Adam Tyner's DVD Talk DVD Reviews

Adam Tyner's DVD Talk DVD Reviews http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/list.php?reviewType=DVD+Video DVD Talk DVD Review RSS Feed en-us The Men (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60439 Tue, 14 May 2013 13:08:36 PDT A Streetcar Named Desire, there was a short interval between his final Broadway performance as Stanley Kowalski and the whir of 35mm cameras

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in the film adaptation. Brando's first role in a feature film was instead in the largely unseen drama The Men.

There's no banter beforehand, no inspiring speeches, and no hordes of enemy soldiers in a frenzied rush towards the camera. Brando's young lieutenant is introduced silently peering around the next corner, ensuring that it's safe for the rest of his platoon to move forward. It's from the opposite direction that the shot rings out. Bud, struck in the back, collapses. From this moment forward, he will never again move his legs or feel any sensation below the waist. Whatever bright light was burning within him has been snuffed out. Bud is sent to a veteran's hospital to convalesce but, rather than adapt to his new life, prefers to wallow in misery instead. Bud does his damndest to ensure that his mind and body remain as inert as his legs. His doctor (Everett Sloane), an early specialist in paraplegia, moves Bud from his private room to a ward of similarly afflicted soldiers. Dr. Brock hopes that the presence of other paraplegic young men -- soldiers who've come to terms with their disabilities and are adjusting as best they can -- will prove to Bud that he's not resigned to life as a lump in a hospital bed. Instead, his toxic negativity threatens to poison the men around him. Two people refuse to relent, though: the unwaveringly loyal girl that Bud turned his back on years ago (Teresa Wright) and the ward's most wide-eyed optimist (Arthur Jurado). They inspire Bud to rebuild himself in the face of his new limitations, but as he soon learns, it takes more than strength and resolve to deal with life as a paraplegic in the outside world.

My initial reactions to The Men were mixed, but this is very much a film I find myself appreciating more and more as I think about it. I initially found the introduction of Bud to be a dramatic misfire. At the outset, he's a nameless, interchangeable soldier with no dialogue or anything resembling characterization to speak of. If such a character had fallen in any other movie as Bud does here, he'd be written off as cannon fodder. It's difficult to feel any sense of loss for a character we as an audience had essentially never met, and that's rendered all the more troublesome since he then vanishes for a sizeable chunk of the film. It took me a short while to realize that this is entirely the point. We're meant to know Bud as the men in the ward do. Bud defines himself purely in terms of his sour temperment and disability, and to his fellow patients and to ourselves, that's all there is to see. By preventing us from becoming acquainted with Bud in sunnier days, the tragedy isn't in what he lost but in what he refuses to reclaim, and that ultimately is far more powerful. When a smile does at long last creep across Bud's face, his newfound outlook is infectious, building to heights that are soon stripped away when his self-destructive, self-loathing tendencies once again resurface. There's an unmistakeable artifice in many of the supporting performances, and that makes Brando's more natural work here stand out that much more. Those around

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him are acting; Brando simply is, and if not for a few seconds of footage of him upright and walking at the outset, I wonder if audiences in 1950 would've believed that the actor heretofore unseen outside of the stage was, in fact, paraplegic. Though Brando's performance throughout the early stretches of The Men is somewhat muted, this ensures that the joyous highs and soul-crushing lows that follow resonate that much more deeply. There's something to be said for the historical significance of The Men showcasing Brando in his first film role, but that sort of asterisk shouldn't overshadow what he as an actor has accomplished here, deftly blending youthful vulnerability with an incendiary rage.

Paraplegia perhaps wasn't something the average filmgoer would've been well-acquainted with back in 1950. Much of the first act of The Men, accordingly, is devoted to Dr. Brock essentially giving the audience a lecture on the nature of the affliction. The patients under his care are introduced as Brock updates his staff on their conditions, and that's addressed with a curious fascination with their bowel movements. Necessary though that fifteen minute exercise may have been more than sixty years ago, it's somewhat tedious to wade through these many decades later. It's not made any easier by Everett Sloan's somewhat overexaggerated performance, relishing every moment when he's the focal point of the film. His acting is far more effective when he shares the screen during Brando's more intense moments and isn't rattling off entire encyclopedia pages at a time. As for the rest of the titular men, they're an intriguing mix of personalities and acting styles. Angel aside, none of them are deep or richly compelling, but they're welcomed diversions that ably buoy the film along. Richard Erdman, still in front of the camera on Community as he approaches the age of 90, is a standout as a wise-cracking gambler. Much like the rest of the patients in the ward, he's given splashes of additional color to further elevate him from the one-note character he appears to be at first glance.

It's all but impossible to watch The Men and not draw obvious parallels to William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives. Both films are intimate, character-driven pieces about the debilitating aftermath of war. They both feature prominent roles by genuine military men who suffered life-changing injuries. There's some of the same uncomfortable curiosity from onlookers and difficult readjustment to the world at large. They both even star Teresa Wright as an embattled love interest. The emotions throughout The Men don't smolder with quite the same intensity as they do in The Best Years of Our Lives, however. The Men is dramatically at somewhat of a disadvantage because so much of the film is set in the hospital -- there's far less of that uncomfortable collision with the world outside as they try to cope -- and simply because of the nature of the affliction. One of the tragedies of paraplegia is that the body at a glance appears to be fine, giving false hope of a miraculous recovery that will never come. Immobile legs inherently aren't as cinematic as Harold Russell's double amputee in The Best Years of Our Lives. The sight of Russell's disability is visceral in a way that The Men could never hope to be, and this film's early exploration of paraplegia can't match the more graphic nature or deeper intensity of later works as Coming Home or Born on the Fourth of July either. Still, The Men treats its subjects with a great deal of respect, considerable effort was clearly invested in its quest for authenticity, and it doesn't diminish these men's struggles with the expected Hollywood gloss. It builds to a finalé that's ultimately hopeful but doesn't have Brando and Wright walking arm-in-arm into the sunset or anything similarly contrived.

Though The Men doesn't approach the same dizzying heights as other films that have delved into similar subject matter, it's a well-crafted work just the same and a worthy debut of one of the greatest actors to ever grace the silver screen. Recommended.

Video

It's not a world-class remaster, no, but The Men does look quite handsome on Blu-ray. Definition and fine detail are certainly both respectable. Contrast is reasonably robust, and though the filmic texture isn't as crisply rendered as I'd have liked, it hasn't been smeared away by overzealous digital noise reduction either. There is quite a bit of speckling, however, and the image is a touch softer that I would've expected. Not that this should be considered a fault specific to this Blu-ray disc, but the quality degrades significantly in shots with dissolves or other optical effects:


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This high definition presentation overall rates as good but not quite great. The Men arrives on a single-layer Blu-ray disc at its theatrical aspect ratio of 1.37:1.

Audio

I suspect that I'd be hard-pressed to distinguish between The Men's 16-bit, monaural DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack and an older DVD release. Pops and crackles persist throughout the entirety of the film. The

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fidelity generally falls somewhere below average. The instrumentation in the handful of scored sequences is indistinctly muddled together, grating enough at the outset that I had to dial the volume down considerably lower than usual for it to be tolerable. Thankfully, The Men is predominantly a dialogue-driven film, so that's not a concern for the the bulk of the movie. Line readings are consistently discernable throughout, although the volume and fidelity of a couple do flutter mid-sentence. Lackluster but listenable.

There are no other audio options.

Extras

Nothing.

The Final Word

The Men is far removed from the enduring classic that a year later would define Marlon Brando's career, and it doesn't approach the heights of such films that tread similar thematic ground as The Best Years of Our Lives and Born on the Fourth of July. Despite not having aged especially well and languishing in relative obscurity for the past sixty years, The Men is still a rewarding discovery on Blu-ray. It's the first document of Brando on film, a status that cannot be ignored, and The Men treats its subject matter with the gravity and sincerity it deserves. Recommended. ]]> Night of the Scarecrow (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60431 Sun, 12 May 2013 08:24:34 PDT You know how the home video rights to movies sometimes shuffle around from studio to studio. As if you need an example, Cujo first

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hit Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate and now has Olive Films' logo stamped on it, and I figured the same sort of thing must've just happened with Dark Night of the Scarecrow. Then I tore off the shrinkwrap and...nope! Completely different movie. The title's not the only thing that's generic and unimaginative about this long-forgotten mid-'90s slasher either.

Once upon a time, there was a sex-crazed warlock defiling all the womenfolk in town. Their husbands and fathers banded together, using the warlock's own magic against him and condemning him to an eternity imprisoned in the form of a scarecrow. Many lifetimes later, the cornfield where the nameless warlock slept is on the verge of being razed to make way for a shiny new mini-mall. The sorceror, still trapped in a body of burlap and straw, is awakened. The descendents of the Goodman family are being slaughtered, one by one, until the warlock can get what passes for his hands on a book of dark magicks. Once he does, he can reclaim his true body and...I don't know, destroy everyone and everything or something equally apocalyptic.

So, yeah, supernatural killer, hefty body count, some inventive murders, a couple of good-lookin' twentysomethings caught in the middle...you know how this whole thing goes. That's kind of the problem with Night of the Scarecrow; it's a

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paint-by-numbers slasher, with only the "oh, this time it's a scarecrow" distinguishing it from about 18,000 other virtually identical horror flicks. Hardly anyone scattered throughout the movie has much of a personality. Nothing intense or suspenseful lurks in the shadows to send pulses racing. The screenplay indulges just about every last genre cliché, from the hand-on-the-shoulder jump scare to the handsome hero type wrongly accused of these grisly murders. It's the path of least resistance all the way around. If I gave you a weekend to hammer out a script for a killer scarecrow movie, dollars to doughnuts it'd end up almost exactly like this.

It's just such a missed opportunity because Night of the Scarecrow really does have a lot going for it. I like that the Final Girl (Elizabeth Barondes) isn't the meek virgin that you usually get in these sorts of movies. Claire is brassy, self-assured, and can take care of herself. Can't really say anything bad about a cast that also includes Stephen Root, Gary Lockwood, and John Hawkes, and it's especially a treat seeing the generally-older-than-his-years Hawkes playing a snotty, overentitled punk. The look of the scarecrow is creepy and unnerving, and the supernatural element makes for some decent kills, though the budget and mandated R rating limit how much gore can be sloshed around. C'mon, you're running a thresher over a guy; don't just toss a bucket of stage blood onto a wall! One kill has some tendrils bursting from a teenaged sexpot's tits, dragging her out the back of a van and into the earth below, which seems really inventive and different. Can't get your hopes up too much because someone else suffers a very similar death when he bursts at the seams with straw a little while later. I wish there were more strange, surreal moments like a pig puttering around a church or a haymaker that's not a punch so much as a blown kiss, but there's not a lot like that to go around.

What's really frustrating about Night of the Scarecrow is that it's not that bad. It's lined up the right cast, and the folks on the other side of the camera clearly know what they're doing. It's just that I'd rather a movie take chances and fail than play it so middle-of-the-road safe like this. Other than "oh, wow, John Hawkes!", a couple of standout setpieces, and snickering at some howlingly inept circa-1995 CGI, there's not a whole lot that's worth mentioning about Night of the Scarecrow. Skip It.

Video

Paramount (or whoever) didn't exactly pull out all the stops when preparing this high-def master of Night of the Scarecrow. There's a good bit more speckling than average. Clarity and fine detail have a tenuous grip on the lower rungs of okay. Film grain is present but frequently muddy and clumpy. The image overall is considerably softer than I'd expect, contrast skews flat, and I don't think there's a pure black lurking around anywhere in the entire flick. I get the impression this is kind of an old, musty HD master which would look lousy on Blu-ray even under the best circumstances, and...well, we're not exactly talking about the best circumstances either. The coarse, chunky texture of the grain can be problematic, particularly in one strobe-heavy sequence where Night of the Scarecrow clearly lacks the bit budget it needs.

Hey, don't take my word for it. Click on any of these screengrabs to pop them open to fullsize and see what I mean. The first is a pretty extreme case, admittedly, due to some clunky digital compositing. In the second, you can see the encoding struggle. The third and final shot gives you more of a typical idea what to expect out of Night of the Scarecrow.

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Not unwatchable but definitely sub-standard. To go ahead and rattle off the rest of the technical specs: BD-25. 1.78:1. AVC.

Audio

Night of the Scarecrow's 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio stereo soundtrack is even more of a disappointment. It's a thin, trebly mix, and not a single effect in the movie -- not even some of the explosions once the climax rolls around -- packs anything resembling a wallop. The higher end of the spectrum is harsh enough that I had to turn down the volume on my receiver a lot for it to feel comfortable, and the reproduction of much of the dialogue is still barely tolerable.

No subs, no dubs, no remixes. The only other audio option is a commentary track.

Extras

I was kind of surprised to see such a healthy stack of extras. Thanks, Jeff Burr!

Audio Commentary: Wow. I really, really dug this commentary with director Jeff Burr. Even though nearly twenty years have passed, Burr is able to speak about the production with such precision
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and specificity that you'd think cameras were rolling last Wednesday. I especially appreciate the balance between more familiar technical comments with the business end of filmmaking. Burr acknowledges that Night of the Scarecrow is a very ordinary genre film and delves into some of the reasons why, with corporate splits, managerial shifts, and an eviscerated budget watering down an ambitious screenplay into something more generic. He's very honest and matter-of-fact about all this too, not assigning blame or wallowing in misery about it. Burr also speaks a lot about the state of low-budget genre filmmaking in the mid-'90s and notes how this class of horror movie doesn't really exist anymore.

It's tough for me to recommend Night of the Scarecrow, but if you do buy or rent this Blu-ray disc, definitely give its commentary a spin.

Gallery (8 min.; HD): Burr also contributes commentary for a very unique image gallery. Rather than focus on the usual production stills and international poster art -- although there's that too! -- this gallery more heavily concentrates on script pages, jotted-down notes, callsheets, storyboards, conceptual artwork, and production memos. I wish more Blu-ray discs would showcase these sorts of things. It's interesting to see how the immediately striking poster art that was made for Night of the Scarecrow was replaced by a bland, boring VHS box. No wonder nobody rented it!

Featurette (3 min.; SD): Last up is a rough-looking promotional featurette, sourced from some multi-generation VHS copy. It's heavy on recapping the plot and lobbing out clips from the movie, but there are some quick interviews and a couple behind-the-scenes peeks at the makeup effects.

The Final Word

It's kind of interesting seeing some of the familiar faces in the cast, and Night of the Scarecrow does trot out a few really nice looking setpieces, but none of that's enough to salvage this limp, lifeless, uninspired, instantly forgettable slasher flick. Skip It. ]]> Captain America (1990) (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60118 Tue, 07 May 2013 05:46:16 PDT released so much as barely escaping direct-to-video a couple years after it was shot.

Steve Rogers (Matt Salinger) never tries to enlist, at least not on-screen. Instead, he volunteers for a secret military project...again, off-screen!...to give America a chance to match the Nazis' diabolical super-soldier, The Red Skull (Scott Paulin). Oh, and the Red Skull is Italian for some reason. Anyway, on his very first mission, Cap is strapped to a rocket and launched straight at the White House. He manages to kick (yes, kick) the missile off-course, crashing deep into the Alaskan wasteland, which...wow, that's some range this rocket has. Captain America -- the unknown hero who saved a nation that never knew it was in danger -- slumbers in the ice for five full decades.

The perfect soldier, ladies and gentlemen...the peak of physical perfection!

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Dateline! 1994, or at least somewhere around there. Phil Collins is still at the top of the charts. A nation remains fixed on O.J. Simpson and that white Bronco of his. The world at large starts to hear about this "Internet" thing that used to just be the domain of academics and the military. Oh, and President Tom Kimball (Ronny Cox) -- who, as a child, was perhaps the only civilian on the planet to catch a glimpse of Captain America! -- is riding high with his uncompromising stance on environmentalism. Ooooooh, but not all the high muckity-mucks in Washington are that enthused about the Prez cleaning house like that, sending Lieutenant Colonel Louis (Michael Nouri) into the arms of a cabal of military and business leaders throughout the globe who seek to wrest control of the White House from Kimball. We're not talking about assassination or anything nasty like that; they'd just be minting a martyr and making life even more difficult than it already is. No, the Red Skull -- a seventysomething-year-old billionaire industrialist who's still Italian and no longer has a red skull, which...I don't know -- proposes a mwah-hah-hah nefarious scheme to inject Kimball with a mind-control device. Why go to all the trouble of replacing a president when you can just seize control of the one that's already there? Pull ze stringk!

Anyway, you can probably guess the rest of the broad strokes from there, with the short version being "...and Captain America has to save the day!" There's a bunch of fish out of water stuff as Steve Rogers adapts to life in the '90s. He finds out what happened to the girl he left behind. He even gets a new

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sidekick out of the deal who kind of looks like Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. It's just...yeah, Captain America is just about every bit as terrible as you've heard. The Steve Rogers we first meet is a reasonably fit smoker (!!!) in his thirties, which is wrong in pretty much every possible way. There's borderline-zero character development since we barely get to know the guy, and the first act is so rushed that the romance angle about the girl who's about to be a half-century in the rear view mirror winds up feeling like a pointless distraction.

The second act, which has Captain America in plainclothes for pretty much the entire time, plays more like a random episode of T.J. Hooker, complete with an underlit warehouse-y-type battle against interchangeable, gun-toting thugs and some generic, repetitive bassline standing in for a score. The dialogue sounds like it was written in Italian and translated back to English by a 10th grader, there's no real emotional or dramatic hook lurking around anywhere in here, the paint-by-numbers plot is woefully uninspired and barely holds the movie together, the pacing is glacial, a bafflingly high percentage of the movie is shot in close-ups, the action is hopelessly choppy and doesn't cut together at all, especially whenever Cap throws his shield... What's fun and deliriously campy at the outset quickly makes way for bamboo-shoots-under-fingernails tedium. The storytelling's somehow both breathlessly rushed and agonizingly slow at the same time. It doesn't help that Captain America looks like it was shot on a backyard-Super-8-epic budget either. I didn't even get to the part with Ned Beatty playing a schlubby newspaper reporter who drives his truck from DC and immediately finds Captain America in the middle of the Yukon, and I also forgot to mention how Cap's superpower is pretending to be carsick than hijacking that ride, something he does twice! Between that and Cap's knack for getting shot over and over and over, at no point does he threaten to seem like much of a superhero.

Pretty much everything Captain America fumbles wound up being done the right way a year later in The Rocketeer, and it's kind of appropriate that its director would go onto helm the immeasurably superior Captain America adaptation a couple summers back. This, though...? Legitimately one of the worst superhero flicks ever made, and this is from a guy who's suffered through Man-Thing. Skip It.

Video

For an underfunded superhero flick from the class of 1990, Captain America looks shockingly alright on Blu-ray. Once the opening titles are out of the way, the clarity, definition, and detail on display here are all respectable enough. Nothing that'll curl your toes and nothin' that'll direct a bunch of grrr-aargh tweets towards @ShoutFactory either. Colors come through pretty well, speckling and the like are kept somewhat mild, and the noise reduction dial isn't cranked up too high. Haloing is visible in a couple of stray shots:

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...although it's so isolated that I assume that's a quirk dating back to the original photography. One frustration is that the bitrate is kinda low, and instead of the sheen of grain being fine and clearly resolved, it all kind of clumps together. Not distinct granules so much as digital noise. It's not perfect or anything, no, but Captain America looks good enough, and that $11 sticker price certainly eases the sting a bit.

Single layer Blu-ray disc. 1.78:1. AVC.

Audio

Captain America is

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rocking a 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio stereo track, and...yeah, it's okay too. The clarity and fidelity are high enough that you can tell from word one that this is indeed lossless audio. Effects in particular are clean, clear, and reinforced by a healthy low-end. The Casio-preset score is thin and insubstantial, though, and dialogue frequently sounds dated, especially the crackly line readings when Cap and Bernie reunite. No dropouts or distracting pops ever get in the way, while hiss tends to be fairly mild. About what I'd walk in expecting to hear.

There's not even a 'Setup' menu this time around, so I guess it goes without saying that there are no dubs, no subs, no closed captions, and generally no nothin'.

Extras

A Look Back at Captain America (20 min.; HD): The one and only extra on this Blu-ray disc is an interview with star Matt Salinger and director Albert Pyun, who's wearing a three-wolf shirt because of course he is. They tackle just about everything you'd want to hear, including why Steve Rogers looks pretty much the same before and after the Super-Soldier Serum infusion, the physicality of a superhero flick like this, the ordeal of wearing such a heavy suit in the triple-digit heat of an Eastern European country that doesn't exist anymore, and trying to overcome the hurdles of zero time and zero money. It's...a little clearer why the movie is as lousy as it is, and the two of 'em make it sound like the Captain America they sought out to make was at least a little better than what eventually escaped onto home video.

The Final Word

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Nope. Sorry, Cap. Skip It. ]]> A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60438 Tue, 07 May 2013 05:31:46 PDT A Glimpse Inside

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the Mind of Charles Swan III is an immaculately designed period piece with an indescribably brilliant soundtrack about a self-absorbed, self-destructive eccentric. Sure, it's drop dead gorgeous, and yeah, Coppola has assembled a hell of a cast, among them such Anderson alums as Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III doesn't just invite comparisons to Wes Anderson's ouevre; it clubs comparisons over the head with a turquoise '64 Fender Jaguar and drags 'em inside by the smalls of their necks, and it does it without a fraction of the wit, intelligence, humanity, warmth, or vulnerability that define Anderson's immeasurably superior work.

Sex, drugs, and graphic design: Charlie Sheen stars as Charles Swan III, a rock star pop artist in '70s Los Angeles whose life is on the skids. He's pissed away most of his wealth, his middle-aged body is crumbling apart, the love of his life just stormed out the door for good, and the well of ideas that made his name has completely run dry. With borderline-nothing to distract him from what a fuck-up he's become, Swan is forced to re-evaluate what really matters. At least Chuck still has his sister (Patricia Arquette) and his seemingly last remaining friend (Jason Schwartzman) to lend him a little moral support: occasionally in real-life, and other times throughout a series of increasingly ornate Walter Mitty-style fantasy sequences.

Taken strictly as a technical exercise, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is brilliant. Belying a very limited budget, its inventive production design and vivid, artfully framed photography are endlessly striking. I can't fathom stumbling upon a more memorable, more note-for-note perfect score than the one musician Liam Hayes has crafted here. I'm a cheap date for any movie with Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Aubrey Plaza, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (::respectful swoon!::) on the bill. There's also something to be said for the parade of breathtakingly

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gorgeous and mostly nameless women that play Swan's exes. The daydreams that comprise so much of the first act of the film left me wide-eyed and entranced.

The problem is...well, everything else. For one, Swan is such a prick. That doesn't have to be an inherent flaw. Look at just about any of Wes Anderson's films -- Coppola sure has! -- or we can keep the period piece ad man routine going and use Don Draper as a point of reference. Don makes far more than his share of unforgiveable mistakes, but it's also a fully realized person who's ultimately at fault; that 360° view changes everything. It doesn't hurt that Don is also staggeringly talented, and that sort of artistry helps smooth over at least some of his shortcomings. Swan has basically nothing going for him. The way Charlie Sheen more or less plays the public perception of himself, Swan is devoid of any charm whatsoever, we're told he's a world-class talent but we hardly ever get to see that put to work, and since his girlfriend's out the door after a few short minutes, I'm left with zero investment in the failed relationship that's the crux of the entire film. The fantasies help buoy the movie along for its first half hour, but they're pretty much over and done with after that. For the last fiftysomeodd minutes, you're mostly left with a loathesome, sadsack asshole hellbent on showing you just how much more you can despise him.

It's frustrating because I'm completely enamoured by the sense of style on display here. The fantasies throughout A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III are so artful and such a ridiculous amount of fun, and I can't begin to tell you how gorgeous a stripped-down, heartfelt Portuguese musical number late in the film is. As flawed as so much of the movie can be, Coppola really does do a spectacular job bringing it all together in the film's final moments. At the end of the day, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is style as substance, and when it stops distracting viewers from how

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vacant it really is and focuses instead on the story, it's on the brink of being unwatchable. A marginal rental at best.

Video

It's a well-worn cliché, I know, but I really do feel as if I could mash the 'Pause' button and hang up any random frame from A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III up on the wall. Its colors are sumptuous, contrast robust, and definition and detail beyond reproach. This intensely visually-oriented film translates about as flawlessly to Blu-ray as anything I could ever have hoped to see. I couldn't spot any hiccups or missteps at all, something I was somewhat concerned about after noticing the AVC encode's sub-18 Mbit/s bitrate. Some screenshots look kind of wonky up close -- look to the one at right for a harshly digital case-in-point -- but I couldn't detect anything like that in motion. Very nicely done.

Single layer Blu-ray disc. AVC. 1.85:1.

Audio

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is backed by a lively, playful, lossless soundtrack. Every last element in the mix is clear, distinct, and perfectly balanced. The fidelity of Liam Hayes's score eclipses anything DVD could ever hope to deliver. There's a wonderful sense of directionality and some silky smooth pans from the front channels to the surrounds. Sequences like a battalion of scantily-clad Indian swimsuit models encircling our heroes take further advantage of the six-channel setup. Perfect.

DTS-HD Master Audio. 24-bit. 5.1 all the way. Commentary aside, there are no alternate soundtracks. Subtitles are limited to English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles White III (12 min.; HD): You might not know real-life pop artist Charles White III by his
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name, but you definitely know his work. White speaks about his ascent and evolution as an artist throughout the '60s and '70s, from countless album covers to hundreds of advertisements to that pulpy '40s-style Star Wars poster. White closes by speaking briefly about the film he inadvertently inspired.

A Glimpse Behind the Glimpse: Making A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (25 min.; HD): Well, that's a title. This making-of piece revolves heavily around the iconic airbrush art that made White's name in the '60s and '70s as well as realizing the movie's daring visual style. There's some Mutual Admiration Society fawning over how wonderful Sheen, Coppola, Schwartzman, and an underutilized, largely wasted Murray are here. The greatest highlight comes near the end, focusing on A Glimpse Inside...'s transition to its end credits which is one of my favorite things in any movie I've seen in the past few years.

Audio Commentary: Hidden under the 'Setup' menu is a commentary with writer/director Roman Coppola. It's kind of dry but is extremely informative just the same, giving a sense of what it's like to helm such a visually ambitious film on an incredibly low budget. It details the deceptively simple fabrication of some of these sets, how much of A Glimpse Inside... was shot in Coppola's home, and how his family and close friends were critical in getting the project off the ground.

Oh, and yeah, there is is a slipcover for anyone keeping track at home.

The Final Word

Pretty. Vacant. Rent It with caution. ]]> Frankie Go Boom (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60339 Sun, 05 May 2013 15:08:07 PDT

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Even when I close my eyes, it's...it's still there. So, yeah, Ron Perlman as a wisdom-dispensing hacker ex-con shemale would make my shortlist for the most memorable things about Frankie Go Boom. I kind of just wish that list were a little longer.

Bruce (Chris O'Dowd) always has a camera in his hand, and he's generally leering at his kid brother Frankie (Charlie Hunnam) in the viewfinder. The last time Bruce decided to play director, Frank's disastrous wedding video -- infidelity! face-slapping! vomit! heartbreak! -- started making the rounds online, racking up tens of millions of views along the way. Frank has tried to move on with his life, and...hey! He's even just met a nice girl. It's just that when Frankie brings Lassie (Lizzy Caplan) back to his parents' place, he has...y'know, performance issues at first, but it all works out in the end. These crazy, damaged kids are in love! It's a night they'll never forget. ...and if they do, Bruce has just about the whole thing on video to remind 'em. That footage winds up in the hands of a washed-up TV star (Chris Noth), then there's a drowning pig, then they have to get a DVD player from some cholo gangbanger

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types, and then it's starting to look like Frank might be in the crosshairs of viral video stardom once again. Maybe they can get the video pulled before too many people give 'er a click, so...yeah, hilarity and assorted hijinks ensue! Sort of!

Sure, Perlman as a gruff, fiftysomething-year-old Jewish grandma is a hell of a lot more effective than the one-note-schticky-sightgag gimmick I thought it was gonna be. Lizzy Caplan is spectacular because of course she is; the only person in front of the camera that can nail the drama and tumultuous emotions that Frankie Go Boom tries to sprinkle in with the raunch. Geez, though, just about nothing else about this movie works at all. Frankie Go Boom bobs back and forth between drama and comedy, and the transitions are generally jarring and awkward. Some of the most critical sequences have dialogue that seems to drone on forever, without the pace or rhythm you usually get out of even darkly-tinged romantic comedies.

Its sense of humor has bits and pieces that could score a huge laugh, but it's too often an "::audible gasp!:: I can't believe they just did that!" shock value setup with no real punchline. Bruce gets up in front of a crowd and compares himself to Martin Luther King, yammering on about how he has a dream, although his has nothing to do with slavery or eating gumbo or whatever. ...okay. Chris Noth is running on a treadmill in nothing but a thong, and he says "my ass is as hard as a dick on Viagra!" ...okay. Bruce tries to console his brother about not being able to get it up with "Claudia had to put three fingers up my ass to get me hard." ...okay. I'm not easily shocked or offended, so that sort of thing gets zero reaction from me, and there's not a joke associated with any of that to score a legitimate laugh.

I certainly appreciate the moxie it takes to get a movie off the ground with zero time, zero money, and a pretty much dream cast like this. Frankie Go Boom just...no, it doesn't work. The parts that are supposed to be funny aren't. The dramatic and emotional hooks never quite manage to dig their way in. I was never in any danger of caring about anything that was going on. Too many characters are excruciatingly annoying, and Charlie Hunnam isn't really cut out to play a panicky dweeb type. I'd see sequences like Bruce making an angelic not-a-sex-tape with his mom dolled up as Satan and an overinflated porn star in angel wings dangling from a crane, and I felt as if I'd like this in a better movie, but here...? I just couldn't do it. Tedious. Laughless. Skip It.

Video

At least it looks kinda nice. Frankie Go Boom is reasonably sharp and detailed on Blu-ray. Contrast is spot-on, black levels

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are meaty, and although dusty yellows dominate the palette more than I'd like, its colors generally come through pretty well too. Not reference quality or anything but a solid effort just the same.

Lightning round of technical stuff! Dual-layer Blu-ray disc. AVC. 2.39:1.

Audio

Frankie Go Boom's 24-bit, six-channel DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack does the job. The film's dialogue is balanced nicely in the mix, steering clear of any clipping or distortion. The score and a handful of gunshots are reinforced by a healthy low-end kick, and there's some passable atmosphere lurking in the surrounds. This is basically a stereo-and-then-some track, so don't expect to be immersed in sound or your subwoofer rattling all the china in the great room. Totally okay for what it is, though.

No dubs, alternate mixes, or commentaries here, kids. Subtitles are dished out in English (SDH), Spanish, and French, though.

Extras

Deleted and Alternate Scenes (11 min.; HD): Writer/director Jordan Roberts introduces this reel of six scenes, among them Frankie reeling
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from having the sight of a middle-aged man's vagina seared into his eyes, changing up who's on the other end of the phone when Frank is delivered some sad news, more of a mostly-nekkid Chris Noth on the treadmill, and a peek at the original cut of the ending.

