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 […]
Sci-Fi
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Hell
In the bleak thriller, director/co-writer Tim Fehlbaum imagines that our world of 2016 has ceased to exist — at least as we know it. Solar storms have raised the temperature by 50? Fahrenheit — something Oklahomans currently can sympathize with — and with resources bare, society has collapsed. Sisters Marie (Hannah Herzsprung, The Reader) and […]
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Digging it
With his debut novel, Zombacter: Center City Contagion, Oklahoma City’s Sean Bingham has created the contingency plan and the apocalypse scenario to go with it. The first book of Bingham’s undead trilogy, Zombacter was published by Severed Press, an independent company that specializes in survival horror. It is Bingham’s first novel. A Georgia native, he […]
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The Hunger Games
I also found it disappointing — not as a near-billion-dollar grosser, but as a movie purported to be both action and science fiction. It’s too inert for the former and not imaginative enough for the latter. The title references a brutal annual competition staged by the government of a dystopian future, of which this film’s […]
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Total Recall: Mind-Bending Edition
Join him, won’t you? Before the Colin Farrell/Kate Beckinsale remake opens next week, take a return trip to the 1990 blockbuster with Lionsgate’s new “Mind-Bending Edition” on Blu-ray. And if you’ve never seen the sci-fi hit, then — to quote another character — “Get ready for a surprise!” (Oh, there are more classic lines to […]
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Lockout
I know exactly what a Besson production will mean: high-concept action rendered as a high-octane cartoon in live-action, with a severe chance for martial arts. The French filmmaker’s name equals a style equals a brand. His aesthetic appears even when he doesn’t direct. His creative stamp supersedes all. And so it is again with Lockout, […]
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Extraterrestrial
The Spanish-language film is a boy-meets-girl story under the threat of an alien invasion. Julio (Julián Villagrán) and Julia (Michelle Jenner) awake in her apartment after a drunken one-night stand neither remembers. Of more concern is that the streets are empty and an alien ship hovers overhead menacingly. They’re pestered by a nosy neighbor (Carlos […]
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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 […]
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Journey 2: The Mysterious Island / Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island
Young Sean (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games) is the only returning cast member from 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, meaning dad Brendan Fraser is nowhere to be found, replaced here by Fast Five‘s Dwayne Johnson as stepdad Hank. (That’s called trading up.) Wasting no time, the movie has Sean and Hank crack […]
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42nd Street Forever: Blu-ray Edition
That adds up to nearly four hours of absolutely outrageous ads. Trust me: Whether you watch in a single sitting or several, it’s a real car-chasing, cycle-revving, bomb-exploding, fist-punching, karate-chopping, foot-kicking, gun-shooting, knife-throwing, laser-blasting, woman-screaming, race-baiting, acid-pouring, eye-gouging, head-chopping, phallus-castrating, breast-squeezing, bed-writhing, succubus-sucking, wrist-tying, drug-injecting, butt-whipping, panty-ripping, bikini-filling, disco-dancing, jail-busting, snake-attacking, robot-battling, voodoo-pinning, slime-invading, dominatrix-singing, […]