Category: DVD/BLU-RAY

Scoring a point for truth in advertising, 1984's "Monster Dog" actually submits the hellish fury of a monster dog, making it a minor success in terms of delivering on a titular promise. The rest of the picture's quality is open for debate. A rare foray into acting for rock music legend Alice Cooper, "Monster Dog" provides the master of shock with an appropriate thespian challenge, tasked with portraying a shadowy recording artist with an interest in the macabre. Perhaps this is slow-pitch softball for Cooper, but the feature doesn't make the transition easy, pitting the singer against the harshness of Italian genre filmmaking, with its loose dubbing, general dismissal of storytelling, and iffy special effects. At the very least, the movie supplies two Cooper tunes and gifts gorehounds with a few sticky encounters, meeting demands with a passably entertaining home invasion/werewolf/killer dog extravaganza that eventually does away with plot altogether, preferring to cling to a routine of violence and lackluster suspense to fill the run time. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Mind games command 1962's "Journey to the Seventh Planet," but they're the inexpensive kind, giving the picture a chance to keep costs down by messing with group consciousness, which is easier on the special effects budget. An endearing offering of confusion from director Sid Pink, "Journey to the Seventh Planet" manages to overcome its monumental monetary limitation, showcasing delightful visual invention to bring a taste of paranoia and alien manipulation to life. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

War films, especially WWII films, typically favor the intensity of combat, watching leathery men set out to shut down the enemy, using heated battles to keep audiences invested in the routine of conflict. 1960's "The Gallant Hours" offers nothing in the way of extravaganza, preferring to take the introspective route as it explores Admiral William F. Halsey (James Cagney) and his leadership approach during the five-week period leading to the Guadalcanal campaign. It's an unexpectedly restrained feature, but its careful way with drama and psychological inspection is exceptionally managed by director Robert Montgomery, who puts his faith in the cast, trusting them to provide the firepower intentionally avoided by the rest of the effort. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The horrors of war are gracefully examined in 1954's "The Purple Plain," which downplays military valor to cut to the center of psychological ruin facing a fighter pilot who wants to die in combat, only to find heroics instead. Director Robert Parrish guides this sensitive study of depression, with Gregory Peck capably managing layers of quiet intensity in the lead role, which demands an exhaustive performance that indentifies the shattering of a soul and its eventual repair through the possibility of love. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1985's "Perfect" is generally regarded as a low point in 1980s cinema, also cited as the film that brought down star John Travolta's career after a string of hits and interesting misses, disrupting a career that once seemed destined for greatness. Perhaps in its day and age, the feature was a strange, humorless production that was marketed as a celebration of the superficial, boasting a title that teed up opportunity for widespread ridicule. Today, "Perfect" certainly isn't perfect, but it's a far more interesting picture than its reputation suggests, generating a celebration and critique of journalism that's rich with professional detail and carries a lived-in quality during all the fictional reporting. The theatrical cut ends up a mess, but never a tedious one, with the film handling the grind of the news-making machine with palpable fatigue, while Travolta and co-star Jamie Lee Curtis make credible transformations into fallible people. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While marketing efforts are more interested in selling the most macabre elements of 1972's "Pigs" (titled "The 13th Pig" on the print), the feature really isn't about a pack of killer swine. Instead of barnyard chaos, writer/director/star Marc Lawrence goes a psychological route with his material, exploring multiple cases of trauma and psychosis while periodically returning to the grunting exploits of pigs that've developed a taste for human flesh. "Pigs" is interesting work, trying to bend expectations away from B-movie exploits to something more experimental and ghoulish, blending expected violence with a mystery of sorts that plays out in a most unusual way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1985's "Blue Ice" chases a darker atmosphere of sleuthing and world power, blending noir-ish interests with its collection of traditional adult film highlights. Director Philip Marshak ambitiously transforms a detective story into a journey that uncovers cult interests and the return of Nazi rule, working to create a compelling offering of cinema that's not always entirely interested in a celebration of sex. "Blue Ice" doesn't have the budget to match its imagination, but it does retain personality and pleasing oddity, keeping things interesting as the tale studies mystical powers and aggressive encounters. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Sincere sexism and comedy is an uncomfortable mix, but 1972's "The War Between Men and Women" gives the tonal nightmare a try. Starring Jack Lemmon and Barbara Harris, the feature is dripping with acid, with director Melville Shavelson ("Yours, Mine and Ours") working to locate lightness to a diseased lead character. The mission is impossible, but "The War Between Men and Women" is inventive with its odyssey into the black heart of relationship cynicism, blending animation and fantasy with a more sobering reality, given a certain spin by the talented cast. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It may be hard to imagine, but three decades ago, a Johnny Depp movie could find its way to theaters and nobody cared (enter your "Transcendence" jokes here). After scoring a major supporting role in Wes Craven's original "A Nightmare on Elm Street," Depp graduated to leading man status with 1985's "Private Resort," joining newcomer Rob Morrow, with the young actors suddenly in charge of a sex comedy, running around a sun-soaked location ogling women and dodging trouble. Another offering from the teen cinema takeover surge of the 1980s, "Private Resort" is caught between the bikini-peeling demands of the subgenre and director George Bowers's quest to construct a Mel Brooks-style farce, laboring to make the feature as broad as humanly possible while still tending to the exposure of bare breasts. While not the worst title to emerge during the decade's obsession with sleazy behavior, the film isn't exactly a stunner, trying too hard to please with slapstick that doesn't blend smoothly with the endeavor's creeper interests. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While it wasn't the biggest hit to emerge during the teen cinema gold rush of the 1980s, "Hardbodies" is often singled out for its precise celebration of subgenre highlights. Its pay cable omnipresence is certainly to blame here, with the 1984 picture often taking over rotational duties in the evening after "The Beastmaster" reigned during the day. Out of all the vulgar, dim-bulb beach and party features that clogged multiplexes (and video store shelves) during the decade, the effort's longevity is really no surprise, with co-screenwriter/director Mark Griffiths filling the movie with enough nudity and sexual high jinks to beguile his target audience, keeping "Hardbodies" eventful when it comes to R-rated encounters. The rest of the film doesn't share the same excitement, slogging through paint-by-numbers writing that spectacularly fails to make wholly repulsive characters appealing in any way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Sean S. Cunningham stunned Hollywood in 1980 when his tiny horror feature, "Friday the 13th," came out of nowhere to dominate the box office and spawn a franchise that remains beloved to this day. Handed a free pass to do whatever he wanted, Cunningham first returned to the genre that served him so well (1982's "A Stranger is Watching") and then issued 1983's "Spring Break," reuniting him with the low-budget comedy aesthetic he developed early in his career. Smelling blood in the water, Cunningham sets out to bite off a piece of the teen horndog genre, manufacturing his own ode to naked women, beach party shenanigans, and matters of the heart. "Spring Break" offers nothing new to the subgenre, and while it samples R-rated tomfoolery, it's almost reluctant to truly dig into salacious business, offering a movie that, with some clever editing, could almost pass for a PG viewing experience. His competition arrives with cynicism and anger issues, but Cunningham keeps this nonsense good-natured for the most part. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Patricio Guzman has built a career inspecting Chilean woes and bruised history, with special attention to the years ruled by dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose violent reign still reverberates in the country today. The helmer returns to duty with "The Pearl Button," a companion piece to his 2010 documentary, "Nostalgia for the Light," with focus now put on water and its special relationship with Chile. Guzman doesn't possess the strongest directorial focus, but his passion is unmistakable, leading audiences on a journey from a tiny droplet to the outer reaches of the galaxy, in search of sanity and order. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Out of everything that emerged from the bottomless pit of brilliance that was "SCTV," who could've guessed that the antics of two Canadian brothers who love beer and conversation would be the most enduring. Bob and Doug McKenzie quickly rose to popularity after their 1980 television debut, with actors Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas embracing the opportunity to gather every Canadian stereotype around, dreaming up a public access show hosted by toque-wearing siblings who guzzled beer, cooked back bacon, and riffed on any topic that came to mind. Instead of blending into "SCTV," the characters exploded in popularity, celebrated as pop culture heroes in the Great White North while beguiling American audiences unaccustomed to such culture-specific satire. Armed with "Ehs," Moranis and Thomas managed to squeeze a successful album out of their newfound fame, while also offered a chance to direct their own feature. 