Disc Reviews

Writer and director Steven R. Monroe has made a decent career in genre filmmaking and since his remake of I Spit on Your Grave gained some moderate success.  Monroe is one of those directors that I feel has a great film in him but the right project just hasn’t crossed his path.  Though many of his creative efforts have been on more meager budgets, Monroe still manages to pull together tight little films.  Unfortunately with Monika he may have bit off a little more than he should have with his new supernatural revenge film.

Despite the title, Reagan (Jason Wiles) is the “hero” of this revenge fueled romp.  Reagan takes off from Los Angeles to a small motel just of the Vegas strip.  Reagan isn’t your average everyday fellow, in fact he has a special gift, one that allows him to glimpse into the future.  These premonitions that haunt him revolve around a beautiful blonde Monika (Cerina Vincent) that he meets just outside of his friend’s motel room.  Rather than wait around for his friend, Reagan sets out for a good time on the town with Monika.  Unfortunately when Reagan wakes up the next morning it is only to discover that this heavenly night with this blonde beauty couldn’t have occurred since Monika was murdered the day before.

"It's called compartmentalization. No one spills the secrets because no one knows them all."

I was lucky enough to grow up during Marvel's wonderful rebirth of the 1960's and 1970's. Of all of the comics they produced during that time, I was always least impressed with Captain America. I don't think I ever read an issue of any of his mags with the notable exception of The Avengers. So how can it be possible that after dozens of Marvel films, and I'm including the Fox and other-studio-produced stuff, that Captain America: The Winter Soldier can end up being my favorite? Could it be that I've warmed up to the Cap under the compelling performances of Chris Evans. Nah! Could it be I've grown and matured a lot since I was a teenager? Anyone who knows me is certain that can't be the answer. Could it be that maybe, just maybe, this just happens to be their best film yet? No maybe’s or could be's about it. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is even better than The Avengers. It's too early to tell if it'll be my favorite tent-pole film of the summer, but it's starting in the pole position, to be sure.

Love can have a strange effect on people and cause them to do things that range from the spectacular to the deranged.  The loss of a loved one can not only break a person’s spirit but send them to the depths of depression and despair from which they will never be able to recover, though most people tend to avoid the melodrama and just wallow in their heartbreak with a couple of beers or a pint of their favorite ice cream.  But what is one supposed to do when the one that they love and cherish is taken from them and they become the number one suspect in the murder of the one they love?  What could this do to a person when they know the responsible party is that of an unseen force from another world?  This is what The Forbidden Girl attempts to explore, but unfortunately this film is messier than most break-ups.

Toby (Peter Gadiot) is the son of a preacher man, and his father is more than a little overzealous about his disapproval towards Toby dating Katie (Jytte-Merle Bohrnsen).  The father is so intent against them seeing each other that Toby has to sneak off to a graveyard to spend time with Katie.  It’s during this late-night rendezvous that the couple is attacked by a demon that emerges out of black smoke and whisks Katie away into oblivion.   Consequently Toby is locked away in a mental hospital for six years as a suspect responsible for what ever happened to Katie.

Erle Stanley Gardner wrote crime fiction, and while many of his 100 or so works are unknown to most of us, he created a character who has become as identified with criminal lawyers as any other in fiction. It was in these crime novels that Perry Mason first faced a courtroom. He developed a style where he would investigate these terrible crimes his clients were on trial for. He would find the real killer, and in what has become a Hollywood cliché, reveal his findings in a crucial moment during the trial. While we may not remember the novels, we all remember the man in the persona of Raymond Burr.  Burr had a commanding presence on our screens and enjoyed a well-deserved 11-year run as the clever lawyer. What makes this run so amazing is that the show followed pretty much the same pattern the entire time. We always know what’s going to happen, but we wait eagerly for that gotcha moment when Perry faces the witness on the stand. We know when he’s got the guy squarely in his sights, and we can’t sit still waiting for him to pull the trigger. OK, so maybe that’s a little over the top, but so was Perry Mason. From the moment you heard that distinctive theme, the stage was set. To say that Perry Mason defined the lawyer show for decades would be an understatement. Folks like Matlock and shows like The Practice are strikingly similar to Perry Mason.

Perry Mason officially ended in May of 1966, but that wasn't going to be the end. Twenty years later the surviving cast members reunited for Perry Mason Returns. It was Perry and Della back together again. Both Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale returned to their roles. William Hopper had died in 1970, so William Katt joined the reunion as Paul Drake, Jr. Katt might not have really been Drake's son; he was Hale's son. When Katt left the films he was replaced by William R. Moses as Ken Malansky. Ken was a young law student helped by Perry once when he was framed in law school for a rival's murder. He ends up being both a legal assistant and investigator for Perry in the reunion films. Ken's girlfriend is Amy, played by Baywatch's Alexandra Hastings. Amy was a rich girl who had too much time on her hands. It led to her involving herself in Ken's investigations. The films also often starred James McEachin as Lt. Brock, the cop on many of the cases.  M*A*S*H's David Ogden Stiers would often play his rival in the prosecutor's office Michael Reston. The team would continue to do 30 television movies from 1985-1995. CBS has now begun to package these reunion films in collections like this.

Shout Factory has yet another Transformers animated series to unleash upon the legions of fans who must not be able to get enough of their robots in disguise.  Beast Machines takes place on Cybertron after the Beast Wars.  Beast Wars is yet another series about the Transformers that somehow has gotten past me while reviewing the other series.  The fact that Beast Wars precedes the events in Beast Machines caused a brief moment of confusion.  Thankfully with the target audience being under the age of ten, catching up wasn’t all too difficult.

This time around, there are no Autobots to be found, but instead we get a new breed of hero in the Maximals.  The introduction of Optimus Primal and his friends was a bit jarring considering this series takes place on Cybertron and Optimus is actually a gorilla.  In fact when we meet Optimus and his friends, they are all animals without the ability to transform.  OK, well, that’s not entirely true, they CAN transform, but in this series it’s not just in the physical sense but also on a metaphysical level.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, these are the Transformers of the modern age, or more appropriately New Age.