Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 20 of 47

A Star is Born (1954) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

March 5, 20141950s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Musical, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, Tom Noonan
screenplay by Moss Hart, based on the screenplay by Dorothy Parker & Alan Campbell & Robert Carson
directed by George Cukor

by Walter Chaw A big, giant mess of a movie, big, giant mess of a director George Cukor’s A Star is Born–a remake of the 1937 Janet Gaynor vehicle as well as Cukor’s own 1932 What Price Hollywood?–finds big, giant mess of a gay icon Judy Garland quivering gallantly on the razor’s edge of total mental collapse for 176 famously-restored minutes. A miracle of single-mindedness and dedication to the film-preservation cause? No doubt. A movie that could easily withstand 90 minutes of liberal pruning? Indeed. And unlike that question posed rhetorically of Joseph II in Amadeus, it’s all too obvious which bits need trimming. Start with the 20-minute (might as well be 20-hour) “Born in a Trunk” number, inserted by Jack Warner unbeknownst to Cukor and intended to showcase Garland’s then-healthy stage act. A “showstopper” in every sense of the word, it’s unbelievably bad and, more than bad, it betrays everything that’s worked about A Star is Born up to that point. A film-within-a-film-within-a-film, it has Judy vamping her way through a series of surreal set-pieces, telling her origin story while doing a medley of standards from the Warner catalogue. It’s painful for all the wrong reasons.

Crawlspace (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

March 3, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Klaus Kinski, Talia Balsam, Barbara Whinnery, Kenneth Robert Shippy
written and directed by David Schmoeller

by Bryant Frazer I’m pretty much on board with a horror movie about a creepy landlord who stalks his college-aged tenants, waging a low-level terror campaign against them by deliberately releasing pests into their living spaces. If he’s a sadist and a serial killer who keeps souvenirs of his victims (by which I mean body parts in jars), that just seems to go with the territory. If he’s also a hardcore Nazi sympathizer with a daddy fixation and a concentration-camp victim locked up in the attic, well, that sounds like it might be a little over the top. But if that creepy landlord-sadist-sociopath-Nazi is played by Klaus Kinski? Now you’re talking.

Hannibal: Season One (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

March 2, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Horror, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
“Apéritif,” “Amuse-Bouche,” “Potage,” “Œuf,” “Coquilles,” “Entrée,” “Sorbet,” “Fromage,” “Trou Normand,” “Buffet Froid,” “Rôti,” “Relevés,” “Savoureux”

by Walter Chaw I read Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon sometime in the summer of 1985, when puberty and a crippling stutter conflated new, confusing biological drives with defensive rage. It’s a wonder, really, that anyone gets out of junior-high alive. I had developed a taste for outré entertainments long around this time–thirteen, gawky, outcast in my mind, if not necessarily in reality. It was easier for me to identify with the Michael Myerses and Jason Vorheeses of the underverse: hiding, voyeuristic, jealous, yearning. I think we learn affinity with monsters as our own bodies betray us, metastasize around us, dosing our brains with liquid spikes of ecstasy and their attendant pitch-black abysses. I took refuge in movies rented from the local video stores in and around my suburban oubliette, and eventually in books like Harris’s masterpiece, which, once discovered, was something I came back to like a scab, like a totem to be worried. Watching Manhunter on VHS a year or so after its release, I was astounded to discover it was Red Dragon. I hadn’t considered that anyone else knew about, much less was interested in, the contents of my secret stash. In the years before Internet and the vast, instant dissemination of information, there were still such things as the private, the personal. Manhunter was validation, exposure, and sanctification of my perversion. I was outed.

The Jungle Book (1967) [Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 23, 20141960s, 2014, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras A
story by Larry Clemmons, Ralph Wright, Ken Anderson, Vance Gerry, inspired by the Rudyard Kipling “Mowgli” stories
directed by Wolfgang Reitherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Jungle Book receives only two passing mentions in Neal Gabler’s mammoth biography of Walt Disney, even though it has the distinction of being the last animated film Disney lived to produce and ended his career in a commercial triumph to bookend the early success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Gabler’s brevity on the subject suggests that The Jungle Book was of little consequence to Disney, but there are clues to the contrary between the lines, such as when Gabler writes tantalizingly about Walt’s opinion that early drafts of the script were too “sober.” Indeed, he was personally invested in the project to the point of choosing it over his relationship with long-time story man Bill Peet, who’d brought Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories to Disney’s attention in the first place. Peet’s adaptation was, as Walt saw it, beset by its fidelity to Kipling, and he solidified his vision for lighter-hearted fare by hiring radio icon Phil Harris, whose husky, hearty voice would become synonymous with Disney animation in those posthumous years. The energy and levity Harris brought to the minor character of Baloo the Bear led to a reconceiving of the narrative so that it pivoted, in Gabler’s words, on the Falstaff/Prince Hal dynamic between Baloo and child hero Mowgli.

