By Robert Scucci
| Published 14 seconds ago

One of my favorite I Think You Should Leave skits involves a burnt-out cop named Detective Crashmore, portrayed by the late, great Biff Wiff, who doesn’t even care if he dies “because everything has sucked lately.” He kicks down doors and pumps rooms full of lead before rattling off catchphrases like “You f****** suck!” He’s overtly angry, constantly butts heads with his commissioner, and arms himself to the teeth with comically large weapons before getting back to business after tragedy strikes.

While there’s no definitive way for me to prove it, I have reason to believe that Rutger Hauer’s Harley Stone in 1992’s Split Second was the inspiration for Detective Crashmore, because it’s basically the same character, aside from the fact that Split Second isn’t meant to be a parody.

Billed as a dystopian buddy cop science fiction action horror film, Split Second is an over-the-top exercise in swift and brutal justice, as our hero searches for answers in a string of serial slayings that have eluded him for years. While Split Second isn’t necessarily a comedy, Rutger Hauer’s cigar-smoking, coffee-swilling, gun-blasting Harley Stone is so deadpan in his badassery that I can’t help but imagine Biff Wiff studying this movie while preparing for the Tim Robinson sketch I love so much.

“He’ll Need Bigger Guns”

Set in 2008 London, Split Second wastes no time establishing Harley Stone as a hardened homicide detective who shoots first, asks questions later, and operates so firmly in his own lane that nobody can keep up with him or keep him under control on their best day. Coming in hot after his suspension is lifted, Harley is forced to let rookie officer and psychologist Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan) tag along on his investigations and report on any unstable behavior that he exhibits. 

Fortunately for Harley, his insane theory about a serial killer ripping the hearts out of its subjects is proven correct, allowing Dick to brush aside any psychological concerns he may have originally had. All they know is that the killer’s activity is linked to lunar cycles, and may have origins in the supernatural, extraterrestrial, or occult. 

Haunted by the case because the killer claimed the life of his partner, Foster McLaine (Steven Hartley), matters are complicated for Harley when his widowed wife, Michelle McLaine (Kim Cattrall) reenters his life and becomes one of the killer’s targets. With no solid leads to pursue, but every single comically large gun known to man at his disposal, Harley embarks with Dick on a blood-soaked quest to find the killer and end his reign of terror once and for all, making sure there’s plenty of collateral damage along the way. 

Extreme Buddy Cop Energy

Harley and Dick are the ultimate odd couple in Split Second, and their chemistry works better than it has any right to. You don’t get the usual fighting-over-the-radio-station trope here, but watching Dick slowly transform from idealistic rookie to chain-smoking, gun-toting, coffee-chugging badass under Harley’s influence is such a satisfying payoff. As they close in on the killer, they move as one in their efforts to keep Michelle safe and finally crack the case that has been tormenting Harley for years.

Split Second’s violence is my favorite kind of violence because it’s so gratuitous you can’t take it seriously. Blood is bright red and splatters everywhere, hearts are theatrically ripped from chests, pentagrams are carved into bodies, and coffee cups get chugged and tossed with reckless abandon. It’s pulpy and melodramatic, but played completely straight, which makes it impossible not to fall in love with these characters. They’re so accustomed to living in this world that everything they do feels second nature, with zero pretension.

A total VHS-era classic, Split Second is one of those movies you throw on simply because it’s so over-the-top in every conceivable way that you can’t help but love it. Marketed as “Blade Runner meets Alien,” it doesn’t really play like either film, but it’s unique enough in its execution to have real staying power as the low-budget B movie it was always destined to be.

As of this writing, Split Second is currently streaming for free on Tubi.

Prime Video’s 56 Days threw in a surprise twist — and some book changes — that shifted the trajectory of the show.

Based on Catherine Ryan Howard‘s novel of the same name, 56 Days follows couple Oliver (Avan Jogia) and Ciara (Dove Cameron) as they start an intense relationship after meeting in a supermarket. Their romance is questioned after an unidentifiable body is found in a bathtub.

In addition to Jogia and Cameron, Megan Peta Hill, Dorian Missick, Karla Souza, Patch Darragh, Kira Guloien and Celeste Oliva make up the cast. Jesse James Keitel, Matt Murray, David Klein and Alec Albert also appear in the show.

The biggest twist on the show was the reveal that both Ciara and Oliver weren’t honest about their lives. Oliver previously went under a name but changed it after he killed a boy — and someone else took the fall. The man who was arrested for the crime was none other than Ciara’s brother.

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Oliver assumed he set up a meet cute — except it was Ciara manipulating the situation. Her plan to get revenge took a turn when she developed feelings for Oliver. Ultimately they are able to overcome the lies and end up together — with a child.

As for the body in the bathtub? That was Oliver’s therapist Dan (Darragh), who convinced Ciara’s brother to take his own life in prison and blackmailed Oliver.

