The Movie

If you have a daughter under the age of 10, you've probably heard of the Barbie DVD series; a straight-to-video computer animated series featuring your favorite 50-year-old plastic, blonde bombshell. And if you're not familiar with the movies, you've probably seen the toys, because department store toy isles are constantly infested with the latest Barbie DVD merchandise. And if you've been hiding under a tarp for the past several years and haven't seen either, then you've probably still had to sit through countless moans and groans from your little one as to why you haven't bought them for her yet. Ah, the trials and tribulations of parenthood.

If you're like me, you probably scoffed at the DVD's upon first look, dismissing them as lame attempts to be the next Pixar studios franchise. After all the animation is almost archaic in appearance compared to the major...Read the entire review

The Movie:

For those who have been living in a cave for the last decade or so, Al Jazeera is essentially the Arabic version of CNN. It's an Arab news network that has become the most watched channel in the Middle East. While the Bush administration has referred to it as the 'mouth piece of Osama Bin Laden' this latest documentary from Jehane Noujaim, a man of Arabic descent, demonstrates that there is a lot more to their brand of reporting and broadcasting than simple fundamentalist Muslim propaganda.

The focus of the movie is on the way that the Iraq war was reported on by the channel in contrast to how it was reported here in North America and in England. Various members of Al Jazeera are interviewed as are members of the American military, and the film is peppered with clips and comments from various members of the current administration in power (odd that I write this on the day ...Read the entire review

Every once in a while a TV show comes along that breaks new ground inthe way it tells a story and the way you look at a its subjects. As far as police shows go, Dragnet brought the police procedural to thesmall screen, examining the steps an officer takes in solving a crime. Hill Street Blues gave a realistic look at the life of a police officer,concerning itself with the daily trials and tribulations, both personaland professional that cops face.  Another innovative series was NBC'sshort lived show Boomtown, a series that looked at a crime fromall angles.  This program told its story from the point of view ofeveryone involved with a crime: The officers, the victim, the paramedic,the prosecutor, the perpetrator, and even the reporters who cover the crimes. The first season of this excellent series is now available on DVD.

Th...Read the entire review

Themovie

It's inevitable: whenever an actor hits the big time, his pre-famemovies will undergo a bit of a renaissance. How else to explain theissue on DVD of a minor film like 1993's The Silver Stallion,except to capitalize on Russell Crowe's appearance among the cast?With a giant head-shot on the cover, as well as top billing in thecredits, Crowe is clearly the draw here... never mind that he's afairly minor element in the film itself.

Basically, The Silver Stallion is a bit of fluff that's sureto please horse-crazy teenage girls, andcause a lot of rolling eyeballs in just about everyone else. Set inthe Australian outback, the film follows the life of an exceptional"brumby&...Read the entire review

Abel Ferrara's 1990 film King of New York doesn't paint a pretty picture, but it's hard not to appreciate the painting as a whole. For a proper perspective, consider his previous work: Ferrara had a history of crafting violent exploitation pictures (including the infamous Driller Killer), and the Bronx-born director wasn't afraid to put his professional reputation on the line with each effort. After this film, Ferrara would go deeper into the dark side of the human psyche with the harrowing Bad Lieutenant, in which Harvey Kietel arguably gave the best performance of his career.

Still, King of New York remains Ferrara's breakthrough picture, more or less. The biggest reason for this: even with a limited budget, a very talented cast was assembled. For starters, Christopher Walken is the star of the show....Read the entire review

Dummy is an eccentric comedy that is stale in at least two ways. First, the film itself which is a very plain, uninvolving look at a family of oddball losers; second, in the fact that it sat on the shelf for three years only to be scrounged up after star Adrian Brody got Oscar buzz for his breakthrough performance in Polanski's The Pianist.

Steven Schoichet (Adrian Brody) is a shy introverted young man living at home with his meal obsessed mom, battleship model building/porn watching father, and wedding planner/stalked by her ex-fiancee sister, Hedi (Illeana Douglas). His only friend is childhood pal, bundle of energy, punk rocker Fangora (Milla Jovovitch). Steven loses his job at a sterile office and decides to pursue his dream of becoming a ventriloquist. Steven finds romance in his employment agency counselor, Lorena, and, despite Fangora's misguided help (advice like spray pain...Read the entire review

Movie: There is something about dinosaurs that appeals to the kid in us all. Be it their massive size, the sense of history behind them, or just the cool way they have been portrayed in movies, these creatures appeal to the kid in us all. Is it any wonder that they have been used in literature and the movies since each format began? In recent years, television has been putting these long-dead creatures on the small screen in a host of shows, some that come to mind include Lost World and Dinotopia, but there has also been a renaissance in the documentary format too. The Discovery Channel on cable has been actively using computer generated dinosaurs to entertain and inform us for years, starting with the hit, Walking With Dinosaurs, and now releasing on DVD their latest effort, ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Way Past Cool is kind of a cross between urban gang stories like Boyz N The Hood and The Little Rascals. In fact, Director Adam Davidson even opens the movie with some musical clips from Our Gang. While the film tries really hard to be though provoking (and it doesn't fall completely flat on its face in that regard) it still leaves you wanting by the time it wraps itself up.

