The Movie:

The fifth and final collaboration between director Don Siegel and leading man Clint Eastwood was 1979's Escape From Alcatraz, based on the book of the same name from J. Campbell Bruce that takes on a real life escape from the titular island prison that took place in 1962.

Set in 1960, the film follows a man named Frank Morris (played by Eastwood) who, after busting out of a few other facilities, is locked away at Alcatraz, the prison island off the coast of San Francisco. Upon his arrival, The Warden (Patrick McGoohan) lets him know in no uncertain terms that no one has ever successfully escape from Alcatraz and that he doesn't except anyone ever well as the security is just that type. While The Warden talks to Morris in his office, the prison's latest addition sneaks a pair of nail clippers from his desk.

As time passes, Morris meets a few of his ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Emilio Miraglia's 1967 film Assassination (not to be confused with the Charles Bronson vehicle of the same name from 1987!) stars the late, great Henry Silva as a man named John Chandler. When we first meet John, he's in prison, visited by his lovely wife Barbara (Evelyn Stewart), when they learn that a last minute pardon they were hoping to receive has not been approved and that he's to be put to death in the electric chair. Moments later, that's exactly what happens.

A few day later, Barbara meets up with her lawyer and goes over John's will. She doesn't inherit much in the way of cash and is upset to learn that the home she shared with her late husband has been, quite puzzlingly, left to his brother, Philip, who Barbara didn't even know existed. Even more confusing is the fact that Philip doesn't live anywhere near them and currently resides in Africa....Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Valerio Zurlini from a script by Leonardo Benvenuti and Piero De Bernadi based on a novel by Ugo Pirro, 1965's Le Soldatesse (also known as The Camp Followers) takes place just as the Second World War has begun to ravage Europe, specifically Italy. Here, a dozen Athenian women who live in poverty and have no other opportunities or means of supporting themselves, climb into a truck that is to deliver them to various locations in Greek and Albania where they'll be employed at brothels set up to take care of the needs of the Italian soldiers stationed in the areas.

A young Italian officer, Lieutenant Gaetano Martino (Tomas Milian), answers to Colonel Gambardelli (Guido Alberti) but wants nothing more than to get out of Athens. Gambardelli assigns him to supervise the transportation of the twelve women and to make sure that they are dro...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Brian De Palma's Hitchcockian thriller starts off with a middle aged woman named Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) in the shower. She lathers up and shows off the goods, heads out into the bedroom, and then feigns her enjoyment as her husband mounts her. Her marriage is dead and she knows it, but at least she got a cool kid out of the deal in the form of science geek Peter (Keith Gordon). Later that day she heads to her shrink's office for her regular session with Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine). She does her best into trying to talk him into bed, but it's not going to happen, he tells her it's not worth risking his marriage over even if he does find her very attractive. Kate needs something though, so she heads to the art museum where she winds up hooking up with a guy, screwing around with him in a cab and then heading back to his place for some quality time in the bedroom. When s...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Clearly influenced by the success of The Sting, Fernando Di Leo's 1976 film Nick The Sting stars Luc Merenda stars as two-bit con artist named Nick Hezard who lives and operates out of Geneva, Switzerland. The big man in town is a crime boss named Robert Clark (Lee J. Cobb), who sets Nick up to take the fall in an insurance scam he's running.

When Nick figures out what's happened and who is responsible for it, he decides to pay Clark back. To do this, he puts together a rag tag group of small time criminal types to setup a fake killing that will, if it all goes right, let them get their hands on Clark's cash and destroy his reputation while they're at it. It is, of course, a very convoluted plan involving fake cops, fake murders and even a fake police station that won't be easy to pull off. And then there's the lovely Anna (Luciana Paluzzi) to cont...Read the entire review

The Movies:

There was a period of time where the Infernal Affairs Trilogy, debuting on domestic Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection, was reasonably well known thanks to the fact that it was the inspiration for Martin Scorcesse's The Departed. For those not in the know, Scorcese's critically acclaimed film is a remake of these three pictures that came out of Hong Kong a few years before. If Scorcese's movie gets a few interested film buffs to check out the trilogy, so much the better as they really are excellent films.

Here's a look at how the movies play out.