Nebraska (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 17, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD

Nebraska1

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

Arrow: The Complete First Season (2012-2013) + Supernatural: The Complete Eighth Season (2012-2013) – Blu-ray Discs

February 12, 20142012, 2013, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Television, Werewolf

Supernatural1

ARROW: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Honor Thy Father,” “Lone Gunmen,” “An Innocent Man,” “Damaged,” “Legacies,” “Muse of Fire,” “Vendetta,” “Year’s End,” “Burned,” “Trust but Verify,” “Vertigo,” “Betrayal,” “The Odyssey,” “Dodger,” “Dead to Rights,” “The Huntress Returns,” “Salvation,” “Unfinished Business,” “Home Invasion,” “The Undertaking,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Sacrifice”

SUPERNATURAL: THE COMPLETE EIGHTH SEASON
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
“We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “What’s Up, Tiger Mommy?,” “Heartache,” “Bitten,” “Blood Brother,” “Southern Comfort,” “A Little Slice of Kevin,” “Hunteri Heroici,” “Citizen Fang,” “Torn and Frayed,” “LARP and the Real Girl,” “As Time Goes By,” “Everybody Hates Hitler,” “Trial and Error,” “Man’s Best Friend with Benefits,” “Remember the Titans,” “Goodbye Stranger,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “Taxi Driver,” “Pac-Man Fever,” “The Great Escapist,” “Clip Show,” “Sacrifice”

by Jefferson Robbins Kindred shows in more ways than just their sharing a network, a Vancouver, B.C. shooting base, and a David Nutter-helmed pilot, The CW’s “Arrow” and “Supernatural” also share a gestalt. Post-“The X Files”, post-“Buffy”, they grapple with family legacies, duty versus desire, and bonds (specifically male) threatened by the intrusion of a) monsters and b) lovers. Watching the debut season of the former alongside the eighth season of the latter, it becomes clear that “Arrow”‘s showrunners, headed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, are just as steeped in the modes and methods of this youth-oriented action programming as “Supernatural” creator Eric Kripke. Both series find young, handsome protagonists consumed with the bloody twilight work left undone by their dead fathers; and both–despite “Arrow”‘s roots as a second-tier DC Comics property straining for multimedia relevance–are better, and bloodier, and in some ways more relevant, than one has any right to expect.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

February 5, 20142012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

Dracula2

Dario Argento’s Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn’t? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento’s work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he’s riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he’s lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn’t really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he’s made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento’s Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all time. Until you’ve endured it, I can’t quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it’s a fucking tragedy.

Night of the Comet (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

February 3, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

Nightofthecomet1

½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B
starring Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Geoffrey Lewis
written and directed by Thom Eberhardt

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s a quote from the seventh season of “The Simpsons” that applies to the problem before us where Bart, happening on a “Schoolhouse Rock” thing and learning from Lisa that it’s one of “those campy ’70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers,” says, “We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little.” If there were, and if it had, we might’ve avoided the current rage for hipsterism–if the Joss Whedons of the world (and David Cranes and so forth) had found themselves casualties in some hostile jungle setting, then would this current youth generation have adopted, ironically, that last generation, and would people like me at my tender age of 40 be fuelling demand for hale distribution/archival companies like Shout! to produce exhaustively-supplemented HiDef releases of garbage like Thom Eberhardt’s excruciating Night of the Comet? Look, I’m not immune–I wrote an entire monograph (200+ pages, no kidding) on Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile that, in my defense, was more memoir than anything else (or is that more disclaimer than defense?). Still, I’ll proclaim to my grave that Miracle Mile has substance, while Night of the Comet has none. The first and greatest danger of nostalgia is that, having grown up with certain artifacts, we treat them like family and tend to love them unconditionally, as family does. This affection doesn’t mean that Junior isn’t a grinning idiot, however, because at least in this instance, he is. And I’m a strong believer that if one of your family members is a grinning idiot, it’s actually your job not to inflict him or her on other people.

John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

February 2, 20141990s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Escapefromla1

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill & Kurt Russell
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The 1990s were unkind to John Carpenter: The stock market was booming, there was a Democrat in the White House, and the American horror film was at a low ebb. That was the decade when Carpenter–arguably the best B-movie auteur in the world during the 1980s and certainly the most audacious–lost his mojo. Exhausted from the experience of making two genre classics (They Live and Prince of Darkness) back to back, Carpenter took a couple of years off from filmmaking. When he was ready to work again, he considered making The Exorcist III but eventually settled on an ill-fated Chevy Chase vehicle, the $40 million sci-fi adaptation Memoirs of an Invisible Man, that torpedoed his attempted return to big-budget filmmaking. Carpenter tore through three more projects in the next three years–the Showtime horror anthology Body Bags, the Lovecraft riff In the Mouth of Madness, and a Village of the Damned remake–before deciding to pillage his own back catalogue with a sequel to the dystopian Escape from New York.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 30, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Road Movie, Satire, The Criterion Collection

WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda “The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror.” So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go–a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn’t enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Robert Blake, Billy (Green) Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. By 1973 in the United States, film had already become chronicles of listless motion, failed ideologies, ironic Westward expansion, and rampant paranoia. American cinema was in the process of cannibalizing itself in great gulps of genre reconsideration, taking the lead of the movies-by-critics of the French New Wave and reassessing the western/film noir/thriller cycle of studio-era Hollywood through a new mirror darkly: The iconography of the hero mythology Americans hold most dear (cowboy, hardboiled detective, two-fisted man of action), forced now to be populated by incoherent psychopaths and, worse, effeminate ones–lawyers, journalists, ex-cons, ex-soldiers back from an unpopular war, unloved, disrespected, lost and still losing.

We’re the Millers (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 23, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Road Movie

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Ed Helms
screenplay by Bob Fisher & Steve Faber and Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

by Walter Chaw Rawson Marshall Thurber’s return to the territory of the screwball gross-out comedy that put him on the map, the better-than-it-should-be Dodgeball, is the better-than-it-should-be (but not as good as Dodgeball) We’re The Millers, an essentially plotless road-trip intrigue that nonetheless glances off 2013’s concern with the decline of the middle class while providing a couple of chuckles along the way. It’s the lowbrow version of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America if looked at through a particularly sympathetic lens–a hint of a conversation about class, a whiff of something about how hard it is to make a living on streets getting meaner by the day. Ultimately, it’s probably just lucky that the cast assembled has an impressive improvisational pedigree (and that the director is open to making adjustments midstream), lending a stale comedy of mistaken identity a degree of perhaps-undeserved life. It probably doesn’t hurt that We’re the Millers never, at any point, tries to be something it’s not: rescued by a total lack of ambition.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 21, 20141970s, 2014, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: John Carpenter, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Nancy Loomis
written and directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer Written and directed by USC film-school grad John Carpenter, Assault on Precinct 13 is the work of a man with something to prove. Carpenter had finished one film, the shot-on-16mm SF parody Dark Star, co-written with Dan O’Bannon, but he found that nobody in Hollywood took it (or him) seriously. After winning a for-hire writing gig for Columbia Pictures (Carpenter wrote the screenplay that became The Eyes of Laura Mars), he got his hands on a hundred thousand dollars and wrangled some of his friends from USC to help him make the first “real” John Carpenter film. The project, which borrowed its story from Rio Bravo and its mood from Night of the Living Dead, was a siege movie set in an abandoned police station in the fictional Anderson, CA, identified on screen as “a Los Angeles ghetto.”

Body Bags (1993) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 13, 20141990s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound C- Extras B
starring Robert Carradine, Stacy Keach, Mark Hamill, Twiggy
written by Billy Brown & Dan Angel
directed by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer In 1989, HBO debuted a horror anthology show, “Tales from the Crypt”, based on stories from the disreputable EC comic books of the early 1950s. Jump-started by a stable of Hollywood big shots like Richard Donner, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis, the show was a hit, and the wisecracking “Crypt Keeper” who introduced each episode quickly became a pop-culture icon. HBO’s rival Showtime, known primarily for its softcore anthology “Red Shoe Diaries”, was presumably aiming to duplicate that success when it backed Body Bags, an anthology project led by co-executive producers John Carpenter and his wife, Sandy King. Despite that genre pedigree, the series never got off the ground, but a pilot was completed: three half-hour segments with a goofy framing story involving Carpenter himself doing a deadpan Betelgeuse impression among the stiffs in a city morgue. The finished omnibus aired on Showtime as a one-off in the summer of ’93.

Eyes Without a Face (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Les yeux sans visage
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin, Edith Scob
screenplay by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon
directed by Georges Franju

by Walter Chaw Five films changed the conversation in 1960. They were the fire, though the embers were stoked in the years leading up to them. Looking for signposts in the Eisenhower Fifties, you find the juvenile-delinquent cycle, plus the outré horror flicks of England’s Hammer Studios, or Japan’s tokusatsu, or France’s Nouvelle Vague. More directly, you find a pair of films based on works by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Diabolique and Vertigo. But in 1960, there was this quintet, each the product of parallel genesis, each proof after a fashion of a Jungian collective unconscious, perhaps, certainly that things long-simmering inevitably boil over. There’s an idea in my head, put there by Ethan Mordden’s Medium Cool, that everything that happened in the arts in the United States throughout the Fifties points to what was about to happen in our culture in the Sixties. Mordden is the source of my favourite teaching point when it comes to the two eras: that in the Fifties, if you didn’t listen to Mother, society was doomed; and in 1960, if you listened to Mother, you were Psycho.

