Welcome to the redesign of Upcomingdiscs.com
Posted in News and Opinions by Gino Sassani on January 10th, 2009
That’s right, folks. We put a fresh coat of paint on the Batcave.
Take some time. Make yourself at home. Explore your new digs. You’ll discover the return of some of your favorite features, particularly the release calendar. We’ve improved the search features to make it easier to find what you’re looking for in our vast 4500 post library of reviews, columns, musings, and news items.
I hope you’ll take the time to drop me a line through our contact page or simply leave a comment right here. Let me know what you like or dislike. In fact, I invite you to use the comments feature on anything posted here. Tell us when we’re doing things right, and tell us when you think we could improve in some way.
Rest assured that while we may have a new shiny look, one thing that hasn’t changed is our dedication to making Upcomingdiscs.com the absolute best in DVD, Blu-ray, and game reviews. You can count on us to continue to deliver the same quality that has made this site everything you’ve come to expect for the last 8 years.
I want to thank Rod Edwards and Jeremy Frost for all their hard work making this new look a reality.
So, welcome to the new Upcomingdiscs.com.
Welcome home.
Gino
The Honesty of Sleaze
Posted in Brain Blasters by David Annandale on January 10th, 2009
I have, for work-related reasons, been watching quite a number of European horror films in close succession, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. Yesterday, in the middle of this, I was moved to reflect on what seems to be a fairly significant difference between the British and Continental films. I won’t go so far as to claim that what I’m going to describe is universal, but it is prevalent enough to be, at the very, very least, a marked trend. And it is this: that the Continental variant has a distinctly sleazier feel than do its cousins.
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Devil Hunter
Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 9th, 2009
A group of low-life gangsters kidnap a starlet (Ursula Fellner) and hightail it off to a jungle island, where they subject their victim to endless indignities while waiting for the ransom money to arrive. Al Cliver is dispatched to rescue her, but his helicopter arrival draws the attention of a group of hostile natives and, more to the point, a red-eyed, cannibal zombie-god who holds them in a grip of fear.
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Gitane Demone — Life After Death
Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 9th, 2009
Gitane Demone was one of the lead singers for seminal deathrock band Christian Death before going solo in 1989. This 2-DVD set is a record of her various solo efforts, tracking various incarnations, most notoriously (and most prominently featured in the release’s packaging) being the fetish performances for the likes of the DeMask club and Skin Two magazine. Present here is a mix of television interviews, one video, and a raft of live footage.
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Breakfast At Tiffany’s – Paramount Centennial Collection
Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 9th, 2009
Holly Golightly is perhaps the most tragic, depressing character in all of literature and film, especially to those of us who know (or have known) people just like her. As an example to aspire to, Golightly fails miserably. She is internally and externally destructive, intentionally so. Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the novella in which she was formed, has created in her a realistic portrait of people that fear happiness, and so imprison themselves to lives of restless and reckless abandon.
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Kung Fu Killer
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 9th, 2009
Kung Fu Killer is a sad attempt to take advantage of the two iconic roles that David Carradine has had in his life. There’s more than one reference or nod to the popular Kung Fu television show. The name of his character is Crane, instead of Caine. Here Crane is the master, and he has his own “Grasshopper” moment with his own student. There is a flute driven theme that could have easily been lifted from one of the television episodes.
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Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget: Uncensored
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 9th, 2009
These Comedy Central Roasts are a bit of a crapshoot. I laughed my rear off during the William Shatner Roast. Unfortunately, I didn’t even crack a smile watching this one. It’s not like Saget’s a funny guy to begin with. Throw in a room full of other not-funny folks, and you get a real snore fest.
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Ring of Death
Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on January 7th, 2009
Every director has a style. Sometimes it can be a deliberate style, sometimes it can be more subtle. I received the movie Ring of Death and was a little worried since I had my fill of bad prison movies. After watching the movie, it seemed familiar but I couldn’t place why. The director’s name on the back was Bradford May. To most people, that probably does not ring a bell. To me, it was a different story: he was the director of Darkman 2 and Darkman 3. Then everything from that point became clear.
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Dare to Play the Game
Posted in Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on January 7th, 2009
Most Played over Xbox Live, Lego Rock Band & Illinois Senate hates alcohol? – Welcome to the column that would be rich if it had a nickel for every bad gaming idea to be made this year known as Dare to Play the Game.
I am currently not playing Fable II, I know you are in shock. So since my time in WoW is limited on purpose; what exactly am I playing? Believe it or not, Lego Star Wars CS and Burnout Revenge. Not Paradise, the older one.
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Ghost Town (Blu-ray)
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 6th, 2009
David Koepp is one of Hollywood’s power screenwriters. His credits include Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, and Spider-Man. As a director he has also had some limited success with films like Stir Of Echoes. It seems almost from left field that we end up with a romantic comedy both written and directed by the award winning writer. If Koepp is out of his element here, it really doesn’t show at all.
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The Tudors – Season 2
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 6th, 2009
The Tudors returns for a rather triumphant second season. The series attempts to modernize the story more than a little. Henry’s attire is more akin to a rock star than a 16th century ruler. The language is also more updated, often filled with modern colloquialisms and the like. The story of Henry VIII is well known, but this is not the Henry your history teachers told you about.
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Kyle XY: The Complete Second Season
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 6th, 2009
“Every story has a beginning. Every life has meaning and potential…”
Kyle doesn’t really know his story, and he’s beginning to understand his potential. But that was last year. This year things are about to change for our adolescent boy without a belly button. The series Kyle XY returned first to ABC Family and now returns to DVD.