Once the hip hop begins to blare over the soundtrack though, it's painfully obvious that the Our Gang kids are nowhere to be found in this story and instead we're treated to the antics of a group of gang-bangers from the same age group who roam the streets of Oakland, California (and refer to it as Oaktown).

Known simply as 'The Friends,' our focal group of prepubescent street thugs is lead by a crafty, if chubby, kid named Gordon. And if Gordon's brains aren't ...Read the entire review

Movie: I've been a fan of dinosaur movies since watching Godzilla movies back in the 1960's. Seeing the fantastical beasts bound around, destroying buildings and eating people was always "cool" to me. As time passed, I also learned to enjoy such classic works of literature as Gulliver's Travels and appreciated the themes the diverse types of entertainment offered me as an impressionable child. I never fully outgrew such things and with the advent of the Jurassic Park movies and television shows like Lost World, I was even willing to accept the limitations of the lower budget shows in order to get my "fix" of dinosaurs. A few years back, another source of such fantasy was aired on television, derived from a couple of picture books of such high quality that I wondered if author/artist James Gurney might've shared a similar childhood as mys...Read the entire review

The Running Man (1987) probably sounded a little far-fetched at the time, but it may have been on to something. Set in the year 2017, it's the name of a deadly cat-and-mouse game show that literally takes no prisoners. Long story short, criminals are hunted down by 'Stalkers' (think American Gladiators with heavy weaponry). In addition to the millions watching at home, a bloodthirsty studio audience cheers on the participants. Hmmm...sounds more like a futuristic Roman Coliseum than your typical episode of Family Feud.

Here's the sad part: with the mind-numbing glut of 'Reality TV' during these past few years, we're really not that far off track, are we? Take the short-lived 2001 show Manhunt, for example: contestants take part in a version of 'Capture the Flag', while hunters wait in the shadows wit...Read the entire review

Themovie

Normanand Ethel Thayer, an elderly couple spending another summer at theirlakeside cabin, are faced with several distressing issues: first,Norman's angst about growing old, and then, when their daughterChelsea (Jane Fonda) shows up with her new boyfriend and his son intow, the need to come to terms with all of their relationships. HenryFonda and Katharine Hepburn both received Academy Awards for theirperformances as Norman and Ethel in On Golden Pond; whetherthe 1981 film has really held up in its own right over the past20-odd years is a matter of opinion that will likely differ fromviewer to viewer.

OnGolden Pond is based on a play, and indeed it feels like a filmedplay...Read the entire review

The Movie

Theatrical Release Date: November 4, 1998

Run Time: 1 Hour 36 Minutes

Belly is the story about Tommy (DMX) and his childhood friend Sincere (Nas). Tommy and Sincere grew up together in the project in Queens, New York. The two grew up to become very different individuals, while at the same time running along the same paths. They work together in crime, but while Tommy is power/money hungry, Sincere just wants to make a better life for his family. The two are undoubtedly different in their lives, but their paths seem to be headed the same direction.

This feature opens in February 1999 with Tommy, Sincere, and the rest of their small crew heisting a club, taking all the cash. As the movie goes on Sincere is ready to give up his evil ways and focus on his family, because that's what he really cares about. So as Sincere is ready to break away from his life of crime wi...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Based on the popular videogame, "House of the Dead" is only notable for the fact that it somehow got Jurgen Prochnow ("Das Boot") to play the captain of a small boat. The film opens with five young folks - Greg (Will Sanderson), Simon (Tyron Leitso), Alicia (Ona Grauer), Cynthia (Sonya Salomaa), and Karma (Enuka Okuma) finding themselves in need of transit to get to a rave on an island off the coast of Seattle that's supposed to be "the rave of the year" (seemed pretty underpopulated to me).

