DVD Talk DVD Reviews https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/list/DVD Video DVD Talk DVD Review RSS Feed en-us The Criminal Life Of Archibaldo De La Cruz (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/75346 Tue, 23 Aug 2022 16:00:17 UTC Recommended

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

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Chariots Of The Gods (also includes Mysteries of the Gods) (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74974 Tue, 14 Sep 2021 15:44:31 UTC Skip It


Cinema-wise, the 1970s was a strange time. When Rocky (1976) was a brand-new movie, audiences and critics alike embraced it, understandably, but what a lot of people don't remember is the praise heaped on star Sylvester Stallone. Look up some of those early reviews and you'll be surprised to learn that many critics thought Stallone was the next big thing in motion picture acting, a successor to Marlon Brando, no less.

Similarly, the granddaddy of speculative, pseudoscience documentaries, Chariots of the Gods (1970), received shockingly good reviews. It was even nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary feature and, as VCI's new Blu-ray's back cover text notes - twice! - it has since been recognized by the Academy as one of the Top 100 Documentaries of All Time. It was also a huge commercial success: it couldn't have cost more than $500,000 to make, yet grossed nearly $2...Read the entire review

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Puzzle (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74831 Tue, 22 Jun 2021 21:00:54 UTC Rent It

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Wild West Days (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74754 Tue, 20 Apr 2021 16:53:05 UTC Rent It

Wild West Days:

Wild West Days is a delightful "Cowboys and Indians" serial directed by Ford Beebe and Clifford Smith, which spread out over 13 weeks (presumably) during the summer of 1937. For 20-minutes at a pop, before your Feature Presentation, you could plop down in a cool movie theater to take in the exploits of Kentucky Wade and his gang, if only to forget the ongoing Great Depression, just for a little while.

Based loosely on the novel "Saint Johnson" by W.R. Burnett, ("Little Caesar", "Scarface" among many others) Wild West Days tells the story of frontier good guy Kentucky Wade, (John Mack Brown) an easy-goin' fellah with an ‘I'm not worried' grin perpetually plastered to his face, and his pals Trigger (Robert Kortman), Dude (George Shelley) and Mike Morales, (Frank Yaconelli) a tight group of do-gooders that ends up looking out for Larry Munro (Frank McGlynn). Larr...Read the entire review

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Santo in The Treasure Of Dracula: The Sexy Vampire Version 4k Restoration (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74724 Mon, 08 Mar 2021 20:30:39 UTC Highly Recommended

Hold on to yer hats -- this one gets pretty convoluted. One of the great icons of Mexican popular culture, El Santo (born Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta) was a silver-masked wrestling star who, beginning in 1958, concurrently starred in more than 50 feature films made through 1982, two years before his death in 1984. In these films El Santo ("the Saint") played a souped-up version of himself, a wrestling champion who moonlighted as a crime fighter and scientific genius, in stories often incorporating sci-fi and/or horror elements. Though he never removed his mask, Santo was never regarded as anything less than a pillar of his community.

One such film was Santo en el tesoro de Drácula ("Santo in ‘The Treasure of Dracula'"), released in 1968. Like other Santo films of the period, it was shot in black-and-white, but a separate color version, El vampire y el sexo ("The Vampire and Sex"), was...Read the entire review

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Jack and the Beanstalk (plus Africa Screams) (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74574 Thu, 19 Nov 2020 21:39:25 UTC Skip It

Not long ago the folks at the 3-D Film Archive and ClassicFlix announced plans for a major restoration of Abbott & Costello's 1952 family comedy Jack and the Beanstalk, a release promising scads of extra features in addition to their typically meticulous restoration work. When Jack and the Beanstalk turned up in DVD Talk's screener pool recently, my reaction was, "That was fast!" and I eagerly grabbed it, unaware that what I'd actually selected was the same movie but from a different label, VCI, offering the film now with their own alleged "4K restoration." As it's been for many decades, Jack and the Beanstalk is in the public domain, and as was the case with VHS and DVD, budget labels have been quick to cash in.

