Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 21st, 2024
"You know the Butcher? That freakin' nutjob that goes around just chopping people up? Well, the feds or whatever heard that he's gonna be here today, so they set up a trap for him. This whole concert? It's a trap. They're watching all the exits, checking everyone that leaves. There's no way to get out of here. It's kinda dope, right?"
The idea is actually based on a true story, with a lot of differences. In 1985 the FBI managed to round up over 100 high-profile criminals with a ruse that involved tickets to an NFL game. There have been plenty of other scams where promises of prizes have attracted otherwise cautious wanted people. I was at a promo for some home improvement club store, and while there, a couple of folks were nervous that it was a sting because they had outstanding warrants. It wasn't, but these things can and do indeed happen. The way it's done here leaves one to stretch credibility a bit more than I'm usually willing to go.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 21st, 2024
"The machines rose from the ashes of a nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here in our present ... tonight."
The idea for The Terminator came to James Cameron in a feverish dream as he was struggling and about to get fired from Piranha II: The Spawning. He was overworked and stressed and ended up in bed. He immediately wrote a treatment with then-wife Gale Ann Hurd, and they approached Arnold Schwarzenegger quickly to make sure they retained control over the property. Eventually he lost it anyway, and that's why so many franchise films that were out of his control.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Jeremy Butler on November 19th, 2024
“The juice is loose.”
Michael Keaton is on quite the reunion tour of reprising his old roles, and for most actors, stepping back into the role isn’t always easy. However, for Keaton, it is as if no time has passed whatsoever. Over thirty years since portraying this iconic role, Keaton returns as Beetlejuice, the trickster spirit who attempted to manipulate a marriage to Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz in order to gain a permanent foothold in the living world. Keaton isn’t the only one who returns in this well-done addition to the ongoing trend of continuation series; Ryder returns as Lydia Deetz, Catherine O’Hara is back as Delia Deetz, Lydia’s stepmom, and most notably Tim Burton is back in the director’s seat for the sequel. Burton’s return is most pivotal addition in my opinion, as the first film was full of his unique style that would be impossible for another director to emulate. Also joining the franchise are Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Danny DeVito, albeit too briefly, and most appreciatively, Jenna Ortega, who previously and actively collaborates with Burton on the Netflix Series Wednesday, whose upcoming season I am anxiously awaiting.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 11th, 2024
"Nuns, guns and gasoline."
Mike Mendez released his first film in 1997. Killers was also just released on Blu-ray from Synapse films. The better of this Synapse double release is The Convent. For me this was the peak of Mendez's low-budget horror films. Synapse must agree with that assessment, because they decided to give The Convent a UHD Blu-ray release in 4K, and that ended up being somewhat of a trick-or-treat combination, with The Convent absolutely being the treat here. Made in 2000, the film took a long time to make it to anyone's screens. There was a distribution deal in place, and it fell through at the last minute. It's the kind of luck Mendez has dealt with his entire career. His friend and co-writer on Killers lost his house when it was mortgaged to pay for that ' creation. He debuted the film at Sundance, and he had hoped for a wider release, at least on home video, but it took 2 years to finally happen.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 5th, 2024
" I think their whole family's like some weird medical experiment. I think they're, like, circus people."
Be honest, who hears the theme music when anyone even mentions The Addams Family? I know I do, and then I have to resist the urge to do the finger snaps. Just in time for 31 Nights of Terror as well as the release of the animated version comes the of The Addams Family: Family Values on UHD (4K), featuring Raul Julia and Angelica Huston as Gomez and Morticia Gomez, and let’s not forget Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci as Fester and Wednesday Gomez respectively. Based on the wildly popular cartoons that appeared in the New Yorker that went on to find success as television series, the The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd, wealthy, aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware, or do not care, that other people find them bizarre or frightening. For me, these movies were my introduction to this family, as the TV series was bit before my time, but a gothic family unaware of their difference from other people.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 27th, 2024
"One … two… Freddy’s coming for you, three… four… better lock the door, five… six… grab your crucifix..."
Freddy might have been born in the mind of Wes Craven, but he grew and developed in the knife-wielding hands of Robert Englund. Granted, not all of these films are equal in quality, but the first was everything you could ask for in a horror/slasher film of the era. Freddy himself is by far the most colorful and animated of the slashers. His burned face, fedora, striped sweater, and knife-blade glove were all integral parts of the wise-cracking maniac. You know the story already, so I'll stick the main idea. Freddy was a child molester and killer before the parents of Elm Street decided to burn him to the ground in a boiler room. Good homestyle justice goes wrong when Freddy reappears in the nightmares of the children of Elm Street. He has become a demon of sleep where he is able to manipulate the world into the most terrifying images possible for his victims trapped by their own slumber.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Jeremy Butler on October 15th, 2024
"Let's get this party started, people!"