They hire a captain named Kirk (Prochnow) and his first mate (Clint Howard - yes, that Clint Howard) to take them out to the island, but the coast guard - who's been after the ship - is following behind. Once they actually arrive, they find out that the party has been overrun by zombies - who got everyone but Rudy (Jonathan Cherry), Alicia's ex, and a couple of other people whose nam...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Not the "Blair Witch"-sized hit that the distributors hoped it would be, Eli Roth's oddball indie horror picture "Cabin Fever" still provides a decently creepy 90-minutes. The film, like most horror pictures, follows a group of teens - Paul (Rider Strong), Marcy (Cerina Vincent), Jeff (Joey Kern), Karen (Jordan Ladd) and Bert (James DeBello). The other four are couples; Bert's just a jock that somehow tagged along for the ride.

While their plans of beer and fooling around go fine for a while, their fun is interrupted when a local hermit comes to their cabin, demanding help. He's contracted a disease that essentially rots his skin, causing him to bleed out terribly. While the kids - freaked out and unaware of how to help - manage to scare him off, it's not too long before one of them starts showing signs of having caught the same terrible disease.

The kids start to...Read the entire review

The Movie

OK, they've done it again. Another perfectly good video game franchise has had its name sullied by a rotten movie. This time the victim is "House of the Dead", a video game in which the player uses a hand-held gun to shoot on-screen zombies and other beasties. (The game originated in arcades and then migrated to home systems.) And while, "House of the Dead" doesn't have the narrative structure of the "Resident Evil" games, or the back-story of the "Tomb Raider" saga (two other games which yielded awful movies), the games does have a plot-line, which was thrown out the window for the movie, House of the Dead.

House of the Dead opens with five twenty-somethings -- Greg (Will Sanderson), Simon (Tyron Leitso), Alicia (Ona Grauer), Cynthia (Sonya Salomaa), and Karma (Enuka Okuma) -- attempting to reach a rave which is taking place on a small island off the co...Read the entire review

Twister, subtitled An Adventure in Windy Living on theDVD but not in the film's credits, has an impressive cast of talented actorshow never quite reached star status.  But talented actors are onlyone link in the chain that makes a good movie, and if the other links arenot solid, the whole thing falls apart, as it did with this movie.

Twister is the story of one weird family.  Maureen (SuzyAmis who also appreared in Usual Suspects) is a 24 year old singlemother who is trying to raise her spoiled daughter Violet (Lindsay Christmanin her only movie role.)  Maureen's brother, Howdy (Crispin Glover)is a very weird free spirit.  Also in the household is the maid Lola(Charlayne Woodard,) and patriarch Eugene Cleveland (Harry Dean Stanton.) The Clevelands are rich.  They live on a palatial estate, and do whate...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In the year 2000, director M. A. G. (a clever shortened form of his real name, Marcus Andreas Gautesen) directed a movie called Just One Look starring up and coming Saturday Night Live star, Jimmy Fallon. The movie wasn't picked up, and so it sat on a shelf somewhere until Artisan Entertainment came to its rescue and slapped this baby out on a shiny silver disc under a new title, The Scheme, for your enjoyment.

Unfortunately, there's very little in the way of anything remotely resembling enjoyment within a hundred miles of this movie and Artisan should have done us all a favor and left it on the aforementioned shelf somewhere.

Fallon plays a Ray, a useless sort who earns his money by scamming people, stealing the mail (in hopes of finding some money or a check inside that he can cash) or selling their blood to the local blood bank on a daily basi...Read the entire review

For almost three years, die-hard fans of "urban action" films have talked about director Craig Ross Jr.'s Blue Hill Avenue, calling it a modern blaxploitation classic. But except for those who had seen it at various film festivals, or somehow managed to score a bootleg copy on videotape, very few people had a chance to see the film. Now, after what seemed like an uncertain future, Blue Hill Avenue has been rescued from obscurity (at least partially), and given a home on DVD.

Chronicling the lives of four inner-city friends from the means streets of Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, Blue Hill Avenue combines elements from the 'hood films of early '90s, with a '70s blaxploitation edge that recalls such classics as Super Fly. Ross starts off the film with a climatic showdown between a small crew of gangsters led by Tristan (Allen Payne), and a rival gang. Before revealing what the final outcome will be, Ro...Read the entire review

Movie: The 1980's produced a lot of teenage movies that appealed to moviegoers by virtue of their soundtrack and stars, not much different than recent movies in fact. In those glory years of music and film, audiences were treated to a host of movies that centered on a mind swap between generations. Be it Big with Tom Hanks, 18 Again, or any of a dozen other copies of this age old idea (heck, I remember when the original Freaky Friday came out). The idea was to show that the generation gap was mostly in our heads and that empathy for one another makes more sense than drawing lines in the sand as we all tend to do. The subject of this review, Dream A Little Dream, was widely considered the worst of the batch by everyone except the kids it was designed for and here's my take on it.

