;DR: Score a free iPhone 17e when signing up for a T-Mobile plan with no trade-in required. The iPhone 17 is also available for free from T-Mobile when signing up for an Experience More plan and trading in an eligible device.
March was massive for Apple. After months of anticipation, new iPhones, MacBooks, and iPads were finally released to the public.
So what now?
Is the expectation that we all just sit around and wait for the next announcement from Apple? No, this is the time for finding the best deals on this fresh lineup. And there’s a special offer available right now for anyone interested in upgrading to the new iPhone 17.
For a limited time, you can switch to almost any T-Mobile plan and get a free iPhone 17e (no trade in required). Alternatively, you can claim the iPhone 17 for free when signing on for 24 months of an Experience More plan and trading in an eligible phone. It’s important to note that T-Mobile will charge taxes on these deals and a $35 device connection fee, but that’s pretty much always the case with these “free” deals.
The Experience More plan is designed for power users who want 4K streaming, huge hotspot data, and international roaming that can keep up with even the most frequent flyers. You’re therefore faced with a higher monthly bill than more limited plans. The Experience More plan does include perks like Apple TV+ and Netflix, which helps to offset some of that cost.
Mashable Deals
The iPhone 17 is the first base model built to handle Apple’s most advanced AI features. Mashable’s Stan Schroeder said it’s an “excellent phone that matches the iPhone Pro models in many ways that matter.” Content creators should note that the camera is “almost as good as the one on the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max.”
Score the Apple iPhone 17 for free this weekend with T-Mobile.
Entertainment
The Extremely R-Rated 90s Sci-Fi That Sent An Alien Caveman On Revenge Quest
By Robert Scucci
| Updated

It really takes a lot for me to sit through an entire movie without knowing what the hell it’s about, and I most recently experienced this with 1996’s Savage. There are so many unrelated storylines that feel like they should connect and lead to a satisfying payoff, but they never really do. My experience with the film made me want it all to make sense, but I had to read detailed plot synopses on both Wikipedia and IMDb just to make heads or tails of the thing, and somehow I ended up even more confused.
Normally when I write reviews, I open those tabs to get the character and talent names straight because I’m great with faces but terrible with names. In this case, I had to SparkNote my way through the plot because Savage is profoundly nonsensical, to the point where I think it should be studied.

Savage is a sci-fi action film, but also a revenge film, but also a film about ancient aliens, super-powered cavemen, and an evil virtual reality game company, all of which are completely at odds with each other. Visually, it’s an absolute feast of low-budget special effects, which is what drew me to it during a late-night Tubi scroll in the first place. I don’t regret watching it, but I can’t speak for how you’ll feel about this one, dear reader.
Hell Hath No Fury Like An Alien Caveman Hellbent On Revenge

Here’s where I try to explain what Savage is all about. A man named Alex Verne (Olivier Gruner) gets committed to a psychiatric hospital after his family is randomly murdered. One day, two years later, he decides it’s time to escape. Wandering through the desert, he hears a voice that leads him to a cave. Inside are paintings of ancient aliens. Alex lives like this for an indeterminate amount of time until he encounters an alien apparition that first takes the form of his dead wife, and then the killer. The alien tells him he has to get revenge because the killer will do it again to “millions of others.”
Alex gets electrocuted and suddenly has superhuman strength, which pairs nicely with the caveman skills he developed while living out in the desert. He wanders the streets naked and gets taken into police custody, where he meets Officer Nicky Carter (Jennifer Grant), who’s put off by his strange behavior but still somehow finds him irresistible enough to become a valuable ally by the third act.

Meanwhile, and completely out of nowhere, we’re introduced to Reese Burroughs (Kario Salem), the corrupt chairman of the Titan Corporation. He specializes in virtual reality video games and has hilariously named henchmen Marie Beloc (Kristin Minter), Edgar Wallace (Sam McMurray), and Allan Poe (Herschel Sparber) following him around wherever he goes. As luck would have it, Reese has been waiting a long time for a police report about a weird naked caveman type getting arrested, and now he has to track down Alex and eliminate him for … reasons, I guess.
Alex, now referred to as a savage by Reese and his goons due to his alien caveman abilities, escapes the holding cell, hellbent on breaching the Titan Corporation for … other reasons, I guess, as the home viewer (because this is obviously a direct-to-VHS effort) tries to piece these plot points together. You’re left wondering how the final showdown between these characters will play out in both the real world and the virtual one they occupy.
Thematically Bankrupt With Plenty Of Visual Bangers

