// Category Archive for: Reviews

Music Review: Those Pretty Wrongs, Those Pretty Wrongs

By Melissa Bratcher

The music that Those Pretty Wrongs makes is familiar in the best of ways. It’s sun-dappled melancholy, 1970s AM radio-friendly songs that soar with warm harmony and delicate guitar. It’s quiet power pop with heart, which makes sense if one looks at their pedigree.

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TV Review: Lucha Underground, S2 E11 – 15

By Sachin Hingoo

Hey, I just met you,
and this is crazy,
Robert Rodriguez
loves lucha libre!

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve visited the Temple, and with Dario Cueto back in control and his feral brother Matanza as champion, the whole show has a different feel. Gone is Mil Muertes looming over the Temple on his throne and the candles and other spooky touches Catrina put in Dario’s office. Instead we’re back to having live bands play us into the shows and a general feeling that chaotic violence can erupt at any time. I have to say that I’m glad to have Dario back in the backstage vignettes in particular, because he’s a much better actor than Catrina and has his sadistic douchebag character down pat.

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Movie Review: Ratchet And Clank

By Tyler Hodg

Beloved video game series Ratchet and Clank has made its way to the big screen, and much to fans’ delight, embodies the unique attributes that turned the franchise into something of substance in the first place. While the CGI film is bumpy at times, it never feels like a forced project developed strictly for monetary reasons, and celebrates the classic story that many have grown up with.

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Podcast: TV or GTFO Episode 3, “Cop Rock”

By Sachin Hingoo

On this episode of TV or GTFO, Gary and Sachin review a short-lived curiosity of early 1990s television, the bizarre Steven Bochco (Hill St. Blues, L.A. Law, Doogie Howser, MD) project, Cop Rock. Rated one of the worst television shows in history by TV Guide, it’s a musical police procedural where cops and elected officials tackle heavy topics like selling babies, serial rapists, entrapment, and bribery—in song?!

Here’s a little taste of the series, soon to be available on DVD:

Will these incompetent cops ever complete a case without mishandling evidence? Why is the police chief constantly shooting his gun inside his office? Is $200 an appropriate price for a crack addict’s baby? Is Randy Newman a genius or a madman? Has anything on television ever matched the fourth-wall-breaking final scene of the series? Find out at the link below, download the episode right here, or listen from your favorite podcast app!

Comic Review: ExMortis #1 – 4

By Tim Murr

I’d love to meet Mary Shelley’s spirit and find out what she thinks of how far her creation has come in the two hundred plus years since she released it into the world. Doctor Frankenstein and his monster are two of the most enduring characters in the history of literature and fit any number of genre interpretations. Not unlike much of Shakespeare’s work, Shelley’s Frankenstein can easily be adapted to any time period and any given version can emphasize the dramatic, the horrific, or the comedic.

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DVD Review: Emelie

By Tim Murr

It’s mom and dad’s anniversary and they hire a new babysitter to watch their three young children. She comes highly recommended and seems like a sweet, smart girl, but the parents aren’t gone long before she starts to strangely assert herself over the children, guiding them into the darkest night of their brief lives.

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TV Review: Outsiders S1 E13, “Long Live The Bren’in”

By Laury Scarbro

This episode was directed by Peter Weller, and I truly hope to see him do more episodes next season. Episodes of other shows that he has directed (such as Sons of Anarchy, Salem, The Strain, and Tyrant) have been some of the best that those shows had to offer. The otherworldly aspects of Shay Mountain and it’s inhabitants have only been vaguely hinted at thus far, and I believe he did an excellent job in ratcheting up the spook factor.

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Music Review: Jimbo Mathus, Band Of Storms

By Melissa Bratcher

New music from Jimbo Mathus is always cause for celebration. The former (and soon to be current again) Squirrel Nut Zipper makes music that is deeply steeped in the South. It’s a melange of influences—gritty swamp rock with a hot hit of blues, a dash of gospel, bluegrass, and more than a little honky tonk—and it comes out sounding exactly right. His latest, a nine-song EP called Band Of Storms, is more of what makes Mathus great. He may wear his influences on his sleeve, but the sound that he has is pure Jimbo Mathus.

