Entertainment
Overlooked R-Rated 2000s Crime Comedy Wants You Dead, But Just For The Money
By Robert Scucci
| Published
After watching 2002’s Hard Cash, the almighty algorithm guided me to other ill-fated heist movies from the early aughts, prompting me to spend 88 minutes of my life watching 2001’s Wish You Were Dead. Similar to Hard Cash, Wish You Were Dead makes you wonder what could have been, because all the moving parts are there for a great film. The heist is fun, and there’s a clear logical progression that any crime comedy thriller fan can get behind. There’s scheming and plotting, and each character has enough personality quirks to keep you interested in the premise.
The problem with Wish You Were Dead, which, unlike Hard Cash, is actually trying to be a comedy, is that the characters’ actions don’t always line up with their surroundings. The jokes and physical comedy are there, but the humor leans too lowbrow when, in my opinion, things should have been more deadpan. Wish You Were Dead is trying to capture a Very Bad Things kind of vibe, but it should have taken a page from the Naked Gun playbook.
Is It Even True Love If There’s No Insurance Fraud?
At face value, Wish You Were Dead has a hilarious setup and some great on-screen chemistry that makes you wish it stuck the landing. We’re first introduced to Melody (Elaine Hendrix), a man-murdering hit woman who loves eating copious amounts of chocolate. Her penchant for sweets reminds me of Rutger Hauer’s Harley Stone from 1992’s Split Second, but the similarities stop there. Melody’s specialty is taking on clients with unfaithful husbands, whacking them, and then moving on to the next job.
Her next job, however, is where things become complicated.
Melody is hired by Sally (Mary Steenburgen) and Tanya Rider (Tanya Allen), a mother-and-daughter team hatching a scheme to commit fraud against a lowly insurance adjuster named Mac (Cary Elwes), who has a million-dollar life insurance policy in his name. Sally and Tanya’s plan is simple: convince Mac that Sally is pregnant with his child so he’ll make her the beneficiary of his post-mortem payout, then hire Melody to finish him off.
Matters get even more complicated when Melody decides she’s actually in love with Mac and can’t, in good conscience, kill him. Instead, they team up with Mac’s older co-worker, Bruce (Christopher Lloyd), and hatch their own plan to evade Sally and Tanya, save Mac’s life, and run off with the money. Along the way, there are run-ins with Gene Simmons from KISS, who plays an eccentric hairdresser named Vinny, along with appearances from Billy Ray Cyrus and Robert Englund portraying a sassy preacher with Tourette syndrome.
Should Work But Doesn’t
Wish You Were Dead is absolutely dripping with potential, but it never feels fully realized because it’s so disjointed. I’m having trouble explaining why it’s disjointed, because the story beats are solid, and the escalating stakes ramp up naturally. Everybody you see on screen has acting chops and knows the assignment, but something about the assignment itself doesn’t work.
I may change my mind if I ever rewatch the film, because maybe I was just in a bad mood or something when I watched it, but it simply did not make me laugh. This movie has It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia levels of scheming. Elaine Hendrix’s crazy eyes when she’s mad, shooting daggers at Christopher Lloyd, should, in theory, be funny. But for some reason, it doesn’t gel. Mac is the perfect hapless victim of circumstance, caught between a murder plot and a budding romance with the person who was hired to kill him. This is all funny stuff, but it’s too quirky to be taken seriously, even as a comedy, and too overtly campy when it should have been just a little more deadpan.
Truth be told, Wish You Were Dead confuses me enough that I want to eventually watch it again and reassess my stance. All the ingredients for a superb crime comedy are there, but as a whole, the movie feels far less than the sum of its parts.
As of this writing, you can stream Wish You Were Dead for free on Tubi.
Entertainment
Grab a lifetime Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus license for just $54.99
TL;DR: Save $195 and own Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for $54.99 with a lifetime license for one Windows PC — no recurring subscription fees.
Monthly subscriptions make sense for some software. But if you use the same Windows PC every day and simply want Microsoft Office installed and ready to go, paying once can be the simpler option.
That’s what makes Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus worth a look. You can currently grab a lifetime license for $54.99 (reg. $249.99), giving you permanent access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Access on one Windows PC.
Mashable Deals
The important thing to know is that this version uses a device-linked license, not one tied to your Microsoft account. That’s the trade-off that helps keep the price lower. If you’re buying Office for a computer you plan to keep for a while, that may be a perfectly reasonable compromise.