The movie looked at a young guy in high school, Bobby (Corey Feldman) who gets into an accide...Read the entire review

Having witnessed the success of franchises bases on children's TV shows,Mattel decided that they would try their hand at it.  They decidedto try to build a franchise out their Hot Wheels toys.  To that endthey have come up the "Highway 35 World Race" line of cars and a good numberof tie-ins.  In addition to the 35 different Hot Wheel cars themselves,you can buy a World Race video game for PS2, Game Boy, Game Cube or PC, several World Race car tracks, and even a World Race wireless video camera. But the driving force (if you'll excuse the awful pun) behind the salesof these other items is the World Race television show.   Theonly problem is that it hasn't been picked up for syndication.  Thefirst (and second?) episodes have been released by Mattel packaged withtwo cars from the series.  I can only assume that the interest fromtha...Read the entire review

WARNING: If Dirty Dancing is your favorite movie of all time, please skip to the technical portion below. You won't like this first part at all.

Dirty Dancing is a hormonally-charged movie that shoehorns 1980s culture and fashion into a 1960s setting. There's lots of dancing, grinding, music, more dancing, more grinding, more music, and even some family dysfunction thrown in for good measure. With that said, it's one of the very few movies that makes me want to thump my head against the nearest wall until sweet, sweet unconsciousness takes me away to a happier place.

For years, I had no idea what all the fuss was about (and I still have no idea). This was a hugely successful movie, and remains a perennial favorite for a lot of people out there. It's actually pretty disturbing t...Read the entire review

Short Takes

VICTORY OVER VHS OBLIVION! After a staggering 116 WEEKS high among CineSchlock-O-Rama's Most Wanted, the vigilance of CineSchlockers has been rewarded with another capture.

At last! The second-most famous erotic thriller starring an '80s sitcom siren desperate to shed her goodie-goodie image -- the first being Embrace of the Vampire with Alyssa Milano. Here a pre-enhancement then de-enhancement Nicole Eggert strips and sizzles as a psycho nympho who snares an ever gap-jaw'd Corey Haim in an extr...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE

What's this? A television movie based on a John Grisham novel that isn't about lawyers?! Yes, it's true – A Painted House isn't the typical John Grisham story, but it's just as involving as some of the other work we've seen from him.

Directed by Alfonso Arau, who also directed Like Water For Chocolate and A Walk in the Clouds, this Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie does a great job of transporting itself back to the south of the early 1950's, where young Luke Chandler learns about life during one harvest season on his parents' and grandparents' cotton farm.

As the movie opens, Luke's grandfather (Scott Glenn) is looking for workers to help them with the cotton harvest. He hires a group of migrant Mexican workers, and he also hires a family of "Hill People", who have a son with a violent streak, and a young daughter whom Luke fi...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE

New World is a French film (in France, its title is Le Nouveau Monde) which would probably not be seeing a Region 1 DVD release at all if it were not for the fact that this 1995 movie co-stars The Sopranos James Gandolphi in some pre-Tony Soprano work.

The French actors in the film speak French (it's dubbed), while the American actors (Alicia Silverstone among them) are undubbed – which gives the feeling of watching both a foreign and domestic film. The story revolves around a young French teenager who is committed to a young French girl, but finds himself drawn to the American lifestyle thanks to Gandolfini (who is a soldier based in France in the early 1950's), who mentors him about all things American.

And, of course, our young French lad can't resist the all-American lure of Alicia Silverstone…but hey, if you're going to dump your long...Read the entire review

The movie

Nefertiti is familiar to modernviewers largely because of the stunning portrait bust of the beautiful queen,but as it turns out, there is potentially a lot more of a story behind Nefertiti than we realized. NefertitiResurrected interweaves the story of Egyptologist Dr. Joann Fletcher'sresearch into Nefertiti's role in history with Fletcher's attempt to identify amystery mummy as Nefertiti herself.

The material itself isintriguing, but the reason that Nefertiti Resurrected doesn't get a higher markis largely that it's a fascinating 45-minute-long documentary trapped in a98-minute presentation.

There are two main elements tothe documentary: the explanations of Nefertiti's history and possible identityby Dr. Fletcher and other Egy...Read the entire review

The Movie

For youngsters today, the line between marketing, merchandise, and entertainment has become so blurred as to be non-existent. Shows begat toys and toys begat show and it all winds up on DVD, in a never-ending hodge-podge shopping lists run amok. Therefore, it's not surprising to see a toy starring in a direct-to-video film. Barbie of Swan Lake doesn't even attempt to disguise itself as anything but marketing, but at least the makers of the movie has added some artistic integrity to the mix.

