Year: 2003

Oh those wild wacky passionate kids of New York City’s High School for the Performing Arts! They’re enough to make you remember that there were actually good aspects to being a teenager, like the scary, wonderful process of finding out who you are and what you can be. Following a gang of wannabe actors and … more…

So this is what we’ve come to: bad *SNL* flicks about characters who never even appeared on *SNL.*

It’s nowhere near the revelation his Dances with Wolves was, but Kevin Costner’s thematic sequel to that groundbreaking revisionist Western again explores the closing of the American frontier and the ensuing culture clash. Butting heads here are a powerful rancher (Michael Gambon: Charlotte Gray) who’s claimed an enormous spread for himself — and has the … more…

There’s evil, and then there’s *Marci X.* I can’t even begin to imagine how twisted must be the alternate universe that spawned this debacle — but as a start, it’s gotta feature lots of evil-Spock goatees and people wearing daggers on their belts and Shakespeare’s great speeches turned all harsh and mean. Only way to explain this movie. Yes, it must have fallen into our spacetime continuum from elsewhere, a Bad Place where Hollywood executives knife each other in the back for a percentage. No, I mean literally.

You’d like to be able to laugh at that twist at the psychosexual subtext of these horror flicks — the Creeper suggestively licks, with a long, slithery, reptilian tongue, the window of the bus while he eyes one hunky football player inside; instead of punishing horny teens for fornicating, like his brothers in predation, the Creeper’s gonna get him some. You’d like to be able to laugh except that, in the most noteworthy twist, Victor Salva is a convicted child molester, and so the whole psychosexual subtext is far more jeepery creepy than it should be.

Seriously, though, Blackout ’03 was surely the work of some desperate humanitarian who flipped a big red switch somewhere in the Northeast U.S. in a valiant attempt to keep as many good people as possible from having their hearts and minds and souls besmirched by *Uptown Girls.* Were you unable to see *Uptown Girls* because you were stuck in a small, stuffy elevator for 12 hours? Count yourself among the lucky.