1983's "Strange Brew" is pure McKenzie madness, finding inventive ways to extend the appeal of the brothers, using a Shakespearean foundation to support this wildly hilarious odyssey into brewery shenanigans and world domination. There's even a flying dog. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For their final collaboration, actor Charles Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson (who passed away in 2002) head into the darkness with 1989's "Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects," transporting their recipe for smashmouth filmmaking to the world of sexual exploitation. It's a difficult subject matter to explore with any type of lightness, but the pair give the topic a B-movie shakedown, delivering a strangely insensitive take on the death of innocence that favors scowling and xenophobia from the star, who takes on the role of a determined cop with the same lukewarm passion he brings to every role. As well-intentioned as "Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects" tries to be, it's missing a few great ideas and patience to truly understand the scourge of human trafficking, treating the topic with minimal interest in collateral damage. There's plenty of Bronson being irritable, smacking around baddies and sassing superiors, but what the picture needs is respect for the crime, not more breakaway glass. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While not an actor of any discernible range, Charles Bronson has made the effort throughout his long career to play a variety of characters. Of course, most of these performances end up in a position of violence, with the mustachioed brute facing down foolish enemies, but at least he's trying. 1988's "Messenger of Death" finds Bronson portraying a journalist for a Denver-based newspaper, marching around looking for clues and interviews to help him create popular stories. It's not an impossible stretch to picture the icon in a newsroom, surrounded by bustling writers while hammering out his latest piece, but Bronson isn't far from a threat or a weapon in the movie. "Messenger of Death" is a serviceable thriller with few surprises, but, as always, Bronson is the big draw, using his natural way with intimidation to infuse the feature with a few thrills, portraying the most aggressive, least professional newspaperman perhaps cinema has ever seen. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1966's "After the Fox" provides an unusual cinematic collaboration that features star Peter Sellers, director Vittorio De Sica, and screenwriter Neil Simon. Behind-the-scenes alchemy doesn't get much stranger than that, and "After the Fox," while never consistent, benefits from its multi-cultural take on broad comedy. Genuinely funny in fits, the picture is held together by its spirit, keeping the effort interested in the next big joke or silly encounter, noticeably trying to throw a big screen party. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1954's "Gog" happily plays into the era's interest in monsters and mayhem, only here the force of evil is a man-made machine, while science is given more of a priority than the average production allows. Directed by Herbert L. Strock, "Gog" is a thriller that doesn't exactly thrill, but it's an entertaining collection of exposition and robot rampage, delivered in your face with a 3-D presentation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Once upon a time in European filmmaking, Anthony Hopkins was being groomed to be the next James Bond-type figure to dazzle audiences with tales of spying and seduction. 1971's "When Eight Bells Toll" is an attempt to transform the fiercely reserved performer into an action hero, working with source material from Alistair McLean, who adapts his own novel. Tough guy antics aren't a true fit for Hopkins, but "When Eight Bells Toll" is a serviceable thriller, embracing its odd take on smuggling and villainy with plenty of excitement and opportunities for the star to showcase his Connery side to a global audience. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

I think it's wonderful that Guy Maddin is continuing his exploration of underground cinema, refusing to compromise his vision to entice commercial success, sticking to a plan of impish, artful moviemaking that celebrates the abstract, his Canadian heritage, and the directorial process itself. He's an original, but that doesn't always make his efforts easy to endure. "The Forbidden Room" is the latest from "The Saddest Music in the World" and "My Winnipeg" director, and perhaps his most challenging feature to date, mixing visions, ideas, and humor to create a swirling galaxy of askew storytelling. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

A mere two years after stunning the world with his vision of the future in "Metropolis," director Fritz Lang returns to the business of ambition with 1929's "Woman in the Moon," a film credited with inspiring the evolution of space exploration. Using research of the day, Lang constructs an epic tribute to scientific visionaries and pulp literature, taking viewers on a unique journey that utilizes bold visuals and broad characters. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com