"Lucky Bastard was a pornographic website that invited fans to have sex with porn stars. The following footage is believed to be the last video shot for the site."

You know exactly what that kind of an intro means. You should. The found-footage genre has been around even long before it was turned into a modern trend by The Blair Witch Project. Since that time the genre has appeared in both large- and small-budget films. The shaky footage usually covers a variety of sins by the filmmakers. Rarely does the genre have anything clever or new to dispense. That's not exactly true with Lucky Bastards.

It's a sad state of affairs. The road that Blood Ties has taken to get to this Blu-ray release is far more interesting than the film itself. It all starts with a French film Les liens du sang that was itself a reflection on the American cop drams genre. One of the original French screenwriters collaborated to bring the idea full circle to become an American cop drama. The film made the film festival circuit with mixed reviews and results. For some reason Director Guilaume Canet decided to go back to the editing room and remove nearly a half hour of the original film's running time.

What happens when you splice together the killer-couple kicks of Bonnie and Clyde and Natural Born Killers with the ritualistic depravity of torture porn offerings like Hostel and Saw? I'm not really sure who — if anyone — was looking for an answer to that particular question, but that didn't stop Scavenger Killers from going to extreme lengths to provide one. Unfortunately, this low-budget slasher flick/wannabe satire is entirely too clumsy and non-committal in its tone to pull it off.

When I read on IMDB that this was meant to be a horror comedy, I have to admit I breathed a sigh of relief.  After watching Ghost of Goodnight Lane I just simply was left wondering if the laughs were intended or if this was a film that just was delivered so poorly that you just couldn’t help but laugh at it.  Having seen now that the film was intended for laughs, I’m still not so sure it’s helps the film any.  Though it has a solid story and a decent cast, the execution just falls flat.

When I was a young boy I loved playing with my toys. We didn't have Transformers in those days, but we did have Major Matt Mason, plastic dinosaurs, Hot Wheels and Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker sets. Yeah, in those days a toy could cause third degree burns, and no one really worried about getting sued. Kind of takes the fun out of being a kid today. You know who else, I bet, loved to play with his toys? Michael Bay. I bet he had the coolest toys in his neighborhood. He probably wasn't the best guy to be friends with, however. He didn't invite the kids over to play with his toys. He likely charged you a nickel to watch him play with them

“I like the fact that there's no desk. I like the fact that he's not wearing a suit and tie. And I like the fact that there's not some over-hyped studio audience being prompted to laugh at topical jokes that we're all gonna forget about in the next few days.”

For its second season, IFC's Comedy Bang! Bang! got bigger and bolder in the way it manically skewered decades of talk show and pop culture conventions. Not surprisingly, the show also got even weirder.

“It begins as a whisper. A promise. The lightest of breezes dances above the death cries of 300 men...”

It may have started as a whisper, but 300 quickly became synonymous with roaring, instant-classic declarations after it burst onto the scene in 2007. Zack Snyder's muscular adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel was an outta-nowhere blockbuster. When a movie achieves that level of success, there's usually a sequel in the works even as the opening-weekend grosses are still rolling in. Of course, that proved to be a bit trickier given what happens to the heroes at the end of 300.

When the first Wolf Creek was released it was one of those films that had a lot of hype around it, and when I got around to watching it, I dug it.  It’s one of those films where the more I’ve watched it the more  I’ve gotten to appreciate it, not just for its gore, but the film has a solid story, and I appreciated that the film at no time allows you to get too comfortable. At any moment a character could be brutally murdered.  It’s the character of Mick Taylor (John Jarratt) who could equally make me smile with his crude outback charm or make me squirm with uneasiness the moment his hands took hold of a weapon.

Detective Carrie Wells (played by Poppy Montgomery) and her former boyfriend/current crime fighting partner Al Burns (played by Dylan Walsh) have been noticed because of their uncanny crime solving percentage in the upper 90% (a fairly common thing in TV crime shows, but nearly unheard of in the real world) and get promoted to the NYPD's Major Crimes unit. With this move, and the fact that this program bounced in and out of cancellation quagmire between the first and second season

It’s hard to believe it was way back in 2001 when Joy Ride was first released.  You can lump me in with the crowd that didn’t expect there to be a sequel, much less a third entry into this series.  The second Joy Ride I seemed to have missed altogether, so when I was given Joy Ride 3, I have to admit I was a little hesitant about checking this film out.  Now that I have checked out the Blu-ray and all its extras, all I can think is that I had a good time with this film.