Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 13th, 2009
What do a messy divorce and a clan of flesh eating cannibals have in common? Well, in both cases someone gets their heart eaten out. They also share plot points in Offspring. Lionsgate brings back their popular Ghost House Underground series from last October. The series title likely borrows a bit from the old Grind House Theater that Quentin Tarantino brought back to fashion in the last couple of years. I assume it is intended to denote a horror film that skirts the art house scene. So, how does Offspring fit into that mold?
If you’re looking for a plot, you really shouldn’t look at this one too closely. It’s more of a set up and then let the cannibal carnage begin. After a quick scare shot we’re introduced to a young family who live in a relatively isolated house in Dead River County, Maine. A friend has arrived with her young son on the run from an abusive husband who was about to get served his divorce papers today. Of course, he’s not taking it lying down, and phones to say he’s on his way. Mom’s got a restraining order, so the solution here is an easy one. Call the local cops. Unfortunately the local police already have their hands full. Another family has just been massacred. It seems an old trouble has returned to Dead River County. Enter former Sheriff George Chandler (Art Hindle). (To make things more complicated, the character’s name was apparently changed from George Peters. So, if you look up the character on the IMDb, that’s what you’ll get.) Chandler was Sheriff 11 years ago when he faced a nomadic clan of cannibals that rained down some serious carnage in the small county. He took care of ‘bidness and thought he sent them all to cannibal heaven. Now it seems there were survivors who had worked their way up to Canada and have returned for dessert. What remains of the clan are mostly young children and barely adults. Play ball.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 12th, 2009
“On the full moon of the seventh lunar month, the gates of Hell open and the spirits of the dead are freed to roam among the living” – Chinese Myth.
I wonder if there’s a roaming charge on that plan. Lionsgate brings back their popular Ghost House Underground series from last October. The series title likely borrows a bit from the old Grind House Theater that Quentin Tarantino brought back to fashion in the last couple of years. I assume it is intended to denote a horror film that skirts the art house scene and Seventh Moon certainly fits that description. This is absolutely the kind of horror film you might expect to encounter at Sundance or an independent horror film festival.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 7th, 2009
Of the many films based on books by prolific writer Stephen King, Misery ranks near the top. Falling somewhere between the horror and thriller genres, this film about a twisted obsession is frightening because the premise seems very real.
Directed by Rob Reiner (A Few Good Men), who first visited King territory with his 1986 film Stand By Me, Misery tells the story of romance writer Paul Sheldon (James Caan, Elf) and the fan who rescues him after a car accident.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 7th, 2009
“For more than 150 million years dinosaurs roamed every corner of the planet. Only a very few left evidence of their existence, their fossilized bones. And, those bones have never ceased to fascinate us.”
The box art to the new IMAX Blu-ray release of Dinosaurs Alive is more than a little bit misleading. The package elicits an image of thundering prehistoric beasts engaged in all sorts of primeval activities. And why not? It’s the stuff of our youth’s imaginations. Has there ever been a more fascinating true story than dinosaurs? But, if you’re expecting, or worse hoping, to get a high definition experience somewhat akin to the Walking With Dinosaurs specials, you’re apt to be more than a little bit disappointed. And that’s actually a bit of a shame, because there are wonders to behold here, just not that kind. Instead the documentary takes you to the places where these stories once unfolded so many millions of years ago. There you’ll encounter these beasts, though not in the flesh, but in the bone. Paleontologists invite you along to some of the most fruitful dinosaur graveyards. There the past is uncovered one brushstroke at a time. And while incredibly fascinating in itself, it’s not exactly the high drama I was expecting.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 24th, 2009
“I’m the best there is at what I do and what I do isn’t very nice.”
