Let’s hurry up and kill mommy because I got to get to Hot Topic and buy more Jack Skellington gear!
Killing Mommy means we’re going to have a whole theme of Lifetime Killing _____ movies (as we’ve already had Killing Daddy!), so get ready for Killing Baby, Killing Granny, and Killing Curt Schilling! This film gives us twin sisters both played by Yvonne Zima, which gives her plenty of time to chew the scenery and make this a ridiculous Lifetime flick to remember, so let’s hope it lives up to the promise! She’s already managed to be Lifetime deranged in The Girl He Met Online, so it will be double the fun! Don’t worry, one of the twins will be the gothiest goth who ever gothed, just in case you need help telling them apart.
When their mother announces her plans to remarry and sell the family estate, twin sisters Juliana and Deb have different reactions to the news. Juliana feels her mother will continue to support her, while Deb begins to threaten her mother’s happiness to the point of threatening her life.
Killing Mommy stars Yvonne Zima, Claire Rankin, Garrett Hnatiuk, Rob Stewart, Vanessa Zima, Emily Galley, and Ellora Patnaik. It’s directed by Curtis Crawford (Killing Daddy) and Anthony Lefresne (Guilty at 17 ), and written by Trent Haaga (Killing Daddy). I hope the two directors thing doesn’t mean there is something wrong with the film.
Killing Mommy premieres Saturday, June 11 on Lifetime!
Lifetime shows it still has some great titles to play around with in You May Now Kill the Bride (aka The Stepsister), the latest in their genre of movies about obsessed stalkers who turn to murder in order to get what they want. This time a stepsister is upset that her stepbrother is getting married and decides instead of catching the bouquet, she’s going to make the bride catch a knife to the chest. Perhaps this will make a good double feature with Kill Bill? Okay, maybe not, but it looks like it will have some great Lifetime moments, and if you are into that sort of thing (and why wouldn’t you be if you are reading this?) then it will be awesome!
I for one can’t wait until You May Now Kill the Bridezilla gets greenlit for Halloween!
Nicole and Mark get engaged, but his stepsister believes she has a claim on him and is willing to do anything to be his bride.
You May Now Kill the Bride stars Tammin Sursok, Ashley Newbrough, Rocky Myers, Jaci Twiss, Shannon Engemann, and Aubrey Reynolds. It is directed by Kohl Glass (Dragonfyre/Orc Wars) and written by Blaine Chiappetta (Dangerous Lessons)
You May Now Kill the Bride premieres Saturday, June 4th on Lifetime!
1987 Screenplay by Jeff Franklin
Story by Jeff Franklin, Stuart Birnbaum, and David Dashev
Directed by Carl Reiner
At one point Summer School was a cable staple, but I first saw it as a lad probably in ’88 or ’89 during a Showtime free preview weekend on cable. You see, we had HBO and Cinemax, but not Showtime, which meant there was a huge chunk of films that we didn’t have the pleasure of watching a billion times. Summer School was one of those, but it was also popular enough it was used to entice people to sign up for Showtime, which we never did, but we did watch their free films. After that, I managed to miss it the hundreds of other times it played on the TBS/TNT/USA channels, until 27 years later when it was screened in an theater again.
Summer School was actually part of a Dean Cameron triple-feature that also saw Ski School and Rockula played at a Midnites for Maniacs event at the San Francisco New Mission Theater. Not only was there three Dean Cameron movies playing, but Dean Cameron himself was there to regale us with a few tales of his career and filming these pictures. Summer School is both an artifact of the time and a harbinger of the future where school testing has become controversial. The kids here being unmotivated high school students who failed a required basic skills test they need to graduate and their teacher. Freddy Shoop is the gym teacher more interested in having fun and summer vacation than teaching, but he’s roped into the summer school gig because he’s up for tenure. His girlfriend goes off to Hawaii without him, and Mr. Shoop now has a room full of rambunctious kids and no desire to be a responsible adult. It’s fun seeing Marc Harmon as the beach bum teacher when he’s now best known for headlining NCIS for a bajillion years, especially since he fills the fun-having teacher role so easily.
No good 80s film is without a stuffed shirt villain, and the vice-principal Phil Gills (Robin Thomas) fills that role nicely, being a constant thorn in Shoop’s side while also dating his love interest, Robin (Kirstie Alley). He is satisfyingly slimy and provides a great foil for the hero and students while putting in a good, cheesy performance that only rarely slips into cartoonish territory.
I can’t take a movie about maids seriously unless they wear stereotypical French maid outfits…
If you ever thought Lifetime would eventually run out of people to be obsessed with other people and then everything comes up murder, you can’t be more wrong. There is an endless supply of jobs for people to get obsessed with other people, hence The Maid bringing out someone who is close to the family but not part of the family. Hey, at least it isn’t the internet this time!
