Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on October 18th, 2017
It’s hard to believe it was way back in 1992 when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was first introduced to audiences. It was a title I had missed in the theaters, but I remember picking it up at our local mom-and-pop video store. With the title being what it was, to go in expecting more than a cheesy horror comedy filled with stakes, fangs, and witty dialog would be on the viewer. I wasn’t a huge fan of the film when I first saw it. I sort of felt like it was a film that was trying to be Fright Night, but let’s face it, there are very few vampire films that are as cool. It’s been over two decades since I last visited the film; how does it hold up? Well, to be honest, it’s grown on me quite a bit.
Kristy Swanson plays Buffy, the vampire slayer that attempts to juggle a social life as a cheerleader while discovering that she is also a vampire slayer. She’s one of the girls who would fit in perfectly with the girls from Clueless and is the typical 90’s pretty girl, but this film works well at developing an arc that turns her into a badass by the time the closing credits roll. While she’s more concerned with impressing her friends and trying to stay fashion-forward, we see that vampires are killing off fellow classmates and many others around town.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by John Delia on September 28th, 2017
Taking a few ideas from superhero films, the animated adventure Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie flies onto DVD, Blu-ray and Digital HD for home viewing. The comical kids’ movie has some great characters and a cool plot that will keep tots to tweens laughing and talking about the fun film. The movie comes with over 30 minutes of fascinating extras, mostly for the youngsters. The movie opens with fifth-grade-schoolers George Beard and Harold Hutchins showing off the comic book they created about a world called “Underpanty” where people only wear underwear. Much like the beginning of Superman, there hero gets catapulted to Earth from a distant planet about to blow up. Landing on Earth, the child starts to save cities from the likes of Egg Salad Sandwich Man.
Switch to reality and we find George and Harold in the school yard being surprised by their Principal, Mr. Krump. He thinks that George and Harold spend too much time thinking up and drawing comic book characters instead of schoolwork. The boys are remanded to Krump’s office where he goes over many of the pranks the two have played and warns them if he ever gets proof, they’ll be sorry.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on September 18th, 2017
“Seems like a new boatload of expatriates gets dumped here every day.”
In The Moderns, “here” happens to be 1926 Paris, a time and place that immediately conjures joie de vivre images of lavish parties and complete artistic freedom. And while both of those things are technically on display in filmmaker Alan Rudolph's 1988 drama, the movie turns down the volume on the Roaring Twenties to explore the tricky and transactional connection between art and commerce...and how it can extend to personal relationships.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on August 21st, 2017
“My name is Chuck Wepner. You don't know me...well, you do know me, but you don't know you know me.”
Unless you're a hardcore boxing fan (or a Jersey boy/girl), chances are you don't know the name Chuck Wepner. On the other hand, you don't have to be a sports buff or a movie buff to know the name Rocky Balboa. Wepner is a former heavyweight boxer, and his 1975 title bout with Muhammad Ali served as the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone's Oscar-winning classic. Originally titled The Bleeder (my two cents...they should've stuck with that title), Chuck is the story of “The Real Rocky.”
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on July 31st, 2017
Ever since Lionsgate acquired the Vestron Video collection and has been re-releasing these remastered titles, I have to say I’ve been in nostalgia heaven. I remember seeing these VHS boxes in the horror section at my nearby video store and renting many of these to get my weekly horror fix. Waxwork was always a box cover I always appreciated, but one of the most memorable was Warlock, because in the sea of black VHS boxes with gory box art, Warlock was this white box with the mysterious Julian Sands and this menacing shadow in red. I even remember seeing the trailer attached to my VHS copy of The Monster Squad, and I always dug the trailer for the film, but it took forever for me to finally get to see the film. Now jumping ahead two decades later, I’m getting to review this trilogy. I have to say this is the title from the Vestron series I’ve been the most looking forward to.
Director Steve Miner (Friday the 13th 2 & 3) helms the first film in the series from a script by David Twohy, who would go on to create the little sci-fi gem Pitch Black. Despite how the cover art may look for this film, and even though it is about a warlock (Julian Sands) hoping to eradicate all existence, the film really doesn’t play out as a horror film. In many ways the film feels more so like The Terminator or Highlander. Not that this is a bad thing, but the trailers are a bit misleading.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by J C on July 26th, 2017
“I'm done with crazy.”
When it comes to movies about psychotically wronged women, the crazier things get, the better. Unfortunately, the makers of Unforgettable — a dull domestic drama/wannabe thriller — never got the memo. It's a shame because the movie had some of the ingredients to be a deliciously pulpy thriller, including an amusingly unhinged turn from one of its stars. But in the end, this comes off as a Lifetime movie that slipped through the cracks, fell upwards, and was accidentally released in theaters.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on June 30th, 2017
From the vaults of Vestron Video has unleashed The Unholy for horror fans to indulge in for the first time on Blu-ray. Growing up and going to a Catholic school, films like The Exorcist and The Unholy managed to be all the more terrifying to me because the prospect of demons coming from hell was thought to be a possibility. Sure, Freddy and Jason could get the young me nervous at night, but what films like The Unholy presented were the kind of thoughts that had me afraid to keep the lights off at night. But does the film hold up decades later? That’s a tough call, but with the new digitally restored version of the film now hitting the shelves, it’s worth grabbing a little holy water and checking out.
