Blu-ray Disc Archives - Page 21 of 47

The Conjuring (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

October 31, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that a pineapple is an apple, James Wan’s latest exercise in jump-scare theatre is the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The Conjuring. In it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film begins lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of ghost-hunting, confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they’re called to the modest New England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former home of a WITCH! Can you fucking believe the luck? An evil witch lived in this house. Fuck. A witch. Motherfucker, am I right? You buy a house and you think that…anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts out innocently enough with the largely indistinguishable Perron girls getting jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of hide and clap (which sounds venereal but isn’t, unless you’re doing it really wrong) that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight of stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That’s when daddy Roger (Ron Livingston) calls the Warrens… Well, he doesn’t, because he’s away on a week-long business trip and he’s a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn after the fact… Um… He’s not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan seems distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 29, 2013****/****, 1940s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, War

Tobeornottobe2

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart
screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw Ernst Lubitsch took chances, none greater than To Be or Not to Be. Released in the first months of America’s involvement in WWII, in that initial flurry of propaganda that saw the Nazis as murderous, animalistic, inhuman Hun, Lubitsch chose instead to portray them as ridiculous, as human–to make a comedy, a farce…and a masterpiece, as it happens. It’s a crystallization of his work in that way: He’s always more interested in foible than in oppressive arcs of personal failure–if Nazis can be seen to be possessed of the same faults as the rest of us, the same vanities, the same fears. Make no mistake, To Be or Not to Be is no olive branch. Seventy years on, it remains among the most withering satires of totalitarian governments and the politics of groupthink, but it suggests that Nazism is just one of many insufficient sops to the insecurities hardwired into us–that we’re all just thin projections strutting and fretting our hour on the proverbial stage, each susceptible to things that would give relief from the pain of lack of self-confidence and identity. It’s a film that seeks to explain why people create cults of personality. That it sets itself amongst a theatre troupe performing “Hamlet”, itself a play that houses another play within itself (holding a mirror up to nature, indeed), makes total sense in a picture that, through this absurdity, seeks to highlight greater absurdities. Of all his great films (and when push comes to shove, I’d say Trouble in Paradise is and likely always will be my favourite Lubitsch), To Be or Not to Be is inarguably his greatest.

Psycho II (1983) [Collector’s Edition] + Psycho III (1986) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

October 27, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

PSYCHO II
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Robert Loggia, Meg Tilly
screenplay by Tom Holland
directed by Richard Franklin

PSYCHO III
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Anthony Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey, Roberta Maxwell
screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue
directed by Anthony Perkins

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For a fool’s errand, Psycho II–a decades-belated, colour follow-up to a seminal black-and-white horror by a filmmaker whose mythical stature had only grown since his death–is nothing short of a miracle. The story goes that in the early-Eighties, when sequels were the new Gold Rush, Universal–who’d seen healthy returns on Jaws 2 and Smokey and the Bandit II–realized it had a sequelizable property in Psycho but intended to hedge their bets with a telefilm for the burgeoning cable market. When Anthony Perkins got wind of the project, he expressed an unanticipated interest in reprising the role of Norman Bates, having done so one time before in a warmly-received sketch on the first season of “Saturday Night Live”. Australian Richard Franklin, a USC graduate back in Hollywood to direct the picture, realized the studio could be shamed into releasing Psycho II theatrically were Perkins to star in it, and recruited The Beast Within screenwriter Tom Holland (who went on to give us Fright Night and Child’s Play) to craft a script the actor couldn’t resist. Once Perkins said “yes,” Universal begrudgingly bumped it up to a feature but still expected it to be made quickly and cheaply like the original–probably to the perverse delight of Hitchcock scholar Franklin, who prided himself on doing things the Master’s way all through production, going so far as to cameo in the film.

John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 23, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blount, Victor Wong, Jameson Parker
screenplay by John Carpenter (as Martin Quatermass)
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The first of two low-budget films that John Carpenter wrote pseudonymously and directed in and around downtown Los Angeles in the late-1980s, John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is one of the creepiest movies ever made. Underrated at the time by critics who called it “cheesy” (Vincent Canby)¹ and said “[it] stinks” (Richard Harrington), Prince of Darkness was clearly made fast and on the cheap, and it’s roughly-crafted by Carpenter standards. Still, it’s a triumph of mood. Filling out a mystery-of-the-ancient-artifact yarn with a cosmic-horror mythology, Prince of Darkness lives in a sweet spot between religious thriller and Satanic potboiler where science is the way, the truth, and the life, for better or worse.

