DVD Reviews

As it deals with constant and continued isolation in Québec circa 1995, one shouldn’t be surprised that Good Neighbors never saw the light of the day here in the United States. Ah, let me count the strikes against thee! The city ...

Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, a classic tale of heroism, love, and friendship, gets yet another unnecessary big screen treatment. This time by Paul W. S. Anderson, known more for his Mortal Kombat, Soldier, and Death Race debacles ...

Boo!  Paramount is at it again; third straight year and third straight sequel to their and America’s seemingly favorite paranormal phenomenon.  While the creep factor is still solidly in place for the patient viewer, the answers provided by Paranormal Activity 3 to the ...

Maybe it took the wicked sting of Cop Out to bring writer/director Kevin Smith back into the world of low, low, super low budget independent film.  Not since Clerks has his writing and his directing fired on all thrusters ...

Pig-headed bastards will dismiss Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary – his first film in nineteen years - as wildly indulgent; a calliope of sounds and sights in a Puerto Rican trip that is ultimately not worth taking.  It will be as if they forgot all about his popular gin-soaked romp that was ...

In Andrew Niccol’s In Time, we learn of an alternate reality in the near future, where time really is money… or more specifically, currency. Everyone is born with a body clock embedded in the wrist which is activated when the frontal lobe of the brain ...

Considering this release of The Ray Harryhausen Double Feature from Legend has only a small connection to the imaginative wonder we know Harryhausen capable of and contains two films on Blu-ray and a bonus film on DVD ...

Finally, the truth about the walking dead can be told (and sold) to the masses.  Cretins and Clodettes, I bring you the blood-curdling classic known as Zombie!  Arriving fresh from its sabbatical at the Mount of All Things Gooey and Gross, Zombie should satisfy your need for babes and brains and ...

Riding the crest of an economically dissatisfied wave of thought that shows no sign of breaking, Tower Heist spins its timely yarn about some middle class broken down luxury apartment workers who decide to strike a big one against a Bernie Madoff-type character ...

Holy hayseeds and chintzy choke-weed, boys and girls!  If A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas isn’t the merriest surprise of unholy raunch and salacious retribution then I don’t know what is.  In a surprise twist of events, the film to enjoy more this weekend is a hellish ...

The poster for The Double - a movie that is yet another eolith in the burgeoning rebound of the cinematic espionage thriller - displays Richard Gere’s character prominently alongside the film’s title graphic intimating, not so subtly, that he ...

I’ve never read Aimee Bender’s novel and, based on director Marilyn Agrelo's puzzling adaptation, I am not sure that I ever will.  An Invisible Sign is a frustrating mess of undeveloped ideas, wasted story lines, and a series of mental illnesses ...

There couldn’t possibly be a creepier basement in the history of Horror films.  Dark, dank, and dangerous, the basement in 1981’s House by the Cemetery is a fright fan’s best worst nightmare.  The corners are tight, the door always slams shut (then locks), the shadows...

While the majority of people probably think Andrew Lloyd Webber when they hear any mention of The Phantom of the Opera, there remains a loyal following of film lovers who, correctly, can’t help but picture Lon Chaney’s ...

Blue Velvet, now celebrating its 25^th anniversary, remains an intoxicating look at supposed small-town tranquility in which innocence fears to tread.  Written and directed by David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks) after suffering through ...

Oy vey. The money-grubbing cynical studio executives have really scraped the bottom of the barrel for this family-friendly flashy mess of recycled pop songs.  It is safe to say that Happy Feet 2 completely stumbles over itself in this largely unnecessary and rather ridiculous sequel. While the glossy 3D animation ...

The gut-busting and side-splitting laughs found in Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker, his 1990 parody of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, are only one part of the film’s many exploitative charms.  There’s an abundance of blood, boobs, and bad acting to boot.  No, Frankenhooker isn’t a great film by any ...

Celebrating its 25^th anniversary as the sequel that serves as more of a remake, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn reunites writer-director Sam Raimi and actor Bruce Campbell with the Necronomicon and then proceeds, on a somewhat better budget, to re-create the ...

With a new creative zest and the same loveable spirit that guided Jim Henson and company through five seasons of The Muppet Show and a venture into feature films, director James Bobin (HBO’s Flight of the Conchords), actor/writer Jason Segal and co-writer ...

This month Kino fires up its release of Silent Era films by unloading two classics from the towering film pioneer D.W. Griffith onto blu-ray.  Way Down East is probably the lesser known of the two releases (The Birth of a Nation being the other ...

Equal parts dishy expose and intimate confession, My Week With Marilyn is the fact-based memoir of Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) that recounts a brief period during the summer of 1956, in which the life of the lowly aspiring filmmaker crossed ...

Bigger than Ben-Hur’ has been in the world’s vernacular for generations, and having just seen the film for the first time in 30 years, William Wyler’s epic quickly reminded this reviewer why. For a film made in the 50s, the sheer scale of this production makes ...

It’s hard to reconcile fifteen years has already gone by since Wes Craven struck gold twice with a new horror franchise. It’s equally hard to reconcile that this style of self-referential and self-aware horror is nothing but a cliché. But of course ...

News broke that the Weinsteins were bringing Scream back to the masses, ten years after the last one. It actually got a lot of folk excited. I had forgotten what a good film Scream was and just filed it in ‘don’t give a shit’ with most of the horror ...

There are few genre fans in the world that don’t know the name Guillermo del Toro, but in 1997 he was still a relatively unknown entity to the western world. The Spanish director was hired by the Weinsteins to helm what was originally conceived as ...

If not because of its twisty, turny plot chock full of delicious intrigue and deception, then Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy cements itself as a rock in the pantheon of great spy thrillers with its strong performances. Especially from Gary Oldman, who commands every frame of the film and will ...

Tackling the territory of camp and schlock films from the 1950s with even more camp and schlock requires a bit of skill as those films, while insanely entertaining, were usually never meant to be the stuff of self-referential spoof.  Writers/directors Adam Rifkin ...

There are several things Steve McQueen’s Shame isn’t trying to be.  Sexy is one of them.  The titillating aspects of its explicit sexual content – as this is a movie about sex addiction – are icily downplayed in favor of a fascinating character ...

Writer/Director Wes Anderson is sort of a modern-day filmmaking hero of mine.  From the opening few minutes of Bottle Rocket, I felt I had a socially awkward brother out there; another who grew up on Woody Allen films and knew too much about The Kinks for ...

The sense of dread that comes bubbling from the soil of Martha Marcy May Marlene is an oily one indeed.  Sticky and messy, it is also rich with promise.  Within minutes, the pastoral opening of men slinging their tools and women prepping meals shifts seamlessly ...