(Bud) Abbott & (Lou) Costello spent nearly their entire movie career (1940-56) at Universal, though Universal loaned them out to MGM for a few films in the firs...Read the entire review

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Dynamo (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74368 Thu, 18 Jun 2020 16:42:36 UTC Rent It

Above average for its type, Dynamo (1978) is but one of dozens of "Bruceploitation" movies, a subgenre of Kung Fu film exploiting the fame of dead superstar Bruce Lee.

When Lee died at just 32 in July 1973, he was fast becoming an international sensation. Yet only three starring movies were released when he was alive: The Big Boss (1971), Fists of Fury (1972), and Way of the Dragon (1973). The partly American-financed Enter the Dragon (also 1973), produced for about $850,000 yet grossed as much as $350 million worldwide, was released mere weeks after his death. Another Lee film, Game of Death, was partially shot in 1972 but put on hold when Enter the Dragon came along. That one was finished using just 11 minutes of Lee footage, the remainder awkwardly substituting doubles.

The movies made in the wake of Bruce Lee's death typically starred "Lee-alik...Read the entire review

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Jungle Queen (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74347 Mon, 01 Jun 2020 14:28:55 UTC Highly Recommended

Part of label VCI's ambitious plan to release newly-remastered Blu-ray editions of classic Universal serials, Jungle Queen (1945) doesn't rate very high among serial enthusiasts but I found its simple charms reasonably satisfying. As with other Universal serials of this period, it's overpopulated with characters, confusing at times, and oddly put together, this like several others ditching the usual recap normally found at the beginning of each chapter.

Perversely, VCI's access to good film elements (mostly: see below) is subverted by remastering seemingly designed to make the image resemble smeary videotape. True blacks are non-existent. Everything is a gray, washed-out mess with no contrast. Flashes of fine detail can't compensate for the utter madness of the senseless, murky look the project supervisor settled (strived?) for. Nighttime scenes suffer badly in particular.

VCI has a reputa...Read the entire review

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El Esqueleto De La Senora Morales AKA Skeleton Of Mrs. Morales (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74234 Thu, 05 Mar 2020 17:26:34 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Dr. Pablo Morales (Arturo de Córdova) works as a taxidermist. He makes a decent enough living and manages to support his hypochondriac wife, Gloria (Amparo Rivelles). Their marriage, however, is quite troubled. While it's fair to say that Pablo enjoys a drink with his friends on a regular basis, he's hardly the raging alcoholic that Gloria makes him out to be when speaking to the local priest (Antonio Bravo) and her judgmental church friends about him. In fact, the way she makes it out, Pablo is an abusive drunk, constantly trying to have his way with her, even when she's taken ill (which seems to be all of the time).

When he comes home from work one day, she insists on sitting with him at the dinner table but then chastises the maid for giving him a beer. He cuts up his steak, only to have her criticize him for eating meat in front of her, something she finds repulsiv...Read the entire review

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Brother Can You Spare A Dime? (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74122 Tue, 10 Dec 2019 15:43:46 UTC Recommended

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Back in the early 1970s I was crazy about Depression-Era Warner Bros. movies, but they weren't shown on TV and only a few circulated in repertory theaters. I bought record albums commemorating a studio anniversary, that had music and dialogue clips. In that climate of deprivation, a documentary that used substantial film clips from the period would have been very welcome. And Philippe Mora made one.

The film sees 1930s America through the movies, through music, and the evasions of newsreels. Franklin Delano Roosevelt preaches prosperity while James Cagney slugs out the decade as a smart-tongued everyman -- in a dozen different roles. Director Philippe Mora investigates what was then a new kind of revisionist info-tainment formula: applying old film footage to new purposes.

Philippe Mora was an accomplished artist and documentary fi...Read the entire review

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Lost City Of The Jungle (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/74053 Mon, 21 Oct 2019 13:30:52 UTC Rent It

Part of label VCI's ambitious plan to release newly-remastered Blu-ray editions of classic Universal serials, Lost City of the Jungle (1946) is an entertaining and unusual chapter play for reasons described below. Remastered in 2K from the original 35mm fine grain, the transfer exhibits a lot of wonderful detail much of the time - but, almost perversely, VCI's access to good film elements is profoundly subverted by remastering seemingly designed to make the image resemble smeary VHS. True blacks are non-existent. Everything is a gray, washed-out mess with no contrast. Flashes of fine detail can't compensate for the utter madness of the senseless, washed-out look the project supervisor settled (strived?) for.

VCI has a reputation for gumming up their Blu-ray releases and, to a point, I've been more forgiving than others. But, in this case, it's mindbogglingly counterproductive to have the raw ...Read the entire review

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The Vanishing Shadow (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73994 Thu, 05 Sep 2019 21:02:37 UTC Highly Recommended

One of the more obscure serials, The Vanishing Shadow (1934) was a Universal production. As fans of such serials - typically 12-part theatrical shorts running two reels (16-20 minutes) apiece - know very well, the vast majority of sound era chapter-plays were made by three companies: Universal, Columbia, and Republic. Though the smallest of the three, Republic is generally considered to have made the best ones, while Universal is said to have made the weakest. That's true to a point, but the serial form went steadily downhill industry-wide after about 1945, until companies stopped making them altogether in 1956. The later ones were much less imaginative, relying on genre tropes and available stock footage with equal measure.

Many Republic titles have been issued through the years, on tape, DVD, and even Blu-ray, but officially-licensed Universal titles have mostly been limited to that company...Read the entire review

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Beyond Atlantis (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73807 Wed, 24 Apr 2019 17:53:35 UTC Rent It

During the late 1960s and early ‘70s there was a surge in partly-American financed movies shot in the Philippines, most of the best of which were directed by Filipino Eddie Romero and produced and/or starred onetime AIP heartthrob John Ashley. Romero was a respected filmmaker within his own country, helming several highly acclaimed films unseen in the U.S. But he also enjoyed steady employment from American producers looking to make cheap movies there. The Scavengers and Terror Is a Man (both 1959), were among the first he made in collaboration with Hollywood-based producers, but Romero really hit his stride beginning with Brides of Blood (1968), a horror film starring John Ashley. Though cheap, Romero's direction brought to the film many genuinely creepy, uniquely Filipino approach to horror cinema.

Ashley enjoyed his "working vacations" there, and got along very well with R...Read the entire review

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Television's Lost Classics Volume One (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73629 Mon, 04 Feb 2019 18:12:33 UTC Recommended

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

John Cassavetes springs forth as a major 1950s talent in these two 'Primetime Special' dramatic plays broadcast live on ABC and CBS. Crime in the Streets is the Reginald Rose classic directed by Sidney Lumet; No Right to Kill is a 'culture for the masses' adaptation of Crime and Punishment. Cassavetes' co-stars are Robert Preston, Glenda Farrell, Terry Moore and Robert H. Harris.

So far the best set of 'classic' Live TV greats is a Criterion disc called The Golden Age of Television, which includes Marty, Patterns, No Time for Sergeants, A Wind from the South, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Comedian and Days of Wine and Roses. Just last year, VCI and Jeff Joseph/Sabucat launched a new Blu-ray project called ...Read the entire review

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Topper Returns (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73582 Mon, 14 Jan 2019 16:01:41 UTC Highly Recommended

Topper Returns (1941) was the third and final "Topper" movie starring Roland Young as henpecked husband Cosmo Topper, even though the fine British character actor never got better than second billing on any of the three films. The first, Topper (1937), starring Constance Bennett and Cary Grant, was producer Hal Roach's first real bid into A-picture production, his small Culver City studio known mainly for short comedies and modest feature films starring Laurel & Hardy, among others. That film was well-received, but Roach was unhappy with MGM's distribution and advertising, and released all his product thereafter through United Artists, including the first Topper sequel, Topper Takes a Trip (1938), reuniting Young with Constance Bennett but not Cary Grant: in that short time he had far eclipsed Bennett on the Hollywood star scale. For Topper Returns, Bennett's character w...Read the entire review

