Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 24th, 2026
It has been a very long time since I have done a film or television review thanks to a wonderful thing known as life. Life often gets in the way of even the most basic hobbies but is often rewarding, or at least pretends to be. So, surely the first review I have had in such a long time will be a wondrous one full of majestic characters and a stirring plot worthy of rousing ambition to the sounds of chaotic beats. *Looks across at package* Hazbin Hotel Season One on Blu-ray. *Googles the synopsis* *Sighs deeply* I mean, if my editor wanted me to stay in quasi-retirement, he should have said so. At least the chaotic beats part seems to be accurate. Let's take a look.
Are we familiar with the story of the angel Lucifer and Lilith, the first woman? No? Well then, let's go over it. Lilith was the first woman with Adam, and she left that man because he was controlling (mmmm hmmm). She then shacked up with the angel Lucifer instead. Then they gave Eve, the second woman, free will through the famous apple. This created Hell, and then those two, Lucifer and Lilith, were sent there as punishment.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 17th, 2025
You often hear it said that Tom Cruise is the hardest working actor in Hollywood. I don't want to take anything away from Cruise, but I'd like to nominate Bob Odenkirk for the title. Yes, that Bob Odenkirk from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame. He's been wanting to do an action film through most of his career, and it would appear to have been a rather farfetched idea at best. But he buddied up to the guys at 87North and 87Eleven Productions. Those are the stunt folks who brought us films like the John Wick series. They didn't laugh at the idea. So Odenkirk trained for four years starting in 2017 to build up his body and learn to do all of those action stunts. The reward came in 2021 with the release of Nobody. It was an action/comedy that gave us the kind of stuff you might expect from a John Wick group. The film didn't make money because it was released while most folks were staying away from places like the local movie theater because of the COVID pandemic. Later the film caught fire on streaming and home video release, and so a sequel was a no-brainer. Except that Bob Odenkirk, while filming the final season of Better Call Saul, suffered a major heart attack that stalled that production and would appear to negate any chance of the actor going through that much physical punishment ... except it didn't. The actor went full speed ahead, and the result is Nobody 2, now out on UHD Blu-ray in 4K from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, and you should check both films out if you're new to this franchise.
In the first film we're introduced to Odenkirk's Hutch Mansell. He's stuck in a dreary cookie-cutter daily existence. He works for his father-in-law as an accountant, and his family pretty much ignores him. To make it worse, he is embarrassed when his house is invaded one night and his son is tougher than he is. Now the world looks at him as if he were a wimp. But that's exactly what he wants the world to think ... or does he? In the military he was an auditor, hence the current bookkeeping job. But when he goes to face the crooks who terrorized his family he ends up walking into a busload of Russian mobsters terrorizing a city bus. We soon discover that he has mad fighting skills and that auditor job in the military didn't have anything to do with bookkeeping or numbers. He was an assassin for the government and now they've forced him to show his hand. He ended up burning the mob's $30 million stash and that ends up being another problem.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 8th, 2025
"The thing I love about Valentine's Day is the expectation of the unexpected. That something magical could happen, and maybe that special someone will come back into your life and change its course for the better."
Valentine's Day is one of those Hallmark holidays that leave us with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Unless, of course, you happen to be alone, or a member of the Bugs Moran gang in Chicago in 1929. So it really means a lot of things to a lot of people, but I really do question the use of that particular day for the setting for first-time director Jonathan Eusebio's action film Love Hurts. The Valentine's Day angle is pretty weak, and a think gimmick for what is basically a comic martial arts film that gives Vietnamese actor Ke Huy Quan his first starring role. The gimmick pretty much failed, and the film tanked after just a short time at the box office, bringing in a measly $15 million with a budget of over $18 million. Universal decided to give the movie a short turnaround, and it's now making its debut on UHD Blu-ray. If the film is going to pick up some extra cash, this is where it's going to happen, and arguably direct-to-video and streaming is likely where the film belonged all along.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 27th, 2025
"What my associate is trying say is our new brake pads are really cool. You're not even gonna believe it. Like, let's say you're driving along the road with your family. You're drivin' along, la-de-da, woo. All of a sudden there's a truck tire in the middle of the road. And you hit the brakes. Eeee. Whoa, that was close. Ha-ha. Now let's see what happens when you're driving with the "other guy's" brake pads. You're drivin' along, the kids start shouting from the back seat, "I gotta go to the bathroom, Daddy!" "Not now, damn it!" Truck tire. I can't stop! There's a cliff. Aaahh! And your family's screaming, oh my God, we're burning alive!" "No! I can't feel my legs!" Here comes the meat wagon. And the medic gets out and says, "Oh my God." New guy's around the corner puking his guts out. All because you want to save a couple extra pennies."