56 Days featured several book changes with the location being swapped to Boston over Dublin. There is also a COVID component that wasn’t included in the Prime Video series.

“Every single thread of the story pays off,” creators Lisa Zwerling and Karyn Usher told People in February about getting the author to sign off on the shifts. “Her book gave us such a sexy, emotional thrill-ride of a show. It was hugely important to us that she was happy.”

Jogia and Cameron broke down their favorite parts of bringing the show to life.

“Ciara could be this kind of manic pixie dream girl that’s gone off the rails if it was in someone else’s hands, who didn’t really see her as a sort of a — I hate this,” Cameron told The Wrap in February. “Yes, a person.”

She continued: “I was gonna say complex, and I hate it when people use that word to define female characters. But, you know, she’s a wholly formed person.”

Cameron elaborated on her developing her character, adding, “There’s some gaps in her personality that she has sort of filled in with things that I think she needed to survive, that she ascertained and gathered from the world on her own, when she was sort of neglected as a glass child, because everything was going wrong in the family, but a true, fully formed person, and not for his consumption, right? Which is what the role so easily could have been.”

56 Days is streaming on Prime Video.

The 1980s brought us some of the best movies in pop culture history. Ghostbusters, Aliens and The Terminator are just a few titles from a long list of exceptional cinema.

This February, Watch With Us takes a look back at three ’80s movies that you should run back a second time on streamers like Prime Video and Tubi, and we ranked them.

For this list, we run the genre gamut: we’ve got horror, comedy and a scintillating erotic thriller.

At the top of our list is Hellraiser, that classic horror movie that spawned a franchise.

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British hedonist Frank (Sean Chapman) gets his hands on a mysterious puzzle box while traveling abroad, and when he opens it, he unleashes a portal to Hell that brings him the perfect synthesis of pleasure and pain. Unfortunately, to achieve this, his body is literally torn apart by a group of leather-clad demons. When Frank’s brother, Larry (Andrew Robinson), and his wife, Julia (Clare Higgins), move into Frank’s old house, they inadvertently bring Frank’s remnants back to life. Julia — Frank’s former lover — quickly becomes his servant, bringing Frank exactly what he needs to become whole again: human blood.

Before Butterball was relegated to delivering Uber Eats orders, he was one of the terrifying Cenobites in this cult classic horror from 1987. Though reaction was initially divided due to the admittedly extreme nature of the film, Hellraiser went on to become a franchise with nine sequels and a straight-to-streaming movie on Hulu in 2022. Hellraiser feels shocking to watch even in 2026 — the lurid practical effects, over-the-top performances and true thematic ambitiousness have allowed it to endure and feel fresh.

During the Great Depression, waitress Cecilia (Mia Farrow) is unhappily married to her brutish, neglectful husband Monk (Danny Aiello), who blows what little money she makes on booze and gambling. To escape the misery of her life, Cecilia seeks refuge in the movies. But when she becomes obsessed with the new film The Purple Rose of Cairo, she rewatches it enough times that her transfixion causes the lead character, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), to emerge from the screen. Initially overjoyed at fiction and reality merging, Cecilia eventually realizes that the two were never meant to mix in such a way, and she has to get Tom back into his movie world.

Funny, sweet and inventive in equal measure, The Purple Rose of Cairo is a loving testament to the emotional power of movies and a compelling take on the line between reality and fiction. Everyone in the cast is superb, but Daniels shines in his breakout performance, and the chemistry between him and Farrow is warm and captivating. At a breezy and scant 84 minutes, The Purple Rose of Cairo manages not to waste a single minute of its time.

Electronics store owner Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) moonlights taking surveillance jobs, and he’s hired by a businessman to spy on a fashion designer whom he suspects is committing white-collar crimes. However, Bobby’s investigation into Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner) reveals her dabbling in something a bit more salacious — spending her nights as a fetish sex worker named China Blue. Bobby can’t help but be intrigued by Joanna, but his pursuit of her in a sexual and then romantic manner is complicated by one of Joanna’s particularly disturbed clients: a sexually deviant priest (Anthony Perkins) who has taken to stalking her.

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It’s always the right time to watch a good horror movie. But October is prime spooky season, and to stream a merely OK horror movie just seems wrong. To avoid doing the scariest month of the year dirty, Watch With Us has compiled a list of the 10 best horror movies of the 1980s, when […]

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Crimes of Passion still divides audiences to this day, although its reputation has grown in more recent years, with more and more regarding it as a classic of the erotic thriller genre. The film stands out with its distinct, expressive cinematography, colorful lighting and production design, plus the melodramatic score and Laughlin, Turner and Perkins positively chewing the scenery. If you enjoy provocative works of art that are daring, surreal and uncompromising in their exploration of human sexuality, try Crimes of Passion on for size.