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Blood And Black Lace (VCI Release) (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73504 Mon, 10 Dec 2018 17:27:56 UTC Recommended

The Film:


Mario Bava is a master of extracting substance from within his style, where the moving parts of emotions and motivations oftentimes lead to deeper horror experiences than one might expect. Whether he's lurking in the heavy shadows of black-and-white gothic tales or operating with vivid pools of colored lights from across the spectrum, his direction -- and influence over the camerawork -- conscientiously focuses upon the characters in such a way that even some of the smallest, seemingly inconsequential characters have a little something else going on beneath the surface. In a murder mystery like Blood and Black Lace, this feeds into credible uncertainty as to who's responsible for killings. Taking place mostly within a modeling-slash-b...Read the entire review

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I Married Joan: Classic TV Collection Vol 4 DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73451 Wed, 14 Nov 2018 18:08:14 UTC Recommended

Back in the late 1970s a local UHF station in my Detroit market, WKBD TV-50, ran a summer series consisting of long unseen, rarely syndicated-by-then sitcoms from the 1950s and early-‘60s, most of which never turned up anywhere else since. These included The People's Choice (starring Jackie Cooper), How to Marry a Millionaire (based on the movie, and featuring Barbara Eden), December Bride (and its spin-off, Pete & Gladys), Topper, My Little Margie, Love That Bob! (aka The Bob Cummings Show) and others. What prompted the airing of this collection of old shows? Maybe the local station had rights and the prints were collecting dust, or perhaps some enterprising distributor packaged them together and syndicated them nationally. I have no idea.

Some of these were pretty tepid, but others were great. The one I liked the most is also by far the...Read the entire review

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Don't Open the Door / Don't Look in the Basement (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/73385 Wed, 17 Oct 2018 17:03:58 UTC Recommended

Don't Look in the Basement / Don't Open the Door:

This Grindhouse Double Feature might be better termed a 'Lovers of Regional Cinema' Double Feature, due to the low-light status of director S.F. Brownrigg. Both movies included are relatively light-hearted entertainment as far as horror-thrillers go, while their presentations here aren't able to rise much past their low-budget origins. If you can look past the 'shocking' titles which don't live up to what you'd expect, and can find this at a good price, it might be worthwhile for your rainy-day exploitation shelf.

Don't Look in the Basement (AKA The Forgotten) gets your evening started as the inmates run a podunk mental hospital. Therapy includes letting a violent offender loose with an axe (results: typical) while otherwise indulging every crazy instinct available. I guess the idea is to drive the crazy people sane by lettin...Read the entire review

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The City Of The Dead: Remastered Limited Edition (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72990 Thu, 26 Apr 2018 11:39:47 UTC Highly Recommended

Nineteen-sixty was a watershed year for horror cinema. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Mario Bava's Black Sunday, Roger Corman's House of Usher, and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom changed all the rules.

John Llewellyn Moxey's The City of Dead (original U.S. title: Horror Hotel) is rarely if ever included in this summa cum laude from the Class of 1960, but it should. For such a spectacularly cheap film (₤45,000, or about $128,000) it's exceptionally well made and still effective all these decades later. Even more intriguingly, it coincidentally shares myriad elements with Black Sunday and especially Psycho. The City of the Dead was shot in the fall of 1959, and all three pictures were released within a few months of one another in the late-summer/early-fall the following year, so it's definitely not a case of it imitating the others.

...Read the entire review

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The Twilight People (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72961 Wed, 18 Apr 2018 11:34:45 UTC Recommended

While not a particularly illustrious genre, Filipino horror movies of the late 1960s and ‘70s have their own peculiar charm. John Ashley (1934-1997), a struggling actor-singer and would-be heartthrob, was best known for his movies for American International Pictures. When work there began to dry up, he accepted an offer to make Brides of Blood (1968), a super-cheap horror movie shot in the Philippines.