Most reasonable people will read the above synopsis of Savage and decide not to watch it. I don’t blame them. However, for a direct-to-video sci-fi B-movie, it has tremendous visuals. The virtual reality sequences are immersive. The aliens are corny but cool, and they perfectly capture that “waking up at 3 am and this is what’s playing on TV after I passed out watching something else” vibe that I remember so fondly from my university days.
If you can get past the fact that the plot makes no sense, Savage is tremendously fun to watch. Personally, I treated it as a series of vaguely related vignettes occupying the same universe, which allowed me to appreciate the visuals without scrutinizing the storytelling too much. That said, it feels like there has to be a director’s cut floating around somewhere because the connection between Alex and Reese is vague at best until far too late in the runtime.


Savage, in all of its insane glory, is currently streaming for free on Tubi. Throw it on when you’re looking for something different because there’s nothing quite like it. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when you get halfway through and realize that so much has happened without telling anything close to a coherent story.

Entertainment
How A Case Of Mistaken Identity Led To Bill Murray’s Most Bizarre Role
By TeeJay Small
| Published

You probably know Bill Murray as one of the greatest comedic minds of the 1980s through the mid 2000s. If you’ve followed his career closely, you’ve seen him put audiences in stitches with performances in Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, Zombieland, and everything in between. Still, every actor makes a few questionable choices in their time, and not every Bill Murray performance is a slam dunk. Fans of the comedic A-lister were shocked, for instance, when Murray agreed to voice the titular orange cat in 2004’s Garfield: The Movie, a role he later revealed he took by mistake after mistaking writer Joel Cohen for Joel Coen.
When this casting news was first announced, fans pontificated on the reason why Bill Murray would agree to lead a highly sanitized PG movie. After all, his other projects around that time include such mature, introspective hits as The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Surprisingly, it turns out that Murray signed on to voice Garfield not for a quick paycheck, not out of love for the original comic strip, but purely by accident, due to this case of mistaken identity.
Not The Coen He Was Looking For

2004’s Garfield: The Movie was written by a screenwriter named Joel Cohen. Cohen is credited as a writer on such hit films as Toy Story, Cheaper By The Dozen, and Evan Almighty. When Bill Murray saw the name on the screenplay for Garfield: The Movie, he mistook the scribe for the very similarly-named Joel Coen, of the Coen Brothers. The Coens, as you likely already know, have a penchant for writing off-beat comedic films that would be a much better fit for Bill Murray’s off-the-walls personality than Garfield: The Movie.
Bill Murray spoke on this subject over a decade ago during a Reddit AMA session. Responding to a fan who asked if there would ever be a third Garfield film, Murray stated “I wasn’t thinking clearly, but it was spelled Cohen, not Coen. I love the Coen brothers movies. I think that Joel Coen is a wonderful comedic mind. So I didn’t really bother to finish the script, I thought ‘he’s great, I’ll do it.’” The comedian claims that he didn’t realize Cohen and Coen were different people until months later, after he started laying down his lines.
A Simple Misunderstanding Extrapolated To Absurdity

In that very same comment, Bill Murray outlined his process while working on Garfield: The Movie, and spoke as though the experience was complete torture. He adds “It was sort of like Fantastic Mr. Fox without the joy or the fun.” Furthermore, Murray claims that all the live action parts of the film were shot before he laid down any lines, and the Garfield model was composited in as a gray blob. It’s well known that Murray improvised heavily throughout the recording process, but he revealed during his Reddit Q&A that he made numerous attempts to reframe entire scenes by swapping his dialogue with jokes that more closely aligned with his vision, much to the chagrin of Joel Cohen.
In an era of social media, it seems like celebrities are more accessible to the public than ever before. Even still, I’m not sure there’s anything more relatable than a guy taking on a massive months-long job based on a simple miscommunication because he couldn’t be bothered to proofread for a single letter H. To this day, Bill Murray has still never worked with the Coen brothers, but he did complete two Garfield films, which are currently available to stream on Hulu.
