// Category Archive for: Reviews

SXSW Movie Review: The Greasy Strangler

By Brad Henderson

If Tim and Eric made an R-rated Napoleon Dynamite-esque movie, that’s exactly what The Greasy Strangler would be.

Sometimes it feels that The Greasy Strangler isn’t even a movie, but an overall test of what one person can endure. It also feels like this would be a good social experiment to show your friends and see if they remain friends with you afterwards. That said, The Greasy Strangler is hilarious, sleazy, slimy, and just a fucking weird comedy that actually exists in this world and it’s perfect.

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TV Review: Lucha Underground S3 E08, “Life After Death”

By Sachin Hingoo

It’s a gigantic week in Lucha Underground, friends. After last week’s outstanding triple-threat match between champion Mil Muertes, Pentagón Jr., and Prince Puma, Fenix cashed in his Gift of the Gods title shot which is our main event for tonight. Let’s also hope that the inter-gender content will be handled better this week, because we have a Trios title match between the Disciples of Death and the team of Son of Havoc, Angelico, and Ivelisse that should be pretty good.

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TV Review: Outsiders S1 E06, “Weapons”

By Laury Scarbro

A bit of news for fans of the show: Outsiders has been renewed for a second season as of March 11. Ged ged yah!

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Music Review: Haircut 100, Pelican West

By Melissa Bratcher

It is a well-known, scientific fact that Haircut 100’s debut album, Pelican West, is the happiest album that ever existed (I just made that up, but hear me out). It’s full to the brim with sunny melodies, bold bursts of brass, and a weird but genius marriage of tropicalia and funk, with a dash of jazz thrown in. It’s a stunner of a debut, a fully-formed, exactly perfect right out of the gate album. It’s crushing, then, that by the time Haircut 100 returned to the studio to record a followup, the band was in tatters. Lead singer Nick Heyward had one foot out the door on his way to a solo career. Haircut 100 soldiered on, but it just wasn’t the same.

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TV Review: The Walking Dead S6 E13, “The Same Boat”

By Laury Scarbro

Remember last week I asked the question “How the hell do you get the drop on Carol and Maggie?” This week answers that question, but presents others.

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Music Review: Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music

By Melissa Bratcher

You can always rely on Numero Group to unearth incredible, forgotten music. You know that music: the kind of stuff you pick up in a flea market because it costs a quarter and has a cover with a lady sporting huge hair and a necklace made of spoons. The kind of albums that were perhaps self-released or on the tiniest label. Hidden gems, for sure.

Numero’s newest compilation, Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music is a trip through the cut-out bins. Here are tracks that, despite not being breakthroughs for the artists, still have merit. It’s Americana, and it’s indie as anything. Maybe the artists weren’t signed to a big label. Maybe they made the record in one of those booths at a fair. Maybe they had a song that they really needed to record for serious reasons.

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Movie Review: Baskin

By Jeffery X Martin

The new Turkish movie by Can Evrenol, Baskin, is one of the best horror movies of the decade so far. It intrigues, it horrifies, it disgusts, but it is never anything but an excellent example of how to make nightmares come to life on screen.

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TV Review: Lucha Underground S2 E07, “Death Comes In Threes”

By Sachin Hingoo

Despite watching this show every week, there are some things about the Lucha Underground product that I’ve glossed over a bit since I started writing these reviews. Lucha Underground features stories and matches that I think we can all agree give reality a pretty wide berth; all of their storylines have an outlandish quality to them. Their potentially problematic (to say the least) choice to feature intergender matches even in this unbelievable universe has earned them some flack, however. Lucha’s handling of matches and angles like this hasn’t been perfect, but it’s mostly been OK because the matches between women and men are presented in a fast-paced, more athletic style that’s not as violent as “hardcore” wrestling can be.

Tonight’s episode is different. We all have our lines, and seeing a woman–in this case, Taya Valkyrie–suplexed off the ring apron and through a table, and then again taking Cage’s Weapon X finisher onto broken glass (it is very clearly prop glass, made of sugar, but the visual is disturbing) steps way over that line for me.

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Music Review: Soft Fangs, The Light

By Brian Baker

When an artist uses “fangs” in its name, you expect a body of work with teeth. For Soft Fangs, a nom-de-plume for Brooklyn, N.Y. denizen John Lutkevich, his debut full-length album, The Light, is lacking that necessary bite.

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TV Review: Broad City S3 E04, “Rat Pack”

By Sachin Hingoo

“The Rat Pack! With Fred Sinatra! And they’d sing acapella and watch each other fuck!”–Ilana

A rat infestation in your apartment is certainly both a common and disgusting problem to have, but Broad City treats this as a catastrophic event that upends Ilana’s entire life and serves as the catalyst for a medium-sized and hilariously low-rent party. Though we see our titular rodent stealing weed, ruining Lincoln’s masterpiece of a sandwich, and chewing through Jaime’s clothes, ultimately Ilana learns that she has more in common with her unwanted visitor than she realizes.

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