As Barbie of Swan Lake opens, we see Barbie (voiced by Kelly Sheridan) at a camp. She's gone to check on the sleeping campers, and find's Kelly (voiced by Chantal Strand) out of bed. Barbie begins to tell Kelly a fairy tale about a young girl named Odette (voiced by Kelly Sheridan), who, in the story, is played by Barbie. Odette lives in a small village and is the ...Read the entire review

The Show

With the recent death of actor John Ritter, there has been a great deal of attention placed on the future of his TV show "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter". But, many have ignore, or most likely weren't aware of, Ritter's other on-going TV project, the PBS children's series, Clifford, the Big Red Dog, for which he supplied the voice of the title character. At this moment, I'm unsure of what will become of this show, but we do have DVD releases of the series with which to remember it.

Clifford, the Big Red Dog, based on the books by Norman Bridwell, tells the story of Clifford (voiced by John Ritter), who is...well...a big red dog. But, Clifford is very big, easily standing ten-feet tall. He lives with his owner, Emily Elizabeth Howard (voiced by Gery DeLisle), a girl whom Clifford loves very much. They live on Birdwell Island, where Clifford...Read the entire review

Short Takes

If New Line's Willard remake represents the zenith of rat wrangling, well, this doesn't. In Rodentz (spelled that way because the letter "S" is, you know, so play'd out, dawg) we've got petshop rats with fishing line yanking them onto two feet and guys standing off camera rattling cages so said beasties appear "angry." What's worse? That's even money between the final reel's guy-in-a-Chuck E. Cheese getup or the 14 looped frames of rodent CGI (including closeups!) that make Asteroids look like Vice City. All that'd be ENDEARING to many creature feature enthusiasts if not for the Yawnsville story about a gaggle of cookie-cutter ...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Prom Night III: The Last Kiss

In the grand tradition of a long line of many sequeled horror films comes the third film in the Prom Night franchise which started with the original back in 1980 and starred Jamie Lee Curtis. While the first movie was a decent enough cheap slasher film, this third entry attempts to fuse horror and comedy, something that far more often goes wrong than right, and comes out as neither and doesn't even manage to be entertaining.

We start the film with Mary Lou Maloney (the lovely looking Courtney Taylor) escaping from Hell and returning to the High School were she was killed years ago. She manages to cast her evil spell over an average student named Alex, who she connives into doing all the clean up work when she starts killing off the staff and students of Hamilton High School. Alex ends up framed for the many murders that o...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Joe Dante's werewolf classic, The Howling, is one of the best horror films of the eighties. And as we all know, with success comes sequels, and in the case of The Howling series, there were a bunch of them. Artisan has recently released two of the later entries in the series: The Howling V: The Rebirth and The Howling VI: The Freaks.

Part V starts off with a scene of mass slaughter centuries ago, in a strange castle in Budapest. We learn that the only survivor is a baby, who we never see, but his cries let us know he has survived. Five hundred years later, a group of people, some American, some British, and some from continental Europe, are invited by a mysterious Baron to the castle from the opening scene that has since been reopened as a tourist attraction after laying dormant and sealed up for hundreds of years.

One by one, certain members of ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE

If Cuba Gooding, Jr. continues to keep placing himself in god-awful movies, I think I'm going to start a campaign to get the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to take back his Academy Award. Boat Trip proves to be another (and perhaps the worst) in a long line of bad choices for Gooding.

Validating Roger Ebert's rule that "No good movie other than The Wizard of Oz features a hot air balloon", Boat Trip assures its path to failure early with a scene where Gooding takes his girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox) on a balloon ride so he can propose to her. It isn't until Gooding is well up into the atmosphere that his character suddenly remembers his problem with heights and motion sickness, and promptly throws up on Vivica – yet still has the nerve to ask her for her hand in marriage.

Needless to say, Gooding is turned down, and also finds out ...Read the entire review

Anthony Hickox's Waxwork films are perfect "concept" horror movies, centered around a premise that was lifted and stretched from the classic House of Wax. It is such a great idea. I don't know about you, but anytime I've ever been at a museum and looked at a good exhibit, I find myself being drawn into it, imagining myself in that place. Suddenly I'm one of those soot covered teens with long faces and bleary eyes standing behind a cannon at the Civil War museum. So, someone finally mined that idea into a horror/comedy. Pass the velvet rope and you're part of the exhibit. And they aren't very friendly.

In Waxwork (1988), college friends, preppie Mark (Zach "Gremlins" Galligan), vixen China (Michelle "Blame it on Rio" Johnson), loudmouth Tony (Dana "Twin Peaks" Ashbrook), and virginal Sara (Deborah "Valley Girl" Foreman) are invited to an exclusive vi...Read the entire review