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The first time you see Friday the 13th in a TV listing in the late 1980s, your brain does what horror-conditioned brains do: It conjures a dock, a machete, and a hockey mask catching moonlight in a woodsy setting. Then Friday the 13th: The Series premieres on October 3, 1987, and takes a route that no one expected.

There, you won’t find Jason Voorhees, Camp Crystal Lake, or any attempt to recreate the films scene-for-scene. Instead, there’s an antiques shop called Curious Goods and a collection of everyday objects that behave like they’ve signed paperwork in blood. From 1996 to 1999, Poltergeist: The Legacy borrowed its name from the Poltergeist film franchise. However, that show dealt with a secret organization battling supernatural forces. In both cases, the title opens the door. What’s inside is something else entirely.

‘Friday the 13th: The Series’ Tricked Its Audience

On syndicated television, attention is currency. A title like Friday the 13th does half the marketing for you. The show was originally going to be called The 13th Hour, but the final name carried instant recognition. That awareness got viewers to sample the premiere, and what kept them engaged was the intriguing structure.

The premise is deceptively flexible: Lewis Vendredi makes a deal with the devil, the antiques in his shop become cursed, then he dies. His niece Micki (Louise Robey) and distant cousin Ryan (John D. LeMay) inherit the store, sell off the inventory, and only afterward learn what those items actually are. With the help of occult expert Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), they begin tracking the antiques down and locking them in the shop’s vault.

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Each episode revolves around a different object. A glove that heals by transferring illness in “Faith Healer,” a locket that resurrects the wearer at a cost in “Mesmer’s Bauble,” or other things like a music box, a camera, and a doll. The show becomes a rotating study of desire and consequence. The antiques don’t chase victims, but rather, they wait for someone to want something badly enough, putting them on the main characters’ radar.

Curious Goods Turns Human Weakness Into the Story Engine

Image via Paramount Domestic Television

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What gives the series its staying power isn’t spectacle, but its repetition with variation. Every object offers a shortcut, the user takes it, and the metaphorical price escalates. Many times, the character possessing a cursed object must use it to kill people, often with Jack, Micki, and Ryan coming in to prevent further deaths, such as in “Crippled Inside,” or “Vanity’s Mirror.” Because the objects are ordinary, the horror slides into domestic spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, or even office desks. A cursed antique isn’t a masked killer lumbering through the woods.

Over 72 episodes across three seasons, the trio accumulates scars. Ryan changes the most, drifting from wide-eyed heir to someone who understands how heavy the work is. Micki sacrifices relationships to stay on the hunt. Jack carries a lifetime of occult knowledge like a man who knows every wrong door in town and keeps knocking anyway.

The format almost functions like an anthology, but the core cast anchors it. Their weariness builds as their vault to contain the cursed objects fills. The shop remains open, selling only non-cursed goods, like a storefront trying to look normal while containing something profoundly not.

There Is a Very Loose Connection to the Friday the 13th Franchise

Image via Paramount Pictures

Even though the show has no narrative ties to the films, the production lineage rings in the background. The series was created by Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams, and Mancuso had produced multiple Friday the 13th movies.

Then LeMay walked into Jason Goes to Hell: the Final Friday, and suddenly the separation felt thinner. Not because the stories connected, but because the same face carried history from one corner of horror into another. It played less like a crossover and more like an echo, proving that distant corners of horror culture can meet in subtle ways across time.

Behind the camera, other creative overlaps reinforced that sense of proximity. Writer/director Tom McLoughlin and music composer Fred Mollin worked on the films as well as the series. Even horror auteur David Cronenberg appeared in Jason X, and directed the episode, “Faith Healer.” Thus, the series carried the atmosphere of the film franchise, even while the stories walked a separate path.

‘Friday the 13th: The Series’ Is an Overlooked Horror Gem

The show ran from 1987 to 1990, producing 72 episodes. In the syndicated ecosystem of the late ’80s, that kind of episode count allowed a series to settle into living rooms and stay there. Viewers encountered it weekly — sometimes accidentally — and slowly recognized its rhythm.

As the seasons progressed, the storytelling deepened. Guest stars rotated in and out. Directors experimented with the formula. The cursed-object concept supported everything from body horror to psychological unraveling. Some episodes leaned pulpy while others lingered in moral dread, and that elasticity kept it from feeling stale. The series ended in 1990, and fans who hoped a final episode would bring Jason Vorhees and Camp Crystal Lake into the mix were sadly disappointed.

What remains is one of horror television’s strangest artifacts: a show that carried one of the most recognizable titles in slasher history and quietly built its own mythology instead. The real menace wasn’t a hulking figure in the woods, but the idea that evil could sit on a shelf, waiting for someone to believe they deserved more than fate had given them.

