Sports movies in general have a formula they tend to follow in order to capture attention. First, they have to be about winners, otherwise most people don’t tend to give them any notice, at all. Who wants to cheer on a loser, right? Second, they have to have real conflict. Some are about the conflagration...

(Movie Review by Christiaan Harden) When Debbie Melnyk and Nick Caine, two self-proclaimed progressive liberal filmmakers, set out to make a biography celebrating Michael Moore, they began as admirers and fans. After discovering a number of otherwise unknown facts about his documentaries, however, they...

Originally titled “Pain Killer” (before a certain TV show got greenlit by the Sci Fi Channel), “Deaden” stars John Fallon as a former undercover cop who goes apeshit when his former bike gang invades his apartment, assaults him to within an inch of his life, rapes his pregnant...

There are certain films in which logic is some sort of abstract notion, something to be considered but never truly taken seriously. “Enter…Zombie King” is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, one of these films. It’s a giddy, weird effort that foregoes any attempts at reasonable thought...

If there’s one thing about Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali that you can take to the bank, it’s that the guy really, really likes to make movies that challenge him as a director. No one gets better mileage out of so little than Natali, who has done wonders with the resource-challenged “Cube”,...

As a sequel to two cult favorites, “Ginger Snaps Back” (aka “Ginger Snaps 3: The Beginning”) is a 2½-star film. As a standalone movie without any ties to the series, it manages 3 stars. Unfortunately for the film, everyone knows it’s the third installment of Canada’s...

Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali burst onto the movie scene with the release of “Cube”, but has since moved onto bigger (although not necessarily better) things ala the big-budgeted “Cypher”. “Elevated” is a 1997 short film by Natali, running 20 minutes total, with...

“Abandon hope all who enters.” This should be the tagline for the “Ginger Snaps” franchise because it fits the films to a “T”. There is almost no hope, no ray of light, not even a sparkle of possibility in any of the two films. And that’s exactly what makes them...

Paul Pedrosa, who plays the improbably named Shahrokh, gets a bullet in the head ala Fulci’s “Zombie” in “Meat Market 2’s”opening scene, thus depriving the viewer of the only actor in the whole “Meat Market” series who can actually act. This leaves us with...

Writer/director Jesse Warn’s “Nemesis Game” is a mild diversion. It’s not bad enough to be useless, but it’s also not quite good enough to surpass average. Wait, does that make sense? Well yes, if you’ve seen “Nemesis Game”, which stars Carly Pope as Sara,...

I know it’s something of a cheat to call Brian Clement’s zombie opus “Meat Market” a foreign film, since while the film is made by Canadians in (most likely) Canada, it’s not really a “Canadian movie”. The questionable cataloging of the movie aside, “Meat...

Deepa Mehta’s “Bollywood/Hollywood” is so obviously a parody of Hollywood romantic comedies and Bollywood melodrama that once you realize this, everything else is irrelevant. Like the South Korean movie “Resurrection of the Little Match Girl”, “Bollywood/Hollywood”...

If you decide to watch “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter”, you will bear witness to the following: (And depending on your level of taste or sense of humor, you will either weep at how bad the movie is, or chuckle at how bad the movie is. Either way, you’ll come to the conclusion that this...

I’m not entirely sure when I personally took notice of the Redemption Sports Movie, but I’d say it started with Disney’s “The Mighty Ducks”, although it’s reasonably certain the genre goes way back. The Canadian movie “Men With Brooms” is as standard a...

In what can only amount to cosmic irony, movies have begun to use the popularity of Reality TV as inspiration for their own plot; if Reality TV was meant to satirize real life, movies are now satirizing Reality TV as a false vehicle for satirizing real life. Get it? “Series 7: The Contenders”...

The opening shots of Ginger Snaps — the identical lifeless homes of a planned community, where lots are still available for $125,000 each — says it all. The Fitzgerald sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, lives in this community, and both are outcasts by virtue of their personalities. They’re...

“Cube” is a strange, but good, movie. It’s one of the more creative movies I’ve seen in a long time. The film is Canadian in origin, and was finished, I believed, with the help of money raised to help Canadian filmmakers. I’m sure there’s a name for this particular...