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The Voyeurs

  • Title: The Voyeurs
  • IMDb: link

The Voyeurs

The Voyeurs is an thrill-less tale of a naïve couple too cute for their own good (Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith) who become obsessed watching their neighbor’s (Ben Hardy) sexual antics from their apartment window. Dragged down by a sluggish pace, questionable acting, and an increasingly absurd storyline, the movie from writer/director Michael Mohan is barely salacious let alone the erotic thriller it aspires to be. The Voyeurs is flaccid for most of its two-hour run-time.

After meeting their neighbor’s wife (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), who they’ve watched the photographer cheat on with a revolving door of models he’s brought into the apartment, Pippa (Sweeney) becomes overly invested in what’s occurring across the street leading to a series of bad decisions, and insane twists (each less believable than the last), before the movie mercifully comes to an end.

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Zoom

  • Title: Zoom
  • IMDb: link

ZoomThrowback Tuesday takes us back to the box office and critical failure of 2006’s super-hero comedy Zoom. The film stars Tim Allen as a former teen super-hero brought back to the secret government program 30 years later to help train a new generation of heroes (Michael Cassidy, Kate Mara, Spencer Breslin, and Ryan Whitney). As with most of these team hero tales, about half of the powers turn out to be useful while the rest are used mainly for comic relief (although rarely for big laughs).

The supporting cast is made up of over-the-top characters in charge of the program played by the likes of Courteney Cox, Chevy Chase, and Rip Torn. Unaware of the looming threat (which turns out to be his long lost brother, played by Kevin Zegers, driven insane by government testing), and resenting being drafted into service against his will, Allen is stuck is schmuck mode for the first-half of the film.

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Subnormal

  • Title: Subnormal
  • IMDb: link

SubnormalThe British documentary from director Lyttanya Shannon looks back at a time when immigrant children with dark skin were being disproportionately labeled “educationally subnormal” and sent to special ESN schools where their chance at a proper education was drastically reduced. Including interviews from former students, their parents, educators, and advocates who helped bring the situation to light, Subnormal offers an intriguing look back a story that cuts to the heart of racism and disenfranchisement.

Although short, and a times a tad dry given the shocking subject matter, the documentary is informative delving into  the schools which started in the 1940s and only stopped because of investigation and activism in the 1960s and 1970s that the British Government eventually could no longer ignore.

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Love and Monsters

  • Title: Love and Monsters
  • IMDb: link

Love and MonstersIt may seem weird to call a story centered around a 23 year-old man a coming of age story, but that’s exactly what Love and Monsters offers. Seven years after the end of the world, with people huddling in bunkers hiding from a wide assortment of mutated monsters roaming the earth, the cowardly Joel (Dylan O’Brien) decides to do something completely against his nature and travel 85 miles across the monster-infested post-apocalyptic landscape to find his girlfriend Aimee (Jessica Henwick) who he last saw seven years ago.

Narrated by the self-deprecating Joel who is both aware of his shortcomings and determined to overcome them, we follow the young man’s journey where he’ll face gruesome monsters and run into an assortment of odd characters including an unlikely pair of survivors (Michael Rooker and Ariana Greenblatt) living on the surface, a robot, and a dog.

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If Looks Could Kill

  • Title: If Looks Could Kill (1991)
  • IMDb: link

If Looks Could Kill

Released six years before Mike Myers would bring Austin Powers to life in a spy parody about a man literally out of time, Richard Grieco stars as a high school student thrust into the spy world in the most unlikely way possible. Flashback Friday looks back at 1991’s If Looks Could Kill.

The movie has a little bit of everything for Bond fans including Linda Hunt in the role of an evil henchwoman playing homage to Lotte Lenya‘s Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love. We also get Roger Rees as the typical evil businessman seeking world domination, plenty of spy gadgets, beautiful women including Gabrielle Anwar and Geraldine James, fast cars, and a tongue-in-cheek plot where the villain is literally crushed to death by his own greed.

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