Behind the Scenes (7 min.; HD): Frankie Go Boom's making-of featurette chats up most of the cast, who breeze through their characters and talk about the allure of a project like this. Leans a little promotional in nature, but there's some meat to gnaw on this bone.

Pig Is in the Pool (1 min.; HD): Porcine behind the scenes, including a fake pig getting chucked into a dingy swimming pool.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): Last up to bat is a high-def trailer.

Oh yeah, and the whole thing comes packaged in a shiny slipcover.

The Final Word

Nevermind the names you might like that are on the bill. Frankie Go Boom is an awful movie with an awful title about awful people -- well, most of 'em are, anyway -- not leaving a whole heckuva lot left to recommend. It's one of those things that was probably a blast to make but is kind of a slog to suffer through once it's all said and done. Skip It. ]]> Childrens Hospital: The Complete Fourth Season DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=61096 Sun, 05 May 2013 08:06:33 PDT

Well, this DVD kind of snuck up on me, anyway. But yeah...! Childrens Hospital. Season four. I guess this review is supposed to say more than that, though, so I'll keep going.

Don't be scared off by the "fourth" in the title up there. Sure, by the time shows like Archer and The Venture Bros. make it to season four, they revel in their sprawling character mythologies and backstories they've built over the years, rewarding fanatics but being kind of impenetrable to the uninitiated in the process. I mean, yeah, newcomers can still get something out of 'em and figure out a lot of the important stuff along the way, but those episodes aren't gonna play anything close to the way they do for frothing-at-the-mouth fans. Childrens Hospital, meanwhile, opens its doors to everyone. Especially this season, pretty much everything you need to know about its cast of borderline-psychotic doctors in a Brazilian children's hospital can be summed up in two or three words, and you'll have all of that down by the end of season starter "The Boy with the Pancakes Tattoo"...which works out since an amnesia virus in the premiere makes everyone unfamiliar with everyone else too. We're all on the same page! Kind of.

If you've yet to witness the awe and glory of Childrens Hospital before, this is the sort of thing you're in for: in the space of one episode, Tranny-Madonna visits the hospital in search of inspiration

for her new single, the hunchbacked head of hospital staff writhes around on the floor waiting for the rapture and condemning all unbelievers to an eternity in hellfire, a paramedic whose ambulance ran out of gas improvises heart surgery with a broken bottle of seltzer water or something, a surgeon dupes a two-left-footed doctor into sleeping with him under the auspices of dance lessons, and the whole thing culminates in the Material ~~Boy~~Girl debuting her super-danceable new hit. This all happens in the space of...like, ten minutes and fifty-something seconds. The series moves quickly enough that if you're not feeling whatever the joke of the moment is, wait another second and a half for another one. Its sense of humor spans everything from the ladies' favorite musical time signatures to tricking a doctor into thinking he ate a missing patient. One episode revolves around Ladies' Night at the hospital. Another swaps out the entire cast with Brits because Childrens Hospital UK. Helper snake! Henry Winkler in a Bourne-style martial arts battle to the death! Extended riffs on pop culture touchstones from Goodfellas to Ghost Adventures to Law and Order to The Pink Panther. Name another show on TV that could deliver a line like "I would never have sex with my real daddy; that's Joseph Mengele." I defy you!

Because each episode is an eleven minute surgical strike, this entire season runs just over two and a half hours and demands to be devoured marathon-style. That's...I don't know, probably slightly shorter than a lot of Judd Apatow comedies, and it's a hell of a lot funnier and more inventive to boot. The central cast -- Rob Corddry, Lake Bell, Ken Marino, Rob Huebel, Megan Mullally, Erinn Hayes, Malin Akerman, and Henry Winkler -- is as brilliant as ever, and to make sure this sentence has a whole hell of a lot of commas, you also score cameos this season by Reginald VelJohnson, Jon Hamm, Michael Cera, David Krumholtz, Kevin Pollak, Philip Baker Hall, Abigail Spencer, Nick Offerman, and the dad from Even Stevens, among many, many others. And, you know, this season is really great and really smart and really funny and really crazy and you

should totally buy it. Or stream it or whatever; tomato, tomahto. Highly Recommended.

Video

I'm sure it's a way bigger deal to me than it is to you, but still, I really wish that Childrens Hospital were coming out on Blu-ray too. Whatever, though, it's sort of a thrill to have one of my most favoritest TV shows ever on a shiny five inch disc no matter what, so I guess this is one of those tomato, tomahto sorts of deals.

High definition it's not so much, no, but Childrens Hospital still looks awfully nice on DVD. The digital photography is about as sharp and detailed as I'd expect it to be in standard-def, colors are generally bright and deceptively cheery, and I didn't spot a whole lot of hiccups in the compression or anything. Actually, the only flaw that really leaps out at me is some infrequent shimmering in the fine textures of Sy Middleman's swanky suits, which...whatever. I'm happy.

Since each episode is only, like, eleven minutes long, one DVD-9 disc preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetty much covers this entire season. With room to spare, even! Wait, though: if it's on one disc and there's room left over, why did I put that many "e"s in "pretty"? I don't even know what's going on anymore. But yeah, one disc. Anamorphic widescreen, the same as ever, too.

Audio

At first, I was all "what, Dolby Digital stereo (192kbps)?!" I know! With the parenthetical bitrate and everything. ...but then I remembered that's what it was on the season three set too, so now I'm all "tomato, tomahto; nevermind". Everything's clean, clear, and all that. I can make out all the funny jokes, and there's no hiss, distortion, crackling, pops, or dropouts -- outside of the bloop for the layer change, anyway -- so again, I don't have a whole lot to gripe about.

No subtitles

or closed captions or anything this time around. If you're deaf or something, I guess you'll just have to fake it.

Extras

Disc 1
- Special Features
  - Oh, yeah, nothing.

It's a change of the guard or something. Unlike the past couple of releases, this season of Childrens Hospital swoops onto DVD courtesy of our pals at Warner Archive, which...I know, tomato, tomahto, but that means no extras and no sexy slipcover and, seriously, no extras whatsoever.

The Final Word

If laughter really is the best medicine, then do I have a prescription for you! The fourth season of Childrens Hospital will leave you in stitches! Something something funny bone! Doctor DVD Reviewer's diagnosis: Highly Recommended!

Sorry for being so obnoxious, but if you're reading a review of a DVD set with "season 4" in the title, the smart money says you're already an established fan. You know that Childrens Hospital is one of the smartest, funniest, most inventive, and most gloriously unhinged series on television, and when I say that its fourth season delivers more of the same, I mean that in the best possible way. Definitely holds up on a second viewing too, so, yeah, I really do mean this: Highly Recommended. ]]> Superman: Unbound (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60093 Wed, 01 May 2013 14:16:29 PDT

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]Kryptonian technology, a tempermental cousin struggling to adapt to life on Earth: Superman's thankful for such things, but in every sense of the word, they belong to a world that will forever remain alien to him. As it turns out, though, Krypton was visited in its final days by an otherworldly intelligence, and the capital city of Kandor was plucked from the dying planet. However many decades later, an entire Kryptonian civilization hasn't just been preserved; Kandor persists, as its inhabitants haven't aged a moment since that day. Superman can experience Kryptonian society, Kryptonian cuisine, Kryptonian architecture, Kryptonian everything not through holo-crystals in the Fortress of Solitude but firsthand.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that Kandor was rescued, though. Brainiac stole Kandor with no goal in mind than to absorb its knowledge, as he has with cities on tens of thousands of other planets over the millenia. If Krypton weren't on the brink of destruction already, Brainiac would've blown it to kingdom come himself, refusing to allow a planet to amass additional knowledge once it's been harvested. A once-proud city has been shrunk to near-microscopic size, trapped in a bottle in a cold, sterile spacecraft. The people of Kandor don't suffer, as long as they behave themselves, but they exist rather than live, caught in an endless, neverchanging loop and deprived of anything but the most bare of essentials for survival.

Earth has nothing to offer a twelfth-level Coluan mind like Brainiac's, but a skirmish with Superman -- invading his spacecraft, sullying his form with brute, Kryptonian fists -- steers his vengeance towards our solar system. Metropolis is doomed to suffer the same fate as Kandor, essentially an ant farm on a larger scale. Brainiac may not have destroyed Krypton, but he will destroy Earth, and Superman seems powerless to stop him.

It's a little strange putting on one of these Blu-ray discs and not spotting longtime executive producer Bruce Timm's name anywhere in the credits. If Superman: Unbound is any indication, though, DC's animated movies are in very good hands. In a lot of ways, I appreciate Unbound for what it's not. Throughout so many of these movies, Superman has

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either shared the bill with other superheroes or he's been pitted against Lex Luthor. It's a thrill to see the Man of Steel fight largely on his own against a different yet equally iconic villain. I love the tone that Unbound strikes. Its sense of humor is razor-sharp and reserved for maximum effect. The action is often staggering in scale and a consistent adrenaline rush. In its more haunting sequences, such as Supergirl's flashback to Brainiac invading Krypton, Unbound starts to feel less like a four-color superhero adventure and more like a horror movie. Some of the imagery is graphic, and the stakes matter, but Unbound strikes the right balance to avoid ever feeling gratuitous or overindulgingly grim-'n-gritty about it.

This is a movie that genuinely has a lot to say about Superman too. Despite his best intentions, Superman keeps Lois Lane and Metropolis as a whole in a sort of bottle too. Without losing sight of the action and superhuman spectacle you'd expect to see, Unbound does a phenomenal job exploring the relationships that drive Superman -- his cousin Kara, Lois Lane, his adoptive parents, and the planet in general -- as well as the relationships he never had a chance to foster on Krypton. In the same way that Superman vs. the Elite explores what it means to be a hero, Superman: Unbound focuses on what you gain, what you stand to lose, and the unavoidable compromises of doing what you believe to be right. Unbound is infused with a great deal of humanity, and when a movie gives you a reason to care like that, all those slugfests and laser blasts hit that much harder. I also love that Superman proactively takes the fight to Brainiac rather than waiting for him to unleash his full forces upon our planet. It's somewhat familiar that the most powerful man in the known universe square off against superhuman geniuses and problems he can't punch his way out of; I'm not going to spoil anything, obviously, but Superman's final actions in Unbound are physical, cerebral, visceral, and really, really inspired.

I'm obviously geeking out here, but geez, Superman: Unbound does pretty much everything right, from its storytelling to an across-the-board fantastic voice cast. Matt Bomer steps into the red and blue tights as the Man of Steel, John Noble of Fringe and Lord of the Rings fame makes for a tremendous Brainiac, and the movie hits up Castle's Stana Katic and Molly C. Quinn to field the voices of Lois Lane and Supergirl, respectively. I'll admit that it took me a short while to get used to the new character designs. I'm one of those oddballs who isn't a fan of Gary Frank's artwork, so I'm sort of glad the designs aren't slavishly faithful to the 2009 graphic novel this is based on, but Superman's long, lean, smallish head just didn't look right to me at first. It didn't take too long to settle into that, though.

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There are also a couple of attempts at heavily stylized visuals that don't quite work, but that's not a constant nuisance. One case in point anyway:

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Those are fairly insignificant gripes, though. Honestly, I was completely floored by Superman: Unbound, which delivers just about everything I ever wanted in a Superman movie (all the way down to Jimmy's signal watch!) along with plenty of things I never knew I needed this much. Very, very Highly Recommended.

Video

I kind of braced myself for the worst when I saw how tiny the AVC encode for Superman: Unbound is: lossless soundtrack, commentary, and all, the movie's been crammed into the space of 13 gigs flat. As it turns out, though, the encoding for Unbound is better than many of DC's direct-to-video animated movies have been. I'm used to these releases often looking pixelated and blocky in the shadows, and they almost always struggle with certain shades of red. None of that's a problem here, though. I couldn't spot any digital breakup like that, even in challenging sequences like the strobing explosions that Superman's subjected to on Brainiac's ship. Overall, I was consistently impressed by how crisp, clear, and well-defined the high-def animation is.

Take this screengrab, for instance. In standard definition -- and probably a lot of cable/satellite appearances too, in practice -- Superman and Supergirl would be reduced to a blue and red smudge in the middle of the screen. It's a powerful image that would be blunted in most any format outside of Blu-ray:

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The colors throughout Superman: Unbound look tremendous as well, and I especially appreciate the contrast between the reds and blues in the Kryptonian cousins' costumes, giving them more individuality. As much Unbound gets right, it does stumble at times, though. As terrific as the linework generally looks, sometimes it can get aliased and chunky:

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...and there's some infrequent banding as well:

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Those are minor concerns at best, though. All in all, I'd point to Superman: Unbound as one of the strongest presentations in DC's animated release slate, and this Blu-ray set is well worth the extra couple of bucks over the standard definition DVD.

Superman: Unbound swoops onto a single layer Blu-ray disc at the usual aspect ratio of 1.78:1. An anamorphic widescreen DVD has also been included.

Audio

Its technical specs may look awfully cinematic, but Superman: Unbound's six-channel, 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is fairly average overall. Every once in a while, a burst of gunfire or the sound of Superman soaring through the sky will pop up in the surrounds, but generally, the rears are little more than an afterthought. Even throughout chaotic shootouts, scenes with helicopters careening all over the place, and who knows how many hundred of robot sentries descending planetside, the rear channels do little more than groan briefly, smack the 'snooze' button, and roll back over. Bass response is generally modest, although I was impressed by a thumping heartbeat in the score leading up to the invasion. I wish the score overall roared with a little more ferocity at key moments, which isn't a jab at the music itself but how meekly it's mixed. The flashback of the fall of Kandor has this incredible music behind it, and it's dialed down so low that it doesn't make much of an impact at all. I'm sure that particular instance is so it wouldn't get in the way of Kara's narration, but it just seems like such a missed opportunity. On the upside, the voice acting is terrific all around, and every last element in the mix is clean and clear. I just wish the 5.1 audio were as ambitious and cinematic as a movie like this deserves.

Also offered here are lossy dubs in French and Spanish (Castilian and Latin). Subtitles are served up in English (SDH), French, and Spanish (Castilian and Latin).

Extras

Superman: The Animated Series (85 min.; SD): First up are four episodes from Superman, spanning all three seasons of the series: the first installment of "The Last Son of Krypton", "New Kids in Town", and the two-parter "Little Girl Lost". Brainiac is a focal part of the first two, and Supergirl makes her debut in
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the two-parter.

Superman: Brainiac (HD): Excerpts of a few pages from Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's 2009 graphic novel from which this movie was adapted have also been included. A vertically oriented comic doesn't read all that well on a widescreen TV, but the panels zoom in as you navigate.

Kandor: History of the Bottle City (17 min.; HD): Exclusive to this Blu-ray disc is a featurette whose title pretty much tells you everything you need to know. These interviews and conversations delve into the allure of Kandor throughout the Silver Age as well as what the bottle city represents to Superman as a character (and not just because it gave him an excuse to play Batman!).

Brainiac: Technology and Terror (25 min.; HD): Unbound's second featurette explores the evolution of Brainiac over the years in various mediums, from the Kryptonian computer of Superman: The Animated Series to the pink-'n-green alien in the '50s and '60s all the way to the malevolent, mechanical creature that became so iconic throughout the 1980s.

Audio Commentary: This commentary with producer/director James Tucker, screenwriter Bob Goodman, and DC Entertainment creative director Mark Carlin is another Blu-ray exclusive. There are no shortage of highlights throughout this terrific discussion, but among my favorites are an argument against Clark's bumbling persona, a comparison between Brainiac and comic book collectors, the colors in Superman's costume here drawing from the Max Fleischer cartoons, and quite a lot about the character designs and voice casting. For someone who hasn't read the Superman: Brainiac graphic novel, the comparing/contrasting that goes on here is appreciated. Worth a listen.

Trailers: Last up are the usual gaggle of trailers and teasers, most memorably a sneak peek at Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (11 min.; HD).

Superman: Unbound comes packaged in an embossed slipcover. This combo pack also includes an anamorphic widescreen DVD and a code for an UltraViolet digital copy.

The Final Word

Bruce Timm may have moved on from DC's direct-to-video animation, but Superman: Unbound is proof-positive that these movies can be just as brilliant without him. Although All Star Superman will probably always be my sentimental favorite, I'm very tempted to say that Unbound is otherwise my favorite solo Superman animated adventure on Blu-ray, and I can't wait to see what comes next. Highly Recommended. ]]> Crimewave (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60119 Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:10:07 PDT "Overall, Crimewave was a lesson about abject failure -- no matter how you slice it, the film was a dog, and everyone involved can pretty much line up to take forty whacks. As filmmakers, we failed to execute a misguided project and our studio refused us the benefit of any doubt."
-Bruce Campbell, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor

Oh, I've heard lots and lots and lots of terrible things about Crimewave over the years, and as it turns out...? Every last one of 'em is true. Playing kind of like Blood Simple filtered through some Three Stooges' wooo-woo-woo-woo, Crimewave is Sam Raimi's

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followup to The Evil Dead and his first time wading around in the studio system, plus you've got Bruce Campbell on the bill, and this sucker was co-written by the Coen Brothers. I know! ...and, somehow, it's pretty much unwatchable.

Well, Vic (Reed Birney), I've got good news, and I've got bad news. Good: tonight, your losing streak is over and done with when you meet this blonde bombshell (Sheree J. Wilson) who's had her fill with heels and is ready to give a nice guy a shot for a change. The bad: before you really get a chance to enjoy it, you're going to be hunted down by a couple of weasely exterminators-slash-hitmen (Brion James and Paul L. Smith), you're gonna get framed for murder, and this is your last night of freedom before getting shuffled off to death row. Um, I did mention that this a comedy, right?

There really are a bunch of things I like about Crimewave. Even though Bruce Campbell had the lead swiped out from under him, he's clearly still having a blast as the smug, smarmy, sleazy badnik Renaldo. It's a small-ish role, sure, but Campbell still manages to run away with every last scene he's in. Sam Raimi and cinematographer Robert Primes have assembled some genuinely inspired visuals, not letting a meager budget get in the way of some remarkably ambitious camerawork. As you'll hear mentioned 18,000 times in the extras, Crimewave is pretty much a 1940s cartoon come to life. Its spastic energy, deliriously over-the-top sense of humor, and show-stopping setpieces like bulldoggish Paul L. Smith crashing Kool-Aid-Man-style through a hallway with dozens of multicolored doors...it's a flesh-and-blood Tex Avery cartoon, and there's no way I'm gonna say no to that. We're talking about a noir that's pretty much a period piece except for a bunch of mid-'80s Japanese electronics; no, there's not a whole lot else out there like Crimewave.

At the end of the day, though, Crimewave is pretty much a disaster. It's a comedy without a single worthwhile laugh. Most of the characters range anywhere from grating to completely forgettable, up to and including Reed Birney in the lead. There's no real emotional or dramatic hook bobbing around anywhere in here, which would be okay if there were some solid gags to buoy the whole thing along, but no, not so much. Even though Crimewave is practically bursting at the seams with manic energy, the pacing is actually kind of a slow, meandering slog. The score is a full-frontal assault

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of wacky!, the cinematic equivalent of a laugh track from some shitball sitcom on TBS. Crimewave was initially conceived as more of a serious noir-ish crime/romance/drama, and what glimmers of that remain too closely echo the Coens' Blood Simple. Embassy Pictures yanked control of the movie away from Raimi and company during post-production, and they took a movie that probably would've been a stinker anyway and managed to make it even worse. This isn't a diamond in the rough; it's just...bad.

If you're an obsessive completist when it comes to Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and/or the Coen Brothers, then...well, you don't really need this review since Shout! Factory could count on your twenty bucks anyway. If you're not a reeeeeeally devoted fan of any of the talent involved, though...? Skip It.

Video

Not bad! Crimewave is pretty grainy and fairly soft -- I mean, no one's going to bounce up to it on-stage with a bouquet of roses, a tiara, and a Miss Teen USA sash -- but there's no excessive digital noise reduction or assorted filtering, no oversharpening, and very little in the way of speckling or wear. For a hopelessly obscure, low budget flick shot all the way back in 1983, definition and detail are pretty much where I'd expect them to be. 'Sokay.

Crimewave and its stack of high-def extras get to lounge around on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc. The movie itself is encoded with AVC and dished out at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. The second disc in the set is an anamorphic widescreen DVD.

Audio

Crimewave's 24-bit, two-channel mono DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is pretty decent too. Even though the score kind of bludgeons me over the head with its zzzzzzaniness, its reproduction here is genuinely impressive. The dialogue and assorted sound effects all come through fairly well too, sounding at least a couple years more recent than they really are. Nothing that'll curl your toes or anything but still a solid effort.

Optional English subs are along for the ride too.

Extras

Audio Commentary: Oh, Crimewave! You had me at "Bruce Campbell commentary". Campbell doesn't pull any punches, building on the stories he spun in If Chins Could Kill. Someone nearly getting shot in the eye with a BB gun for the sake of a gag, Louise Lasser insisting on painting her face clown white with bright red lipstick, having to get a forklift to rescue Paul Smith from the aftermath of a Warner Bros.-style comedy setpiece,
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how so much of Detroit has been abandoned that much of the city is practically a backlot, being so inexperienced that their stunt cars would run out of gas before making a big jump: no one -- not the movie, not the studio, not even Campbell himself -- escapes unscathed. Unbelievably funny and genuinely insightful, this is one of Bruce Campbell's very best commentaries, and considering how incredible he always is, that's kind of saying something.

Interviews (40 min.; HD): Sam Raimi and the Coens sit this one out, but you do get interviews with would-be-leading man Bruce Campbell, actually-was-leading-man Reed Birney, and producer/first-and-only-time-in-front-of-the-camera Edward Pressman.

There's a good bit of overlap in Campbell's interview (15 min.) with his audio commentary, naturally, but this is a good place to catch the highlights: what a miserable experience making Crimewave was all around, how much he, Raimi, and Rob Tapert learned from its failure, and how he's kind of glad the movie disappeared from view. Birney (16 min.) tells a pretty terrific story about his last-second casting and how Crimewave accidentally made him an international movie star, plus it's pretty neat to see some home movies from the set scattered around here. Finally, Pressman (9 min.) chats about basically being bullied by Raimi into a prominent role even though he'd never be mistaken for an actor, and yet he could still get recognized in Japan where the movie was somehow a cult hit. All three interviews are definitely worth a peek.

Alternate Title Sequence (1 min.; HD): This time, the title card reads "Broken Hearts and Noses".

Photo Gallery (7 min.; HD): Thrill to a montage of high-res behind the scenes shots, production stills, and even a little poster/video box art.

Trailer (2 min.; SD): This full-frame trailer looks like it was nicked from an old VHS dub or something.

In case you missed it a little further up there, Crimewave is a combo pack, so you get a DVD out of the deal too.

The Final Word

Of course it's a thrill to see that Shout! Factory has rescued Crimewave from obscurity. I mean, we're talking about a flick that only played theatrically on these shores in Alaska and Kansas, this is its first time officially winding up on a shiny five inch disc over here, and it's scored a pretty terrific special edition to boot. I'm really glad I had a chance to catch up with a movie I'd heard so much about for so many years, I can cross this off my Campbell/Coen/Raimi bucket list, and I definitely dug all the extras. At the same time, I'm preeeeeeetty certain I'll never, ever give Crimewave another look again. For particularly zealous completists only. Skip It. ]]> A Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60088 Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:06:13 PDT The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia is its cringingly awkward, Mason/Dixon-line-leaping title. My second favorite thing about the movie, meanwhile, is...ummm...hmmm....uhhh...no, wait,

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I think I had something for this.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that no, The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia -- I'll never get used to writing out that whole thing -- really isn't very good.

If your family is blessed/cursed with the ability to pierce through the veil and see the spirits of the dead, a tragedy-laden stop on the Underground Railroad might not be the greatest place to play house. ...but, hey, the realtor didn't get into all that when Andy (Chad Michael Murray) was negotiating. Heidi (Emily Alyn Lind) keeps going on and on about a kindly old man named Mr. Gordy who no one else can see. An imaginary friend, right? Precious! It's just that everything he tells the young girl comes to pass, from an old swing that used to be hanging up there all the way to a cache of valuable coins buried in the garden. Aunt Joyce (Katee Sackhoff) encourages Heidi to explore these ancestral gifts; her mom Lisa (Abigail Spencer), meanwhile, follows in her own mother's footsteps and chemically suppresses them, teetering on the brink of insanity as a result. Is Mr. Gordy a figment of Heidi's imagination or is he a phantom that's crossed over into the realm of the living? Is he the benificent spirit this wide-eyed young girl believes him to be or something far more sinister? What other secrets are buried in the grounds of this historic home? What with The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia being a paranormal thriller and all, you probably don't need me to tell you that shit goes south. Wait, why wasn't that the tagline?

The most frustrating thing about The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia is that on so many levels, it's actually put together pretty well. I mean, Yaron Levy's cinematography looks fantastic, and I stopped a couple of times to marvel at how strikingly composed the camerawork can be. Even though the movie was shot a couple states over from Georgia, some of the exteriors are still wonderfully atmospheric and unmistakeably Southern. Everyone in the cast generally holds their own, and that's always a good thing. Because Ghosts of Georgia opts for mood, atmosphere, and tragedy over cranked-up-to-eleven supernatural scares, the effects work plays nicely with the film's limited budget. Apart from having the most ridiculous title this side of The Last Exorcism II, there's

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not much to be snarky or sarcastic about here.

If you've never been exposed to anything resembling a ~~horror flick~~paranormal thriller before, The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia might be wildly effectively. The first two-thirds of the movie play like screenwriter Dave Coggeshall picked up a Paint-by-Numbers Haunted House Movie set at Stuckey's on the drive down to Baton Rouge. A silhouette breezes by in the background...colossal sting in the score! Rated-E-for-everyone ghostly visions. Mysteriously opening doors. Beetles and bugs because ewww, gross! A kind of fuzzy guy off in the background. The camera pans down and oh noes there's a skeleton that wasn't there a second ago. The first two acts are almost aggressively routine and uninspired, devoid of any tension or so much as a single, effective jolt. I appreciate horror with this sort of atmospheric bent -- The Innocents and The Changeling are two of my all-time favorites, so I really do get it -- but throughout its first two acts, Ghosts of Georgia unimaginatively flounders around. It's so lackluster and uninvolving that when all hell finally starts to break loose...when the most horrifying secrets of the stationmaster's home are revealed!...the movie's already been poisoned. The screenplay at that point does a tremendous job upending everything you thought you knew, some of the revelations really are jaw-agape devastating, and there's one entrancingly bizarre type of supernatural assault I can honestly say I've never seen before. By that point, though, it's far too little and much too late. Skip It.

Video

Despite being saddled with a fairly lackluster bitrate, The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia doesn't suffer for it. Clumsily stylized flashbacks and SpiritVision^™ aside, this Blu-ray disc looks terrific all around: sharp, richly detailed, and surprisingly colorful. No real complaints.

Single layer disc. AVC encode. 2.39:1.

Audio

This 24-bit, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack hits all the right marks. The surrounds reinforce the movie's atmospheric approach to horror, with strange, skittering sounds in the woods and haunting whispers approaching from behind. There are also some impressively smooth pans across the front and rear channels. The stings in the score, meanwhile, are reinforced with every bit as much bass as you'd expect. The level of distinctness and clarity offered here far outclass anything DVD could ever hope to deliver. The movie's dialogue is generally reproduced well, although some of the Southern-fried line readings early on are mumbled to the point of barely being discernable. The mix deliberately isn't as aggressive as most fright flicks, but the fidelity and sharp sound design earn all kinds of stars in the sidebar over there.

No dubs or alternate mixes. Subtitles are offered in English (traditional and SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Seeing Ghosts: The True Story of the Wyricks (10 min.; HD): Oh, yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia is
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based on a true story, and here you get to catch up with the Wyricks and hear more about The Veil, Mr. Gordy, and how their ghostly visions have persisted in the couple decades since.

Audio Commentary: Ghosts of Georgia's commentary track features director/editor Tom Elkins, writer David Coggeshall, and co-producer Brad Kessell, and it's one of those discussions that's so personable, so energetic, and so overflowing with enthusiasm that I kind of feel guilty for trashing their flick. Elkins marvels at how wonderful everyone and everything associated with the movie is, laughs about a scare with a vulture turned into a scare with an owl that turned into nothin', the kismet deal about finding a ratty RV in the woods instead of having to buy one, struggling with the MPAA to score...wait, this wasn't PG-13?, and how many scenes and shots were reshuffled around during editing. I'm not crazy about the movie, obviously, but this commentary is pretty solid.

Deleted Scenes (18 min.; HD): Tom Elkins was an editor before taking the reins as a director, and he's made it a point to show how dramatically a few nips and tucks can change a sequence. This reel of thirteen (!) deleted scenes and early edits focus heavily on how a film takes shape in the editing room, and that's also the dominant topic of discussion in his optional commentary.

Outtakes (4 min.; HD): I'm a cheap date for a blooper reel with owl and doggie hijinks.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): Last up is a trailer...and no, not for this movie, but for The Haunting in Connecticut. You know, the one that's actually set in Connecticut.

An UltraViolet digital copy code is also tucked inside.

The Final Word

The bland, forgettable The Haunting in Connecticut scores an even blander, more forgettable sequel-in-name-only. Skip It. ]]> The Sandlot: 20th Anniversary Edition (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60690 Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:46:26 PDT A Christmas Story. What's the fun in only doing that once

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a year, though? So, here's a new tradition for you to consider: grab the kids (y'know, if you have any) and ring in summer with The Sandlot.

It's the summer of 1962, and Scott Smalls (Tom Guiry) is still trying to figure all this stuff out. New town. New house. New stepfather. No friends. Smalls whiles away the early days of summer tinkering around with erector sets in his bedroom and occasionally working up the nerve to ask his newly-minted dad (Denis Leary) to teach him to play catch. Smalls isn't exactly what you'd call a natural at the game, and when he meekly winds up throwing the ball with the kids at the sandlot, they practically laugh him off the field. For them, baseball's not just a game. Heck, they don't have a full team, they don't keep score, and every morning, they pick up wherever they left off the day before. They don't have time for an L-7 weenie who can't throw! Well, Benny (Mike Vitar) makes time. Far and away the most talented player on the...errr, team, if you want to call them that, Benny takes Smalls under his wing, and just in time for the adventure of their lives too.

If you've never had the pleasure of catching The Sandlot before, it really does play a lot like a boys-of-summer version of A Christmas Story. The period backdrops -- the summer of '62 in The Sandlot's case -- help ensure that they age well. Both movies look back on the past through the prism of a child's eyes, so everything that happens is huge and exciting and important. The Sandlot and A Christmas Story both have narration that's kind of like a warm glass of milk, all comfortable and inviting. Their senses of humor are family-friendly but still have teeth. Neither movie really bothers with the usual three-act structure, instead

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stringing together a bunch of little vignettes.

