For his feature debut, The Millennium Bug, writer/director Kenneth Cran imagines that Something Actually Happened besides a world’s collective “whew!” Taking place on Dec. 31, 1999 (natch), the movie follows the Haskin family, whose three members head for the mountains in order to escape the panic and presumed riots. Instead, the happy campers find trouble […]
Sci-Fi
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Holy Motors
Now that the French film is out on DVD and Blu-ray, it’s the next best thing to the theatrical experience we were denied. Love it or hate it, Holy Motors is nothing if not an experience. Carax regular Denis Lavant (The Lovers on the Bridge) is front and center of this weird, wonderful ride as […]
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Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft
Another: H&G: WOW is directed by David DeCoteau, whose dirt-cheap filmography includes 1313: Giant Killer Bees! (exclamation theirs), Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000 and the forthcoming A Talking Cat!?! (exclamations and question mark theirs). In this flaccid effort, Hansel and Gretel Jonah and Ella (real-life sibs Booboo and Fivel Stewart, respectively) play orphan […]
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Dredd
In this case, Dredd succeeds where the 1995 Sylvester Stallone vehicle Judge Dredd did not: ringing true to the roots and spirit of the UK-based comic — an anarchic, dystopian world. In doing so — you’re not missed, Rob Schneider — the action’s just way better, too. Set in a future U.S., some 800 million […]
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Looper
In Looper, writer/director Rian Johnson crams in so many, it initially looks as if this sci-fi actioner might collapse under the weight of them all. Dystopian society, time travel, telekinesis, gangland killings — there are a lot of ground rules to keep track of here, much of them conveyed through the wobbly device of a […]
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Doomsday Book
Doomsday begins with the most fun of the bunch, “A Brave New World,” in which a nerdy, horny young man is upset that his family embarks on a fabulous getaway vacation without him, leaving a long list of chores. Many of them deal, unsettling enough, with food waste. He gets ill, and I’ll leave the […]
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Elvira’s Movie Macabre: Mega Movie Marathon
Spanning nearly three decades of release, the movies included are Night of the Living Dead, I Eat Your Skin, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The Werewolf of Washington, The Terror, Eegah!, Scared to Death, Tormented, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The Manster, Lady Frankenstein and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. All reside in the public […]
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Coma
Now, cable’s done the same thing with the perfectly fine ’70s sci-fi thriller Coma, which was directed by Crichton. Both updates come from director Mikael Salomon. It’s nice to see the lovely and talented Lauren Ambrose (Sleepwalk with Me) headlining the project as an idealistic med student who uncovers a conspiracy involving a remarkable number […]
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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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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 […]