Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Jeremy Butler on December 25th, 2023
While the film definitely feels like a Wizard of Oz carbon copy, it is not without its charms. For one, it was nice to see Keanu Reeves in one of his earlier roles, before Bill and Ted or Speed. Same goes for Drew Barrymore; while this wasn’t one of her first roles, as she was a child actor, it was still nice to see some of her earlier work, especially as it was one of the film’s charms that I mentioned earlier. Babes in Toyland tells the story of Lisa Piper, a eleven-year-old girl. While most girls at this age are all-consumed by Christmas and presents, she is too busy caring for her family, as the death of her father has caused her to have to grow up fast. As a result, she has no time for toys, and she resents being treated like a child despite her age. Concerned about a impending snowstorm, Lisa travels to her older sister Mary’s job to warn her. Mary’s boyfriend, Jack Fenton (Reeves), gives them a ride home, but loses control due to the blizzard conditions.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 24th, 2023
Every family has their holiday traditions. Christmas is probably the king of family traditions. We all have our favorite Christmas songs and our favorite foods and methods of celebrating. A part of that has long been the Christmas movie. I'm talking about those films that somehow represent the spirit of the time of year, and not merely movies that take place during Christmas time. Yeah, John McClain, I'm talking about you. For me it's been A Christmas Story since its release in 1983. There are others high on the list for me. The Man Who Invented Christmas and It's A Wonderful Life along with almost every version of the Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol all have a special place in my heart. But none of them come close to Ralphie's quest for a Red Ryder air rifle. Jean Shepherd's In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash is as classic a slice of Americana as Norman Rockwell paintings or summer picnics and fireworks. The tale told in A Christmas Story is only a small part of that book, but it's just Christmas to me and always shall be.
Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 22nd, 2023
"I would like to play a game."
I heard it everywhere. When I would mention that I'd be reviewing the 10th entry in the Saw franchise, almost everyone thought I had miscounted. It's hard for anyone to believe that the franchise has gotten into the double digits, and there's more. Next October should be the release of Saw XI. I think what confuses folks is that the numbers stopped with Saw VII. The 8th film was called Jigsaw, and the 9th was called Spiral: From The Book Of Saw. Before you know it, numbers don't mean a heck of a lot. We keep going to see the films and buying them for our home entertainment collections. A movie here. A movie there. Before you know it you have 10 films. Now you can add the 10th film to your library on UHD Blu-ray in 4K. Just remember that it goes next to Spiral on the shelf.
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.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 11th, 2023
As I have mentioned numerous times, I am not a fan of horror movies. In particular, my number one pet peeve is jump scares. Now, for certain scary movies, I'll allow one good jump scare; it almost goes with the territory. But if the director has to use one every fifteen minutes, my heart does not need that much of a workout, and I am going to avoid it very quickly. This is mostly reserved for American movies, quite often on their fifth sequel. However, Korean horror flicks know how not to use the jump scare and instead focus on making things as gruesome and disturbing as humanly possible. Or inhumanly, perhaps. Today, we take on a modern horror classic in the 2016 film, The Wailing as it makes its way on 4K UHD disc. Let's take a look and see if the ol' ticker can handle this one.
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 Brent Lorentson on December 8th, 2023
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
It is hard to ignore the hype around the film Oppenheimer. Any time a Christopher Nolan film has come out, it has become a pretty big deal for cinema fans, whether it was for his The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Inception, or Tenet, his films carry the same kind of respect alongside the names of Stanley Kubrick and James Cameron, and his films can be just as divisive. But the anticipation for the release of Oppenheimer feels like a different beast entirely. The release coming out the same day as Barbie has created such a stir on the internet that the term Barbenheimer has become a part of the zeitgeist of modern day. Then another aspect is how the film was literally shot on 70mm film, which is unheard of in today’s digital-hungry climate, and the film is being released in certain theaters on 70mm prints that reportedly weigh around 600lbs.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 5th, 2023
Most people, when asked to provide the best Korean film in modern times, would probably answer Oldboy or Parasite. Others might respond Memories of Murder or Train to Busan. Maybe A Tale of Two Sisters or The Wailing. I, on the other hand, always respond with the same title, The Man from Nowhere, which to this point in the US has only been released on Blu-ray from Well Go. That Blu-ray was also the victim of a bunch of discs from Well Go that came away with a quick dose of rot, infecting my copy as well as many others. For the last couple of years, I've been working with a bootleg, which I'm not exactly proud of, but felt necessary because I loved this film so much. However, that changed, as Well Go has released a 4Kcopy of this sensational film (and also of The Wailing, which I will get to later in the week). I thankfully received it a little bit earlier than expected and took it for a spin. Let's see how it does.
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.