Slacker (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 15, 2013****/****, 1990s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine, and a whole bunch of people
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Jefferson Robbins Before it became a lazily-applied shorthand for my generation in particular, Slacker was a film about doom. It’s pervasive throughout this seemingly casual, meticulously constructed, 24-hour baton-pass through bohemian Austin, Texas, in which characters confront intimations of death, their own or that of the species in general, and respond with rhetoric, bemusement, a fatalistic shrug, or a joyride. Writer-director Richard Linklater awakens from vivid dreams on a bus in the opening scene, then unspools his vision to a Buddha-silent cab driver (Rudy Basquez). His most memorable dreams, he reports, often feature sudden death: “There’s always someone gettin’ run over or something really weird.” Fair enough to wonder if we’re not dreaming along with him, in some dress rehearsal for Waking Life, when he quickly happens upon a mother (Jean Caffeine) sprawled in a residential Austin boulevard, freshly driven over by her disturbed son (Mark James).

The Bling Ring (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

October 15, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama

Blingring1

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the VANITY FAIR article by Nancy Jo Sales
directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Doomed to be compared–unfavorably, I think–to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring is better seen as another document of ennui and privilege and the different ways the same old dissatisfaction and yearning manifest in endlessly evolving, endlessly confounding ways, generation by generation. Appearing as they both do in the middle of a ceaseless recession with our leaders arguing, as they did in the late-1930s, about social programs that one side believed indispensable and the other recklessly overpriced, neither film is terribly different in structure and execution from The Wizard of Oz. Coppola, upon reflection, is the perfect artist for an updating of Dorothy’s trip to the Emerald City–she is, after all, Dorothy. If you were to freeze-frame the film during its opening titles (scored brilliantly, discordantly, by the Sleigh Bells‘ “Crown on the Ground”), you’d note, as my editor Bill did on Twitter, that Coppola’s own credit reads “Written and Directed by Rich Bitch Sofia Coppola.” Self-awareness, self-deprecation, it’s all of those things, but what it is most, I think, is a kind of acceptance: her own peace with her relationship with the two “acts” of her public life, the first indicated perhaps by her father not protecting her well enough as an actress, the second by her move to behind the camera as a director of quiet, trance-like pictures about little girls lost. If The Bling Ring is ultimately the least of Coppola’s films, it gathers weight, develops context, taken as a whole with the others. Say what you will and count me deep in her camp, Coppola is every bit the auteur her father is–and it’s his fault.

The Hangover Part III (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

October 6, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Road Movie

click
any image to enlarge

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring
Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay
by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed
by Todd Phillips

by
Angelo Muredda When Project X
spilled forth from its amniotic
septic tank last spring, I
read it as a prime example of a
producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That
found-footage
chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a
monument to
producer Todd Phillips's equally noxious Hangover
series, where the same Dionysian impulses and
deep-seated hatred of the different–whether female, trans, queer, or
disabled–were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a
difference a
year makes. If Project
X was a brand
consolidator and The
Hangover Part II
was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing
Phillips's
demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley
Cooper's
Phil to Ed Helms's Stu, Part
III is an actors'
contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment,
Cooper has
become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been
savaged
for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on "The
Office", while co-star Ken Jeong's fortunes have inexplicably risen.
Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil's "Paging Doctor Faggot,"
along with Stu's loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack's infinite jokes
about Mr.
Chow's shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly
neutered, if
inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for
being.

Seconds (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 1, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Frances Reid
screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by David Ely
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the longest time I wanted to write a book about John Frankenheimer, the crux of which would be a closer look at the relationship, if there was one, between the declining quality of his work and the assassination of his buddy Bobby Kennedy. It would be a cultural study, see, this way to tie the death of the Sixties with a director who for me definitively speaks to the rises and valleys of that decade, and who paved the way for the despairing paranoia flicks of the 1970s. In the end, I was defeated by the prospect of dealing with Frankenheimer’s later films–not because they were all as bad as Prophecy (or that any of the others are near as bad as Prophecy, or that anything could be), but because many of them are really, really good in really, really difficult ways to quantify. Closer to the truth of his output post-RFK assassination is not that it’s terrible, but that it’s all Seconds again in some form or another: diaries of personal apocalypses and the constant threat of the dissolution of identity. Besides, I think there might be an entire book in 52 Pick-Up alone.

