Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 11th, 2011
Roger Corman has never let an exploitable opportunity slip by. A case in point is what we have here. In the wake of the first two Godfather films came this rise-and-fall tale. And because the Godfather movies were handsome, expensive and classy, then this Corman-produced effort is also a nice-looking piece of cinema, even if the budget-conscious element shows through with the use of leftover footage from The St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Ben Gazzara plays Al Capone, moving up from street-smart hood to mob kingpin through cunning and violence. His mentor is Johnn Torrio (Harry Guardino), who works to unite the various ethnic Chicago gangs, but lacks the bloodthirstiness necessary to impose his will. Capone has the right ruthlessness, and betrays Torrio, taking his place. But Capone has his own right-hand man with high ambitions: Frank Nitti (Sylvester Stallone).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by BABY on April 7th, 2011
"You can't keep a good dog down."
Baby here again. Yeah, that's right. I'm the German Shepherd/Chow mix that runs security here at Upcomingdiscs. I make sure only the best movies get through my complicated security system. And that spells F A N G S. Okay, I made that last part up. I try to keep them all out, but let's not talk about that right now.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on April 6th, 2011
If you are old enough to have seen the original Tron back in 1982, you know how much things have changed in the digital world since then. The block graphics of the film and subsequent game might have been state-of-the-art at the time, but it looks like something very primitive to the younger generation. Like all good science fiction, many of the incredible elements of the film have become quite commonplace. The idea that a person can be scanned by a laser and transported into a virtual world might still be out of reach, but it turns out that using lasers to scan objects is exactly how we get three-dimensional images of real-world items into the virtual world. When Flynn is communicating with his program, the program is represented by an image of Flynn himself. Today we'd call Clu an avatar, and it's become quite common for people to socialize in environments like Second Life, where their avatar representatives engage in the same kinds of activities we do in the real world.
Tron wasn't quite the huge box office film you might have expected. It did pull in about $5 million on its opening weekend, which was pretty respectable in 1982. The film ended its box office run with just under $40 million from a $17 million budget. That's not where Tron found its biggest success. The film became more popular as the years went by and some of the content was getting more and more like reality. The game became a classic and is still found in the occasional arcade. That was another trend started by the film. It was one of the first films to spawn a video game, something almost every big-budget genre film does as a matter of course today. The movie was a milestone in computer-generated images combined with animation. It took nearly 30 years, but it really isn't a surprise that Tron has finally gotten a sequel. It's been a commanding presence for years at ComicCon. It's the little big movie that wouldn't die.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 5th, 2011
Three years after her unsettling turn in Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Mimsy Farmer headlined this giallo-related effort by director/co-writer Francesco Barilli. She plays a successful chemist on the verge of a psychotic break. She has been haunted since her childhood by the death of her father, and she has recurring memories (or are they fantasies?) of her mother in the arms of a sinister man. Her sense of reality crumbles as objects and people from her past appear and vanish. She retreats deeper and deeper into a paranoid shell. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you, and there are signs that she may be the victim of a sinister conspiracy.
By the time Barilli's film reaches its admittedly chilling finale, it has ceased to make a lick of sense. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: many gialli (and related Italian horror films) follow a logic that belongs to dreams rather than the real world. But even as Barilli adopts a stately pace (all of the violence in the film is reserved for the last fifteen minutes), he also tries to do too much, as if he were trying to fuse Repulsion with The Wicker Man. The film's head-scratching aspects get in the way of the fist-in-the-gut denouement, or at least prevent it from having quite the impact it deserves. However, the film is handsomely shot, and the ending is sufficiently powerful that it will linger in the mind.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 1st, 2011
One of the (many) reasons that Scream 3 was such a weak entry is that it tried to riff on the rules of trilogies, when, at the time of its release, there really weren't any horror film trilogies, with notable exception of the Omen series (and the not-so-notable exception of the trio kicked off by Captive Wild Woman in 1943). But the last few years have seen the completion of two horror trilogies, whose third parts were a very long time in coming. Dario Argento wrapped up his Three Mothers trilogy with the disappointing Mother of Tears in 2007. And now, hitting home video, is a primal roar that also happens to be José Mojica Marins' 2008 conclusion to his Coffin Joe saga.
Despite his enormous list of crimes and his total lack of repentance, Coffin Joe (Marins) is released from prison after serving a mere 40 years. Administrative bungling appears to lie behind his freedom – a hint of the vein of mordant humour that runs through the film. Met outside prison by his hunchbacked assistant Bruno (Rui Rezende), Joe is at first thrown by the 21st-Century metropolis he finds himself in, and Marins has some fun with the Gothic and wildly out-of-place Joe and Bruno stumbling along through the traffic. But things take a darker turn very quickly, once Joe is back in the slums, and embarks once more on his quest for the superior woman who will bear his son, and ensure the immortal continuity of his blood.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 29th, 2011
"Jellystone Park, one of the nation's oldest and most beautiful stretches of wilderness. For years, families have headed out from the busy city eager to enjoy a little camping, fishing, and, of course, observing the park's natural wildlife..."