Infernal Affairs:

When the first movie begins, Chan Wing Yan (Tony Leung) and Lau Kin Ming (Andy Lau) are training to become police officers. Chan Wing Yan is kicked out of the academy so that he can be used as an undercover operative and before you know it, he's working as a mol...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Vernon Sewell for Tigon in 1968, The Blood Beast Terror (also known under the even more salacious title of Blood Beast From Hell) features a lot of highly regarded members of the vintage British horror scene of the day but fails to hit the heights of other more highly regarded efforts from Hammer, Amicus and even Tigon's own output like Witchfinder General. It does, however, have enough going for it that fans of British horror will want to check it out, if only to decide for themselves.

The storyline is set in Victorian times where a killer is afoot on the streets of London, leaving young men dead and drained of all of their blood. Obviously the powers that be want to put a stop to this and so Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) is called in to investigate the murders and see if he can put together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle. A few cl...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Kino Lorber Studio Classics presents three more unique film noir entries from the Universal Studios vault in the tenth boxed set of their Film Noir: The Dark Side Of Cinema collections. Here's what's inside…

Flesh And Fury:

Director Joseph Pevney, with a story from William Alland and Bernard Gordon, was behind this 1952 Universal production which headlines Tony Curtis as Paul Callan. Paul makes a living for himself as a prize fighter, but there's something unique about him in that he's deaf. Regardless, Paul is really good at what he does and his star is certainly on the rise. He trains with ‘Pop' Richardson (Wallace Ford).

One of Paul's biggest fans is the lovely Sonia Bartow (Jan Sterling), a woman who is always in the audience whenever she can be. She decides she likes what she sees in Paul and that if she gets in with hi...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Kino Lorber Studio Classics presents three more unique film noir entries from the Universal Studios vault in the ninth boxed set of their Film Noir: The Dark Side Of Cinema collections. Here's what's inside…

Lady On A Train:

Directed by Charles David and released by Universal Pictures in 1945, Lady On A Train stars the beautiful Deanna Durbin as a young woman named Nikki Collins who travels by train from San Francisco to New York City for the Christmas holidays, along the way, witnesses a murder as she looks up from her book (a murder mystery novel, of course!) and gazes out the window of her train compartment. The killing took place in a building across the street from Manhattan's Grand Central Station, and she saw it happen just as the train was pulling in.

After disembarking from the train, she goes straight to the n...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Based on the novel by novel by Thomas McGuane, 1971's The Sporting Club, directed by Larry Peerce, explores the idea of The Centennial Club, a hunting lodge located in the Midwest populated by wealthy elitist type W.A.S.P.s (white, Anglo-Saxon, protestants). Early in the movie, we learn that the club is celebrating its one hundredth year of existence, quite the milestone, and many of its members are celebrating by drinking heavily and generally enjoying some mild debauchery.

Vernur Stanton (Robert Fields), one of the younger members of the club and a spoiled rich kid who has never had to work a day in his life, decide he wants to make a statement about the club's place in society and the separation of wealth between the haves and the have nots. To do this, he fires the groundskeeper and replaces him with a pot smoking, lower class man named Earl Olive (Ja...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997\'s Cure is set in the director\'s native Japan and is centered around a detective with the local police department named Kenichi Takabe (Kōji Yakusho). His job is stressful and his home life less than ideal, as his wife (Anna Nakagawa) has some mental health issues.

When a string of murders occurs, each of the victims with a giant letter \"X\" carved into their neck, he\'s tasked with trying to find and apprehend the killer. If that weren\'t enough for him to deal with, the killer seems to be a different person each time, with the presumed murderers caught shortly after each killing, right near the location of each respective murder, each one confessing to the killing but without an obvious motive of explanation. To get to the bottom of this, Takabe teams up with Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), a psychologist, and they soo...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Jayro Bustamante, who co-wrote with Lisandro Sanchez, 2019's La Llorona introduces us to General Enrique Monteverde (Julio Díaz). Early in the film, he is on trial, accused of masterminding the genocide of the Mayan natives of Guatemala during his stint as the country's president in the early eighties. Monteverde is, at this point in his life, an old man and he is not in the best of health. He shares a home with Carmen (Margarita Kenefic), his wife, their daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz) and their granddaughter Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado). A maid named Valeriana (María Telón) lives on set as well, as do a few other servants. The Monteverde does not want for money, they live a very comfortable life, at least in terms of material possessions and wealth.

