Birdemic
The opening scene of Birdemic: Shock and Terror- a winding drive filmed from the front seat of a car- is too long for its own good and doesn’t go anywhere all that interesting. This unfortunately sets the tone for the rest of this romantic thriller, written, directed and produced by James Nguyen. The acting is stilted and the romance between the two leads has the air of a prescription drug commercial. Add to this an overly exploited environmental message and it would appear that there’s little left to criticize about this film. And then there are the birds.      Alan Bagh plays Rod, a disaffected yet ambitious software salesman who barely has time to consecrate his relationship with Victoria’s Secret model Natalie (Whitney Moore) before... READ MORE >>>

The Good, The Bad, The Weird
So what's wrong with making a Korean version of a legendary spaghetti western (Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly)? After all, John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven is a retelling of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Leone's A Fistful of Dollars is Kurosawa's Yojimbo. In a way, it seems only fair, especially as talk persists of an unfortunate American remake of Chan-wook Park's great Oldboy.     And from a technical standpoint, The Good, The Bad, The Weird  is damned good. Hotshot South Korean director Ji-woon Kim telegraphs his slick intentions with an early shot – the camera follows an eagle as it swoops down, snatching a snake up from a set of railroad tracks just as a train comes roaring by, kicking off... READ MORE >>>

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
"I'm going to shove art down people's throats, without them even being aware of it," declares Samuel Bayer, the prolific commercial and music video director charged with rebooting A Nightmare on Elm Street for 2010. As quoted in a recent Los Angeles Times article, Bayer is an auteur who producer Michael Bay had to personally convince to take the job of remaking one of the great scare flicks of the 80's.        &nb sp;    For horror fans, the only "art" they're usually interested in is how convincingly the gore is churned out and sprayed across the screen. In this Nightmare, the bloody killings are unusually restrained (when compared to the wildly gory remakes... READ MORE >>>

Taxidermia
The story of three generations of men, over two centuries, filled with oddities and cringe worthy moments is the only way to describe Taxidermia.  This movie isn’t for the faint of heart nor is it for the typical foreign movie connoisseur.  All the way from the beginning to the end, the viewer is taken through completely unique stories, each, leaving the viewer either traumatized, questioning who could possibly write a movie like this and where they got their inspiration.   Taxidermia is the perfect movie for horror fans or for someone who craves a deranged story with a copious amount of gore and disturbing imagery.       The film takes place throughout three different generations and the... READ MORE >>>

After.Life
After.Life could have been a decent episode on The Outer Limits, but instead it’s a lost feature about being lost. Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci, Black Snake Moan) is a schoolteacher dissatisfied with everything: her boyfriend, Paul (Justin Long, Live Free, Die Hard), her hair color, her whole life.  That’s all we need to know about Anna before she gets into a fatal car wreck, and wakes up, dead, in Eliot Deacon’s (Liam Neeson, Schindler’s List) funeral parlor.  Deacon tries to counsel Anna into accepting her death, but is she really dead? The remaining hour and twenty minutes is spent guessing if Anna has really kicked the bucket, or if Deacon is playing a morbid trick on... READ MORE >>>