The Nazis mistake the landing as a prelude to an invasion, so the Third Reich prepares to strike the earth before the earth can strike it. Iron Sky has all the makings of a big batch of poor taste. Instead, it’s an inspired goof of a spoof that bridges the worlds of highbrow and lowbrow […]
Rod Lott
Posted inArts & Culture
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
This time around, now the early 1980s, blowhard network anchor Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell, The Lego Movie) loses his job and his wife (Christina Applegate, Hall Pass). Things look up when he is recruited to a bold TV experiment: the 24-hour news channel. To help with the graveyard-shift time slot, Ron calls upon his trusty […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Swimmer
At once allegorical and existential, Frank Perry’s film follows tan-and-tone Ned Merrill (Lancaster, Field of Dreams) as he embarks on a countywide trip home via the swimming pools of his upturned-nosed neighbors. As he dips from lavish house to lavish house, visiting friends and lovers past and present, we learn more and more about Ned’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Wolf of Wall Street
As he did with the mob in 1990’s Goodfellas and with the gambling world in 1995’s Casino, Scorsese again grants us an epic peek at another world’s process; in this case, Wall Street’s repeated fleecing of Main Street. It’s yet another Scorsese masterpiece. Leonardo DiCaprio never has been better — and that’s really saying something […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Nurse 3D
That’s the kind of crazy thinking that fuels Nurse 3D, a bizarro, purposely trashy piece of horror pulp that deserves to find the demented audience for which it was made. If it doesn’t through Lionsgate’s Blu-ray release (containing the flick in both two and three dimensions) … well, blame Obamacare. At All Saints Memorial Hospital, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Flu
The flu of Flu is suspected to be avian, yet advances far too rapidly, causing death within 36 hours of exposure … and that window grows ever shorter. It’s up to a rescuer (Jang Hyuk) and a disease specialist / potential love interest (Su Ae) he recently saved to find a vaccine — and stat, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Contracted
Samantha (Najarra Townsend, Me and You and Everyone We Know) learns this the — ahem — hard way, after drowning her inhibitions in vodka and letting them run free at a party where she’s roofied by a stranger (Simon Barrett, You’re Next). What happens in the few days that unfold thereafter are akin to scientist Seth Brundle in Cronenberg’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Return to Nuke ‘Em High
Usually, Troma can offend with simple scoops of sex and violence and gore; here, director/iconoclast Lloyd Kaufman realizes lesbian couplings can’t serve as his ceiling, so the script includes bad-taste jokes related to James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Jerry Sandusky and Trayvon Martin. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t laugh during the movie — just […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Gravity
That said, it’s a must-own Blu-ray, and the bigger the TV you have, the better. Rightly the recipient of seven Academy Awards earlier this month, Gravity quickly gets rolling, with U.S. astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney, The Monuments Men) and scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock, The Heat) left to their own devices — and possibly […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Beneath
The effort he gives Beneath makes the Chiller Films presentation better than your average made-for-TV monster movie — or below-average, in the recent case of Hypothermia, a similar film in which Fessenden appeared. To the teens of Beneath stranded on a boat in the supposedly cursed Black Lake, a killer fish provides the fatal threat — not a […]