If you haven't seen The Sandlot in a while, you might be thinking that the pickle Smalls gets himself and his pals in -- knocking a baseball autographed by some lady named Baby Ruth or whatever over the fence and into the domain of a 400 lb. hellhound known as The Beast, and the Rube-Goldberg-esque lengths they take to get it back -- is a bigger part of the movie than it really is. Sure, sure, that's important and all, but that chunk of the story is introduced a lot later than you might think. That's completely fine too. The Sandlot doesn't need some dastardly villain to conquer or a championship game to win. That's not what the movie's about. Heck, it's not even about baseball. The Sandlot is really about how our friends and our family enrich our lives -- about taking risks and overcoming your fears -- although it's handled in a smart, charming, endearing way that's not nearly as schmaltzy as I'm probably making it sound. These are kids I would've loved to have palled around with when I was their age. The Sandlot's not a slave to plotting because it's a blast just hanging out with the nine of 'em, and if the movie feels like tearing off on a tangent where geeky Squints engineers a scheme to make out with a too-cute lifeguard or the gang realizes that chewing tobacco and the Tilt-o-whirl at the county fair are a recipe for disaster, that's all part of the fun.

The Sandlot's just one of those movies. I have nothing even a little bit critical to poke and prod at it. Even when a line reading creaks and groans, and even when there's a hokey thumbs-up or whatever, everything about the movie is too sincere to scoff at. So many family movies anymore feel so coldly calculated and deliberately constructed, but no matter how many times I see it, I just find myself hopelessly escaping into The Sandlot, making me feel like I'm in 6th grade all over again. With all that ridiculously quotable dialogue, an endless amount of fun, and an appeal that hasn't dimmed in the slightest twenty years later, it's a 35mm bear hug. The Sandlot is one of my all-time favorites, and for those of us who missed this Blu-ray disc the first time around, it's a thrill to be able to catch up with it again in a slightly spiffed-up 20th anniversary edition. Very Highly Recommended.

Video

Geez! Talk about an upgrade. That DVD from all the way back in 2002 really hasn't aged well, looking harshly digital and awfully fuzzy these days. Take a peek at these screenshot comparisons. (Click on any of these grabs to open 'em up to full-size.) For one, the DVD looks kind of zoomed in by comparison, with the high-def presentation exposing a good bit more information on the top, left, and right of the frame while only losing a little something on the bottom. The cooler colors on this Blu-ray disc look so much more natural and lovely, and as far as clarity, definition, and detail stack up...? Not even close.

Blu-ray on the top; DVD on the bottom
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Yeah, yeah, this next comparison's not quite as dramatic, but it gives you a sense of what The Sandlot looks like when the camera's closed in a little more tightly. The DVD is so soft by comparison that it practically looks out of focus, there's such a richer sense of detail and texture, and...well, you have two eyes, so why do you need me to keep going on about it?!

Blu-ray on the top; DVD on the bottom
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If that star rating over there were just supposed to reflect how much of an improvement this Blu-ray disc is over the musty old DVD, The Sandlot would score five stars all the way. On the other hand, there is some of the softness and distortion that occasionally creep in with anamorphic photography, the image expectedly degrades whenever there are opticals and wipes and stuff, and contrast can be kind of flat at times. Ooooh, but when The Sandlot is at its best, it looks really, really fantastic. This Blu-ray disc is an essential upgrade, especially with such a low sticker price.

Guess I'm not doing a comparison for this one.
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The Sandlot slides onto Blu-ray with a single layer disc, an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and an AVC encode.

Audio

I seem to

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remember there being a little controversy about The Sandlot's initial Blu-ray release, with arguments flying back and forth about whether or not it featured lossless audio. No need to fret here, though; as advertised, you're lookin' at 24-bit, six-channel DTS-HD Master Audio.

For a twenty year old family catalog title, The Sandlot sounds pretty great too! The key effects are wonderfully clean and clear, especially the crack of the bat against the ball, the thud of feet hitting the bases, and the low-frequency snarl of The Beast that threatens to rattle everything in the room, even if it is on the boxy side. The surrounds are subtle but effective, sounding so lush and organic that they really bring the 1962 backdrop to life. The period-influenced score sounds terrific, and The Sandlot's dialogue is generally reproduced very nicely too. Definitely a notch or two better than expected.

Along for the ride are lossy stereo tracks in English, Spanish, and French. Subtitles are served up in English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Despite being a "20th Anniversary Edition!" and all, The Sandlot delivers disappointingly little in the way of extras. What few bells and whistles are on the disc are all holdovers from the DVD that came out more than a decade ago. Fox did throw in a few other goodies for you, though:

There's a set of baseball cards, a coupon for PF Flyers (!), an anniversary slipcover, and a DVD. Oh, and that DVD is a flipper just like the one from all the way back in 2002. As far as the rest of it goes...

Featurette (6 min.; SD): This promotional featurette from 1993 showcases a little behind-the-scenes footage and chats up the cast. Mostly, though, it recaps
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the plot and lobs out lots and lots of excerpts from the movie. Kind of neat as a curiosity, but it's basically trying to sell you on watching The Sandlot, so keep your expectations low.

Trailer and TV Spots (6 min.; SD): The only other extras on the disc are a standard-def trailer and a set of seven commercials.

The Final Word

The Sandlot has yet to score the sort of special edition I've been waiting for, but it's still one of the warmest, funniest, and most enduring family movies of the past quarter-century, and that's really all that matters. This high-def spit-and-polish is an enormous upgrade over that DVD you've had on the shelf for the past ten years, and with it retailing for $9 or $10 all over the place...oooohhh, I guess I'm corny enough to say that The Sandlot is a home run. Highly Recommended. ]]> Stitches (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59025 Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:39:08 PDT

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...and pumps and pumps and pumps...

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...and pumps and pumps and pumps until...

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I guess what I'm getting at here is that Stitches is the best movie ever. ...or, well, it's at the very least in the running as my favorite slasher of the past decade. Stitches is writer/director Conor McMahon's bloodsoaked Valentine to '80s body count flicks, only more infectiously fun and more dementedly imaginative than pretty much anything hailing from the slasher genre's Golden Age. While he's at it, McMahon stamps out the usual hiccups from those old dead teenager movies, to the point where Stitches is pretty much perfect.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, though. Lemme pedal back to the plot summary part of this review. Stitches' schtick has seen better days, and here he is again, half-assing his way through the usual balloon animals and juggling routines for a gaggle of bratty, unappreciative kids. A prank goes haywire, there's an unfortunately placed butcher knife, and...well:

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Show's over for Stitches (Ross Noble), I guess. Rest in peace, sweet prince. ...and for a while, he does. It's just that Stitches didn't get a chance to see that last party all the way through, and when a now-teenaged Tommy (Tommy Knight) winds up inadvertently throwing another one, the zombie clown claws his way back from Hell to finish the gig. No one's gonna be laughing for the encore, though.

Stitches is everything I could ever want out of a slasher flick. Longtime performer and first-time movie star Ross Noble is a brilliant choice to play the undead clown, with the presence, the physicality, the charisma, and maniacal sense of humor demanded by a horror-icon-in-the-making like Stitches. The kills are

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spectacularly gruesome while also playing like a Looney Tunes short come to life. If you're sick of seeing yet another nutjob mindlessly wave around a butcher knife, Stitches will break you out of that rut. I don't want to give away any more of the gags than I have to, but there are geysers of the red stuff, the butchering is really clever and inspired, and the approach to each kill is tightly woven into the plot. Hell, Stitches generally worms two or three completely different attacks into every murder, making the already-hefty body count feel even higher. It's, like, a better value!f

The worst thing about most slasher flicks is all the filler in between...the stuff you twiddle your thumbs to while you wait around for the next kill. Stitches isn't really like that, though. I mean, part of the reason the downtime in slashers is generally excruciating is that the characters are so one-note and clumsily acted. Stitches has assembled a pretty terrific cast all around, without a weak link in the bunch. The writing and performances are sharp enough that this small army of teenagers seem very much like actual people. Exaggerated, sure, and you've got a bunch of your usual archetypes, but they're much better realized than usual. The friendships, crushes, and rivalries all feel surprisingly genuine, and all of that serves two purposes. One, if you give a shit about these characters, all the not-killing stuff is a lot more interesting. Two, if you give a shit about these characters, the stakes of having a vengeful, undead, unstoppable zombie clown around actually matter.

The list just goes on and on. I'm so sick of modern day slasher flicks that are joyless and sadistic, plus the frantic quick-cutting and desaturated palette leave 'em all looking pretty much the same. Stitches, meanwhile, is bright and colorful, complementing the gleefully demented tone of the movie. Relying on practical effects whenever possible,

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director/editor McMahon wants you to revel in all the splatter, so it's cut at just the right rhythm too. It's fast, it's fun, it's slick, it doesn't feel like a slasher I've watched a couple hundred times already, and, well, it's Highly Recommended.

Video

Stitches puts the "gore" in "gorgeous". The digital photography this time around is inhumanly crisp and detailed, bolstered further by a cheery, vibrant palette and rock solid blacks. There's nothing at all for me to cross my arms and scowl about. No excessive filtering, no missteps in the encode, no nothin'. Well worth the extra couple bucks to check it out in high-def.

Single-layer disc. 1.78:1. AVC.

Audio

Its 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack ain't bad either. Every last element in the mix is rendered cleanly, clearly, and distinctly, and Stitches' dialogue never struggles for placement. I'm really impressed with the overall fidelity, and I can definitely say that I've never heard Cutting Crew sound this great before. The low-end's substantial, and the surrounds get a moderate amount of use. The emphasis is definitely placed up front, but there are some solid atmospheric effects, and some of the splatter -- especially that exploding head! -- take advantage of the rears. No gripes or complaints this time around.

Stitches also piles on a 24-bit PCM stereo track while it's at it. Subtitles are served up in English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Audio Commentary: Big thumbs-up to the folks at Dark Sky for putting Stitches' commentary on the Setup menu and listing it alongside the rest of the
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Extras. More Blu-ray releases oughtta structure things like that. Anyway...! Writer/director/editor Conor McMahon and star Ross Noble sit down for this chatty, energetic, and impressively comprehensive track, tackling tattoos as a barometer of fandom, how tough it is to get cute, barely legal girls to get nekkid for you on camera, why you really shouldn't rent your house out to a bunch of horror filmmakers, and cliffs occasionally sinking into the sea. Had a blast. Wish I took better notes so I could do a more competent job with this chunk of the review.

Making of (20 min.; HD): Stitches' behind-the-scenes featurette chats up McMahon some more as well as pretty much all of his cast, breezing through the long list of characters and delving into the barrel drums of splatter. Worth a look.

Bloopers (4 min.; HD): Next up is Stitches' blooper reel, which piles on a bunch of outtakes, clowning around (get it? "clowning"? because there's a zombie clown? Mommy?), and the occasional boom mic booping into the frame.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): A high-def trailer rounds out the extras.

The Final Word

Think Can't Hardly Wait, only instead of Peter Facinelli, you're lookin' at a vengeful zombie clown, and you're somewhere in the ballpark. Highly Recommended. ]]> Iron Man: Rise of Technovore (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59939 Wed, 03 Apr 2013 05:45:49 PDT Iron Man:

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Rise of Technovore isn't just a title; it's a warning.

Think about it. When was the last time anything, ever with "colon-rise-of-the-something" in the title was any good? G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior...one swing and a miss after another. Rise of Technovore, a feature-length anime production by Madhouse, marches right along in that same proud tradition.

Tony Stark (you know, the cool exec with a heart of steel) is on the verge of launching H.O.W.A.R.D., a roving Big Brother spy satellite designed to scan and analyze every square inch of the earth for potential threats. (...and we're supposed to root for this?) Not one to meekly stand behind a console and wait for a button to be pressed, Stark's soaring above the launch facility in his Iron Man armor to ward off any potential threats. Turns out that Ezekiel Stane has his own set of armor, though: a technobiological fusion of man and machine generations from anything Stark could ever hope to envision. Iron Man is so hopelessly outmatched that you can't rightly call it a battle. The facility is reduced to smoldering rubble. James "War Machine" Rhodes -- Stark's closest friend and ally -- is feared dead.

Stark naturally tears off after this sinister new enemy in search of vengeance. The forces of S.H.I.E.L.D. can't allow that because...I don't know, because the screenplay says they can't, I guess, and they attack Iron Man with every weapon in their arsenal. Not only does Stark have to fend off Stane, whose brilliance, resources, technology, and ambition far outstrip his own, but he's pitted against former allies like Hawkeye and Black Widow as well as hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s android warriors. 'Course, Stark still has a couple of phone numbers in his Rolodex, and The Punisher's heavy artillery and Pepper Potts' endless resourcefulness ought to even up the odds at least a little.

Oh, man. That's pretty much the review right there, actually. Rise of Technovore is teeming with some really cool visuals, especially the spastic mecha-type battles that anime does so well, but that's just about the only vaguely positive thing I can think to say about this feature-length misfire. The plot is mostly a bunch of anime tropes lazily stapled together. Pretty much none of the driving motivations

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really make any sense. Iron Man wants to stop the lunatic who slaughtered several hundred innocent people and gunned down his best friend, but S.H.I.E.L.D. puts the kibosh on that because there are rules they have to follow, and plus they don't want the sole surviving witness of the massacre to wind up in the morgue. When Stark blasts off to hunt down Technovore anyway, S.H.I.E.L.D. uses what sure as hell looks like lethal force against the guy they're supposedly trying to protect, their attempts to rein him in without sparking an international incident wind up costing who knows how many billions of dollars in damages, and Zeke Stane is out of play for such a long time that I kind of forgot that S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't the central villain of the piece for a while there.

Not so much of a surprise that the terrible writing extends to clunky dialogue like "I can already hear the boss dismissing us, sarcastically" and "There's one thing I've finally come to realize. Even with talent, you need chaos to give birth to a dancing star. I'm not sure I have it. Some day, man will no longer give birth to any star." ...what? Pretty much no one has anything resembling a personality, with even the mighty Pepper Potts reduced to eye candy who won't stop yammering on about going on vacation. As a lifelong Marvel zombie, it's kinda neat to see how much stuff from the comics is crammed in here -- S.H.I.E.L.D., the Helicarrier, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Hawkeye, the Black Widow, The Punisher, Sasha Hammer, Zeke Stane, Rhodey, A.I.M., Pepper Potts -- but Rise of Technovore sort of just throws a lot of them in just for the hell of it. If you're trying to figure out how The Punisher factors into an international spy/sci-fi revenge story about a techno-organic-armor-powered nutjob hellbent on world destruction like any random JRPG villain, then...well, the screenplay's still clumsily working that angle out too.

I really do want to like Iron Man: Rise of Technovore. My inner fanboy loves seeing these familiar characters translated to anime, the designs and action look great, and the way the movie strings together so many genres -- spy intrigue, robot wars, a high-speed car chase, the dreamlike standoff with Stane, an extended climax that's sort of like Dead Space meets Gamera before building to a gloriously insane crescendo -- every last bit of it is right up my alley. Alas, the screenplay's a shitstorm, what passes for plot and characterization are woefully uninvolving, and even though it looks nice, the action throughout Rise of Technovore isn't even enough of a consistent adrenaline rush to function as a turn-your-brain-off empty spectacle. Nah. Just Skip It.

Video

Pop quiz! Which of these screenshots are from the Blu-ray release of Rise of Technovore, and which ones are from the DVD?

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Trick question. Sorry. They're all from the high-def release. As you could probably tell, quite a bit of the animation throughout Rise of Technovore is extremely soft and diffused, and its colors generally look washed out. So, yeah, high definition eye candy it's not so much. To play nicely, I'll lob out a counterpoint with a reasonably sharp screengrab:

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Even at its best, though, this Blu-ray disc doesn't trump what I'd expect out of a really good upconvert. There's zero fine detail, the clarity of the linework is generally fuzzy and indistinct, and the only time the image screams high definition is during the opening and closing titles. Though the results aren't nearly as disappointing as Madhouse's Supernatural anime series, I still wouldn't be surprised to hear that the actual animation was produced in standard def, and the more recognizably HD titles were all added after upconversion.

Iron Man: Rise of Technovore arrives on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc with an AVC encode and an aspect ratio of 1.78:1.

Audio

Rise of Technovore boasts three lossless soundtracks. The disc defaults to the movie's original Japanese in 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio, and the English and French tracks drop down to 16-bit. I flipped back and forth

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between the English and Japanese tracks, and although the English dialogue is a little sharper and more natural, the performances are awfully drab. I have a tough time watching anime in anything but Japanese, and not surprisingly, that's a more comfortable fit here too.

I'm about as disappointed with the audio as I am with the visual end of things. Rise of Technovore is surprisingly thin and trebly. It's not one of those soundtracks whose snarl engulfs every square inch of the room...it just sort of disinterestedly limps from each speaker. There are a couple of times when I was impressed with the LFE -- the synth-bass in the score when Technovore first attacks, most memorably -- but otherwise the subwoofer just lets out a half-belch every so often. The audio fails to ratchet up the intensity, and that's especially disappointing in the climax when the entirety of mankind is on the verge of being snuffed out, and the score sounds like I left my iPod playing in the other room. Distinctness and clarity are almost always unremarkable. Even with the endless onslaught of action, few of the effects pack much of a wallop. Dialogue sounds okay, and the surround channels get a good bit of use, but there's nothing that elevates this soundtrack anywhere beyond lackluster.

Along for the ride with those three lossless soundtracks are Dolby Digital 5.1 dubs in Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai. Subtitles are served up in English (traditional and SDH), Chinese (simplified and traditional), French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai.

Extras

Not much.

Conceptual Art Gallery (HD): I stopped
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counting at 50, but there are somewhere around 65 model sheets and various bits of conceptual art here.

Tale of Technovore (8 min.; HD): This love letter to Madhouse gushes about how brilliantly Iron Man translates to anime, the benefits of going feature-length and targeting an older crowd, and incorporating many different elements from many different Marvel comics into the movie.

S.H.I.E.L.D.: Protecting the Marvel Universe (8 min.; HD): The disc's other featurette is a S.H.I.E.L.D. primer that breezes through the spy/police organization's roles in the comics and on the silver screen, and there are brief introductions to Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and the Helicarrier if you need 'em.

Iron Man: Rise of Technovore comes packaged in an embossed slipcover, and there's an UltraViolet code lovingly tucked inside.

The Final Word

I'm pretty much the target demographic for a genre-hopping Marvel anime with oodles of four-color cameos and Shellhead duking it out with hundreds of robots, but Iron Man: Rise of Technovore is a misfire on just about every conceivable level. Skip It. ]]> Continuum: Season 1 (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59863 Sun, 17 Mar 2013 08:33:24 PDT

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]but the barriers that bridge the past, present, and future...? Far more easily shattered. The eight of them leap back sixty-five years to 2012, transported to an era before sprawling, multinational corporations seized a chokehold on their government. They have the knowledge, the means, and the iron will to ensure that the future they once knew will never come to pass. Freedom and liberty won't be outmoded concepts in long since destroyed history books. Impoverished people won't die starving in the streets because limited food supplies make the third quarter earnings look better. No matter what the cost to themselves...to friends or family that may never exist...Liber8 refuses to let the future fall.

Just to be clear, Liber8 are the bad guys.

I guess that's all a matter of perspective, though. After all, one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Liber8 succeeded in taking out a couple dozen of their highest-placed targets in 2077, and the collateral damage numbered in the tens of thousands. If sacrificing 30,000 innocent lives spares several hundred million more, they look at that slaughter as a necessary evil. This is war, and wars have casualties.They're not moustache-twirling villains out of some '40s serial, hellbent on conquering the world; the eight of them give up everything they've ever known to save it.

That's part of what makes Continuum so compelling. Without leaning on too many overly familiar anti-hero clichés, the series blurs the lines between right and wrong. Liber8 feels that they've been given an impossible second chance, and they don't want to squander it by hedging their bets. They utilize the only tactics they know to be effective. The most interesting villains are almost always the ones with moral certainty on their side...that they look at themselves as the good guys.

Meanwhile, Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols) -- a "Protector", if you want to call agents of the Corporate Protective Services that, ensnared in Liber8's timejump -- isn't an typical heroine either. She's an agent of an oppressive status quo. This law enforcement officer hails from a future where due process is a distant memory...where suspects can be brutalized without

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impunity, where "innocent until proven guilty" makes way for truth serums jabbed in the back of the necks of anyone who's acting a little squirrelly. Kiera doesn't relish any of that, exactly; it's just the way things they are (errr...will be?), and she hails from a time where questioning authority too loudly gets you thrown down a deep, dark hole. As sympathetic as Kiera so often is, it can be uncomfortable rooting for her at times.

If you're starting to cringe that Continuum preaches from some sci-fi pulpit about economic inequality, then you can relax. Those sorts of politics are definitely in play, but it's hardly Occupy-meets-Time Trax. Honestly, Continuum is pretty much everything I'd want in a series like this. For one, it strikes a really nice balance between a stop-the-nefarious-scheme-of-the-week procedural with a heavily serialized arc. There's no shortage of action, I found myself completely hooked by the investigations of a group with elusive motives and unconventional tactics, and the mythology that's being constructed here is more inspired than you might expect at first glance. There's a surprising amount of forward momentum, especially since there are a finite number of members of Liber8, and not all of them make it out of this first season alive. Some of the twists and turns in what looks to be a series-long arc caught me completely off-guard in the best possible way, and it feels like there really is a grand plan here rather than the making-it-up-as-we-go-along of Lost and Heroes.

Continuum makes the most of its ten episode order. I'm used to genre series that spend most of their first seasons trying to find steady footing: figuring out how to best play to the strengths of their actors and writing staff, striking the right balance between action and world-building, remaining accessible to new viewers while rewarding established ones...you know what I mean. It doesn't help that a lot of freshman series don't know how many episodes they'll have to play with either. Continuum finds its voice unusually quickly. The series premiere can be a little shaky, sure, but I found myself with very few complaints after that. For my money, there's not a single weak episode at all this season. I'm impressed by how quickly Continuum is able to pick up on its missteps and correct them. For instance, the series starts with Kiera clad in a "future-tech-is-magic!" suit that's bulletproof, houses the planet's most powerful computing system, has a built-in taser, can turn invisible, and on and on and on. It's a cool idea, yeah, but that super-suit makes Kiera so unstoppable that it stomps all over the

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potential drama. The writers realize before too long that they need to take it out of play, and that's exactly what they do. If you twiddle your thumbs throughout the first half of the season whenever the rest of Alec's family is on-screen, well...just wait; the payoff's well worth it. Basically, any gripe you have is out of the way fairly quickly.

The way that Continuum continually reveals more and more of the overarching scheme behind the timebreak is unbelievably compelling. Even with all of the mythology that's being doled out here, it doesn't come at the expense of the series' characters either. Liber8 aren't a bunch of interchangeable idealogues; hell, some of them only seem to be part of the movement as an excuse to wreak havoc. The strife within the group, the jockeying for control, everyone having their own endgame and motives...they're a hell of a lot more interesting than C.O.B.R.A.-from-the-future or whatever. Speaking of which, after suffering through G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I was kind of iffy about watching a series starring Rachel Nichols. Far more than just a pretty face, she's completely up for the challenge of shouldering her own TV series, deftly fielding the drama, action, comedy, and some intensely emotional moments without missing a beat. Kiera is an immediately engaging lead, and I appreciate the fact that her driving motivation is to return to the future where her husband and young son await. Kiera may be partnered with an impossibly handsome detective (Victor Webster), but Continuum doesn't get caught up in the will-they-or-won't-they between Carlos and Kiera that you'd expect in...oh, any other TV series, ever. I can't say enough good things about Erik Knudsen as Alec, a seventeen-year-old off-the-charts-genius whose experiments in the here and now will shape the face of technology in 2077. Alec is the technosorceror who knocks down the walls of every corner the writers paint themselves into, but he's so ridiculously likeable and so critical to Continuum rather than just another plot device.

I have so much more to say about Continuum, but this review is probably unreadably long already. I love its sharp sense of humor, from the gentle ribbing of Kiera by Carlos and Alec all the way to the inevitable fish-out-of-water comedy. Because it's genuine serialized sci-fi rather than a police procedural with time travel stapled on, Continuum really lends itself to being devoured in marathon viewing. The brawls are generally staged very well, and the series knows how to get the most out of its budget, especially when it comes to the use of visual effects. As an honorary Canuck living in South Carolina, there's part of me that's all giddy that Continuum is a Canadian-lensed sci-fi series that's actually set in Vancouver. Unprecedented...? I'm a definite fan of the way the back-to-the-future flashbacks/flashforwards inform the present. The series upends about as many genre tropes as it embraces. Even when Continuum does really cornball stuff like "I'm trying to trace this IP, but it's bouncing through proxy servers all over the globe!" or the lack of repercussions when Kiera and Carlos pull unforgiveable stunts, it all seems like part of the fun. I went into Continuum hoping for nothing more than sci-fi/action junk food, and while it definitely delivers on that front, it's so much smarter, better crafted, and more engaging than I ever could've expected. I'm counting the days till the season two premiere. Very Highly Recommended.

Video

The digital photography in Continuum's premiere has a distractingly video-like appearance, but it settles into a more cinematic look once the meat of the series is underway. The image is reasonably sharp and well-defined, benefitting further from some really robust contrast whenever it has plenty of light to play with. More dimly-lit stretches can get kind of noisy, and black levels sometimes struggle in those moments as well. Being a serious genre series lensed in Vancouver and all, it follows that Continuum's palette tends to be rather subdued. Colors do pop at times when appropriate, most memorably throughout a sequence set in Kiera's apartment in the premiere. I couldn't spot any missteps in the authoring of this disc at all. Very nicely done.

Continuum's ten episodes are spread across a pair of dual-layer discs. They've each been encoded with VC-1 -- hey! haven't seen that codec in a while -- at a higher-than-average bitrate for a TV-on-BD set.

Audio

Continuum boasts a set of 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks. Its technical specs may mirror most of the sci-fi blockbusters coming down the pike, but as far as the execution goes, there's never really any doubt that Continuum was produced for the small screen. The surrounds are reserved primarily for ambiance and atmosphere. Sometimes they'll help reinforce the action as well, but it's a coin flip whether or not a shootout will

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find its way to the rear channels. Throughout the premiere, I felt that the chronal blast and various other explosions packed a healthy low-frequency wallop, but kicks, punches, and gunplay generally fell flat. As the season breezed along, that seemed to change, with bass response throughout the brawls getting more impactful. Still, the sort of distinctness and clarity that Blu-ray generally delivers isn't really on display here. On the upside, Continuum's dialogue is clean, clear, and nicely balanced throughout. Overall, a solid effort for a TV series but not approaching cinematic quality the way some sci-fi series do.

No dubs, alternate mixes, or audio commentaries. Subtitles are offered in English (SDH) only.

Extras

Meet the Makers, Protectors, and Terrorists (19 min.; SD): Creator Simon Barry is joined by actors Rachel Nichols, Victor Webster, Erik Knudsen, and Tony Amendola for a set of brief interviews. The four of them speak about Continuum's view of the future, its origins here in the present, casting, being part of such an action-heavy production, and delving into what sets this series apart from the rest of the pack. Feels a little promotional in nature but is worth a look.

Continuum comes packaged in a traditional width Blu-ray case and a glossy, slightly embossed slipcover.

The Final Word

I had a blast with Continuum, a Canadian import that strikes the perfect balance between a heavily serialized sci-fi action/drama and an accessible case-of-the-week police procedural. It's smart, it's funny, it's exciting, it's heartbreaking, and it's wildly addictive, demanding to be attacked in a seven and a half hour marathon. Very Highly Recommended. ]]> From Beyond (Unrated) (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59260 Tue, 12 Mar 2013 05:56:30 PDT Pineal gland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The pineal gland (also called the pineal body, epiphysis cerebri, epiphysis, conarium or the "third eye") is a small endocrine gland in the vertebrate brain. It produces

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the serotonin derivative melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of wake/sleep patterns and seasonal functions. ^[1][2] Research conducted by Dr. Edward Pretorius suggests that carefully modulated electrosonic stimulation of the pineal gland can awaken a sixth sense in some subjects, piercing the veil that separates this dimension from the one beyond. Side effects of such stimulation include heightened sexuality, the pineal gland manifesting itself as a stalk from the subject's forehead, a compulsion to feast on human brains, and occasionally getting devoured by insatiably ravenous extradimensional monstrosities.

No, really; I have citations and everything! Too bad Dr. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) can't say the same. Only bloody, fist-size chunks of Pretorius remain, and since the cops stumbled onto Tillinghast ranting and raving and lugging around a crimson-spattered axe at the time...well, into the psych ward he goes. Whiz-kid psychiatrist Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) is enthralled with Tillinghast's fantastic, impossible tales of enlarged pineal glands and dimension-bending. With the watchful eyes of Detective Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree) close behind, the two of 'em set out to recreate Pretorius' experiments with the Resonator. It's just that before, Pretorius barely cracked open the gateway to this other plane of existence; McMichaels busts the door wide open, an open invitation to the...the something that's invading our world from beyond.

Don't ask me how, but I somehow managed to deftly avoid watching From Beyond till now even though it reteams just about everyone on both sides of the camera behind Re-Animator, one of my absolute favorite genre flicks of all time. It took me more than a little while to settle into it too. The initial manifestation of these extradimensional creatures -- pretty much just a floating lamprey eel -- is pretty underwhelming, the first out-and-out kill takes place mostly off-screen, and the rest of the first half hour is bogged down by reams of

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exposition, endless character introductions, and standard issue Asylum from Hell clichés. With a resigned sigh and a frown to match, I figured I was going to have to pan a movie I had endlessly high hopes for, but it was right around that time that From Beyond really got underway.

Just as the movie lurches past the half-hour mark, From Beyond stomps on the clutch and shift gears into unhinged, unapologetic batshit insanity. I obviously mean that in the best possible way too. The creature designs are staggeringly huge in scale and scope. Crafted with unparalleled skill and a demented imagination, most of these practical effects hold up startlingly well more than a quarter-century later. It's hard to convey in a plain-text review just how many of these extradimensional beasties there are, exactly. There's at least one enormous creature in damn near every last scene throughout the second and third acts, and they're every bit as inventive and disturbing as you'd hope to see out of a Lovecraft adaptation. In those rare moments where the frame isn't sopping with UltraSlime and stage blood, From Beyond showcases Barbara Crampton stripping down to studded leather dominatrix straps and not a whole hell of a lot else.

The dark satire of Re-Animator makes way for an even more pervasive and intensely disturbing sexual edge. I'm intrigued that From Beyond swaps out the dynamic between Crampton and Combs. In Re-Animator, he was the hopelessly obsessed scientist who sacrifices himself and everything he holds dear in the name of discovery; here, Tillinghast is the skittish, reluctant voice of reason while McMichaels is seduced by science. The final fifty-someodd minutes scream ahead at an unrelentingly manic pace, the story twists and transforms itself in entirely unexpected directions, From Beyond couldn't be more perfectly cast if it clenched its fists and tried really really hard, I remain completely in awe of the creature effects, and the sharply written dialogue is the right kind of quotable. For crying out loud, I spotted legendary comic artist Neal Adams' name in the credits as providing concept art, somehow managing to make me love From Beyond more profoundly than I already had. It's such a thrill to have a movie that's been on my wish list for ages now finally find its way onto Blu-ray, especially as part of such a slick special edition release. It's also very much worth noting that the trims the MPAA insisted upon have all been restored in this unrated director's cut, all the way down to the leering closeup on that spat-out eyeball. As if you couldn't pick up on my hands overenthusiastically trembling as I clack away at my keyboard, you know what I'm going with this: Highly Recommended.