So what do you do after three successful, if not critically acclaimed, X-Men feature films that brought in over a billion dollars total when you factor in domestic and foreign box office and home video sales? It was getting a bit expensive to bring back such a large and growing in popularity cast. Even if you wanted to spend the money for such an ensemble, it gets awfully difficult to write effectively for so many characters at once. Someone’s going to get the dark end of the spotlight. Hurt feelings aside, you can’t continue to please such a wide diverse group of fans. Bryan Singer did such a great job in the balancing act for the first two that it looked like maybe this could go on forever. But Brett Ratner, who is used to working with teams of two, put a fork in the franchise for many, and it seemed we’d seen the last of our favorite mutants. Honestly, I didn’t think the third film was all that bad, but that’s just me. I was never looking for anything more than an amusement park ride for my theater ticket, and that’s exactly what I got all three times. But these issues remain, as does the question, where do you go from there?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 22nd, 2009
This was the final of Miramax 4 martial arts classics released as a collection or separately on Blu-ray. The collection featured some extraordinary action and top line star power for the most part. Zatoichi, for the most part, is the weakest of the four films. It is almost a solo effort by renowned Japanese actor Takeshi Kitano. He participated in writing the script. He is also the director, editor, and star of this rather off the wall martial arts film. The character of Zatoichi has appeared in many films and is as much a part of martial arts culture as Jackie Chan. Kitano does quite a superb job in portraying the blind swordsman, but it is in the other areas that he falls considerably short of the intended mark. Instead of reaching for the classic staples of the genre, he decides to take this tale in a far more fantastical direction. Swords blaze with such speed it’s impossible to really appreciate the skills, because you never actually see the sword. It’s out, slice and dice, and resheathed all in a blink of an eye. Rather impressive the first 20 times it occurs in the film, but before long it’s merely an old punch line that’s been repeated one too many times by a desperate comedian who doesn’t really have anything else. It’s sad, really. Because, Kitano does have something else to offer, and we certainly get glimpses of that. In the end, however, Kitano pushes the boundaries too often for me to take this film seriously at all.
The film is really a Western guised in the form of a martial arts film. The plot rings of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. When a blind masseur wonders into a village, he finds that it has been terrorized by a gang that extorts shop owners for protection and runs the local gambling and geisha houses. The blind drifter has startling skill with a sword he hides sheathed in his seeing eye cane. He has an uncanny ability to hear enough from his environment to counter any blow raised toward him and cut up his opponent quickly and quite efficiently. He meets up with Genosuke (Asano) who supplies the comic relief here. Genosuke is a degenerate gambler who can’t seem to catch a break in the local dice parlor. But he is impressed with the uncanny ability the masseur has of hearing the correct lay of the dice. The two of them clean up at the game. Deciding to spend some of their winnings at the geisha house, the pair meet two geisha girls who are actually more than meets the eye. They are the sole surviving children of a family slaughtered by the mob kingpin running the local gang. Together they plot to discover the identity of the boss and rid the village of the gang forever. The gang has employed the services of a very skilled samurai to enforce their will on the people. It doesn’t take much time to figure out that all of this is leading to a wild west style showdown between the samurai and the masseur.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 22nd, 2009
It’s nice to see some of these staple films starting to reach the Blu-ray high definition releases. Unfortunately there really isn’t anything new here at all. The picture is an upgrade but not as outstanding as you might expect. The audio doesn’t really get much better at all. Finally, all of the extras are merely ported over standard definition pieces from the most recent DVD release. It’s the best way to go if you don’t already own the film, but not remarkable enough to warrant an upgrade from any but the most die hard fans. And they didn’t need this review to talk them into it. For the rest of you, here’s what you can expect.
