Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Man, has television come a long way in just over 50 years. There was once a pretty strict code that applied to television programs. Men and women, even when married, couldn’t be seen to have shared the same bed. Anything stronger than a “golly gee” was strictly forbidden. You couldn’t even show a woman’s belly button. And the good guys always had to win, while the bad guys got their comeuppance in the end. Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first to push those boundaries by telling mystery stories where the bad guys often appeared to get away with their evil deeds. Even Hitchcock wasn’t brazen enough to completely skirt these rules, and at the end of such immoral plays he would always add, in his spoken postscript, some terrible twist of fate that got the bad guys in the end. Those days seem long behind us now. We have mob bosses, crooked cops, and now a serial killer, not only getting away with their crimes but acting the hero, of sorts, for the show. Vic Mackey and Tony Soprano only helped pave the way. In Showtime’s groundbreaking series, Dexter, Morgan Dexter is a serial killer who happens to kill other killers. The series is based on two novels by Jeff Lindsay. Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter gave birth to the character and world of Dexter Morgan.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
I remember the first time I saw a Herschell Gordon Lewis film. It was Blood Feast, and it was sometime back in the early 1970’s. Lewis was ahead of his time and was doing extreme slasher before even mainstream slasher films were cool. It was shortly after that bloody experience that I saw the original Wizard Of Gore. Perhaps those experiences didn’t prepare me as much as I thought they would for the remake of Wizard Of Gore. I have to honestly say that I don’t really see the connection between these two films. Certainly the main idea of the magician remains, but little else of the original material survives.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Animal Planet has created their own new genre of television show over the last few years. Nature shows have been around forever. I remember spending time with my family as a kid watching Animal Kingdom. Since then very little about that type of program has changed. With Discovery Channel the nature show certainly became more sophisticated. Everything changed with Shark Week. Now we have an entire cable network dedicated to animals, so it stands to reason the nature show, like the animals themselves, had to evolve. That’s a lot of program time to fill. Animal Planet has taken a new step toward the next generation of nature shows.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 25th, 2008
Sonic Underground would be an interesting study in the land of Sonic Cartoons if one was into such a thing. The series lasted forty episodes and was made at the request of Sega who needed the promotion for their Dreamcast console in the fall of 1999. The show itself was an odd departure from the first two series in that it always contained a musical number and featured three main hedgehogs instead of just one. The show did serve to introduce a couple of new sub villains and Knuckles the Echidna. I honestly don’t remember Sonic Underground; I am more familiar with the previous two series, but with one look at the dvd cover and description on the outside, I might have begun to see why.
Queen Aleena the Hedgehog had three children: Sonic, Sonia & Manic. However, Dr. Robotnik & his robots decide to overtake things and force her out. Aleena went into hiding. But before doing so, she separated Sonic, Sonia & Manic. When the threesome became older, they heard of a prophecy that they could reunite with their mother. They would be able to end the tyrannical rule of Dr. Robotnik and resume their rightful leadership. The three also have medallions that can change into musical instruments to play as part of Sonic Underground and are also used as powerful weapons against the forces of Robotnik. The last twenty episodes join the trio as they try to find their mother and keep themselves alive against the selfishness of evil.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 25th, 2008
Current indie It-girl Ellen Page stars in this pre-Juno effort as a similarly headstrong teenager but whose life is far, far worse simply being pregnant. Here she comes from a dysfunctional home, her high school would be called a snake pit if that weren’t disrespectful to snakes, and her baby brother has disappeared while she was supposed to be taking care of him. She plunges into the underbelly of Toronto in a quest to find him, and an unending picaresque nightmare ensues.
But this isn’t called The Tracey Fragments for nothing, and the above summary fails to convey the actual experience of the film. Director Bruce McDonald breaks the screen up into fragments, and Tracey’s story unfolds as a kaleidoscope of multiple frames and shattered chronology. It’s a technique that won’t work for everyone, and that can be horribly misused, but here I found it both intense and exciting. In fact, it made some of the more familiar and/or hard to take/swallow aspects of the narrative itself much more palatable.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 21st, 2008
My mother was a big fan of The Untouchables. I think she really just had a crush on Robert Stack. Years later when Stack was hosting Unsolved Mysteries, I could swear that I heard her murmur a few
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 21st, 2008
There was some speculation from folks out there, myself included, that
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 21st, 2008
In recent years, there has been only one group of parody movies that were considered really good. The Scary Movies. Started off by the Wayans Brothers, the first two movies were very mature but also very funny. The third & fourth films were taken over by David Zucker who did a fine job of making it more family friendly while keeping the zany humor. In September of 07, production started on a spoof movie that went after Superhero movies. David Zucker took on the producer role while Craig Mazin stepped into the writer/director chair. Craig had also worked in the third & fourth installments of Scary Movie and was obviously talented. The question remained. Was this act tired or did it still have some life to produce a quality spoof film?
Rick Riker (played by Drake Bell) is just your average high school student. He has a best friend, Trey (played by Kevin Hart). He has a crush on the most popular girl in school, Jill Johnson (played by Sara Paxton). But things go wrong for Rick Riker when he is suddenly bitten on the neck by a genetically-altered dragonfly during a scientific field trip (darn that H2O9). He gains super human reflexes and armored skin (akin to Spiderman). He shows his powers to his best friend, Trey and his Uncle Albert (played by Leslie Nielsen). He then decides to use his powers for good and dawns the mask of “The Dragonfly”.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 20th, 2008
My earliest recollection of VCR’s was when I was just a little boy and my parents went down to the local TV shop and purchased a Zenith for about $600. At the time, it was a wondrous machine and I can still remember fondly my copies of Ghostbusters or Die Hard and how many times I would watch them. I didn’t care whether the tapes had a case or which edition of the tape I had. As long as it was the original movie and the tape wasn’t beat to heck I was a happy camper. Times change. I don’t think I own a single VHS tape that isn’t exercise related and my dvds, more than 400 of them are cataloged and cared for to the utmost degree. In truth, I sometimes miss the VHS days when things were simpler & films sold on the film alone, not on how many extras the dvd has or how fantastic the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is. Be Kind Rewind goes back to that simpler time and gives a movie that is more about substance than the tiny snap case it comes contained in.
Fletcher (played by Danny Glover) owns a VHS rental store called Be Kind Rewind on a corner lot in Passaic, New Jersey. The place has history claiming that legendary jazz musician, Fats Waller was born in the very store. But business has been in decline and now town officials wish to demolish the building and replace it with a new complex. However, they give Fletcher the chance to bring the place up to code. Fletcher decides to research a more successful DVD store and see what makes it tick. He leaves the store in the hands of his best (and only) employee Mike (played by Mos Def). On the train, Fletcher leaves Mike one last note scribbled backwards on the glass that reads “Keep Jerry Out”. Mike can’t decipher the message as the train speeds away.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Athena on August 19th, 2008
Can animals actually talk to humans? Can we understand each other enough to consider it communication? Heck. You don’t need to watch some show on television to answer that question. I can do it for you right here and now. I’m Athena. I’m Gino’s 13 year old Siberian Husky, and Gino’s letting me communicate with you so that I can tell you what I thought about When Animals Talk. I’m here to tell you that we can talk pretty good. We also understand a lot of your human words as well. My favorite are words like Belly Rub, and Want. If you have a dog of your own, you already know how to communicate. And that spells T R E A T. I don’t know so much about other kinds of animals so I watched this DVD that Gino got, and here’s what I thought:
