Category: DVD/BLU-RAY

"The Almighty Johnsons" is a low-wattage take on Norse mythology from New Zealand, which does away with extraordinary powers and godly might to focus on the daily bouts of melodrama facing a band of four brothers and their grandfather as they learn to cope with their secret lives. The program is an acquired taste, with the first season (the show was recently canceled after its third year) devoted to convincing the viewer that names such as Odin, Thor, and Loki could embrace a different interpretation in the Marvel Comics world we live in. Instead of power and brawn, "The Almighty Johnsons" takes on the foibles of relationships as it pays vague attention to the magical forces that run the universe, submitting weak jokes and feeble conflicts as it works to define its creative mission in ten episodes. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For Burt Shavitz, a simple idea to make a little money selling honey near his home in Maine snowballed into decades of fame and near-fortune, and it's difficult to tell if he cares at all about the bizarre turn in his life. Directed by Jody Shapiro, "Burt's Buzz" details the life and times of the creator of Burt's Bees, a major brand name in the personal care product industry, concentrating on Burt's current position as the face of the corporation, while his life remains committed to country living and aging, creating an interesting contrast of money and comfort that's ideal fodder for a cinematic exploration. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2002, director Aleksandr Sokurov masterminded "Russian Ark." A sweeping exploration of the Hermitage Museum, the picture was a technical and artistic marvel, following through on an ambitious filmmaking design while securing his name as a creative daredevil to watch. Following up such an achievement hasn't been a priority for the veteran Russian helmer, who's most comfortable examining fogged psychological spaces in broken characters, finding an apt challenge in "Faust," an adaptation of the famous German legend. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Watching the competition storm the box office with disaster pictures during the 1970s, producer Roger Corman decided he had to have one too. 1978's "Avalanche" is a low-budget take on catastrophe, this time heading to a mountain resort in Colorado experiencing the worst opening weekend in the history of the industry, with Rock Hudson, Mia Farrow, and Robert Forster playing the panicked and heroic as tons of snow descend on a collection of vacationers and athletes, each with their own domestic problems. It's a paint-by-numbers effort from Corman, who wants a big screen emergency, but doesn't want to pay for quality. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Two years before he delivered "RoboCop" to the masses, director Paul Verhoeven attempted his first connection to Hollywood-style filmmaking with 1985's "Flesh + Blood." Remaining true to his European sensibility, Verhoeven didn't simply deliver a big screen adventure with swinging swords, damsels in distress, and castle battles, but a picture with distinct elusiveness, eschewing heroes and villains to create a war movie with a sophisticated morality. And rape. Lots of rape. "Flesh + Blood" doesn't display the helmer firing on all cylinders, but it's an interesting chapter in his gore-stained career, unleashing his signature cinematic roar on an industry that often had no clue what to do with him. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Before Oliver Stone was OLIVER STONE, he was oliver stone: aspiring film director. 1974's "Seizure" was his grand debut, storming the industry with a bizarre chiller inspired by nightmare imagery and the poisonous depths of the subconscious mind. It's also a fittingly nutty grindhouse offering that favors suffering, shock value, and unusual sights, including an appearance by Herve Villechaize as a knife-wielding ghoul wearing tights and a bone necklace. For that alone, "Seizure" deserves a look. It's just a shame the rest of the movie isn't nearly as captivatingly bonkers. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