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Greek: Chapter Two
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 6th, 2009
If there is a highlight of this second release, it’s the flashback episode, Freshman Daze. It’s absolutely great. We get to meet all of these characters back in high school and see how the dynamics developed. Now we know why they are the way they are to each other. I particularly enjoyed seeing how the Cappy and Evan characters were once pretty tight friends.
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The Banality of Weirdness
Posted in Brain Blasters by David Annandale on January 5th, 2009
Some movies have “cult” written all over them. But that can actually be counterproductive. If the psychotronic audience sense the film is trying too hard to be a cult epic, then it risks rejection. In this context, I’m not quite sure what to think of Minoru Kawasaki’s The World Sinks Except Japan (2006).
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Tommy Boy (Blu-ray)
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 31st, 2008
There are a ton of parallels between the Chris Farley/David Spade comedy team and that of John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd. Both teams began in the Saturday Night Live arena. It was that physical big/little guy combination that has its roots with Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello. Both teams were at the height of their careers when a drug overdose would claim the wilder member of the team. Both of the deceased comedians left behind at least one successful brother to carry on the name in show business. Tommy Boy was by far the best of the films this duo made before Farley’s tragic overdose in 1997.
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The Duchess
Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 31st, 2008
“I fear I’ve done some things in life too late… and others too early.”
Not a creed for the growing minions of our divorced population (though it probably should be), but a remarkably summative line from the new film The Duchess starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes. Knightley is Georgiana, a spirited young girl, who starts with a fairy tale ideal of how her life as a married woman will be
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Pulse 3
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 31st, 2008
“Gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss gazes back at you…”
The original Pulse film was a remake of an Asian horror film, part of the recent trend of converting many of these titles into American retellings. That trend appears to also include strong warnings against technology and linking ghostly apparitions with some form of technology, from video tapes to cell phones.
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Dare to Play the Game
Posted in Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on December 31st, 2008
Video Game Physiques, Sixty Dollar Standard Disappearing & Michael Phelps: Next Action Hero? – Welcome to the column that brings in the New Year with as much booze, chicken wings and women that $10 and witty jokes will get him known as Dare to Play the Game.
This past week I found myself playing two games in the 360 arena: Fable II & Lego Batman. In Fable II, I went to the task of getting all of the achievements that I reasonably could on my “good” character. This included things like getting married, having a child, getting married again, etc.
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Coach Carter (Blu-ray)
Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 31st, 2008
Based on the true story, Coach Carter follows the tale of a high school coach who was once an All-American athlete himself. He is brought in to coach basketball at his old school where he still holds a few records. He accepts a challenge to turn around a program that has become mired in a tradition of defeat. He takes a no nonsense approach to the players from the moment he meets them
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Eagle Eye
Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 31st, 2008
Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan are on the run from a series of carefully orchestrated catastrophes. All are ominously foretold by a rather humorless young lady that may or may not be a robot in the new thriller Eagle Eye, a film that purports to be “from Stephen Spielberg.” Spielberg-lovers, don’t get your hopes up. Authorial rights belong more to director D.J. Caruso and a smorgasbord of writers that include John Glenn,
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Duckman – Seasons Three & Four
Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on December 30th, 2008
The series known as Duckman can be explained in one phrase. Guilty pleasure. The series ran on USA during the 90’s before they decided to re-brand themselves as something more serious. Though for some reason they still tend to show the dog show every year. Anyhow, as I remember it came on right before another guilty pleasure of mine from the 90’s, Rhonda Shear and Up All Night. I miss Rhonda deeply, plastic never looked so good. Heck Tupperware was jealous. Duckman was a series like no other; full of debauchery and indecency just like Grandma intended. Grandpa will never be the same. Paramount has brought us forty-eight episodes over seven discs to compose season 3 & season 4. One has to wonder if it will hold up after all of these years.
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Ghost Town
Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 29th, 2008
Ghost Town, the new romantic comedy from writer-director David Koepp, succeeds in not only introducing its British star Ricky Gervais to a wider audience but also in telling a simple, familiar story with an addictive charm all its own. Gervais plays Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets without the extreme OCD. What he lacks in this, however, he makes up for in his hatred of humanity.
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Visits: Hungry Ghost Anthology
Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 29th, 2008
Visits – “an anthology of bone-chilling horror”? Well, it has its moments, I will say that. The most effective scenes are the ones that don’t call attention to the scare elements. Scenes that involve one or two little things out of the ordinary that don’t smack you in the face, but actually force a double-take in considering what it was you just saw
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Dude, Why Did the Earth Stop Moving?
Posted in Brain Blasters by David Annandale on December 26th, 2008
First, let me wish my fellow site scribes and whoever might be reading this the best of the season. Now I should turn to the painful task of following up my speculative piece a couple of weeks ago about what might go wrong with the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, a blockbuster whose success is so anemic that, a few years from now, it will certainly have lapsed into sufficient obscurity that whatever profile it might still have will be the result of masochists voluntarily subjecting themselves to its inanities. It will, in other words, have become a cult film, but of the sort where the cult’s loyalty is the loyalty of absolute contempt.
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Dare to Play the Game
Posted in Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on December 24th, 2008
Death to the Clamshell, Guitar Hero: Metallica Edition & Breath of Fire dismissed? – Welcome to the column that Santa Claus brought three non-working N64’s, two suspended WoW accounts and no Morgan Webb in a pear tree known as Dare to Play the Game.
This weekend I beat Fable II. Now, many beat this game a long time ago but I was taking my time. I wanted to be in line for certain achievements and my hard work payed off. As a result of buying Giles’ farm, I found myself to be the recipient of a wonderful weapon. Ever see Army of Darkness? I got me what can only be described as a boomstick.
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