DVD Reviews

If your maitre d’s offer of free private access to a secluded beach that you will share with only a few select fellow guests seems too good to be true, it’s probably because it is. ...

The greatest sequel ever made… There. Done… Oh, you want more? All right then. Star Wars changed cinema forever. Some say to its detriment. Its penetration into the world’s lexicon was all encompassing. It was in everyone’s vernacular after 1977, and made the left of field auteur George Lucas the ...

Fans of Paul Blaisdell’s creature work for films like The She-Creature, It Conquered The World, and Invasion of the Saucer Men are going to dig How to Make a Monster as his monster designs get some prime camera time when hung on the walls.  Some audiences are going to see ...

Star Wars’ new caretakers, Disney, have gone to painstaking work to be able to release this series of films for the first time in 4K. After purchasing the franchise from George Lucas, acquiring 20th Century Fox, and continuing the Star Wars saga with (so far) 5 new ...

Beware the barn!  Ah, f@#$ it.  Enter at your own risk, fools.  You’ve been warned. With the smells of rotted wood and autumn leaves hanging in the air, you know that it is time to celebrate serial killing season once more!  Hell, we even have a Friday the 13th release for this horror flick ...

If one of the final moments of director J. J. Abrams’ Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker - two lightsabers sinking into the sands of Tattooine - hits you rather hollow, it is by the director’s choice.  The Skywalker Saga is over with this film, but what’s shocking is that it really doesn’t feel ...

Alien invaders?  Mind control via sharks?  Underwater inner monologues?  Treasure and babes in bikinis?  Shark Encounters of the Close Kind has it all!  It even has an abundant amount of gut busting laughs as this comedy takes nothing seriously - even the shark attacks! ...

Filmmaker Sam Mendes gets down and personal with his new film, 1917 about two young British soldiers sent on an impossible mission to save hundreds of their fellow soldiers. Though largely fictionalized, his tale comes from an actual account told by his paternal grandfather who served in the ...

Shot in black-and-white on a shoestring budget of nickels and dimes, Lake Michigan Monster is - at once - alarmingly successful in its goal of sending-up the whole monster hunting motif in horror films as a wronged sea captain living in a lighthouse mounts a hilarious hunt involving a  ...

The latest iteration of Bob Clark’s ultra-gory yule tide slasher, Black Christmas, promises a modern take on the cult horror classic that stoked the fears of every sorority girl back in 1974  ...

From dry deserts to tropical islands, Tremors shows no signs of stopping anytime soon, but - if this is the end of the road for the franchise - it goes out on a hell of a high note thanks to Tremors: Shrieker Island ...

There’s a shocking, telling moment late in the movie Harriet (2019). Referring to a group of escaped slaves, the villain Gideon (Joe Elwyn) calls them “three bucks and a female with foal.” Of course, he does much worse throughout the movie. But that ...

Greetings, Starfighter!  Arrow Video invited you to watch this 1984 science fiction classic in a way never before thought possible.  With a newly restored 4k scan of the original negative and the 4.1 sound mix originally created for the 70mm release, The Last Starfighter returns to your living   ...

I’ll start this review with a question. 4K has been out for a few years now, and although this reviewer has only recently dipped into this new resolution, I wonder why companies like Arrow are still going to the effort of releasing restored definitive and feature-laden movies from days gone by, at scanned  ...

Watch polio get pulverized by a primate! When a circus burns down, a mustached Boris Karloff, as Dr. Bernard Adrian, finds himself battling a loose ape in his laboratory.  What? What? What.  You heard me.  It’s one of the wildest scenes - and maybe the best scene ...

There’s a key scene about halfway through A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood in which cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), utters under his breath, "he's about the nicest person I've ever met.” Of course, Lloyd is talking about Fred Rogers, the host of ...

Housesitter . . . The Night They Saved Siegfried’s Brain has an interesting history and it makes for a great lead.  Originally filmed in Kalamazoo in 1987, this horror/comedy sat unfinished for over 30 years because no one wanted to deal with it.  Now, thanks to Skywalker Sound and Paramount  ...

Hollywood needs more war films. Despite the pig-headed durability of the world’s war machine providing an unending supply of source material, the genre has largely become abandoned with only the occasional passion project popping up from time to time around Veteran’s Day. For decades, the underserved ...

Planet Drool, here we come . . . again!  This is what happens when you go in expecting worse.  You are constantly surprised. Max (Cayden Boyd) has had an incredible summer.  He’s made new friends and is super stoked to tell all his friends at school about them.  The problem is their  ...

Interior: DARK, GIN-SOAKED MOVIE THEATER CAMERA - SLOW PAN LEFT TO RIGHT. It was a dark and stormy night. Flickering frames of light pierced the smoky darkness, casting shadows on the tattered silver screen. The projector’s jittery rays revealed the forlorn faces of a checked-out audience while the stormy night’s deafening ...

Hi-yo, Silver . . . . Bullet, away!  Arriving just in time for our quarantined Halloween is Curse of the Undead, an oft neglected B-grade horror/western about a vampiric gunfighter (played by Michael Pate, Hondo) and the trouble he kicks up when he arrives in a small town and falls for ...

There are few directors out there that have the distinction of making sequels to hit films that not only reach the quality of the original, but surpass it. James Cameron is one of them. He is an auteur that never rested on his laurels, always coming at things with a fresh take for a follow up and never settling for ...

Dark Infinity and genre filmmaker Dustin Ferguson (who is comparable only to Roger Corman when it comes to impressive B-movie offerings) have yet another horror hit on their hands with the FIVE terrifying stories absolutely crawling and clawing their way through the innards of Tales for the Campfire 3 ...

With Disney’s current dominance at the box office, it is difficult to believe it, but they weren’t doing so well (theatrically) in the latter half of the 1980s. They had experienced, especially in the animation realm, a series of costly underperforming features and the sure thing that used ...

Ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma.  Two repeating syllables is all it takes to conjure up memories of pure evil slashing away at fleshy objects in the night.  I know we fans of Friday the 13th and its many incarnations have been burnt before by subsequent releases of these films, but Scream Factory - issuing ALL the films together with love, care, and respect - have seriously come through with their latest release the Friday the 13th Collection  ...

The road trip through the zombie apocalypse continues with Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland: Double Tap, which comes some ten years after his Zombieland caught the front end of the zombie resurgence in the ‘90s and rode it into undead lore. ...

The new comedy starring Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson called The Hustle is an almost identical remake of the 1988 classic comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels which starred Michael Caine and Steve Martin - itself a remake of Marlon Brando’s Bedtime Story. I say “almost” because  ...

The last decade of the 20th Century in movies saw the pinnacle of star-powered excess-driven extravaganzas peak with Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. One of the biggest stars in the world, at the time, he could write his own ticket, dictate all terms, and will anything he wanted into existence. That ...

Question for you all, Dear Readers.  When is a ship not like a ship?  When it’s a Ghost Ship! And, true to its name, this supernatural horror film from Dark Castle Entertainment - who previously brought to life the Thirteen Ghosts remake - doesn’t behave at all like a boat afloat as its ...

Rarely does conventional wisdom hold in Hollywood. Particularly with regards to the notion that less is more and that simplicity is superior to elaborate embellishment. Take, for instance Jerry Bruckheimer, the titan of TNT, who subscribes to the theory that if a candle is needed ...