Colin Hanks is a serial killer. If you watch Dexter on Showtime, you know that already. On Dexter, Hanks is playing a conflicted messenger of God who is dour and unhappy and under the control of another to do horrific and brutal murders. In Lucky, he seems more like a regular guy. That’s the kind of guy that Hanks normally plays. He is usually someone who is kind of smart and nerdy with a somewhat preppy and fussy edge. He is different than his father, Tom.

By Natasha Samreny

“Gee Dad, it's great to see you again. How'd you get your parole so soon?”

You can usually count on getting two things from the old Westerns – good guy versus bad guy, and a compelling storyline. While a nostalgic respect for this genre might drive me to bump up its score, I feel like a meaty third of the film was missing—sucked out from between dusty skeleton scenes, hastily chopped off and left forgotten on a reel cart somewhere.

His troops defeated and massacred, General Pang (Jet Li) staggers away from the battlefield, more dead than alive. After a brief by intense overnight encounter with a mysterious Lian (Xu Jinglei), he falls in with bandits headed up by Er Hu (Andy Lau) and Wu Yang (Takeshi Kaneshiro). He finds a renewed purpose in life with this group, and forges the band into a formidable fighting force, one that will play an ever greater role in shaping the conflicts that are dividing China. But the fellowship he forms with his blood brothers has a fatal flaw: as fate would have it, Lian is promised to Er Hu. Betrayal and tragedy lurk in the wings.

“In a blaze of blood, bones, and body parts, the vivacious young girl was instantly reduced to a tossed human salad... a salad that police are still trying to gather up... a salad that was once named Elizabeth.”

Ah, there is nothing that can bring an exploitation movie alive like the unhinged imagination of Frank Henenlotter.

The Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) has made a tidy living preaching the Gospel and working his specialty: exorcisms. But he has lost his faith and, along with it, his willingness to fleece the gullible. He does, however, acknowledge that an exorcism can prove psychologically beneficial if the recipient believes in the ceremony. All that said, Marcus wants out of the business, but he takes on One Last Case, and a film crew tags along with him to the backwoods (where else?), where the devout Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) is convinced that his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell) is possessed. Marcus slips into his routine, but soon discovers that there is is much more afoot here than he could have imagined.

 

The Toronto After Dark film festival has left it's claw marks all over the Big Smoke and in the fallout, audiences were floored by two feature length delights by Canadian film collective ASTRON-6. Father's Day, a revenge tale about a vigilante group tracking a “father-rapist,” and Manborg, a lo-fi, sci-fi epic about a cybernetically altered soldier facing the forces of Hell in the future, both made their Canadian theatrical premieres at TAD and have been receiving not but rave reviews since.

“Do you want to paaarrrty!”

If one loves zombies, one loves The Return of the Living Dead. This wonderful, unofficial sequel to Night of the Living Dead seamlessly combined horror and comedy in a way that has rarely been achieved. I would say the only other movie which did that as well was An American Werewolf in London. I had often heard stories in interviews about the insane experience making this movie was, but never knew the whole story. Or should I say stories?

Season 2 of the Tyler Perry-created series continues misadventures of Leroy Brown (David Mann), who, last season, opened up a seniors’ residence. This season has all the characters firmly in place, and the stage is set for no end of misguided schemes and misunderstandings, all of which conclude with lessons learned and heartstrings tugged.

Ken Burns has achieved a rare feat in the world of filmmaking: he makes clean, concise, uncontroversial documentaries and yet has somehow become a household name, or as close as any documentarian can get in this society. It also depends, I suppose, on the ratio your household's television is tuned in to PBS compared to, say, Spike TV.

Director Declan O’Brien created the right recipe for the gut wrenching blood-oozing tale that follows a group of friends that decide to go snowboarding during their winter break.

They make the ‘Wrong Turn’ and end up getting lost in a deadly storm with killers in their midst.