Romola Garai (Atonement) plays Sugar, a 19-year-old prostitute pimped out by her own mother (The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson, almost unrecognizable) to the hoity-toity about town. One such uncool customer is William Rackham (O’Dowd), a soap titan married to a mentally ill woman (Amanda Hale, Bright Star). So taken is he by Sugar’s honeypot that he […]
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Grimm: Season One
The gist is that young Portland police detective Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) finds his world of working homicide turned topsy-turvy when his librarian aunt informs him that his parents didn’t really die in a car accident, but were murdered. And not only that, but they were descendants of the brothers Grimm, whose stories weren’t fictional […]
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Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XXIV
This edition — four episodes on four discs, per Shout! Factory’s usual — is like a cinematic-crap tour around the globe. We venture south of the border for 1962’s Samson vs. the Vampire Women, a masked-wrestler epic that stars Santo (not Samson, no matter what the title says), the caped superhero of Mexico’s wrasslin’ ring. […]
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Bigfoot
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 […]
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Blade Anime
Therefore, I should love Blade Anime. And yet, even going in with no expectations to do just that, I don’t. Worse, I didn’t even like it. Collecting all 12 episodes — each about 20 minutes — the Japanese series offers strong visuals throughout, as it uses Blade’s origin as a diving board to tell an […]
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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 […]
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It’s a TV-on-DVD summer spectacular!
Breaking Bad: The Complete Fourth Season If Breaking Bad‘s current fifth and final season goes south (not bloody likely), at least season four delivers a climax that could have serves as a satisfying serious closer, were it not renewed. But it was, and no wonder: Bryan Cranston may have the tube’s richest character arc, as […]
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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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Steve Niles’ Remains
Making Reno, Nev., look like a miserable stinkhole of a city — and that’s even before any undead show up — Remains focuses on the dozens of denizens who play and work in the Silver Star Hotel and Casino. When a government test of a new “nuke oven” goes awry, everyone who’s not, say, having […]
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Casting the Runes
Those working on a TV special on the history of witchcraft have peculiar run-ins with a mysterious, reclusive alchemist known as Karswell (Iain Cuthbertson, Gorillas in the Mist), a man who openly espouses lust, deviance and all-around evil. When one character recalls a co-worker’s fatal brush with Karswell (depicted in the prologue) and says that […]