Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 21st, 2010
In Florida we have some very large bugs. There's this one particular spider that is quite a problem in my house. It's real name is a huntsman spider, and it grows to about 16 feet, not including the legs. It sports 27-inch fangs and tends to move the furniture around at night while it stalks its prey. Yes, it stalks its prey at night in my house while I'm trying to sleep. Years ago I coined my own name for these clever, ferocious killers. I call them Rambo Spiders. The name fits these long-legged freaks perfectly as they perform their recon missions throughout our home. When I find them, I terminate them with extreme prejudice. I suspect that if these arachnids happen to be movie fans, they have a name for me, as well. You guessed it: Rambo.
John Rambo was the brainchild of novelist David Morrell. In his novel you'll find a John Rambo who is very much like the one played by Sylvester Stallone, yet quite different, as well. While he retains that one-man-fighting-machine persona, in the book he is much more of a cold-blooded killer than the man we meet in the franchise's first film. In that movie, Rambo disables the police and whoever else stalks him, but he never kills one person in that film. The officer who does die does so because of his own actions, not Rambo's. He's actually a very innocent man, when we first meet him. There's a vulnerability that we see in that film's first five minutes that we never will see again over the course of four films. Credit Stallone for allowing us those fleeting moments that you won't find anywhere in Morrell's book. But it is the Rambo as portrayed by Stallone that has become the cultural icon and household word today. The term is in most modern dictionaries, usually to describe a relentless force of strength, which brings me back to those spiders. And before you animal rights people start writing me your displeasure over my spider kills, understand that it's more than a fair fight. They have those 99 inch fangs, and all I have is a rolled-up newspaper.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on July 21st, 2010
The Super Friends as a cartoon show had a long and sketchy past. It started out in the 1970’s and ran in nearly a dozen different incantations and over a hundred episodes until 1986 when it was put down for the last time. The original episodes that ran from 1973 until 1974 were unique, they ran for an hour with commercials and focused on one core story. Eight of them are provided here.
Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice the TroubAlert computer sounds. It seems that there is an environmental disturbance and only the Super Friends can help. The current roster of Super Friends involves the Man of Steel: Superman, the Dynamic Duo: Batman and Robin, the Amazon princess: Wonder Woman, and the King of the Sea (no, not Charlie the Tuna): Aquaman. They also have three friends who act as sidekicks: Wendy, Marvin, and Wonderdog.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on July 20th, 2010
The Real McCoys was a major TV hit during its run of 1957-1963. Starring three-time Oscar winner Walter Brennen and a pre-Rambo Richard Crenna. Led by Grandpa, the family move from Virginia to California (sound a touch familiar?) and is comprised of brothers and sisters that range in age from their twenties right down to eleven. This series paved the way fir rural comedies, especially the Beverly Hillbillies, proceeding it, and Brennen's voice set the bar for wiley Southern farmer characters for a generation.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on July 19th, 2010
G.I. Joe the Movie was originally supposed to be a real box office movie. It was to be the first of three animated motion pictures put out by Hasbro Toys. The other two were based on Transformers and My Little Pony. However, production delays caused the other two to go first. When Transformers and My Little Pony did poorly (gee, never would have guessed that a talking magical pony failed to grab box office sales), it was decided that G.I. Joe would go the direct video route. Years later, it still proved to be arguably the best of the three.
It seems that Cobra Commander and Serpentor just can’t get along. They constantly bicker as to who is in charge of Cobra and would rather accuse each other of incompetence than figure out how to defeat G.I. Joe. It is at that moment that a woman breaks into the Terrordrome. Cobra Commander tries to rally the troops and goes off to find this stranger leaving Serpentor behind. However, the woman still makes it to the Cobra Leader.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 19th, 2010
This series from Comedy Central began as a low-budget film hosting show in a small television station in Minnesota. It was the brainchild of Joel Hodgson. It ended up running for 11 years and a feature film version.
