What do you get when two different kinds of horror movies collide? One answer is The Millennium Bug, which combines your typical monster/alien thrill ride with the increasingly popular “Help! I’ve been abducted by crazed rednecks!” brand of horror movie nightmare. It's better if you think of this film as Alien meets Wrong Turn.

Last week I got a chance to chat with Lindsey Shaw. She's just celebrated her return to Pretty Little Liars as the fan-favorite Paige. She's also staring in a nice little thriller out from Anchor Bay. The film is Love Me and you can listen in to what she had to say to me about her career and the film. Bang it here to listen to my chat with Lindsey Shaw

 

If Compliance weren’t based on true events, the film’s plot would immediately be dismissed as implausible and insulting of its audience’s intelligence. (Same with Argo.) As the story of an incredibly committed prank caller and his unwitting prey progresses, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll repeatedly roll your eyes. There’s an even better chance the eye rolling will be followed by a feeling of outrage — definitely toward the caller, but maybe even toward the gullible victims — when you remember this stuff actually happened.

Spongebob Squarepants, the flagship cartoon for Nickelodeon for the last few years, has been churning out DVD specials inbetween releases of complete seasons. Sometimes these are linked by a theme (such as the Halloween DVD I reviewed in October https://upcomingdiscs.com/2012/10/15/31-nights-of-terror-spongebob-squarepants-ghouls-fools/ and this would mean taking episodes from numerous seasons. This particular special mostly contains more recent episodes, all of which have some sort of "extreme" or somewhat violent/action oriented story.

Chris Hardwick is a card carrying, flag-waving nerd. He is very proud of said nerdiness and has devoted the lion's share of his career expressing this. Probably best known for his various hosting duties, especially for the Nerdist podcasts, Hardwick gets to display his stand-up chops in his first, full-length DVD special and he does not disappoint.

"You don't want to take the silver, you take the lead".

He always told us he'd be back. After spending some years in the real world in the California governor's mansion, Arnold Schwarzenegger is indeed back...back in the reel world where he belongs. And if The Last Stand is any indication, it appears Arnie hasn't missed a beat. In fact, he's showing a bit of maturity in his acting that I honestly never would have believed possible back in the early days. Here Arnie's more Dirty Harry than Terminator. Throw in a little modern Spaghetti Western and more than a little help from Korean director Jee-woon Kim and you have a pretty tasty treat.

Sometimes a movie comes along that simply has so much to say that two hours simply isn’t enough to flesh it out to its full potential.  Broken City is a film that is filled with many great characters and story threads that needed more than just the 109-minute running time to tie everything all together.  Broken City is more than just a film about a private eye trying to take down a corrupt mayor.  Every character involved has something to gain from winning an upcoming election and even more to lose depending on the results.  The same can be said about any election.

TNT prides itself on “knowing drama,” but as far as I’m concerned the network’s best series was also its most woefully underappreciated. It didn’t have any cops, lawyers or doctors. It wasn’t as light or slick as some of the channel’s hits like The Closer (cops), Franklin & Bash (lawyers) and Rizzoli & Isles (a cop AND a doctor; don’t make me guess which is which). It didn’t have aliens (Falling Skies) or impossibly charismatic crooks (Leverage). Instead, Men of a Certain Age dealt with a topic that is much less fun to think about, yet happens to 100 percent of us: getting older.

Shout Factory this week releases a Jackie Chan double feature that I can actually stand behind and say, “Yes, buy this.”  Chan has been churning out movies since the early 60’s, and with a rumored retirement looming, soon we’ll only have his vast catalog of films to gush and cringe over.  Though I think it is safe to say his body could use a break; after all, how many broken bones has this man sacrificed all in the name of cinema?

Do you realize how much you’re affected by advertising? Branded attempts to answer this question while showing us where our world is headed if the trend continues. Mishka Galkin (Ed Stoppard, The Pianist) is Russia’s advertising whiz kid. When Mishka meets Abby (Leelee Sobieski, 88 Minutes, The Wicker Man), they immediately become friends, despite the fact that she is the niece of Bob Gibbons (Jeffrey Tambor, TVs Arrested Development, the Hellboy movies), Mishka’s boss.