Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 24th, 2009
“Just because our parents keep telling us that Jason was only a legend, doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. What if he did come back here looking for the camp counselor that caused him to drown as a boy, searching for the one that decapitated his vengeful mother? And you do know what today’s date is, don’t you?...Happy Friday the 13th.”
Legend or not, Jason’s back in the 6th Friday the 13th film, and he’s out for more blood than ever before. Filmed under the fake name of Aladdin’s Sane, in an overt tribute to director Tom McLoughlin’s favorite musician, David Bowie, the new film was a return to the franchise’s more established roots. Gone are the psychological thriller aspects of the previous disaster. Jason is back, and there’s no mistaking him for anyone else again. As the titles implies: Jason Lives.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 24th, 2009
The whole trick to watching the new educational series from the Smithsonian Channel is to keep your head. Someone once said that was the key to battle, to keep your head while those around you are losing theirs. Well, it appears a ton of folks have been losing their heads for centuries. On the surface Tomb Detectives is a real life Bones. The half hour episodes explore ancient bodies, usually merely skeletal remains, and attempt to answer some basic questions: How did they die? What was their life like? What kind of cultural traditions might have been involved with the death? Was this an execution or an inevitable result of battle? Where these ancient victims the willing participants in a religious sacrifice, or were there criminal elements at play? The series gives you a close up look at these remains and then introduces you to a team of scientists who will attempt to answer these burning questions. It’s sort of like the team from CSI trying to solve murders that are as much as 2000 or more years old. Of course, there is no statute of limitations on murder. We follow the team into the lab where various experiments provide clues to these answers. There are often very low budget dramatizations of the various theories the scientists come up with. The first two stories deal exclusively with ancient beheadings, and the theme pops up pretty consistently throughout the rest of the series. Someone has a serious head fetish here.
The episodes pretty much play out as your standard cable documentary with a bit more drama added on for effect. As we are introduced to each scientist there’s a freeze screen and an X-Files scroll that tells us who they are and what their specialty happens to be. Unfortunately, even in 26 minutes there is a ton of repetition in these shows. We see the same dramatization scenes over and over. There’s a lot of dry in the lab talk that might put you to sleep if the images themselves weren’t enough of an eye-opener. The show attempts to delve into a little history surrounding the discoveries in an attempt to put the find into some historical perspective. The narration, however, tends to point out the obvious and isn’t incredibly entertaining. In the end it’s a matter of seen one, seen them all kind of a thing. Your best bet is to try and catch the episodes on rerun at the Smithsonian Channel.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on June 23rd, 2009
Racism seems to be one of those words that people like to throw around without a care to meaning or the concept of right and wrong. Many groups of people like to throw around this word for a variety of reasons but mostly to benefit themselves and not help the greater good. Spinning into Butter takes on the task of a white Dean of Students named Sarah Daniels who must examine her own beliefs when a black student named Simon finds racist notes that read “Little Black Sambo” and the aftermath that soon follows. It sounds like the premise for a rather simplistic race relations movie. However, what really comes next is something far different and has a couple of twists to boot.
Sarah Daniels (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) is the Dean of Students at a small college in Belmont, Vermont. When the movie opens, she is trying to convince Patrick Chibas (played by Victor Rasuk) to change his ethnic choice in a scholarship application from Nuyorican (of Puerto Rican descent who is born and raised in New York) to Hispanic. Finally they agree on Puerto Rican because it is determined that the board will not understand what a Nuyorican is.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 22nd, 2009
We were all told that the fourth film in the Friday The 13th series was going to be the last. From the cast and crew to the studio execs it was official: Jason was dead and gone. Time to move on. But it took less than a year for a new chapter to be tacked on to that final one. The fifth entry into the franchise would contain one of the more limited budgets. But it wasn’t the budget cuts that has made this one of the most highly criticized films of the series. It’s the total disregard for the tradition of the films and the poor choices that were made in making this film. The movie was filmed with little fanfare. This was in the days before the internet made such things all but impossible. It was made under the name Repetition to hide the true nature of the shoot from anyone who caught wind of the production. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to try and diminish the film’s buzz. It brought in a very disappointing $21 million at the box office. That might have had a better chance of truly killing Jason than anything else.
Director Danny Steinmann’s only real credit was a porno film. You can’t mistake the tendencies in this outing. It certainly contains a greater amount of nudity than any of the other films. The sexual scenes are by far more graphic. It was also the last we'd hear of the troubled director. Meanwhile Jason was relegated to an almost non-existent part in the film. The kills all are very quick and happen mostly outside of camera range. The obvious excuse is that the MPAA had reined down hard on these films, and to an extent that was true. The real problem here was a lack of both imagination and money. Tom Savini was again gone from the scene, and his replacement couldn’t carry Savini’s latex jockstrap. The series went from using barrels of stage blood to a couple of toothpaste tubes’ worth. Finally the killer isn’t even necessarily Jason at all. It’s almost impossible to criticize this kind of a film for being ridiculous, but the series reached a low point with this outing.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 19th, 2009
When the cast and crew went about their work on Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter it appears that it really was intended as a sendoff for the popular franchise. There had been a turnover at Paramount, and the powers that be thought the slasher cycle was pretty much over. Now whether any of that is true is anyone’s guess. Everyone associated with the project claims that that was their firm understanding from the beginning. Writer Barney Cohen insists that the Paramount brass made it very clear that he was supposed to kill off Jason with such Hollywood “grammar” that there was little doubt he was dead and gone forever. We, of course, know that Jason might very well be dead, but he’s far from gone.