When 19-year-old Laura receives disturbing messages and threats, she believes she’s being stalked by her ex-boyfriend. But when the pranks follow her 3,000 miles home, she quickly finds out it is someone she’s never even met who has a bizarre reason for wanting her dead.
The Maid stars Kathryn Newton, Fay Masterson, Kenton Duty, Doug Haley, Castille Landon, and Lee Broda. It’s directed by Darin Scott (Megachurch Murder) and written by Christine Conradt (So much Lifetime it’s crazy!) Christine Conradt as the writer is pretty much a guarantee that this will be awesome, even if you didn’t think the topic of a maid becoming obsessed with a high school student and then going all murder spree on her wasn’t already awesome. Though I’d sort of question your interest in Lifetime movies if that was the case! Until I actually watch the film I won’t know how the power dynamic is going to play out, because situations where a rich family has a maid will usually cause me to sympathize with the maid, sometimes even if she tries to kill people.
The Maid premieres Saturday, May 28th on Lifetime!
Chinese cinema hit the news cycle recently, but not because of a new breakout hit or because another Hollywood studio added a big Chinese star for one line of a movie in order to try to get a share of their box office, but because of a movie that is basically a bootleg of a bigger budget movie. Cinemas in China will get what is basically a bootleg Warcraft film, called My Wow (aka 我的魔兽世界 which means My World of Warcraft)! My Wow is set to hit theaters before Warcraft does, and the costumes look shockingly familiar. The plot is completely different, as it features “A man gets transported to a fantasy world of warcraft, where the impossible occurs…”
So basically it’s that same story where someone gets transported into a fantasy world and becomes a hero, except this time the fantasy world looks suspiciously like World of Warcraft without actually being Warcraft. It also stars Jatfei Wong/Wong Yat-Fei, though he doesn’t play the fish out of water character. The image at the top of the article are the oddly suspicious costumes from the film.
If you bootleg fish out of water stories from China, then you might also be excited for the upcoming release of The Adventures of Panda Warrior, which is totally not Kung Fu Panda, don’t get any ideas!
A peace-loving soldier from Ancient China is magically transported into a world ruled by an evil nine-headed snake. Transformed into a panda, he joins forces with a flying pig to free the once-peaceful Merryland from tyranny. But first he must train to be the kingdom’s most courageous panda warrior.
If The Adventures of Panda Warrior seems vaguely familiar, that’s because you might have stumbled across a trailer for it when it was called The Adventures of Jinbao (大兵金宝) in 2012. Jackie Chan voices the panda, because The Adventures of Jinbao is actually a sequel to his 2010 movie Little Big Soldier. Sort of. It’s a sequel to a flash game sequel to Little Big Soldier called FLASH Little Big Soldier (FLASH大兵小將), hence following the art style for the very beginning before Jackie Chan’s character is turned into a panda. Of course, the US version trades Jackie Chan for Rob Schneider and Norm MacDonald. None of this should be confused with the other animated Kung Fu Panda ripoff, Little Panda Fighter, which is Brazilian but also awful.
Now if you want even more exciting stuff, April’s Crazy Toy City (疯狂玩具城) mysteriously has a similar poster and title to Disney’s Zootopia, known in China as Crazy Animal City (疯狂动物城). This was roundly mocked on China’s internet, though the film itself seems to have little to do with Zootopia, instead following a boy who is transported to a toy-ruled city after mistreating his toys. So maybe it’s a sequel to Toy Story?
Whatever the case, I’m sure we’ll soon have many more very original films to talk about! Now I have to go watch Hollywood’s latest reboot of a prequel of a sequel of a remake.
I didn’t kill my husband, because someone else killed him first!
Those darn men are up to no good again, this time marrying women while having secrets of their own! Marriage of Lies features one such man, except for the fact that his secrets get him disappeared, and then his poor wife has to spend the rest of the film proving that she didn’t kill him. As he just disappeared instead of was found dead, I’m thinking a twist of him not being dead will happen. But we shall see.
Basically, I’m watching this one because Corin Nemec is in it. He plays one of the cops investigating the case, so his role might not be that big, but he always brings 110% and the film will be a thousand times better with him involved even if his role is very tiny. Beyond that, I can’t say much, the teaser barely showed anything and the plot line isn’t anything we haven’t seen a hundred times before. So it’s all up to the creative team to give us a winner!
When Rachel’s husband disappears, the police have one suspect: her. While trying to prove her innocence, she uncovers many secrets about the man she married.
Marriage of Lies is directed by Danny J. Boyle (The Assistant) and written by Brian D. Young (Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep) with contributions by Matt Hamilton (The Actress Diaries ). It stars April Bowlby, Corin Nemec, Ryan Bittle, Virginia Williams, Eric Scott Woods, and Madison Iseman.
Marriage of Lies premieres on Saturday, May 21st on Lifetime!