The Collection (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

September 30, 20132012, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick, Lee Tergesen, Christopher McDonald
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by Marcus Dunstan

by Walter Chaw A cheap, loose remake of Aliens that substitutes rampaging hordes of xenomorphs with a gimp-masked kung-fu master, Marcus Dunstan’s stupid sequel to his stupid The Collector at least, this time around, doesn’t function as a lame, who-cares-if-it’s-intentional echo of Home Alone. No, this one vaguely recalls turn-of-the-century serial ghoul (and hotel owner) H.H. Holmes, who built a giant hotel for the express purpose of culling his guests for, among other things, medical skeletons and simple shits and giggles. Oh, who’m I kidding–the only thing The Collection reminds me of is that I have other things I should probably be doing…oh, and that Steve Beck’s Ghost Ship opens with a bunch of people getting bisected by a runaway cable. The Collection, incidentally, opens with everyone getting chewed up by a combine attached to a runaway cable at a nightclub. This leaves Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick, of interest for the short For Your Consideration, in which she absolutely nails Anne Hathaway’s Les Misérables performance) to be packed into a steamer trunk, because for all the things our bogey The Collector (Randall Archer) is, he’s also a Jazz-era ocean-liner passenger. The Collector promptly spirits her away to his horror hotel, the one he’s set up with boobytraps and galleries of pickled people parts (and tarantulas, of course, in case he needs to set them free to gross out girls and stuff), making it a terrible place to stay but still better than most Motel 6s. BAM! Take that, Motel 6.

Day of the Dead (1985) [Divimax] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 25, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Far from the weak sister that critics and fanboys have branded George Romero’s conclusion to his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead is at once the most hopeful and the most melancholy of the trio while falling short of the stark satirical perfection of the first (Night of the Living Dead) and the bloated satirical imperfections of the perhaps over-celebrated second (Dawn of the Dead). In fact, I find Day to be the equal of Dawn in almost every way and to exceed it in terms of its alacrity–its relative tightness in the development of its ideas about the nature of man unfolding against the backdrop of a rise of a new society. The obvious precursor to the zombie mythos is the Christian faith, with its saviour a zombie installing a new order (covenant) and its key ritual dedicated to a celebration of the eating of the saviour’s flesh and blood: a literal consumption of the Host that incorporates into its rite terms of infection and contagion. In fact, Day of the Dead, of the three, seems the most serious in exploring that spiritual/thaumaturgical connection with the introduction of what is essentially a demigod–an offspring of thought and body in the same way that Christ was meant to be God made flesh in all its weakness–in the form of the much-reviled Bub (Howard Sherman).

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Combo Pack

September 23, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor
screenplay by Darren Lemke and Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There's an interesting moment early on in
Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Slayer, but don't get used to it. It's a
cross-cut sequence wherein peasant Jack (Nicholas Hoult) and princess Isabelle
(absolutely adorable Eleanor Tomlinson) reveal they're both products of neglect
and the devastation of a parent lost too young. This unites them in strife
and turmoil (in the way that wasn't properly addressed by the Mako/Raleigh
team-up in Pacific Rim) to (likewise) battle monsters of the theoretical
Id (Oedipus is the first guess, Electra the second), here literal giants
in a cloud-shrouded kingdom, accessed by a priapic growth sprouting in the dead
of night. It's the only time the film identifiably belongs to Bryan Singer, a maker of large films nonetheless invested
in personal, intimate deconstructions. People in my world are neatly divided
between the ones who didn't like Singer's Superman Returns and the ones who are
right. I want to believe that movie is the reason why Stanley Tucci, Ewan
McGregor, and Ian McShane said "yes" to Jack the Giant Slayer, and not because Tucci,
McGregor, and McShane are already just filthy impulses cashing paychecks à la
1980s Michael Caine.

World War Z (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

September 22, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, DVD, Horror, Zombie

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

Swamp Thing (1982) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

September 15, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Superhero, Wes Craven

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise, Dick Durock
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Bryant Frazer Do you find monster movies that revolve around damsels, décolletage, and men in phony rubber suits pathetic or endearing? If the latter, you may well find room in your heart for Swamp Thing, an old-fashioned creature feature that already seemed anachronous when it hoisted itself up out of the mud of early-1980s genre cinema. As movies like Alien, Altered States, and Scanners put a grim, often grotesque spin on ideas about biological transformation, Wes Craven–surely one of the grimmest of horror directors in the 1970s–embarked on a PG-rated fairytale about a gentle scientist whose own experimental chemicals turn him into a super-powered hulk made entirely of plant matter. As Craven’s contemporaries busied themselves with tales of human bodies rent asunder by sex, drugs, and the military-industrial complex, the director of Last House on the Left was making a story of tender love in the wilds of South Carolina, where a wound to the breast can be healed by a clump of swamp moss and a beast’s severed limb can regenerate through the judicious application of sunlight.