It’s minutes from the events of the previous film. Police and paramedics are on hand to clean up the mess left by Jason in full 3D glory. Jason’s body is taken to the hospital morgue. Fortunately for Jason, the place is has a couple of teen attendants with those raging hormones that bring out the best in our hockey-masked avenger. After a little play time with the attendant and nurse, Jason is once again on the loose. Meanwhile a group of teens are moving into a remote house out in he woods. The only neighbors are the Jarvis family. There’s single mom (Freeman), daughter Trish (Beck) and young Tommy (Feldman). Tommy is a monster fan who has a Tom Savini-like ability to create killer monster masks and prosethics. He’s a bit introverted and nerdy. Little do they know that Jason is going to crash the new neighbors’ party. It’s left to Tommy and sister to take Jason out, supposedly for good.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 19th, 2009
“Back to the days of the Gold Rush, as Sergeant Preston with his wonder dog, Yukon King, meets the challenges of the Yukon … A land inflamed with gold. Men who came quickly learned the heroism of sacrifice and the treachery of greed.”
These words first reached across the radio airwaves in 1947. Children and adults alike would gather around the warm glow of their large radios to hear the exploits of Canadian Mounties Sergeant Preston and his trusty companions Rex, his horse, and Yukon King, his Alaskan Malamute. When the early days of television arrived, it was no surprise that the more successful radio dramas would become some of the first television shows. Sergeant Preston was part of that transition wave of the new medium of television. Although filmed in color, the series ran in black and white, which was the only format available to the homeowner in those days. Now through the release of the series on DVD, we get to see the series for the first time in color.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 19th, 2009
A group of amateur ghost hunters armed with cameras and other equipment pose as documentary producers for the Discovery Channel. They head for the isolated town of Goldfield, where an abandoned haunted hotel is rumored to be one of the 7 portals to “the other side”. Their car breaks down just outside of town near an old cemetery in the middle of the night. A local bartender appears to be the caretaker for the old hotel and the town’s historian. He gets the exposition that sets up the story for the kids. He hands out the keys to the hotel, but warns them not to go into room 109. Of course, I don’t have to tell you where they go.
The film shows the past events in sepia tone flashback sequences. A woman was brutally tortured and killed in the hotel many years ago. One of the kids has a connection. Her grandmother was involved in the tragic events. Mostly, the kids stumble around drinking, having sex, and pinching a few of the hotel’s antiques. Until the ghost decides to join the party.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 17th, 2009
Back in 1998 there was a very promising television series on the Fox Network. Unfortunately, the network never gave it a fighting chance, and it was soon gone as quickly as it had appeared. It was called Brimstone. The idea was that a dead cop (Horton) went to Hell for killing his wife’s rapists. He gets a second chance when the Devil (Glover) offers him his life back if he would become Hell’s bounty hunter. He would capture souls who had escaped from Hell. I loved the show and even participated in its attempts to be reprieved. I never did get to see the return of Brimstone, but the concept would return in the lighter Reaper. Reaper is like Buffy The Vampire Slayer meets Kids In The Hall.
Sam Oliver (Harrison) is a young guy who works at The Work Bench with many of his high school friends. The Bench is basically a Home Depot clone. One day the Devil (Wise) shows up in his car. It appears that his parents sold Sam’s soul to him, and now that he’s turned 21 it’s time to collect. Sam’s job is now to collect and returned escaped souls back to Hell. For each job he’s given a vessel that is, in some way, appropriate to the soul he’s tracking. The vessel can be a vacuum cleaner or an 8-track tape. Failure is not an option, as the Devil doesn’t take rejection lightly. To help him in his tasks he recruits his two best friends and co-workers. Sock (Labine) looks and acts a lot like Jack Black. He has crazy pointed hair and is basically a slacker. He’s always looking for the easy way out or the scam that will pay off for him, regardless of who gets hurt. He really does have a good heart and comes through just when Sam needs him to come through. Ben (Gonzales) is always coming up with crazy ideas like a self sucking straw. He’s hungry for attention and lacks in self confidence. He’s somewhat of the team tech guy. Sam is in love with Andi (Paregrym) who’s not sure if she can take the whole evil thing. She’ll help out in a pinch, and they have an on again, off again relationship.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 17th, 2009
Perhaps best known and beloved for his portrayal of Felix Unger in the original Odd Couple film, Jack Lemmon has a long list of credits to his name. He’s appeared in 100 films and many stage and television productions as well. It was also a little known fact that he was an extremely accomplished musician and wrote music for a couple of his films. He was one of those actors who simply loved his job. He was known for uttering the phrase “It’s magic time” before a take on the set of almost all of his films. While primarily known for his comedy, Lemmon was actually not a bad dramatic performer and believed there was no reason the two couldn’t be combined. His role in The China Syndrome was far from a comedic one and showcased his ability to do drama.
Jack Lemmon might not be the most dramatic or even the most acclaimed actor out there. But there was something about him that defined him as an icon all the same. He was a very typically American actor. He brought to life characters that were instantly identifiable, but yet oddly eccentric enough to keep our interest. He always came off as genuine and was literally loved by the plethora of actors who always considered it an honor to work with him. He developed lifelong friendships with many of his co-stars, most notably Walter Matthau. The relationship you saw on the screen was what you got off the screen. Jack’s son Chris referred to him as Uncle Walter and claimed that if Matthau played golf, Jack would have married him. But this was just the kind of guy he was. In a day of angst-filled superstars who make more press outside of their roles, Lemmon is still a breath of fresh air. You might miss the man, but Sony and Chris Lemmon have gotten together to make sure you don’t miss some of the greater films.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on June 17th, 2009
“Don’t forget that at the end of the day, it’s just a snake, a big messed up snake”.
Boy, if one word of dialog ever summed up a film before, this one does a pretty good job of it. Carnivorous is a low budget answer to the Anaconda series. Throw in the plot from Pumpkinhead and you pretty much have the entire film down, without ever having to have seen it. I wasn’t so lucky.