As the start date of the trial looms heavy over Enrique's head, he starts hearing the sou...Read the entire review

The Movie:

A decidedly bizarre mix of horror, noir and surrealism, David Lynch's 1997 picture Lost Highway begins with the story of a man named Fred (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). He's a saxophone player in an avant-garde jazz band. They share a nice house together in Hollywood. Things seem okay on the surface but Fred has strange nightmares and doesn't seem to quite trust Renee, even when he's having sex with her. Their life gets rocked a bit when, one morning, she finds an envelope outside containing a video tape. They put it into their VCR and realize that it's footage someone shot of the exterior of their home. They're weirded out, but don't panic. When a second tape is delivered and shows not just the exterior but the interior too, as well as footage of them sleeping, they call the cops who can find no evidence of anyone trying to break in.

The Movie:

Directed by none other than J. Lee Thompson in 1981, Happy Birthday To Me is centered around the The Crawford Academy, an ivy league-esque private school. Here, the various students attend classes and socialize, just as you'd expect them to. The so-called 'Top Ten' are the popular kid. Some find love, some don't, it's fairly typical school 'stuff' until someone starts killing people off.

The cops do what they can to try and find out who the killer is and why he or she is doing what they're doing. Meanwhile, a student named Virginia Wainright (Melissa Sue Anderson), one of the 'Top Ten,' starts to suffer a series of panic attacks and flashbacks that not only tie into her past, but also the school's present predicament.

Happy Birthday To Me is as entertaining as it is predictable. It won't take an especially seasoned slasher movie fanatic t...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In Hudson Hawk, 1991 film directed by Michael Lehmann from a screenplay by Steven E. de Souza (based on a story by Bruce Willis and Robert Kraft), Bruce Willis stars as Eddie "The Hawk" Hawkins. He was once the world's most famous cat burglar but then he got caught and, well, he did a decade or so of hard time to pay for his crimes. Now that he's a free man once again, Eddie says he's going to stay on the straight and narrow. No more crime for him! But you know where this is going, right?

Eddie's partner and pal, Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello), is in trouble. He's being blackmailed by the mob and the F.B.I. both of whom have got some pretty heavy dirt on him that he'd prefer not be exposed. What do they want in return? The theft of three paintings done by Leonardo DaVinci, currently held in the world's most prestigious art museum. And who does Tommy need ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Just in time for Halloween, Paramount Studios bundles together all seven of the Paranormal Activity movies, including Paranormal Activity: Next Of Kin, which is exclusive to this collection, and a fairly sprawling documentary on the series titled Unknown Dimension: The Story Of Paranormal Activity. Each film, with the exception of Next Of Kin, is offered up in its original theatrical version as well as its extended cut, which is a nice touch, although those expecting loads of extra features may be ultimately disappointed. But before we get into that, let's go over the movies themselves.

Paranormal Activity:

The first movie in the series, from 2007, was written and directed by Oren Peli and made for fifteen grand using his own home as the movie's solitary location. Paranormal Activity has much in common with a p...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Gordon Hessler, who re-wrote portions of the script with Christopher Wicking when he took over after Michael Reeves (originally intended to direct) passed away, 1969's The Oblong Box was yet another adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's work made for American International Pictures starring Vincent Price.

The film begins in Africa where Sir Edward Markham (Alistair Williamson), a plantation owner, is abducted and mutilated by a tribe of natives in a voodoo ceremony. When he returns to his native England, his brother Julian (Vincent Price) decides it would be best to keep him out of view, and so he has him shackled in the basement of the massive family home. This allows Julian to spend more time with his pretty fiancé, Elizabeth (Hilary Dwyer), and less time worrying about his disfigured brother who is quite quickly losing his mind down below.

The Movie:

Written and directed by Rob Zombie, the 2022 incarnation of The Munsters was the subject of almost instant internet scorn the moment the trailer was released online a few months back. Now that the movie is out on Blu-ray and on Netflix, making this the first of the director's films to not get a theatrical release, the movie proper can be evaluated, making some wonder... was it really deserving of all the scorn it received when the trailer dropped?

