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The Last Days on Mars

Lots, after fellow crew member (Goran Kostic, Taken) gets greedy enough to lay claim to finding life on Mars, in the form of a viral bacteria. To spill what happens next would spoil the surprise the film has up its well-padded sleeve; suffice to say, The Last Days on Mars has Alien‘s DNA all over […]

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The Slumber Party Massacre

Or, if they do have the sense, they stupidly return to the house soon after. In the 1982 original written by Rita Mae Brown and directed by Amy Holden Jones, a girls’ basketball team (whose players suck on the court, it should be noted), shack up for a night at the house of Trish (Michelle […]

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Darkman

A very lanky and pale Liam Neeson (The Grey) portrays Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on creating synthetic skin, but can’t get it to last beyond 99 minutes. When his girlfriend (Moonrise Kingdom‘s Frances McDormand, who appears in a brand-new interview on the disc) stumbles onto a secret memo she shouldn’t have, corporate goons destroy […]

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The Past

Opening Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial Rd., The Past begins as Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns to Paris after four years to finalize a divorce with his estranged wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo, The Artist). The ambivalence between them — an easy rapport pivoting to sniping and then back again — surfaces […]

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Haunter

Abigail Breslin (August: Osage County) stars as Lisa, a teen who’s the only one in her happy family of four to notice that for some reason, they’re re-living the same foggy Sunday in the ’80s over and over and over and over. Keeping her forever 15, it’s a cyclical grind of missing laundry, Atari Pac-Man, […]

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Blind Date

In his first movie role, Bruce Willis exhibits some of that easygoing charisma that then was serving him well as TV’s Moonlighting and, just one year later, rocketed him to the stratosphere in Die Hard. At the time hot off 9 1/2 Weeks, but not yet cast in Batman, future Oscar winner Kim Basinger also […]

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Escape Plan

The world of 2013, however, is a mighty different landscape; Escape Plan bombed. That’s too bad, because it’s pretty good for what it sets out to be: a big, dumb action movie, in the style of its stars’ big, dumb bread-and-butter recipe of yesteryear.  Stallone’s Breslin works as a security expert hired to go undercover […]

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Judges Creed

Not too long ago, someone who works at Oklahoma Gazette asked, “Does anyone in Oklahoma City make movies besides Mickey Reece?”  My answer was, “Of course,” supplemented with several caveats, one of which is that the local filmmaker generally makes more feature films in a year than my parents see within the same time frame. […]

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The Postman Always Rings Twice

Most of the sordid story unfolds at the Twin Oaks Tavern, a sparsely attended roadside diner owned by a Greek man (John Colicos, The Changeling) whose prized possession is either the place, his record player or his much-younger wife, Cora (Lange, TV’s American Horror Story). Much bored, she perks up when Frank (Nicholson) drifts in. […]

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Banshee Chapter / You’re Next

Using the CIA’s real-life Project MKUltra as a jumping-off point, freshman writer/director Blair Erickson explores the fates and legacy of those who volunteered for the controversial mind-control experiments, which ran in secret for about 20 years beginning in the 1950s and often involved LSD.    After a friend disappears from downing a 150-mg dose, an […]

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