There are a ton of parallels between the Chris Farley/David Spade comedy team and that of John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd. Both teams began in the Saturday Night Live arena. It was that physical big/little guy combination that has its roots with Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello. Both teams were at the height of their careers when a drug overdose would claim the wilder member of the team. Both of the deceased comedians left behind at least one successful brother to carry on the name in show business. Tommy Boy was by far the best of the films this duo made before Farley’s tragic overdose in 1997. It's now the 30th anniversary for the film, and Paramount has released a nice steelbook UHD Blu-ray (4K) version of the film to celebrate.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Jeremy Butler on November 19th, 2024
“The juice is loose.”
Michael Keaton is on quite the reunion tour of reprising his old roles, and for most actors, stepping back into the role isn’t always easy. However, for Keaton, it is as if no time has passed whatsoever. Over thirty years since portraying this iconic role, Keaton returns as Beetlejuice, the trickster spirit who attempted to manipulate a marriage to Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz in order to gain a permanent foothold in the living world. Keaton isn’t the only one who returns in this well-done addition to the ongoing trend of continuation series; Ryder returns as Lydia Deetz, Catherine O’Hara is back as Delia Deetz, Lydia’s stepmom, and most notably Tim Burton is back in the director’s seat for the sequel. Burton’s return is most pivotal addition in my opinion, as the first film was full of his unique style that would be impossible for another director to emulate. Also joining the franchise are Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Danny DeVito, albeit too briefly, and most appreciatively, Jenna Ortega, who previously and actively collaborates with Burton on the Netflix Series Wednesday, whose upcoming season I am anxiously awaiting.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 5th, 2024
" I think their whole family's like some weird medical experiment. I think they're, like, circus people."
Be honest, who hears the theme music when anyone even mentions The Addams Family? I know I do, and then I have to resist the urge to do the finger snaps. Just in time for 31 Nights of Terror as well as the release of the animated version comes the of The Addams Family: Family Values on UHD (4K), featuring Raul Julia and Angelica Huston as Gomez and Morticia Gomez, and let’s not forget Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci as Fester and Wednesday Gomez respectively. Based on the wildly popular cartoons that appeared in the New Yorker that went on to find success as television series, the The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd, wealthy, aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware, or do not care, that other people find them bizarre or frightening. For me, these movies were my introduction to this family, as the TV series was bit before my time, but a gothic family unaware of their difference from other people.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 9th, 2024
When you look back at 2004, it’s a little hard to imagine just how big an impact Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy would have on the film industry. I’m not trying to say the film invented anything new with this fun, satiric comedy, but what it did do was launch the careers of many and really helped make comedy fun and raunchy for a while, and more importantly, profitable at the box office. I mean, this film is stacked with stars. Sure, there’s Will Ferrell front and center, but this is had a pre-40 Year-Old Virgin Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Christina Applegate, Kathryn Hahn, Seth Rogan, David Koechner, Fred Willard, and numerous others who are in the background or just make cameos. Seriously, this might be the best comedic cast put together of all time, and when you dive into the extras, you get a glimpse at just how talented everyone is. The film may be 20 years old, but it holds up. I’ve seen the film at least a dozen times, and it still makes me laugh. So what makes this film so special?