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Although it’s one of the most celebrated subgenres of science fiction, cyberpunk is criminally underrepresented in live-action TV. Fans have a hard time finding any long-form content to watch that’s not animated, and are generally still waiting for a series that does it justice. The thing is, there is already one that most people forget about: Altered Carbon. Starring Joel Kinnaman and Anthony Mackie as the same character, this groundbreaking Netflix series left an indelible mark on streaming over its two seasons and is proof of the unexplored potential of the genre on TV. There may be more cyberpunk stories on the way for different streaming platforms now, but it all began with mercenary Takeshi Kovacs being re-sleeved.

‘Altered Carbon’ Has One of the Most Creative Worlds in Science Fiction

When thinking about cyberpunk, it’s usually the neon haze, fast-paced action, and interconnectedness between humans and technology that come to mind. All this is present in Altered Carbon, of course, but it also highlights other essential tropes of the genre, like the ever-expanding social gap between the rich and the poor, and how death isn’t the end in a world where the line between the human soul and raw data is blurred. In the series, this is mostly represented by the cortical stack, a disk-like device that stores one’s consciousness and may be inserted into different vacant bodies called sleeves.

That’s where protagonist Takeshi Kovacs comes in. Once part of a rebel group called the Envoys, he is re-sleeved and brought back to life after 250 years at the request of a man named Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy). Part of the wealthy elite known as Meths (like Methuselah, not that other thing), Bancroft recruits Kovacs to investigate his own murder, which didn’t fully succeed thanks to his remote satellite backup (something only made available to absurdly rich individuals). If Kovacs succeeds, he gets to live again in his new sleeve, which is one hell of a prospect after centuries of pretty much not existing.

The series is based on the Richard K. Morgan novel of the same name, posing many of the same philosophical questions. While Meths live in impossibly tall buildings high above the clouds and may be perpetually re-sleeved inside clone bodies, people like Kovacs deal with different sleeves (that is, if they even get new ones) and live precariously in the darkness of the surface. Because of all that, notions like identity and morality become fluid, since death isn’t necessarily final, and your current body may very well not be the only one you’ll ever have.

‘Altered Carbon’ Broke New Ground in Live-action Cyberpunk on Streaming

There’s a reason there aren’t many live-action cyberpunk series around: the genre usually thrives in animation, which favors the surreal aesthetic and fast-paced narratives. Replicating it in live-action is a huge financial risk, since production costs are often higher than the average series’ budget, thanks to setting and CGI, for example. As Joel Kinnaman revealed at the time, Altered Carbon itself had “a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones.” That’s a risk not many are willing to take, of course, an investment that’s usually reserved for feature films with blockbuster potential.

So, when Netflix released Altered Carbon in 2018, it felt almost like a statement that not only could it compete with premium cable in both scale and tone, but also give audiences something they wouldn’t find on TV. It was the first proper live-action cyberpunk series in decades, effectively opening the doors to the genre for fans and newcomers alike. The series checks nearly all of cyberpunk boxes, including the pulpy noir feel of Takeshi Kovacs’ story, the existential sublayer that is intrinsic to it, and an R-rating mostly due to its gritty action sequences and adult themes.

Thanks to all that, Altered Carbon shaped what cyberpunk could be in a series. Its first season was acclaimed by audiences and critics thanks to its impressive visuals and futuristic pulpy detective story. Only in cyberpunk would you find the story of a man in a body that isn’t his, using an abandoned hotel managed by an Edgar Allan Poe AI (Chris Conner), for example. All that happening in live-action with live actors sets the series apart from other works of the genre in visual media. Season 2 then doubled down on what made the series special, but, unfortunately, it didn’t work out as well as Season 1 did.

Despite Being Short-Lived, ‘Altered Carbon’ Has Become a Cult Favorite for Fans of Cyberpunk

Image via Netflix

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Altered Carbon‘s sleeves are a unique narrative device, and having different actors playing the same character over the seasons seemed like a great way of keeping things fresh and adding star power to the series. Two years after Season 1, Kinnaman was replaced by Anthony Mackie as Takeshi Kovacs, and, while that would seem like a great idea at first, it didn’t translate on screen. Mackie’s version of Kovacs is more charming than Kinnaman’s brooding take, and many behind-the-scenes changes also affected how Season 2 felt to the audience, leaving behind the neon-drenched setting and pulpy noir atmosphere.

Altered Carbon is still regarded by fans as one of the best cyberpunk stories on streaming, despite its flaws, and rightly so. Perhaps if Season 2 had been given the same conditions as Season 1 to tell its story, the series could have gone on longer and become a classic. In the end, instead of the bold statement it was supposed to be about streaming’s potential, it became almost like a cautionary tale about how unstable the whole system may be. Regardless, Altered Carbon is still very much worth the watch, and is still the standard for what live-action cyberpunk can achieve.