Pete Volk

Hi! I'm Pete. I'm a writer, editor, journalist, and manager with over a decade of experience in digital media. I cover the entertainment industry, with a focus on curating what to watch, interviews, action movies, Dropout, and Taskmaster. Here is a collection of just some of my work!

PV Guide •

Ghost Killer review: A hilarious, electric action comedy with a ghostly gimmick from the team behind Baby Assassins

The all-star team behind the excellent Baby Assassins franchise is back with another banger, the ridiculous and entertaining supernatural action comedy Ghost Killer, from writer Yugo Sakamoto (who wrote and directed the Baby Assassins movies) and director Kensuke Sonomura (who designed the action on those movies). Featuring terrific action choreography, likeable characters, and a lead actress with superb control over every part of her performance, it’s a great time that is now available for digi...
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Cloud review: A searing action thriller about our increasingly digital world

The internet has a funny way of making us feel insulated from the consequences of our actions. Anonymous user names, private browsing, digital avatars … the sheer intangibility of the virtual world can make everything that happens online feel like it’s less real.Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is deeply interested in this phenomenon, and exploring it through his work. The Japanese horror master delved into this topic in Pulse, one of the scariest horror movies of the century, in which ghosts invade th...
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Dirty Laundry co-hosts Lily Du and Grant O’Brien talk the Dropout show’s new look and their dream guests

The season five premiere of Dirty Laundry aired Tuesday night with a new, art deco-inspired look for Dropout’s drinking game show and a cavalcade of new, ridiculous stories to gab over. I talked to co-hosts Lily Du and Grant O'Brien about the changes, the show’s evolution from season one, Lily’s first season as a Dirty Laundry executive producer, and who their dream guests would be.I wanted to start, Lily, by congratulating you on getting the hero edit of the Game Changer episode “The Drinking G...
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Jason Mantzoukas Taskmaster interview, part 2: “Taskmaster Series 19 will undo Brexit and undo the 2024 US election”

Good morning, PV Guide readers! This is part two of my interview with Jason Mantzoukas, the hilarious actor, podcaster, and comedian who recently starred on Taskmaster Series 19. You can read part one here, and you can watch the season on the Taskmaster YouTube channel.Let’s jump right into it.I have to ask about the haunted painting you put up as a prize task, especially because you have two like it behind you. You ended up winning that episode. Do you still have the painting?Yes, of course I h...
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"I feel like my best mode is chaos." Jason Mantzoukas on his heel turn in Taskmaster, one of his favorite shows

While each Taskmaster series features large personalities, few contestants have been able to make an impression on the same level as Jason Mantzoukas. The first American-based contestant on the British panel show, Mantzoukas burst onto the series with his signature comedic style, sowing a path of chaos and destruction wherever he went.Mantzoukas is also one of the rare contestants to ask to be on the show, rather than vice versa. A long-time fan of the series, Mantzoukas took his shot and reache...
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Rematch creative director on making a sports game for everyone

I’ve loved sports games my whole life, but lately, they’ve been largely restricted to two categories: AAA simulators like NBA 2K or Madden, or glorified-Excel-sheet management simulators like Football Manager (note: I say this with love and an embarrassing number of hours played). There are exceptions, to be sure, but the market is dominated by games trying to replicate the real thing as closely as possible, which inevitably results in shortcomings when you see the seams of the simulation. (Find...
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Ally Beardsley and Siobhan Thompson talk life on an airship in Dimension 20’s Cloudward, Ho!

After years of watching Dropout’s comedy shows, I was drawn into the world of Dimension 20 with their action-movie focused campaign Never Stop Blowing Up. In that season, a group of video store employees find themselves magically pulled into the over-the-top world of a 1980s action movie, a premise that turned out to be an excellent match for the players’ penchant for outrageous hijinks.After a couple of sequel campaigns to previous adventures and a wrestling-focused one that looks neat but is n...
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Lost Bullet director Guillaume Pierret on shooting real fireworks at a real helicopter in the action trilogy’s final entry

The Lost Bullet trilogy, from director Guillaume Pierret and streaming on Netflix, knows exactly what you want from action movies featuring cars. While the movies also deliver tense, fast-paced crime narratives and brutal melees, the trilogy excels on the road. Each movie features some of the most intricately choreographed vehicular action you’ll ever see, with high-speed chases, inventive new gadgets, and a tangible authenticity and sense of danger that many green-screen heavy Hollywood blockbu...
Polygon •