You’ll also avoid recurring Microsoft 365 payments while still getting the productivity apps most people use every day. Whether you’re building spreadsheets, writing reports, creating presentations, or managing email, the core experience is designed for long-term stability.
It also includes Dark Mode and is built to perform well on a wide range of hardware without requiring an ongoing subscription.
If your goal is simple — a full Office suite on one Windows PC with no recurring fees — this is an easy way to get there.
Mashable Deals
Get Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for a one-time $54.99 (reg. $249.99).
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Entertainment
R-Rated Director’s Cut Of The Worst X-Files Movie Is Streaming In Less Than A Month
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Possibly no TV series ever made has had such a meteoric rise and epic fall as The X-Files. The early seasons captivated ‘90s audiences with a potent combination of sexy lead actors and stories about alien abductions and government conspiracies. The franchise arguably hit a high point with the first movie, The X-Files: Fight the Future. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there. Later seasons got progressively worse, and David Duchovny eventually left the show for good. He came back for the worst revival in television history, one that followed up on some of the revelations of the second movie, The X-Files: I Want To Believe.
Whereas Fight the Future advanced the complex mythology of the series, I Want To Believe was modeled more after the series’ monster-of-the-week episodes. Unfortunately, the monster was weaksauce, and the film’s vestigial ties to some of the stupider lore really dragged it down. But could this failed film be one good edit away from being a banger? Chris Carter seems to think so. Last year, he teased that he was working on an R-Rated director’s cut of the film, one that brings it to bloody life like never before. Now, fans will be able to judge for themselves: The X-Files: I Want to Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn will begin streaming on Hulu on August 14.
Somehow, Mulder And Scully Returned
The X-Files: I Want to Believe is a movie where Mulder and Scully have long since left the FBI; she’s a doctor, and he’s a hermit. But when an FBI agent gets kidnapped, and a Catholic priest starts seeing her in psychic visions, the Bureau gets Mulder to consult on the case because of his prior experience with all things spooky. Unfortunately, the PG-13 movie was a flop: it has a 32 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and audiences alike. It also earned only $68.4 million against a $30 million budget, with its box office likely suffering because it premiered only one week after Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
It’s a movie so bad that most X-Files fans would rather forget that it exists. However, when Chris Carter appeared on David Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast last year, he said that he was working on an R-rated director’s cut and hinted that it would premiere on streaming. “Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended to make,” he said. “It’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut. It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.”
It’s Alive!
For better or for worse, the teasing is over. Previously, the new cut (titled The X-Files: I Want to Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn) was set to debut on Disney+ in June, but it got quietly yoinked off that streamer’s schedule to make time for some last-minute tweaks. Now, the movie is set to premiere on Hulu on August 14. While Carter is excited to show us his original vision for this flawed sequel, it’s not yet clear how it will differ from the theatrical version. It’s also not clear what the weird new title is about, though many think it’s a hint that Carter has, Frankenstein-style, cobbled together a new film out of assorted footage that had been left on the cutting room floor.
Will this director’s cut from Chris Carter leave fans screaming “it’s alive,” or will we just want to burn the movie with fire? Like Mulder always says, the truth is out there. And we can find out together: The X-Files: I Want to Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn premieres on Hulu on August 14. Here’s hoping it can help to erase the stink of Season 11 from our collective minds!
Entertainment
The Greatest Star Trek Icon Just Created A Vulgar Heavy Metal Band
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
To this day, the greatest Star Trek icon is William Shatner. As Captain Kirk, he taught all of us the importance of boldly going where no man had gone before. In many ways, the actor has led his life by this philosophy: after dominating sci-fi, he killed it in other genres, including cop dramas, legal procedurals, documentaries, and so much more. Heck, he even headlined some infectiously charming commercials for Priceline. After a while, it looked like there might be no new worlds for Shatner to conquer. However, he’s about to boldly go into his own final frontier with the project of a lifetime: leading his own heavy metal band!
I’ll be the first to admit that this news feels like something out of a fever dream. But as William Shatner’s colleague Avery Brooks once said so memorably on Deep Space Nine, “it’s real!” Shatner has assembled a heavy metal band called The *uckers, and they will be making their debut on September 20th at Chicago’s Riot Fest. This will be the group’s first live performance, but in a truly bizarre twist, their appearance took nearly two decades to arrange.
Captain Kirk Gets Heavy
While Riot Fest is mostly about established musical acts, they have a charming tradition of trying to woo various celebrities into attending and performing. For example, after a decade of increasingly wacky invites, the festival eventually convinced Full House star John Stamos into performing alongside the Beach Boys. Similarly, Riot Fest has courted Shatner for the last 17 years. He finally said yes, but instead of performing with a well-known band, the Star Trek legend decided to assemble his own group, the equivalent of a musical away team.
