The gist is that for its season/series finale, one of those ridiculous ghost-hunting shows goes to Hicksville, Texas, in search of the “yeti-demon” known as Smallsquatch. To give you an immediate idea of the level of humor the flick operates, the creature tickles its victims to death. Ha-ha! I mean, ha-ha? This flimsy setup allows […]
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Americano
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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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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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 […]
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Sinister
Had I been watching it at home, alone, on a dark and stormy night, my neck likely would be sore by the end of it, from making repeated glances behind the couch — you know, just to be safe. It’s this year’s Insidious: well-built, respectful of audience members’ intelligence and yet genuinely freaky. Ethan Hawke […]
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Rock of Ages
Taking place in the hair-metal heyday of 1987, Rock of Ages jumps from Broadway to the big screen, and lands on its face with a thud. If it’s not the year’s most misbegotten big-studio project, I don’t wish to be exposed to what is. Talking and singing in a baby voice akin to nails on […]