Category: DVD/BLU-RAY

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

What "The Unseen" aims to be and what it actually becomes are two
separate things. It's a horror picture exploring evil from an unusual
source, with all the requisite scenes of violence and hints of
perversion. There's another side to the work as well, a creative push
that seems like it wants to construct a substantial character drama out
of chiller materials, striving to instill personality into the effort to
increase the movie's lasting potential. Interesting in fits, but also
groggily paced and unsure of direction, "The Unseen" definitely has
moments of tension, but there's also plenty of dead space littering the
feature, reducing conflict and indulging oddity to a point of tiresome
repetition. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The American experience during the Vietnam War has been extensively
documented in feature films, leaving audiences with a developed
comprehension of the hardships, tragedies, and lost innocence of the men
and women who fought for the country. Australia's participation in
Vietnam hasn't enjoyed the same cinematic illumination, leaving 1979's
"The Odd Angry Shot" a valuable dramatic tool in a larger appreciation
of sacrifice and wartime temperament. Writer/director Tom Jeffrey cuts
to the heart of the Aussie mentality in this off-kilter picture,
electing to represent the narrative through chapters of boredom and
militaristic encounters. It's a flavorful movie with stout performances
and a distinct cultural atmosphere to help it maneuver through a few
passages of stagnant storytelling, but "The Odd Angry Shot" is best
appreciated as a snapshot of pride melting into disillusionment,
previously imagined as strictly an American perspective. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Located in the United Kingdom, Highclere Castle is an extraordinary
country house teeming with pure majesty in worlds of art and
architecture, constructed nearly two hundred years ago as a show of
wealth. It's also the current home and inspiration for the blockbuster
television series, "Downton Abbey," making its considerable history pale
in comparison to its current rank as a popular tourist attraction,
launching a million fantasies of elegance, order, and opulence. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Produced two years before 1974's "Black Christmas," "Tower of Evil" has
built a reputation in recent years as one of the forefathers of the
slasher subgenre, which would go on to mainstream success in iconic
pictures such as "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th." While the effort
doesn't have much creative gas in its tank, it remains an interesting
sit due to its historical placement, detailing a reign of terror that
picks off victims in a most gruesome manner, often catching these poor
folks following sexual relations, thus making their exit from the film
all the more cruel. "Tower of Evil" is rough on patience levels, but
there's undeniable craftsmanship to study, displaying interesting
atmosphere that emphasizes oncoming doom, while the friskiness of the
characters is remarkable. In fact, there's so much attention paid toward
the sexual proclivities of the personalities, it's easy to forget the
stillborn fright feature antics that rarely add up to genuine chills. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

"Hands of the Ripper" sets the bar for gruesome violence high during its
main titles, where we witness Jack the Ripper murder his wife in front
of his young daughter. It's a horrifying moment that certainly
establishes the tone for the feature, suggesting that anything goes in
this Hammer production. Fortunately, in terms of "should I be watching
this?" ugliness, "Hands of the Ripper" doesn't match its vivid opener,
though it tries with multiple gory moments intended to give increasingly
demanding genre fans a jolt. What's actually here is a fascinating
psychological chiller that's artfully made on a low budget, trusting the
power of performance to carry a heavy workload of exposition and
suspense as the famed horror factory endeavors to breathe new life into
an oft-told tale of serial murder. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The mystery of Islam is a powerful puzzle of interpretation and emotion
that seem impossible to approach in our modern era, with the passions of
certain participants discouraging outsiders from acquiring a deeper
appreciation of the complicated religion. "The Life of Muhammad" isn't
the final word on the vast sea of experience found within Islam, but
it's an excellent starting point of understanding. Credit host Rageh
Omaar, a composed journalist who dares to work his way into the nuances
and controversies of the Prophet Muhammad's channeled wisdom, submitting
a fascinating overview of an extraordinary life that touches on diverse
acts of divinity, experience, aggression, and education. It's three
hours devoted to the opinions of scholars and participants, with Omaar
traveling around the Middle East on a quest to bring the intriguing
layers of Islam to those unaware of its profound significance in world
history and individual consciousness. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com