Apparently, both the actor and the festival know how silly it is to have William Shatner playing heavy metal, and they collectively decided to lean into the humor by publishing a hilariously outlandish rider by the actor. The rider includes demands for Chicago to let Shatner co-anchor the local weather, name some local food after him, let him sing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” at a baseball game, and name a boat after the actor that he can then captain.
Let’s Open Up This Pit!
Additionally, the rider requests a dressing room themed as “Shatner’s Shag Shack,” a bunch of adoptable puppies, an intro video from Gwar, and a bunch of Faygo that is not to be shared with the Insane Clown Posse. Oh, and he wants his artist’s golf cart replaced by a Delorean. Believe it or not, these are just a few of the winking, outrageous, and almost certainly fake demands.
Obviously, most of this is tongue-in-cheek, and as a Star Trek fan, it’s great to see Shatner playing along. But he also expressed some real sincerity in an official statement, writing that, “I’ve always believed that music, like space, is about exploration. Riot Fest is exactly the kind of place where anything can happen.” Continuing, he wrote, We’re bringing volume, intensity, and a few surprises. I can’t wait to share this experience with the fans.”
Somehow, Mr. Tambourine Man Returned
While Shatner is new to heavy metal, he’s not new to music, having released several albums in the past. Instead of taking on Riot Festival solo, the Star Trek actor assembled a band, The *uckers, consisting of several well-known musicians. This includes Marcus Nand on guitar, Phil Soussan on bass, Britt Lightning on guitar, and Fred Aching on drums. Together, they will play reimagined songs from Shatner’s musical history as well as songs from their amusingly titled debut album, What the F Is Heavy Metal. As he told People, “That’s the name of the album because I know nothing or didn’t know anything until I found out how little I do know.”
Want to see William Shatner make his inexplicable heavy metal debut? Be sure to save up your latinum and snag tickets to Chicago’s Riot Fest, which runs from September 18-20. On Instagram, the actor claims it will be an event that fans will want to tell their grandchildren about. We’re inclined to agree: one way or another, Shatner beaming into his metal era is something nobody will ever forget!
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Entertainment
Overlooked R-Rated 2000s Crime Comedy Wants You Dead, But Just For The Money
By Robert Scucci
| Published
After watching 2002’s Hard Cash, the almighty algorithm guided me to other ill-fated heist movies from the early aughts, prompting me to spend 88 minutes of my life watching 2001’s Wish You Were Dead. Similar to Hard Cash, Wish You Were Dead makes you wonder what could have been, because all the moving parts are there for a great film. The heist is fun, and there’s a clear logical progression that any crime comedy thriller fan can get behind. There’s scheming and plotting, and each character has enough personality quirks to keep you interested in the premise.
The problem with Wish You Were Dead, which, unlike Hard Cash, is actually trying to be a comedy, is that the characters’ actions don’t always line up with their surroundings. The jokes and physical comedy are there, but the humor leans too lowbrow when, in my opinion, things should have been more deadpan. Wish You Were Dead is trying to capture a Very Bad Things kind of vibe, but it should have taken a page from the Naked Gun playbook.
Is It Even True Love If There’s No Insurance Fraud?
At face value, Wish You Were Dead has a hilarious setup and some great on-screen chemistry that makes you wish it stuck the landing. We’re first introduced to Melody (Elaine Hendrix), a man-murdering hit woman who loves eating copious amounts of chocolate. Her penchant for sweets reminds me of Rutger Hauer’s Harley Stone from 1992’s Split Second, but the similarities stop there. Melody’s specialty is taking on clients with unfaithful husbands, whacking them, and then moving on to the next job.
Her next job, however, is where things become complicated.
Melody is hired by Sally (Mary Steenburgen) and Tanya Rider (Tanya Allen), a mother-and-daughter team hatching a scheme to commit fraud against a lowly insurance adjuster named Mac (Cary Elwes), who has a million-dollar life insurance policy in his name. Sally and Tanya’s plan is simple: convince Mac that Sally is pregnant with his child so he’ll make her the beneficiary of his post-mortem payout, then hire Melody to finish him off.