Video

I'm guessing this high definition presentation of From Beyond is sourced from the same master as the MonstersHD airings all the way back in 2006. If that's the case, then...well, they did it right the first time. There were several

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points throughout the movie where I'd stop and think "...geez, this looks really good!" Its colors -- especially when the Resonator's whirring and the screen's drenched in magenta -- look terrific. Definition and fine detail are especially impressive whenever the camera's closed in somewhat tightly. Something about the texture struck me as looking a little video-like, but there's still a reasonable amount of grain and all on display. I was honestly surprised when I learned in the extras that the unrated footage was culled from a workprint rather than some sort of negative materials. When you see the condition of the original trims, it's that much more startling that their insertion is pretty much seamless. There's a little degradation, sure, but it's very, very slight; nothing jarring that takes you out of the movie like the reinserts in the original My Bloody Valentine. Yeah, I'm happy.

The AVC encode for From Beyond gets pretty much an entire layer to itself, and all the extras lounge around the better part of layer numero two-oh. The mattes are opened up a few scanlines to reveal an aspect ratio of 1.78:1.

Audio

From Beyond boasts two 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks: one in the film's original stereo and the other remixed to 5.1. At first, I was kind of floored by this remix. The clarity of the score...the way it glistened and twinkled in the surrounds...the low-frequency snarl and crystalline highs as the Resonator whirred to life: I'm not sure what my expectations were walking in, but From Beyond immediately eclipsed them. Once the movie really gets underway, though, it sounds a lot more normal. Dialogue sounds somewhat dated. As inspired as the sound design is, the effects don't deliver that sense of distinctness and clarity that I'm usually spoiled with when it comes to lossless audio. That initial awe I had of the rendering of Richard Band's score remained elusive afterwards. On the upside, the surrounds in the remix are used to very strong effect -- the buzzing of that swarm of insects; Pretorius' otherworldly voice lurching from every direction -- and it consistently feels comfortable too, never coming across as forced or gimmicky the way some remixes can. Totally listenable but nothing impressive.

Subtitles are offered in English (SDH) only.

Extras

Thanks, Scream Factory and Red Shirt Pictures!

Audio Commentary: From Beyond features what looks to be a newly-recorded commentary with screenwriter Dennis Paoli. It's on the quiet, subdued side, so it would've been nice to have someone else with a live mic in front of 'em so it'd play like more of a conversation. Paoli reads directly from the original Lovecraft short story, explores the process of expanding a 7 page work into a feature-length film, and touches on why Lovecraft's stories lends themselves so wonderfully to adaptations such as this. Not at all a poor commentary, but it's low-key enough that it's better left playing in the background.

Multiple Dimensions (24 min.; HD): Out of the nearly four and a half hours of extras on From Beyond, the first of the disc's featurettes gets the nod as my favorite. This effects-oriented retrospective features John Carl Buechler, Anthony Doublin, John Naulin, and Mark Shostrom, part of the three FX teams that toiled away on the film. The four of them discuss the appeal of visualizing Lovecraft's horrors, just how fiercely ambitious From Beyond was with the size and scale of its effects work, and the revelation that actor Ted Sorel happened to be the nephew of effects legend Jack Pierce! What other featurette sneaks in the effects artists' research to prove to the MPAA that they're not looking at a penis on Jeffrey Combs' forehead, heating KY jelly in oversized pasta pots, and a special appearance by the Pope's surgical team? If you only have time to watch one of the extras on this Blu-ray disc...well, that's kind of tragic, but make sure you don't miss out on this one.

Paging Dr. McMichaels (14 min.; HD): Barbara Crampton -- who, geez, still looks incredible well into her fifties -- talks about why From Beyond features her very favorite role as an actress and how well (or not so well, as the case may be) she got along with Ken Foree and her Re-Animator co-star Jeffrey Combs.

A Tortured Soul (18 min.; HD): ...and speak of the devil...! Jeffrey Combs talks about everything from munching on Fixodent, terrifying a gaggle of 5-year-old Italian girls, working with wildly imaginative but punishing practical effects, and why he doesn't think he's really all that good a fit for the movie. There are way too many highlights to list, so don't get the wrong idea just because this writeup's on the short side.

An Empire Production (5 min.; HD): Producer Charles Band delves into the landscape of video-oriented genre filmmaking in the mid-'80s, including the rise of Empire Studios in Italy and the trick to lining up a world-class crew with very little money.

Holdovers from MGM's 2007 Special Edition DVD

Audio Commentary: From Beyond's other audio commentary features filmmakers Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna as well as actors Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs. The four of 'em have a blast catching up with this then-recently-recreated director's cut, occasionally riffing on it MST3K-style and pointing out nonsensical plot points that I never really stopped to think about. I mean, where did
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Dr. McMichaels get a fancy bomb with a timer an' everything on zero notice? Among the topics of conversation are some of the initial ideas that had to be discarded, toiling away in the punishingly cold trenches alongside a crew that spoke little-to-no English, and everything you wanted to know about the pineal gland but were afraid to ask. Well-worth a listen.

The Editing Room: Lost and Found (5 min.; SD): The unexpected discovery and startlingly effective restoration of the MPAA-mandated trims to From Beyond are discussed at length here.

The Director's Perspective (9 min.; SD): On its own, this conversation with Stuart Gordon would be terrific, but most of the topics on the bill had already been tackled by the time I found my way here, such as the role reversal between Combs and Crampton compared to Re-Animator, shaping a 7 page story into an 86 minute film, the MPAA slicing From Beyond to ribbons, and the unlikely rediscovery of that missing footage a couple decades later. Its inclusion is definitely appreciated, but if you're scouring through all of the extras on this disc, consider watching this first so it won't seem like such an also-ran. If you're looking for a quick overview instead, this might be your best bet.

Interview with the Composer (5 min.; SD): Well, that's not an imaginative title. Anyway, Richard Band briefly touches on conveying the horror and sexuality pervasive throughout From Beyond through his score, the uncharacteristic lack of a driving theme, and shoving the less-than-perfect opening title music to the end credits instead.

Storyboard to Film Comparison (9 min.; mostly HD): The minute and a half introduction by Stuart Gordon is in standard-def, but the four storyboard-to-screen comparisons that follow are in shiny HD.

Photo Gallery (4 min.; SD): This montage of production stills and behind the scenes shots sprinkles in some poster art while it's at it.

Trailer (1 min.; SD): Last up is a short standard definition trailer.

From Beyond is a combo pack with an anamorphic widescreen DVD along for the ride. The set comes in a slipcover with some wonderfully sleazy new artwork, but if that's not your thing so much, you can revert to the original poster art by flipping the insert inside-out.

The Final Word

It took From Beyond a little while to worm its way into my cold, embittered heart, but once it did, I wound up loving it almost as much as Re-Animator. Highly Recommended if you're game for a splattery, perverted, wildly unpredictable good time. ]]> Red Dawn (2012) (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=60003 Sat, 09 Mar 2013 05:09:52 PST Red Dawn Remake!

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... Sorry, I'm still coming to grips with the bug-eyed comic relief from Drake and Josh getting cast as a football hero heartthrob-type. Where was I? Oh! Yeah. Unnecessary Red Dawn remake. Matt Eckert (Josh Peck) -- the kid flipping the middlesie up there -- plops downstairs one sleepy Saturday morning. His older brother Jed (Chris Hemsworth) is snoozing away on the couch. Joined the Marines, disappeared for however many years without a word, and he just strolls in like this? And I...and I...wait, what is that?! Matt walks out on the porch to figure out what that thunderous rattle is, and...oh, the sky's dotted with dozens upon dozens of paratroopers. North Korea has invaded Spokane.

We're in some alternate timeline here where the global economy is somehow even more in tatters, nations have been using cyberwarfare to send each other's infrastructures buckling to their knees, and...well, North

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Korea -- who can't even launch a single friggin' rocket successfully here on Earth-616 -- is a legitimate force to be reckoned with. What little resistance they meet with is easily overcome. The power grid and all form of communications have been irrevocably knocked out. The United States is no more. Spokane falls. ...but wait! A glimmer of hope remains: a shining beacon to rally those freedom fighters with the iron will to overcome their oppressors in the face of impossible odds. I'm obviously talking about Subway, whose franchise restaurants remain open and well-stocked for some of the most "...the hell?" distracting product placement in the history of anything, ever. Oh, and there are also The Wolverines. In the Middle East, Jed devoted years to crushing insurgent attacks; now, he's leading a group of terrorists to reclaim Spokane to its rightful...well, I don't know if "glory" is the word, but whatever Spokane was before the Koreans swarmed in.

I'll give Red Dawn this much: it hates bloated action flicks just about as much as I do. This remake is a startlingly lean and efficient beast, essentially one action sequence after another after another after another for 93 minutes straight. Red Dawn hardly ever stops to catch its breath, no one stops to yammer on about their feelings or heap out a couple scoops of exposition, there are lots of purty ladies and handsome boys, and tons of shit blows up. Don't get me wrong: Red Dawn is about every bit as aggressively mediocre as you think it is, but plenty of B-action flicks could learn a lot from how swiftly this remake moves and how it carves off all the fat.

On the other hand, there's everything else. Not that a boots-on-the-ground Soviet invasion was plausible in the mid-'80s, but the Cold War was still at such a fever pitch that the pervasive paranoia made it feel like a real possibility. The remake of Red Dawn loses out because the political climate is so different these days, and North Korea just doesn't inspire the same reaction that the Russian threat did all those decades ago. Hell, when cameras were rolling in this remake, the invading force hailed from China, and the whole North Korean thing was stapled on during post-production. The enemy forces are so interchangeable that even their nationality can be swapped out without missing a beat. The '80s Red Dawn invested at least some marginal effort in making the enemy forces seem like recognizable human beings, but the badniks in the remake are nothing but dead

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air. The Wolverines don't have it a whole lot better, saddled with some excruciatingly awful "...because family!" dynamics between the Eckert brothers, Josh Hutcherson doing his proto-Peeta helplessly demure deal, and a handful of "Seventeen" cover models only distinguishable by who their boyfriends are and how well they fill out a tanktop.

No one on either side has anything resembling a personality, this remake doesn't have a hook that digs its way in like the Cold War era-original did, and this bloodless retread is bullet-for-bullet meeker and less violent than the original. Marginally entertaining but instantly forgettable. Rent It.

Video

Well, at least Red Dawn looks all nice and shiny on Blu-ray. Robust contrast, a remarkable level of fine detail, a consistently filmic texture that's becoming more and more rare with action flicks anymore, nothing in the way of unwelcome digital hiccups: the one chunk of the review with no bitching at all!

Red Dawn gets to stretch out across both layers of this BD-50 disc, which is awfully generous considering that it's a 93 minute movie with zero extras.

Audio

Red Dawn boasts the 24-bit, six-channel DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack you'd waltz in expecting to hear. The film's dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, and every last line is balanced flawlessly in the mix.

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Sprays of gunfire swarm from every direction. Countless jet fighters and attack choppers soar from one speaker to the next, taking better advantage of the multichannel setup than just about anything else that's found its way into my home theater in recent memory. The Wolverines kinda have a knack with C4, and all those eighty megaton explosions grab a chokehold on the lower frequencies too. One gripe I have is that the volume is dialed down a little lower than usual. I had to tick it up three notches to sound closer to normal. Even then, the LFE wasn't quite as impactful as I'd expect, and distinctness and clarity felt as if they were a few percentage points from being where they oughtta be as well. The sound design is jaw-dropping, but it kind of feels as if someone dialed down a couple of sliders at the last minute. Well above average but not quite perfect.

No dubs or alternate soundtracks at all, surprisingly. Subtitles are served up in English (SDH), Spanish, and French. Also breaking away from convention, the translated ~~Chinese~~Korean dialogue is burned-in rather than leaning on player-generated subs.

Extras

Whole lotta nothin'. Not even a trailer. I mean, you get a DVD and a digital copy and all out of the deal, but nothing that matters.

The Final Word

Wait, what was the line again? "More like a shit sandwich without the bread." No, no, I'm getting a bit too over-the-top here. Despite being just about universally reviled, Red Dawn plays like a pretty okay action flick for my money. Completely forgettable, mostly toothless, and not even a little bit engaging, but shockingly alright. Worth a rental or a couple of clicks on Netflix. Rent It. ]]> Deadfall (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58803 Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:49:58 PST Deadfall as a slice of neo-noir, you'd figure that out quickly enough. The film delivers a seductive femme fatale in a slinky dress, a

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backseat covered in bricks of $100 bills from an off-screen heist, and a well-meaning cop gunned down in cold blood, and the counter hasn't even ticked to the five minute mark yet.

Deadfall is basically about a small army of deeply damaged people colliding into one another on this side of the border in Northern Michigan. Addison (Eric Bana) and his kid sister (Olivia Wilde) made the big score they'd been dreaming of after knocking over a casino, racking up a body count along the way that has them making a mad dash toward Canada. While her brother skulks through the woods, trying desperately to escape the punishing cold and slaughtering damn near everyone who crosses his path, Liza sticks to the main roads. She hitches a ride with Jay (Charlie Hunnam), a disgraced boxer who's out of prison maybe an hour and a half before brutally attacking the bastard who screwed him over. Neither one of them realize just how much they have in common. Liza schemes with her brother to meet up at Jay's folks' place, a stone's throw from the border, and what was supposed to be a quiet Thanksgiving dinner turns into a blood-spattered hostage situation.

Everything about Deadfall feels so frustratingly artificial. It doesn't bother with characters so much as puzzle pieces waiting to snap into place. Just about every last player on the bill is either a frothing-at-the-mouth, raging, irredeemable asshole or quietly and stoicly keeps everyone at arm's length. I guess I'm meant to sympathize with the deputy played by Kate Mara -- she was just accepted to the FBI Academy, but her fellow smalltown officers keep cracking tampon jokes and won't let her see any action! -- but mostly that's because the movie's violently shaking me by the shoulders and barking at me what I'm supposed to feel.

Rather than the usual down-'n-dirty fistfights you'd expect to see a noirish drama, the first brawl has Eric Bana leaping twenty feet as if someone had dumped a few quarters into an '90s arcade game. Bana and

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Olivia Wilde adopt just about the most grating, inauthentic, ger-hyuk Southern accents I've ever suffered through. I like Charlie Hunnam well enough, but his cardboard performance here is so mannered that I can practically see a P.A. holding cue cards just off-screen. Deadfall assembles a cast of very familiar faces -- Bana, Wilde, Hunnam, Mara, Treat Williams, Kris Kristofferson, and Sissy Spacek -- but they're saddled with dialogue that can't help but sound overly scripted. Even worse, pretty much everyone in the bit parts around them sound as if they were cast from smalltown community theatres, so wildly unconvincing that it's impossible to escape into the film.

Deadfall is at its best during the less labored third act when several different families plow head-on into one another and are forced to deal with their dysfunctions. It's a neo-noir, so we're not talking about Dr. Phil here. This is when the film is at its most intense, it's where the relationships between all these characters begin to feel more genuine, and...well, this is the movie I think Deadfall really wanted to be all along, with the genre trappings just a marketable excuse to get there. Otherwise, though, Deadfall is uncomfortably artificial, uninvolving, and wholly unmemorable. A marginal rental on the outside. Rent It.

Video

Deadfall is startlingly sharp and detailed on Blu-ray, boasting a wonderfully filmic texture and a very striking palette. Its colors alternate between biting cold -- a sprawling canvas of white -- and a faint, slightly warm, golden tint. A healthy bitrate helps stave off any issues with the AVC encode, and no edge enhancement, excessive noise reduction, or assorted manipulation ever get in the way either. The image struggles somewhat under lower light, although that tinge of softness and coarse, gritty grain feel very much in-step with a modestly budgeted neo-noir. Despite my many (many!) misgivings about Deadfall as a film, I'm not left with much to gripe about the way it looks in high-def.

The AVC encode for Deadfall spans both layers of this BD-50 disc, and this presentation preserves the film's theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1.

Audio

Somewhat surprisingly, Deadfall's lossless soundtrack is 16-bit rather than the meatier 24-bit that's generally standard on Blu-ray. Then again, anyone who's not staring at a bitrate meter would be unlikely to notice, judging by the impressive fidelity, the remarkable sense of atmosphere, and the low-frequency bite reinforcing the fistfights and gunplay. Though howling wind and a violent blizzard are the dominant forces in the surround channels, such moments as the overturning car that opens the film and a frantic snowmobile chase also take full advantage of the 5.1 setup. The film's dialogue is reproduced

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cleanly, not marred by the slightest flicker of distortion, and it never struggles for placement in the mix. A very strong showing.

No dubs, alternate mixes, or audio commentaries. Subtitles are limited to English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Featurettes (11 min.; HD): "Snow and Western" breezes through the grueling but gorgeous weather, and afterwards it's mentioned how the film is essentially a Western with snow taking the place of desert sand. "AXS TV: A Look at Deadfall" is more or less the trailer with some promotional interviews gingerly interspersed throughout.

Interviews (21 min.; HD): Deadfall also features four interviews. Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde speak about what drew them to these roles, various character dynamics,. and the operatic Thanksgiving sequence that closes out the film. Director Stefan Ruzowitzky appears in two separate interviews, and there is a fair amount of overlap between them. Both conversations explore the characters and casting, including the allure of playing a villain. The first interview on the set touches on Ruzowitzky's interest in storyboarding, and the second delves more deeply into a couple of standout sequences.

Behind the Scenes Footage (8 min.; HD): Eight minutes of fly-on-the-wall footage snapped throughout production.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): Last to bat is a high-def trailer.

Deadfall is also available in a DVD combo pack, but the release reviewed here just features the Blu-ray disc.

The Final Word

Deadfall emphasizes plot over character, and maybe the movie could've pulled that off if the way all these walking puzzle pieces fit together were even a little bit engaging. Instead, it's an uninspired. aggressively mediocre take on neo-noir that squanders a largely talented cast. Not recommended. Rent It. ]]> The Intouchables (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58822 Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:54:48 PST The Intouchables' staggering box office gross suggests that nearly one in three people in its native France caught the film theatrically. When it was all said

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and done, this border-smashing juggernaut would hold the world record as the highest grossing non-English-language release in the history of cinema. The promotional blurb on the flipside of case proclaims that "The Intouchables dares you to resist its charms!", and if the box office receipts are any indication, it's not wrong.

...and, well, that's entirely by design. The Intouchables wants you to fall for it. Despite its premise of a quadriplegic and the intense bond he forms with his unlikely anchor to the world at large, The Intouchables bears less of a resemblance to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly than it does to, say, When Harry Met Sally. François Cluzet stars as Philippe, a cantankerous and fabulously wealthy invalid who's suffering through another round of interviews with potential live-in caretakers. They're wormy and milquetoast all, and no one he'd hire would last more than a few weeks anyway. Philippe takes a rare shine to Driss (Omar Sy), a Senegalese ex-con who barges in for an interview he couldn't give less of a damn about, only there to pretend he's looking for a job and to keep those welfare checks rolling in. Deprived of his own strength and vivacity, Philippe is fascinated by how alive Driss is, and he appreciates finally being looked at as something other than a deep-pocketed China doll. On their own, neither Driss nor Philippe had much of anything you could rightly call a life, but together...?

Despite swirling around a depressed quadriplegic and a recently released convict, the beats of The Intouchables' story have been torn right out of a romantic comedy, from their meet-cute to their initial fascination-slash-disgust to the intensely close friendship that gradually forms to the obligatory break-up-to-make-up to the sugary, inevitable reunion once the climax rolls around. There are all sorts of bug-eyed fish-out-of-water moments when these two opposites collide, such as Driss introducing Philippe's society "friends" to Earth, Wind, and Fire or this impoverished immigrant finally getting a taste of the fancy bathtub he'd been daydreaming about. Looking at The Intouchables from a 20,000 foot view, the overall premise is standard issue, there really aren't any unexpected left turns on the menu, and the film doesn't hide the fact that it's calculatedly and aggressively tugging on your heartstrings.

If all of that sounds as if I'm gearing up for a brutal pan, that's really not the case. Is The Intouchables kind of predictable and manipulative? Sure, but this is also an astonishingly fun flick. Calculated with precision though its emotions may be, they still manage to come through as so sincere that it's borderline-impossible not to get swept away. Cluzet and Sy radiate an irresistable charm, and the friendship between them seems so unmistakably real

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that it alone glosses over most every one of The Intouchables' flaws. I appreciate the respect that the film clearly has for its characters, such as how Driss is savvier than his brusque, almost clownish behavior might suggest. The Intouchables may not have much piercing insight into the human condition or tell an inventive new story in a trailblazing new way, but it's a well-made bear hug of a movie, and sometimes that's exactly what I want to nustle up to on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Recommended.

Video

This Blu-ray release of The Intouchables is spectacularly crisp and detailed, retaining the warmth and pleasantly filmic texture of its 35mm photography. No heavy-handed noise reduction or artificial sharpening threaten to intrude, contrast remains robust throughout, and the AVC encode never once sputters or stutters. As the presentation on this disc has presumably been culled from the digital intermediate, it really ought to go without saying that no speckling or wear gets in the way. I can't say I'm left with much of anything to grouse about here -- an expectedly terrific effort.

The Intouchables arrives on a single layer Blu-ray disc at its theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

Audio

Presented exclusively in its original French, The Intouchables sounds every bit as good as it looks as well. Where this 24-bit, six-channel DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack particularly excels is its reproduction of music. From the punchy kick drum to Earth, Wind, and Fire's "September" that plays over the opening titles to Philippe putting a very accommodating orchestra through its paces, the fidelity and clarity showcased here really highlight what lossless audio has to offer. Although The Intouchables is very much a dialogue-driven film, a few sequences take full advantage of the surround channels, such as a night at the opera and the seamless pans througout a breakneck car chase. Dialogue is consistently rendered cleanly and clearly, with every last line reading balanced perfectly in the mix.

There are no dubs, alternate mixes, or audio commentaries. English subtitles are enabled by default, and SDH and Spanish subs are also there if you need them.

Extras

Deleted Scenes (6 min.; SD): Even with as much of a behemoth as The Intouchables has
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been the world over, it apparently couldn't muster any more in the way of extras on these shores than a short reel of deleted scenes. Driss pals around a bit more with his family, sharing one of his very favorite perks from the high life. The standout sequence has Driss calling out an associate of Philippe's as he clumsily avoids picking up the check for dinner. These five scenes can be viewed individually or all at once.

Also included is a code for an UltraViolet digital copy.

The Final Word

There's a nagging, cynical voice grumbling somewhere in the back of my head about its calculated sentimentality, the overly familiar broad strokes of its premise, and such uninspired moments as a small army of septuagenarians wiggling their butts to "Boogie Wonderland". The rest of me, though...? Hopelessly charmed by The Intouchables. There's far more depth and complexity to Philippe, Driss, and the bond that forms between them than "Rich Stuffed Shirt and Dude from the Wrong Side of the Tracks Learn About Life from Each Other". The Intouchables lives and dies by the strength of its performances. François Cluzet and Omar Sy seize hold of what could've been a competent take on a fairly routine story and elevate it instead into something so much more remarkable. Recommended. ]]> Girls Against Boys (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59400 Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:38:27 PST (Danielle Panabaker) is still reeling after getting dumped by her middle-aged and more-than-a-little-bit married boyfriend, so she does what any other rational twentysomething-year-old woman would do: girls' night out! It seems like it's going

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pretty well, too, with the fresh wounds of that breakup bandaged over by barrel drums of liquor and her tongue rammed down some reasonably good lookin' guy's throat. Tragically, as dawn breaks, that meet-cute makes way for a tragic rape. Unsure who to talk to or where to go, a shellshocked Shae tries to explain the situation to her ex (Andrew Howard), and that ends with her nearly being raped for the second time in the space of a few hours. When she goes to file a report with the police, one officer sneers "you look alright to me", and another is too busy trying to slurp every last ounce of Sprite out of that styrofoam cup to give much of a damn of whatever it is that Shae's blathering on about. So, fuck it. With her pal Lu (Nicole LaLiberte), a pistol, and a seething hatred for an entire gender in tow, Shae storms out in search of vengeance, slaughtering every last son of a bitch who did her wrong.

The obvious point of reference for a rape-revenge movie like this is I Spit On Your Grave. Hell, one of Shae's attackers even played a rapist in the remake. It's just that Girls Against Boys isn't about rape. In fact, what little of the critical assault is seen remains out-of-focus, with the camera fixated instead on Shae's weathered keychain from the Sanrio store. It's not about revenge either. Shae and Lu's reign of terror on anything with a Y chromosome is largely out of the way more quickly than you might expect. What Girls Against Boys is ultimately about is sisterhood. Still, is Lu trying to use torture and murder to ease Shae's torment, or is she using it as an excuse to revel in her own misandry? The list of people who mistreated or attacked Shae isn't particularly long, and once they're out of the way...what's next on the hit parade?

Girls Against Boys awkwardly stumbles into this odd middle ground where it's not balls-out exploitation (pun kind of intended), and it's a really long way from some philosophical arthouse flick. I like Danielle Panabaker as an actress well enough, but she's too much of a blank slate here. That makes sense when she's been deadened by the rape, with a slight grin at the sight of her tormenters' dismemberment and

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brutal murders as the only sign of life. You barely get to know her as a person before the assault, she's an automaton for a big chunk of the second act, and there's not a real glimmer of humanity until Girls Against Boys has just about drawn to a close.

Panabaker is more or less dead air, outshone at every turn by Nicole LaLiberte as the seductive devil on Shae's shoulder. Girls Against Boys as at its most interesting when exploring the dynamic...the escalating tension...between Shae and Lu, but that's glossed over surprisingly quickly. The first act drones on for far too long, and the best stuff near the end is dispatched so much faster than it ought to be. Most revenge movies focus primarily on the assaults, and I'm intrigued by the fact that Shae and Lu hardly seem to care, more interested in quizzing each other about the nutritional information block on a box of Cap'n Crunch or belting out Donovan's "Sunshine Superman" into the barrel of a gun. I guess that's supposed to reflect that the two of them view men with such contempt that they're barely worthy of their attention...the juxtaposition of horrific murder and romantic-comedy-style whimsy. I get the general idea, but it doesn't really hit its mark.

Girls Against Boys is pretty much grindhouse by way of a first year Women's Studies major. Unevenly paced, only sporadically engaging, not trashy enough for exploitation fanatics but not nearly as thoughtful as it thinks it is to play for a more philosophical crowd: yeah, a marginal rental at best. Rent It.

Video

Shot with a variety of digital cameras, Girls Against Boys generally looks terrific on Blu-ray. The image is startingly crisp and detailed throughout. Colors are generally subdued -- sort of like squinting on a late summer afternoon -- but appear to be rendered accurately enough. Its bitrate is nothing to write home about, but that doesn't ever get in the way of the compression. No real complaints at all.

Single layer disc. No matting. AVC encode.

Audio

Girls Against Boys sports a 16-bit Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack. This thriller doesn't bother with the usual sorts of cat-and-mouse chases, so the surrounds aren't really used to ratchet up the intensity or anything like that. The sound design is teeming with atmosphere and ambiance, though, and there are some impressively smooth pans from the fronts to the rears when appropriate as well. Bass response is modest but effective enough, really only rattling the room with the club music blaring throughout Shae's wild night out. Dialogue is consistently rendered cleanly and clearly, not marred

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by so much as a flicker of distortion and never struggling for placement in the mix. Nicely done.

Subtitles are offered in English (SDH) and Spanish. The only other audio option is a commentary track.

Extras

Audio Commentary: Writer/director Austin Chick and actress Danielle Panabaker sit down for Girls Against Boys' commentary track. The discussion's a little too low-key and relaxed, peppered with an awful lot of gaps of complete silence, and it's not one of those commentaries where I'm left with a half-page of highlights to rattle off. A few of the ones I jotted down include an unused prosthetic penis, bonecutting sound design, the travails of Shae and her nice-guy coulda-been-a-boyfriend slurping down bad clams, and way more chatter about vomiting than you'd probably waltz in expecting to hear.

Chick mentions in his commentary that the reel of deleted scenes couldn't be included due to hiccups with music licensing, so...yeah, not much in the way of extras.

The Final Word

How can a rape/revenge flick where a rapist gets his legs sawed off be this tedious and awkwardly paced? With an Applebee's-level-of-bland lead and a pseudophilosophical streak stomping all over its trash cinema trappings, Girls Against Boys is only particularly memorable as a showcase for scene-stealing Nicole LaLiberte. Not recommended, but if you've gotta watch it, Rent It. ]]> Side by Side (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58512 Sun, 10 Feb 2013 19:56:57 PST Side by Side doesn't seek to crown a victor. The question isn't whether or not CCD chips are superior to celluloid, though the documentary does explore both sides of the digital vs. film arguments. The fact of the

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matter is that the transition to digital has been underway for quite a number of years now, and 35mm film -- both as an acquistion format and certainly as a delivery method -- is in decline. Side by Side explores the implications of this shift away from century-old photochemical processes and towards endless streams of 0s and 1s. What do we gain? What do we stand to lose? What tradeoffs have to be made? What does the future hold?

If that high-level summary in any way makes Side by Side sound dry or impenetrably technical, rest assured that this is not at all the case. The documentary deftly strikes a balance where it introduces key concepts to the unfamiliar without droning on so long as to bore the initiated. Side by Side doesn't pit two types of cameras against one another; it delves into most every visual aspect of filmmaking, including editing, color timing, visual effects, and even distribution. By exploring the mechanics of filmmaking over time, both analog and digital, its talking points are placed in an intriguingly historical context. As obvious as it seems in retrospect, I honestly hadn't thought about the fact that the actual photography was the last pre-distribution aspect of filmmaking to make the shift to digital. Side by Side features interviews with a great many filmmakers, spanning a number of disciplines, eras of filmmaking, budgetary levels, and countries of origin. Among those interviewed are luminaries like Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, Dogma 95 DV pioneers Lars von Trier and Anthony Dod Mantle, such digital advocates as Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderbergh, and George Lucas, and celluloid loyalists like Christopher Nolan. Directors whose works run in the nine figures are featured alongside fiercely independent filmmakers shooting on DSLRs with comparative pocket change. As the topic of conversation is the fundamental underpinning of their art, the discussions are intensely passionate.

