In the bleak thriller, director/co-writer Tim Fehlbaum imagines that our world of 2016 has ceased to exist — at least as we know it. Solar storms have raised the temperature by 50? Fahrenheit — something Oklahomans currently can sympathize with — and with resources bare, society has collapsed. Sisters Marie (Hannah Herzsprung, The Reader) and […]
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The Liquidator
Rod Taylor (The Birds, Hotel) is Boysie Oakes, a mistaken wartime hero with a silly name, whom the Secret Service hires as an assassin. The joke is that not only does Oakes not want to become Agent L, but he doesn’t have the stomach to harm a fly. “No more romping around the mulberry bush: […]
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One in the Chamber
Gooding is Ray Carver, a fixer who “solves” disputes between mob families. He also narrates from the start, so you know on whose side the movie stands; however, his softly spoken platitudes like “The past is the devil. You can’t run from it. It’s always behind you” put me squarely on the opposite side. Meanwhile, […]
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Hercules, Samson and Ulysses / The Slave / Sandokan the Great
The appeal of 1963’s Hercules, Samson and Ulysses is right there in the title, or as the trailer puts it with caps-lock hyperbole, “THE 3 OF THEM — TOGETHER!” Here, Pietro Francisci, director of the 1958 Steve Reeves smash Hercules, marries the mythical with the biblical in joining Hercules (not Reeves, but Kirk Morris, Hercules Against the […]
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Blade Anime
Therefore, I should love Blade Anime. And yet, even going in with no expectations to do just that, I don’t. Worse, I didn’t even like it. Collecting all 12 episodes — each about 20 minutes — the Japanese series offers strong visuals throughout, as it uses Blade’s origin as a diving board to tell an […]
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The Moth Diaries
Told from the perspective of 16-year-old Becca (Sarah Bolger, The Spiderwick Chronicles, In America), it chronicles a year at Brangwyn, a private school for girls. With the help of her best friend, Lucie (Sarah Gadon, A Dangerous Method), Becca is just starting to cope with her father’s recent suicide as the semester begins. A new […]
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Elevator
Last year’s M. Night Shyamalan-produced Devil, right? Well, yes, but also the new-to-DVD Elevator. Whereas supernatural forces were to blame in Devil, the indie Elevator boasts something even more evil: mankind. Going up in a metal box to a corporate fundraising party are nine people, including:• the CEO (John Getz, The Social Network) and his […]
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Jersey Shore Shark Attack
The great William Atherton, the reigning sleazeball of ’80s movies from Ghostbusters to Die Hard, plays a greedy developer breaking ground on a premiere beach club and spa near the New Jersey boardwalk. The underwater drilling — illegal, of course — unleashes a school of CGI albino sharks, just in time for the big Fourth […]
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Penumbra
That sounds too good to be true, but stranger things have happened on the day of a total solar eclipse. And they will. Too bad Penumbra takes a full 51 minutes of its 90 to get near there. Only then does the Argentinian film approach any plot points that reveal themselves as thriller-esque. Before then […]
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Lovely Molly
The film opens with a deeply distraught Molly (newcomer Gretchen Lodge, in a fearless, go-for-broke debut) recording herself on Oct. 16, 2011, saying, “Whatever has happened, it wasn’t me.” Immediately, we jump back to “whatever.” Married just 13 months earlier, mall janitor Molly and her level-headed truck-driver hubby, Tim (Johnny Lewis, TV’s Sons of Anarchy), […]