Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 28th, 2009
A while back, Cult Epics released a 2-disc limited edition of Un Chant D'Amour. This single-disc reissue features a number of the features (though not all) from the limited release. The actual film and transfer quality are the same, and so much of this review is likewise the same.
Long the bad boy of French novelists, Jean Genet directed this 25-minute short in 1950. Borderline pornographic, it is a silent portrayal of (literally) imprisoned desire. Two prisoners convey their longing for one another through the prison walls, while a voyeuristic guard watches, becoming aroused and frustrated to the point of violence. poetic, fetishistic, and intensely personal, it is a startling and historic piece of underground cinema.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 24th, 2009
“The best movies you totally forgot about”
That’s the marketing slogan for this Lionsgate collection of mostly 1980’s films that never really broke any ground in their box office releases. They are, for the most part, cheap comedies. A few have somewhat of a cult following. None of them ever really set the receipts on fire. At just under $15 each, likely less if you shop around, they are good for a couple of laughs, but little more than that.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 23rd, 2009
With so many cast changes, it didn’t really come as too much of a surprise to fans that the series was winding down. Only one more season would follow, and this year never clicked in quite the same way previous seasons had. By now the team was so significantly different that there was little of the cast chemistry that made this one such a winner. With its glory years behind and only one more struggling year to come, we reach the end of our journey with the IM Force.
Jim Phelps (Graves) led his team in a sixth season of Mission Impossible starting in 1971. The show continued its trademark traditions. Jim would receive a mission from the “self destructing” tape and would gather his IMF (Impossible Mission Force) team. The team was necessarily eclectic in nature, and it changed significantly in the sixth season. Gone were Leonard Nimoy, Leslie Ann Warren, and Sam Elliott in his signature role of Dr. Robert. Still in the team we had Barney Collier, the gadget man, played by Greg Morris. The muscle was still supplied by Willy Armitage, played by brute Peter Lupus. Together they took on missions that the government could not be officially a part of. They were always admonished that should they be caught “the secretary would disavow any knowledge” of them. Usually they were sent somewhere to put some evil mastermind out of business. Their tactics ranged from scams to outright theft. Sometimes they were a rescue team, while other times they would infiltrate a group of bad guys. There were certainly cold war elements to the whole thing. Each week the team concocted some convoluted con to play on their mark, walking away at the end of each episode often without getting any credit or congratulations.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 23rd, 2009
After five years on the air, Hawaii Five-O entered its sixth season pretty much unchanged. There was actually very little change over the years. McGarrett was still on the case with his trusted Danno and Chin-Ho. The Hawaiian settings continued to showcase the locations of the island chain as well as much of the state’s local acting talent. But most of all, the show kept up with the quality of stories. The season began with an armless man out to kill the cops he holds responsible for his condition. The episode, Hookman, would get the season off to a solid start. Charter For Death brings plague infested rats to the island and a quarantine. The Sunday Torch means there’s an arsonist on the loose who only sets fires on Sunday. Is a Federal officer to blame for the death of a wealthy tax evader? McGarrett must catch one of their own in Murder Is A Taxing Affair. McGarrett must protect a visiting dictator from a female hired killer who looks like the target’s own daughter in A Bullet For El Diablo. Is a cop on a rape and murder spree in Hawaii? Find out in Nightmare In Blue. These are just a few of the cases for the gang at Five-O in this 6th season collection.
Working in Hawaii on one of televisions hottest shows in the 1970’s was too good a job for most of the cast and crew of Hawaii Five-0. This meant that there was very little cast turnover for the series in general, and none going into the fourth year. Jack Lord saw his star rise considerably, and while he began to see some serious pay hikes, even he wasn’t about to kill the golden goose. With this kind of consistency, fans were never disappointed or turned off by drastic changes in the cast or formula. With this cop show, it was all about tropical locations and formula. The fifth season was no exception to the rule.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 23rd, 2009
“You are invited to a reunion.”