Father Michael (Ben Cross) is simply your typical priest and is called out to a location where a man threatening to jump from a balcony is requesting to speak with the priest. Meeting with the man on the ledge, Father Michael seems to feel he’s gotten through to the suicidal man, and through a bizarre incident, Father Michael is pulled from the safety of the room through a window and falls to what should have been certain death. Yet by a miracle or simple luck, the priest manages to survive nearly unscathed, and the members of the church begin to believe he is special, “the chosen one,” and in the process he is placed in charge of his own parish.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on June 28th, 2017
“First, there is an opportunity. Then…there’s a betrayal.”
It’s been 20 years since the release of Trainspotting, and it’s fair to say a lot has changed in the past two decades. I remember going out to the United Artists Mission Bell Cinemas to see Trainspotting the weekend it came out. I was with my best friend at the time, and neither of us was old enough to buy tickets for the film, so we ended up having to sneak into the film. We’d seen the trailers, and in a time before the internet there just wasn’t much we could find out about it aside from reading articles in the entertainment magazines. To this day, I remember walking out of the auditorium simply floored by the film. Everything from the soundtrack to the visuals just hit me, and this was one of the first times I realized what creative influence a director has on the look and feel of a film. I came out as a fanny of Danny Boyle and the insane kinetic energy he puts into the look of his films. Over the years Danny Boyle has stepped out of the independent film spotlight and become a big-league director with several other award winning films, i.e. Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, and Steve Jobs.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on May 9th, 2017
It's hard to believe that it has been 45 years since The Godfather first graced theater screens. The Godfather films changed storytelling forever. Films before that time, mobster or otherwise, had some very simple but unshakable rules. There was always a fairly clear distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys always win in the end, and the bad guys always succumb to justice before the final credits. For perhaps the very first time, we were given characters that we knew in our souls were evil men. They killed. They broke laws. They manipulated everyone around them through fear and terrorism to bend to their wills. Somehow, now they are the film’s core heroes, if you will. When Vito is shot, we cheer for Michael, who discards his contempt for his family’s criminal image and comes to his father’s aid. Suddenly this wasn’t just about a gang of mobsters. This was a story about a family. Most of us can’t relate to the mafia ins and outs, but we all have fathers, and even when we dislike what our fathers represent, we will more often than not come to their aid if they’re being threatened. This unique morality paved the way for an entire genre of such characters today. There just couldn’t have been a Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey without The Godfather. While there were certainly protests from aspects of the Italian-American community decrying the violent way our ethnicity was portrayed, most of us from that community saw more than violence and Mafioso. If you’re from an Italian family, you simply can’t help recognizing aspects of your own family in the Corleones. I could see my own grandfather in Vito, sans the mob boss occupation. Many of us took away the strict codes of honor and respect that drive Italian-Americans to this day in very normal lives. We’re a very passionate people, even if most of us are not part of an organized criminal element.
I’m not going to waste any time here taking you through the Godfather saga. Even if you’ve never seen any of these films, and I can’t imagine anyone hasn’t, you know the story and characters almost as much as if you had. For those of us who have seen these films, it has likely been an experience you have never forgotten. They are like potato chips in that you can not have watched them just a single time. For us these films are more than merely films. They are memories that we share as a culture. They have surely become a part of American mythology, as much as Homer’s tales of conquering heroes and mighty gods were for the ancient Greeks. We know the names of the Corleones as well as any of Shakespeare’s characters. We’ve quoted these films as much as anything short of the Bible itself. It is entirely outside of the realm of possibility, for me at least, to imagine American culture without them. While the films are now 45 years old, they still shape our films and literature today. What television series hasn’t done a spoof of The Godfather. Phrases like: “An offer you can’t refuse”, “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli”, or “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” appear everywhere around us.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Brent Lorentson on May 8th, 2017
When The Ring (2002) first came out, if you looked hard enough you could still find movies on VHS, so the thought of a mysterious tape that kills you seven days after watching it wasn’t so entirely farfetched. Now that we are in 2017, if someone were to find a mysterious VHS tape, well, they’d be out of luck for the most part, since I’d wager most of the US population no longer has a VCR. But Hollywood won’t let this stop their successful franchise from moving forward, even though it’s been 12 years since The Ring Two, this weekend is the release of the third film in the series, and quite frankly, I have to wonder if anyone really wanted this.
Samara is back, and she is hungry to take the lives of anyone foolish enough to watch the video, and as the film opens we’re in a plane along with a passenger who has seen the film and only has minutes to go before his seven days are up. While this is a fun scene that gave me hope for what would continue, I couldn’t help but feel that the scene was perhaps a throwaway sequence from Final Destination. Then, oddly enough, the film seems to start again, two years later when we see Gabriel (Johnny Galecki), a college professor, purchasing an old VCR. Once Gabriel gets to his apartment, he gets a surprise when he discovers a tape with the words “Watch Me” written on it. Just like all foolish characters in horror films, he watches the film and immediately gets the phone call.