Make no mistake that this is a conversation. Side by Side doesn't aim its cameras at cinematographers like Wally Pfister, Vilmos Zsigmond, or Vittorio Storaro and bark "go!" The documentary

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has a genuine interest in understanding the impact of the digital transition. Host/producer Keanu Reeves is willing to play devil's advocate -- no pun intended -- and pose challenging questions to these many filmmakers. Side by Side makes a concerted effort to pay equal time to those who prefer film and those who prefer digital. The plusses and minuses of both are explored at length on a variety of different levels. For instance, shooting digitally greatly reduces the cost of raw materials, and directors can keep the cameras rolling far longer. On the other hand, not having to swap out mags every ten minutes means actors can get exhausted, and since money isn't rolling through the camera as it does with film, that can have an impact on the cast and crew's discipline. Though the advent of digital photography has democratized filmmaking, it also makes it easier for others to wrest artistic control from directors and cinematographers (not to mention from each other). I'd say the orientation does lean somewhat towards digital, with the analog arguments tending to be more abstract or romantic, but I suppose that's unavoidable with so much of the industry already having embraced that transition.

Side by Side casts a wonderfully wide net, not limiting itself to just how moving images can be captured but what's done with that footage afterwards, from effects to editing to color timing to distribution. It even tackles both sides of the idea of people streaming feature-length movies on their iPhones via Netflix, an aspect of the digital transition I wasn't expecting to be addressed here. It's heartening to see that the topic of archival is not glossed over...that most any film projector can screen a movie shot a hundred days or a hundred years ago, while finicky hard drives and ever-changing standards mean the digital art being created today may be lost to future generations.

As someone who generally whiles every spare moment watching, reading about, or writing about movies, the cynical part of me was expecting Side by Side to reassemble familiar film-versus-digital arguments in a very appealing packaging. The conversations are far wider in scope than I was anticipating, I appreciate its interest in remaining even-keeled while still acknowledging the inevitability of digital's dominance, and there's something to be said for putting all of this in a historical context as well. With as ubiquitous as digital cinematography is anymore, it's easy to forget how unrecognizably different things were just ten years ago, and Side by Side points to the promise and uncertainty the future may hold. Engrossing, surprisingly accessible, and very Highly Recommended.

Video

For whatever reason, I was expecting Side by Side to be polished to a gleaming, cinematic sheen -- the sort of documentary I'd be able to see screened theatrically. Instead, it looks very much like something produced expressly for one of the high-def channels on cable. Side by Side is presented at 1080i, even. Clarity and detail are lackluster, again closer in appearance to something I'd expect to catch on cable. Its lean bitrate struggles to keep up. In a word, the presentation is underwhelming.

Side by Side arrives on a single layer Blu-ray disc. The documentary is presented at its native aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and has been encoded with AVC.

Audio

Side by Side features two 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks: one in stereo and the other in 5.1. I opted for the six-channel mix, not that it's worlds removed from the stereo track. Brief bursts of music fill the surrounds and take advantage of the subwoofer. Some of the films excerpted throughout Side by Side also make modest use of the rear channels, and there are brief splashes of color unique to the documentary itself. By and large, of course, the focus is placed squarely on the filmmakers' conversations. Every last one of them is clear and intelligible, although the recording can be somewhat

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uneven. A handful of the participants sound distant and hollow, and one is marred by some light flickers of distortion. Although the inclusion of lossless audio is appreciated, I'm not sure I could tell the difference between this and a 384kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 appearance on cable.

English subtitles are also offered.

Extras

Deleted Scenes, Presented by American Express (3 min.; HD): It's not just you; the title makes me cringe too. AmEx didn't really get their money's worth, considering that this reel consists of a pair of short snippets that run two and a half minutes, all told. Robert Rodriguez speaks briefly about how one half of Grindhouse was shot digitally while the other was captured on 35mm, although viewers often confused which medium was used for which segment. Editor Walter Murch also touches on the lack of a shutter in digital projection.

Additional Interviews with the Filmmakers (14 min.; HD): This second reel is far more substantial, featuring additional comments by Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, the Wachowskis, David Lynch, Robert Rodriguez, David Fincher, James Cameron, Greta Gerwig, George Lucas, Lena Dunham, and Lars von Trier. Among the topics of conversation are the absurdity of an artist turning up his nose at a new creative concept, the omnipresence of video delivery methods in the age of the iPad, the brain's response to 2D and 3D imagery, and how the democratization of filmmaking has made it more difficult to stand out in an endless sea of movies.

Side by Side comes packaged in a flat slipcover.

The Final Word

Side by Side takes a discussion that could be overly technical inside baseball and approaches it in a way that's both accessible and compelling. The sheer variety of impassioned opinions about the transition from celluloid to digital, perceptions that span many different disciplines and backgrounds, an insistence on asking questions rather than trying to arrive at a predetermined conclusion, the staggering scope of what this shift encompasses, and, of course, a thoroughly impressive selection of directors and cinematographers lending their thoughts: as high as my expectations were for Side by Side, the documentary readily exceeded them. The unremarkable presentation, sparse extras, and limited replay value leave me thinking that Side by Side would be best discovered on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but no matter which method you choose, this documentary comes Highly Recommended. ]]> TerrorVision / The Video Dead (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58833 Sun, 10 Feb 2013 08:15:00 PST TerrorVision and The Video Dead -- two movies that have been near the top of my wish list for ages but haven't scored a home video release since Reagan was in office -- and brought 'em to DVD and Blu-ray where they oughtta be.

TerrorVision

The Puttermans are free! Free from the shackles of cable TV. That big, ugly dish in the backyard gives them a direct pipeline to pretty much any broadcast the world over...or universe over, I guess, since they unwittingly intercept a colossal, slobbering, insatiably ravenous mutant that some aliens were digitally chucking in the garbage. The creature can zap his way in and out of any of the TVs in the house, perfectly

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mimicking voices and whipping out any of the severed heads in his gullet to lure in his prey. The only thing standing between the otherworldly mutant and an intercontinental buffet are a twelve year old gun nut (Chad Allen), Cyndi-Lauper-by-way-of-Valley-Girl (Diane Franklin), and a studded-leather-clad cock-rocker (Jon Gries)...so I guess we're pretty much screwed.

Writer/director Ted Nicolaou mentions in the extras that he made TerrorVision to warp twelve year old kids, and, well, mission accomplished. I stumbled upon the flick at some point when I was in junior high, and despite decades having passed since then, The Fibonaccis' ridiculously catchy title song and a metric ton of the movie's off-kilter imagery were seared into my brain. Rediscovering TerrorVision, I had the same bug-eyed expression and goofy grin plastered across my face that prepubescent-me did when I first watched the movie all those years ago.

If you've never managed to catch TerrorVision before, try to picture a cross between Eating Raoul, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and just about any late night black-and-white creature feature from the '50s. I'm not pointing to Eating Raoul just because it also co-stars Mary Woronov, has a whole thing with swingers, and is pretty much entirely set in one home. They're both head-on collisions of camp and satire with similarly exaggerated, absurd sensibilities. TerrorVision mocks the excess of the 1980s, with 98.3% of the movie set inside the Puttermans' gloriously garish home. The walls are hot pink, you can putter around in an indoor Olympic-size jacuzzi, there's a TV no matter which way you turn your head, eight foot tall pieces of fetish art are drapped all over the living room, Roman statues spew water from their fountain-nipples: I mean, the filmmakers obviously had to build the place on a set since there's not a house the world over like this. That sense of deliberate artifice extends to the exteriors too, with an evening sky that's clearly just a sheet of fabric in a corner.

TerrorVision is never not deliriously over-the-top, every bit as entrancingly strange in 2013 as it was a quarter-century and change ago. The production design is drop dead gorgeous, at least if you're as enthralled by that mocking 1986-cranked-up-to-eleven aesthetic as I am. TerrorVision sports one of my favorite creature designs this side of The Deadly Spawn, courtesy of John Carl Buechler who contributes all sorts of other inspired splatter as well. First-time filmmaker Ted Nicolaou has a hell of a cast onboard: super-cute Diane Franklin (Better Off Dead...), Gerrit Graham (Phantom of the Paradise), cult cinema icon Mary Woronov, Jon Gries (Real Genius), Chad Allen, Burt Remsen, and Alejandro Rey among them. The screenplay pretty much never bows to any of the usual conventions, as you could probably guess by the time you get to a girl with hypercolor hair teased up two and a half feet treating an otherworldly beast to several hundred pounds of TV dinners. TerrorVision is just a hell of a lot of demented, inexorably '80s fun, and it does my heart good to see that a movie I was utterly fascinated with as a kid continues to hold up so well all these years later.

The Video Dead

Wait, they didn't tell you? Isn't it, like, the law that a realtor has to tell you when you buy a house where there's been a murder or a suicide? Or one of those all-too-familiar ordeals where a battered old black and white TV is misdelivered to a chainsmoking lush of a writer's house, is stuck on a movie called Zombie Blood Nightmare that's apparently nothing but undead ghouls shambling through the

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woods, and then the zombies break through the TV and slice open that one guy's throat and put a party hat on his blood-spattered corpse and stuff? Oh. Guess not. At least brother-'n-sister Jeff (Rocky Duvall) and Zoe (Roxanna Augesen) didn't get CC:ed on that memo. Before you can say "aaaaahhhhh, zombies have invaded suburbia!", the undead have slaughtered half the neighborhood. Sure, sure...Zoe, Jeff, his newly-minted kinda-sorta-girlfriend, and a Texan shitkicker who's been hunting these sumbitches could barricade themselves inside the house Night of the Living Dead-style and cower, or they could take the fight to the ghouls. This isn't a Romero flick, though -- this is real life -- so it takes more than a headshot to bring these zombies down: think total body dismemberment. As it turns out, that's what the zombies are itching to do to their prey too.

While TerrorVision is a splattery satire skewering '80s excess, The Video Dead turns the dial a little more towards horror. There's definitely a dark, depraved sense of humor on display here -- I mean, there's a rotting bride in a wedding dress who leaps out of a washing machine to kill a housewife -- but it mixes in some genuinely effective scares while it's at it. The Video Dead dishes out some pretty solid jolts, its best sequences are remarkably tense and suspenseful, and...geez, it's not afraid to get bleak and nihilistic about the whole thing either. Writer/director Robert Scott refuses to play it safe. His zombies aren't ripped right out of the George A. Romero playbook; The Video Dead kinda goes out of its way to be as un-Romero-ish as possible, to the point where they're sadistic killers rather than mindless gutmunchers. With a lot of horror flicks, you know who the hero is, who the red shirts are, who's gonna make it to the end, and...no, that's not even a little bit the case here. Though The Video Dead doesn't have the seasoned cast and crew and modest-but-way-bigger-than-this production values of the other half of this double feature, the movie makes it work anyway. The cast may generally be inexperienced, but they're all earnest and instantly likeable. The zombies all have a hell of a lot of personality, aided by some really terrific prosthetics and makeup and stuff, and The Video Dead has 'em whipping out some really inspired kills.

When I first stumbled onto The Video Dead some lazy Sunday afternoon on USA in the very early '90s, my eyes tripled in size in that "I can't believe this exists...!", hushed awe kind of way. I was more than a little concerned that this would wind up being one of those cases where my memories of the flick completely eclipsed the actual movie (::coughcoughFlesh Eating Mothers::), but instead, I think The Video Dead is even better than I remember it being. I mean, eight hojillion horror movies later, I'm better equipped now to appreciate just how clever and defiantly different it is than the rest of the pack. Being generally unavailable for a couple of decades probably got in the way of it being the cult classic it ought to be, but now that it's finally clawed its way onto DVD and Blu-ray...? Maybe now The Video Dead can get the following it deserves. Essential viewing for fanatics of off-kilter '80s horror.

Video

TerrorVision and The Video Dead have been making the rounds on various high-def cable/satellite channels for six or seven years now, and it's a pretty safe bet that this Blu-ray disc is culled from the same mid-aughts masters that those were. Both movies look decent enough, not dragged down by any excessive speckling, print damage, or digital knob-twiddling. The Video Dead was shot on 16mm, and

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its coarse, gritty texture is present and accounted for on Blu-ray. Clarity, contrast, fine detail, color saturation...nothing earth-shattering but pretty solid all around. For some reason, I really want to say that the overall quality of The Video Dead is very close to the picture I have in my head of how Friday the 13th Part V would look in high-def, and considering that we're talking about a flick that was shot on 16mm for a fraction of the budget, I'm walking away happy. TerrorVision looks pretty great in medium-to-tight shots, but the further back the camera is, the softer it all gets. Neither end of the bill is gonna be mistaken for reference quality or whatever, but...y'know, it's okay. Not great. But pretty good.

Both halves of this double feature are lightly letterboxed to an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and have been encoded with AVC. What with two feature-length movies being on here and everything, you probably already guessed that we're talking about a dual-layer disc here.

Audio

Yeah, both TerrorVision and The Video Dead have the same set of technical specs here too. Their original stereo soundtracks are served up in 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio, they're both rockin' lossless 5.1 remixes, and there are English (SDH) subs if you need 'em. The six-channel remixes are basically stereo too. TerrorVision generally just uses the surrounds for light reverb, and the LFE twiddles its thumbs disinterestedly for an hour and a half. There really is no low-end whatsoever, to the point where I got up and made sure my subwoofer was turned on. The Video Dead is stingy with the lower frequencies but at least dishes out some modest synth-bass. The remix on this half of the bill commits a cardinal sin, though, with every line of dialogue spilling over into five channels at once. That's a really lazy way of doing things. The instrumentation in the score is spread across the different speakers pretty effectively, at least. Dialogue and sound effects in both movies are understandably dated. TerrorVision suffers from some mild clipping and distortion at times, and the fidelity in The Video Dead is limited enough that I really don't think it would sound a whole lot different pumping through the built-in speakers on my TV. Totally listenable but kinda underwhelming.

Extras

It never even occurred to me that there'd be any extras on this Blu-ray disc. I mean, I thought part of the reason it's a double feature was to make up for a lack of extras. So, imagine my surprise -- no, really; imagine -- when I flipped over the case and saw hours and hours and hours of bells and whistles.

Monster On Demand: The Making of TerrorVision (34 min.; HD): This retrospective from my heroes and yours at Red Shirt Pictures features everyone. No, I mean everyone: writer/director Ted Nicolaou, executive producer Charles Band, composer Richard Band, special makeup effects designer John Carl Buechler,
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fellow effects wizard Cleve Hall, and actors Dianne Franklin, Mary Woronov, Jon Gries, Ian Patrick Williams, and Chad Allen. With a meaty runtime and a small army of cult cinema legends in front of the camera, it kinda goes without saying that "Monster On Demand" is really comprehensive and a hell of a lot of fun. Among the highlights: Belinda Carlisle read for the part of Suzy, there was poster art way before there was ever a premise, Frank Zappa was consulted to do the score, and Buechler was pulling double-duty doing post-production stuff on Troll while trying to get TerrorVision's beastie off the ground. Tons of casting notes, a whole lot of stuff about working with an Italian crew (some of whom had Fellini films on their résumés!), the deliriously insane production design, an eagerness to careen clear over the top...yeah, you need to hurry up and watch this already.

Pre-Recordead (12 min.; HD): Makeup effects creator Dale Hale, Jr. and makeup assistant Patrick Denver tear into the grisly effects work of The Video Dead, including the unconventional fabrication that was done to accommodate a really tight schedule, the bursting-out-of-the-TV sleight of hand, and, you know, accidentally feeling up The Nuns' frontwoman Jennifer Miro.

Audio Commentaries: Three! Count 'em. Writer/director Ted Nicolaou and actors Diane Franklin and Jon Gries sit down to chat about TerrorVision. I'd probably have been into it a lot more if I hadn't just watched "Monster on Demand"; too many of the same stories and stuff are retreaded again here. The three of 'em are really charming when they speak, but they fall into a habit of watching the movie rather than talking about it, and it's a lot of really quick, off-hand reactions to what they're seeing rather than a conversation, y'know? On the other hand, I hadn't noticed that O.D.'s goopy remains were shaped like a guitar till now, and I was kind of in awe that Jon Gries' family filmmaking connections extend into everything, everywhere.

The Video Dead scores two audio commentaries, believe it or not. Chris MacGibbon, who'd been leading the charge for years to get The Video Dead onto one of these shiny five inch discs, moderates both of 'em. In the first, he's joined by writer/producer/director Robert Scott, editor Bob Sarles, and makeup effects sorceror Dale Hall, Jr. Even with a moderator on-hand, there are an awful lot of lulls in the discussion, again sounding as if they're leaning back in their chairs and quietly watching the movie instead. Among the topics of discussion when they do get around to speaking are setting a horror flick largely in the bright of day, drawing from such disparate inspirations as Halloween and The Little Rascals, making The Video Dead with the rental market expressly in mind, financing, post-production, its unanticipated success no matter how obscure you think it is, and a sequel that sort of almost happened. Commentary numero two-oh is by far the chattiest on the disc. MacGibbon and Hall, Jr. both return, sharing the mics with production manager Jacques Thelemaque, makeup effects assistant Patrick Denver, and actors Roxanna Augesen and Rocky Duvall. They run through quippy zombie backstories, recasting one of the most memorable ghouls a little while into shooting, the many uses for a single set of fake legs, and the thrills of discovering their hard work on the shelves of a video store.

Outtakes (2 min.; SD): A couple minutes of silent, VHS-sourced footage from the set of The Video Dead have been piled on for good measure.

Image Galleries (7 min.; HD): There's a two minute montage of high-res production stills for TerrorVision, four and a half minutes of behind-the-scenes shots from The Video Dead, and a minute-long peek at various ...Dead VHS releases and stuff.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): No clip for TerrorVision, but you do score a high-def trailer for The Video Dead.

This double feature of TerrorVision and The Video Dead comes in a combo pack, so you score a DVD out the deal too.

The Final Word

...and Scream Factory announced this double feature, like, three days later. I know! They're in my head. Highly Recommended. ]]> Zombie Lake (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59240 Sat, 09 Feb 2013 07:24:37 PST Zombie Lake: truth in advertising.

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Zombies...? Check. Lake...? Check. Cut. Print. We got it.

So, Jess Franco walked off Zombie Lake, like, a day before shooting was scheduled to start, so they brought in Jean Rollin with pretty much zero notice. Rollin didn't really thumb through the script beforehand. He'd shoot whatever the producer told him that morning was supposed to be on the docket. That...uh, general lack of shit-giving pervades just about every last frame of Zombie Lake too.

Zombie Lake is kind of a cautionary tale: if you live next to a body of water whose official name translates to "The Damned Lake", don't dump a bunch of Nazi corpses in it. Flash-forward however many decades, and this sleepy little French village is plagued by mysterious disappearances in and around the lake. The townsfolk know it's cursed, but I don't think they were copied on the memo about the zombie part

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of the deal until the undead pull up stakes and start slaughtering everyone in that neck of the woods too.

How can a movie with waterlogged Nazi zombies and a skinnydipping girls' volleyball team be this tedious to watch? It's basically a softcore porn flick loosely strung together with a half-sentence of plot. Quite a few of the girls are drop-dead gorgeous and don't leave a whole lot to the imagination, so there's that. The endless full-frontal nudity kinda helps distract from the absolute-everything-else. There are definitely more nekkid wimmin than there are flesh-eating ghouls.

If you're feeling generous, you could describe the pace as leisurely or dreamlike. 'Smore like there's thirteen minutes of movie here, and it's padded out to feature-length by having the cast sloooooooooowly sleepwalk through every single scene. The undead aren't even a little bit threatening. There's no haunting, enduring imagery. No scares. No attempt at generating tension, suspense, or even an unnerving atmosphere. No memorable dialogue, not even of the so-bad-it's-good variety. None of the characters really stick with you, although there is a good Nazi zombie who gives a little girl a necklace, and I've gotta admit that that is a first for me.

It's just...ack, so sloppy. There's a WWII flashback that's howlingly low-rent -- just guys in uniforms wincing at cherry bombs going off or whatever -- until it drones on for nineteen and a half hours and you

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wanna run a warm bath and open a couple of veins. The makeup effects are limited to paper maché and fingerpaint. When the intrepid, forgettable reporter speaks with the mayor about the dark legend of the lake, you can clearly see the cameraman and lighting rigs and stuff reflected in the mirrors. The movie's supposed to be set about ten years after the end of WWII -- I mean, the whole point is that the little girl is the daughter of one of the undead -- and yet the volleyball team is tooling around in a '70s model VW bus. Characters appear and vanish at random, and...I could keep going, but I'm pretty sure you get the gist of it by now.

Zombie Lake is pretty much unwatchable. I've devoted myself mind, body, and soul to schlock cinema, and Zombie Lake is such an irredeemable piece of shit that it doesn't even manage to work on that level. Excruciatingly boring, incompetently crafted on every possible level, and...yeah. Skip It.

Video

...but hey, at least it looks nice, right? This remaster of Zombie Lake is honestly pretty gorgeous. The image is impressively crisp and detailed, boasting a richly saturated palette and retaining an appreciated filmic texture. Colors are deliberately dialed down in the endless WWII flashback, and they flutter briefly when the reporter's chatting up the mayor, but otherwise...? Pitch perfect. Sometimes things can get a little jittery, and there's a lot of speckling, but I'd rather deal with that than the usual digital nasties or an outdated transfer. So, yeah, I'm happy.

Zombie Lake has been slopped out on a single-layer Blu-ray disc at an aspect ratio of 1.66:1.

Audio

Zombie Lake sports

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a pair of PCM soundtracks, both 16-bit and in two-channel mono. The deliriously over-the-top English dub is present and accounted for, although it's in really rough shape, kind of strained and harsh to suffer through, at least in the stretches I sampled. That's okay, though. The disc defaults to Zombie Lake's original French, and it's...spectacularly clean and clear, so polished that it's sort of distracting. There's not a lot going on in the lower frequencies, although that's pretty much to be expected. I did find that I had to dial down the volume a good bit for it to feel comfortable, so keep your remote within arm's reach, but I wasn't left with a lot to complain about after making that minor adjustment.

Since Zombie Lake defaults to a French language soundtrack and all, I guess it goes without saying that English subtitles are enabled by default.

Extras

Alternate Footage (9 min.; HD): Thrill to an English language title sequence, a more TV-friendly opening assault, and a mostly-fully-clothed version of the volleyball skinnydipping slaughter.

Trailers (HD): Lotsa high-def Rollin trailers on here, including Zombie Lake promos in both English and French.

The Final Word

Well, it could be worse: I could be reviewing Oasis of the Zombies right now. Though Zombie Lake isn't the absolute lowest point of Jean Rollin's sprawling filmography, it's still legitimately one of the worst movies ever made. Skip It. ]]> Mimesis (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59236 Thu, 07 Feb 2013 18:00:37 PST (Taylor Piedmonte) comes to in a cemetery. He doesn't know where he is or what's going on, exactly, but that clumsily-fitting suit, the ridiculous necktie, these leather gloves...that's not what he was wearing at that low-rent horror convention or the oddball afterparty last night.

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Sprawled out next to him is a blonde (Jana Thompson) that looks like she tripped on a rock in 1967 and somehow landed in the here and now. As the two of them try to get their bearings, a distant figure shambles onto the frame. Russell meekly assumes this cadaverous stranger is just some hungover partier from the night before who can clue them into whatever it is that's happening. Instead the ghoul leans in for a bite and rips out Russell's throat. Karen flees to the closest thing to sanctuary in sight: a nearby farmhouse. See, Karen's never been much for horror. If she had, maybe this whole thing would be instantly familiar. Maybe if Karen were to look in the mirror, she'd realize someone's dolled her up to be a dead ringer for Judith O'Dea. She'd get a nagging familiar feeling after running by the black guy in the truck. Surely the family holed up in the basement -- complete with an overbearing, loudmouth of a father -- would clue her in. ...but no. Karen's never seen Night of the Living Dead before, but all of a sudden, she's starring in it.

That's a hell of a hook, and at first, it doesn't seem like Mimesis is capable of taking advantage of it. The undead fail to exude any real menace. The violently shaky camerawork, the Zack Snyder-esque framerate relentlessly speeding up and slowing down, the image falling in and out of focus...it's meant to be stylish but winds up feeling overused and intrusive. Especially early on, the camera has a tendency to cut away mid-scare, neutering what could've been some really effective jolts. It doesn't help that the central character is Duane (Allen Maldonado), a walking, talking "...and brothers do it like this!" cliché yanked straight out of a hacky circa-'93 standup routine. I braced myself for the worst.

Once Mimesis really gets underway, though, I was completely sucked in. Duane shifts from an insufferable loudmouth into a credible hero. Mimesis does a pretty remarkable job of posing

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that "...the hell's going on here?" question, keeping the audience every bit as off-balance as its characters. There's clearly some guiding hand behind this real-life Night of the Living Dead routine, but it's not some April Fool's Day-style goof; these ghouls are undeniably tearing off their flesh and slaughtering them one by one. Mimesis can get gruelingly intense, starting with the zombies' siege on the farmhouse. Quite a few of the jump scares hit me when it counts. Mimesis continues to reshape itself rather than comfortably lean on its high-concept premise, and it does so without stomping on everything it had done so well up to that point too. So, yeah, despite its shaky start, I wound up having a blast with Mimesis. Probably better suited for a rental, but I had a good enough time that it still comes Recommended.

Video

Mimesis was shot with the Red One, and...well, it definitely has that Red One look to it, with the low-ish contrast and tinge of softness I'm used to seeing in movies lensed with that particular camera. That kind of works to Mimesis' benefit, though, as does its approach to color. Its understated palette is a perfect match for a movie so heavily inspired by a black-and-white classic, resisting any attempt at saturation outside of its bright, visceral reds. The clean digital photography compresses well enough, and no artificial sharpening or heavy-handed noise reduction ever get in the way. The only glaring flaws are bursts of excessive stair-stepping and distracting moire effects. If you want an example, take a look at the zombie's coat in this screenshot. At least it's not a constant nuisance, and the worst of it seems to happen fairly early on.

If you want me to rattle off the rest of the technical details...? Single layer Blu-ray disc. Matted to

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an aspect ratio of 2.39:1. Encoded with AVC.

Audio

Mimesis boasts a robust 24-bit Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack. Its sound effects and wonderfully eerie score are rendered with remarkable clarity; I mean, you could stroll into the room with your hands cupped over your eyes and instantly tell that this is a shiny new Blu-ray disc being spun. The sound design seizes hold of every channel at its disposal. The music is reinforced with pounding, punishing bass, and so much attention has been lavished on the specific placement of discrete sounds that Mimesis was clearly mixed with 5.1 rigs in mind. The recording of the dialogue is a bit of a letdown, though. It's noticeably less clean and clear than any other element in the mix, some line readings sound distant and hollow, and more loudly shouted stretches suffer from moderate clipping. That dings the score down a little, but this is otherwise a very solid showing.

The only other audio options are a commentary track an' subtitles in English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Audio Commentary: The lone extra on Mimesis is a commentary track with director/co-writer Douglas Schulze and co-writer Joshua Wagner. It's a pretty terrific and very comprehensive discussion, tackling the structure of the movie, careful consideration about what to reveal and when, the creature design, working within the constraints of the time and budget they had on-hand, and quite a few technical details about the photography. There are also highlights like running through some of the other titles that were considered, noting one nasty accident that ended with a slashed wrist, and pointing
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out Courtney Gains' small role...y'know, Malachai from Children of the Corn! Worth a listen. The commentary's hidden under the 'Setup' menu rather than listed as an extra for whatever reason.

Although Schulze and Wagner mention a deleted scenes reel, taking care to highlight several specific sequences that were heavily trimmed down or removed outright, none of that footage found its way onto this Blu-ray disc.

The Final Word

Mimesis is an uneven but surprisingly effective homage to one of the most enduring horror films ever made, and it's a hell of a lot more creative than settling for just another remake. Recommended late night viewing, especially if you can round up a few other frothing-at-the-mouth genre fanatics in front of your TV. Recommended. ]]> The Nest (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58394 Tue, 05 Feb 2013 08:26:27 PST Jaws with mutant cockroaches.

No, really! The Nest shares a bunch of the same ingredients: the central character's the sheriff on some sleepy, remote island, the mayor

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shrugs off everyone's pleas in the name of good business, the sheriff has a quirky expert as a sidekick, there's the whole nature-run-amok-and-devouring-people deal... It's just that if you want to steer clear of one lone great white shark, all you've gotta do is stay out of the water. Legions of mutant cockroaches that are immune to every poison on the planet...? Not a whole lot you can do there.

As someone whose life and existence revolves almost entirely around '80s cult cinema, how have I never caught The Nest till now? This plays in every way like something 13-year-old-me would've taped off USA Up All Night and watched over and over and over and over. The Nest holds up better than similar killer insect flicks like Ants and Slugs because the sight of cockroaches instinctively makes everyone squirm. Take a nuisance that's fast, repulsive, and uncomfortably familiar, then make it borderline-indestructible and ravenous for human flesh...? Ack. The roaches aren't four feet tall like the cover art teases, but they're a legitimately unnerving threat even at their tiny size. Because they're mutant roaches and all, they play by a different set of rules, and the old saying "you are what you eat" takes on a gleefully unhinged new meaning once the third act rolls around.

Ooooooh, I love The Nest so much. The movie has a pretty decent cast at its disposal, including Empire of the Ants alum Robert Lansing as the mayor with a crisis of conscience, Franc Luz as the sorta trailer-trash sheriff-slash-hero-type, scream queen Lisa Langlois (Class of 1984; Happy Birthday to Me) as the too-cute love interest who's rolled back into town, Nancy Morgan as the other point on that love triangle, and Terri Treas (The Terror Within) as the frigid scientist who's pretty much fallen in love with these carnivorous critters. Yeah, I touched on the similarities to Jaws already, but the scientific-experiment-gone-wrong angle brings in a little Piranha as well, which seems appropriate since The Nest was a Corman production too. The Nest is overflowing with cockroaches, yeah, and the howlingly bad '80s fashions are almost as repulsive. The practical effects work is impressively gruesome and generally holds up a quarter-century later. Yeah, I used "generally" for a reason, but the occasional clunkiness is all part of the fun.

Even though The Nest had me pretty much from word one, it gets so batshit insane in ways I never saw coming near the end that I'm just...I think I'm in love. There's nothing really inventive or original throughout The Nest, but it captures everything I love so much about '80s cult cinema. Highly Recommended.

Video

C'mon, just look at it!

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The story's pretty much right there in that one screencap. The Nest is reasonably sharp and detailed, not dragged down by any wear, noteworthy speckling, or excessive noise reduction. Its gritty, filmic texture is faithfully retained from start to finish, and the AVC generally avoids choking on all that grain. That distinctively late-'80s palette is impressively robust, and black levels are right where they ought to be. You're not gonna hear any complaints from me this time around.

The Nest is dished out on a single-layer Blu-ray disc, opening up the mattes slightly to reveal an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. I think this is its first widescreen home video release, for anyone keeping track at home! The second disc in the set is an anamorphic widescreen DVD.

Audio

The 'Setup' menu lists a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack, and that was kind of a surprise, seeing as how it wasn't mentioned on the flipside of the case or anything. Turns out...? That's because there is no 5.1 remix anywhere on here! Instead, The Nest boasts a pair of 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 soundtracks. There's a clear difference toggling back and forth between them, but I couldn't detect any stereo separation in either of 'em, at least in the brief stretches I compared. Are they both two-channel mono?