Ashley, eager to be far from home following his divorce from AIP ingénue Deborah Walley, fell in love with the country and enjoyed working with director Eddie Romero. Moving to Texas, he owned a chain of movie theaters, and discovered Brides of Blood was drawing impressive crowds at his drive-ins. Returning to the Philippines, he eventually bought a condo and in partnership with Romero, would spend three months out of the year there, producing and usually starring in one-to-three movi...Read the entire review

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One Million B.C. (redux) (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72727 Tue, 16 Jan 2018 13:43:18 UTC Highly Recommended

When I reviewed VCI's Blu-ray of One Million B.C. (1940), I wasn't alone in immediately noticing a major flaw in their video transfer. At the time I wrote:

"VCI's Blu-ray…is seriously flawed, though the company presently seems aware of the problem and is working to fix it in the form of eventual replacement discs. Basically the film source elements appear to be in decent if not stupendous shape, but during the authoring stage somebody messed up. The image, while clearly better than any previous home video version, is rife with what VCI describes as 'vertical jaggy' or aliasing, i.e., when straight lines instead resemble jagged little steps. This might be invisible on smaller monitors but on my 90v projection system it's highly noticeable."

Happily, that's been corrected and the replacement discs are now in circulation.

One Million B.C. was a hard-to-find title - I think I ...Read the entire review

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Ruby (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72653 Tue, 12 Dec 2017 02:54:46 UTC Recommended

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Curtis Harrington had as rough a directing career as anyone, but not one without artistic triumphs. Fascinated by fantasy and horror films, he was filming avant-garde short subjects while still a teenager, and wrote what might be the first critical look at screen horror as a genre (Ghoulies and Ghosties, Sight and Sound, 1952). A moody mermaid-terror picture and a trippy space vampire show earned Harrington his ticket to ride. After the highly regarded Games he specialized in horror movies for TV and scare pictures with...Read the entire review

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Topper (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/72514 Mon, 23 Oct 2017 11:16:03 UTC Highly Recommended

Producer Hal Roach saw the decline of two-reel comedies early on. During the early 1930s his chief competitor in that field, Mack Sennett, struggled and eventually went bankrupt, while Roach had a plan to ease his "Lot of Fun" out of short subjects and into features, beginning with Pardon Us (1931), Laurel & Hardy's first long-form movie. That team proved equally popular in feature films, but attempts to transition other Roach favorites like Our Gang and Charley Chase didn't pan out and eventually Roach, who always aspired to make glossy, big-studio features out of his own modest company finally struck pay dirt with Topper (1937).

It's a charming fantasy-comedy, aided greatly by its clever and well-executed optical and on-set special effects. Not only was it a huge critical and commercial success, it established Cary Grant, heretofore primarily a dramatic actor, as a star of screwb...Read the entire review

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The Giant Spider Invasion (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/68568 Sun, 14 Jun 2015 17:31:12 UTC DVD Talk Collector Series

The Giant Spider Invasion:
Boo-ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh! My quest to have a copy of all of the best Giant Spider movies ever made is nearer completion! (OK, so I'm probably not trying that hard.) (Also, inasmuch as a tarantula is a giant spider, let's just let this category be fairly broad.) (And while we're at it, we'll acknowledge that there are a lot of levels on which The Giant Spider Invasion might not be considered the 'best' of anything.) (And there you have it, my quest to write a review with three or more parentheticals in succession is done, too!) So, "boo-ahh-ahh-ahh!" I say! I decree this extras-packed Blu-ray, DVD, CD, Combo, lovingly released by VCI Entertainment, is just what the Holistic Health Care Professional ordered for you! Yes, you!

It's simple really, a meteor crashes behind the farmhouse in which some country-folk are rehearsing Tennessee Williams outtakes or so...Read the entire review

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Annie Oakley: The Complete TV Series DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/66661 Fri, 14 Nov 2014 05:06:23 UTC Recommended

I don't have a whole lot to say about Annie Oakley (1954-1957), the Gene Autry-produced Western series starring Gail Davis as the famous sharpshooter. As the saying goes, it is what it is, which in this case is a TV Western geared for juvenile audiences. VCI's handsome boxed set of The Complete Series seems to be targeting nostalgic fans who were kids back in the 1950s (and now in their sixties and seventies) rather than fans of Westerns generally. Although movie buff me has managed to nurture an appreciation of old black and white movies in my seven-year-old daughter, who without any other prompting surprisingly developed an interest in B-Westerns, it's fair to say kids weaned on Hanna Montana and iCarly probably can't relate to the more innocent charms of Annie Oakley.