Room 237 (2013) – Blu-ray Disc (UPDATED)

December 20, 20132013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Documentary, Esoterica, Stephen King

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
directed by Rodney Ascher

“A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analyzed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd.”
–Stanley Kubrick, interviewed by Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Part 4

by Bryant Frazer Did director Stanley Kubrick encode The Shining with an admission that he helped create phony footage of the Apollo moon-landing in 1969? Well, of course not. That’s nuts. It’s a cockamamie argument. And it’s one of several cockamamie arguments advanced by viewers given a platform for their unconventional theories in Room 237, an odd duck of a documentary about the conclusions reached by five different Kubrick fans upon very close analysis of The Shining.

The Lone Ranger (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

December 15, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Superhero, Western

Loneranger1

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw What Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger has going for it, in addition to a genuinely ugly streak of nihilism and a surprisingly high body count, is that it doesn’t seek to “darken” its titular boy scout hero so much as offer that his brand of do-gooderism seems naïve and ineffectual in the modern conversation. It’s the same tactic taken by Arthur Penn’s own picaresque western Little Big Man, the film it most resembles right down to the framing story: an aged narrator relating his sometimes fanciful tale to a modern chronicler, used to amusing effect when the plot gets out of hand, Princess Bride-style. It’s like a lot of movies, I guess (including two Simon Wincer westerns, Quigley Down Under and Lightning Jack), which doesn’t mean it’s derivative so much as it means that it plays like any number of satires of the kind of innocence that made the Lone Ranger character a favourite of impressionable young Americans for generations. It’s more the anachronism of The Brady Bunch Movie than the update of Man of Steel, in other words–and the better for it, even if its ultimate message appears to be that the crimson tide has overtaken us, once and for all, and there’s no real room left in the world for the idealism represented by a hero with a list of creeds, the first of which is that to have friends one must first be a friend.

Curse of Chucky [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

December 3, 20132013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Curseofchucky1

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fiona Dourif, Danielle Bisutti, Maitland McConnell, Brad Dourif
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Bryant Frazer Say what you will about the Child’s Play movies, but don’t accuse franchise creator Don Mancini of being a hack. Sure, his Chucky, a walking-and-talking “Good Guy doll” possessed by the soul of a serial killer, is a steal. Nothing original about it. Chucky is a foul-mouthed iteration of creepy Toys “R” Us killers from any number of horror films–most of them dating to Cavalcanti’s famous segment from 1945’s Dead of Night, though another key influence was the notoriously pants-wetting 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, with its murderous Zuni fetish doll sharing the screen with a terrified Karen Black. But something about Mancini’s formulation clicked with Fright Night director Tom Holland, and the 1988 Child’s Play, which detailed Chucky’s origin story and pitted him against a young boy, was a low-budget success that naturally demanded sequels. Mancini remained on board as screenwriter as two more directors took on two more Child’s Play entries. After 1991’s Child’s Play 3, the character seemed played-out, but Mancini successfully resurrected him with the tongue-in-cheek Bride of Chucky, which brought Jennifer Tilly into the fold along with director Ronny Yu, and Mancini finally took the directorial reins himself with the even more broadly comic Seed of Chucky, which numbered Britney Spears and Martha Stewart among its victims.

Monsters University (2013) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 12, 20132013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Pixar

Mu2

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Daniel Gerson & Robert L. Baird, Dan Scanlon
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Bill Chambers On a school trip to Monsters, Incorporated, young cyclops Mike Wazowski, the kind of pipsqueak who gets saddled with the teacher when his classmates choose partners, sneaks onto the scaring platform and follows an octopus-like creature through one of the closet-door terminals. Rather than reprimand him, the monster tells Mike he might have what it takes to become a scarer and gives him his cap, Mean Joe Green-style. That hat bears the logo of the Scarer’s alma mater, Monsters University (better than Fear Tech!); an undergrad is born.

Snuff (1976) – Blu-ray Disc

November 11, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Thriller

*½/**** Image B+ Sound C+ Extras B+
starring Liliana Fernández Blanco, Ana Carro, Enrique Larratelli, Mirtha Massa
written and directed by Michael Findlay (with additional footage directed by Simon Nuchtern)

by Bryant Frazer For the majority of its running time, Snuff is pretty standard grindhouse fare. Shot on the cheap and loosely based on the Manson cult murders, which were still big news when the film was being shot in 1971, it’s a potboiler about a serial-killing biker gang of women in thrall to a presumably charismatic, self-styled guru calling himself Satán. Shootings, stabbings, softcore groping, and general toplessness ensue. But it’s not your ordinary South American Satanic nudie cult film à clef. Among dime-a-dozen exploitation films, Snuff is special.