Mystery Science Theatre is an acquired taste. For me, I’ve really got to be in that certain mood to watch it. That’s the beauty of these DVDs. You pop them in when you’re ready. The idea is pretty whacked. Depending on the season you’ve got, Joel or Mike is trapped in space on the “Satellite of Love”. Doomed to spend his life watching very bad films, our hero makes the best of a bad situation. He uses his resources to construct a couple of robot pals. There's Crow T. Robot (Beaulieu), Tom Servo (Murphy), and Gypsy (Mallon). Part of an experiment together, they watch the films from the front row, constantly ranting throughout. If you’re like me, you’ve invited a few friends over to watch a schlock festival. The movies weren’t as important as the banter you created while watching. That’s exactly what you see here. The silhouettes of our host and his robots dominate the lower portion of the screen, where they provide alternative dialog and sometimes witty commentary on the action. The two evil station owners/mad scientists send them a new bad film each week to observe their reactions to the bombs. The films are broken up by off-the-wall skits and fake commercials to alleviate the tedium. This DVD collection is better than some because it includes films from four different seasons to give you a good sample of the overall series.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on July 14th, 2010
Street Hawk is an adventure series about a young cop named Jesse Mach, played by one-time 80s pop idol Rex Smith, who gets injured on the job and is selected to be a part of an experimental motorcycle / vigilante program (funded by the government), that is helmed by computer genius Norman Tuttle, played by a pre-Murphy Brown Joe Regalbuto.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on June 21st, 2010
Most people who read this site frequently are aware with my love for cartoons. More often than not, my favorite cartoons are those from the 90’s or 80’s cartoons and included such shows as Batman Animated, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Darkwing Duck. But there are some cartoons that have been made in the last decade that twenty years from now will be considered classics. As it turns out, I got to review one of those modern classics with the help of a very special and biased friend.
Hi there, my name is Michael Durr and you might remember me from such great reviews as Superman: The Complete Animated Series and Duckman, Seasons 3 and 4. Today, we are talking about Johnny Bravo: Season One. Johnny Bravo was a fantastic cartoon on the Cartoon Network that premiered on July 7th, 1997 and would then last sixty seven episodes until it ended in the hot summer of 2004.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on May 31st, 2010
Many people look around today and say we are perhaps going through one of the most corrupt times in the history of the world. Government spending is out of control, rights seem to going by the waste side and human liberties are forgotten in travesties of justice. But what they don't know is that many years ago, life was cheap and rulers often gained absolute power by the most despicable of methods. However, what some people forget, the History Channel does remember Ancients Behaving Badly.
Ancients Behaving Badly is a documentary series on the History Channel that chooses an infamous leader from ancient history and goes into great detail about their rule. Let's take for example, Caligula, the first leader presented and a fairly easy target to spend time on. Caligula, the third Roman emperor who despite living only a shade under four years in power broke all the rules and was famous for debauchery and murder on the grandest scale.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 9th, 2010
Having accidentally blinded a singer during a contract killing, hit man extraordinaire Chow Yun-Fat, consumed with guilt, becomes the woman's protector, and seeks redemption by finding some way to restore her sight. Meanwhile, Danny Lee is the plays-by-his-own-rules cop on his trail, and inevitably the two men will find themselves as unlikely allies in gigantically operatic gunfights.
I can remember when John Woo was still a name whispered with reverence by cult film fans, and his films were only available on grey market VHS or import laser disc. In fact, I first saw The Killer on one such disc, in Cantonese with Mandarin subtitles, reading a transcription of a translation, desperately trying to grasp the gist of the action. It was worth the effort, though, for I had never seen action sequences like these. Today, of course, the situation is very different. Woo's films are readily available, Hard-Boiled's sequel is a video game (Stranglehold), and his stylistic characteristics have become clichés. The passage of time and over-familiarity have arguably robbed the film of some of its power, while making the OTT sentimentality harder to take, but the fact remains that this is still a seminal moment in action filmmaking.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 9th, 2010
We are in the midst of the Great War. Michael Dunne (Paul Gross) is a Canadian solider recovering from physical and psychological wounds. He falls in love with his nurse (Carline Dhavernas), and when her asthmatic brother enlists, Dunne heads back to the trenches to protect him, and the two men wind up at the gigantic, murderous battle that gives the film its name.
Writer/director/star Gross has an almost messianic commitment to Canadian film and Canadian history, and here he combines his obsessions in a 20-million-dollar effort that is, by the standards of the Canadian film industry, nothing short of gargantuan. And to his credit, the battle scenes are impressive. The editing is frequently startling and brutal, in keeping with the events themselves. On the other hand, the romance is painfully hackneyed, and the naked appeals to national pride can be rather wince-inducing.
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