Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 19th, 2003
Dracula II drops all the characters from Dracula 2000, fudges the ending of that film, but retains the central idea of Dracula in fact being Judas Iscariot, cursed with eternal life. This time around, his sunlight-burned body is recovered by a group of grad students and their crippled professor with the hope of finding a miracle cure from the regenerative qualities of vampire blood. Meanwhile, a vampire-hunting priest named Uffizi (Jason Scott Lee, no more improbable as Italian than he was as Irish in Tale of the Mummy) is on the trail of Dracula (with minor help from Roy Scheider, putting in a few seconds of screen time). Within the limited budget, the story has admirable ambitions, and it skips along at a good pace. Character motivation is a bit hazy at times, however. As well, you’re much better off renting this and Dracula III at the same time,because the story here is very incomplete, leaving viewers hanging in much the same way (all proportions retained) as The Two Towers and The Matrix Reloaded.
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Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 18th, 2003
Fred Ward is a tough, no-nonsense cop. One night (when for some reason he has no partner),he is the victim of an attack, and wakes up with a different face and a new identity. He has been recruited by a shadowy government organization (currently made up of three other people). He is trained by Korean master Chiun (Cabaret MC Joel Grey under lots of makeup) to become a fighting machine. Meanwhile, future starship captain Kate Mulgrew is an army major investigating an industrialist who seems to be fleecing the US military for billions of dollars. All paths will soon merge.
Remo Williams is certainly a cheerful enough exercise, and its puppy-dog-like desire to be just the beginning of an endless series has a certain endearing quality to it. But not that many of the jokes are funny, and the action scenes are flat (which is a disappointment, given that the director – Guy Hamilton – helmed Goldfinger). As well, the training takes up far too much of the film time, relegating the thriller angle to a mere subplot. The film is thus two hours of passable entertainment, but only just.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 17th, 2003
This is closer to a being a tone poem than a narrative, so there is hardly any plot as such. We move through Berlin in the company of angels. They can hear our thoughts, but they cannot interfere or feel the physical world. Two of the angels -- Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are increasingly disenchanted with their existence, and Damiel, falling in love with a trapeze artist, wants to become mortal. This simple story is built on very gradually, and most of the film consists in our hearing the innermost thoughts of various characters, and all these thoughts are presented in poetic (often elliptical) words. The cinematography is quite extraordinarily beautiful.
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Posted in: Game Reviews by Archive Authors on June 15th, 2003
Take me out to the ballgame! Buy me peanuts, and popcorn, and…ah, maybe not. But, you should probably check out Inside Pitch 2003 out now for the Xbox console.
Players can do a bevy of gameplay options with Inside Pitch 2003 such as Season, Single Game, Network Play, and Championship Challenges. On top of all that, players with the LIVE service hooked up to their consoles can enjoy some downloadable content from the MS servers and invite a friend for some action out on the diamo...d.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 15th, 2003
Synopsis
A knock on your door in the middle of the night can change your life forever for Kathryn Lyons this knock comes after her husband’s plane crashes off the coast of Ireland. As the investigation starts to piece together that there was an explosion on board and that her husband may have had something to do with it here perfect life starts to unravel. As she starts to look into her husbands life in an attempt to clear his name she starts to discover that she really did not know her husband at al....
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 15th, 2003
Forget Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop; Midnight Run has got to be one of the funniest cop-buddy films of the genre. True, Midnight Run did not break any records at the box office and was actually panned by a few well-known critics of the time, but the comic action just never lets up. Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin share a rare chemistry. The overkill plot developments just wouldn’t work with any other combination. In all fairness, I wasn’t too thrilled about this one when it first hit the theatres. My wife suggested it and I agreed more out of guilt for all the genre films I’ve inflicted on her. I walked out still laughing.
Synopsis
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on June 15th, 2003
This disc is a compilation of the 5 highest rated episodes of the Steve Harvey Show. This TV series ran from 1996-2002 on the WB network and features Steve Harvey (The Original King’s of Comedy) as Steve Hightower ex-1970’s R&B star turned music teacher and assistant principal and Cedric “The Entertainer” (Barbershop) as coach Cedric Wilson and Steve’s best friend and roommate. It also featured your usual high school sitcom cast of characters. The five episodes presented here are:
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Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 14th, 2003
One of Ray Harryhausen’s earliest stop motion projects was a military training film on how to build a bridge. In It Came from Beneath the Sea he got to destroy a famous one and create yet another vivid memory for his legion of fans. It Came from Beneath the Sea was the second film I had the pleasure to discuss with Ray Harryhausen (stop motion pioneer) at the 2003 Wonderfest in Louisville. Again I was joined by Einsiders writer Rusty White. You can find the actual interview at: http://einsiders.com/features/interviews/harryhausen.php.
Certainly this could not be considered one of Harryhausen’s most imaginative films. Still, the stop motion effects were incredible for their day. If the film suffers at all it is from enormous budget constraints, particularly when it came to the creature itself. Ray told me me, “It was a sextapus. If we had cut the budget any more it would have been a tripod!”
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 13th, 2003
Essentially, this is standard Hulk stuff: Bruce Banner wants to stop his horrible transformation, General Ross wants to kill the Hulk, Betty Ross wants to save the man she loves,and all sorts of villains get into the mix. There is a bit more continuity than in some other TV cartoon fare (though not on the level of, say, Gargoyles). The animation is standard TV stuff.Keeping the commercial breaks in so obviously wasn’t necessary, I have to say.
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Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 13th, 2003
AIDS is at the forefront of the gay community’s consciousness, and Jeffrey (Steven Weber)is frustrated by how complicated sex has become. His solution is to swear it off, and naturally he immediately meets and falls for Steve (Michael T. Weiss). What to do, especially when you are neurotic like Jeffrey. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Jeffrey has plenty of friends and family who want to help out, including Patrick Stewart, whose line about looking like “a gay superhero”suddenly has more bite than it did in 1995.
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