Posted in: Holiday Gift Guides by Gino Sassani on December 15th, 2023
I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. Keep checking back to see more recommendations for your holiday shopping. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. With conditions as they are, shopping won't be easy this season. The nice thing about discs is that they're so easy to get from places like Amazon that you can give a great gift and stay perfectly safe while you do it. Well... being safe isn't exactly what this gift guide is about. Some of the people on your list like to mix a little fear with their Yuletide. Think about it. There's last year's sleeper hit Violent Night, Nightmare Before Christmas, and who can forget jolly ol' Krampus? Shout Factory's Scream Factory has you covered once again. They've released four Chucky movies and the original Night Of The Demons on 4K just in time for the horrordays ... eh ... holidays. So be of good cheer, and slide some fear under the tree this year.
Posted in: Holiday Gift Guides by Gino Sassani on December 13th, 2023
I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. Keep checking back to see more recommendations for your holiday shopping. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. With conditions as they are, shopping won't be easy this season. The nice thing about discs is that they're so easy to get from places like Amazon that you can give a great gift and stay perfectly safe while you do it. Today we feature KL Studio Classics
Posted in: Holiday Gift Guides by Gino Sassani on December 12th, 2023
I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. Keep checking back to see more recommendations for your holiday shopping. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. With conditions as they are, shopping won't be easy this season. The nice thing about discs is that they're so easy to get from places like Amazon that you can give a great gift and stay perfectly safe while you do it. From Sony we have the inspirational story of Rudy in UHD Blu-ray/4K. An inspirational story for an inspirational season. How could you go wrong here
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 9th, 2023
"Space...the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before!"
Since the relaunch of Star Trek on television via the Paramount+ streaming service, I must admit to being a little underwhelmed. It's truly bad when Alex Kurtzman makes me pine for the days of Rick Berman. There have been some pretty good moments in the various new Trek shows. Picard has shown promise and has improved with a third season that looks very exciting. Lower Decks is just too campy for my taste, and Discovery has so many ups and downs I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. So along comes Strange New Worlds, and this is the Star Trek I've been waiting for these last decades.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2023
"Is that the biggest one you got?"
Remember the old days of the action movie? Those films where someone like Stallone or Schwarzenegger would run around and take out armies of bad guys while barely breaking a sweat. You know the kind of movie I'm talking about. The ones where the hero goes up against a hail of bullets and explosions and manages to pick off the bad guys without catching a single slug himself. Those were the days when a guy like Bruce Willis could fall thirty floors, get a spike impaled in his ribcage, have a ton of concrete wall fall on his head, and get run over by a truck, but still manage to take out the bad guy while muttering some witty little catchphrase that we would all be repeating, because if we could deliver the line just right, that meant we were tough guys too, and we didn't even have to fall out of an airplane to prove it. Well, you won't have to remember. You just have to watch Sly Stallone's love letters to the action movie fans. The franchise is called The Expendables and along the way we got to relive some glorious moments with our favorite action stars from the 70's to the 90's.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 5th, 2023
"I don't know about you, but it always makes me sore when I see those war pictures ... all about flying leathernecks and submarine patrols and frogmen and guerillas in the Philippines. What gets me is that there never w-was a movie about POWs - about prisoners of war. Now, my name is Clarence Harvey Cook; they call me Cookie. I was shot down over Magdeburg, Germany, back in '43; that's why I stammer a little once in a while, 'specially when I get excited. I spent two and a half years in Stalag 17. "Stalag" is the German word for prison camp, and Number 17 was somewhere on the Danube. There were about 40,000 POWs there, if you bothered to count the Russians, and the Poles, and the Czechs. In our compound there were about 630 of us, all American airmen: radio operators, gunners, and engineers. All sergeants. Now, you put 630 sergeants together, and, oh mother, you've got yourself a situation. There was more fireworks shooting off around that joint ... take for instance the story about the spy we had in our barracks ..."
Stop me if you've heard this before. The premise is we're in World War II, but not where all of the action is.
Posted in: Podcasts by Gino Sassani on November 30th, 2023
All of us love to celebrate those moments in American history where there have been breakthroughs particularly in the way of our constitutional rights. We should celebrate those moments, but the latest film from Michelle Danner reminds us that there are also victims when it comes to rights of the accused. Miranda's Victim is a wonderful portrayal of just that situation. We all know about Miranda warnings given to suspects upon arrest. If you've seen enough cop shows, you've heard it a thousand times: "You have the right to remain silent..." This film explores the victim behind Ernest Miranda's landmark Supreme Court case. It's a rare film that looks at a rare side of our criminal justice system. I had a chance to see the film and then have a conversation with director Michelle Danner about the film. Bang it here to eavesdrop on our conversation, and you won't even need a court order to listen in. Interview with Michelle Danner.
Posted in: Holiday Gift Guides by Gino Sassani on November 24th, 2023
I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. Keep checking back to see more recommendations for your holiday shopping. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. Let's look at an old classic science fiction series brought back to life by Shout Factory: Farscape: The Complete Series - 25th Anniversary Edition
Posted in: Holiday Gift Guides by Gino Sassani on November 23rd, 2023
"There is an old saying that blood is thicker than water."
Today is Thanksgiving. It's a time that we often spend with family. On television, the biggest family for decades was the Nelsons. So here at Upcomingdiscs, we decided it was the best day to let you know that the final two seasons have finally been released, and you can now spend your holidays with Ozzie, Harriet, Rick, and David. Tomorrow we'll start posting our suggestions for holiday gifts for your loved ones. Consider this an early start. We've had Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Gene Simmons with his Family Jewels, and even Snoop Dog's Father Hood. It's become a bit of a trend to follow these celebrity families around and watch the drama of their privileged lives unfold on our television screens. You might think it's a relatively recent phenomenon, but would you believe they were doing it back in the infant days of television when we followed around a musician named Ozzie and his wife way back in 1952? No, we're not talking about Ozzie Osbourne
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 17th, 2023
"It's the things we love most, that destroy us."
It's actually a little hard to believe that it's been eight years since last we visited Suzanne Collins' future dystopian world of The Hunger Games. The last two films were shot and released as two parts of the final book in the saga, and I think most of us had laid the soul of Katniss Everdeen and her rebellion to rest. Of course, not without the franchise doing quite a bit of damage at the box office. Not counting home video releases, the franchise generated a total box office of about $1.4 billion. That's a lot of scratch, and if you understand the movie business at all, you know that finishing a franchise for good is like leaving money sitting on the table.
