Jetting to Los Angeles where she lived — and where he grew up for a few years until his father took him back to France, and where he hasn’t visited for five years — Martin plans on a quick trip to sign paperwork and put her condominium on the market. He doesn’t count on his […]
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Rites of Passage
It concerns a group of party-hearty students at the University in Santa Barbara — that’s right: in, not of, per the opening scrawl — taking a field trip to a burial ground of the Chumash Indians, a tribe evidently known for shape-shifting and downing toxic, hallucinatory flower tea. Along with much sexual activity and drug […]
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Gone in 60 Seconds: Car Crash King Edition
Making its Blu-ray debut in a combo pack — albeit one saddled with the silly subtitle of Car Crash King Edition — the film features writer/director/producer Halicki as its protagonist, too: an insurance investigator named Pace (get it?) who makes better money heading an illegal car-theft ring and chop shop that’s more or less wallpapered […]
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Confessions of an Opium Eater / The Face of Fu Manchu / The Vengeance of Fu Manchu
Based on the novel by early 19th-century journalist Thomas De Quincy (whom Price plays), the film from notorious schlock director Albert Zugsmith (Sex Kittens Go to College) is, to put it bluntly, nonsense. Should you choose to embrace that nonsense, you’ll be greeted with lots of falling bodies (including a bird), Asian women as slaves, […]
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Chernobyl Diaries
From the mind of Paranormal Activity maestro Oren Peli and first-time director Bradley Parker, the film follows six 20-somethings (including former boy bander Jesse McCartney) taking an “extreme tour” of the town of Pripyat, abandoned since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of 1986. They’re not supposed to be there, but it wouldn’t be extreme if […]
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247?F
Three years after a horrific car crash all but destroyed her will to live, Jenna (Scout Taylor-Compton of Rob Zombie’s pair of Halloween remakes) takes a much-needed vacay with three pals to a lakeside cabin for some R-and-R. Part of the agenda includes drinking brewskies in the sauna, then jumping into the lake to cool […]
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The Girl
Premiering Saturday, The Girl is the first of two high-profile biopics of the master filmmaker to hit screens this season. The other, simply titled Hitchcock, is a larger-budget feature with a whiff of Oscar bait, yet there’s room enough for both. While that forthcoming film focuses on the making of 1960’s Psycho, The Girl concerns […]
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The Tortured
That said, I’m a big boy. I can take it. That’s my way of saying I kind of dug the evil game it plays, mammoth faults and all, because how often does that happen? Having a child kidnapped is something I hope never to experience, yet that’s the premise behind this nasty little thriller, which […]
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Argo
There’s no way the movie industry could have resisted this stranger-than-fiction yarn. The film chronicles how CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) saved the six by establishing a phony cover story that they were a Canadian movie crew scouting locations in Tehran for a science-fiction cheapie titled Argo. Details of that real-life mission would not be […]
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Beyond the Black Rainbow
Ostensibly, the film’s plot — wait, perhaps I should put that word in quotation marks, and then quotation marks around that set of quotation marks just to be safe. Yeah, I’ll do that. Let’s start over. Ostensibly, the film’s ““plot”” centers on Elena (Eva Allan, TV’s Caprica), a young woman trying to escape the labyrinthian […]