Three years after a horrific car crash all but destroyed her will to live, Jenna (Scout Taylor-Compton of Rob Zombie’s pair of Halloween remakes) takes a much-needed vacay with three pals to a lakeside cabin for some R-and-R. Part of the agenda includes drinking brewskies in the sauna, then jumping into the lake to cool […]
stream
Posted inArts & Culture
The Girl
Premiering Saturday, The Girl is the first of two high-profile biopics of the master filmmaker to hit screens this season. The other, simply titled Hitchcock, is a larger-budget feature with a whiff of Oscar bait, yet there’s room enough for both. While that forthcoming film focuses on the making of 1960’s Psycho, The Girl concerns […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Tortured
That said, I’m a big boy. I can take it. That’s my way of saying I kind of dug the evil game it plays, mammoth faults and all, because how often does that happen? Having a child kidnapped is something I hope never to experience, yet that’s the premise behind this nasty little thriller, which […]
Posted inMusic
Shiny Toy Guns — III
It marks not only singer Carah Faye Charnow’s return to the band whose founders were born in Shawnee, but also a return to the New Wave synth-pop sound that made them famous. The opening trio of “Somewhere to Hide,” “Waiting Alone” and “Carrie” are just as synthsational as the band has ever been. “Carrie” is […]
Posted inMusic
Movin’ Melvins
The Melvins aren’t the household name they deserve to be. Hopefully, time will favor the American rockers, but if not, at least they will go down in the record books: Appearing Saturday at Opolis, the Melvins are in the midst of becoming the first band to play all 50 states (plus Washington, D.C.) in 51 […]
Posted inMusic
Come, the new Jerusalem
Preachers — the sophomore album from indie-rock outfit My Jerusalem, playing Thursday at The Conservatory — is as much indebted to a certain ’80s horror sequel as it is any musical influence. “I was at my usual coffee shop, and I saw this guy that looked like the creepy old guy from Poltergeist II. I […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Argo
There’s no way the movie industry could have resisted this stranger-than-fiction yarn. The film chronicles how CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) saved the six by establishing a phony cover story that they were a Canadian movie crew scouting locations in Tehran for a science-fiction cheapie titled Argo. Details of that real-life mission would not be […]
Posted inArts & Culture
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 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sinister
Had I been watching it at home, alone, on a dark and stormy night, my neck likely would be sore by the end of it, from making repeated glances behind the couch — you know, just to be safe. It’s this year’s Insidious: well-built, respectful of audience members’ intelligence and yet genuinely freaky. Ethan Hawke […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Frankenweenie
A film of stop-motion animation, it is a feature-length version of a charming but unremarkable live-action short he made for Disney in 1984, about a kid who revives his beloved dead dog via lightning bolts. The House of Mouse found the end result so odd and macabre that it shelved plans to send it to […]