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TV Review: Time Traveling Bong

By Sachin Hingoo

In a scene at the end of Time Traveling Bong, Ilana Glazer’s Sharee wraps up a bonghit-punctuated journey by stating her discovery of “how shitty the world has been for women forever.” Though this is made really clear as Sharee goes through horrific witch trials before nearly being burned alive in 1600s Salem, is sexually harassed in the 1960s, and is indifferently probed right in the tit in a dystopian future. If Time Traveling Bong can be said to have a point at all (as if it needs one), it’s that Sharee needs to discover the plight of women throughout history in order to see how willingly and thoroughly she’s relinquished her own freedom and sense of agency in her current life.

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In Case You Missed It: April 24 – 30, 2016—Throwing Shade In The Green Room

By Less Lee Moore

Even Tommy Shelby wants to see more diversity in TV.

Did you know that April 8 is the day in Queer History that all homosexuals were cured? Hahaha, we’re just kidding. It’s actually the day that homosexuality was removed from the DSM.

And speaking of queer folks, here’s an open letter to the TV industry about why we’re so fucking sick of straight white dudes.

In other TV news, Sachin Hingoo bids farewell to Broad City until next season with the hilarious “Jews on a Plane” and Laury Scarbro reveals how all hell breaks loose on Outsiders in the appropriately titled episode, “All Hell.”

May is the month when the long-awaited Season 3 of Peaky Blinders arrives on our TV screens. Did you know David Bowie was a fan of the show? Try to keep your eyes from leaking when you read about what he sent to the show’s lead actor, Cillian Murphy. (Here’s a recent, wonderful, career-spanning interview with Mr. Murphy that includes some lovely photos.)

Everyone is talking about the talking animals in The Jungle Book movie but don’t forget about Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to Blue Ruin, called Green Room. Brian Baker took the plunge and reviewed this ultraviolent, ultra-brilliant film. You might forget about Hardcore Henry after you see it, though, as Tyler Hodg remarks in his review.

Meanwhile, on the home video front, Jeffery X Martin tackles the “bad crazy” with Arrow’s reissue of Niko Mastorakis’s The Zero Boys, Sachin has warm fuzzies over the white foam in the Blu of ‘80s schlock horror The Stuff, and Melissa Bratcher is delighted that Bayou Maharajah, the doc about infamous New Orleans piano player James Booker, is finally available for everyone to see.

Bone Tomahawk was my favorite movie of 2015 but I’ve never seen one entry in Charles Band’s bizarrely legendary Puppet Master series, so imagine my surprise (and delight?) to learn that the director behind Bone Tomahawk is helming the Band-less Puppet Master reboot. Modern Horrors has the deets.

Oh, and if you’ve always wanted to delve into actor Sho Kosugi’s career, The ScreamCast can help with their most recent podcast, “A Show on Sho.”

It’s been just over a week and we’re still trying to come to terms with a world without Prince. Here’s a stupendous 2009 article from the L.A. Times about the side of Prince that most people in the public rarely saw. Then, lighten up with this hilarious YouTube video, a compilation of all the times that Prince threw shade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4k-d88BEsI&feature=youtu.be

We have a ton of new music for you to check out this week: Tim Murr raves over the David Lynch aura of Dark Palms’ Hoxbar Ghost Town and insists that Grindmother’s Age Of Destruction is not a novelty album; Melissa calls The Jayhawks’ Paging Mr. Proust “a record for the ages” and marvels at the depth and breadth of Cherry Red’s latest comp, Another Splash of Colour: New Psychedelia in Britain 1980 – 1985; while X comforts us with the fact that at least Rob Zombie is good at coming up with song and album titles.

Could it be that Ke$ha is finally free? Find out about this and the “boycott Beyonce” movement on Unicorn Booty’s latest installment of NOW HEAR THIS!

Since tomorrow is a Monday (groan!), here is something that might make the day go a bit faster: a list of 11 hilarious and slightly political celebrities that you must follow on Twitter.