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The Thompsons

Personally, I went in to The Thompsons relatively cold, having heard of its big brother, but never having caught up with it. In doing so, I felt like I had jumped onto a sitcom in its second or third week: I could immediately get into its groove without knowing the backgrounds of the players. All […]

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The Frozen

Mike knows Emma isn’t thrilled about the trip. What he doesn’t know is that she’s just found out she’s pregnant. That’s an issue they can deal with later, however; more pressing is that their snowmobile crashes, leaving them injured and no cell signal to call for help. Plus, it appears they are being followed. It’s […]

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Freaky Friday

Maybe it’s too early, but what are you doing New Year’s Eve? Unless you’re Down Under, you’re not going to see The Flaming Lips’ annual New Year’s Eve Freakout. It’s true: Music’s favorite weirdoes will ring in 2013 in Australia, but in exchange, they’ve conjured up a holiday gift more appropriate than their usual end-of-year […]

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Back from Hell

Presented as four days of a taped holiday — because apparently, that’s what young people do — the movie follows a handful of pals who vacay together, screw around with a Ouija board and eat shish kabob outdoors. In other words, not a Hell of a lot happens beyond the occasional person screaming from outside. […]

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Theater of blood

For those curious about the start of Reduxion Theatre’s fifth-anniversary season, know this: There will be blood. While Shakespeare serves as Reduxion’s bread and butter year in and year out, founders Tyler and Erin Woods — who serve as artistic director and managing director, respectively — wanted to expand beyond their upcoming slate of Richard […]

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Death and Cremation

One of the outcasts is the lonely, miserable Stan (Brad Dourif, Halloween II), who runs a crematorium. The other is Jarod (Jeremy Sumpter, Soul Surfer), a high school “loser” who paints his nails black. When the latter approaches the former about a job, Stan reluctantly gives in, yet sees so much of himself in his […]

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Houdini

Narrated by Mandy Patinkin, the just-OK doc traces his meteoric rise from immigrant to death-defying superstar to spiritualist exposer. Those who’ve never read a book on Houdini — I highly recommend William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s “The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero” — are sure to learn something, but for current […]

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Vamp camp

With titles like “Color Me Blood Red” and “The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood” under his belt, the sales pitches definitely crackled. Ultimately, it was up to hungry audiences to decide if they were eating prime rib or snout membranes. When shooting a film titled “Bikini Vampire Babes” in a conservative state shaped like a […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Blood

It’s called “Blood,” but it’s not to to be confused with the “Blood: The Last Vampire” anime or its live-action adaptation. In “Shinobi” director Ten Shimoyama’s 2009 film, the murder of a maid in the home of a woman named Miyako (Aya Sugimoto) remains a cold case for several years until hotshot Detective Hoshino (Kanji […]

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