“Foot Chase” felt like a return to the “just okay” Justified of season one. It wasn’t a bad episode by any stretch, though; I enjoyed the banter and gradually increasing trust between Raylan and Sheriff Shelby (the more airtime for Jim Beaver, the better). And the suggestion that Josiah might actually be Drew was a…
The Devil’s Rejects is Rob Zombie’s sorta-sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. Its concept is genius: take the psychotic, white trash murder-family from the first film and send them out on the road, pursued by police. Sadly, the execution leaves much to be desired. Zombie abandons the attention-deficit style of 1000 Corpses for a more…
Some horror films succeed thanks to a carefully constructed atmosphere of dread, conveyed through a minimalist soundtrack and disconcerting cinematography. Others succeed with nuanced, subtle performances in a bare-bones, unsettling story. House of 1000 Corpses isn’t one of those films. Its cinematography is all over the place: Zombie knows where to place a camera, but…
This week’s Spartacus episode was in many ways a “typical” Spartacus episode – a good stretch of the running time was spent at a drunken party, filled with female and male nudity, a handful of sex scenes and, of course, bouts of violence born of mistrust or competitiveness. The conclusion went from a confrontation between…
“I want everything. I want all the things.” Tonight’s episode of Girls impressed me with the show’s ability to capture those unreal, fleeting moments where things just happen, one after the other, extraordinary events, moments that seem unreal and make a great (if slightly unbelievable) story a year later. It might be a whirlwind marriage…
Community’s season four premiere carries the weight of expectation, given it is the show’s first episode without Dan Harmon as showrunner. The new showrunners address this head-on with a broad parody of Community as a laugh-track-heavy, multi-cam sitcom. It’s supposed to be clever, but is instead remarkably clumsy, and it’s telling that it doesn’t seem…
Return of the Living Dead is the epitome of the B-movie. It’s an honest-to-goodness classic, stuffed with campy humour, cheap yet effective special effects and the first appearance of now-ubiquitous zombie movie tropes like zombies that run rather than shamble and groan “Braaaaains…” It’s full of funny moments: a young punk girl gets involved with…
The title of this review is misleading, as Bomb the Music Industry! were supporting Melbourne lads The Smith Street Band (alongside The Bennies and Toy Boats), but given I left the venue before those guys started playing, I’m going to treat it as a BtMI! gig. They put on a boisterous, shambling, living-room-jam of a…
Justified’s typically laconic pace shifts into second gear in “Kin,” with the mysterious Drew Thompson suddenly getting everyone interested in finding him. Raylan wants to find Drew to stop Arlo getting out of prison, Boyd wants to find him for a hefty reward from Wynn Duffy, who’s after Drew because Dixie mafioso Nick Augustine wants…
Spartacus is a series that’s always made good use of Australian and New Zealand actors and in the second, middling quality episode of Season 3 it introduces a couple new Australasians to the fold. The first addition is Anna Hutchison (Underbelly, Cabin in the Woods) who plays Laeta, introduced to show the human toll of…
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