Yes and no.

The movie, which is essentially a prequel to the TV series that inspired it, is extremely light on plot. What little story there is starts in Transylvania and revolves around how Dr. Henry Augustus Wolfgang (Richard Brake) and his assistant Floop (Jorge Garcia) created Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips) who then moved away from his creators and found new life as a rock n roll star. From...Read the entire review

The Movie:

When the movie opens, we see a close up shot of Tigr, her bleach blonde mullet clearly anchoring this movie in the era in which it was made Tigr speaks to the camera quite enthusiastically about her first impressions of Mitchell, at which point we cut to Mitchell herself in the back of a taxi cab on her way to the set of her latest adult film production. Cut back to Tigr talking about how her relationship with Mitchell changed her as a person and how she wanted...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Made more than a decade after comedian Bob Einstein's character, Super Dave Osborne, was a stable of late night TV talk shows and cable TV specials, The Extreme Adventures Of Super Dave, directed by Peter McDonald (the man who gave us Rambo III and Legionnaire) struggles to take what was a series of typically very funny short sketches and turn them into a feature length movie.

The story opens with Dave getting ready to perform his latest feat of daring do just as New Year's Eve turns 1999 into the year 2000. Of course, this being Super Dave and all, it goes horribly wrong, much to the dismay of celebrities in the crowd like The Pope and Queen Elizabeth II. Understandably, after his latest failure to pull of an Evel Knievel style stunt proves a flop, Dave decides to hang up his hat and retire.

Hoping to live a nice, quiet life away ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Adapted from the novel penned by Tsutomu Minakami, Tomu Uchida's 1965 film A Fugitive From The Past takes place in 1947 when a massive typhoon hits a ferry taxiing passengers from Hokkaido and the mainland of Japan. The ferry is destroyed and the island thrashed and hundreds of people die, but in the chaos that ensues, three men are seen running away from a pawn shop set ablaze in the island town of Iwanai. The local police understandably assume that this is a case of burglary and arson and Detective Yumisaka (Junzaburo Ban) is tasked with investigating.

As Yumisaka starts working the case, he discovers some strange clues, first in the form of a burned out husk of a boat and then, more shockingly, the dead bodies of two men, leading him to wonder what exactly the third unknown suspect has been up to here as he know these men were not killed when the ferry...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Peter Maris, the same man who gave us Delirium and Land Of Doom, and written by noted comic book scribe Mark Verheiden, who wrote the scripts for projects like Time Cop, The Mask, and the 2019 Swamp Thing series, 1987's Terror Squad opens in Libya where a terrorist type is delivering an impassioned anti-American speech at a rally. The crowd eats it up and before you know it, Old Glory has been set ablaze.

From here, a quartet of Libyan terrorists sneak their way into the United States Of America and heads towards a nuclear power plant in Indiana. A few students at the nearby Kokomo High School find themselves staying after school in detention. Will this be important later? Yes, but before then, local top cop Chief Rawlings (Chuck Connors), with some help from Deputy Brown (Ken Foree) finds out about the terro...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1943 from a script that the director co-wrote with Louis Chavance, Le Corbeau (or The Raven in English), was quite controversial upon its release in France but has since been properly recognized as the excellent piece of challenging filmmaking that it is.

The story takes place in a French town dubbed "anywhere" in the movie. Hhere, someone identifying themselves only as 'Le Corbeau' is sending scathing letters to Doctor Remy Germain (Pierre Fresnay) of carrying out a clandestine affair with a woman named Laura Vorzet (Micheline Francey), the beautiful, and much younger, wife of one Doctor Michel Vorzet (Pierre Larquey), an aging psychiatrist. On top of that, the writer also accuses Germain of discretely conducting abortions, an act which is very much agains the law. From here, the letters spread, the writer send...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Yves Boisset in 1970, Un condé (or, simply, The Cop in English), starts with the killing of a man named Roger Dassa (Pierre Massimi) who, after not agreeing to sell drugs in his bar, is beaten to death by the thugs in the employ of a mobster named Tavernier, also known as ‘The Mandarin.' The main thug responsible for the murder is Georgy Beausourire (Henri Garcin) and he and his crew aren't content to just kill Roger. Once they're done with him, they track down his sister Hélène (Françoise Fabian) and beat her to death as well.

