DVD Reviews

With Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre as its reference point, Motel Hell is a seriously delicious horror film that exploits all the typical genre markers for the sake of comedy. And it’s all because director Kevin Connor (From Beyond The Grave, At The Earth’s Core)   ...

Sex.  Violence.  Crisp cinematography.  Frank Miller’s black and white comic canvas with splotches of color from time to time.  Welcome back to Sin City.  It’s been nearly a decade since last we walked its violent stylized streets.  And how well you enjoyed the first one  ...

Following the discovery of a wrecked Soviet submarine and a spiked flask of vodka, one undersea mining crew is about to have a very bad day in George P. Cosmatos’ Leviathan.  This undersea monster movie came and went to theaters in 1989 but has recently been ...

There are two superheroes from New Jersey. The first, of course, is Bruce Springsteen. The second is Melvin Junko. Not ringing any bells? Well, you might know good ol’ tutu-wearin’ Melvin by his other name, The Toxic Avenger, and this month Troma Entertainment  ...

Ray Harryhausen and his stop-motion work is legendary. While his stuff is slow to trickle out on blu-ray, the high-def picture and the clarity it provides is always insightful into his creative processes. The latest to be released is a twofer featuring 20 Million Miles to Earth   ...

Ah, the glory of the small-scale UK cinema. Full of tightly-wound tension and white-knuckled suspense, The Legend of Hell House is the quintessential haunted house for the ages. Screenwriter Richard Matheson adapts his own novel, appropriately titled “Hell House”, and  ...

With more grit and ambition than your average television series, The Walking Dead continues its mad march toward total zombie annihilation with the release of its 4^th season on blu-ray.  The season story curiously breaks up our group of survivors after their bloody showdown ...

With more corpses buried underneath its streets than there are people currently living above ground, the city of Paris seems like the perfect setting for As Above, So Below, a rambunctious little horror film that hopes to turn the labyrinth of catacombs and tunnels running beneath  ...

Alfred Hitchcock has many classics under his none-too-skinny belt, but arguably none are as universally beloved as the 1954 thriller Rear Window. Based on the short story by writer Cornell Woolrich called ‘It Had to Be Murder’, Hitchcock guided new screenwriter John ...

That one sentence often accompanies many reviews, lists, and assessments about Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1962 epic, honouring of D-Day. Before it had even rolled a frame of film, this film was in trouble. 20^th Century Fox was in financial ruin, thanks to Elizabeth Taylor’s star   ...

Filmmaker Charlie Paul’s documentary For No Good Reason isn’t as sharply focused as it could have been.  Steadman, who famously illustrated Hunter S. Thompson’s most famous works, is a fascinating artist and, as he continues to churn out some seriously  ...

What began as one confident FBI Agent’s routine assignment inside an idyllic seaside town in Maine has now turned into a mission to recover her identity.  Audrey Parker (Emily Rose) is not Audrey Parker.  Or is she?  Part Twin Peaks and part The X-Files, Haven: The ...

Growing up, I never realized that the Toho-helmed Godzilla flicks of the 1970s really had a lot in common with the Roger Moore era of James Bond.  Godzilla vs. Megalon, released last month on blu-ray (but already hard to come by in brick and mortar stores), is proof of ...

What a sad, sad story of one man’s tragic revenge.  Another viewing of Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead, newly remastered and released from Scream Factory, confirms this for me.  This cult classic and its following seems to get more reputable every single year that passes  ...

While not the massively misaligned train wreck that was TriStar’s Godzilla (circa 1998), Godzilla 2000: Millennium is admittedly a letdown. It is successful in that it returns the series to Japan and gets it back on track but, with huge gaps in logic and a pacing that simply ...

Bonafide folklore and then some; that's the result of Bobcat Goldthwait's first forray into horror.  Willow Creek, writer/director Goldthwait’s latest film, sucker punched me right in gut. I guess I am still affected by these found footage flicks. What he has done here ...

Sony and Toho Productions join forces and bring audiences the trilogy of films that reintroduced the world to Mothra and the tiny singing of Moll and Lora (otherwise known as the Elias Sisters) after a long cinematic draught. Rebirth of Mothra and its two sequels are more   ...

Released in 1984, Charles E. Sellier Jr’s Silent Night, Deadly Night did for Christmas what John Carpenter did for trick or treating: memorialize the day with a seriously twisted flick.  While not as popular as the coveted Halloween franchise, Sellier’s movie definitely does not  ...

Rarely do cinematic miracles like The Battery occur for a mere $6000 and the cost of a butt-load of cigarettes.  The Battery, the directorial debut of Jeremy Gardner might be exactly what the zombie craze needs to keep its forward momentum smelling as fresh as daisies ...

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I mistakenly thought David Lynch’s Eraserhead was a wicked trip through a sort of nightmarish version of an industrial Wonderland without rhyme or reason.  I dismissed it for being surreal without reason and purposeless in its ...

In cine-massacre history, there are few films that compare to the in-the-gut feeling Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre leaves you with.  Every imperfection in this low-budget Slasher works in the movie’s favor and adds to the overall grisly experience  ...

The first scene of Hateship Loveship sets the tone of this quirky indie drama, starring Kristen Wiig. Main character Johanna Parry (Wiig) attends to a sickly old woman in bed. “I’d like to wear my blue dress,” the woman says. When Johanna returns to the room, the elderly  ...

According to Warner Bros, the “scream” always rises to the top and, with release of this 6-disc set, the evil has arrived.  Or was it always here?  Warner Bros unleashes The Exorcist: The Complete Anthology to a public always hungry for more demonic possession  ...

It is a movie that still doesn’t have the audience it deserves.  Krull, a gorgeously mounted fantasy film from 1983, continues to live on in spite of the massive ignorance surrounding it.  Director Peter Yates’ broke the Joseph Campbell mythology and saddled it with  ...

The genius of Peter Sellers is that he can, in fact, carry an entire picture by saying very little. Just watching him “become” is the joy. Whether he is playing Chance the Gardner in Being There or Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound nuclear war expert and former Nazi, who ...

Santos Alcocer’s Cauldron of Blood is such a weird film. After simmering in its own juices for three years after its completion, this bizarre tale about a blind sculptor named Badulescu who uses the bones of murdered women for his art finally saw the light of day. It was 1970  ...

At long last. Every icon deserves a sequel.  Scream Factory’s excellent treatment of the horror films of Vincent Price is continued in another 7-film second serving.  The films in this treasured collection - The Raven, The Comedy of Terrors, The Tomb of Ligeia, The Last Man On Earth, Dr. Phibes ...

If one worm can’t kill you, maybe 100,000 could. Writer/director Jeff Lierberman’s Squirm takes a closer look at our fish bait and turns those harmless, wriggling little creatures into mean-spirited suckers with mutated mouth-parts capable of rending flesh from bone thanks to a  ...

The forefather of Italian Horror Cinema reanimates the dead … in outer space.  Mario Brava’s Planet of the Vampires is not a cinematic masterpiece.  It is; however, one of the most influential of narratives ever produced, introducing some timeless sci-fi tropes and is a   ...

“Whoa.  Free toy inside!  Free toy inside!” Do I have your attention Cult of UHF?  Because the blu-ray you want and need has just been released. "Weird Al" Yankovic, the reigning king of pop song parody, once took on Hollywood with his gift of satirical gab. It was ...