John Wick’s director breaks down how he got to design action on Lazarus, ‘the funnest job’ he’s ever done

Chad Stahelski: I had talked to Joseph Cho, who’s a producer on it. I’m very fascinated by animation. We’re trying to do one of our own right now as well. So we had been going back and forth with Joseph, who became a good friend, and knew my love of anime, and he just happened to be a producer on Lazarus. Every time somebody interviews me for John Wick, I always bring up anime and what I love about it, from Ghost in the Shell to one of my biggest influences, Cowboy Bebop, and obviously Samurai C...
Polygon •

‘It was real cat wrangling’: Alex Horne and Greg Davies on Taskmaster’s ‘chaotic’ series 19

Horne: That’s a good question. There’s a spreadsheet which me and the director and the producer constantly play with as we’re recording ’em, thinking, OK, that could be an opener for the series, that could be a closer for the series. And then you sort of slot them in thinking, Well, we’ve got one in the garden, so we should have one inside next. So it is boring location stuff and then thinking, Well, this is really high-energy, good to have a low-energy one next, or This one’s artistic, it shoul...
Polygon •

Saloum director’s new thriller is so relevant in 2025, he’s not sure how to feel

After taking the world of genre cinema by storm with 2022’s cult hit Saloum, director Jean Luc Herbulot is back with another fascinating genre experiment filled with surprising twists and turns and a radical political message. His new movie Zero, out in theaters and available on VOD this week, is one of 2025’s most explosive new movies — and not just because its premise involves quite a few bomb vests. Part Crank, part Phone Booth, part odd-couple buddy comedy, part unusually relevant action mov...
Polygon •

How the Righteous Gemstones brought sci-fi to church with the magic of jetpacks

As it barrels through its characteristically outlandish fourth and final season, Danny McBride’s HBO comedy The Righteous Gemstones has cemented a reputation for itself. Yes, it’s side-splittingly funny. Yes, its “failchildren of a crumbling empire” narrative is surprisingly relevant. Yes, there is a core of sincerity at the center of the madness. But Gemstones’ legacy wouldn’t be complete without talking about the bold ways McBride and co. spend the budget on ridiculous props and movie-level se...
Polygon •

If John Wick director Chad Stahelski ‘could get away with it,’ he’d fully pivot to anime

The official announcement of a John Wick animated prequel movie should come as no surprise. Franchise auteur Chad Stahelski (who is producing the prequel) is a longtime anime fan who has made no secret of the medium’s influence on his work (“I hope people can watch at least John Wick: Chapter 4 and go, Oh, he’s got a heavy, heavy anime influence,” he told Polygon), and has been dropping hints about the project for months. He’s also recently flexed his action design chops in that arena, working o...
Polygon •

Lazarus is so stylish, I don’t need to care about its mystery

Lazarus, the new anime from the legendary Shinichirō Watanabe, has a lot on its mind. There are scientific marvels, explosive action sequences, and a mind-spinning mystery that’s only just begun to be mined. But even better than all that? A show that looks and feels so good, so evocative in its designs, that nothing else matters.A new project from Watanabe is always exciting, but the lineup behind Lazarus is special, even within that context. In addition to Watanabe and animation from MAPPA (Juj...
Polygon •

Netflix’s hidden action-comedy gem The Man Who Feels No Pain delivers on all fronts

I haven’t watched Novocaine yet, but I’m looking forward to it. The action comedy about a man who doesn’t feel pain and looks to save his co-worker from a hostage situation has been described to me as “what if the Crank movies were romantic comedies,” which sounds exactly up my alley. My wait for the movie to come to home viewing was a great excuse to watch a similar movie that’s been on my Netflix queue for years — the 2018 Hindi action comedy The Man Who Feels No Pain, listed on Netflix under...
Polygon •

The Thai horror gem Operation Undead takes a big swing with its zombie twist

It’s easy for a genre as specific as zombie movies to start feeling repetitive, no matter how many micro-variations on the story directors have explored. Whether the undead are lumbering or sprinting, whether the plague was human-made or seemingly random, the general notes remain: a sudden apocalypse, loved ones separated, society crumbling, “Brains!!!” You get the picture.Enter Operation Undead, the 2024 Thai zombie movie from writer-director Kongkiat Komesiri, which is finally out digitally in...
Polygon •