No matter what it is that's going on here, exactly, I'm not left with a lot to gripe about. The modest hiss is easily shrugged off. There's a healthy low-frequency growl to all that synth-bass in the score, although strangely, the handful of explosions are limp and anemic by comparison. The dialogue stems show their age a bit, but it's all balanced cleanly and clearly in the mix just the same. I get the sense that every micron of

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clarity than could possibly be unearthed is on display here. There aren't any clicks, pops, or dropouts to get in the way. Nothing that'll curl your toes or anything, obviously, but a very solid effort for this sort of horror flick.

The Nest also features an audio commentary and optional English (SDH) subtitles.

Extras

Audio Commentary: It would've been great to have more in the way of extras, but...well, at least the one that's on here is pretty great! Director Terry Winkless (or Terence H. Winkless if you're feeling formal) chimes in with an infectiously fun commentary track. Winkless is one of those instantly charismatic storytellers that I could listen to for hours on end, striking a really terrific balance between Low-Budget Film School and his self-deprecatory sense of humor about making a killer roach flick. Among the many highlights are noting how screenwriter Robert King went on to create the upscale TV series The Good Wife, working under Richard Donner in a gorilla suit on the set of The Banana Splits, and shoehorning in an exploding cabin just because they had the footage handy. From declining to film in a lighthouse where a horn blared every thirty seconds to the specifics of how you collect thousands of cockroaches for a flick like this, Terry Winkless' commentary is an absolutely essential listen.

An anamorphic widescreen DVD is also along for the ride in this combo pack.

The Final Word

Scream Factory is the best thing to happen to Blu-ray since...I don't know, anything, ever. They haven't had a swing-and-a-miss on their release slate yet, and the skin-crawling, splattery fun of The Nest captures pretty much everything I love about late-'80s genre flicks. We're talking about killer mutant cockroaches here, so you pretty much know if you're the target demographic or not when I say that The Nest comes very Highly Recommended.

I Snapped Way Too Many Screencaps

]]> The Man with the Iron Fists (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59304 Sat, 02 Feb 2013 09:59:20 PST The Man with the Iron Fists is a chop-socky flick starring, directed by, and co-written by the RZA, plus Eli Roth produced and fielded some of the writing chores, and the whole thing's brought to

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you courtesy of Quentin Tarantino. At least on paper...? This is the movie that 14-year-old-me daydreamed about while devouring movies like Mad Monkey Kung Fu and Death Mask of the Ninja on an endless VHS loop.

But, hey, you've listened to more than your share of Wu Tang, you're definitely familiar with the RZA's scores for Kill Bill and all that, and maybe you've even given his commentary on The 36th Chamber of Shaolin a spin. We're talking about a guy who doesn't just like these sorts of movies; he eats, breathes, and sleeps Shaw Bros., and The Man with the Iron Fists is the RZA's blood-spattered valentine to '70s kung fu cinema. The lavish production design, drop dead gorgeous period costumes, and...hell, even the old-school optical opening titles are all pitch-perfect. True to form, the premise doesn't take more than a sentence or two to sum up: a bunch of warrior clans fight to the death over a fortune in gold, and...well, that's pretty much it, actually. That lust for gold results in a staggeringly high body count and leaves a hell of a lot of collateral

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damage in its wake, and the resulting war hinges on a handful of the fighters caught in the middle, among them a nameless blacksmith played by the RZA who...yeah, eventually winds up being a man with iron fists.

If you tune into The Man with the Iron Fists for a few minutes at a time, it's exactly what you'd think it is. Not much in the way of plotting or characterization, no, but the visuals are insanely gorgeous with a real eye for vintage chop-socky cinema authenticity. The kung fu battles -- choreographed by the legendary Corey Yuen! -- are numerous, epic in scale, deliriously over-the-top, and sopping with geysers of crimson red. The word going around was that the first cut of The Man with the Iron Fists clocked in at four hours, to the point where the RZA was considering splitting it in half and releasing it as two separate movies, taking a cue from the Kill Bill playbook. Expanded from the R-rated theatrical release, this unrated cut may only run 108 minutes, but...well, it sure feels like it takes four hours to slog through.

Early on, yeah, I was totally into it. I was swept away by the inspired visuals, and the hyperviolent disemboweling and dismemberment completely eclipsed anything I could've hoped to see. With very little story and such anemic characterization, there's not really a movie here. It's just a bunch of cool-lookin' crazy shit that happens. For the first thirty minutes and change, that's perfect. After that, I desperately wanted to fast-forward through any scene that wasn't drenched in blood. By the time the depraved, demented, there-aren't-really-words-for-it climax rolls around, I couldn't even appreciate it 'cause every micron of interest I once had was long gone. There's not a single memorable line of dialogue. Barrel drums of blood are brilliant, but not when it's so distractingly digital like it is here. The direction and editing try to be too

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stylish and modern, and that frequently stomps all over the beauty and brutal elegance that The Man with the Iron Fists has to offer. Why put someone like Corey Yuen on the payroll if you're gonna make it so difficult to see the elaborately choreographed fights? There's also the whole thing where a big chunk of the movie is set in a brothel, complete with a couple of orgies and a lengthy group bathing sequence, and yet there's not even a fleeting glimpse of nudity. Just sayin', if you're gonna be an exploitation flick, go ahead and exploit!

The RZA is kind of the focal point of the flick but blandly and disinterestedly sleepwalks his way through most of it. With one exception, there's no real hook to any of the characters...no boo-hiss-worthy-type villains or heroes you wanna root for. Rick Yune makes a huge impression initially as a warrior whose blades are embedded in his armor, but after a while, I kept forgetting he was even still in the movie. The only real standout is Russell Crowe as a wildly charismatic cowboy-ish British hornball-slash-opium addict who stands by the blacksmith's side when things are most dire, and...hey, with that many random words strung together, how could I not love the guy?

I hate to say it, but The Man with the Iron Fists is kind of terrible. If I ever attempt to watch it again, I'm pretty sure I'll wind up fast-forwarding through two-thirds of the flick to get straight to the gruesome good stuff. There are enough highlights to make The Man with the Iron Fists worth a rental, but I really wouldn't recommend shelling out twentysomething bucks to buy it sight-unseen. Rent It.

Video

If The Man with the Iron Fists has anything going for it, it'd be the breathtakingly gorgeous art and production design. That comes through beautifully in this razor-sharp, richly detailed, and vibrantly colorful high-def

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presentation. I'm really impressed that even though this is a 2D release, there's such a strong sense of depth and dimensionality that I easily could've been fooled that it had been shot with 3D in mind. I don't have much more of a review to write than that; I'll just say "pretty much perfect" and move on.

The Man with the Iron Fists is dished out on a dual layer platter. There are two versions of the movie on here, but this Blu-ray disc uses seamless branching to be as efficient as possible about it. The flick's presented at an aspect ratio of 2.39:1 and has been encoded with AVC.

Audio

I wish I could keep my review of the six-channel, 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack that short and sweet. Surprisingly, the lossless audio is kind of a letdown. The music throughout The Man with the Iron Fists has a bad habit of overwhelming everything else in the mix. The surrounds are cranked up so high that it distracts from whatever it is that's happening across the front channels, dialogue struggles somewhat for placement, and, bizarrely, few of those flurries of punches, kicks, and colliding weapons are reinforced in the lower frequencies. The subwoofer sounds as if it's belching out a dull, indistinct rumble rather than really punctuating the action. I appreciate that the sound design is this aggressive -- effects are constantly whizzing across the soundscape, and there are more pans across the fronts and rears than probably anything else I've watched in the past 12 months -- but the mix is kind of a mess.

Also included are lossy DTS 5.1 dubs in French and Spanish as well as a stereo DVS track. Subtitles are served up in English (SDH), French, and Spanish, and owners of constant image height projection setups should note that some of the subs in the movie itself spill over into the letterboxing bars. The Man with the Iron Fists also supports D-Box bass shaker rigs.

Extras

There are two cuts of The Man with the Iron Fists piled on here: the R-rated theatrical release which, realistically, no one will ever watch again as well as an unrated version. This new unrated version runs around 12 minutes longer, but presumably there are some alternate takes and stuff that amount to a larger difference than that. I could barely make it through The Man with the Iron Fists once, so I'm not really up for meticulously comparing both

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versions for specific differences. I'm guessing the fights are more gruesome and that some beats in the story are fleshed out in greater depth, so you've gotta take the good with the bad.

Deleted Scenes (24 min.; HD): There are five deleted and extended scenes, beginning with "The Saga of Gold Lion" that runs fourteen minutes (!!!) and would've bloated the first act of the movie to the point of being unwatchable. There's also a different introduction to Russell Crowe's Jack Knife, more with Zen Yi's diarrhea-prone sidekick, and a lengthier mirror maze assault.

Micro-Featurettes (9 min.; HD): Bizarrely, there's pretty much nothing else in the way of extras. "A Look Inside The Man with the Iron Fists" is a quick two minute promotional piece hosted by the RZA, breezing through the premise, recording the score, and why he felt compelled to make the movie. "A Path to the East" pretty much just says "hey, we made it China with Chinese people!" I was kind of expecting "On the Set with RZA" to be a feature-length documentary or something since it gets its own submenu and everything, but it's a set of minute-long clips that don't amount to much, concentrating heavily on the visual end of things. On one level, the lack of extras are a disappointment, but on another, I was pretty eager to mash 'Eject' anyway.

The Man with the Iron Fists comes packaged in an embossed slipcover, and a DVD and UltraViolet digital copy code are lovingly tucked inside.

The Final Word

We're talking about a movie so batshit insane that I didn't even get to the part where Dave Batista's skin turns to brass when struck with a blade or where Russell Crowe yanks anal beads out a hooker's ass with his teeth, and normally, yeah, I'd be the target demographic for something that far out there. It's just that The Man with the Iron Fists has these awe-inspiring bursts of brilliance but is otherwise kind of sloppy and tedious. It's too wildly uneven to recommend with any real enthusiasm, but you might find this Blu-ray disc worth a rental just to fast-forward to the highlights. Rent It. ]]> Nobody Walks (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58509 Fri, 01 Feb 2013 10:30:38 PST Nobody Walks has its central characters aiming a directional microphone at small, seemingly mundane events that, when examined more closely, prove to be larger, joyous, and wholly entrancing.

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That sensation is what Nobody Walks as a film is ultimately trying to capture as well. There are no sweeping romances beginning to bloom. There isn't a villain to vanquish, a clock to outrun, a seemingly insurmountable hurdle to leap over, nor a heart to win. It's a series of moments, closely observed.

Martine (Olivia Thirlby) is an early twentysomething artist who's made the trek from New York to Los Angeles to finish her experimental film. A friend from back east put her

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in touch with Peter (John Krasinski), a Hollywood sound designer with time to kill until his next project gets underway, so it's kismet. Peter has a pretty nice home studio, Martine's set up shop in the pool house; his Silver Lake home winds up being a kind of artist commune with ritzier property values and an unusually intense fixation on sound. Peter feeds off of Martine's passion, talent, and youthful energy, and their working relationship eventually turns into a sort of flirtation, which turns into...well, something else altogether. Nobody Walks is about the transformative impact of attraction -- less about fulfilling that desire than the lingering effects it can inspire, regardless of whether or not that fixation has been consummated.

Nobody Walks somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts. It offers a very intimate view of filmmaking in Los Angeles, propelled by an infectious joy of creation. Nobody Walks benefits greatly from its terrific cast. I've always thought of John Krasinski as a likeable but rarely more than serviceable actor, but Nobody Walks shows how comfortable a fit drama is for him as well. Krasinski deftly fields both the soaring highs of an artist infatuated as well as the crashing lows of obsession and loss. Rosemary DeWitt is expectedly marvelous as Peter's wife, quietly forming the emotionally resonant core of the film. India Ennenga was previously an unknown quantity to me, but it's clear that hers is a name to keep an eye out for. As Peter's teenaged stepdaughter Kolt, Ennenga is affected, both positively and negatively, by Martine's intrusion...drawn towards her yet desperate for her to leave. As is the case with most everyone else in the film, Kolt both desires and is desired.

It's through Olivia Thirlby the presence of co-writer Lena Dunham is most greatly felt. Martine doesn't know who or what she is, exactly. This character isn't some Manic Pixie Dream Girl who's there to jab a syringe full of

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adrenaline into a staid, lifeless family's humdrum existence; she's actually stepped foot into a very happy and very well-balanced home. She's not a temptress, coldly and calculatedly scheming to steal Peter away from his wife and kids. There's a sexual ferocity within Martine that doesn't necessarily come down to intercourse. The decisions she makes may be destructive but are without guile. Martine isn't a victim. She's hardly in command. She's drawn richly enough to feel believably real and yet remains enough of a cipher for everyone in close proximity to project whatever they want onto her. Thirlby is invariably the most memorable element of every film in which I've seen her, and that's certainly the case here as well.

As well-crafted as Nobody Walks is on so many levels -- from a unilaterally terrific cast to its quietly striking cinematography -- it ultimately doesn't come together as a film. Characters are often introduced then quickly discarded or shuffled so deeply onto the sidelines that their presence is forgotten. The wildly uneven pacing is a struggle even with a runtime that doesn't even break the 80 minute mark, minus credits. Nobody Walks feels as if it's primarily interested in building to a key moment that arrives halfway through, and it's unable to maintain that same energy and momentum once that's out of the way. I was engaged by the performances but felt little investment in the actual characters, and there's not enough of a narrative for my attention to be directed there instead. There are such an absurd number of infatuations that each new one that's introduced begins to feel like that much more of a distraction. Nobody Walks would likely benefit from a tighter, more concentrated focus; there's a great deal of potential here, but few of the plot threads are explored deeply enough to really mean much of anything. At the end of the day, I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to take away from the film. Martine arrives, she indulges her passions, she inadvertently does some damage, and...well, that's pretty much it. A fair amount of time is devoted in the extras to noting what a transformative effect Martine has on this family, but is anyone really substantively changed by the time the end credits roll?

For a film where passion is such a focal point, it comes as a disappointment that all Nobody Walks inspires is indifference. Rent It.

Video

I was thrilled to see that Nobody Walks was lensed on 16mm. That warm, filmic texture wonderfully complements the movie, and it wouldn't evoke nearly the same tone with smooth, glossy digital cinematography. This does

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mean that there's a fair amount of grain on display, just as there should be, and that's faithfully retained on Blu-ray. Though the image is immediately recognizable as high definition, there is a tinge of softness, and it's less richly detailed than a 35mm or digital production would be. The AVC encode doesn't struggle with the challenging texture, and I was unable to spot any missteps in the authoring. Nobody Walks by design isn't a reference quality release, but this Blu-ray disc looks to be a very faithful rendition of the original photography.

Nobody Walks arrives on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1.

Audio

One of the central characters of Nobody Walks is a sound designer, so I guess it follows that the film would take such a stylized approach to audio. Though this Blu-ray disc does feature a 24-bit, six-channel DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, the surrounds are almost entirely dormant outside of the recording of Martine's experimental short. If there's not a directional microphone on-screen or footage from Scorpio unspooling, the rear channels might as well be dead silent. Those sequences are in so many ways the driving force of Nobody Walks, and that aesthetic greatly heightens their strength and also encourages viewers to listen with the same intensity as Martine and Peter. The subdued nature of the film doesn't lend itself to anything otherwise sonically adventurous, although dialogue is consistently rendered cleanly and clearly in the mix, and the synth-bass in Peter's ambient score is impressively substantial. Very effective.

There are no dubs, alternate mixes, or audio commentaries this time around. Subtitles are offered in English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Scorpio (5 min.; HD): The standout extra is Martine's experimental short Scorpio, presented here in full, and yes, those entrancing synths are presented in lossless audio.

Deleted Scene (2 min.; HD): Nobody Walks' lone deleted scene takes a look at a car ride with Kolt and a gaggle of her friends. The
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90 second clip also gives Jane Levy a little more time in front of the camera to make up for her otherwise blink-and-oops-you-missed-it role.

Interviews (34 min.; HD): Nobody Walks features a pair of interviews: one with director/co-writer Ry Russo-Young and the other with actress Olivia Thirlby. Russo-Young's interview, clocking in at 22 minutes all told, is wonderfully comprehensive. Among the many topics of discussion are replicating the sensation of a New Yorker suddenly transplanted to L.A., the research and inspiration that went into capturing Los Angeles on film, casting, sound design, and the process of co-writing the film with Lena Dunham. She also delves deeply into Nobody Walks' characters as well as some of what the film is ultimately trying to convey. The more cursory conversation with Thirlby touches on some of Martine's defining characteristics, the family structure she invades, the intimacy of listening, and what attracted her to the film. Thirlby's is a charming chat, but if you only have time for one interview, the conversation with Russo-Young is your best bet.

AXS TV: A Look at Nobody Walks (5 min.; HD): It's the trailer padded out with interviews you've already watched. Nice for the sake of completion, I guess, but it's a strictly promotional piece that repackages extras that are already on the disc.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): Last up is a two minute trailer.

The Final Word

Nobody Walks is frustratingly okay, seizing hold of all the right elements but unable to transform them into anything particularly engaging. Rent It.

Then Again...

I kind of do want to grade Nobody Walks on a curve for having John Krasinski fiddle with a Moogerfooger MF-105. Sorry, it warms my cold, soulless heart. ]]> All Superheroes Must Die (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58347 Sun, 27 Jan 2013 08:30:24 PST
Rickshaw (James Remar) was their Lex Luthor-type arch-nemesis once upon a time, with every last moustache-twirlingly nefarious scheme foiled over and over and over and

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over by this team of costumed do-gooders. This time around, he's leveling out the odds. Rickshaw has stripped the heroes of their powers. Everyone in this sleepy little town has been strapped with homebrew explosives and scattered all over the place. As games go, the rules are pretty simple: in each "level", the heroes are faced with one challenge or another. Complete the challenge, and the hostages go free. If not...well, kaboom. Their spirits are crushed. Their numbers dwindle. All superheroes must die.

My kneejerk reaction to the opening moments of All Superheroes Must Die was that it's cut from the same unrelentingly grim and gritty cloth as DC's "New 52" reboot. I mean, before the counter ticks past the two minute mark, there's already decapitation, disembowelment, and a staggering body count. I braced myself for some masturbatorily gruesome dark-for-the-sake-of-being-dark superhero deconstruction, and instead I found an incredibly engaging story about perseverance and heroism. The core of All Superheroes Must Die isn't "sally forth and save the town!" or "we must succeed or these many hapless innocents will die!" This isn't their town. The victims are, by and large, nameless and faceless; hell, aside from one, they have bags over their heads. They're not people...they're trembling collateral damage waiting to happen. Rickshaw could've just fired a few shots into these four costumed heroes' temples, but that sort of vengeance is only part of what he's after. No, he wants to utterly destroy them: shatter all traces of hope or optimism, strip away everything that makes them good, bat around the mice in a cage when there's no chance of victory or escape in sight... That is the core conflict throughout All Superheroes Must Die. It's not about who wins or who loses, or who lives or who dies; it's ultimately about holding onto that key part of one's self.

...and if I'm making All Superheroes Must Die sound like some preachy story with a quadruple-underlined moral message, then...well, it's not. I'm just trying to say that the darkness serves a purpose, unlike the gratuitous, double-digit-IQ dismemberment in comics like "Infinite Crisis". I'm thoroughly impressed with All Superheroes Must Die on every level. For one, filmmaker Jason Trost has a remarkable sense of economy. The movie begins in media res, ensuring that the audience is initially as disoriented as the four costumed heroes on-screen. There are no opening credits to get in the way. Exposition

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is kept to a minimum, and though All Superheroes Must Die does dole out some lengthy flashbacks, they emphasize characterization and relationships rather than reams of plot. The movie refuses to stop dead in its tracks and explain things, and yet it's all there if you're listening. I immediately got a sense of who these heroes are and what their personalities are like, even if I never had the chance to see Charge, The Wall, The Shadow, or Cutthroat with their powers fully intact.

All Superheroes Must Die was shot on a microscopic budget, and yet those limitations rarely intrude. Stripping away the superpowers is an inspired way of working within those confines, and it also makes the movie feel more grounded, dramatic, and real as well. Trost and the rest of his cast do a tremendous job conveying the sense that these superhuman abilities were once there even if I've never had an opportunity to see them myself. Anything that would otherwise be viewed as a weakness is ultimately molded into a strength, from the indeterminate era in which it's set all the way down to the weathered, homemade look to the costumes. With a runtime of 78 minutes, All Superheroes Must Die is a surgical strike, not weighed down by anything even a little bit unnecessary. I'm also impressed by how deftly All Superheroes Must Die balances grave reality with four-color exaggeration. The movie makes it a point to make the scenario feel grounded and that the four fallen heroes come across as people, but you still have a cackling nutjob with a flamethrower, a trampoline cagematch with a tattooed strongman, and James Remar gnawing on the scenary as the deliriously over-the-top mastermind behind it all.

Reviews of All Superheroes Must Die have generally been brutal, but...whatever. Maybe it's because I'm a ravenous, lifelong comic book fanatic and I'm looking at the movie with a different set of eyes the most. While it's true that sometimes the seams show given the incredibly low budget, some of the performances are a little spotty, and a certain tolerance for violently shaky camerawork is required, I absolutely am not bothered by any of that. An inspired premise, remarkable craftsmanship, a willingness to go places that no $180 million superhero epic is willing to tread...I love All Superheroes Must Die, and it's a movie well-worth discovering on Blu-ray. Recommended.

Video

Don't let the opening moments of All Superheroes Must Die throw you off. The first couple minutes are underlit and excessively soft, yeah, but it's not all that much of a concern once the movie really gets underway. Despite not being startlingly sharp or overflowing with fine detail, I'm generally happy with the way All Superheroes Must Die has turned out in high-def, with one glaring exception:

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All Superheroes Must Die is teeming with some of the nastiest moiré effects I've ever come across on Blu-ray. Just about any fine pattern -- curtains, grilles, masks, you name it -- winds up looking violently distorted. I'm guessing that All Superheroes Must Die was shot on DSLRs, which tend to have problems with aliasing and moiré patterns in their video modes, and that'd mean that all this dates back to the original photography. The texture, somewhat flat contrast, and limited detail are also closer in appearance to what I'm used to seeing in DSLR-sourced indies as well, furthering that suspicion. I can't really blame the Blu-ray release for any of that, but since I kind of write these reviews with videophiles in mind, it can't be ignored either. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Presented at its

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original aspect ratio of 2.39:1 and encoded with AVC, All Superheroes Must Die swoops onto a single-layer disc.

Audio

All Superheroes Must Die boasts a 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack that doesn't take the most obvious path. The movie is one round after another of bone-shattering brawls and thunderous explosions, and yet the sound design doesn't make particularly aggressive use of the surrounds. The rear channels are far more interested in establishing an unnerving sense of atmosphere than they are in ratcheting up the action. The end result may be somewhat subdued but is wildly effective. Gunfire is infrequent but more impactful than any other capes-and-cowls movie I've seen, and the slew of explosions coax a healthy snarl from the subwoofer. The reproduction of the dialogue is unremarkable but emerges well enough, never struggling for placement in the mix. Very well done.

The only other audio option is a set of English (SDH) subs.

Extras

Absolutely nothing.

The Final Word

All Superheroes Must Die has the opportunity to experiment in a way that a capes-and-cowls flick with a nine-figure budget really can't. Lean, brutal, astonishingly engaging, and very much Recommended. ]]> Lightning Bug (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58352 Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:48:56 PST Lightning Bug isn't a horror flick, and yet it's a film I'd bet many genre fans can relate to...those of us who grew up devouring Fangoria and GoreZone month in and month out, daydreaming about being the next Tom Savini or Rob Bottin. See, high school senior Green Graves (Bret Harrison) has a knack for creating gruesome monsters: doodling, sculpting,

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and eventually building full-size demented creatures. If he were somewhere in sunny Los Angeles, that'd be one thing. Living in crushing poverty in Fairview, Alabama at the tail-end of the 1980s: the buckle of the Bible belt...? Not so much. Green knows this is his way out...that this is his calling in life. Until that day comes, he has to struggle with a well-meaning but hopelessly alcoholic mother (Ashley Laurence), a violently tempermental stepfather (Kevin Gage) who demands that this little shit get his head out of the clouds, and a puritanical community that looks at Green's creations as some sort of communion with the devil.

Embattled dreams, a single mother, alcoholism, poverty, kissin' cuzzin' jokes, a dumpy trailer, spousal abuse, Bible thumpers, a newfound girlfriend with a dark past (Laura Prepon): on its surface, Lightning Bug might look like a couple hundred other coming-of-age dramas, dutifully checking off just about every clich on the list. What I initially dismissed as more of the same quickly drew me in, though. For one, Lightning Bug is wholly sincere, not some cynically contrived drama to cash in on a bunch of laurels from however many different film festivals. Its emotions are real, aided in particular by intensely powerful performances by Ashley Laurence, Laura Prepon, and an ambitious yet vulnerable Bret Harrison. Green's passion for creature effects beams brightly throughout every last frame of the film. That he's a horror fanatic resonates with me, seeing as how I wasn't too far from that age when I tumbled headfirst into the genre, but I think anyone with an artistic calling can relate to his plight.

I appreciate that there isn't some singular nemesis or obstacle Green has to overcome to be happy. Sure, sure, Green struggles with his stepfather's incendiary temper, his girlfriend's fundamentalist Christian mother (Shannon Eubanks), and a smug, condescending sheriff's deputy (Hal Sparks). What he's ultimately pitted against, though, isn't

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a person or a tactile thing; it's a way of thinking...succumbing to the certainty that there isn't a life beyond the borders of this sleepy little town. With a turbulent life at home and a community that sneers at him as some kind of psychopath, Green's monstrous creations are the closest thing to a sanctuary he has, and those bursts of happiness are soon stripped from him as well. This is a story about following your dreams, yes, but it goes beyond the familiar "work hard, and believe in yourself!" beats; it's about the suffering that's sometimes necessary for one's art, a willingness to take risks, a capacity to endure, and the ability to leave the rest behind.

Lightning Bug draws deeply from the life of its writer/director, as Robert Hall also grew up in this very same town in Alabama and went on to found a prominent effects shop in Hollywood. It's not exactly the sort of film I'd expect a horror effects wizard to helm for his first time to the plate as a director, but that's kind of the point. Hall coaxes near-unilaterally fantastic performances from his cast and builds such powerful emotions that it feels like the work of a seasoned professional, not a first-time director. In making a movie like this, Hall takes risks not far removed from the character standing in for himself, and there's certainly something to be said for literally putting his money where his mouth is. Actually filming in a remote speck on the map in Alabama lends Lightning Bug a wonderful sense of authenticity as well. It's just been far

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too long since I escaped into a movie like this.

I'm honestly not left with a lot to complain about. I guess Lightning Bug might be a bit too overstuffed, though. For instance, Green has a kid brother who gradually becomes deeply religious. A good bit of time is spent fleshing that out, and yet he's never actually given any sort of dramatic or emotional hook. Even if the point is to show how different the brothers' reactions are to their plight, he could be cut out of the movie altogether and it wouldn't amount to any difference at all. I don't know, it's just that no matter what flaws might be staring me in the face, I could easily shove them aside. Some people seize an opportunity to direct because it's the next stage in their career; meanwhile,I'm left with the sense that Lightning Bug is a film that Robert Hall had to make. It's borne of passion, and that's absolutely contagious. Lightning Bug alternates between cute, playful, haunting, and horrific. It's bursting at the seams with honesty, and that sort of sincerity really does go a long way. I'm very glad to have had the chance to discover Lightning Bug now that it's found its way onto Blu-ray, and I very Highly Recommend that anyone who's made it this far in my rambling review do the same.

A couple of quick notes before I move onto the technical end of the presentation, though. First, this Blu-ray disc features two cuts of Lightning Bug, one of which I don't believe has ever been available on home video. Second, the 'original' version of Lightning Bug has been fiddled with a bit, and that may or may not ruffle the feathers of purists. Most of the changes are digital nips and tucks to strengthen some of the visuals. There's also a smirking insert in the video store that threw me off. Green walks through all these racks of clamshell VHS tapes, and all of a sudden, there are the covers for Laid to Rest and ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2, produced as recently as 2011. Yeah, yeah, I get the joke, but...anachronistic! C'mon, though, if that's the only thing I'm complaining about...

Video

Nevermind that Lightning Bug was filmed right at a decade ago; the photography has a indeterminate sense of time to it, to the point where if I didn't know better, I'd absolutely believe its cameras had been rolling back in 1987. Considering that the movie is set somewhere around then, that dated quality ultimately works in Lightning Bug's favor too. Of course, that doesn't translate all that well to traditional high definition eye candy.

Even for a fiercely independent 16mm production, Lightning Bug is considerably softer and less detailed than anticipated. Texture and clarity are at best a marginal improvement over what I'd expect to see from an upconverted, well-mastered DVD. I don't have Anchor Bay's standard definition release of Lightning Bug handy to do a direct comparison, but if this blows the 2005 disc out of the water, that says more about the DVD than the presentation on this Blu-ray disc. I'm not going to say for certain that Lightning Bug is a straightahead upconvert, but so little definition and detail are resolved that it's somewhere in that general ballpark. I mean, open these screenshots to full size and tell me if there's anything the least bit "HD" about them:

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I'd expect a 16mm indie to boast a crisply rendered sheen of grain; here, it's chunky and generally indistinct, far more DVD-like in that sense than what I'd expect out of a newly-minted Blu-ray release. Director Robert Hall bemoans the lack of a gritty texture in one of his audio commentaries, but this goes beyond that. Its palette is somewhat strangely saturated and doesn't really strike me as playing in Blu-ray's colorspace. On the other hand, black levels are substantial, and what speckling there is can readily be shrugged off.

Presumably all of this met with Robert Hall's approval, though. After all, Lightning Bug did pass through the digital arm of his special effects company for this Blu-ray release. Even grading on a microbudget indie curve, though, Lightning Bug looks decidedly lackluster in high definition.

Both versions of Lightning Bug have been encoded with AVC and are presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. The 95 minute cut preferred by Hall has been authored at a higher bitrate than the extended version. Between the two separate presentations of the film and an onslaught of needlessly upconverted extras, Lightning Bug takes up the better part of this dual-layer Blu-ray disc.

Audio

On the other hand, Lightning Bug's 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks -- one for each cut of the film -- are a staggering improvement over anything I'd expect a DVD to be able to deliver. Easily the highlight of the lossless 5.1 audio is the music, particularly the startling distinctness and clarity of Kevn Kinney's contributions. Though the front channels expectedly shoulder the bulk of the work, the surrounds are used frequently and effectively as well. The rears are teeming with atmospheric color and do a brilliant job establishing a sense of place. Even though the lower frequencies aren't relentlessly rattling, the subwoofer makes its presence known when it counts. There's a good bit of stereo separation up front, dialogue is consistently rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, and...well, aside from some light clipping

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in a couple of loudly shouted lines, I'm really not left with much to grouse about at all here. A strong effort.

Both cuts of Lightning Bug are accompanied by Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks (448kbps). The 95 minute version of Lightning Bug also offers a Dolby Digital stereo surround track (448kbps) and a pair of audio commentaries. There are no dubs, subtitles, or captions.

