THE PROGRAM

"The Sensei" is best described as HBO financing "The Karate Kid" meets a "very special episode" of "Blossom." Directed, written, and starring Diana Lee Inosanto (the daughter of one of two men authorized by Bruce Lee to teach Jeet Kune Do), "The Sensei" sets out to tackle some very serious issues, but does so in one of the most amateurish and at times, (unfortunately) unintentionally hilarious fashion. If it weren't for the film's good intentions, I would say this is a movie just waiting for a RiffTrax release, but despite all its shortcomings, I did appreciate what it tried to do.

Opening in a see...Read the entire review

Live Animals:
Suffering (or benefiting) from the usual wintertime madness at our house, I find myself alone with the TV as the wife goes to bed at 9pm. See, she's got a cold, which I think gives us an unbroken three months of illness in the house, as bugs whip back and forth between her and our daughter, occasionally hitting me as well. Which has meant plenty of nights with everyone but me in bed - for what? To watch crummy movies, that's what! Looking like it might fit into that crummy mold is Live Animals, a movie that in some ways typifies low-budget horror filmmaking in the aughts.

What this movie doesn't typify is the mean-spirited crappiness of many of these films. If slashers ruled the '80s, torture porn was the horror hero of the aughts, ushered in by Saw and Read the entire review

Uncross the Stars:
Arghh! That's what I'm coming away with, after watching Uncross the Stars, not because it's 'bad' in the traditional sense of the word. It's just easy. It's mid-century computer programming; three buttons on a TV remote. Click. Click. Click. As the little metal bolt is thrown, the Sylvania switches from poignant Pop Song to even more poignant Strings Instrumental as the young, bereaved husband moves from denial to acceptance. Spare me the moldy platitudes. Uncross is tastefully photographed, skillfully assembled and taken far more seriously by the actors than necessary. It's adding insult to injury.

Corinne, the wife. She's dead, most likely cancer. Her husband plows through the funeral and after with stoicism that a statue would admire. He's a waxwork Kyle MacLachlan. Corinne wrote him a letter. She loved him, and he ought to help his kooky aunt out in the ...Read the entire review

Platinum Disc Corporation's Legends of the West: Volume 5 touting "32 Features, Over 30 Hours" spread over eight single-sided discs with a suggested retail price of just $9.95, is good buy if you can get past the lackluster and in some cases unacceptably poor quality of about half the transfers. The titles are all presumed to be in the public domain, and though one wishes there was an incentive for these bargain basement distributors to put more care into the transfers, many of the films look better than you'd expect and, more importantly, many of the most obscure titles likely would never see the light of day were they not exploited by companies like this one.

Though this is the last of the label's five-volume collection, they weren't scraping the bottom of the barrel either in terms of the quality of the films, nor in terms of their audio/video. (Volumes One and Four are probably the worst ...Read the entire review

Volume 2 of Platinum Disc Corporation's Legends of the West series, a collection of "32 Features, Over 47 Hours" (!) spread over eight single-sided discs with a suggested retail price of just $9.95, is the usual mixed bag of classic public domain offerings, forgotten TV movies, minor Spaghetti Westerns, cheap documentaries, and oddball indies with low bit-rate transfers that range from pretty good to really awful.

Actually, Volume 2 is notable for the number of watchable to pretty good transfers overall. Unlike other volumes in this series, there aren't any cut Roy Rogers films, no dragged-through-the-gravel-pit prints. Of the four volumes reviewed thus far, this is the best-looking set of the bunch.

This reviewer wasn't able to sit through more than a couple titles all the way through, but sampled the rest to gauge the quality of their transfers and print sources. The DVDs a...Read the entire review

With its $9.95 suggested retail price versus 33 feature-length films spread over 38 hours on eight discs, Legends of the West, Volume 3 is a remarkable buy - this despite the fact that about one-quarter of these presumed public domain Westerns are presented in unwatchable transfers while the rest vary greatly in terms of video/audio, from a notch below fair to barely tolerable. What it boils down to is one's personal tolerance for substandard presentation. For this reviewer, the pre-widescreen era movies, those (mostly) B-Westerns made prior to 1953, come off best because they avoid the horrible panning-and-scanning, lackadaisical dubbing and (in some cases) cuts inflicted on European Westerns of the 1960s and '70s, though even these earlier movies are in some cases sourced from cut reissue prints, color productions presented here in black and white, etc.