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

August 26, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Q
***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bryant Frazer Writer-director Larry Cohen makes exploitation look easy. His iconic Black Caesar was basically a remake of Little Caesar with a black cast; his mutant-baby flick It’s Alive amplified the generational rift created in families by the social revolutions of the 1960s and early-1970s to horror-movie proportions. Cohen is so commercially savvy that his screenwriting career has continued, in earnest, into the 21^st century, placing projects like Phone Booth, Cellular, and Captivity at the Venn-diagram intersection between high-concept appeal and low-budget execution. He also has an instinct for character, and it never served him better than it did in Q, which is the story of a little criminal in a big city as much as it’s the story of a huge feathered serpent lording over Manhattan. Q was set up quickly (in two days, to hear Cohen tell it), after Cohen was fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, and it features a terrific cast (Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree) improvising many of the scenes in a screenplay that was being written as the shoot progressed to take advantage of whatever New York locations Cohen was able to secure. The result isn’t quite a great monster movie, but it gets maybe 80 percent of the way there.

The Burning (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

August 21, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Lou David
screenplay by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein
directed by Tony Maylam

by Walter Chaw The pleasures of Tony Maylam’s The Burning, such as they are, arise when one engages it in an extra-textual conversation about why at the end of the American ’70s there suddenly bloomed an exploitation slasher subgenre to provide a nihilistic gateway into the Reagan ’80s. Really, when you look at the wonderland of ’80s blockbuster cinema, there is throughout an undercurrent of Friday the 13^ths and Elm Street flicks, of course, but also stuff like Slumber Party Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Maniac, Camps Cheerleader and Sleepaway, Mother’s Day (which Roger Ebert referred to as a “geek” show–the kind that bit heads off chickens, not the kind that founded Apple)…all the lurid VHS covers that made browsing the neighbourhood rental joint such delicious taboo delight. It’s that thrill that The Burning captures and evokes still–that feeling adolescent boys of a certain age got, pre-Internet, by renting something they shouldn’t rent with the suspicion, nay, promise, it would provoke the same erotic tingle as hardcore porn would in a couple years’ time. It’s a movie very much like Tolkien’s writing: if you don’t discover it in junior high, you’ll never appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated again.

On the Road (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Road Movie

Ontheroad1

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the novel by Jack Kerouac
directed by Walter Salles

by Angelo Muredda “You goin’ some place, or just goin’?” a fellow traveller asks Sam Riley’s Sal Paradise in the long-gestating, still-undigested On the Road, Walter Salles’s handsomely-mounted but stiff adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s hipster Bible. While that’s a dangerous line to adapt in such an aimless movie, it isn’t even the most unfortunate moment of meta-commentary within the first ten minutes. Consider Sal’s panicked voiceover about the text he’s spinning out, ostensibly the same one we’re trudging through: “And what is there to talk about exactly? The book I’m not writing? The inspiration I don’t feel? Even the beer’s flat.” What, indeed? What’s left to say about a project that insists on reviewing itself at regular checkpoints and keeps finding its inspiration wanting?

Oblivion (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

August 6, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Tom Cruise

*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurlylenko, Melissa Leo
screenplay by Joseph Kosinski and Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw If you’re going to see Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, you should see it in IMAX. Oh, who’m I kidding? There’s no good way to see Kosinski’s sci-fi-lite follow-up to Tron: Legacy, starring Emperor Thetan Tom Cruise as a future-Jiffy Lube mechanic jetting around post-bellum Earth circa 2077, fixing automated drones programmed to kill alien “Scavs” that have taken over the empty planet. Following? It doesn’t matter. Via soulful voiceover, Cruise’s Jack Harper informs us that a war has decimated Earth and that all the surviving humans have fled to Titan (that’s a moon around Saturn, Jack explains), leaving behind only Jack and his lady-pal Vika (Andrea Riseborough) to tend to giant sea-water fusion engines that provide energy to our ragtag, fugitive fleet. No, it already doesn’t make much sense, except that it’s sort of like something L. Ron Hubbard would have written–but that’s gotta be a coincidence, right? Anyway, seems that Jack has built a special cabin in the woods despite Earth being uninhabitable due to the nuclear holocaust we unleashed to free ourselves of alien enslavement…or is it? Irradiated, that is. Earth, I mean. And what of these strange memories of the Empire State Building that memory-wiped Jack keeps having, where he and supermodel Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko exchange doe-eyes and sweet nothings? If you’ve seen any science-fiction film worth a crap in the last twenty years, you’ve already seen a better version of Oblivion, I promise you.