Extras

This Blu-ray release of Lightning Bug carries over the extensive slate of extras from Anchor Bay's DVD from 2005, and there are a slew of very noteworthy new additions along for good measure. For whatever reason, the overwhelming majority of them have been upconverted from standard definition.

Extended Version (110 min.; HD): Don't confuse this with a director's cut, even though this is closer to the version of Lightning Bug that was making the festival rounds. The fact that it's only available under the 'Extras' submenu and doesn't have any commentaries along for the ride make it that much clearer that the tightened 95 minute cut of Lightning Bug is the preferred version.

If you have the original Anchor Bay DVD on your shelf, you've already seen these additions in a rougher form; they're a more visually polished version of what's in the deleted scenes reel. Among the new scenes here are an early food stamp scam, a longer and deliriously over-the-top version of Deputy Dale's talk show, Green enlisting his brother's help in swiping a set of car keys, and an entire subplot with the boys' crazy Uncle Marvin (Revenge of the Nerds' Donald Gibb) who's nowhere to be found in the final cut! The shorter version of the film is better paced and feels more tonally consistent, but it's pretty terrific to see this footage reinstated just the same. The quality is comparable to the 95 minute version of Lightning Bug, by the way, and I believe this marks the first home video release of this cut of the film.

Luciferin: The Making of Lightning Bug (21 min.; SD): Lightning Bug's original making-of featurette splices together talking head interviews, footage from the set, and even some of the original audition tapes. Among the topics of the discussion are what drew each member of the cast to this film, working alongside first-time director Robert Hall, how filming in such an incredibly small town wound up being so advantageous, and how seasoned fx veteran Hall kept a greater distance from the movie's makeup effects than you might have thought.

Afterglow: A Look Back at Lightning Bug (25 min.; SD): The newly-produced retrospective "Afterglow" catches up with much of the cast and crew, as well as coaxing comments from some of Robert Hall's other friends and collaborators, such as Darren Lynn Bousman, Lena Hedley, and Thomas Dekker. Some of the material from "Luciferin" has been repurposed here, but the bulk of "Afterglow" is original and digs deeper than that earlier featurette. The highlights include the psychology behind the film, what the lightning bug metaphor represents, the ultimate moral message to take away, smalltown fear and aggression, the reveal that Laura Prepon fielded a good bit of 2nd unit direction, and a list of some of the visual effect enhancements added in for this Blu-ray release.

Deleted Scenes (20 min.; SD): Since most of this footage has been repurposed into the extended version of Lightning Bug, I guess you don't
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need me to retread that again, although there are a few snippets -- hey, a fantasy exorcism! -- that didn't make it into the longer cut unless I dozed off or something. Writer/director Robert Hall offers optional commentary that's far more insightful than the usual "we cut it for pacing" notes that you usually get with these things.

Outtakes (5 min.; SD): Blown lines. Manic bursts of laughter. Hal Sparks riffing relentlessly. You know the drill.

Audio Commentaries: Both of the commentaries from the 2005 DVD have found their way onto this Blu-ray disc. In the first, writer/director Robert Hall goes it alone, delving into how deeply Lightning Bug draws from his own life, pointing out subtle homages to Halloween, differentiating a self-funded film like this from other low-budget efforts, and marveling at the talents of his 21 year old D.P.

Hall is joined in the second commentary by producer Lisa Waugh and actresses Ashley Laurence and Laura Prepon. The four of them talk about Hall trying desperately to cast one role by making the rounds in strip clubs, the joys and occasional headaches of lining up locations in a sleepy little town in Alabama, addressing criticisms of Southern-fried stereotypes, and noting that the bars in the jail cells were the only things that were actually built for the film. Hall has a tendency to say some of the same things in just about the same exact way he does in his other commentary, but I found both to be well worth a listen.

Music Video (4 min.; SD): A video for Kevn Kinney's "(Welcome to the) Sun Tangled Angel Revival" has also been included.

Photo Gallery (HD): Lightning Bug's extensive image gallery features 85 production stills, promotional shots, and poster art.

Trailers (4 min.; HD / SD): Rounding out the extras are two trailers. One is an upconvert of the original trailer, and the other has been newly produced for this Blu-ray release.

The Final Word

Lightning Bug is a smartly crafted, resonant, and remarkably engaging story about the pursuit of dreams against the most impossible of odds. This isn't an "...and they lived happily ever after!" sort of coming-of-age film, though; it's about determination in the face of adversity and loss. Green's passion for his craft is infectious, certain to warm the cold, deadened hearts of horror fanatics like myself with a similar lifelong fascination with makeup effects. The film is emotional without feeling cloying or oversentimental, it doesn't hesitate to take jaw-droppingly bleak sharp turns, and what threaten to come across as small-town Southern drama tropes are elevated by a set of terrific performances. Highly Recommended, despite my reservations about the presentation. ]]> A Thousand Cuts (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=56668 Sat, 12 Jan 2013 16:56:54 PST

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]hottest horror director is about to learn the true meaning of terror!!!!! *

Lance (Michael A. Newcomer) graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts with all sorts of flowery art house aspirations, but instead he fell into a ridiculously lucrative career as a splatter-horror hack. He's made more money than he can count by shitting out a torture porn series called A Thousand Cuts: y'know, the one about the nutjob who drugs his victims, slowly carves off slices of their bodies, and makes them watch in horror as each individual strip of flesh is removed. Maybe it's not classy or whatever, but the franchise has made Lance the rich and mighty Hollywood power player he is today, so fuck you.

Sure, sure, Lance stepped on all sorts of fingers on his way to the top, but one bit of collateral damage he never anticipated was the grisly murder of a cute college-age girl named Susan Bennett (Madi Goff). I mean, our douchey director never even met the girl, but the psychopath who mercilessly butchered her took every last one of his cues from A Thousand Cuts. Her father Frank (Michael O'Keefe) holds Lance personally responsible, and he's engineered his own brand of torture to exact his revenge.

Nevermind the Saw-style cover art. The torture is more psychological than anything else. There's very little blood. It's nothing I'd call a gore-fest, exactly. A Thousand Cuts isn't even a horror movie, if you want to get right down to it; it's instead a very literal debate about the impact cinematic violence has on the real world...about the culpability of filmmakers and software developers when someone

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snaps and commits the most horrific of crimes. In the wake of the shootings in Newtown, it's an unexpectedly timely discussion at that. The film is essentially a two character piece, with Frank and Lance each arguing one side of the debate. If you've seen Hard Candy, the structure is pretty much identical, from the friendly first meeting, the near-entirety of the film taking place in the accused's home, the tables turning on who's the tormented and who's the tormentor, some sense that the solution might be worse than the problem, everything not being quite what it seems...honestly, A Thousand Cuts draws so deeply from Hard Candy that the latter isn't a source of inspiration so much as flat-out Xeroxed.

One key difference is that Hard Candy is a tightly edited, unnervingly intense, and brilliantly acted thriller. Even with its barely feature-length runtime -- 77 minutes, with credits; 10 minutes less than what the promotional copy touts -- A Thousand Cuts meanders on endlessly. There are absolutely a couple of times when my pulse quickened and I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, but when I say "a couple of times", I really do mean just that. Michael A. Newcomer and Michael O'Keefe infuse their performances with a great deal of emotion and intensity, and to a point, it works. When they start screaming at each other, though, they start to feel less like characters in a taut thriller and more like cartoons. I mean that in every possible sense with O'Keefe, whose Southern drawl is a mess and is one "varmint!" away from sounding like Yosemite Sam when he's at his most frenzied.

I really do like what A Thousand Cuts is attempting to do, and the violence debate is handled reasonably respectfully on both sides. Still, the movie is far too static, the balance of power mostly stays flat, there's rarely a convincing threat of imminent danger, an argument about the impetus behind a mostly-offscreen death of a barely-there character doesn't spark much in the way of emotional investment; all I could think was how indescribably more effectively Hard Candy attacked on every one of those fronts. Ugh, and although I absolutely get the meaning behind the final shots of A Thousand Cuts -- this comparison will only make sense to about eight people out there, but your James Wan analog turns into Tom Shadyac -- I can't help but roll my eyes just the same. Anyway, at this point, you can probably guess that I'm not coasting towards a wildly enthusiastic recommendation, so I'll just say Rent It, I guess, and move on.

Video

I can't say for sure -- there aren't any extras, and I'm way too lazy to do any research -- but it looks like A Thousand Cuts was shot with the 1080p24 mode on a DSLR camera...kinda like I Melt With You a year or so back. If my guess is right, that means the movie was lensed with a camera oriented towards stills rather than video, and that'd go a long way towards explaining how substandard the photography is.

A Thousand Cuts devolves into a pixelated mush under limited light. You know what they say about pictures and words and all that, so instead of rambling on, pop open this screenshot to full-size and look at...well, anything, but especially the darker side of the bearded dude's jacket:

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Another case-in-point with special guest star David Naughton, who I totally didn't recognize even though I've watched An American Werewolf in London eighteen hojillion times:

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Some shots are just straight-up trainwrecks:

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A Thousand Cuts fares better when it has a good bit of light to play with. It's still a good bit softer than average even at its best, though. Look at how flat and mired in noise the screengrab below is when expanded to full-size:

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From the fuzzy and interlaced look to the opening titles, A Thousand Cuts starts off looking terrible and improves little from there. Color reproduction is impure, edges and fine patterns flicker violently, the photography is noisy and unstable...I mean, I'm sure pretty much all of this dates back to the original production, so the authoring of this Blu-ray disc isn't to blame, exactly, but it's still far, far, far below average.

A Thousand Cuts has been slopped onto a single layer Blu-ray disc. The presentation is unmatted and has been encoded with AVC.

Audio

Blah. A Thousand Cuts' six-channel, 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio track isn't exactly curling my toes either. It's a perfectly serviceable soundtrack, but it doesn't deliver the sort of distinctness and clarity

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I'm used to hearing on Blu-ray. The subwoofer and surrounds are reserved almost exclusively for music. There are a handful of exceptions -- applause, panning sirens, crickets somewhere off in the background -- but the whole multichannel thing comes across as an afterthought. The score does coax a pretty nice growl from the subwoofer, unleashing a few really resonant booms when A Thousand Cuts is at its most intense. The recording and reproduction of the dialogue are adequate but thoroughly unremarkable. I don't have a DVD handy to do a direct comparison, but I wouldn't expect it to be a night-and-day difference.

A Thousand Cuts also piles on a 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio stereo track because...well, I have no idea why. There are no subtitles.

Extras

Essentially nothing.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): A high-def trailer starts things off...

Stills Gallery (HD): ...and rounding 'em out is a gallery with eight production stills.

The Final Word

Competent but only sporadically effective, A Thousand Cuts is a neutered (no pun intended) take on Hard Candy, shifting the backdrop to Hollywood and losing all the production values and intensity somewhere along the way. I wouldn't exactly call it torturous, but A Thousand Cuts is still too uneven to recommend with anything resembling enthusiasm, and the rough-hewn production doesn't make for high definition eye candy so much. Better off streaming. Rent It. ]]> Hit & Run (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58693 Mon, 07 Jan 2013 07:24:51 PST
Miss Annie Bean (Kristen Bell) has been slogging away at a community college in some speck on the map in California for years now, but she's finally been called up to the big leagues. See,

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UCLA is on the verge of launching a Conflict Resolution program -- the first in the country! -- and seeing as how Annie has a one-of-a-kind doctorate in Non-Violent Conflict Resolution that she put together herself, it's kind of a match made in heaven. Two little hiccups, though. One, the clock's ticking for the big interview in L.A. She's gotta pack and be up there yesterday. Two, she can't leave her boyfriend behind! Charles Bronson (Dax Shepard) is a total sweetie, though, and he offers to shrug off his smalltown life and trade up to the big city together. And heck, with seven hundred horses under the hood and a seemingly endless amount of trunk space, this tricked-out 1967 Lincoln Continental has plenty of room to lug Annie and all her stuff to L.A. With a car like that, a road trip's nothin'. I mean, you could rob a bank, toss who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in the trunk, cram, say, five gun-toting thugs inside, and outrun anything the law could throw your way.

Wait, that's the part Charlie left out. Annie knew he was in witness protection, but Charlie...if that even is his real name...never got around to mentioning the whole wheelman deal or the part where he ratted out his partners in crime when one of 'em killed a guy. His testimony wasn't enough to score a conviction, but still, that flavor of betrayal stings four years later. Oh, and guess what sprawling metropolis Alex (Bradley Cooper), Neve (Joy Bryant), and Alan (Ryan Hansen) are based out of? Wow, only took you one try too. So, as Annie and Charlie are tearing a path to Los Angeles, they've got a bumbling U.S. marshall (Tom Arnold), Annie's intensely jealous ex (Michael Rosenbaum), a horsepower-crazed hillbilly (David Koechner), and a station wagon full of bloodcrazed bank robbers on their tail. And maybe...just maybe!...they'll learn a little something about life and love along the way.

Ooooohhh....I really, really want to like Hit and Run. I sort of do too. I mean, it's a throwback to all those testosterone-dripping car chase action/comedies from the '70s and '80s. Tons of high speed chases, pretty

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much an entire fleet of ridiculously cool (and, okay, a few less than cool) cars, no CGI fakery, Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell doing their own driving and stunts...what's not to like? The sprawling cast has a superhuman amount of chemistry together, which maybe isn't all that surprising seeing as how pretty much every last one of 'em are close friends and/or frequent collaborators with Bell and Shepard. The real driving force of the movie isn't any of that Detroit muscle under the hood; it's the relationship between Annie and Charlie. As I'm sure anyone reading this already knows, Bell and Shepard are a long-time couple themselves, and you get the sense that a lot of their conversations, their playfulness together, their arguments...it's all rooted in things they've actually been through. There's a real emotional heft to a lot of that too, and it's woven in deftly enough that it never seems cloying or jarringly out of place with the breezy sooooo-weeeeee-Carolina-Crusher! tone of the rest of the flick.

I'm not going to say anything snide or snarky about Hit and Run, so apologies if you were holding out for that. Despite being produced independently for borderline-nothing, the sheer volume of car chases and half-battalion of familiar faces give Hit and Run a lot of production value, its heart is in the right place, the whole thing's a Valentine to the sorts of movies I wouldn't mind seeing more of on the big screen, and its emotional core is surprisingly resonant. It's just...it's a comedy that's not even a little bit funny. With running jokes about nekkid old people and ethnic assrape in jail, Hit and Run's sense of humor is maybe a notch or two above the "Ow, My Balls!" dreck that Shepard was snickering at in Idiocracy. I like dumb gags as much as the next guy, but Hit and Run keeps it a little too lazy, obvious, and oooohhh nooooo! pratfall-ish. Some of the conversations meander on for too long, Bradley Cooper is kind of miscast as the heavy, and there are too many peripheral characters that don't get a laugh and don't add anything to the story either.

Even though I think the end result misses the mark a little too often, I really like what Hit and Run is aiming towards, and I wish there were more movies out there these days like it...just ones that stick the landing, you know? Rent It.

Video

Hit and Run looks pretty slick in high-def. I mean, the image is impressively bright and colorful, a welcolmed change from all these dark, dour horror movies I've been reviewing lately. Contrast

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is pretty substantial too, and the digital photography overall is nice and sharp. Being a shiny new movie and all that, no artificial sharpening, clunky noise reduction, or sputters or stutters in the compression ever get in the way either. Nothin' but nice things to say.

The AVC encode for Hit and Run spans both layers of this BD-50 disc. This high-def presentation has been letterboxed to an aspect ratio of 2.39:1.

Audio

Just like you'd probably expect for a movie straight outta theaters, Hit and Run is rockin' a 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. It ticks off a lot of the right checkboxes too. It's packing a pretty monstrous low-end, from that low frequency kick to Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" to the gutteral growl of that souped-up '67 Lincoln Continental. With meaty dynamic range, ridiculous clarity, and dialogue that's balanced this cleanly and clearly in the mix, there's not a whole lot to complain about. Well, except for the surrounds, that is. They kind of seem like an afterthought. There are a couple of slick pans and nice atmospheric effects, but the rears otherwise hardly ever draw attention to themselves. Even with all these manic chases where you'd expect to hear cars flying all over the soundscape, that doesn't...really happen. It's a stereo-and-then-some track, but at least it's a pretty good one.

There aren't any dubs, commentaries, or downmixes this time around. Subtitles are served up in English (SDH), French, and Spanish. Oh, and Hit and Run also offers up support for D-Box bass shaker rigs. I forgot about those!

Extras

Deleted Scenes (18 min.; HD): This hefty reel doesn't really dish out much in the way of deleted scenes so much. Instead, these are scenes that are very similar to what made it into the final cut, just alternate takes, a line or two of dialogue that've been swapped out, a shiny new quip that's
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been tossed in...that sort of deal. Among the highlights are a different spin on the show-stoppin' car chase, chatter about shallots and bowling, and Annie wondering why ~~Yul~~Charlie didn't nick Burt Reynolds' name instead.

Featurettes (7 min.; HD): The only other extras are three short promotional featurettes, each clocking in around two and a half minutes a pop. "Run and Gun" recaps the premise and breezes through a list of the characters in the flick. "Love on the Run" touches on that head-on collision between a testosterone-fueled car chase comedy and a sugary-sweet romance. "Street Legal", my favorite of the bunch, focuses on the fleet of cars and stuntwork. Turns out...? All Dax's cars, and that really is him and K-Bell behind the wheel.

Hit and Run comes packaged in a lightly embossed slipcover, and an anamorphic widescreen DVD and UltraViolet digital copy code have been lovingly tucked inside as well.

The Final Word

Hit and Run has charm to spare, a hell of a cast, and more high-octane car chases than you can shake a muffler at. It's just...well, Hit and Run isn't bad. It's just nowhere near as hysterical, off-beat, or infectiously fun as it wants to be. I could've just written "yeah, it's okay" as my review and saved us both a bunch of time. Worth checking out if you're a fan of any of the actors on the bill or if you're game for a guy-movie throwback, but you're probably better off with a rental. Rent It. ]]> War of the Dead (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58593 Sun, 06 Jan 2013 05:24:18 PST

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]to reanimate the dead in the tailend of the 1930s that Hitler eventually put the kibosh on during his ascent to power. I know! If I had a dollar for every Nazi zombie term paper I wrote for AP European History... What you might not know, though, is how an elite group of American soldiers teamed up with a squad of Finnish asskickers back in the '40s to take down a secret Russian bunker, and how the enemy combatants they mowed down along the way returned from the dead to exact revenge and eat them and stuff.

This is normally the point in the review where I'd start rattling off the names of the characters and delve more deeply into the plot, and...yeah, there's not really much of a point to that here. Even as War of the Dead was underway, I couldn't tell you the name of a single character even if you'd had an M1 Garand pressed right up against my temple. If the straggling survivors didn't have such pronounced accents, I probably couldn't have distinguished one from another. No one has any more of a personality than the mechanics of the plot absolutely require. War of the Dead has a capable cast in front of the camera, but they're kind of like those bags of a hundred green plastic little army men; the soldiers are all basically the same and are completely disposable. There's no dramatic or emotional hook whatsoever.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Who cares about lush characterization or whatever? I wanna see zombie Nazis chow down! ...and, I

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mean, fair point. That's definitely where War of the Dead's head is too. The movie's pretty much wall-to-wall action. It boasts such staggeringly high production values that it looks like it cost ten times as much as it really did, War of the Dead delivers more gunplay than you'll see in two or three different WWII flicks, and there are a hell of a lot of zombies. To further amp up the action end of things, we're not talking about slow, shambling corpses. They have super-strength, they can run thirtysomething miles an hour, they can leap forty feet in the air, their actions are vengeful and deliberate, they still remember all their close-combat training, and they can even friggin' skitter up trees.

It's just...I mean, think back to Predator. No shortage of action or anything, but Dutch and company still came across as something resembling people. There was a reason for you to give a shit what happened. In War of the Dead, the soldiers are dead air. The plot is there just to loosely string together a parade of brutal action sequences. I get that these gutmunchers are all fresh corpses, and I appreciate that War of the Dead isn't just thumbing through the Romero playbook, but as superhuman as they are, they're kinda...boring. There's no rush of adrenaline when they roar onto the screen. They're pretty much completely interchangeable; just period military uniforms, whited-out contact lenses, and maybe a little spatter of blood on their faces. No gore. No dementedly clever makeup effects.

I know that "it's like watching someone else play a video game!" ranks somewhere in top ten Stale Online Movie Reviewer Clichés, but...well, that really is the case with War of the Dead. As many Nazi zombie flicks as I've devoured, I don't think I've actually seen one set during WWII before this. That's kind of a blast for a little while, but with nothing interesting or different thrown at me, I got kind of numb to it after a while. Even with as overflowing with action and briskly paced as War of the Dead is, I was numb to it halfway through. No investment in the plot. Couldn't care less about these characters if I'd clenched my fists and tried really, really hard. Just more and more and more and more of the same for 86 minutes. Rent It.

Video

If the IMDb entry for War of the Dead has it right, the film was lensed on a combination of 16mm and 35mm stock. That might explain why some shots are strikingly crisp and clear, and others...well, aren't:

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Most scenes are drenched in one color or another, typically a dusty yellow or cold, steely blues. The image looks rather flat, and the middling black levels sure don't help on that front. War of the Dead boasts a coarse, gritty texture, one that I generally like, although a handful of shots are buzzing with unstable noise rather than a sheen of well-defined film grain. That texture is a little more than the modest bitrate of this encode can handle, sometimes causing the granules to clump together. There's never any doubt that I'm watching a proper high definition release, but the overall quality rarely wows, y'know?

War of the Dead shambles onto Blu-ray with an AVC encode, a scope presentation, and a single-layer disc.

Audio

The 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack does a pretty terrific job filling the room with sound. Line readings never struggle

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for placement in the mix. The surrounds are teeming with tortured screams, gutmunching, undead snarls, and sprays of gunfire. There's even a good bit of directionality to the dialogue. On the other hand, dynamic range is surprisingly cramped. It's pretty much nothing but mid-range. Bass response is so lackluster that the stings meant to punctuate the jump scares consistently fall flat, and the gunfire and grenades don't pack much of a wallop either. That richness, that clarity, that ferocity that I'm so used to hearing on Blu-ray is nowhere to be found here. Serviceable but a definite disappointment.

If you only parlez français or habla español, you're kinda S.O.L. here. The only other audio options are an English Dolby Digital 5.1 track (640kps) and English subs (SDH).

Extras

Well, this won't take long.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): The one and only extra is a high-def trailer.

War of the Dead comes packaged in a shiny slipcover, and an anamorphic widescreen DVD is along for the ride in this combo pack.

The Final Word

I mean, I definitely respect how ambitious War of the Dead is, from its thoroughly impressive production values to the staggering amount of action it delivers. With interchangeable zombies, a bunch of soldiers that are just about as lifeless, and a woefully uninvolving plot, though, War of the Dead is kind of like slumping over in the recliner and watching someone else play one of the zombie modes in Call of Duty. Someone else is having all the fun, and I'm kind of just wondering what I'm doing here. Add in the limited extras and not-overwhelmingly-impressive presentation, this is one you're probably better off streaming or renting instead. Rent It. ]]> Sleep Tight (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58520 Sat, 05 Jan 2013 05:18:22 PST (Luis Tosar) shoulders all sorts of responsibilities. He opens the door for his tenants as they come and go. He drops the daily mail in their boxes in the lobby. He waters the plants on the roof. If the drain in your kitchen is giving you a hard time, he's the one to unclog it. If your sixteen year old doggie has

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a weak stomach, César might toss him a slice of potato pie to give you a couple gallons of diarrhea to mop up. He might swipe a treasured family heirloom, scorch it with drain cleaner, and pretend it was all your fault. He's likely to flood your phone with terrifyingly obscene text messages. He might...well, that would be telling.

César's mission in life is to make everyone as miserable as he is. The only time anything resembling a smile ever creeps across his face is when he's successfully made someone else's life a living hell. César's latest project is Clara (Marta Etura), a gorgeous, infectiously joyous woman in her late twenties. Clara is so bright-eyed and optimistic that no matter what minor tortures César throws her way, she shrugs it off with a toothy grin. It escalates, and as the full extent of César's obsession begins to take shape, what at first seem like devious fits of mischief devolve into something far more dark and depraved.

Sleep Tight inverts the traditional thriller formula, unspooling almost entirely from the perspective of the tormentor rather than the tormented. César is the bad guy, sure, but he's also the protagonist. That's not without precedent. Think back to Psycho as Norman Bates tries to submerge the evidence of a grisly murder in a nearby swamp. When Marion Crane's car all of a sudden stops sinking, the heart of every last viewer for the past half-century skips a beat. Just moments earlier, we'd seen the focal point of the film stabbed mercilessly in a shower, and now we want Norman to get away with it. Of course, Hitchcock had the advantage of Norman not being entirely unlikeable at the outset. Strange, to be sure, but awkwardly charming just the same.

[REC] director Jaume Balagueró, meanwhile, wastes no effort pretending that there's anything the least bit redeeming about César. From word one, he's a cold, soulless sociopath whose compulsions demand that he hide behind a quietly charming façade. It's a testament to the skill of all involved -- director Balagueró, screenwriter Alberto Marini, and certainly actor Luis Tosar -- that César remains so endlessly compelling. It helps that at first he seems like more of a prankster...one that's a little crueler than average, yeah, but since his victims don't realize that they're victims, exactly, it

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honestly doesn't seem that bad. When one of César's schemes fails to put a damper on Clara's unwaveringly sunny disposition or if a ploy backfires, I kinda feel sorry for the guy. Clara is as endearing as César is monstrous, making them perfect foils, even if only one of them is aware there's a battle underway. By the time it becomes clear how psychotic César truly is, I was already wholly ensnared.

Much of the allure of Sleep Tight comes from its disinterest in stock thriller convention. There is no layer of whodunnit. There are no frantic cat-and-mouse chases. There's only one sequence of explicit violence. As low-key and understated as that might sound, Sleep Tight executes it brilliantly. The film is unrelentingly engaging, benefitting immeasurably from Balagueró's command of pacing and tone. It's a delicate balancing act, juggling a sort of playfulness in with the depravity, and yet Sleep Tight never once stumbles. It delivers well-earned shocks without leaning on sharp left-turn twists. Sleep Tight also manages to be deeply disturbing without relying on exploitative, excessively visceral theatrics. The intimacy of its setting -- of home -- plays no small role in that. I found it unsettling that, for at least a short while, it's uncertain who the audience is supposed to root for, exactly. ...and the ending! There just...there aren't words.

Sleep Tight ranks among the most unique and wildly effective thrillers I've stumbled upon in years. On my usual message board haunts, Sleep Tight seems to have slunk in under the radar -- despite director Jaume Balagueró's genre credentials! -- but hopefully that won't remain the case for long. Sleep Tight is a disturbing yet deeply rewarding discovery on Blu-ray. Highly Recommended.

Video

Lensed on 35mm, Sleep Tight benefits from a wonderfully filmic appearance that sets it apart from the legions of other modestly budgeted and invariably digitally photographed thrillers competing for the same shelf space. Detail and clarity are both terrific. I'm enthralled with cinematographer Pablo Rosso's painterly approach to color and shadow, especially the way those hues help sculpt a scene's tone without being heavy-handed about it.

On the other hand, black levels have been mastered incorrectly; even the letterboxing bars at the top and bottom of the frame fail to offer pure blacks. The bitrate is passable but not quite adequate for a film with this challenging texture. Though I suppose it could just be a factor of the way the film grain and lighting play together, some of the more dimly-lit sequences suffer from what looks like posterization and what I'd swear is dithering. I've snapped a couple of examples below, although they need to be expanded to full-size for the effect to be appreciated:

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I did find some of these flaws to be distracting, though not at all to the point of being a dealbreaker.

Sleep Tight arrives on a single layer Blu-ray disc, with its AVC encode and lossless audio taking up less than 17 gigs in all. The film is presented at its theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1.

Audio

Oriol Tarragó's masterful sound design is rendered flawlessly in this 24-bit, six-channel DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. The 5.1 mix consistently sounds lush and alive, filling every speaker with color. There's even some directionality to the dialogue as César waits underneath a bed and his prey moves throughout the room. The lower frequencies are impressively robust as well, though they never threaten to overwhelm the clean, clear Spanish line readings. It comes as little surprise that Sleep Tight took home a statuette for Best Sound at the 4th Annual Gaudí Awards.

Sleep Tight is presented exclusively in its original Spanish. Subtitles are offered in English (traditional, by default, as well as SDH) and Spanish. The default English subs do

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spill over into the letterboxing bars, something owners of constant image height projection rigs may want to bear in mind.

Extras

César's World (107 min.; SD): It comes as a pleasant surprise that Sleep Tight boasts a feature-length documentary -- one that runs a few minutes longer than the film itself! As one would expect, given its more-than-substantial runtime, César's World is startlingly comprehensive. Every stage of production is addressed in detail: the drastic streamlining of a remarkably complex script, transplanting the setting from New York to Barcelona, the structure of the film and the pacing of its revelations, recording the score at Abbey Road, the sound design, location scouting, building the apartment sets, cockroach wrangling, the seamless visual effects work, a more realistic approach to fight choreography...entirely too many highlights to list here, honestly. Essential viewing.

Deleted Scenes (13 min.; SD): Sleep Tight's reel of deleted scenes spends more time with the residents and staff of this high-end apartment building, among them one of César's victims who I don't believe appeared in the final edit. We're also offered a glimpse of a farewell letter being written, a sense of the scale of César's little thefts, rummaging through Clara's childhood photo album, and a miscalculation with ether that hints at just how long this has been going on. Well-worth taking the time to watch.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): The last of the extras is a high definition theatrical trailer.

The Final Word

Sleep Tight upends most of the familiar thriller conventions as it leers at the disturbing obsession of a sociopath...a compulsion to invade his latest target's life in ways far more intimate than she would never have dreamt possible. Here's hoping that Sleep Tight garners the attention on these shores that it so richly deserves now that the film has found its way to Blu-ray. Highly Recommended. ]]> The Thompsons (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=59124 Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:04:05 PST Twilight meets Tarantino!", and...yeah, that's pretty much on the money. I mean, you're lookin' at a starcrossed romance between a brooding, day-walking bloodsucker and the gorgeous brunette he just fell for. On the Tarantinoier side of things, The Thompsons is hyperviolent, has a cacklingly dark sense of humor, nicks Pulp Fiction's fiercely non-linear

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narrative, and even has the lead shopping from the same catalog as the bank robbers in Reservoir Dogs. 'Course, like Twilight and like just about every movie that flails around shouting "we're like Tarantino too! See? See?", The Thompsons reeeeeally isn't all that great.

Maybe you used to know 'em as The Hamiltons, but these days, they're going by the name of Thompson. This family of fanged, superhumanly strong bloodsuckers -- call them vampires if you want -- is on the run after getting caught in the crossfire of a killing spree. Lost without their mother's guidance, the Thompsons don't have anyone to turn to on these shores, so they trot across the Atlantic in search of help. The family spreads out across the British countryside and into Paris, desperately hoping to find someone with their...unique condition; someone wiser in the ways of vampirism who might know how to bring their kid brother (Ryan Hartwig) back from the brink of death. Francis (Cory Knauf) finds what he's looking for in the sleepy British hamlet of Ludlow. Then again, there's that whole thing about being careful what you wish for...

