Andy Andersen

Maggie Connors is the founder and CEO of Besito, an Los Angeles-based cannabis brand specializing in "mini-joint" prerolls of classic California-grown strains. Besito was recently acquired by vertically integrated Bay Area cannabis operator SPARC, with Connors joining the SPARC executive suite as VP of Brand Marketing.

It's summer y'all, which means it's time to cozy up with some sungrown bud and indulge in the great tradition of summer movie watching. Whether you're hitting the vape and venturing into a cool, dark theater to escape the heat, catching a cult classic at a retro summer evening drive-in, or just throwing a classic summer comedy on your TV at home while nursing an indica from your favorite bong, there's no summer-movie experience you can't successfully augment with a little cannabis.

If you're into weed, gummies are an invaluable and inevitable resource, especially out here on the west coast. I'm a flower guy, which basically means I still dig a good ol' fashioned analog joint above all else. But I frequently turn to gummies — perhaps more than any other edible product on the modern legal market — because they're undeniably convenient for discreet use and precise dosing.

It had been a minute since I'd smoked anything like Cookies' London Pound Cake #75.

David Hershkovits is a lifelong advocate of what he calls "cultural disruption." As a journalist, culture critic, co-founder of Paper Magazine, and host of the Light Culture podcast, Hershkovits has had a front-row seat to cultural disruption in America in every phase of his career.

If you've spent any amount of time smoking weed and watching movies, you already know the two activities make an ideal pair. You might say film is the most psychotropic art form, engaging multiple senses and modes of thinking and feeling at once for an experience that, at its best, you can intuit sensorily as well as emotionally. The late filmmaker and legendary stoner Robert Altman once described the ultimate cinematic experience as such on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972.

Ricardo Baca is a prolific veteran journalist and considered the first modern weed news editor (outside of the old High Times school). He was an editor at The Denver Post where he ran The Cannabist for over three years. Baca's place “at ground zero of the green rush” was the subject of the 2015 documentary Rolling Papers. Today, he's the CEO and founder of Grasslands, a cannabis PR company dedicated to championing journalism while helping cannabis brands tell their stories.

1981: it’s the witching hour in America. A recession is in full bloom and Ronald Reagan’s promise to “make America great again” remains, for good or ill, unfulfilled. Strung out between the aching, post-’60s come-down nihilism of the late ’70s and the neoconservative free-market mass-consumption orgy of the Reagan era, the masses occupy a strange, pre-apocalyptic no-man’s-land moment in American culture, and so do the movies.

Madison Margolin is the co-founder and managing editor of DoubleBlind, the biannual print magazine and digital media outfit that's taking the psychedelics movement by storm. Before starting the magazine, she and co-founder Shelby Hartman were both prolific cannabis journalists. Though many will be most familiar with Margolin's cannabis coverage in a wide range of publications over the last five years, she's been covering the political, cultural, and spiritual impact of psychedelics

Most of Nolan’s movies I like more than I dislike, but I also get turned off by the fussiness and preciousness with which Nolan approaches his concepts and how his films often feel like looking at an MC Escher drawing with someone behind you demanding you see something more profound than what’s actually there. Fortunately, I mostly found Tenet to be a stylish thrill ride that wasn’t begging me to revere it more than it deserved or even care about understanding it that deeply. And I think what makes that possible is that it’s a loving, Byzantine monument to James Bond movies first, and a Chris Nolan joint second.

The name may or may not ring a bell, but you know the work of Ralph Bakshi even if you don’t know you know it. You’ve likely come across a Fritz the Cat poster at your local comics or record store, caught snippets of the animated Lord of the Rings on Cartoon Network as a kid, or seen memes and stills of a young, pre-fame Brad Pitt with an animated buxom blonde Jessica Rabbit-type in Cool World.

It’s hard to remember a time when Disney wasn’t the behemoth media/entertainment empire it is now. But in 1981, the company was a whole different, non-Earth crushing animal. It was on the verge of being bought off and broken up, in fact. And in this transitional period, a small band of folks at Disney Records put together a sci-fi stadium rock band called Halyx. Live from the Space Stage: A Halyx Story is a new documentary that uncovers this fascinating piece of forgotten pop history...

If this were a normal, non-pandemic summer, UNHINGED would’ve been exactly the type of B-movie I’d relish seeing at a theater on a hot afternoon – popcorn, maybe a hot dog and a soda in hand, in the company of strangers as ever-so-momentarily carefree as I. So it feels super weird to have watched this strange and scruffy Russell Crowe B-thriller from home on a screener, days before it’s supposed to be the movie that “reopens theaters” in the U.S. All this is to say, be careful out there

I’m always game for a good documentary about a movie. You Don’t Nomi, the new doc about Paul Verhoeven’s notorious NC-17 “trashterpiece” Showgirls, ranks among the best of them. Taking a similar approach as Room 237 did with the cottage industry of conspiracy theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, You Don’t Nomi looks at Showgirls from every possible angle...

I tend to be a sucker for slashers with “massacre” in the title. From The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (contender for greatest horror movie ever made) to 80s camp classics like The Slumber Party Massacre and Sorority House Massacre and modern ultra-low-budget oddities like Pool Party Massacre. There’s just something about the simple pleasures of the whole ***** Massacre phenomenon that really does it for me. So I jumped at the chance to review WRESTLEMASSACRE

Performance is a psychedelic British crime film starring James Fox and Mick Jagger as a gangster and reclusive rock star brought together by fate for an existential melding of minds, egos, and personas in a kaleidoscopic haze of blood, sex, drugs, art, and music. Drug movies from the late 60s and early 70s can often be tedious, frustratingly incoherent, and just plain shitty. But Performance succeeds where so many others fail, partly because it’s bookended by another genre.

TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG is a movie about crime. It’s a modern, poppy work of historical fiction that approaches the idea of criminals and the nature of crime with a deep sense of modern concern. What are the power dynamics at play when it comes to deciding who is a criminal, who is the law, and who is more equipped to uphold justice?

Well shit! Top Gun: Maverick, the latest victim of Hollywood’s unfortunate but necessary mass-rescheduling wave in response to the pandemic, has been pushed all the way back to December. Gotta admit, I was pretty stoked to indulge in this particular title come July — though much more as a Tom Cruise Stan (not to mention, an ardent Miles Teller enthusiast) than out of any love or nostalgia for Top Gun.

We are only a couple of days into 2020 and the team here at Nightmarish Conjurings is still reeling from all of the different horror films released in 2019. There was just so much produced in terms of quality and quantity released last year that it was difficult to narrow down our selections for our top 10 picks list.

I’m a movie guy, and I probably always will be. No more than a few years ago, the thought of making a Top 10 list for TV wouldn’t have even occurred to me. But it’s 2019 and the age of peak television has changed my tune. And how could it not? The big-screen cinema experience has been all but overrun by one mammoth superhero franchise and the advent of streaming has turned television into an endless virtual hub of phenomenal shows — available anytime, anywhere.