You won’t see Connecticut pop-punk act Hostage Calm refueling at Chick-fil-A on the road between gigs. The group’s guys are some of the most vocal supporters of marriage equality touring today, playing rallies, helping assemble a documentary on the movement and even selling merchandise that benefits organizations fighting for same-sex legal unions. “For my generation, […]
sex
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Above Suspicion: Set 1
Emetophobes may wish to shield their eyes in the opening scenes of the pilot, as rookie Detective Constable Anna Travis (the magnetic Kelly Reilly, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows) has trouble getting used to the job’s sights and smells when it comes to corpses. She eventually proves useful elsewhere, when her superior, the brusque […]
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Michael / Silver Tongues
Michael is no comedy, however, and refers to a balding, chubby, nerdy outcast who keeps a 10-year-old captive in his basement. Michael is more than a mere kidnapper: He’s a pedophile. The subject matter alone will keep many from giving the German-language film a try, but his most devilish acts of evil thankfully go unseen. […]
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Girls Gone Dead
In a case of having cake and eating it, too, one thoroughly repellent character refers to women as, among other things, “fish buckets,” “dumb twits” and “meat holes.” When he’s not referring to them as a whole, he zeroes in on certain parts of their anatomy, which he pegs as “piss flaps.” And yes, the […]
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The Girl from the Naked Eye
All of 16 years old, but with the soul of an old poet, fresh hooker Sandy Wright (Samantha Street, Alien Raiders) is dead, and Jake (Jason Yee, who co-wrote the script), the club’s driver, takes it upon himself to track down her killers and dish out the requisite payback. Having saved the runaway girl from […]
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Casa de Mi Padre
Shot in “Mexicoscope” by director Matt Piedmont (TV’s Funny or Die Presents …), the movie casts Ferrell as dumpy ranch hand Armando Alvarez who inadvertently gets mixed up in the drug war between his favored brother, Raul (Diego Luna, Contraband), and Raul’s nemesis (Gael García Bernal, Babel). To further complicate matters, he falls for his […]
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Cherry Bomb
The title refers to a stripper (Julin Jean, The Final) who is raped on the job by five guys in the “champagne room” at 3 a.m. Because one of them is a big construction honcho in the community and properly lawyered up, the cops do nothing. In revenge, her estranged brother (John Rodriguez) accidentally kills […]
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The Deep Blue Sea
Written and directed by Terence Davies — who performed such duties on 2000’s well-received The House of Mirth and 1992’s The Long Day Closes — the film announces its dreary, depressing nature right from the opening scene, in which Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz, Dream House, The Lovely Bones) decides she wants to die. So she […]
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Zoom In: Sex Apartments
The 1980 Japanese film is part of Impulse Pictures’ “Nikkatsu Erotic Films Collection,” which would equate to a hard-R rating here. While nudity is often, it’s all above-the-belt, frontally speaking, and this work in particular is like a Skinemax flick with an actual plot, and where sex is integral to the story. Well, sorta. That […]
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Chesty Morgan’s Bosom Buddies
Now that that’s, um, out of the way, let’s dive into the new triple-feature Blu-ray, Chesty Morgan’s Bosom Buddies, from pioneering sexploitation director Doris Wishman and the cult-film gods at Something Weird Video. For fans of really whacked-out movies, it’s one of the year’s few must-own discs. Busting out of the box first is […]