Unfortunately, for Georgy and his gang, Roger had some pretty bad-ass friends who aren't anything but furious about his murder. Enter Dan Rover (Gianni Garko) and Raymond Aulnay (Rufus), two army friends from Roger's stint in the military in Africa. They set up a plan to hire a hitman named Viletti (Michel...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Paramount goes back to the Star Trek well with this new set, a new collection reissuing the six original theatrical films from the franchise on UHD for the first time and on remastered Blu-ray (and following a steelbook release that really isn't that old… but which contained only the first four movies, making this a bit irritating, and understandably so, for those who put money down on that earlier offering). There isn't much here at all in terms of new extra features, but the presentation quality is very strong across the board. But first, the movies…

Star Trek: The Motion Picture:

Directed by Robert Wise and released in 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is set in the 23rd century and the story begins when the Starfleet's Epsilon 9 monitoring station discovers an alien presence inside an energy cloud heading to Earth. A trio of...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Not to be confused with the Nicholas Winding Refn movie of the same name from 2011, 1997's Drive, directed by Steve Wang, introduces us to Toby Wong (Mark Dacascos), a martial arts expert who has been technologically enhanced to make him the ultimate ass kicker. We see this first hand when he takes down some bad guys in the opening scene. From here, he winds up at a dive bar in Los Angeles where he meets aspiring musician Malik Brody (Kadeem Hardison), just as some more bad guys show up only to once again get slaughtered by Wong.

In quick need of an escape route, Wong winds up taking Malik hostage to a certain extent, forcing him to drive him out of the city in his car to escape from those chasing him down. It's here that Wong explains to Brody his situation. As the bad guys, led by Vic Madison (John Pyper-Ferguson) working for the mysterious Mr. Lau (Jam...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Sidney Salkow in 1963, Twice-Told Tales is a three part horror anthology film that adapts a trio of suspenseful short stories originally written by Nathanial Hawthorne.

The first of the three stories is Dr. Heidegger\'s Experiment, tells the tale of Doctor Carl Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot) and his lifelong friend Alex Medbourne (Vincent Price) as they celebrate his birthday. As the rain comes down, the two men wind up in the crypt of the woman who Carl was to marry, Sylvia Ward (Mari Blanchard), but she passed away from a sudden illness thirty-eight years prior. Heidegger has never loved again, his loss was too great. While in the crypt, Sylvia's coffin is opened and the two aged men are shocked to discover that her corpse is perfectly preserved. Heidegger deduces that the only thing that would have done this would be the unique water that has been...Read the entire review

The Movie:

A wonderfully weird and horny movie that could only have come from the wonderfully weird and horny Ralph Bakshi, 1992's Cool World, a mix of live action and traditional cell animation not unlike Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in that regard, is essentially a film noir, albeit one where a good chunk of the cast is made up of cartoon characters.

The story revolves around Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), a man who spends ten years in prison, and while in the slammer, created a popular comic book series called Cool World whose lead character was a sex pot named Holli Would (Kim Basinger). It was a form of escape for him while doing time and something to do to pass the time. Jack's been having visions of Holli for some time, where she wants to escape from Cool World into the real world and become a flesh and blood human being. The only way that this ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Previously released on Blu-ray in 2012 by HD Cinema Classics, Lewis Milestone's 1946 film The Strange Loves Of Martha Ivers, a film that's been packaged and repackaged plenty of times over the years and which is fairly well known for featuring a young Kirk Douglas in a prominent role, gets reissued in an improved edition from Kino Lorber.

The story follows the titular woman (played by the lovely Barbara Stanwyck), who we meet as young girl where we learn she was raised by her rather unfriendly aunt (Judith Anderson). The victim of a ridiculously strict and sometimes even cruel upbringing, she eventually kills her aunt by sending her careening down a staircase after she attacked young Martha's pet kitten. Martha's two friends, young boys Sam and Walter, witness the death.