Matters get even more complicated when Melody decides she’s actually in love with Mac and can’t, in good conscience, kill him. Instead, they team up with Mac’s older co-worker, Bruce (Christopher Lloyd), and hatch their own plan to evade Sally and Tanya, save Mac’s life, and run off with the money. Along the way, there are run-ins with Gene Simmons from KISS, who plays an eccentric hairdresser named Vinny, along with appearances from Billy Ray Cyrus and Robert Englund portraying a sassy preacher with Tourette syndrome.
Should Work But Doesn’t
Wish You Were Dead is absolutely dripping with potential, but it never feels fully realized because it’s so disjointed. I’m having trouble explaining why it’s disjointed, because the story beats are solid, and the escalating stakes ramp up naturally. Everybody you see on screen has acting chops and knows the assignment, but something about the assignment itself doesn’t work.
I may change my mind if I ever rewatch the film, because maybe I was just in a bad mood or something when I watched it, but it simply did not make me laugh. This movie has It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia levels of scheming. Elaine Hendrix’s crazy eyes when she’s mad, shooting daggers at Christopher Lloyd, should, in theory, be funny. But for some reason, it doesn’t gel. Mac is the perfect hapless victim of circumstance, caught between a murder plot and a budding romance with the person who was hired to kill him. This is all funny stuff, but it’s too quirky to be taken seriously, even as a comedy, and too overtly campy when it should have been just a little more deadpan.
Truth be told, Wish You Were Dead confuses me enough that I want to eventually watch it again and reassess my stance. All the ingredients for a superb crime comedy are there, but as a whole, the movie feels far less than the sum of its parts.
As of this writing, you can stream Wish You Were Dead for free on Tubi.
Entertainment
Grab a lifetime Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus license for just $54.99
TL;DR: Save $195 and own Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for $54.99 with a lifetime license for one Windows PC — no recurring subscription fees.
Monthly subscriptions make sense for some software. But if you use the same Windows PC every day and simply want Microsoft Office installed and ready to go, paying once can be the simpler option.
That’s what makes Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus worth a look. You can currently grab a lifetime license for $54.99 (reg. $249.99), giving you permanent access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Access on one Windows PC.
Mashable Deals
The important thing to know is that this version uses a device-linked license, not one tied to your Microsoft account. That’s the trade-off that helps keep the price lower. If you’re buying Office for a computer you plan to keep for a while, that may be a perfectly reasonable compromise.
You’ll also avoid recurring Microsoft 365 payments while still getting the productivity apps most people use every day. Whether you’re building spreadsheets, writing reports, creating presentations, or managing email, the core experience is designed for long-term stability.
It also includes Dark Mode and is built to perform well on a wide range of hardware without requiring an ongoing subscription.
If your goal is simple — a full Office suite on one Windows PC with no recurring fees — this is an easy way to get there.
Mashable Deals
Get Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for a one-time $54.99 (reg. $249.99).
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Entertainment
R-Rated Director’s Cut Of The Worst X-Files Movie Is Streaming In Less Than A Month
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Possibly no TV series ever made has had such a meteoric rise and epic fall as The X-Files. The early seasons captivated ‘90s audiences with a potent combination of sexy lead actors and stories about alien abductions and government conspiracies. The franchise arguably hit a high point with the first movie, The X-Files: Fight the Future. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there. Later seasons got progressively worse, and David Duchovny eventually left the show for good. He came back for the worst revival in television history, one that followed up on some of the revelations of the second movie, The X-Files: I Want To Believe.
Whereas Fight the Future advanced the complex mythology of the series, I Want To Believe was modeled more after the series’ monster-of-the-week episodes. Unfortunately, the monster was weaksauce, and the film’s vestigial ties to some of the stupider lore really dragged it down. But could this failed film be one good edit away from being a banger? Chris Carter seems to think so. Last year, he teased that he was working on an R-Rated director’s cut of the film, one that brings it to bloody life like never before. Now, fans will be able to judge for themselves: The X-Files: I Want to Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn will begin streaming on Hulu on August 14.
Somehow, Mulder And Scully Returned
The X-Files: I Want to Believe is a movie where Mulder and Scully have long since left the FBI; she’s a doctor, and he’s a hermit. But when an FBI agent gets kidnapped, and a Catholic priest starts seeing her in psychic visions, the Bureau gets Mulder to consult on the case because of his prior experience with all things spooky. Unfortunately, the PG-13 movie was a flop: it has a 32 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and audiences alike. It also earned only $68.4 million against a $30 million budget, with its box office likely suffering because it premiered only one week after Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
It’s a movie so bad that most X-Files fans would rather forget that it exists. However, when Chris Carter appeared on David Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast last year, he said that he was working on an R-rated director’s cut and hinted that it would premiere on streaming. “Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended to make,” he said. “It’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut. It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.”
