COOP COOPER is an independently syndicated film critic with a split personality. His “Southern Side” prints mainstream reviews that appear in various print publications across the mid-south. His “Dark Side” from Los Angeles befouls the site with reviews of horror and grindhouse flicks. Welcome to the site where COOP’s two halves (and his contributors) review and debate the latest film/DVD releases…

I love the “paranormal”. Hell, I AM the paranormal and I don’t wait around for Halloween just to get excited about the subject. So when Coop inherited a box of crazy from an amateur paranormal researcher, I was giddy. GIDDY, I say. Now Coop ain’t tellin’ me much about what’s in The Box [cue organ music and mad scientist laughter], but he’s already found some groovy stuff from this rogue investigator named Wes Cotten. Formerly based out of Memphis, TN, Wes has gone AWOL and left a bunch of his research for his old friend Coop to wade through and do what he wants to with it, including Wes’s creepy website THE MAN BEHIND THE DOOR…

Every few years or so, a film comes along that changes the way you look at cinema… One that incites scholarly debates, spawns books dedicated to analyzing it and inspires lesser filmmakers to shamelessly imitate it. Critics have to watch a lot (a whole lot) of bad movies to find these diamonds in the rough. I had a sneaking suspicion “Inception” might be a “crown jewel” in the rough, but often when I get that feeling I shuffle out of the theater with nothing but lumps of coal in my pocket. Not this time…

(NOTE: Due to… 1. the Halloween Holiday 2. a trip out of state and 3. a lack of a working laptop, The Small Town Critic website will go on vacation until Nov. 4 when I will be bringing you a review of “Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day” – Coop)

Here’s a Halloween tip for those of you NOT particularly jazzed about seeing a horror movie in the theater. It might not be your thing, but sometimes you end up doing it; whether it’s your date choosing the movie, a group decision or it’s something you really want to see despite your aversion to acute fright…

I didn’t laugh until about 40 minutes into this artsy, awkwardly-styled independent film. There, if that didn’t scare you off, then you might enjoy this light and quirky story by Steven Soderbergh. You won’t be rolling in the aisles, but if you can wait for the tension to build, the laughs will come. It’s too bad Soderbergh couldn’t kick the humor off to an early start because a less patient audience would either fall asleep or walk out…

I dig viral marketing for its innovation and the way it can emmerse you further into a fictional experience. While it reaches only the most tech-savvy of fans, a good campaign can cause an overnight sensation and facilitate unprecedented levels of interest in a film that might have been ignored back in the days before the internet.
Studios have embraced the practice as well. They now dump a portion of their budget into creating viral marketing for their new releases. This works best for the genre flicks that have either a mythology or a mystery to work with. Let’s look at a few of the best and most successful viral campaigns out there and through the process, try to determine which strategies studios and film pioneers will use next…

Like some kind of evil sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fourth Kind takes real file footage from supposed alien abductees under hypnosis in Nome, Alaska and fictionalizes their stories for the silver screen.

Milla Jovovich plays Abby, a shrink who discovers a disturbing similarity in her patients’ nightmares. They all have visions of an owl at their window, paralysis, intense fear, yadda-yadda. The deeper she delves into this mystery, the scarier it gets. Under hypnosis, patients relive their terror as aliens…

Click HERE to download “The Small Town Critic’s Movie/Film Review Lesson Plan.”
It might surprise some of you that I was once a High School English teacher…
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Okay, now that you’re done laughing, I know how hard it can be to develop a lesson plan that will engage students, access their prior knowledge, allows for scaffolding and [...]

Looks like some eggheads at a university in Edinburgh (Heriot Watt University to be precise) have confirmed something I’ve hypothesised for years…
Romantic Comedies, A.K.A. “Rom-Coms,” while highly entertaining, give people unrealistic expectations about love and relationships. Read the article here.
My two cents?
Look at it this way: The writers that create these stories are often socially [...]

A very interesting study of a man whose real-life research broke sexual taboos in America.
Taking place in the 1940’s and 50’s, Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) is a brilliant scientist/college professor who bores his colleagues and students with 20 years of research on the gall wasp. Eventually he gets the opportunity to teach a sex education [...]