DVD Reviews

A fun-filled weekend for some park rangers and their girlfriends turns deadly when they find themselves on the wrong side of a killer’s blade in The Final Terror. Long out of print and available only in the dingiest of VHS rental dives after a super quick theatrical release, this ...

What has been seen can never be unseen. It is a saying as old as the wise man who told it to me and Cannibal Holocaust – with its graphic rape, cannibalism, torture, and on-screen REAL killing of animals – is proof of that. . The scenes depicted in director Ruggero  ...

Helix, when you get to the midway point of Season One, will otherwise be known as a squandered possibility.  Don't believe me?  Well, watch for yourself. Co-produced by Ronald D. Moore (of the re-outfitted Battlestar Galactica fame), Helix: Season One, a Syfy Channel ...

The documentary Kids’ Rights: The Business of Adoption jumps all over the place, in terms of its topics and locations. Filmmakers Olga Rudnieva and Michael Dudko, who want to adopt, travel to various countries to learn more about the process. They meet with lawyers ...

Mad genius. Visionary. Prophet. Egomaniac. Whatever word you use to describe cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky would probably be correct. This Chilean-French filmmaker is also a playwright, an actor, an author, a musician, a comic book writer, and a spiritual guru  ...

It is a movie we didn’t know how to talk about. Released in 1999 and written on-spec by David E. Kelley, Lake Placid and its R-rated mixture of horror and comedy scared audiences away. Why? Because it was effective at its ambitions of being solely a trash-talking B-movie ...

Jason Bateman is on quite a roll. After having his career resuscitated by starring (and starring again) in Arrested Development, he seems to earn only goodwill from all his projects – even the ones that bomb. Bad Words, his directorial debut, is yet another win. Effectively   ...

Hailing from the early part of the dreaded 1980’s, it is safe to say that Deadly Eyes is not the most technically brilliant film ever made about marauding rats terrorizing humans and trains alike in subway tunnels. It is a Canadian low budget film made in the era of practical  ...

Grateful Dead.  Janis Joplin.  The Band.  Buddy Guy.  What do they all have in common?  Well, other than being fantastic rock bands, artists, and live performers, they once upon a time in 1970 shared the same train as it traveled through Canada and played a series of  ...

At the center of Saving Mr. Banks, the fascinating back-story of how Disney’s beloved classic Mary Poppins made its way to the big screen, is the relationship between the book’s prickly author, P.L. Travers and Walt Disney himself. A relationship that could be described ...

When it comes to the comedy of Harold Lloyd you just can’t top 1925’s The Freshman. In it, Lloyd plays Harold Lamb – and, yes, that IS the best character name in the Silent Film Era – and the movie traces his comedic journey to become the big man on campus. It is,   ...

Forget the grandma crawling on the ceiling.  The absolute BEST scene in The Exorcist III happens about halfway through the picture.  A killer is loose.  We have a static shot of a hospital hallway.  Clean.  White.  The camera is positioned far enough back to capture  ...

The flash of neon.  The absorbing synths.  The resounding thump of the bass.  Nerve is more than a movie; it is an interactive realm of total absorption.  Classifying its audience into two parts, Nerve is either for (a) players or (b) watchers.  And let me be the one to tell   ...

From the pages of bestselling author Lee Childs’ novels, comes a new movie hero. His name is Jack Reacher, and while he doesn’t fly, wear tights, or posses any otherworldy super-human powers, his goals are the same as those sought by our lycra-tighted friends currently ...

No new gound is broken with DreamWorks’ latest release.  Its simple theme isn’t genre-defying either.  But the hilarious hijinks never stop for very long as the first family of cave-dwelling, affectionately called The Croods, takes a family vacation of sorts in this highly ...

Start your engines!  The summer blockbuster of 2013 has arrived.  Yes, with Justin Lin’s Fast & Furious 6, our collective need for speed lives on.  Now, I was late to the franchise as a whole but – after an interesting fourth entry – I found myself watching the originals ...

Where to go and what to do with the sequel of a movie that got its traction from an evil villain turned into lovable hero? That’s the ultimate challenge faced by the makers of Despicable Me 2 which picks up where the original left off - with former(?) super-villain ...

In a summer chock-full of underwhelming tentpole features, superhero misfires, and a general box office malaise threatening to change how movies are made, it’s refreshing to find a bit of relief in the least likely of places: a film that stars Jennifer Aniston - the sweet ...

Horror movie convention gets turned on its bloody head with You’re Next, the latest visit to the home invasion slasher. Though the setup is a familiar one with the proverbial herd of sacrificial lambs converging on an isolated house for a family reunion, it’s what ...

Perhaps the timing of Riddick, the sequel to Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick is a stroke of genius.  After all, it’s a literal dead season for movies and there is just little of great interest out in theaters right now. Perhaps it is just having ...

Oscar-nominated director Denis Villeneuve teams up with Oscar nominees Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners, a twisting thriller that – while involving – is not nearly as smart as the screenplay thinks it is.  For the careful observer, much of Prisoners is ...

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is a masterpiece of sound and vision.  It achieves – in a crisp 90 minutes – everything that any filmmaker in love with the medium sets out to achieve.  Few attain it and most never produce a film as marvelous as the very Kubcrickian ...

Robert Rodriguez’s Mex-ploitation saga continues with the batshit crazy antics highlighted in Machete Kills.  While the print critics prematurely hammer nails into the character’s coffin, no amount of bullets can kill Danny Trejo.  He may be older and bit more stiff ...

Captain Phillips, the latest film to cover the tragic events surrounding the 2009 hijacking of the American container ship Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia, has Paul Greengrass all over it. The one-time documentarian who applied his kinetic style to two ...

Alan Taylor’s Thor: The Dark World might feel - with its Anthony Hopkins-narrated beginning concerning a war with elves – a bit like the next installment of The Hobbit but when it comes down to it, Marvel’s second trip through the Norse mythology is indeed magical ...

The heart of America – the real America that is – should be viewed in hard-bitten black-and-white photography.  Director Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) knows this about his Omaha birthplace and – while merging the brilliance of About Schmidt ...

The comets are coming!!  The comets are coming!!  Science fiction gets satirized in writer/director Thom Eberhardt’s fantastic Night of the Comet.  Released the same year as David Lynch’s Dune and 2010, this entry into the genre was – while the reviews were ...

Director John Carpenter does director Howard Hawks.  Call Assault on Precinct 13 the premiere urban western because, in the era before the action movie craze, that’s exactly what this lean and mean to the extreme movie is. In what amounts to an updated ...

Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, and its love affair with writer/director John Carpenter continues with the release of Showtime’s anthology of horror, Body Bags.  Comprised of three short films – two directed by Carpenter and one directed by  ...

Tom Holland’s 1985 vampire in your neighbourhood jaunt was a really enjoyable, of its time, funny and scary composite of a movie. It has a cult following, and in many people’s eyes, is a classic from a very fertile and brave era of filmmaking. A sequel followed a ...