I grew up on the Peanuts creations of Charles M. Schulz. Most of us have in some way or another. His newspaper comic strip is one of the longest running and most successful strips of all time. The work has been translated into every language currently spoken on the planet. The images of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the rest of the Peanuts gang have appeared on just about any kind of product imaginable. Our pop culture contains too many references to the strip to mention briefly. For me, it was the television specials starting in the mid 1960’s that brought the gang into my life. The classics are running annually, still after nearly 50 years. A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are the most mentioned and certainly beloved by generations of children and adults. I thought I never missed an airing. Somehow 1991’s Snoopy’s Reunion has managed to escape my notice all of these years. Why isn’t this particular special among the classic cartoons of that era?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 21st, 2009
So Toby Wilkins will be helming The Grudge 3. That's a bit of a shame. Not because I think he's the wrong man for the project. Rather, it's the wrong project for the man. Or, less glibly but more precisely, he is showing real promise as a filmmaker, and it would be a shame to see more talent squandered on a franchise that should definitely be put out to pasture. I base this evaluation on the evidence presented in Splinter, a nifty little creature flick .
The film begins with the collision of seriously two very different couples. Seth and Polly (Paulo Costanzo and Jill Wagner) are young urbanites on a camping trip. He's working on a PhD in biology, which becomes important later. Meanwhile, Dennis and Lacey (Shea Whigham and Rachel Kerbs) are on the run (he's an escaped con, and she's his twitchy, detoxing girlfriend). The latter two carjack the former, but the situation becomes much more complicated when they stop at an isolated gas station (is there any other kind in horror movies?) and are attacked by the titular creature.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 19th, 2009
"Space...The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!"
Star Trek: The Original Series finally makes it to high definition. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been waiting for this day for what seems like centuries. They’re here. One of the best features about this set is the multi-angle option. Remember how we were promised all of this control way back when DVD’s first hit the market? We got the same promises when Blu-ray arrived, and we weren’t going to hold our breath. Hey, I still have a red, yellow, blue, and green button on my Blu-ray remote. What are they ever going to be good for? Anyway, we finally have a use for the angle button. You can use it to toggle between the new digital f/x Paramount recently created for the show, or you can watch the original f/x if you’d rather. With that button you now have the ability to toggle between the two. Through the use of branching technology you can go between them as often as you like and never stop the show. I will warn you, however, that many of these shots occur so quickly that the second delay in transition might not allow you to see the entire segment. It also does not change while the video is in pause. It’s one of the best new features out there and perhaps the best reason to upgrade your recent purchase of season one to the Blu-ray release.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 16th, 2009
The curtain finally falls on Wings on DVD some 12 years after the show came in for its final approach on television in 1997. The end was a planned one so that the final episode was a fitting goodbye for the series and its collection of crazy characters. The final episode finds Joe and Helen off to Vienna to live while Helen studies cello. Brian is left alone to man the business. For us, we’ll get this one last chance to laugh it up with the clever and often hilarious television series.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 13th, 2009
Try this plot on for size: Gordo, an ape owned by carnival sideshow barker the Great Lampini (Paul Richichi), gets loose and rampages about Long Island, raping and killing and stealing cars (!). Meanwhile, the moronic detective in charge of the murder case dismisses the idea that an ape is the culprit, and casts his racist eye on the unfortunate Duane Jones (Christopher Hoskins, whose character is named after Night of the Living Dead's lead).
Though made in 1997, this shot-on-super-8 effort does its level best to come across as the Lost 70s Grindhouse Flick, and it has to be said that it does a pretty credible job in capturing that trash aesthetic. There is also wit on display, most prominently in Lampini's deliberately overwrought and baroque dialogue. The film does, though, take its time getting to the rampage: nearly half its 77-minute running time has elapsed before the attacks begin. That first thirty minutes consists largely of people arguing, which has varying entertainment value. The gore scenes have a charming DIY feel, but there is a nastiness to the attacks on women that, as with Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 (director/co-writer Keith Crocker's other recently released effort), is in some ways more off-putting than those of its inspirations, given how much of the rest of the film works as a goofy comedy.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 8th, 2009
“The Black Freighter, the Hell bound ship’s black sails against the yellow Indies sky. I know again the stench of powder and men’s brains and war…more blood”
Zack Snyder had a big problem. He was trying to make a film out of a graphic novel that many acclaim as the best graphic novel ever written. Many directors before him have declared the project unfilmable. Alan Moore, the writing part of the book’s creation team, was dead set against a film version of the book and refused to have his name associated with the film. A lawsuit had broken out between Warner and Fox over who exactly owned the rights to even make the movie. The fans were making their expectations known loud and clear: Mess this up and we’ll get you for it. Did I say Zack Snyder had a problem? On second thought he had several, and not the least was that he found himself staring into the abyss of an unreleasable four hour film. Cuts were going to have to be made, severe cuts. One of those cuts was the comic within a comic story of The Black Freighter.
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