This winds up putting Martha into some money as she inherits a steel mill w...Read the entire review

The Movie:

This 1988 Cannon Films/Golan-Globus production stars Peter Fonda as an American Vietnam veteran named Virelli (in a role originally offered to Richard Kiel!) who gathers up a few other soldiers of fortune. Soon enough, DJ (Reb Brown), Cliff (Ron O'Neal) and Wilson (James Mitchum, and yes he is related to Robert, he's his oldest son and it shows) among others head off to Africa where they've been hired by a Colonel Kjemba (Robert DoQui) to protect a dam that's going to be built. It seems that there's some unrest in the area and those in charge of the fictional country want to make sure that the construction goes as planned. Why is there unrest? Because the people who live in the area where the dam will be built are none too keen on being flooded out of their homes.

Upon their arrival, it all starts to hit the fan fairly quickly as different warring factions each ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

An American-Swedish co-production bankrolled by none other than Cannon Films, Dan Wolman's 1971 film, Maid In Sweden was at the top of many a Christina Lindberg fan's wish list until it got a DVD release through Impulse Pictures in 2008. Fast forward twelve years to 2022, and Code Red, through Kino Lorber, give the film a welcome Blu-ray upgrade. While the film follows a formula almost to a fault, it features enough of Christina in her birthday suit to more than make up for whatever shortcomings might be in the script.

Lindberg plays a sixteen year old girl named Inga who decides to leave her small town for a weekend to hang out with her older sister, Greta (Monica Ekman) and her creepy boyfriend, in the big city of Stockholm. Soon enough, she boards a train and makes the journey but upon her arrival, it doesn't take Inga long to discover that her foxy go...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Director Jean Chapot's 1973 film, The Burned Barns (or Les granges brûlées in its native France) would be the filmmaker's last theatrical effort as after the difficulties he ran into on this shoot, he'd make the shift into television productions. Regardless, if he somewhat infamously had trouble corralling his two leads, Simone Signoret and Alain Delon, their performances in this imperfect but interesting murder mystery are so very good that the movie is worth seeing for their work alone.

Early in the movie, the corpse of a beautiful young woman is found brutally murdered in the French countryside on the outskirts of The Burned Barns farm. The farm is run by a stern woman named Rose (played by Signoret) and her husband Pierre (Paul Crauchet) and it is operated by them and their family, Paul (Bernard Le Coq), who is married to Monique (Miou-Miou)...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Arrow Video's Running Out Of Time Collection brings together the two thrillers directed by Johnnie To in 1999 and 2001 respectively in one handsome collector's edition double feature Blu-ray release.

Running Out Of Time:

The first film, written by Frenchmen Laurent Courtiaud and Julien Carbon and then worked on by Hong Kon's Nai-Hoi Yau, introduces us to a man named Cheung (Andy Lau) who is told by his doctor that he's in the late stages of terminal cancer and has only got seventy-two hours left to live. He heads outside and without any hesitation whatsoever, robs a building in the middle of Hong Kong where he takes a hostage. The police send in Ho Sheung-sang (Lau Ching-Wan), the best of the best when it comes to dealing with situations like this, and Cheung essentially tells Ho that, over his remaining seventy-two hours, he'll be playi...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Ted Post's 1978 film, Good Guys Wear Black, was Chuck Norris' second starring vehicle, made shortly his debut in Breaker, Breaker!. In this film, Norris plays a retired special forces operative named John T. Booker who is now finishing up his time at grad school and working here and there as a stunt car driver. Back in The 'Nam, however, he was in charge of The Black Tigers, an elite military group that was ambushed by enemy combatants and left there by the American government, one that claimed it would do all it could to rescue prisoners of war. It was a rescue mission gone very wrong, leaving only Booker and a handful of other men still breathing.

The Movie:

The last of storied director Luis Buñuel's ‘Mexican period' and a more commercial and accessible film than you might expect from the man who gave us films like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and the Salvador Dali-penned exercise in surrealism that is Un chien andalou, 1955's The Criminal Life Of Archibaldo de la Cruz (or, Ensayo de un crimen in its native Spanish titling) is an interesting mix of the macabre and the comedic, a trait that the director would exploit throughout his career.

When the story starts, a bourgeoisies boy is given a music box that has been handed down through his family for generations. The legend behind the antiqued piece is that whenever the music box is played, an enemy will be killed. Not one to take things lightly, the boy decides to give the music box a test drive of sorts, and after letting it p...Read the entire review