It’s Alive!
For better or for worse, the teasing is over. Previously, the new cut (titled The X-Files: I Want to Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn) was set to debut on Disney+ in June, but it got quietly yoinked off that streamer’s schedule to make time for some last-minute tweaks. Now, the movie is set to premiere on Hulu on August 14. While Carter is excited to show us his original vision for this flawed sequel, it’s not yet clear how it will differ from the theatrical version. It’s also not clear what the weird new title is about, though many think it’s a hint that Carter has, Frankenstein-style, cobbled together a new film out of assorted footage that had been left on the cutting room floor.
Will this director’s cut from Chris Carter leave fans screaming “it’s alive,” or will we just want to burn the movie with fire? Like Mulder always says, the truth is out there. And we can find out together: The X-Files: I Want to Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn premieres on Hulu on August 14. Here’s hoping it can help to erase the stink of Season 11 from our collective minds!
Entertainment
The Greatest Star Trek Icon Just Created A Vulgar Heavy Metal Band
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
To this day, the greatest Star Trek icon is William Shatner. As Captain Kirk, he taught all of us the importance of boldly going where no man had gone before. In many ways, the actor has led his life by this philosophy: after dominating sci-fi, he killed it in other genres, including cop dramas, legal procedurals, documentaries, and so much more. Heck, he even headlined some infectiously charming commercials for Priceline. After a while, it looked like there might be no new worlds for Shatner to conquer. However, he’s about to boldly go into his own final frontier with the project of a lifetime: leading his own heavy metal band!
I’ll be the first to admit that this news feels like something out of a fever dream. But as William Shatner’s colleague Avery Brooks once said so memorably on Deep Space Nine, “it’s real!” Shatner has assembled a heavy metal band called The *uckers, and they will be making their debut on September 20th at Chicago’s Riot Fest. This will be the group’s first live performance, but in a truly bizarre twist, their appearance took nearly two decades to arrange.
Captain Kirk Gets Heavy
While Riot Fest is mostly about established musical acts, they have a charming tradition of trying to woo various celebrities into attending and performing. For example, after a decade of increasingly wacky invites, the festival eventually convinced Full House star John Stamos into performing alongside the Beach Boys. Similarly, Riot Fest has courted Shatner for the last 17 years. He finally said yes, but instead of performing with a well-known band, the Star Trek legend decided to assemble his own group, the equivalent of a musical away team.
Apparently, both the actor and the festival know how silly it is to have William Shatner playing heavy metal, and they collectively decided to lean into the humor by publishing a hilariously outlandish rider by the actor. The rider includes demands for Chicago to let Shatner co-anchor the local weather, name some local food after him, let him sing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” at a baseball game, and name a boat after the actor that he can then captain.
Let’s Open Up This Pit!
Additionally, the rider requests a dressing room themed as “Shatner’s Shag Shack,” a bunch of adoptable puppies, an intro video from Gwar, and a bunch of Faygo that is not to be shared with the Insane Clown Posse. Oh, and he wants his artist’s golf cart replaced by a Delorean. Believe it or not, these are just a few of the winking, outrageous, and almost certainly fake demands.
Obviously, most of this is tongue-in-cheek, and as a Star Trek fan, it’s great to see Shatner playing along. But he also expressed some real sincerity in an official statement, writing that, “I’ve always believed that music, like space, is about exploration. Riot Fest is exactly the kind of place where anything can happen.” Continuing, he wrote, We’re bringing volume, intensity, and a few surprises. I can’t wait to share this experience with the fans.”
Somehow, Mr. Tambourine Man Returned
While Shatner is new to heavy metal, he’s not new to music, having released several albums in the past. Instead of taking on Riot Festival solo, the Star Trek actor assembled a band, The *uckers, consisting of several well-known musicians. This includes Marcus Nand on guitar, Phil Soussan on bass, Britt Lightning on guitar, and Fred Aching on drums. Together, they will play reimagined songs from Shatner’s musical history as well as songs from their amusingly titled debut album, What the F Is Heavy Metal. As he told People, “That’s the name of the album because I know nothing or didn’t know anything until I found out how little I do know.”
Want to see William Shatner make his inexplicable heavy metal debut? Be sure to save up your latinum and snag tickets to Chicago’s Riot Fest, which runs from September 18-20. On Instagram, the actor claims it will be an event that fans will want to tell their grandchildren about. We’re inclined to agree: one way or another, Shatner beaming into his metal era is something nobody will ever forget!
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