Posts by Brent Lorentson

Writer and director Steven R. Monroe has made a decent career in genre filmmaking and since his remake of I Spit on Your Grave gained some moderate success.  Monroe is one of those directors that I feel has a great film in him but the right project just hasn’t crossed his path.  Though many of his creative efforts have been on more meager budgets, Monroe still manages to pull together tight little films.  Unfortunately with Monika he may have bit off a little more than he should have with his new supernatural revenge film.

Despite the title, Reagan (Jason Wiles) is the “hero” of this revenge fueled romp.  Reagan takes off from Los Angeles to a small motel just of the Vegas strip.  Reagan isn’t your average everyday fellow, in fact he has a special gift, one that allows him to glimpse into the future.  These premonitions that haunt him revolve around a beautiful blonde Monika (Cerina Vincent) that he meets just outside of his friend’s motel room.  Rather than wait around for his friend, Reagan sets out for a good time on the town with Monika.  Unfortunately when Reagan wakes up the next morning it is only to discover that this heavenly night with this blonde beauty couldn’t have occurred since Monika was murdered the day before.

Love can have a strange effect on people and cause them to do things that range from the spectacular to the deranged.  The loss of a loved one can not only break a person’s spirit but send them to the depths of depression and despair from which they will never be able to recover, though most people tend to avoid the melodrama and just wallow in their heartbreak with a couple of beers or a pint of their favorite ice cream.  But what is one supposed to do when the one that they love and cherish is taken from them and they become the number one suspect in the murder of the one they love?  What could this do to a person when they know the responsible party is that of an unseen force from another world?  This is what The Forbidden Girl attempts to explore, but unfortunately this film is messier than most break-ups.

Toby (Peter Gadiot) is the son of a preacher man, and his father is more than a little overzealous about his disapproval towards Toby dating Katie (Jytte-Merle Bohrnsen).  The father is so intent against them seeing each other that Toby has to sneak off to a graveyard to spend time with Katie.  It’s during this late-night rendezvous that the couple is attacked by a demon that emerges out of black smoke and whisks Katie away into oblivion.   Consequently Toby is locked away in a mental hospital for six years as a suspect responsible for what ever happened to Katie.

Shout Factory has yet another Transformers animated series to unleash upon the legions of fans who must not be able to get enough of their robots in disguise.  Beast Machines takes place on Cybertron after the Beast Wars.  Beast Wars is yet another series about the Transformers that somehow has gotten past me while reviewing the other series.  The fact that Beast Wars precedes the events in Beast Machines caused a brief moment of confusion.  Thankfully with the target audience being under the age of ten, catching up wasn’t all too difficult.

This time around, there are no Autobots to be found, but instead we get a new breed of hero in the Maximals.  The introduction of Optimus Primal and his friends was a bit jarring considering this series takes place on Cybertron and Optimus is actually a gorilla.  In fact when we meet Optimus and his friends, they are all animals without the ability to transform.  OK, well, that’s not entirely true, they CAN transform, but in this series it’s not just in the physical sense but also on a metaphysical level.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these are the Transformers of the modern age, or more appropriately New Age.

What would you do if you had access to a computer that was capable of giving you information that could prevent a crime from happening?  One step further, what if this machine could locate any person with only a few keystrokes?  This “God” like machine is the basis for what Person of Interest revolves around.  For two seasons we’ve watched as Harold Finch (Michael Emerson) and ex-CIA agent John Reese (Jim Caviezel) used the machine to protect those whom the machine feels are in danger.  But along the way, the lives of Finch and Reese have grown more complicated as their actions have intertwined them with HR (a mafia-like group run by dirty cops), the Russian mob, and numerous government agencies that would like to obtain the machine for their own personal agendas.

Helping out Finch and Reese are NYPD officers Det. Fusco (Kevin Chapman) and Det. Carter (Taraji P. Henson).  In the previous seasons we’ve watched as Fusco has struggled to clear his name after working as a dirty cop in league with HR; Fusco has been one of those characters we’ve seen change the most over the seasons while we see his genuine struggle of keeping his past behind him and showing that he is no longer a dirty cop.  But in season three (well, the first half of the season) the attention is mainly on the struggle Detective Carter has in her attempt to take down HR to avenge her boyfriend’s death in the previous season and clear his name.

Cartoon Network has just released yet another collection of episodes of Regular Show, only this time they are all based around Rigby.  For those new to the show who want in on the obsession that kids, friends, and other cartoon addicts have for this show, here is a little need-to-know info about the Regular Show.  The show centers on Mordecai (a blue jay) and Rigby (a raccoon) and the crazy adventures they find themselves stuck in the middle of.

The Rigby pack is filled with 16 hilarious episodes that are sure to please the longtime fans of the show, but also work as a DVD to introduce those who are new to the show as well.  That’s the great thing about these smaller episode packs that Cartoon Network has been churning out between the releases of the full seasons; it gives you a taste without hurting your pocketbook too much.