Although the promise of a rare Russ Meyer work will sell this double feature to the curious, the pairing of "Fanny Hill" and "The Phantom Gunslinger" is more about broad comedy and Albert Zugsmith's commitment to the advancement of silly business. If boings on a soundtrack, cakes smashed into faces, people slipping and falling, and little people scurrying around are your thing, this double shot of absurdity is going to scratch that itch in a major way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
After the success of narrative-driven films such as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "Life of Brian," it seems regressive for the lauded comedy group (including Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, John Cleese, and Terry Gilliam) to return to their sketch-show origin with "The Meaning of Life." Building momentum with fantastic adventures through history and religion, Monty Python's 1983 endeavor has a noticeable lack of energy and almost no cohesion about it, stumbling around big ideas on life and death with all the concentration of a group on the brink of going their separate ways. It's a hit-or-miss effort that features all the hallmarks of the team's work, offering rich design elements, puckered animation, gross-outs, and crack comic timing. Despite its obvious shortcomings, "The Meaning of Life" also happens to be devastatingly funny at times, hitting a few beats of silliness with traditional Python precision — terrifically loony moments that manage to salvage the entire viewing experience. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
Around the early 1970s, Clint Eastwood was a major actor looking to make a transition to directing. Cutting his teeth on actioners and westerns, it would've made perfect sense for Eastwood to select a project that played to his strengths, allowing him a chance to impress the industry by taking the easy career route. Instead, the star made "Play Misty for Me," an itchy psychological thriller that showcased his gifts with modest staging, performance, and mood. Finally, in 1973, Eastwood was ready to saddle up again, with "High Plains Drifter" a return to form, assuming command of a flinty, violent western, finally able to craft his own take on a well-worn genre. Channeling the spirits of former collaborators Don Siegel and Sergio Leone, along with decades of experience on the backs of horses, Eastwood rose to the occasion, generating a refreshingly bizarre feature with an unexpected mean streak. Mysterious, sporadically comical, and classically Eastwood, "High Plains Drifter" is a wholly satisfying revenge saga that's askew enough to surprise as it exercises known elements. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
Ah, the 1970s. It was a time of randy teen behavior, bralessness, and rampant high school mischief. It was an age before movie make-up, where anyone could scrounge up a few bucks to make a film about adolescent behavior and not even bother with a plot. 1976's "The Pom Pom Girls" isn't a classic of the genre by any means, but it contains a charmingly free-flowing take on matters of the juvenile heart, following whims without any concern for structure, while encouraging its untested cast to express emotions far beyond their skill levels. Raggedy and unshowered, "The Pom Pom Girls" is best appreciated as a time capsule, where viewers of today can look back on an era before lawsuits, social media, and proper nutrition, where the only concern facing young men of the day was the number of girls they could sleep with before the weekend was over. Obvious and determined shortcomings aside, the feature does a fine job itemizing the dilemmas of '76, developing into a beguiling snapshot of the way things once were. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
It's hard to believe this all started with "Air Bud." The 1997 picture has spawned a series of sequels and spin-offs that have transformed a simple tale of a basketball-shooting pooch into cash cow for Disney, who issue a DTV production every year, using the power of puppies to latch on to whatever trend is happening in Hollywood. The dogs have met Santa, searched for buried treasure, and enjoyed Halloween, but now it's time to suit up in spandex and save the world. "Super Buddies" is the latest in the "Air Buddies" franchise, working with visual effects to turn everyone's favorite canine pack into caped crusaders, protecting lovable humans from an intergalactic threat. As these things tend to go, kids won't mind the light action and mild jesting, with the whole production played in an exhaustively cartoon mode to avoid the burden of actual screenwriting. Older viewers may not be as patient, though "Super Buddies" could be of use to die-hard comic book cinema fans unable to wait for the next Marvel or DC endeavor. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
On the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Dallas, the life and times of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is recounted in the new American Experience production, "JFK." Stripped of conspiracy theories and belabored political dissection, the two-part program seeks to pull focus away from eye-crossing debate to expose how John lived his life, growing from a sickly boy into one of the most powerful men in the world. Gathering interviews with experts, family members, and authors, collecting photos and film, and using recordings created by John while in the White House, "JFK" constructs a dynamic weave work of experience and ambition, shaping a portrait of an American icon that's honest and engaging. Instead of playing up the myth, the show scrapes away the protective layer of time to expose John as a fallible man who strived to make his homeland a better place, using connections, good looks, and intelligence to achieve greatness in a manner that might inspire his fellow Americans, working to protect a country he dearly loved. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
I'm not entirely sure what the point of a horror prequel is. The genre is dependent on scares to transmit its experience, to use shock as a method of suspense. Yet, with a prequel, there's no reason to get excited about the story because, after all, we all know who lives and who dies. It's a toothpaste-back-in-the-tube situation that would take remarkable moviemaking skill to transform into a nail-biting effort. With "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning," we're faced with Jonathan Liebesman, the helmer of "Darkness Falls," "Wrath of the Titans," and "Battle: Los Angeles." Not exactly a stunning resume. A 2006 prequel to the 2003 remake, "The Beginning" fulfills its titular promise by detailing how Leatherface found his chainsaw, how Sheriff Hoyt came across his law enforcement uniform, and how Monty Hewitt lost his legs. You know, burning questions horror geeks have been dying to see answered. The uselessness of this feature is astounding, emerging from the smoke and sweat as an obvious cash-grab from producers caught off-guard by their own success, unaware that forward, not backward, is the proper direction to take with a simplistic blood-smearing series such as this. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
Ozploitation takes a serious turn in "Harlequin," a bizarre mystery film
that employs the art of magic to help secure its illusory intentions.