At the tail end of the disaster movie craze of the 1970s, "Meteor" landed with a thud. The 1979 picture boasts an incredible cast led by Sean Connery (also including Natalie Wood, Brian Keith, Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Richard Dysart, and Henry Fonda), and a dependable premise of Earth-threatening doom that permits panic on a global scale, yet "Meteor," for all its bluster and smorgasbord of iffy special effects (okay, they're awful), is merely entertaining, rarely hitting the nail-biting highs the subgenre is known for. The all-star cast can only do so much to liven up the proceedings, with director Ronald Neame gradually losing tension as the film drags out the obvious for far too long. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Ossie Davis (who passed away in 2005) was a respected actor, but little is shared about his brief career as a film director. 1970's "Cotton Comes to Harlem" was his second movie, but it's an important feature when it comes to the growth of blacksploitation cinema, helping to define what the decade would eventually offer in defiant, gritty entertainment. It's also something of a supercop picture, always a delightful subgenre, bringing the exploits of Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) to the big screen, with the pair of no-nonsense cops scouring NYC to locate a missing bale of cotton containing a small fortune and nail a crooked preacher for his considerable crimes. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1980's "Prom Night" holds a peculiar place in the slasher film spectrum. Created to cash in on the wild success of 1978's "Halloween," the movie arrived just before standards for this type of horror dipped into pure financial calculation. It's a tad slower than its brethren, offers limited violence, and submits a noticeable effort with editing and performances, making it quite interesting if not entirely triumphant. It's a mixed bag of delights, but "Prom Night" retains appeal through its unusual tone and care with motivation, adding just a hint of real-world torment to ground the masked killer shenanigans. Also adding to the picture's appeal is its era-specific setting, eschewing timelessness to whip up a disco inferno, gifting the feature a bewitching time capsule-style allure. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In American politics, there have been many dynasties, but few have represented the nation's spirit of determination and authority quite like the Roosevelts. Enter celebrated documentarian Ken Burns, who undertakes an exhaustive exploration of the family with "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History," spotlighting the trials and triumphs of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt. In typical Burns fashion, historical fixation results in television gold, devoting 14 hours to the understanding of motivation, hubris, and compassion, while reinforcing a criminally outdated concept of near-selfless public service that helped to secure the longevity of the family name. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1972's "Across 110th Street" is often labeled a blacksploitation picture, and while parts of the movie fit into such a classification, this cops-and-criminals saga appears to have more in common with "The French Connection." Gritty and mindful of perspective, the feature is a bruising examination of power and desperation, filled with energetic chases and fiery confrontations. And while the picture deals with race and prejudice, it's more interested in dissecting character, creating a community of hotheads after one another for numerous reasons. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In the mid-2000s, Hollywood picked up on the monster success of "Jackass," trying to turn its bruised and battered lead, Johnny Knoxville, into the next big thing. He was offered prominent supporting parts and a few leads, and audiences responded to this development by largely refusing to buy tickets. Perhaps the most potentially disastrous project to emerge during this dark period was 2005's "The Ringer," a film that attempted to poke good-natured fun at the Special Olympics, shepherded by the Farrelly Brothers. Pre-release press wasn't favorable and audiences were clearly uncomfortable with the idea, yet, in the midst of all the suspicion, "The Ringer" proved itself to a refreshingly mild comedy that made good use of whatever Knoxville actually does in front of a camera ("acting" just isn't the right description). It takes some serious unclenching to get used to the plot of the movie, but once comfort is established, it's clear that director Barry W. Blaustein ("Beyond the Mat") and screenwriter Ricky Blitt aren't out to offend with this effort, working to celebrate Special Olympics participants with a liberal helping of silliness. "The Ringer" isn't a classic comedy by any means, but that it's approachable at all is an achievement. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

During a decade of terrorist thrillers and paranoia cinema, 1974's "Juggernaut" emerges as a crisp, efficient chapter in the era's examination of global mayhem. Director Richard Lester submits some of the tightest work of his career in this engrossing suspense effort, trading theatrics to take on a coldly procedural event that's teeming with A-list actors, working with a script that's paced wonderfully, always paying close attention to the nail-biting aspects of the story. "Juggernaut" is deceptively casual, yet there's hardly moment when it's not extracting near-perfect details of character and setting. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