Maybe I'd have a different take on The Thompsons if I'd caught the first movie in the series, The Hamiltons, beforehand. At least as far as the story goes, this followup stands completely on its own, but I really don't feel like I had a chance to get to know the family. None of 'em have a personality that takes more than one or two words to sum up, and most of the ~~Hamiltons~~Thompsons are sitting on the sidelines pretty much the entire time anyway. It's really Francis' show, and...well, when you see Corey Knauf in the extras, he's this bright-eyed, instantly charming, ridiculously charismatic guy, but in The Thompsons itself, Francis doesn't really have any presence whatsoever. He's brooding dead air to keep the plot chugging along. When the movie's called "The Thompsons", it just seems like you oughtta feel invested in The Thompsons, and I can't say I do. I found the family they go to war with -- the Stuarts -- far more compelling, especially Selina Giles in the role of their bloodthirsty matriarch. Of course, she's also the one you see the least. Elizabeth Henstridge acts her heart out as the young girl who's caught in the middle, and she's a tremendous discovery who's already on her way to bigger and better things.

The script doesn't really give the cast a lot to sink their teeth into (I know, I know, sorry), and they make up for it by cranking everything up to eleven. The Thompsons heightens

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everything to standing right on the brink of camp. It's too spastic and ridiculous for the intensity or drama to register, but it's too restrained to be infectiously fun. I get the tone that the movie's aiming for -- kinda falls in line with the Tarantino nod on the cover blurb -- but it's a swing and a miss. Unlike many of the films that inspired it, there's no sparkle or wit to the dialogue. I mean, "God save the queen and all that crap. Now you're gonna fuckin' die!" ...?!? I can't say any of the bloodsuckers on either side ever really strike me as particularly menacing.

I like The Thompsons' playful, non-linear approach, which helps mask the fact that the movie's basically two vampire families beating the hell out of each other in an ancient British pub. The Butcher Brothers, who direct and co-write, ensure that it doesn't overstay its welcome, with the flick clocking in at seventysomething minutes minus credits. The Thompsons doesn't skimp on the vampiric batle royales or the buckets of blood that are sloshed around. Some of the digital splatter and one particular set of CGI fangs can be kind of dodgy, but the practical effects are top-notch. To keep ticking off all the exploitation checkboxes, The Thompsons dishes out plenty of nudity and sex while it's at it. The direction and cinematography are impressively slick as well. I don't know what the final budget is, but every cent and then some is there on the screen. I appreciate that The Thompsons breaks away from a lot of the usual vampire imagery -- quite a bit of the film is set in the bright of day, and it occasionally juxtaposes brutal violence with a cheery, cutesy backdrop -- and it disregards just about every last one of the rules from the Traditional Vampire Playbook. The Thompsons doesn't overromanticize either family. Every last one of 'em has blood on their hands by the end, and the title family has murdered plenty of innocent Happy Meals with Legs along the way too.

I mean, I respect what The Thompsons is trying to do. It's never boring. Its dark, depraved heart is in the right place. We're just talking about a war movie that doesn't give me a reason to really care which side wins. You can feel the effort as The Thompsons labors to be clever and dementedly fun, but it never really hits the mark. Worth a rental but tough to recommend buying sight-unseen. Rent It.

Video

The Thompsons generally looks pretty incredible in high-def. Aside from one brief set of shots halfway through that are out of focus, the digital photography is impressively crisp and detailed throughout. Contrast and color saturation can vary, but black levels are frequently robust, and its palette is punchier than the desaturated hues I'm used to seeing in horror nowadays. I wouldn't say it's perfect, though. The gear they're using doesn't hold up well under extremely low light, leaving a few shots buzzing with coarse, gritty noise. The image holds up very well despite the anemic bitrate; all in, the AVC encode and lossless audio total just 11.5 gigs! There is some banding and posterization, though, and it's especially noticeable during fades. One case in point, and...yeah, I know it's dark. You'll need to open it up to fullsize to see what I mean:

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Generally, though, this is a really nice looking release, and none of my gripes are even close to being dealbreakers.

The Thompsons is dished out on a single-layer Blu-ray disc at an aspect ratio of 2.39:1.

Audio

The Thompsons is rocking a 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. The sound design is front-heavy but takes advantage of the 5.1 setup when it counts: unnerving sounds skittering across the rears, taunting

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chants that slowly encircle a couple of hapless victims, and even some nice discrete effects such as a knock on the door in the right surround channel. Clarity and fidelity are nothing startling, and the dynamic range isn't all that expansive, but I still don't have a lot to complain about here.

No dubs or commentaries or anything this time around. Subtitles are served up in English (SDH).

Extras

I had a blast with the extras on The Thompsons. With no EPK-style promotional filler to get in the way, its stack of featurettes are very comprehensive and genuinely interested in giving viewers a look behind the curtain.

Featurettes (75 min.; HD): All told, The Thompsons' six featurettes run just about as long as the movie itself! Every last one of them is worth taking the time to watch, and I don't get to say that too often.

"Relocating the Family" (12 min.) delves into the appeal of shifting the setting to pastoral England and the process of lining up locations there. "Scribed in Blood" (12 min.) touches on how the British backdrop influenced the writing, the collaborative and not even a little bit rushed screenwriting process, and teases at the possibility of a third film in the series. Though the business end of things is explored briefly as well, that's covered in far greater detail in "Awakening the Project" (19 min.), from crewing up to lining up financing.

"Humans to Monsters" (13 min.) is basically about how these vampires were brought to life, although they're not technically undead, so...well, you know what I mean. The featurette
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tackles the fight choreography, costume design, practical and digital effects work, and differentiating between the two clans. "Family" (17 min.) chats with each member of the cast about the character that he or she plays, and, in the case of the Hamiltons, it explores how they've each changed since the first film. The last and shortest of the featurettes is "The Ringlestone Inn" (2 min.), a brief history of the centuries-old pub where so much of The Thompsons is set.

Trailer (2 min.; HD): Last up is a high-def trailer.

An anamorphic widescreen DVD is also along for the ride in this combo pack.

The Final Word

One of the great things about XLrator Media is the pricing of their genre releases. The Thompsons looks pretty great in high-def, there are a ton of worthwhile extras, and the whole thing is going for $12.99 on Amazon as I write this. Rolling the dice is a lot easier when there's no sticker shock to get in the way.

If you're a card-carrying fan of The Hamiltons, maybe you'll look at this followup a lot differently than I am. For my money, it's imitating a lot of what's earned Quentin Tarantino such a rabidly loyal fanbase, but The Thompsons never really figures out how to get that to gel into a movie. Totally watchable but kinda forgettable. Rent It. ]]> V/H/S (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58177 Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:44:06 PST The Cabin in the Woods, Detention,

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and ParaNorman, then...yeah, it's been a hell of a year for the genre. I just don't think of them as horror. Informed by horror, drawing deeply from horror, sure, but horror themselves...? Not really. Come to think of it, it took me till now to find an out-and-out horror flick I could point to as my favorite from the class of 2012. If you'd told me this time last year that I'd be championing a found footage horror anthology, I'd probably slug you in the solar plexus, and yet, here we are. V/H/S is by far the most grueling, most disturbing, and most intense horror film that I've come across this year, there hasn't been a genre anthology anywhere near this league for several years now, and I'm struggling to think of a more effective or more inspired use of the found footage concept to date.

In fact, I kind of want to end the review there. Before I shoved V/H/S into my Blu-ray deck -- and, yeah, it's kind of funny typing that out -- I knew precisely two things about it. I'd heard about the insanely positive buzz from Sundance, where one person passed out in the middle of its midnight premiere. I'd seen the list of directors who contributed to the anthology, among them Adam Wingard (Home Sick; A Horrible Way to Die), David Bruckner (The Signal), Ti West (The House of the Devil), Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead), hyperprolific Joe Swanberg making his genre debut, and the Radio Silence collective. ...and, well, I guess I figured a VHS tape played into that somehow. Honestly, I think going in somewhat blind like that had a lot of do with how much I dug V/H/S. It's not so much that this collection of shorts rely on twists, exactly. It's just that with, say, a vampire movie, a slasher flick, or a zombie epic, you know a lot of the beats before you've even see a frame of it. Part of the fun with V/H/S is that I had no idea what to expect. I didn't have some sort of clean, clearly defined classification for each of the six segments that make up the film. V/H/S gains a lot from storming in blind and watching a premise gradually take shape. Even just a high level overview of each segment stomps all over that. The less you know going in, the better.

It's not giving anything away to say how eclectic these six segments -- or five segments with a wraparound, if you wanna count 'em that way -- are. They span all sorts of subgenres, from haunted houses to '80s slashers to straight-up creature features. They each

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have their own unique approach to the found footage concept, winning me over a hell of a lot more than feature-length dreck like Paranormal Activity ever have. Some segments are more tragic character pieces, while others are littered with red shirts lining up for the slaughter. Several have a darkly depraved sense of humor, and...well, they all rip out your jugular sooner or later. As different as these segments are in so many ways, they gel together as an anthology exceptionally well. There really isn't a misfire among them all either. I mean, I like some more than others, sure, but there's not a straight-up disappointment anywhere in here.

If V/H/S makes one miscalculation, it's with the framing device. On its own, the wraparound story about a bunch of smash-happy thugs breaking into a house in search of some mythical VHS cassette is fine. Still, having two segments in a row with a bunch of loudmouthed, boorish, sexploitative, raging assholes feels like it's mashing the same familiar note over and over again, and when it climaxes in an incredibly similar yet far less impressive way as another of the shorts...well, the whole thing just seems unnecessary. I don't need an introduction to the tape; just gimme the damned thing. Some occasionally sloppy acting can also get in the way, although that's not entirely out of place with the slasher riff of "Tuesday the 17th". I can twist the things that bugged me about Ti West's "Second Honeymoon" -- the most subdued segment of the lot -- and say they're the best things about the short. So, yeah, I don't have a lot of complaints.

V/H/S definitely benefits from its half-battalion of sharp, smart writers and directors behind the camera. I find it interesting that many of these shorts deliver sex and nudity, but there's nothing even a little bit alluring about it. We're talking about condemnation rather than double-digit-IQ, voyeuristic exploitation. I can't help but laugh when I come across message board posts of people scowling at V/H/S for being misogynistic when, to my mind, it's the complete opposite. A studio horror film would make it a point to overexplain all the havoc that's being wrought. V/H/S opts instead to keep viewers at arm's length. There's a layer of mystery in not knowing what the hell's going on...of not even knowing what form the inevitable threat would take. That, coupled with the sense of reality from the found footage approach and the brutal, intense, visceral, unnerving violence that follows...it's wildly effective. One of the downsides about subjecting myself to so much horror is that I get kind of deadened to it after a while, with pretty much nothing leaving a meaningful impression, but V/H/S fucked. me. up. Far and away my favorite horror movie from 2012 and very Highly Recommended.

Video

I mean, the movie's not called V/H/S because it's pretty. The overarching premise of the whole thing is that these burglars are tearing through a compilation of fucked-up videos that've been making the rounds between traders, and you're looking on as they watch 'em on VHS. If the end result were sparkling, glossy, high-definition eye candy, then they'd be doing it wrong.

So, yeah, the quality is all over the place, with each segment having its own very distinct look(s). Some are still reasonably sharp and nicely defined; others look like a ninth-generation bootleg. Some have impressively vivid colors; others are dull and washed-out. Tracking errors, dropouts, glitchy DV recordings, hyperpixelated Skype video chats, heavy moire distortion and aliasing, wildly uneven focus, anemic black levels, pasty fleshtones...a lot of effort went into making V/H/S look this authentically brutal. Make no mistake that this is an essential and inexorable element of the storytelling, though,

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not at all to be confused with some sort of cornball gimmick. That it's so rough-hewn makes V/H/S feel that much more unnervingly real, and the sputters and stutters in the video help shape a chaotic sort of pace. There are definitely moments where there's no doubt that I'm watching honest-to-God HD video, even if it is kind of put through the wringer, so it's worth the extra couple of bucks to opt for this Blu-ray release over the DVD.

The AVC encode for V/H/S spans both layers of this BD-50 disc, and the movie's presented on Blu-ray at its original aspect ratio of 1.78:1. Oh, and if you're wondering about the score in the sidebar, I tried to find a middle ground between the accuracy of the presentation and how rough it deliberately looks, but that number's pretty much meaningless.

Audio

If you're wondering how the whole VHS deal meshes with 5.1 audio, then...well, your first guess was right. V/H/S is basically a stereo-plus-sub soundtrack. The subwoofer gets a hell of a lot more of a workout than what I strolled in expecting to hear. On the other hand, I don't think I noticed the surrounds being active at all until "Tuesday the 17th" rolled around, and that's, what, an hour in? Again, though, keeping everything rooted up front with maybe a little bleed into the surrounds is totally appropriate. A staggering amount of effort also went into battering this 16-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, which is riddled with background noise, the deafening roar of wind blowing into a camera's onboard mic, distorted dialogue, and a handful of lines that are pretty much impossible to make out. The sound design is artfully, meticulously, and deliberately messy, and I pretty much love every second of it. You have to grade by a different set of rules here, obviously, but as intensely stylized as it is, I think V/H/S might get the nod as my favorite sounding horror release of the year. There's so much I adore about V/H/S, and its flawlessly flawed soundtrack ranks very close to the top of that list.

No dubs or alternate mixes this time around. Subtitles are offered in English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Deleted and Extended Scenes (4 min.; HD): Yeah, we're all better off this way. There's a "...what?" alternate ending for "10/31/98", and even though I completely get that jarring tonal shift it's going for, it's just a colosally bad idea. "Tuesday the 17th" tosses on a vloggy framing device along with a couple of outtakes. That's mostly terrible too, although it is kind of intriguing to see the original look of the footage before it was digitally beaten to Hell and back.

Interviews (42 min.; HD): V/H/S' interviews lead off with a pair of Skype video chats, appropriately enough, with Joe Swanberg. The director of "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" speaks with his leading lady, Helen Rogers, as well as writer Simon Barrett. These are terrific, insightful conversations that are
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teeming with personality, so I guess you can add "skilled interviewer" to the list of eight thousand other things Swanberg does so well.

There are also six traditional interviews, clocking in right at a half hour in all: executive producers Brad Miska and Zak Zeman, director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, writer/director Ti West, multihyphenate filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, man of many talents Glenn McQuaid and writer/director David Bruckner, and finally actor/director Joe Swanberg and a return visit by Simon Barrett. The evolution and execution of the project in Miska and Zeman's interview is the standout for me, but all of these conversations are well-worth setting aside the time to give a listen. For instance, you get to hear about the mindset behind making an '80s-style slasher where you don't get some sort of iconic killer and "10/31/98" getting transferred from high-def to Hi-8 to get the look just right.

"Amateur Night" - Balloon Night (4 min.; HD): The only real making-of featurette on V/H/S is this look at how "Amateur Night"'s final shots were assembled. There are experiments with a camera phone, styrofoam, and...yeah, balloons, just like the title says, and you can also look forward to some pretty slick before-and-after VFX comparisons.

AXSTV: A Look at V/H/S (5 min.; HD): This promotional featurette teases at the general concept and has the small army of directors each introducing their segments. Pretty solid as this sort of thing goes, but it's meant more for folks who haven't just finished watching the movie.

Image Galleries: V/H/S' behind-the-scenes photo gallery features just shy of a hundred different shots. A separate gallery documents the design of the creature from "Amateur Night", driven primarily by sketches and conceptual art.

Audio Commentary: Just the list of the members of the cast and crew featured in this commentary is review-length: Brad Miska, Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett, Helen Rogers, Joe Swanberg, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Justin Martinez, Tyler Gillett, Chad Villella, David Bruckner, Gary Binkow, and Roxanne Benjamin. With that many people on the bill, I figured this commentary would be two hours of chaos, but as it turns out...? It's pretty much perfect. The conversation overall is a hell of a lot of fun, there really aren't a lot of problems with folks stepping all over each other when they speak, and the presence of an even dozen different filmmakers ensures that there's never any dead air. There are kind of too many highlights to list here, but to rattle off a few anyway, we learn what Lily in "Amateur Night" and a foreign exchange student have in common, the fortune that's read in "Second Honeymoon" is the actual one the machine spat out, the visual update that "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" has gotten now that it's on home video, and many notes about the way-more-extensive-than-I-thought visual effects wizardry throughout "10/31/98". Definitely the best of the disc's extras.

The Final Word

I had high expectations and all that, but still, I had no idea walking in that V/H/S would far and away be my favorite horror film from the class of 2012. This is easily the most masterful use of found footage in the genre to date. If there's another horror flick from this year that's anywhere near this grueling and intense, I apparently missed it. Impressively clever and endlessly inspired, V/H/S also ranks among the most consistent horror anthologies I've ever stumbled across too. Essential viewing for genre fanatics tired of the same stale routine. Highly Recommended.

Totally Random, But...

Seriously, though, hearing MU330 blasting on a car stereo completely made my week. The great thing about a period piece set in 1998 is that you can get away with third-wave ska on the soundtrack. ]]> Silent Night (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=58428 Thu, 06 Dec 2012 06:28:05 PST

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I know, right? Killer Santa with a Flamethrower: it's like someone caught a sneak peek at my Christmas list or something. Silent Night is a throwback to the '80s slashers I grew up with, and that makes sense seeing as how it's a kinda/sorta/not-really remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night and all. You get your hot broads and shameless nudity and a parade of splattery, dementedly over-the-top kills. The only thing is that like a lot of the slashers of days past, pretty much every scene without any blood or boobs is dead air.

Welcome to Cryer, Wisconsin! Home to a holiday parade with five hundred Santas and...well, not a lot else since the mill shut down. Cryer is pretty much in its death throes, and you can take that totally literally when an unrepentant killer dolled up as Santa storms into this sleepy little town. He knows who's been naughty or nice. If you make the "naughty" list, you don't just get a lump of coal; your head winds up split down the middle with a fuckin' axe. Sheriff Cooper (Malcolm McDowell) doesn't want to raise a panic or anything, so he and a handful of deputies try to hunt down this nutjob on the down-low. Aubrey (Jaime King) is doing what she can to help out, but she's still reeling from seeing her husband gunned down before her eyes, and if she hadn't choked then... Anyway, Aubrey is pretty much the only well-formed character in the movie, so I guess you know who your Final Girl is.

Silent Night really does have a lot going for it. Director Steven C. Miller has a hell of an eye, and I'm kind of in awe of his inspired use of shadow and off-kilter compositions. In stark contrast to the crude photography behind Silent Night, Deadly Night, this loose remake is the right kind of slick. Santa's slay ride is

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frequently kind of amazing, including what I think might be my all-time-favorite woodchipper kill. Silent Night abides by the '80s slasher rulebook where the people who are getting slaughtered deserve it (kinda), and they're tinged with a cacklingly dark sense of humor. I mean, Silent Night even has the balls to walk up to this bitchy, foul-mouthed twelve year old girl and jab her with a friggin' cattle prod, and that's kind of amazing. As ridiculous as the flick can get, Jaime King doesn't let it distract her. Hers is a startlingly intense performance, brilliantly conveying how tortured and shattered Aubrey is. As a card-carrying fan of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, it's pretty great to see Ellen Wong pop up again too.

The problem I have with Silent Night is...well, everything else. The movie doesn't really know what to do when it's not spilling guts or baring breasts, and all that in-between stuff can be kind of a slog to wade through. The mystery of who this killer Santa really is -- and all the red herrings that are lobbed out along the way -- winds up feeling pretty uninvolving. Aside from a handful of folks like Jaime King and Ellen Wong, just about all of the acting is aggressively campy and deliriously over-the-top. That could've worked really well if Silent Night were as batshit insane as Hobo with a Shotgun or something, but when you drop a cartoon character into laughless, sort of tedious scenes, it winds up just making 'em worse. That goes for the marquee draws, like Malcolm McDowell who's rockin' a the-fuck accent and a coke-addled Donal Logue, and the bit players like whoever it is that's doing the cranked-up-to-eleven skeevy priest deal. Silent Night clumsily mugs for laughs sometimes, and its gags are clunky, stale ones like the douchebag who holds some mistletoe over his head or a Santa's-got-a-boner quip as kids are sitting on his lap. The jump scares are pretty lukewarm across the board, and Silent Night never really hits the mark when it tries to ratchet up the intensity. The ending's pretty much a complete misfire, and the epilogue revealing the killer is kind of just a bad idea all around. With a worthwhile script under its arm, I think Silent Night really could've been something, but this...? Bah, humbug. Rent It.

Video

Silent Night puts the "gore" in "gorgeous". I mean, its digital photography is superhumanly sharp and detailed. I'm so used to the

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flat look of smaller horror movies that are shot on the Red One that these deep, inky black levels and robust contrast are a greatly appreciated change of pace. The palette is generally subdued, but that's just to make the hypersaturated reds and greens leap off the screen when it counts. The strands of lights in the opening kill and the Christmas colors in the climax are kind of breathtaking. Although the bitrate is fairly modest, the AVC encode doesn't sputter or stutter, even in challenging sequences with strobes and fire and stuff. I really don't have a whole lot to complain about here.

Silent Night is served up on a single-layer Blu-ray disc and is letterboxed to an aspect ratio of 2.39:1. This is a combo pack and all that, so you get an anamorphic widescreen DVD outta the deal too.

Audio

Silent Night is packing a 24-bit Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack, and it's pretty damn great too. I'm particularly impressed by the warmth and clarity of Kevin Riepl's score, and it's packing a hell of a low-end too. Not that the writing is any great shakes or whatever, but movie's dialogue is rendered cleanly, clearly, and balanced flawlessly in the mix just the same. There are some really nice touches in the sound design, like an off-screen skewering that splatters all over the rear channels or Aubrey getting tossed through glass doors an' into the surrounds. Really solid work.

No dubs or anything. Subtitles are limited to English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Behind the Scenes (6 min.; HD): No narration or talking head interviews
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this time around. Silent Night's making-of reel splices together a few minutes' worth of fly-on-the-wall footage of the cast and crew at work, leaning towards stunts and effects.

Deleted Scenes (5 min.; HD): The only other extra is a set of four deleted scenes, including a little more time getting to know Aubrey's folks, the mayor getting the heads-up about the whole Bad Santa deal, and the sheriff's department going on their Santa roundup.

Silent Night also has a DVD of the movie tagging along for the ride.

The Final Word

Silent Night is pretty much a glossier version of any random slasher you could've pulled off the shelf at Movie Gallery in 1986. It's teeming with demented, inspired, splattery kills, but just about every scene where the camera's not closed in on boobies or blood feels kinda tedious. Silent Night benefits from a hell of a performance by Jaime King as well as Steven C. Miller's strong direction, but the end result is too sloppily written and wildly uneven to really recommend. Rent It. ]]> Catch Me If You Can (Blu-ray) Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=57990 Wed, 05 Dec 2012 05:56:35 PST Catch Me If You Can. At least to a point, I get that. When someone has such a staggering number of epic, important, and intensely personal films under his belt as Spielberg does, it's easy for something that the director himself describes as "an upbeat dessert

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of a movie" to fall through the cracks. Don't get needlessly distracted by trying to figure out where it stacks up with the rest of Spielberg's filmography. Visually sumptuous, brilliantly acted, infectiously fun, and more resonant than most people give it credit for, Catch Me If You Can is an underrated gem that deserves a second chance now that it's found its way to Blu-ray.

If Frank Abagnale, Jr. hadn't led such a startlingly cinematic life in reality, a screenwriter somewhere would have to invent it. Traumatized by his parent's divorce and on his way to being a second-generation financial foul-up, Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) somehow stumbled into the life of a con man. While most kids his age were finishing up their senior year of high school, Abagnale was passing himself off as a pilot for one of the most prestigious airlines the world over, cashing bogus homebrew checks on Pan Am's dime, and flying just about anywhere he could dream up for free. He didn't just pretend he was a doctor; Abagnale wormed his way into a supervisory position at a hospital. This teenaged high school dropout convinced people who really ought to know better that he had his medical license and passed the bar, even taking a position as an assistant prosecutor down in Louisiana. Heck, Abagnale dupes the FBI agent who's been hounding him all over the country, following his endless trail of bad checks, into believing he's a Secret Service agent! See, back then in the 1960s, Abagnale's forged checks ranked him among the most successful bank robbers in this nation's history, making off with millions without even having to raise a pistol.

Still, though, Abagnale isn't a cold, calculating, exploitative monster; he's a kid who's gotten caught in the riptide of his own racket. Because Abagnale's targets are faceless corporations and monolithic banks, and since his only weapons are charm and printing know-how, it really doesn't even feel like he's hurting anyone...that this is all just multimillion dollar teenaged mischief. Even Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), the FBI agent tasked with hunting down Abagnale, can't help but feel some level of admiration. To be that inventive, that much of a craftsman, that audacious, and that young...I mean, what Abagnale did was wrong, obviously, but even in

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Hanratty's eyes, it's undeniably impressive. Despite the fact that Abagnale leads an ill-gotten life of wealth, sex, and glamour while Hanratty setttles for stuffy suits and crappy motel rooms, the two have more in common than they might want to admit. Their families are both fuzzy images in their rear view mirrors. Their existences are both wholly defined by their jobs, legitimate or otherwise. Neither really has any constant in their lives except the other, and that holds true even after this cop inevitably does chase down this criminal.

I absolutely adore Catch Me If You Can. For one, it offers the most achingly gorgeous recreation of the 1960s this side of Mad Men. Despite the film's nearly two and a half hour runtime, the pacing is so breezy and nimble that it feels closer to half that. It's difficult to fathom any actors better suited to these parts, from supporting players like Amy Adams, Martin Sheen, Christopher Walken, Nathalie Baye, and James Brolin all the way to Catch Me If You Can's two leads. The pitch-perfect casting of DiCaprio helps to ensure that Abagnale never comes across as a bad guy. DiCaprio's inherent charms go a long way, but the performance also resonates because Abagnale isn't flawless. He's a kid who's generally making every bit of it up in the moment. He's constantly on the razor's edge of being discovered, and when Abagnale says the wrong thing or starts to get in over his head, Catch Me If You Can is breathlessly suspenseful; you want this brazen liar to get away with it! It sure does help that DiCaprio's performance deftly blends in so much vulnerability with the necessary confidence. If Abagnale were as smug and smarmy as most people in his position would likely be, Catch Me If You Can would probably be insufferable. Even though Hanks' do-right FBI agent is ultimately the antagonist of the film, the actor finds a great deal of humanity in a role that's drab and dry by design. I can't help but love the father/son dynamics in this film, from Abagnale's flesh-and-blood father (Christopher Walken) taking such pride in his son's schemes -- a sort of revenge on the banks that ravaged his life -- to Hanratty's role as a surrogate parent.

Spielberg's craftsmanship ensures that the characters don't get lost in the concept. Sure, sure, Catch Me If You Can would work in lesser hands; c'mon, it's the story of a multimillionaire chameleon being chased around the country by the FBI! The difference is that Spielberg makes sure that Abagnale and Hanratty come across as people rather than cinematic constructs, and Catch Me If You Can pulls that off without being overly schmaltzy or heavy-handed about it. As entrancing as the overall premise is, so much of the film's success comes from these subtle flourishes...these small, seemingly insignificant moments...that most filmmakers would toss aside. Its sense of humor is top-shelf as well. Catch Me If You Can captures so much of what I love about Spielberg at his best, and just because it isn't E.T., Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Schindler's List, this is a film that doesn't deserve to be left out of the conversation. Well-worth rediscovering on Blu-ray and very Highly Recommended.

Video

Catch Me If You Can has a subtly stylized look to it. The opening moments in the crumbling French prison are startlingly sharp and drenched in a cold teal, for instance, before cutting back to the warm, nostalgic

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glow of the early '60s. One of the visual conceits of the film is the way its colors gradually grow more and more vivid, and at its peak, the palette really is a knockout. It's appreciated as ever that the filmic texture has been retained. Though Catch Me If You Can isn't the most dazzingly crisp movie I've come across, the grain is rendered with such clarity and definition that most every trace of fine detail has clearly been faithfully represented on Blu-ray. As expected, nothing in the way of wear or damage ever threatens to intrude, and the presentation has been encoded at such a high bitrate that there are rarely any issues on that front. A terrific effort all around.

The AVC encode for Catch Me If You Can spans both layers of this BD-50 disc. The presentation has been lightly letterboxed to preserve the film's theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

Audio

Catch Me If You Can features a six-channel, 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, and there's nothing but praise to be had on that front as well. The sense of clarity is expectedly marvelous, particularly the rich and full-bodied reproduction of John Williams' jazz-infected score. The film's dialogue is consistently rendered cleanly and clearly throughout as well. Though this is very much a front-heavy film, there are some definite nice touches in the multichannel sound design just the same, such as the pans of off-screen aircraft across the rear speakers. No complaints.

Also included are Dolby Digital 5.1 dubs in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Subtitles are offered in English (traditional and SDH), French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Extras

Catch Me If You Can doesn't ring in its tenth anniversary with any new extras, but plenty of bells and whistles from the initial special edition have all been carried over.

Behind the Camera (17 min.; SD): The first of Catch Me If You Can's featurettes breezes through the development and production of the film, from reworking an initially episodic script all the way to the period design. The staggering number of locations and breathlessly fast pace of the shoot are also tackled. "Behind the Camera" covers quite a lot in its fairly lean runtime and is worth setting aside the time to watch.

Cast Me If You Can (29 min.; SD): The disc also offers five sets of interviews, among them conversations with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Jennifer Garner, Christopher Walken, Nathalie Baye, Martin Sheen, and Amy Adams. Although the actors have quite a lot of insightful comments to offer, I particularly enjoyed hearing the real-life Frank Abagnale speak
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about the people behind the characters.

Frank Abagnale: Between Reality and Fiction (15 min.; SD): Across these five mini-featurettes, Abagnale returns to further delve into his 21 month crime spree, touches more on his not-always-successful attempts at blending in like a chameleon, and his colossal success in the years since as a fraud consultant.

The FBI Perspective (7 min.; SD): The FBI Technical Advisor on the set explains his role in helping to shape Catch Me If You Can's sense of authenticity.

Scoring Catch Me If You Can (5 min.; SD): John Williams speaks about his twentieth collaboration with Steven Spielberg and how its jazzy spy groove sets itself apart from the rest of his work to date.

In Closing (5 min.; SD): Frank Abagnale touches on how unusually accurate this adaptation is to the life he once lead and briefly reflects on what it all meant to him.

Photo Galleries: Last up are three expansive image galleries, divided into "Cast", "Behind the Scenes", and "Costume Gallery" headings.

The cover art for this Blu-ray release is awfully bland compared to the decade-old DVD, but it's nothing I can't live with.

The Final Word

Benefitting immensely from its pitch-perfect cast, endlessly clever script, and infectiously fun premise, Catch Me If You Can may be the single most underrated film in Steven Spielberg's œuvre. This is a movie that's well-worth re-evaluating now that it's found its way to Blu-ray. Highly Recommended. Do you concur? ]]>