The Fog (1980) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|The Howling (1981) [Special Edition] + The Fog (1980) [Special Edition] – DVDs

July 29, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Werewolf

THE HOWLING
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan, Christopher Stone
screenplay by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless
directed by Joe Dante

John Carpenter's The Fog
***/****
BD – Image C+ Sound A Extras A
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Houseman, Janet Leigh
screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
directed by John Carpenter

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The theory is that gangs of artists working at around the same time in the same place, in complementary milieux, can lead to something like artistic Darwinism, a certain macho brinkmanship that pushes genres towards a kind of organic evolution. Within a very few years, artists like John Carpenter, John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Rob Bottin, Rick Baker, Sam Raimi, Brian DePalma, Bob Clark, Dan O'Bannon, Sean S. Cunningham, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Stan Winston, Larry Cohen, and on and on and so on, were working in and reinvigorating the horror genre–many under the tutelage of Roger Corman, still others the initial products of formal film school training, almost all the consequence of a particular movie geekism that would lead inevitably to the first rumblings of jokiness and self-referentiality-as-homage that reached its simultaneous pinnacle and nadir with Craven's Scream. In the late 1970s into the early 1980s, however, that cleverness wasn't so much the hateful, patronizing post-modernism of the last decade's horror films as what feels like a genuine affection for the genre–an appreciation of the legacy of the Universal, Corman, and Hammer horror factory traditions.

6 Souls (2013) + Dead Souls (2012) – Blu-ray Discs

July 25, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Television, Thriller, Zombie

6
SOULS (a.k.a. Shelter)
**/****
Image A
Sound A
starring
Julianne Moore, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Jeffreey DeMunn, Brooklyn Proulx
screenplay
by Michael Cooney
directed
by Marlind & Stein

DEAD
SOULS
½*/**** Image
C Sound B Extras C
starring
Jesse James, Magda Apanowicz, Bill Moseley, Geraldine Hughes
screenplay
by John Doolan
directed
by Colin Theys

by
Walter Chaw The best scene in the surprisingly-not-awful 6 Souls happens in a toothless hinterland, up yonder in them thar hills, ’round
campfires and lean-tos and a wilderness of patchy facial hair, where
forensic
psychologist Cara (Julianne Moore) meets a Granny Holler Witch (Joyce
Feurring), who is just indescribably awesome. She’s like a refugee from
The
Dark Crystal–the very incarnation of Aughra, blind but
seeing through an
albino familiar (Katiana Davis) as she performs psychic surgery, sucking up
souls
with her mouth and depositing them in a jar she calls “shelter.” Indeed, it’s
such an awesome scene that it shows up how
perfunctory the
rest of Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein’s 6 Souls
is; how the idea of a
demon jumping bodies (like The Evil Dead, yes,
but more like Fallen)
can look very much like an early-’90s mid-prestige thriller and
therefore not
anything interesting or special. A shame, as the talent
assembled for
the piece is exceptional–Moore, certainly, along with the
always-fabulous Jeffrey DeMunn as Cara’s dad Dr. Harding. It’s his
fault that
Cara gets involved with psych-patient Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who, in the
process of manifesting multiple bad-accent theatre personalities, also
seems to
be manifesting their physical traits (like paralysis, say, and bad
acting,
too). Turns out it ain’t science afflicting our man Adam, but you
knew
that already.

Would You Rather (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

July 23, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Brittany Snow, Jeffrey Combs, Jonny Coyne, Lawrence Gilliard Jr.
screenplay by Steffen Schlachtenhaufen
directed by David Guy Levy

by Bill Chambers Iris (Brittany Snow) is a demure blonde vegetarian with a brother named Raleigh (Logan Miller) who’s dying of cancer. These traits, the only things we ever really learn about her, add up to a plucky determination that preordains Iris to be the Final Girl, though it means her character arc hinges on a reversal of expectations that haven’t been well established. In any case, mysterious philanthropist Lambrick (Jeffrey Combs, magically transformed into Stuart Wilson from Lethal Weapon 3) spots potential in her and invites her to join the eponymous high-stakes parlour game in David Guy Levy’s Would You Rather. Iris is poor as shit, and even if she did get that hostess job she’s interviewing for in the opening scene, the money it pays is hardly cancer money, ergo, she takes the bait: the promise of the best, most expensive medical care for her brother should she emerge victorious at Lambrick’s next gathering. What she doesn’t know is that the alternative to winning isn’t as easy as losing.