2-Disc

The women on this show are easily the most selfish, self-centered, hateful, wretched wenches that I have ever seen. The fact that they would voluntarily put themselves on this show proves it. Who would ever watch this show (whose sole purpose is to show how horrible a person can be) and think to themselves, “I would really like to be on that show. I want the whole world to see me acting that way.”

Even so, here they are. The second season (!) of this show features eight episodes and eight brides-to-be at thei...

Valley of the Dolls is a musical that way way ahead of its time. Based on the novel by Jacqueline Susann, the film tells the story of three aspiring actresses and their attempts at becoming stars. Sure, this is an age old tale, but it had not been told as bluntly an honestly until now. The film starts Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke and Sharon Tate as the actresses in question. Audiences must have been shocked upon going to the theater, as they were much more used to rags to riches musicals such as A Star is Bo...

A lot has been said about Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer. Ebert has been called the most famous film critic this side of Pauline Kael (he certainly is the most informative one since I've started becoming a wee critic myself), and Meyer certainly found a niche audience directing and producing films with large-breasted women. So when Fox got the two of them together and had them come up with a script that would be a pseudo-followup to The Valley of the Dolls, one would be interested to see what became of it.

God bless producer Irwin Allen for aiming high in just about everything he did. He would make large scale productions, some focused on disasters (like his next film after this, The Towering Inferno), but he also produced Lost in Space for TV and made other contributions like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and an incarnation of The Lost World. He may not have had a DeMille-like grip on his project because the studios had so much control still in the early '70s, but he sure dreamt big, which is always a good thing.

Synopsis

Four teens hit the wilderness, looking for a Professor Waterman (celebrated SF/fantasy/horror writer Fritz Leiber in a non-speaking role). The professor is missing, but they find an ancient time that turns out to provide the secrets of life, death, and the demons beyond. Said demons want the book back, and our heroes are attacked by one monster after another.

I've seen people quote this film from time to time, and I never understood the attraction because I saw it once and forgot about it. After a bit of intrigue, I finally got my hands on a copy of the US version of this 2 disc set (though the UK version, with the orange cover and silhoulette image of Ewan McGregor on the cover looks much cooler) and gave it a spin, lo and behold, I discovered a pretty good movie.

Synopsis

Rayne (Kristanna Loken) is a dhamphyr – a human/vampire hybrid. Escaping from the carnival where she is imprisoned as a freak, she sets out on a crusade against vampires, her ultimate target being the lord vampire Kagin (Ben Kingsley, an actor showing Michael Caine’s former penchant to whore himself out without shame), who also happens to be her father. Along the way, she forms an initially uneasy alliance with Michael Madsen, Michelle Rodriguez, and Will Sanderson – members of Brimstone, a ...

It is exceedingly strange to me that in this unprecedented age of media availability, movies on demand and theaters in our very own homes, more and more men have not seen those movies that were a staple of manhood for so many years. Movies like Bullitt, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and even The Godfather are less and less familiar to male audiences than ever. There is a reason that these films were so popular amongst men. They are movies about tough guys who weren't afraid to rearrange some fac...

Before it became a somewhat famous regional barbecue house (I kid, I kid!) red, hot and blue was another name for the Red Hot Organization, a group designed to help fight the AIDS epidemic. Back in the early and mid '90s kids, AIDS was raging on through the land, and Ronald Reagan did nothing to stop it. In fact, he was injecting homosexuals with AIDS while delivering crack into the ghetto.

A long time ago, Sony owned the MGM video library (before Fox picked it up for impending HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Wars) and re-released some films as Special Editions, and combined others as part of convenient two-packs. This is an example of the latter, perhaps as some sort of romantic two-pack that's easy on the wallet but heavy on the heart.

At First Sight is directed by Irwin Winkler (Night and the City) and tells the tale of Virgil Adamson (Val Kilmer, Real Genius) who has been blind all of his life.