When television was becoming popular in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, the first wave of TV W...Read the entire review

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Gorgo (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/59663 Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:19:38 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Kind of a British hybrid consisting of elements from the original Godzilla (or, if you will, Gojira) with a little bit of King Kong thrown into the mix for good measure, 1961's Gorgo was directed by Eugene Lourie who had previously helmed The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms in 1953 and The Giant Behemoth in 1959. Produced by the UK's King Brothers, the film was distributed theatrically by MGM and while it lacks the 'classic' status of some of the better made monster movies that came before it and so obviously inspired it in the first place, it's still a really entertaining way to kill a brisk seventy minutes with some fun, family friendly entertainment.

A mysterious undersea explosion off the coast of Ireland finds two fisherman, Joe Ryan (William Travers) and Sam Slade (William Sylvester) rocks the me's boat and finds them stranded ...Read the entire review

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Dark Star (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57363 Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:21:02 UTC Highly Recommended

I must have first seen Dark Star in 1978 or '79, four or five years its original theatrical release. Star Wars (1977), of course, had been a big hit, and probably distributor Jack H. Harris thought Dark Star could attract college-age kids starved for more space swashbuckling, or something. I think I saw it on the campus of the University of Michigan, on a double-bill with Woody Allen's (and Takashi Tsuboshima's and Senkichi Taniguchi's) What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966). The mostly university student audience found both movies hip and laugh-out-loud funny.

Which is why I was surprised to learn that upon its first release in 1974, audiences weren't even quite sure if Dark Star was supposed to be funny, greeting it with crickets-chirping-in-the-distance silence. Considering that one of the major characters is an alien played by a painted beach ball with the hands ...Read the entire review

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The Fighting Sullivans DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57466 Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:14:28 UTC Rent It

The Movie:

Warning: this review contains spoilers.

The Fighting Sullivans opens with the legend "This is a true story," which must have seemed redundant to the audience who first saw it in 1944. The tragedy of the Sullivans, five close-knit brothers who all enlisted in the Navy during World War II and perished while serving on the same ship, was a well-known, galvanizing event in its day. When 20th Century Fox opted to turn their tale into a film, it must have been a challenge. Playing to an audience of families still grieving from the loss of their own loved ones (or anxiously awaiting their return from service), the filmmakers ultimately chose to make it in a tastefully understated way. The final film plays ou...Read the entire review

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A Christmas Carol (1951) - Restored (Blu-ray) Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57588 Sat, 08 Dec 2012 16:41:08 UTC Highly Recommended



Throughout this review, 2009 on left, 2011/12 on right. Click on ALL images in this review to see 1080p screenshots.


There are countless reiterations of A Christmas Carol, but I never took the time to familiarize myself with 1951's Alastair Sim starring Scrooge (later renamed A Christmas Carol for its American release). Friends and acquaintance...Read the entire review

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Dick Tracy - Complete Serial Collection DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/58577 Fri, 07 Dec 2012 19:27:33 UTC Highly Recommended

The Serials:
 
There are a lot of great companies putting out movies and TVshows that the big studios have ignored, and one of my favorites is VCI.  They're the only retail company thatroutinely releases serials from the golden age of Hollywood, and I don't know wherecliffhangerfans like myself would be without their efforts. Their latest releaseis animpressive collection of all four Dick Tracy serials made by Republicin the30's and 40's.  Including their newlyrestored version of the first serial (which looks absolutely beautiful)as wellas copies of their earlier releases of the other three chapter-plays,this is awonderful set for new and old serial fans.
 
Though ...Read the entire review

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Dark Night of the Scarecrow DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46092 Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:12:48 UTC Highly Recommended

"You may think that you're getting off free, but there's other justice in this world besides the law..."