The picture doesn't quite add up as a cohesive exercise in cinematic
misdirection, but its working parts are fascinating, especially when
director Simon Wincer and screenwriter Everette De Roche play into the
fantastical, making a logical breakdown of the feature's enigmas
impossible. It can be a frustrating movie with a foggy sense of purpose,
yet performances, especially Robert Powell in the lead role, are
greatly amusing, with a few hypnotic qualities, and the story's ambition
to blend political intrigue with historical influence, enough to save
"Harlequin" from itself. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
We live in a special time for comic book fanatics, with characters great
and small receiving a shot at big screen glory, helping to augment a
revolution that began decades ago on the page and grew into an
inescapable industry. "Superheroes: The Never-Ending Battle" is a
three-part highlight reel of comic book evolution hosted by Liev
Schreiber, who examines amazing developments that transformed seemingly
silly, small-time super men into legends, tapping into the psyche of
readers who fantasized about such heroism and mysterious powers,
highlighting a reoccurring presence of awe as artists, writers, and
corporate players sit down to discuss their participation in trends and
invention as the saga of the comic book unfolds. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
A film such as "Open Road" should come packaged with a pair of maps: one
to navigate the interstate travels of the lead character, and another
to help track her emotional journey as it winds through a range of
experiences that aren't defined to satisfaction. Without some type of
guide to ease explanation of screen events, the picture feels hopelessly
lost, baffling viewers as it strives to concoct a poignant odyssey of
self-discovery and maturity, only to peel off storytelling textures in
the editing process. It's seem rude to label the movie a mess when it
clearly launches with pure intentions to connect with viewers via road
trip melodramatics, but director Marcio Garcia (an popular South
American actor at the helm of his second feature) doesn't have the skill
to manage such suffocating cliche, playing too fast with the
particulars of the plot in an effort to tie a bow around the tale by the
time the end credits arrive. "Open Rage" immediately dissolves into a
blur of motivations and ill-defined histories, making soulful connection
impossible. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
Inside the average 15-year-old boy is a furious mechanism of sexuality
that's so demanding, it clouds rational thought. In "Weird Science,"
writer/director John Hughes harnesses that impetuous, erection-heavy
urge and channels the tension into a full-fledged cartoon; he relaxes
his career concentration on teen pathos with a screwball comedy that
combines titillation, humiliation, and the awe-inspiring,
traffic-stopping screen presence of Kelly LeBrock.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
If there must be a film about dance party happenings at a club built
exclusively for creatures of the night, it seems appropriate that
Vincent Price would be our tour guide. 1981's "The Monster Club" is an
anthology effort with a bizarre wraparound story that interrupts spooky
and disturbing events to observe singers and bands rock out onstage in
front of a throng of extras clad in bad Halloween masks. Normally, this
type of schlock would trigger immediate dismissal, yet "The Monster
Club" has enormous charms and a fairly convincing line-up of chiller
material to help offset the feature's cannonball splashes into
absurdity. It's a lively, sincere movie, given considerable genre reach
by a colorful cast, including Price, John Carradine, and Donald
Pleasence. Sure, it's silly business, perhaps spending too much time
trying to sell a soundtrack, but picture is immensely entertaining,
setting the spooky season mood with aplomb. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
The cover art for the "Corruption" Blu-ray contains an illustration of
star Peter Cushing pinning a woman to the ground, slashing her throat
with a knife while staring out expressionlessly, as though this act of
ultraviolence was all in a day's work. It's disturbing, selling the
movie as first class ticket to exploitation nirvana, promising a picture
that's unhinged and excessive. Turns out, "Corruption" isn't that
extreme, at least by today's standards, emerging not as a careless
rampage, but as an engaging chiller with some sense of taste between
brutal killings. For the most part, the feature is satisfactorily
plotted, with superb performances from Cushing and co-stay Sue Lloyd,
who manage to elevate the unseemly appetites of the script with a great
deal of class, turning cheap theatrics into an absorbing depiction of
manipulation and guilt-stained murder. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
In 1983, "My Tutor" played up the fantasy of an older teacher seducing
her younger student. In 2013, that type of activity is typically greeted
with a felony sex offender charge. How times have changed. Of course,
"My Tutor" is only a movie, and a rather entertaining "teensploitation"
effort from 30 years ago, engineered to titillate teen audiences hunting
for a peek at naked breasts and horndog monkey business, employing a
common scenario of temptation to lure ticket buyers in, only to hit them
with a genuine sense of humor and an unusually muted seductress in
actress Caren Kaye. "My Tutor" is simple but effective, and if
approached on a lowered level of expectation, the picture captures all
the hormonal urges of adolescence, frosted with a permissive '80's
attitude that doesn't judge the taboo couple in question. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
How does one make a weird horror film weirder? Include footage from
three abandoned suspense pictures, tying it all together with a
wraparound story feature God, Satan, and a group of new wave rockers
from the 1980s jamming inside a locomotive. "Night Train to Terror" is a
pleasingly bonkers creation that doesn't even pretend to make sense,
instead providing genre maniacs with random images of violence, torment,
and nudity as it winds through four different stories of doom. The 1985
effort is a madhouse of ghoulish delights, boosted by performance
sincerity that turns a horribly dated musical number into a jubilant
lighthouse for a profoundly confused endeavor. It's coarse, gruesome,
and clearly created to relieve the financial pressure of someone tied to
the production, but it certainly isn't a boring movie. Watching "Night
Train to Terror" feels like sitting through a horror film festival with a
heavy finger resting on the fast-forward button, zooming to all the
grisly goodies before it's on to the next sinister story. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
There's a stunning lack of trust running through "Laurence Anyways," and
it cripples what should be a searing portrait of self-worth.
