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Meatballs

Things such as:• the kid-vocalized “Are You Ready for the Summer?” theme song;• the nerd, Spaz (Jack Blum, Happy Birthday to Me), getting a milkshake dumped on his head;• clown counselor Murray downing so much club soda that he burp-talks, “Oh, really? Really?”;• the fat guy, Fink, getting depantsed;• the rival camp’s entire basketball team getting depantsed (don’t accuse Meatballs […]

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Demoted

Luckily for Klein, as the head honcho of Treadline Industries tires, he checks out early, leaving the tire company in the hands of Ken (the too-good-for-this David Cross, TV’s The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret), a nerdy, put-upon salesman/laughingstock who’s long been the target of fellow salesmen Rodney (Michael Vartan, Colombiana) and Mike (Sean […]

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Mutant Girls Squad

It’s told “relay”-style, with one of three directors each taking on a different chapter, although you can’t really tell: Tak Sakaguchi, (Yakuza Weapon), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Helldriver) and Noboru Iguchi (Karate-Robo Zaborgar). That three cooks are stirring the pot matters as much as the plot, which is minimal — at least a lucid one. Just know […]

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The Wizard of Gore / The Gore Gore Girls

The Wizard of Gore may not be among Lewis’ best, but it’s one of his most notorious. The title character is Montag the Magnificent (Lewis regular Ray Sager), a stage magician who maims and dismembers his hypnotized female “volunteers,” who leave appearing A-OK, only for their wounds to reappear later, this time fatally. Sherry Carson […]

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Death and Cremation

One of the outcasts is the lonely, miserable Stan (Brad Dourif, Halloween II), who runs a crematorium. The other is Jarod (Jeremy Sumpter, Soul Surfer), a high school “loser” who paints his nails black. When the latter approaches the former about a job, Stan reluctantly gives in, yet sees so much of himself in his […]

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Strip Strip Hooray!

If you’ve seen one of these black-and-white oddities, you’ve seen them all, whether or not they’re included here. I challenge even the most patient among you to sit through all half-dozen. Even with breaks, I’m not certain it can be done without cracking. Title notwithstanding, striptease is just a part of the proceedings, with pure-vanilla […]

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The Divide

No sooner as the movie opened than a nuclear bomb has dropped. The precious few apartment building residents with the most recognizable, screen-friendly faces are those who conveniently find shelter in the basement, barricaded by a huge steel door that the supe, Mickey (Michael Biehn, Take Me Home Tonight), seals to keep out any radiation. […]

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Sleeping Beauty

Here, it’s Lucy (Emily Browning, Sucker Punch), a college student so strapped for cash that she holds four jobs: working at a café, doing Xerox duties in an office, participating in a medical study that requires a balloon and tube to be fed down her throat, and blowing guys at a bar. A fifth gig […]

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The Nurses Collection

Part of the label’s ongoing and hopefully never-ending “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” line, The Nurses Collection presents a quadruple feature of the sexy, soapy, seriocomic flicks on two DVDs: 1974’s Candy Stripe Nurses, 1972’s Night Call Nurses, 1971’s Private Duty Nurses and 1973’s The Young Nurses. As you may have noticed, they’re not presented in […]

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