Posts by Brent Lorentson

With a title like The Zombinator you basically know the kind of B-movie spectacle you are getting into.  Any notions of great special f/x or even a good script should be cast aside, and you simply have to tell yourself to sit back and enjoy the silliness that should follow.  But what the title did was build up these crazy thoughts of a cyborg from the future to take out hordes of zombies.  Well, this isn’t that movie.  Even the cover art gives promise to this kind of cheesy film, but there are no cyborgs from the future; instead we get another run-of-the-mill film about a documentary film crew that stumbles into trouble.

With a new Transformers film on the horizon, it is no surprise that the animated series finds its way on DVD.  Shout Factory releases the entire series of Transformers: Energon in a 7-disc set with 51 episodes that amount to over 18 hours of Transformer fighting goodness. Over the years there have been numerous incarnations of the hit animated series; just how well does this series fare?  Honestly it surprised me how much fun this series turned out to be, and it left me wishing that Michael Bay had drawn some inspiration from this series.

There is something I find unsettling about an amusement park after hours, when all the rides are shut down and the laughter and screaming of kids running around are gone.  These parks, for the most part, are designed to take us to another time or another world where reality is how the park engineers design it to be.  So when Skip (Jason Spisak) arrives at the Old West theme park to be the overnight janitor, I could appreciate the surreal world he would be stepping into.  As we go along with him on a tour during his first day, his guide and superior is played by Jon Gries, who seems to have a story for just about everything at the park.

In 1998 following the release of Roland Emmerich’s version of Godzilla, the story would continue following some of the characters that we met in the film as well as a host of other characters and monsters.  With a 40-episode run coming out to about 14 hours of television, the DVD release of the series comes out at just the right time for those who need a temporary fix before seeing their favorite big green lizard splash across the big screen once again.

Martial arts films are just about as done to death as the slasher film.  Just about every angle and direction that you can take with these films has been explored by now.  When it comes to the martial arts genre, seeing a student or son avenge their father or master is just about the motivation in most of these films, but audiences accept this  because what we are sitting down for is the action.  Seriously, how many people remember the plots of the old Jackie Chan or Jet Li films?  But go back even further to the core classics like The 36^th Chamber of Shaolin or Five Deadly Venoms; these films are all rooted in the spirit of revenge.