"Put your game face on."

When you have the highest-rated drama on television, there is a temptation to milk it for all that you can. We've seen it happen with both the Law & Order and CSI franchises. The results tend to be mixed, with some capturing and even exceeding the popularity of the original. Others never quite seem to connect and are gone while their mother ship is still on the air. NCIS: New Orleans became the first to fall after seven seasons. Dwayne Pride (Bakula) is a native of New Orleans. His family has history here. His father (Keach) is in prison for various fraud activities. His daughter Laurel (Caswell) is in college studying music, a passion she and her father share, although this season we discover she's not quite so passionate as her father. He's now divorced and starting to settle in for himself. He goes way back in his defense of the city and considers protecting it as his own private responsibility.

No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose, especially when it comes to great white sharks. In Great White, an unsuspecting group on a blissful tourist trip find themselves at the mercy of a bloodthirsty shark as it stalks them on the open seas. The film delivers some decent scenes of suspense, but for the most part, the action is a bit on the predictable side as it follows the blueprint for a movie of this genre: there is going to be one character who is completely unlikeable, several members of the cast are fated to fall victim to the sharks, and out of the original group only maybe one or two will survive to tell the tale. While there are several moments of predictability, that isn’t to say that the film does not have its areas of excitement.. I’m not sure it is a movie that I would feel compelled to see again, but not bad for a one-time watch.

Kaz and her boyfriend, former marine biologist Charlie, operate a seaplane tourist business. While business is not exactly flourishing, they get by. Eventually, an opportunity for a big payday presents itself in the form of Joji and his wife, Michelle, who are hoping to book the couple’s plane for a day trip. Kaz and Charlie along with their cook, Benny, take the couple to the picturesque Hell’s Reef (I know, the name gives a heavy dose of foreshadowing). Their nice opening is ruined by the discovery of a corpse of a man that shows all the telltale signs of a shark attack.

CBS releases the 18th season of NCIS on DVD, and just the sound of that gives one reason to pause. There are few shows or franchises that get to live in that rarified air. In the modern age of television, only the Dick Wolf Law & Order series has accomplished this kind of sheer mass of episodes. The NCIS landscape is certainly in for some big changes. The New Orleans show ended with its 7th season last year, and we'll be talking about that show in the days to come. This 18th season of the mothership includes the 400th episode of just that series. The franchise will close in on its 900th episode next season with the addition of NCIS: Hawaii. CBS still has production facilities in the Island State, and those will soon be put to good use extending the family that actually started with JAG, and if you include that 10-year run, the franchise is over 1000 episodes. Shows don't last that long without doing something right.

The 400th episode of NCIS is a bit of a special one. The show goes back in time to the days when Gibbs (Harmon) and Ducky (McCallum) first met. A current case takes them back to that meeting, and we get to learn some of the quirks of that relationship and where it came from. In fact, if there is a theme for season 18, it's Gibbs and his relationships. A lot of the season's stories really bring some of those relationships to new levels, and for some, full circle. Gibbs is absolutely the big story this season. Imagine a character that has been on a show for 400 episodes and he can still evolve and expand. That's exactly what you're going to get here.

"Let's just cut the crap and get on with it, shall we?"

You shouldn't need a primer on the NCIS franchise by now. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last decade or longer, you're up to speed on these guys. If not, you still could have some fun and enjoy the CBS DVD release of NCIS: L.A., but NCIS has been around for nearly 20 years, and this particular version has been around for 12 seasons now. That's a lot of characterizations under the bridge and a ton of character evolution and stories that can't help but give you maximum mileage out of the release. If you aren't up to speed, you can check out over 30 seasons of various NCIS reviews by just banging it here: NCIS Reviews. That should keep you busy long enough to get you to the point that we're here talking about Season 13. So hopefully you are up to speed, and we can get on with it. Shall we? 

It was 1975, and cop shows were all the rage. The only way a crime show might be able to distance itself from the crowd was to introduce the audience to a group of cops that were not quite so known and show off special-unit kinds of skills and equipment. The solution in 1975 was the L.A. SWAT team. Most folks didn't know what SWAT was. It stands for Special Weapons And Tactics. They are the guys who have the cool armored trucks and go where the serious action can be found. Hostage situations and severe firepower that overwhelms the typical cops on the beat are no match for these elite forces. So Steve Forrest and Robert Urich took our televisions by storm. The amazing thing is that the series was a mid-season replacement in its first year and only really lasted one complete season. It was 37 episodes and out. But the theme by Barry De Vorzon became a top-40 hit on the radio, and while the ratings never really caught fire, something about the whole experience remained in the pop culture all of this time. An A-list film in 2003 that starred Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrell, Jeremy Renner, Michelle Rodriguez, and LL Cool J did well enough at the box office to spawn a few direct-to-video sequels in name only. And it all went away once again.

