DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

For those of you out there wanting to gain access into the celebrated madness that is the b-movie world, Dreamscape is a certified rite of passage.  You. Must. Enter. Here.  All paths lead through its twisting corridors.  Scream Factory celebrates this fact with their updated 2K  ...

Director Abel Ferrara (of Ms. 45 and Bad Lieutenant fame) and his long-time collaborator, screenwriter Nicholas St. John, are certified madmen of the NYC gutter scene.  They are art punks through and through, tirelessly splattering their canvas with a bit of the old ultra-violence  ...

I’m not sure if it is Tangerine Dream’s electronic score or Tommy Lee Jones’ performance as the veteran who takes over Central Park for about two days or the subject matter itself of pushing back against the system that makes The Park is Mine work so insanely well  ...

The follow-up to the 1982 hit Creepshow probably arrived three years too late.  While George A. Romero and Stephen King are involved with the project, it simply doesn’t have the same deadly bite that the first one did.  Directed by Michael Gornick and written by Romero, the  ...

Thanks to J.J. Abrams and everyone’s efforts at Bad Robot, I have – to date – watched Phantasm more times in the past 2 months than in the whole of my entire life.  The reasons are clear.  It is, warts and all, one of the most perfect B-movies of all time.  It’s re-release in  ...

Laird Cregar.  I’d like to spend a minute or two dwelling on just how awesome he is as an actor.  Hilarious in the screwball comedies he was cast in, Cregar was a very tall man of many hats and he never failed to deliver a memorable performance.  He was an imposing figure  ...

The Phantasm series completes its offbeat rotation around the sun with the release of Phantasm: RaVager this Friday.  It is a movie that is both a fitting goodbye to the late Angus Scrimm and, operating as the fifth and final movie in the series, a fitting conclusion.  As you are more...

With funding provided by the Packard Humanities Institute, the members of the UCLA Film & Television Archive have worked tirelessly to restore a small black-and-white crime potboiler that was thought long lost due to the unforgiving ravages of time.  The edgy film is a prophetic  ...

Never fear, Doc Savage is here!

With that joyous announcement, one of the campiest flicks to ever hit the 1970s leaps off the screen and into the hearts and minds of cinephiles everywhere.  Let’s get something straight first.  Doc Savage is completely ridiculous.  Full of knowing winks to the camera  ...

Bad Acting.  Bad dialogue.  Bad movie, right?  Not quite.  There are exceptions.  The Majorettes, starring Kevin Kindlin, Terrie Godfrey, Mark Jevicky, and Thomas E. Desrocher, is one of those.  This psychosexual charged flick owes much of its creative prowess to its creators’ ...

And so we come to the blatant rip-off.  Perhaps that’s too harsh.  After all, there are some interesting things in the mechanics of Larry Stewart’s slasher (the finale inside the multi-level Dallas Market Center being one), but not enough to keep audiences focused on its  ...

Bubba Ho-Tep and I have finally made up.  I get it.  I finally get why the movie absolutely works and why my punk-ass comments when it was originally released were so naïve.  To borrow a line from from Gatsby's Nick Carraway, “in my younger and more vulnerable years”I was a complete ...

Ha, Criterion Collection.  It seems that little April Fools Day joke (back in 2011) has come to bite you in the ass.  C.H.U.D. has made it to blu-ray! There was a time in America when we surrendered to the idea of nuclear war.   It was bound to happen. Why fight it? This attitude  ...

I first saw Dario Argento’s Phenomena when it was released here in the United States as Creepers.  That version – heavily edited by 30-minutes (for no other reason than to save Americans from actually thinking) – was essentially one long music video.  Goblin and Simon  ...

And now it is time to get weird; really weird.  Jeremy Irons, man.  What a commanding actor, right?  Well, in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, he plays a set of talented twins that, after a simple misunderstanding over the same woman, turn their successful gynecology  ...