Tim Chiou Movies
A romantic trip to China turns into a lunar nightmare for a pair of happy newlyweds when their taxi driver ditches them in a remote village, and the locals offer them up as sacrifices for the menacing moon creatures that return to Earth annually to replenish their ranks. According to Chinese legend, the dead return to Earth on the seventh month of the lunar year, when the moon glows full in the night sky. America-born Yul (Tim Chiou) and his new wife Melissa (Amy Smart) had just arrived in China to meet Yul's family when their idyllic getaway takes a sudden turn for the worse. When night falls and their tour guide leaves them stranded in a darkened, boarded-up village, Yul and Amy quickly realize that this wasn't a planned stop. Once a year, the lunar creatures return to Earth in search of a sacrifice. Yul and Amy have just been offered up, and now in order to avoid being assimilated into the collective that pursues them through the darkened forest, they will have to survive until the morning light casts the frightful beasts back to the moon for another year. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
A mysterious magician has some very unpleasant secrets in this gory tale of terror. Edmund Bigelow (Kip Pardue) is the publisher of Cacophony Gazette, a journal that covers the cutting edge of art and performance in California. Jaded Bigelow thinks he's seen it all until he and his girlfriend Maggie (Bijou Phillips) take in a show by Montag the Magician (Crispin Glover), who with the help of his sidekick the Geek (Jeffrey Combs) delivers a stomach-turning show in which he brings volunteers on stage and dismembers them, only to have his victims stagger off stage at the end of the show, shaken but still very much alive. Bigelow soon becomes obsessed with Montag's show and wants to know more about him and his illusions, but he suspects that there might be more to the magician's show than he imagined when maimed bodies start appearing all over L.A., and with the help of his pals Jinky (Joshua Miller) and Dr. Chong (Brad Dourif) they discover the bizarre secret behind Montag's hold over his audience. Based on a cult-favorite gore film from Hershel Gordon Lewis, The Wizard of Gore also features several members of the contemporary burlesque troupe the Suicide Girls as Montag's volunteers. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kip Pardue, Bijou Phillips, (more)
- 2007
In the second episode of a three-part story arc, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) has fallen in the water at the scene of a horrendous ferryboat disaster, and is still among the missing. Izzie (Katherine Heigl) takes medical instructions by phone as she performs emergency cranial surgery on a victim trapped between two cars. George (T.R Knight) tells a mother that her son has been found safe so she would agree to undergo surgery--and now must conduct a frantic search for the boy. And while trying to mollify the victims' families, Alex forms an unusual bond with an unidentified pregnant woman (Elizabeth Reaser) who has sustained mulitple injuries. With all this going on, Cristina and Burke still find time to announce their upcoming wedding--only to start quarrelling the moment the words are out of their mouths. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 2006
A college freshman is quickly seduced into the wild life, only to realize too little too late that there's a high price to pay for living large. Jimmy Bravo has just moved into Chandler Hall. He's making some new friends, and in the blink of an eye he's gotten swept up in a heady haze of fraternities, sex, and drugs. Before long Jimmy and his friends are making a killing as dealers. But you can only make so much money selling marijuana alone, and it doesn't take long for them to realize that the real money is in hard drugs. Later, Jimmy meets his true love and decides to get out while the going is good. At first the sacrifices he makes are all for her, though by betraying her trust and his own integrity to make yet another sacrifice for his friends, Jimmy finds the typical college experience rapidly morphing into a life or death experience. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jesse Luke Dunn, Shanna Collins, (more)
- 2006
Chinese-American director Abraham Lim's ensemble comedy-drama The Achievers) hones in on five San Franciscan roommates in their mid-twenties, each one something of a misfit. The domino-like story commences when out-of-work resident and general ne'er-do-well Shingo (Akie Kotabe) forgets to pay the rent, spelling misery for everyone; this draws a notice-of-eviction (effective within one month) for all of the roommates. Shingo thus cooks up a plan to raise the monies by manufacturing thousands of Ecstasy pills, but that scheme turns into a debacle when another resident, the mousy Murphy (Dave Lee) mistakes them for allergy medication. Meanwhile, Ellen (Samantha Quan, the flat's third roommate, claims that she's attempting to save the day by arranging a new residence for everyone, but quietly plans to strike out on her own - realizing, on some level, that the end of her shaky interracial romance with a WASP (Troy Hauschild) and/or her tenuous office job, could spell personal misery. In another corner of the apartment sit. The picture's fourth and fifth roommates consist of Akira (Jennifer Willson), a young woman plagued by self-hatred who manifests it in a series of increasingly dangerous acts, and Indian-American technophile Trent (Bahldeep Parihar). Lim and Michael Golamco co-adapted Golamco's stage play of the same name. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dave Lee, Samantha Quan, (more)
