Co-directors/co-writers/co-producers Mike Bradecich and John LaFlamboy also co-star as the Mugg brothers, slackers who run the crappy abode where a mole man (Justin DiGiacomo) lurks the halls for dogs and cats to consume, before moving up the food chain to humans. Any ingenuity begins and ends with the title; Bradecich and LaFlamboy mug(g) their way […]
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Posted inArts & Culture
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death
Fresh from a mental hospital, Jessica (Zohra Lampert, The Exorcist III) is taken by her husband, Duncan (Barton Heyman, The Super Cops) to a farmhouse with a cove nearby for a fresh start. If only Duncan had known that it’s reportedly haunted, which can’t be good for Jessica’s fragile psyche. Almost immediately upon their arrival […]
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Urban education
“If we’re going to operate as a fully functional 24-hour downtown, we need more than an elementary school. We need a middle school and a high school,” said Russell Claus, city planning director, about John W. Rex Elementary School, under construction at Sheridan and Walker avenues. The $14 million charter school is the result of […]
Posted inMusic
Made you Flinch
As far as names for dubstep producers go, veteran Los Angeles beat maker Adam Glassco picked a pretty great one. Moving from his roots in drum and bass music to electro and now dubstep, Flinch inspires his fair share of involuntary movements in dance halls and clubs across the world since he first started experimenting […]
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The Fog
The picture depicts a supernatural takeover of the sleepy California coastal town of Antonio Bay by a band of ghost pirates seeking revenge for their deaths 100 years prior. They menace the entire populace, but for the purposes of this story, Carpenter focuses primarily on the DJ of the lighthouse radio station (Adrienne Barbeau, Swamp […]
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The Kentucky Fried Movie
Nothing more than a collection of roughly two dozen unrelated sketches, The Kentucky Fried Movie succeeds most at skewering its own medium: American commercial cinema. Fake trailers mock the exploitation fads of the era with Cleopatra Schwartz (blaxploitation), That’s Armageddon (disaster movies) and Catholic High School Girls in Trouble (youth sex films); they’re so dead-on, […]
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RED 2
Its inevitable successor, RED 2 (the acronym stands for “Retired, Extremely Dangerous,” per the comic-book source material), is, instead, a caricature of a caricature, one that revels in its lack of substance to the point of phlegmatic disinterest. The film revisits retired CIA agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis, A Good Day to Die Hard), who, […]
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Juggin’ out
The Great American Jug Band Photo: John Thomas For calling itself The Great American Jug Band, the Norman-grown group is conspicuously light on the jug part. “We own a jug,” front man Will Gardner said. “We just don’t have anyone to blow into it.” But really, the jug always was meant to be more than […]
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Enter the Dragon: 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition
With this, director Robert Clouse made what is easily Bruce Lee’s finest film (and then proceeded to follow it up with a never-ending string of schlock). While Lee is technically one point of a heroic triangle — with A Nightmare on Elm Street’s John Saxon and blaxploitation icon Jim Kelly being the others — let’s […]
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Monsters University
But that’s not college — that’s high school. Whatever it is, Monsters University, which opens Friday, certainly isn’t the overachiever that its predecessor was. While not on the failure level of, say, Cars 2, this disappointing effort is mildly redeemed by an involving third act — at just about the time pint-sized viewers are apt […]