Writer/director Xavier Dolan doesn't lead the feature through its
dramatic entanglements, he pushes it, spending the nearly three-hour run
time slapping symbolism and overwrought stylistics on the viewer,
eschewing subtlety to beat simple emotional concepts into the ground,
unaware that the audience doesn't need much to grasp the primal scream
burning within the lead character. "Laurence Anyways" is a beautiful
expression of a challenging life mummified by a filmmaker who could
learn a thing or two about the editing process, demanding an eternity to
articulate universal needs. For every sublime moment the movie has to
offer, there's a cinematic dead zone of indulgence that wipes it away,
generating a frustrating, occasionally intolerable sit. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
In the realm of horror cinema, the "Friday the 13th" franchise is a
behemoth. It wasn't the first to dream up the concept of a masked maniac
slicing and dicing his way through a throng of idiot teenagers, but it
gave the concept pop culture enormity, with healthy box office and an
explosive home video presence to help guarantee longevity with its
rabid, fall-on-their-sword fanbase. Other movies have made more money,
displayed more gore, and showed more creativity, but nothing has touched
the genre omnipresence of this series. Without warning, "Friday the
13th" became a cult classic and Jason Voorhees grew into the Elvis of
slasher icons. Not bad for a picture that began life as a rip-off of
"Halloween." Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
In the curious career of writer/director Stuart Gordon, his dedication
to the work of author H.P. Lovecraft could never be called into
question. With cult classics such as "Re-Animator" and "From Beyond,"
the filmmaker has explored and cinematically transformed the celebrated
writer's fascination with depths of depravity and the hypnotic hold of
terror, turning fandom into a personal quest. Picking a 1926 short story
("The Outsider") as inspiration, Gordon returns to his Lovecraftian
cravings with 1995's "Castle Freak," a bluntly titled genre exercise
that provides the necessary amounts of lip-quaking panic and goopy gore,
gifted a mildly gothic touch by the picture's remote, forbidding
setting. It's a slim tale of redemption and survival, with excitable
acting that practically transforms the effort into 3-D, but the macabre
essentials are provided with skill by the helmer, who's clearly enjoying
this opportunity to romp around an empty castle, dreaming up way to
repulse and creep-out the audience. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
"An American Hippie in Israel" isn't most subtle of titles, and its
opening scene doesn't mess around with subtext. In a field of flowers,
we see a steamroller making its way across the land, crushing natural
beauty with its steely, heavy might. Amos Sefer's 1972 allegorical
extravaganza announces its tone right up front, leaving little to the
imagination as its threadbare plot and impulsive performances take over.
It's been branded one of the worst films of all time by the guardians
of cult cinema, and it certainly has enough clunky moments to merit such
hyperbolic consideration. However, for all the nonsense and
pull-your-hair-out padding that's included in the feature, Sefer has a
weird vision for "Hippie" that almost works if one squints hard enough,
attempting to make an anti-war picture that's soaked in oddity and
nudity. It's an admirable effort, with periods of floppy B-movie
shenanigans that are surprisingly entertaining. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
1973's "The Doll Squad" has all the ingredients for a rollicking B-movie
viewing experience. We have a diabolical villain bent on world
domination, a team of bikini-wearing secret agents brandishing cartoony
weapons, and a taste of chunky 1970's action choreography to sell the
hysteria. It's an ideal blend of escapist elements and a film some
suggest was a clear inspiration for the jiggling juggernaut known as
"Charlie's Angels." However, as enticing as "The Doll Squad" is, it's
also a strangely airless endeavor that's hampered by its no-budget
ambitions, finding writer-director Ted V. Mikels striving to make his
own Bond movie with mere pennies to spend, forced to rinse and repeat
every single scene. There's gold in the corners of the effort, but it
takes considerable patience to find the highlights of this strangely
chaste, frustratingly repetitive picture.
Read the rest at Blu-ray.com
BRIAN ORNDORF 