14 Mar 2006

Radioactive Blast: "The Hills Have Eyes," "The Libertine," "Failure to Launch," and "Ultraviolet"

By Mike Schulz

THE HILLS HAVE EYES

The setup for The Hills Have Eyes - Alexandre Aja's remake of Wes Craven's 1977 horror classic, with Craven himself on board as a producer - couldn't be simpler. A vacationing family, headed for California, stops for gas at a filling station near an abandoned nuclear-testing site in New Mexico. The station's gnarled and suspiciously friendly attendant guides them to a shortcut. The shortcut is a trap, set by the attendant and a family of horribly mutated, not-entirely-inhuman cannibals. And from there on, the plot boils down to three words: Us Against Them.

01 Jul 2003

These "Angels" are a Joyously Ridiculous Spectacle: "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," "28 Days Later," and "From Justin to Kelly"

By Mike Schulz

CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE

Everything I loathed about the original Charlie's Angels movie - the Matrix-as-shampoo-commercial direction of McG, the beyond-senseless plotting, the "Are we hot or what? " imperiousness of Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu - is back in spades in the franchise's sequel Full Throttle, but this time, it worked for me.

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