The film is about Ron Burgundy (Ferrell), who is San Diego’s top news anchor in the 1970’s. He’s a mixed bag of charming and is full of bravado and simply believes every woman would be honored to have him take them to bed. To Will Ferrell’s credit, if anyone else was playing this role, I feel the character would be despised, but Ferrell manages to make him seem more like a loveable buffoon. Surrounding Burgundy are his Channel 4 news team, Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) as the suave man-on-the-street reporter, Champ Kind (David Koechner) as the sports reporter, and Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) as the weather reporter. The chemistry these four have is something special, and they play so well off one another. Seriously, I don’t know how they got through some of these scenes without constantly breaking character. The team though is in for a rude awakening when their news director, Ed Harken, wants to inject some diversity to the team and so enters Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), a transfer to their news station who is vying for a reporter job. Corningstone wants to be the first female lead anchor, and, well, let's just say the rest of the news team doesn’t feel a woman belongs behind the news desk.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 3rd, 2024
In 2004 when Team America: World Police was released, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were already well established in the film industry as the guys who created South Park. They had even dipped their toes into doing live action films like Orgazmo and BASEketball, but what the industry knew them for was their animated series South Park that began back in 1997 and is still going strong on Comedy Central. The duo isn’t afraid to take chances, whether it’s insulting celebrities (after all, part of their charm is being equal opportunity offenders) or creating their musical for the stage, The Book of Mormon, so was it a big surprise they’d want to do an action adventure film entirely with puppets? The film is very much a parody of the action films of the 90’s and early 00’s that were produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. In case you are unfamiliar with his name, he produced the mega hits like Top Gun, The Rock, Con-Air, and Pearl Harbor. But what this film was also tapping into was the over-the-top patriotic attitudes that the media projected. I mean, everything needed to be patriotic in a post 9-11 world. Not that there is anything wrong with patriotism, but with the amount of people that were cashing in on it, looking back, well, you can see where it wouldn’t be too hard to parody the country. Then you throw in how many believed our country was getting involved in global issues we had no business being in; well, it’s no surprise where the title “World Police” came from. This film showed that Parker and Stone were not afraid to take some major political swings, but at the same time they wanted people to be able to laugh at the absurdity of it all, because that’s just who they are. Needless to say, if you are easily offended, this movie is not for you.
Team America is a group of elite fighters who have their secret base hidden within Mount Rushmore, like something you’d see out of some old James Bond film. Spottswoode (voiced by Daran Norris) leads the group and hands out the missions like a hybrid of Mr. Phelps from Mission Impossible and Bosley from Charlie’s Angels. In the opening scene we meet the team, the all-American former quarterback, Joe (voiced by Trey Parker), the martial arts expert, Chris (voiced by Matt Stone), the psychologist, Lisa (voiced by Kristen Miller), the psychic/empath, Sarah (voiced by Masasa Moyo), and then there’s Carson (also voiced by Parker); they’ve come to Paris to stop a terrorist attack … by stopping this really means shoot and kill everyone and destroy the city in the process (you know, like we’re used to seeing superheroes do in every battle they have). In the process, Carson is killed, which leaves an opening on the team.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on December 14th, 2023
“Let’s go get the s**t kicked out of us by love.”
It’s hard for me to accept that Love Actually is really 20 years old already. I remember being a projectionist when this came out and splicing the film together back when movies were actually shown on film. When I first saw the film, it was after hours in the movie theater, and we had to screen the movies the day before release to make sure it was put together properly, and I was with my girlfriend at the time, so it was just us in the auditorium, and from that moment on I was in love with this film. I’ve seen the film well over a dozen times through different phases of my life, and each experience it hits a little differently, but I still come away from this film feeling a bit schmaltzy and in the Christmas spirit. For those of you who have missed out on this classic and are wondering just what is so great about this sentimental British love fest, the movie is written and directed by Richard Curtis; this would be his first time directing, but he had previously made a name for himself after writing Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones Diary. These were a trio of films that American audiences were ravenous about and basically set up Love Actually to become an instant success, but I don’t think anyone was ready for just how charming and heartwarming this film would actually turn out to be.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 21st, 2022
I am not usually into serious zombie movies or television series. I am not a particular fan of The Walking Dead or The Night of the Living Dead. I do allow exceptions for, say, the Resident Evil series, or perhaps something funny like Shaun of the Dead. So the first time I saw Paranorman probably about half a dozen years ago, I wasn't expecting much. Thankfully I did not let my biases creep in, and to be honest, quite enjoyed myself. So I was very excited when I saw the 4K slide across my desk. Let's dive in.
This is a feature presentation. We join a horror movie already in progress. There are monsters, lost of squishy stuff, and some bloodcurdling screams. Then the zombie goes munch munch on the brain matter of the blonde heroine. Rumor was that it was far from satisfying.