He's smarter than the average bear. Children and adults alike have been watching his adventures since 1959. Yogi and his young sidekick Boo Boo were one of the most popular of the Hanna-Barbera stable of talking animal characters that reached a peak of popularity on the Saturday morning cartoon shows of the 1960's and 1970's. The two brown bears lived in the fictional Jellystone Park, which is often considered to be intended as Yellowstone Park. Such real-life fixtures as Old Faithful appeared in the original cartoons. The park was kept in order by Ranger Smith, who was always frustrated by the plots and exploits of Yogi, particularly his obsession with acquiring pic-a-nic baskets. It sure beat foraging, and Yogi would go to incredible lengths just to snatch an unsuspecting camper’s lunch.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on March 9th, 2011
There have been very few films of this stature that I have not had the chance to see over the years. Even if I don't think I might enjoy a particular movie, there are those titles that have become so well known or a part of the culture that one feels a sense of obligation to take in. For years The Last Tango In Paris was one of those films for me. Thanks to a new Blu-ray release by MGM, I was finally afforded the opportunity.
The plot of the film is almost irrelevant. It's not about a story at all. Marlon Brando plays a man who has just lost his wife to suicide. But we quickly learn that he had lost her really long before she took her life with a razor blade. She was having an affair with a man who lived in the hotel they ran. It was an odd affair. She insisted that her lover take on the habits and appearances of the husband she was running away from. She required that he wear an identical robe and drink the same booze, or at least have the bottle on hand. She went so far as to tear the wallpaper from the bedroom walls with her fingernails so that the room would appear as hers. One gets the impression that this would have been the more compelling story. Alas, that is not meant to be.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 3rd, 2011
A criminal defense attorney, played by Matthew Modine, has lost all hope after his family dies in an accident. On the brink of suicide, he is called upon for one more case, defending a young man who may face the death penalty on a murder charge.
The story is established very quickly and though each character resists joining forces for the defense, it only takes about a 30 second scene each to convince them otherwise, and then it is straight into the trial (hence the title I suppose).This quick assembly and ever faster exposition makes the story harder to buy. I understand the film only clocks in a bit faster than an episode of Law and Order, but one wonders if it is all necessary if its going to be so hasty.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 25th, 2011
While the warden is away, the inmates of the isolation block break out out of their cells and seize a group of guards and administrators as hostages. Caught, by pure chance, in the wrong place at the wrong time, is Jim Brown, whose sentence is short enough that he wouldn't choose to become involved. However, before he knows it, he is, along with Gene Hackman, leading the riot. The ruckus is, in fact, a cover for an escape attempt: the inmates are digging a tunnel while, as a stalling tactic, Hackman presents a list of grievances to the authorities. But even as Brown becomes more and more enmeshed in the running of the operation, Hackman becomes more and more engaged with the protest, forgetting that it is supposed to be a charade.
Nice, gritty jailhouse piece, shot entirely at the Arizona State Penitentiary, and featuring not only plenty of real inmates, but the actual warden playing the warden of fictional prison. As one would expect of a film starring both Brown and Hackman, the characters are a tough lot, and the action is brutal. Characterizations are strong, with even the minor figures clearly defined. The only false note is sounded by the clumsy pseudo-Johnny Cash prison song that thuds against the ears several times over the course of the film. Otherwise, this is a bone-crunching good time, and is another example (along with Rosemary's Baby) of how different films merely produced by William Castle were from the films he actually directed himself.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on February 25th, 2011
A Wild West overlord is plotting to shrink the world's population. This evil plot is running along smoothly until a shrunken Texas ranger escapes in a whiskey bottle and finds himself saved by a plucky sibling duo named Luke and Lucy, along with their gaggle of wacky friends. The group become honourary rangers and set out to battle evil.
The character design, and over the top sense of adventure, are reminiscent of the Tintin series as these characters are based on those that appeared in Belgian comics under the same Herge banner that Tintin shares. Sadly, the CGI animation takes most all the life out of them with rigid movements and very poor lip syncing. Of course, being originally produced in Dutch, one can forgive some of the mismatched dialogue-to-mouths, but some more work could have been done to smooth it out.
![All Dogs Go to Heaven [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/all-dogs-go-to-heaven-blu-ray-large.jpg)
![Last Tango in Paris [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/last-tango-in-paris-blu-ray-large.jpg)