Bring back the 2000s-era sci-fi flopbuster

We didn’t know how good we had it in the 2000s. Sure, some things were awful, but the movie industry was something special. Every year felt like it held something new and fantastic: the Bourne movies, Avatar, Gladiator, Lord of the Rings, Pan’s Labyrinth, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Mulholland Drive, just to name a random handful. On top of that, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Atonement, Juno, and No Country for Old Men were going head to head at the Os...
Polygon •

Split Fiction’s invented sci-fi-vs.-fantasy rivalry is driving me up a wall

Split Fiction, the long-awaited It Takes Two follow-up from developer Hazelight Studios, is a very fun couch co-op game in a gaming environment with fewer and fewer of those. The game has creative mechanics that encourage two players to work together and a large variety of settings and types of play, plus it’s relatively easy to pick up for players of many gaming backgrounds. But the game has a glaring problem that consistently takes me out of the fun: The central conflict between the two playab...
Polygon •

Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson say the hard part of adapting George R.R. Martin is not evoking Game of Thrones

That was the test Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich faced with In the Lost Lands, their new dark fantasy Western movie, based on the George R.R. Martin short story of the same name. The film — the first movie adaptation of Martin’s work since 1987 — is a largely faithful adaptation, albeit with some radically new elements. In particular, there’s a new central antagonist: a religious cult the protagonists (Jovovich and Dave Bautista) have to contend with.Polygon spoke with Anderson and Jovovi...
Polygon •

In the Lost Lands is getting trashed critically — but it shows off exactly what genre movies need

In the Lost Lands, the latest collaboration between Hollywood power couple Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich, continues the collaboration trend they started back in 2002 with Resident Evil: With him directing and her in the lead role, they make kick-ass, highly stylized genre movies that critics reject. But genre movies deserve care and technical acumen, too, and Anderson and Jovovich’s projects teem with it. In the Lost Lands is no different.The only Anderson-directed movie with a score abo...
Polygon •

Tsui Hark’s stylish new movie puts a wuxia king back on his throne

When a genre master returns after years away from the field, you pay attention. Wuxia veteran Tsui Hark, one of the major figures from Hong Kong cinema’s golden age, has returned with the historical fantasy Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants. While he’s worked in many different genres, Condor Heroes marks the sixth consecutive decade in which the legend has directed a wuxia film. And while it doesn’t reach the stellar heights of some of his masterpieces (the Once Upon a Time in China ser...
Polygon •

Daisy Ridley on ‘becoming Spider-Woman’ in her new action-thriller Cleaner

“I feel like I’m drawn to very different things,” Ridley told Polygon in a video interview. While it’s true that her recent projects are spread across a wide group of genres, though, many of them have featured physicality as an important part of her performance. Ridley trained with Olympic swimmer Siobhan-Marie O’Connor in preparation for the historical drama Young Woman and the Sea, while Sometimes I Think About Dying required her to stay deathly still for a significant portion of the movie. (“...
Polygon •

Tubi’s new home invasion thriller is secretly a charming action comedy

I’ve always found the home invasion thriller to be the scariest subgenre of horror: the terror of people infringing on your space, the loss of the sense of safety, the spooky masks. But it doesn’t have to be that way. By making the wannabe burglars into incompetent, hopelessly overmatched buffoons and focusing on the complex familial relationship at its center, Tubi’s new Don’t Mess with Grandma is a charming, tension-free, low-budget home invasion action comedy with plenty of laughs and some ex...
Polygon •

Viral comedian Vinny Thomas broke the one Star Wars improv rule while filming Ahsoka

Vinny Thomas: I grew up in Denver, Colorado. I didn’t want to be a performer necessarily for most of my childhood. I wanted to be the curator of birds at the Bronx Zoo. That was my main goal. I just wanted to work at a zoo and I wanted to take care of birds. But then I joined a little improv group that they were having auditions for at my school, called Spontaneous Combustion, and I loved it. I really loved it. We would perform at the two improv theaters in Denver at the time, and I just loved i...
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