The 70’s and 80’s were fertile ground for horror films. It was a new era of iconic monsters. Starting with Michael Myers and Jason, the trend that gave us Freddy seemed to be at the end of its run by the late 1980’s. Certainly sequels were still being churned out, but it seemed like we’d seen the last of these maniacal monsters, at least for a while. But before it petered out, the cycle would supply our nightmares with one more notable denizen…Chucky. Today Chucky paces the sidelines here in Tampa as the head coach of the local NFL franchise, but for the last 20 years it was the darkest alleyways of our dreams that Chucky prowled. Inhabited by the soul of a killer, Chucky was truly one of the “Good Guys”.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 21st, 2009
Only two social classes existed in the tiny town of Chekian, China, circa 1858: the peasant citizenry, and those who lived in the Governor’s palace. Lawlessness was the order of the day; the streets of Chekian crawled with scum and villainy of every degree, from pickpockets to kidnappers to roving gangs of thugs and extortionists. The worst of all was none other than Governor Cheng himself, the greedy and corrupt ruler of the town (James Wong). The governor’s latest profitable but nefarious practice: to hoard the town food supply and gouge the poor and starving for every sliver of their meager livings. Fortunately for these peasants, they have one advocate with the smarts and the guts to stand up for them: the mysterious Iron Monkey (Ronggaung Yu). To the Governor, he’s a masked rogue fit to be tortured when caught, but to the people he’s a saint clad in black, the Chinese Robin Hood or Zorro, a swashbuckling super ninja who employs his skills mainly in pilfering gold from the governor’s house, oftentimes from right under his nose.
The governor doesn’t just hate Iron Monkey, he’s absolutely terrified of him (as demonstrated in typical over-the-top, grindhouse kung-fu style histrionics). He’s gone to all sorts of measures in an effort to capture this righteous and elusive bandit, from doubling his private security staff, to setting elaborate traps, to hiring powerful but corrupt Shaolin monks. Try as he might, nothing works, and the Iron Monkey always escapes with his prize. Come hell or high water, Cheng is going to stop Iron Monkey once and for all. His underhanded technique uses the son of a Shaolin monk to get the father to promise to bring down the Monkey.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on September 21st, 2009
He’s one of the most compelling villains of modern fiction. Disturbing, disgusting and absolutely captivating at the same time, Hannibal Lecter can really get inside your head.You may not have read the novels by Thomas Harris, or even seen all of the films, but I’m willing to bet you’re familiar with The Silence of the Lambs. One of the greatest thrillers in film history, the film in which Sir Anthony Hopkins became Dr. Lecter is the cornerstone of this three-movie set.
The Hannibal Lecter Collection brings together – in chronological order – Michael Mann’s Manhunter, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and Ridley Scott’s Hannibal. Film buffs will note the absence of Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon, essentially a remake of Manhunter. Unfortunately for any completists, MGM, the studio behind this set, doesn’t have the rights to Red Dragon, which is a Universal picture. In any case, these three films make a fantastic trilogy.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 17th, 2009
“People give up their lives for many reasons. For friendship. For love. For an ideal. And people kill for the same reasons. Before China was one great country, it was divided into 7 warring states. In the Kingdom of Qin was a ruthless ruler. He had a vision to unite the land, to put and end once and for all to war. It was an idea soaked in the blood of his enemies.”
I have to say that Hero has to be one of the most beautifully shot films I might have ever seen. This is the first time I’ve watched a martial arts film and embraced it as a total high definition experience. The film contains many incredible fighting scenes that are brilliantly choreographed and brutal in nature. But it all takes a back seat to the incredibly breathtaking cinematography coupled with seamless and fantastical CG enhancements. The film is stylish in the extreme, and it might be easy for the story or characters to get lost in this marvelous imagery. They don’t. Fighting scenes might move from black and white to blazing color. Back and forth with incredible rapidity. Yet everything is intensely clear and is never jarring. There is a distinctive Sergio Leone influence from the music to the angles. Too often films use a frenetic pace to hide a multitude of visual sins and hope it’s accepted as brilliant artistic flair. Here you’re invited to savor each moment. The filmmakers dare you to pick apart the imagery or the fighting stunts. You’re encouraged to linger and take it all in. All of the fighting from huge battles to intimate hand to hand takes place in the most exotic and unreal of settings. The film is a study in contrasts at almost every turn. Bloody battle takes place amid stunning beauty. It’s all a rather provocative yet effective blend of traditional Asian cinematography and modern filmmaking. It’s not the kind of film you see. It’s the kind of work of art you experience.
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