// Category Archive for: Movie Reviews

Blu-Ray Review: The Bees

By Jeffery X Martin

Mother Nature always gives us humans a little something to be afraid of. Fire ants, hurricanes, just some little nudge to remind us that the links on the food chain are weak and interchangeable. In the late 1970s, the big scare was killer bees, super-aggressive buggers that migrated from Mexico into the United States. They attacked in swarms and wouldn’t stop, even after their prey was dead.

These bees became the subject for a few nature-run-amok movies. None of them were particularly good (see Irwin Allen’s The Swarm for some high-level bad moviemaking), but none of them were quite as earnest or weird as Alfredo Zacarias’s exploitation movie, The Bees.

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Movie Review: Deadpool

By Laury Scarbro

The short-short version of the synopsis: Wade Wilson, a.k.a. Deadpool, is a former Special Forces operative who turns mercenary for hire in his civilian life. He meets a girl, they eventually fall in love, and then tragedy strikes. He undergoes an experimental procedure that turns him into a hideous version of his former self, requiring him to wear a suit to hide his appearance. Then he sets out to get revenge on those responsible. And that’s when the real fun starts.

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Movie Review: Girls’ Night Out

By Richelle Charkot

Nearly 14 million women in America binge drink 3 times per month. Photo Credit: White Pine Pictures

It is perhaps a little too appropriate that I’m writing this review of Girls’ Night Out with an upset stomach because I’m growing more concerned that I might be allergic to beer, in spite of the fact that I for some reason keep going out and drinking beer.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Graduate

By Jeffery X Martin

Mike Nichols’ film from 1967, The Graduate, is a darkly humorous ode to the disenfranchised and distant. It’s also a definitive bad romance. The movie has a lot to say about toxic people and how they can mess up your life. Then again, pretty much everyone in The Graduate is toxic.

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Blu-Ray Review: Creed

By Jeffery X Martin

People forget that Sylvester Stallone wrote and starred in the Best Picture of 1977, Rocky. That’s an Academy Award in the hands of Stallone. Isn’t that odd? We forget about it because Stallone’s output since Rocky has been so spastic. He’s given us fantastic performances, like the half-deaf officer in Cop Land. Then again, he’s also given us three Expendables movies and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.

Does he hate us? Does he love us? How can we know?

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Blu-Ray Review: Pieces

By Jeffery X Martin

Horror fans have known for decades that there is no other movie quite as delightfully crazy banana-pants as Pieces. With the infamous tagline, “You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre,” Pieces honestly attempts to be a straight-ahead horror film. It’s not.

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Retro Review: American Psycho

By Jeffery X Martin

Toronto residents! If you haven’t seen American Psycho in a while or if you’ve never seen it on the big screen, you’ll get your chance February 17 at the Carlton, where The MUFF Society is putting on a screening of the film at 9:00 p.m.

The quirky genius of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner’s film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial novel, American Psycho, lies in the generic nature of its characters and its excoriation of the wretched Yuppie movement of the 1980s. The movie is infused with comedy as dark as motor oil, and social commentary so sharp that watching the movie could cut your retinas. For a certain level of society, this is the definitive Eighties flick, even more cynical and astute than Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.

There is also an extended scene with a chainsaw, so that’s an automatic win.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Mutilator (1984)

By Jeffery X Martin

The Mutilator is an oddity in the slasher genre, less for what it is and more for what it is not. If you’re looking for copious amounts of nudity, look elsewhere. There’s not even a lot of bad language. On that level, The Mutilator is more like a live-action Disney movie from the Sixties. You half expect Dean Jones and Don Knotts to show up.

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Blu-Ray Review: Jack’s Back

By Less Lee Moore

In 1986, I fell in love with James Spader. Sure, I was 15 and he was 25; and he was an actor and I didn’t actually know him; but it was real to me, damn it. I’d seen him on the big screen in Pretty In Pink, but he reminded me too much of the rich, preppy jackasses I knew in real life for me to develop anything but antagonism for him in reel life. (And what was up with his feathered, John Taylor-in-“The Wild Boys”-video hair, anyway?)

Serendipity intervened shortly thereafter: Tuff Turf was on HBO one night when I was at a friend’s house and that’s when it hit me: this James Spader guy was all right. Better than all right, in fact. As Morgan in Tuff Turf, he was perfect (and woe unto all the guys who didn’t measure up). Thus began my lifelong quest of watching every James Spader movie ever. That’s how I found out about Jack’s Back, released in 1988.

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Blu-Ray Review: Convergence

By Tim Murr

In the summer of 1999, Detective Ben Walls (Clayne Crawford) is enjoying time off with his wife and daughter when he is called in to investigate a bombing in downtown Atlanta. Not long after arriving on the scene, Walls is injured by a second blast, set intentionally to harm first responders. He awakens in the hospital, seemingly unharmed, but nothing is as it seems. Worse, the terrorist behind the bombing may be in the hospital with him.

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