So, I somewhat missed the boat on the Despicable Me franchise but let me see if I got the gist. So Gru, played by Steve Carrell, is a reformed clumsy master villain, (though from what I can see he maintains the clumsy part) who now works for the Anti-Villian League; essentially now helping catch villains instead of being one. Interesting premises and after watching Despicable Me 4, I can see why the studios have deemed to keep the series going. Returning to the franchise with Carrell is Kristen Wiig as Lucy, another member of the Anti-Villian League that originally hunted captured Gru before falling in love and becoming his wife and mother to his son, as well as Miranda Cosgrove, who voices Margo, Gru and Lucy's oldest adopted daughter, and Dana Gaier as Edith, Gru and Lucy's middle adopted daughter. New additions to the cast include Will Ferrell as the film’s primary antagonist and old nemesis of Gru’s, Sofia Vergara as a femme fatale and secondary antagonist, and most notably and possible my favorite character of the film, Joey King as Poppy Prescott, an aspiring super villainess who has admired Gru for a long time.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 26th, 2024
“You got everything money can buy, except what it can’t. It’s pride. Pride is what got you here. Losing is what brung you back. But people like you, they need to be tested. They need a challenge.”
There have been a ton of boxing films. They’ve been popular going back to the silent era. Most of them have many of the same themes. But there was always something about Rocky that stood out above all of the rest. That “something” can’t really be described or defined. As the Supreme Court once said about the definition of obscenity: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” That’s all you can say about Rocky. Some might call it heart. That’s about as good a word for it as anything else. Rocky himself would call it “stuff in the basement”. It almost demeans it to put a word on it at all. Whatever you call it, you don’t necessarily see it in Rocky … you feel it.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 26th, 2024
"This is the story of one of America's great unsung heroes. I mean, you've seen him, but you never knew who he was. You've cheered for him and cried for him, and women have wanted to die for him. But did he ever get any credit, or the girl? No! He's what we call the "stuntman", and the reason I'm talking so fondly about him is, well, because it's me, Colt Seavers. Anyway, picture work isn't wall-to-wall employment, so maybe you wonder how a guy keeps his head together. Well, one way is to wait by the phone ... and wait, and wait. The other is to take an occasional job with the court system of the United States of America, where a man is considered innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, sometimes a lot of these people get out of jail on what we call bail, and they'd run like hell ... and that's where I come in. I sometimes pick up rent money trying to find them and bring them back to justice." - Television series open.
Lee Majors performed a pretty solid television hat trick in his television career. Over three decades he starred in three iconic television shows that defined him for three successive generations. In the 1960's he was Heath Barkley on the TV western The Big Valley. Like the Cartwrights in the more popular series Bonanza, the Barkleys faced all of the elements of the Wild West, and Lee Majors was there for it all. From 1965 to 1969 he was in 112 episodes of the hit show. Then the 1970's arrived, which was the decade in which I became acquainted with Majors as Steve Austin, "a man barely alive" until a secret government organization made him "better than he was" as The Six Million Dollar Man. He was "reassembled with a bionic arm, eye, and two legs. It made him "stronger ... faster ..." I spent many a summer afternoon running in slow motion and making that "chichichi" sound as a young boy. The Six Million Dollar Man ran from 1974 to 1978 and went 99 episodes, a couple of spin-offs, and several television movies. The show has been kicked around in Hollywood for decades with several attempts to make it a film franchise, often updated to The Six Billion Dollar Man. I guess a million bucks just doesn't go as far as it used to. Now it takes $126 million to put Majors' third series on the big screen. That happens to be the role of Hollywood stuntman-turned-action-hero Colt Seavers, and it ran from 1981 to 1986 and another 112 episodes. If you're keeping score at home, that's an amazing 323 + episodes of television over three decades. And now it's Colt who beats Steve and Heath to the big screen in The Fall Guy, directed by David Leitch and starring Ryan Gosling in Majors' Colt Seaver role and Emily Blunt as his co-star, playing Jody Moreno, originally played by Heather Thomas. But is this a movie that audiences are going to fall for?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Sean Boelman on July 23rd, 2024
When a new 4K restoration of the 1993 Palme d’Or winner Farewell My Concubine — the first Chinese film to ever take home the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival — debuted at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, physical media collectors were waiting for the announcement that it would be released through the Criterion Collection. Well, fans did not have to wait long, as the Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film is being released by Criterion on both 4K and Blu-Ray, and this gorgeous restoration alone makes this edition worth picking up. That’s not even to mention the quality of the movie itself, which is considered a seminal film in Chinese cinema for both its content and form.
Based on the novel of the same name by Lilian Lee, Farewell My Concubine follows a decades-long friendship between two boys who meet at an opera training school in Peking in 1924, growing up through some of the most tumultuous times in Chinese history. Lee and Wei Lu use the story of a love triangle to frame this exploration of identity, cultural expression, and other themes that serve both as a cultural time capsule and a commentary on issues that are unfortunately still relevant today.
