Wednesday 19 Jun
 
 

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Unlike many moviegoers, 17-year-old farm girl Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell, The Day) has no memory of the events of The Last Exorcism, a found-footage smash of three years prior. The Last Exorcism Part II finds her taking steps to build life anew, beginning in a boarding house for troubled girls, where the deeply devout Nell is exposed to such heretofore corrupting influences as lipstick and rock music and YouTube and cotton candy.
06/19/2013 | Comments 0

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Suspense novelist Jeffery Deaver once praised the short-story format, writing that the minimal time investment on the part of the reader allows the writer to get away with endings he or she cannot in the long form. In other words, the writer can be meaner, more devious. He's absolutely right, and the theory applies wholesale to The ABCs of Death, more or less a horror anthology depicting "26 ways to die."
06/19/2013 | Comments 0

Ninja III: The Domination

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06/14/2013 | Comments 0

Dead Souls

With Dead Souls, we can prove something about the Chiller cable network's original features that Remains could not: Source material is not to blame for their pervasive generic nature — it's the economy, stupid.
06/11/2013 | Comments 0
Home · Articles · Movies · Comedy · Knights of Malice
Comedy

Knights of Malice


Rod Lott February 22nd, 2012  

Knights of Malice
8-11 p.m. Saturday
City Arts Center
3000 General Pershing
cityartscenter.org
951-0000
$5

While “Knights of Malice” is not the best effort from local director Mickey Reece and his version of the Mercury Theatre players, it carries the most distinctive opening: that of the “Star Wars” crawl.

Turns out, there’s a reason for the Jedi-rific reference, but I leave that for audiences to discover when the film debuts Saturday at City Arts Center. As usual, Reece has turned his premiere into a party, with free beer from Titswiggle Brewing Co. and the requisite musical guest, Joey Paz of Norman band Luna Moth.

In “Malice,” mild-mannered Joan (Stacey Cunningham), a night-shift receptionist at a bail bond office, shares fluids with slacker Tucker (Jacob Ryan Snovel), but no emotions or information. Instead, her heart belongs to her Don Draper-channeling boss, Jack (Dustin Sanchez).

Being introverted, Joan doesn’t let him know, so her sexy, snooty pal (Rebecca Cox) does something about it: She seduces Jack, who belies his clean-cut image by asking for dirty talk and to be spit upon. So begins a skewed, dangerous love triangle, or quadrangle, or perhaps something that isn’t quite a shape. At times, Reece’s narrative is equally malformed, as if it tries to be two to three things at once, with no single approach winning out.

Still, it’s tough to dislike. Cox and Rhianan Hilliard are hilarious as Joan’s oil-and-water friends. Their dialogue and others’ remain sardonically smart — witness: “Sounds like an international best-selling trilogy written by Stephen King if he had a stroke and started writing novels for pedophiles,” and “Let’s not kid ourselves: You have the physical attributes of a snapping turtle.”


 
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