DVD Reviews

Are you ready kids?!  Stephen Hillenburg’s TV toon that’s all about nautical nonsense returns to the silver screen with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. While the television show and its hour-long specials have moved on past the glories of the first three seasons ...

A soulless and very much psychotic totalitarian government gets a proper “F--- You” in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.  Named after a song from 1939 (“Aquarela do Brasil”) that’s often heard playing in the background or hummed by its lead character, Gilliam’s movie is possibly more   ...

From the silent opening sequence to the arrival of Ndugu’s drawing at the very end, About Schmidt is a fantastic depiction of a lone man facing important choices at several of life’s crossroads all at the same time.  It is a film that breaks a lot of the dramatic rules with comic aplomb  ...

Matthew Vaughn – the acclaimed director of Layer Cake, Stardust, Kick-Ass, and X-Men: First Class - returns to the comic book-minded genre with the wildly irreverent Kingsman: The Secret Service and kicks some serious cinematic ass in doing so.   Loosely based on  ...

A child history buff.  Six angry dwarfs spat out from one closet.  One hell of an adventure.  You guessed it.  Time Bandits has returned.  Writer/director Terry Gilliam’s classic fairy tale mixes science fiction with comedy and gives audiences a timeless movie full of historic ...

John Candy had Uncle Buck.  Bill Murray has St. Vincent.  The role of the grizzled and unexpected father figure makes its comeback with the release of Murray’s latest on blu-ray this week.  Written and directed by newcomer Theodore Melfi, the by-the-numbers dramedy is made ...

Writer/director Adam Green is still the horror genre’s independent darling.  His Hatchet trilogy kicked up a fair amount of dust among Horrorhounds but it was the Hitchcockian Spiral and the chilling Frozen that really delivered the promise in his particular brand of madness  ...

Roger Corman, famed producer and director of exploitation cinema from the 1950s through the early 1980s, captures the very essence of the biker counterculture years before Easy Rider would the be the be all and end all of the genre.  Hindered by B-movie trappings and  ...

Bringing the dead back to life is tricky business. Director David Gelb (last seen behind the lens of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi) doesn’t unearth any new treasures with The Lazarus Effect, his narrative film debut. He does; however, manage to dig up enough  ...

Originally titled The Mask of Satan, Mario Brava’s feature length debut, released here in the United States as Black Sunday, was a gothic-sized hit for Roger Corman’s American International Pictures.  The hype was all about its shocking images.  While tame when ...

Few film genres evoke the silly, impulsive giddiness we experience from a good con or heist flick. There’s just something supremely fascinating about watching some hapless rube get fleeced of all his worldly possessions at the hands of a well-oiled con team. That   ...

The 80s just pumped out classic after classic. They took risks back then. They gave us some of the most memorable genre pictures in cinematic history. This was the decade of new horror icons galore, of Indiana Jones, and E.T. This was also the decade where Richie  ...

In a world where the word terror has become synonymous with maniacs the world over hurting or killing innocent people in the name of their cause, revisiting this 1991 action thriller has reminded this reviewer it is hardly a new phenomenon  ...

Many years ago, there used to be such a thing as life without reality programming on the television.  Call it boring.  Call it slow.  Call it whatever you want.  The fact remains that the medium used to have atypical production values.  Miss Marple, a co-production between the  ...

Filmmaker David Robert Mitchell turns horror on its head with his It Follows, a creepy little bugger of a film that has been lighting up the film festival circuit over the past year and even made quite the fuss at Cannes with an appreciative nod in the Critic’s Week Grand  ...

Don’t Go In The Woods … Alone!, a cult horror film from 1981, is the attention-grabbing title that always screamed at me to watch when I used to frequent the VHS rental store tucked inside a row of seedy businesses in Vista, California. The title said it all. Oh, yes,  ...

Ronald D. Moore, the showrunner who turned a rebooted Battlestar Galactica into a modern classic series, is back again doing what he does best. This time, though, his aim is not for the stars. It’s 1743 Scotland by way of a postwar England circa 1945. Working with Diana  ...

Suddenly, every other horror movie coming out this year now looks better.  Thrusting audiences straight into the horror of isolation, Muck takes that GEICO commercial – the one spoofing the horror genre – and turns into a 90-minute feature. The problem is that the movie isn’t nearly as funnay or as smart ...

You’ve probably already heard the bad word of mouth about Get Hard, kiddos. The critics have spoken. Now, you get your say. Oh, it’s a dumb comedy and full of offensive jabs at almost every living thing to be sure BUT I was never expecting Shakespeare or, hell, Laurel   ...

Operating like a fever dream about some bizarre nightmare in a haunted house, The Beyond – directed by Lucio Fulci – is still considered the director’s masterpiece.  This underrated film is still, in my opinion, a movie without the proper audience.  Unique in its ability to mesmerize  ...

Hyperbole in this century is rampant. Every second nitwit is a hero; the latest doohickie will ‘change the world’. Drives this reviewer nuts. So when I say that this film undoes a great injustice and sheds light on a man who did, in fact, change the world, you better believe me.  ...

Because we don’t give up on family. Spanning Tokyo, the Dominican Republic, Azerbaijan, Abu Dhabi and LA, the gas tank of Furious 7 should already be sputtering on empty. The fact that the series – and specifically this movie - is fresher and more energetic than it has any ...

Gather your wits, the elderly super-sleuth returns for a second round of investigations.  While many actresses have filled her shoes, none but the great Joan Hickson can boast about being “favorite” to play the part of Miss Jane Marple by the author, Agatha Christie  ...

The Bean is back!  Newly remastered from the original SD video sources, Mr. Bean has never looked better than he does with this new set from Shout! Factory, the reigning kings of exceptional taste.  The show will also never get any better than with this DVD set and  ...

While it may roll out of its cinematic jar as slow as molasses, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun remains a strong spread of science fiction gooeyness.  Released in 1969, this Gerry and Sylvia Anderson (Thunderbirds, Space 1999) production deals with the discovery of   ...

Imagine what the earth would look like without its green foliage.  Imagine the heat.  Imagine the barren and scarred landscape.  Widespread deserts as far as the eye can see.  That’s the future imagined in Silent Running, a little science fiction gem from 1972.  While we   ...

The opening sequence. Pulsing music surges. An unnamed red liquid drizzles out over the darkness. Our lady of justice is formed, bathed by this crimson element. Familiar cityscapes are covered, too. New York City. A bridge forms.  Following it, an angel and its church  ...

Cinematic horror has worn many faces over the years.  Few actors such as those of Vincent Price have actually earned a reputation for being the genre’s torchbearer.  The man “gets it” and made a bankable career in films we now celebrate as horror classics.  ...

It has been 16 years since The Blair Witch Project caught audiences off-guard with its creative use of previously recorded material in order to tell a story. The narrative style stuck, much to chagrin of critics and a few of my friends, and continues to be applied to various   ...

Sometimes less of something is better. The Blacksmith is back in RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists 2.  It is, at once, a movie no one thought possible considering the original film’s lukewarm response back in 2012.  Directed by cinematographer Roel Reiné  ...