The Movie
It's amazing how specific nuggets of pop culture stick in your mind as a child, indelible images that are instantly tattooed to your brain. Those snapshot memories are just as vivid now as they were 30-odd years ago. For whatever reason, I'll never forget the excitement surrounding who shot JR (despite being more of a Dynasty fan), commercials for all three of the Jaws films, the tapping on the window from Salem's Lot, the Super Friends take on the Legion of Doom, a mother being murdered with a garden shovel by her daughter in Night of the Living Dead, rooting for Heather Locklear in Battle of the Network Stars (omg, I...Read the entire review

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Spaghetti Western Collection: A Bullet for Sandoval / Any Gun Can Play / The Strangers Gundown / Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die! DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/43869 Fri, 21 May 2010 23:04:29 UTC Recommended

The Movies:

A few years back, VCI released a quartet of Spaghetti Westerns onto DVD, one movie on one disc at a time. Cut to the present day and those four films are back, albeit this time on two DVD-9's and in one handy, fairly priced two disc collection entitled, appropriately enough, The Spaghetti Western Collection. The transfers and extras are identical to those single disc releases, so if you already own those releases this new set offers you absolutely not logical reason to upgrade, but fans of the genre who haven't already picked up these four films can now do so in one fell swoop. Here's a look...

A Bullet For Sandoval:

One of a few foreign films that Ernest Borgnine made, A Bullet For Sandoval, which was directed and co-written by Julio Buchs, is more accurately a starring vehicle for George Hilton, who plays a confederate soldier named John Warne...Read the entire review

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Sea Devils DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/41846 Tue, 18 May 2010 12:16:37 UTC Recommended

In all likelihood produced with funds tied up in Britain, Sea Devils (1953) is a handsomely produced but unmemorable Technicolor historical melodrama about spies and smugglers - it's not really the swashbuckler its advertising suggests - along the English Channel in 1800. The film was produced by David E. Rose and John R. Sloan's Coronado Productions, which made somewhat classy British films with American directors and/or stars: Circle of Danger (1951), Saturday Island (1953) and, most famously, The End of the Affair (1955). In this case, stars Yvonne De Carlo and Rock Hudson were brought over from America, along with director Raoul Walsh.

This Kit Parker Films/VCI release has no extras (other than a few trailers for other VCI titles) but the transfer is excellent, almost flawless.

Read the entire review

]]> Sabu Double Feature: Savage Drums & Jungle Hell DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/41843 Sat, 01 May 2010 11:03:14 UTC Recommended

VCI and Kit Parker Films have teamed up once again for a Sabu Double Feature: Savage Drums plus Jungle Hell. These low-budget jungle movies are quite a contrast: the first is cheap and ridiculous yet pretty enjoyable while the latter is simply atrocious, a misbegotten production with a convoluted history that accounts for much of its awfulness. Savage Drums looks great and so does Jungle Hell. In fact, the latter is a longer cut of the film not seen in more than 50 years, but in the process it loses the only draw it had in the first place. More on this below.


A typical Lippert production that knows how to efficiently deliver its low-budget goods, Savage Drums (1951) is a weird morphing of several genres, a merging of the standard jung...Read the entire review

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Buck Rogers DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/39233 Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:28:39 UTC Recommended

Lost in the shuffle of Universal's three classic Flash Gordon serials, the like-minded Buck Rogers (1939) isn't as fondly remembered, this despite the fact that it's practically Flash Gordon minus the bleached hair. It has the same star, Larry "Buster" Crabbe and some of the same busy supporting players, many of the same sets and stock music cues, co-director Ford Beebe, art director Ralph DeLacy and a few of the screenwriters, and an identical visual style. But it also has less interesting characters, in particular an especially dull main villain, a sharp contrast to Flash Gordon's deliciously evil Ming the Merciless, memorably played by scenery-chewing Charles Middleton. Middleton's Ming was like an outer space Fu Manchu; Anthony Warde's villain in Buck Rogers, space age gangster "Killer" Kane, resembles Ernie Kovacs.

VCI previously released the 12-chapter show ...Read the entire review

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