In 10 Words or Less
Good intentions plus celeb cameos don't make a good movie

Note: Images in this review are for illustrative purposes only, and do not reflect the quality of the disc.

The Movie
As someone who is friends with a number of people in and around the film industry, I am well aware of the effort it takes to make an independent film. It's legitimately hard work, and above the money it takes, there's an incredible investment of time involved, not just on your part as the filmmaker, but for everyone you manage to get to work with you. As such, there is nothing wo...Read the entire review

Sometimes indie films turn out to be just a couple friends from film class who stumbled upon some money and decided to make a movie. Such seems to be the case with Earthrise. It's hard to judge it as an indie flick, or even low-budget sci-fi, although it falls into both of those categories. It's hard to judge it as a film at all actually, since it really is three characters attempting & failing to act within the confines of a plot that's no more thought out than a scene from a hat thrown out as improve in the middle of class. I've seen great sci-fi and I've seen awful e sci-fi, hilarious 80s sci-fi and sci-fi with all the techno...Read the entire review

The Film:
There are inherent expectations that come when the title of a movie is Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! - Strippers vs. Zombies. Mind you, those expectations aren't necessarily all that high--in fact they should be rather low--but the expectations are there none the less. First and foremost, it is not at all unreasonable to expect a movie called Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! - Strippers vs. Zombies to have lots of zombies and a fair amount of strippers as well. Now, exactly how many zombies and how many strippers a person thinks will fill the quota is something each individual must determine on their own. But as far as I'm concerned, if you show me a movie with the title Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! - Strippers vs. Zombies that runs 82 minutes, I want at least thirty minutes of gratuitous nudity and forty minutes of zombie related mayhem, which leaves approximately twelve ...Read the entire review

THE STRAIGHT DOPE:
The swing revival is done and over with leaving a lot of cherry poppin' daddies with no place to shake their two-tone shoes. Director Brian Johnson's film Pop was filmed in 1997 and released in 1999 but it's only hitting DVD now. Still, this swanky throwback to the slickster era has enough pep and goofy charm to outlive its moment of cultural relevancy.

Billed as a cross between The X-Files and Scooby Doo, Pop tells the story of Nora (Elisa Donovan of the Clueless and Sabrina the Teenage Witch TV series) and Nick (Peter Paige from Queer as Folk), co-workers at the Oppenheimer labs. This light-hearted pair of physicists find themselves caught up in a plot cooked up by various shadowy government agencies to find their co-worker Hugo, who seems to have stolen something called the Fat Boy Numeral. There is a lot of runn...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Bill Plympton never ceases to put a nasty smile on my face. There's something prurient and restlessly alive about his work—that shifting, herky-jerky colored-pencil animation that tends toward outrageous gore and sex played for laughs. Plympton is probably most famous for his brief interstitial work for MTV, but his best films are those that sprout from his own fertile imagination. Plympton's feature film Mutant Aliens falls squarely into the latter category.

Plympton has a unique visual style—he essentially repeats animated frames in groups of four. The result is an image that boasts a nervously alive quality that's somehow perfectly suited to his subject matter. Plympton dabbles gleefully in the grotesque, hacking his way through flesh with wild abandon, squishing faces, splaying bodies, emitting screams, and piling on other cartoon violen...Read the entire review

The movie

What do you do when your ownpersonal dream pulls you in a direction opposite to where your friends, yourparents, even your girlfriend want you to go? That's the dilemma facing BrianRoberts (Robbie Bryan) in The Stand-In: to follow the clearly markedpath toward law school, or head off into the wilderness of New York to pursuean acting career. This highly autobiographical film, based on writer and actorRobbie Bryan's own career, traces Brian's experiences as a struggling actor,including his interactions with "Mitchell K. Wolfe," a thinlydisguised Michael J. Fox.

The advertising seemsdetermined to shoehorn The Stand-In into the "romantic comedy"genre, but the film's strength lies more in its independent nature: it doesn'treally fit into a cookie-cutter mold of either comedy...Read the entire review

Movie: Over the last 40 years or so, I've seen countless treasure hunt movies. Some of them were big budget and others were throwaway movies made for television or cable. I think the reason so many of them are made has to do with the universal dream most of us have about living on easy street after such a discovery. Whether it's Spanish treasure in the Florida Keys, pirate treasure (see Goonies), or Nazi Germany's war loot from WWII, most of us have probably seen a number of these movies. The Devil's Keep is another movie in this vein.

In the movie, two young high school students, played by Danny Perkin and Gathering Marbet, get involved in a treasure hunt for some of the gold hidden in the waning days of Nazi Germany after Jeff's neighbor, an elderly man with an obviously dark past, provides him with a small box. The neighbor dies and Jeff decides to get some help deciphering the pieces of pa...Read the entire review

Movie: Anyone who lived in the 1970's will probably remember the punk music movement. Out of the desperate times and in response to the glossy styles of the times, a revival of various anarchist themes came about. The 1980's saw a lot of these movements go underground as the very conservative political times took charge. In light of various rulings by the FCC, a number of radio, television, and other media outlets were turned into corporate shills in a quest for profits. Anarchy TV is a movie made based (very slightly) on a real life event where some anti-everything protestors took over a public access station. In this version, a religious leader decides to spread the gospel and close down a station run by fringe elements that he wants silenced. There's no real story here but the vignettes were often way overdone stereotypes of how some activists apparently think are every day occurrences.

The...Read the entire review

The Movie:

A minor, very minor footnote in the slasher genre, Unhinged finds renewed life, so to speak, via DVD release from IndieDVD.

It offers a simple, derivative tale. Three college girls head off for a rock festival (though that fact is hardly made clear). During their chatty trip, they drive off the road for some reason and when they wake up find they are guests in a creepy house (Portland, Oregon's tourist attraction the Pittock Mansion). The household is overseen by an angry woman in a wheelchair and her daughter Marion (J. E. Penner). When the three (only three) girls start vanishing, there is a small sum of suspects to confound the viewer: the wheelchair bound matriarch, a mustachioed gardener, and?that's it. Slowly the girls are picked off one by one, and in the film's final scene, the remaining girl confronts evil, learning the ghast...Read the entire review