Essentially a six-person play, the film by writer/director James Felix McKenney concerns two groups of people ice-fishing and a creature lurking underneath that sheet. One is a family fronted by Michael Rooker (TV’s The Walking Dead) and Blanche Baker (Sixteen Candles); the other infringes on their territory, so you know one of them will be […]
monster
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The Barrens
The Barrens harkens back to the cryptozoological craze of that decade, rife with mostly rotten pics about Bigfoot and Boggy Creek and the like. This one’s better, following family man Stephen Moyer (TV’s True Blood), his second wife (Mia Kirshner, The Black Dahlia) and their two children on a fun-filled vacation (well, for him, at […]
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Karate-Robo Zaborgar
As silly as it is satisfying, the Sushi Typhoon serving is both an update and a spoof of a live-action kiddie series from the 1970s, à la Ultraman, so the approach is both reverent and respectfully raunchy (think The Brady Bunch Movie). It’s about the love story between a man named Daimon (Yasuhisa Furuhara) and […]
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Grimm: Season One
The gist is that young Portland police detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) finds his world of working homicide turned topsy-turvy when his librarian aunt informs him that his parents didn’t really die in a car accident, but were murdered. And not only that, but they were descendants of the brothers Grimm, whose stories weren’t fictional […]
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Bigfoot
Personally, the morbid-curiosity draw isn’t seeing the giant hairy beast, but watching The Brady Bunch’s Barry Williams square off against The Partridge Family’s Danny Bonaduce. Not since ’80s pop tarts Tiffany and Debbie Gibson matched wits in Mega Python vs. Gatoroid has The Asylum’s casting been this interesting. Williams plays a former rock star turned […]
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Zombie A-Hole
I wish I could say the live-action Zombie A-Hole matched those felt-based shenanigans of Massacre; instead, I must admit being disappointed. While it exhibits flashes of Mills’ indie-minded manic brilliance, three things killed it for me: • amateurish acting, • nudity just for the sake of nudity (to a ridiculously exploitative degree), and • a […]
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Sector 7
Also reminiscent of everything from James Cameron’s The Abyss to Stephen Sommers’ Deep Rising, but with multiple mentions of feng shui, the Korean sci-fi film takes place on a real-life ocean drilling rig, where work is on hold due to a stuck drill bit. Nevertheless, tough girl Ha Ji-won (Tidal Wave) is determined to find […]