After catching a movie, a woman (Julia Ormond, TV’s Mad Men) and her young son (Evan Bird, TV’s The Killing) take a cab to get home, but the cabbie isn’t really a cabbie. He’s Bob (Vincent D’Onofrio, Full Metal Jacket), a lisping serial killer of “whores.” Bob offs the mom, but keeps the kid as […]
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Posted inArts & Culture
Dark Shadows
Sporting spindly fingers à la 1922’s Nosferatu, Johnny Depp’s 18th-century vampire character of Barnabas Collins rises from the grave in 1972 where he’s puzzled by the high-tech times of television sets and breakfast waffles. He settles in with his descendants at their dreary Collinwood mansion, headed by matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer, who gets lovelier each […]
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Iron Sky
The Nazis mistake the landing as a prelude to an invasion, so the Third Reich prepares to strike the earth before the earth can strike it. Iron Sky has all the makings of a big batch of poor taste. Instead, it’s an inspired goof of a spoof that bridges the worlds of highbrow and lowbrow […]
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Weird-Noir
In true B-programmer form, let’s run through each with sterling efficiency: Girl on the Run (1953) This may be the only noir set at a carnival with a burlesque show featuring a tummy-rifiic dancer in a Catwoman mask. In fact, I’m counting on it. Cops are there searching for Bill Martin (Richard Coogan, TV’s Captain […]
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Little Shop of Horrors: The Director’s Cut
That’s one fun fact I learned, but the real draw of this release is the film’s Holy Grail: the 23-minute original ending in its entirety and in full-color — not the unfinished black-and-white version — and it’s Quite Something to See. As many Little Shop fans know, but thought they’d never view, the movie stayed […]
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Peace, Love & Misunderstanding
God knows this isn’t the first indie film to fall prey to contrivances, inept predictability and forced quirkiness. But what’s so perplexing is that Peace, now on DVD and Blu-ray after a small theatrical run, is made by such talented people. Its director is the usually dependable Bruce Beresford, whose credits range from Breaker Morant […]
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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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Hostel / Hostel: Part II
From 2005, Hostel drops three collegians into Amsterdam for a debauched vacation of pot and poon, only to accidentally become victims in a bizarre business in which the wealthy pay big bucks to torture the kidnapped in an underground warehouse. Roth spares nothing, leaving viewers to cringe at every slice of the Achilles tendon, snipped […]
Posted inMusic
The Wrath of God
As Father Van Horne, Mitchum is part of a small group of non-natives “recruited” by the local military to kill the ruthless leader Thomas De La Plata (Frank Langella, Unknown) in order to end the senseless killing he orders. For doing so, Father and friends (including burly Victor Buono from TV’s Man from Atlantis) are […]
Posted inMusic
One direction
Six months ago, John Johnson and Joie Sherman-Johnson, both University of Oklahoma alum who make up the duo North Meets South, were working corporate jobs in Washington, D.C., playing “casually, not even weekly, not even monthly for about two years,” per Johnson, before relocating to Norman. Fresh from a short tour of the Midwest, the […]