If you can get past these considerabl...Read the entire review

It was with considerable trepidation I plucked Legends of the West, Volume 1 from DVD Talk's screener pile. Though attracted to the sheer number of mostly arcane B-Westerns, Spaghettis, and forgotten obscurities included on its eight single-sided discs - "36 Features, Over 43 Hours" boasts the cover art - I also knew I was perilously riding headlong into Public Domain Territory. With their copyrights not renewed or never properly copyrighted in the first place, these movies have all become fair game for anyone with a little ambition and a DVD burner; no painstaking restorations of original camera negatives here.

Perhaps more than any other movie genre, the B-Western exemplifies the problem of movies falling into the public domain. On one hand, protected films like Warner's early John Wayne movies (The Telegraph Trail, Somewhere in Sonora, etc.), Image Entertainment's "Hopalong C...Read the entire review

Nasty space aliens plan to convert Earth's population into a fast-food resource in this derivative but not totally undistinguished cable miniseries. A diverse group of citizens comes together when threatened by a conspiracy that seems to have infected all of city hall and the police force. Before one can say "Quatermass" three times very fast, the show gives a nod to every invasion cliché from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Alien. A pleasant cast and good direction smooth out the dull passages, and every so often a rather good scene surfaces to give Final Days of Planet Earth an unexpected thrill or two.

Strange disappearances and cover-ups proliferate in a N...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/24411 Mon, 16 Oct 2006 05:23:04 UTC Highly Recommended

The Movie

Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but lately, I tend to focus more on the story in movies. Sure, being a film lover, the visuals are still very important, but if there's not a good story involved, I just don't find myself invested in the film. And all good stories start with a good concept. The movie Salvage starts with a whopper of a concept (and one that -- to the best of my knowledge -- hasn't been done before) -- take the central premise of Groundhog Day and place it in a horror film. The result is a low-budget horror film that packs a wallop.

Lauren Currie Lewis stars in as Claire, a fairly normal young woman. As the film opens, Claire is getting off of work from her job at a convenience store. She goes outside to wait for her boyfriend Jimmy (Cody Darbe) to pick her up, but when his truck arrives, a stranger is driving it. The man introduce...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/11420 Mon, 05 Jul 2004 17:44:17 UTC Recommended

features this title....Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/3198 Fri, 04 Jan 2002 07:05:08 UTC Recommended

Is a picture "lost" if no one ever bothered to buy it? Probably not. You'd think a Nazi biker flick would've been an easy sell for the drive-ins, but The Tormentors (1971, 78 minutes) sat in a garage along side musty National Geographics and rusted paint cans until TransWorld Entertainment decided to put it on video in 1986. That's 15 YEARS after director David L. Hewitt completed the film using B. Eagle as an alias. James Gordon White penned the script, did a bit of acting in the flick, and would later go on to type up the screenplay for Lee Frost's racially-charged Thing with Two Heads. Now, 30 years after Tormentors' failed bid for big-screen glory, the film rises once...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/2974 Mon, 19 Nov 2001 08:41:01 UTC Recommended

CineSchlockers should be well versed in the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis by now. Among the Godfather of Gore's many contributions to exploitation cinema was his discovery of actor William Kerwin. The late Mr. Kerwin, who often worked under the name Thomas Wood, was a leading man who knew his lines, took direction and wasn't hesitant to lug heavy lighting cables around when called upon. A true professional, not a star, which is exactly why Lewis repeatedly cast him in such classics as Scum of the Earth and Blood Feast. Between making pictures with Herschell, Bill joined his brother Harry in scenic Montreal to shoot a flick they'd dreamed up called Playgirl Killer (1966, 86 minu...Read the entire review

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