Usually, Troma can offend with simple scoops of sex and violence and gore; here, director/iconoclast Lloyd Kaufman realizes lesbian couplings can’t serve as his ceiling, so the script includes bad-taste jokes related to James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Jerry Sandusky and Trayvon Martin. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t laugh during the movie — just […]
spoof
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Motley ghoul
Recently released digitally and on demand, Ghost Team One is a spirited spoof. BY ROD LOTT With this Halloween season being the first without a new chapter in the Paranormal Activity series, perhaps a Paranormal Activity spoof is the next best thing. There’s no shortage of them, but of the roughly half-dozen I’ve seen, Ghost […]
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Ghost Team One
The film opens Friday in select theaters, as well as digitally and on demand. Using a cameraman hired through Craigslist, two best buds — virginal Sergio (Carlos Santos) and horn-dog chucklehead Brad (J.R. Villarreal, Akeelah and the Bee) — attempt to capture footage of the ghost they believe haunts the home they share. The specter, glimpsed as an Asian female, […]
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Detention of the Dead / The Demented
Imagine if zombies invaded The Breakfast Club. That’s literally the setup experienced by your stock-character students of the nerd, the jock, the misfit, the bully, the cheerleader and, so it’s not a total copy of the 1985 John Hughes classic, a wisecracking Asian kid (Justin Chon, 21 & Over) to spout things like, “I gotta […]
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The Phynx
To review the movie, I need only tell you what it’s about. The dictator of communist Albania has swiped dozens of United States “world leaders,” including Butterfly McQueen, Johnny Weismuller, Maureen O’Sullivan, Dorothy Lamour, Xavier Cugat, Col. Sanders, Busby Berkeley, the Bowery Boys, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. (Mind you, all of them appear as […]
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Supernatural Activity
The gist is that for its season/series finale, one of those ridiculous ghost-hunting shows goes to Hicksville, Texas, in search of the “yeti-demon” known as Smallsquatch. To give you an immediate idea of the level of humor the flick operates, the creature tickles its victims to death. Ha-ha! I mean, ha-ha? This flimsy setup allows […]
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Drive-In
(How meta it would’ve been to see this at an actual drive-in; I’ll settle for its DVD debut from Sony Pictures’ Choice Collection, rather than the alternative, which is to never see it at all.) Like American Graffiti three years before it, the movie follows a select handful of youngsters, mostly teens, over the course […]
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Karate-Robo Zaborgar
As silly as it is satisfying, the Sushi Typhoon serving is both an update and a spoof of a live-action kiddie series from the 1970s, à la Ultraman, so the approach is both reverent and respectfully raunchy (think The Brady Bunch Movie). It’s about the love story between a man named Daimon (Yasuhisa Furuhara) and […]
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The Liquidator
Rod Taylor (The Birds, Hotel) is Boysie Oakes, a mistaken wartime hero with a silly name, whom the Secret Service hires as an assassin. The joke is that not only does Oakes not want to become Agent L, but he doesn’t have the stomach to harm a fly. “No more romping around the mulberry bush: […]
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Jersey Shore Shark Attack
The great William Atherton, the reigning sleazeball of ’80s movies from Ghostbusters to Die Hard, plays a greedy developer breaking ground on a premiere beach club and spa near the New Jersey boardwalk. The underwater drilling — illegal, of course — unleashes a school of CGI albino sharks, just in time for the big Fourth […]