"Space Raiders" was Roger Corman's attempt to piggyback on the release of 1983's "Return of the Jedi," hoping to steal a few gold bars from George Lucas's vault before anyone noticed. Instead of putting in a heroic cinematic effort, Corman instead recycled footage, music, and design achievements from such movies as "Battle Beyond the Stars" and "Galaxy of Terror" to construct another space opera, creating a kiddie adventure with the bare minimum of budget. This is why the film, while determined to entertain, is shoddy, incomprehensible at times, and shameless. All the space battles and rogue banter in the world can't scrape away the crummy penny-pinching vibe of this excessively noisy feature. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After achieving major success with 1992's "Wayne's World," it's amazing how badly director Penelope Spheeris stumbled with her subsequent career choices. Hunting for an easy lay-up Hollywood hit, she accepted the challenge of bringing "The Beverly Hillbillies" to the big screen during the great T.V. adaptation gold rush of the 1990s. And then Spheeris turned her attention to an update of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" film series of the 1920s and '30s. It was an impossible mission of tonality that was doomed from the start, working to bring something that was defined by its era into the present, yet still retaining all the old-timey shenanigans and iconic character design. "The Little Rascals" wasn't a smart professional decision for the helmer, and the stress shows in every scene of this misbegotten endeavor. Instead of paying tribute to a golden age of comedy, the production merely reheats established bits, adding crudeness to lubricate likability, generally missing the appeal of the original shorts. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1984's "The Toxic Avenger" is the movie that put Troma Entertainment on the map. Previously employed as a distribution machine for titillation comedies, Troma hit pay dirt when they switched their focus to silly splatter efforts and horror pictures, finding a rabid audience who couldn't get enough of their specialized brand of winky mayhem. "The Toxic Avenger" is the prototype for subsequent Troma endeavors, mixing a bewildering cocktail of one-liners and ultraviolence in a production that actually desires to make audiences laugh, even while it kills a kid and a dog, and points a shotgun at a baby. Still, the earnestness of the feature is amazing, always working to find a note of absurdity to molest as directors Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman (billed here as "Samuel Weil") bathe the screen in blood, nudity, and slapstick, funneled into a superhero spoof with a vague environmental message. 30 years after its initial release and "The Toxic Avenger" still manages to trigger disgust and a handful of laughs, representing not only a key Troma financial victory, but it's quite possibly their finest original work. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With a title such as "Bloodsucking Freaks," there's not much left to the imagination. Refusing such a pesky limitation, writer/director Joel M. Reed attempts to give the audience their money's worth with this twisted splatter effort from 1976, which also stomped through cinemas as "Sardu: Master of the Screaming Virgins." Pick any label you like, as Reed stages a perverse and bloody extravaganza that defies description, hoping to take a style of shock value pioneered by Herschell Gordon Lewis to fresh heights of repulsion. "Bloodsucking Freaks" isn't much of a movie, but it does retain an eye-popping sense of violence, brazen in its contempt for women and disregard for human life. It's best to treat it all as an extended joke, which helps to digest the intentionally sickening display of pain Reed is a little too eager to share with the audience. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

"Breathless" is a little late to the "Mad Men" party, missing its chance to ride coattails as the iconic series ends its run in 2015. The production's timing is unfortunate, but so is the program, at least in fits. Attempting to create a stylish look at the traumatic events facing the staff of The New London Hospital, "Breathless" quickly drowns in melodrama, dropping all regality and sensibility to match "General Hospital" in nostril-flaring acting and prolonged narratives. This is an exhausting show, and not because of its emotional content, as there isn't any. Instead, it takes one hour of story and breaks it up into six episodes, dragging out secrets and indiscretions to a point where they cease to retain their intended meaning. Those on the prowl for a hospital procedural or even a period dissection should look for creative highlights elsewhere. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Before "Bring It On" was released in 2000, cheerleading movies tended to favor exploitation features that emphasized nudity or derogatory comedies that treated the spirit-focused without respect, often turned into the punchline for lame jokes. And don't even ask about male cheerleaders in these productions. "Bring It On" takes the sport to a whole new level of concentration, detailing the insatiable achievement appetites of school squads as they ferociously compete for a national championship. It's not an original picture, but it's determined to celebrate the skill and neuroses of the cheerleaders without pronounced derision, resulting in an engagingly manic effort, but one that's not nearly as funny as it would like to believe. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It's hard to hate any horror movie that opens at a track meet and welcomes viewers with a disco theme song. 1981's "Graduation Day" arrived in a crowded marketplace, with dubious producers scrambling to cash in on the success of 1978's "Halloween," with their lust for cheap and easy profit renewed when 1980's "Friday the 13th" hit the box office jackpot. Horror was hitting hard and fast during this period, with overall creative quality less of a priority. While "Graduation Day" isn't an awards contender, the Herb Freed-directed chiller has a little more interest in cinematic pursuits than much of its brethren, offering audiences a traditional offering of slasher entertainment, with victims pierced and gutted by a variety of weapons, but done so with a raw style that fixates on pace, not prolonged suffering. It's completely goofball stuff, but engaging and, at times, exciting, giving a notoriously lazy genre a firm towel snap as it strives to turn a minimal budget into a nail-biter. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com