Jump to 2017, and it appears little has changed. Cop and crime shows are all the rage, and the only way to stand out is to introduce the audience to a new kind of unit or team. That's how we got the NCIS, Criminal Minds and CSI franchises, to be sure. So why not pull out a few old tricks. That appears to be television gold these days with remakes of Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver, Magnum P.I., Charmed, and The Equalizer all having significant runs in the primetime schedule. Why not bring out SWAT? That's exactly what happened, and here we are four years later with the fourth season hitting the video shelves on DVD.

Have you ever wondered what the Jurassic Park franchise would have looked like if instead of a amusement park, it was a hunting preserve? Yeah, me either, but someone must have, because that is essentially the embodiment of the film Jurassic Hunt. After watching the film, I’ve come to the conclusion that some films just don’t need to be made. Especially if they are going to be done with cheesy special effects and sub-par storytelling. To put it mildly, this was not a movie for me, and if you are a fan of high-quality content, I’m pretty sure you will feel the same. I suppose the film reaches the level of a sci-fi made-for-TV movie, but other than that, I can see no higher aspirations for it. The film kind of puts you right into the thick of things; no real back story or anything like that. We are just kind of launched right into the hunt. On this type of film, I would have expected background information to be paramount. It would have been nice if they had at the very least an opening sequence that showed our protagonist’s motivation for coming to the park. Maybe add in some details that she lost someone close to her who was determined to expose the wrong dealings at the park, and now their mission has become her own. It’s a little cliché, but I could have gotten behind that. It certainly would have helped develop the character a little bit. At first glance, there isn’t really much to root for with her. She is clearly acting tougher than she is, and her attitude is very soon exposed to be all sizzle and no steak. If it wasn’t for the fact that she attempting to do something noble at the risk of her own life, she would be a throwaway character.

Speaking of her mission, the conspiracy that she seems hell-bent on exposing needed to be fleshed out too. On paper, there is nothing really inherently evil about them. Granted, their representative is a sociopath and all, but we never really get a real look behind the curtain and what it is that our protagonist is so determined to expose. I suppose using dinosaurs as hunting prey rises to the level of animal cruelty, but I don’t believe that is the platform that she is crusading for. Then let’s talk about the company that she is keeping. She is surrounded by killers, one of whom seems to have some pretty despicable things planned for her, and she is against killing or even carrying a gun. OK, she might as well be wearing a sign that says “sacrificial lamb” on it.

“By 2014, hundreds of young women had left Europe to join ISIS. Their journeys began on social media platforms where they found new friends and chose new names.”

Based on the non-fiction novel, In The Skin of a Jihadist, this film tells the story about one reporters journey to create a groundbreaking story and how she nearly lost herself in the process. Valene Kane (The Fall) plays Amy Whittaker, a freelance reporter struggling to make ends meet when she decides to investigate the recruitment of young European women by ISIS. As part of her investigation, Amy creates a fake Facebook profile of a young woman who has recently converted to Islam. Before long, she is contacted by Bilel (Shazad Latif, Star Trek: Discovery), an ISIS fighter from Syria. On the surface, he is charming and he speaks of his chosen cause with great passion and conviction. Amy’s editor is ecstatic about the potential story, and before long, Amy finds herself disguising herself in the garb of a respectable Muslim so that she can engagement in Skype sessions with Bilel. This was a very unique and compelling story that was full of intense and suspenseful moments from the opening scenes. The most unique element of the story was that the entire film is told from the perspective of a computer screen.

Not bad for a B-movie alien invasion dystopian film. That was a nice surprise, as I was all prepared to endure a bunch of cliches and basic character archetypes. However Occupation: Rainfall delivers a moderately decent movie experience. There were some obvious timing issues towards the film’s conclusion, but we’ll get into that later. Speaking of surprises, I was surprised to discover that this film is actually a direct sequel of a film that was released in 2018. Granted, there were some changes, such as Jet Tranter replacing Stephanie Jacobson as Amelia Chambers, or Amelia the human as she is referred to more frequently than by her real name. The film also features the addition of The Originals’ Daniel Gilles and Jason Isaac as a hilarious character. All in all, minus that timing issue I mentioned earlier, Occupation Rainfall delivered a surprising and overall enjoyable experience.

Given that I did not see the original film, I am at a bit of a disadvantage as to background information regarding the story, but fortunately for me, the film served pretty much as a standalone movie. Obviously there are a few callbacks to the original film in reference to the characters’ personal history, but other than that, it is pretty self-explanatory. The film also starts off with a narration that gives some background information, which ensures that you won’t be completely lost in the sauce. In a nutshell, aliens have landed on earth with the intent of invading. Naturally, the human race has risen to defend their home, and despite being outnumbered and technologically inferior, the human race has managed to hold their own for nearly two years. However, billions have died on both sides of the struggle, and the weight of the war is felt on both sides as well.