Category: DVD/BLU-RAY

After a highly successful producing career in television (responsible for such shows as "Happy Days," "Laverne & Shirley," and "Mork & Mindy"), Garry Marshall made the leap to feature filmmaking with 1982's "Young Doctors in Love." It's material that plays to his sensibilities, offering character- based comedy that's silly, but just misses the mark in terms of a snowballing madness. The picture is often labeled an "Airplane"-style farce that lampoons daytime soap operas, and while "Young Doctors in Love" has that intention, Marshall can't quite wind the effort up correctly, content to pepper the movie with throwaway gags and limp one-liners. In the grand scheme of things, Marshall's done worse, a lot worse, but his helming debut, while brightly made, lacks snap and edge, displaying some of the cuddliness he'd come to rely on. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For her second directorial effort from 1988, Robert Findlay returns to the comfort of horror to inspire the extremes of "Lurkers." It's a ghost story that's primarily fueled by paranoia, again keeping the helmer busy with a vision of Hell on Earth that doesn't require much in the way of locations and story. It's a simplistic nightmare, and one that's not particularly tasteful, but it has closure, giving it the appearance of a "Tales from the Crypt" episode, only with slightly more feminine hygiene-inspired sexuality. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The plot of "Prime Evil" would find a more suitable home as a short story, or possibly as part of a horror anthology film, but director Roberta Findlay isn't about to give up on her moviemaking mission, laboring to stretch the 1988 effort without completely breaking it. It's a Satanic Panic endeavor, and one that's fairly light on thrills, often falling back on traditional exploitation moves to keep viewers interested in the feature. Findlay's working hard to make something threatening out of very little, and while she comes up short, "Prime Evil" is not completely devoid of entertainment value.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1947's "Driftwood" is aimed at a family audience, making its general weirdness a bit more understandable as the production goes big to appeal to all ages. After all, this is a movie that features on dog on trial and a young Natalie Wood trying on her best Shirley Temple impression, so any expectations for subtlety and depth are generally punted out the nearest window five minutes into this endeavor.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Some people will go a long way to make a buck. The premise of 1971's "The Corpse Grinders" is a hoot, detailing the struggle of two men using dead bodies to manufacture cat food, hoping to make a fortune by feeding felines rotting human meat. Certainly there are more efficient, less disgusting ways to pay the rent, but lunacy is part of the film's charm. There's no logic here, no moment of thought to consider alternate vocational routes. There are only cadavers and cat food, with director Ted V. Mikels making sure to keep the macabre study of food processing at least passably revolting. While "The Corpse Grinders" is ultimately more of a detective story than a gross-out extravaganza, there's still plenty of ghoulish fun to be had with the feature's low-wattage charms and strange misadventures with kitties. Sure, it could be more, but this is Mikels, and he rarely goes above and beyond what's necessary to sell a picture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

1977's "A Woman's Torment" is an adult movie made by a writer/director who simply didn't care to add any eroticism to the effort. Roberta Findlay has different ideas for this horror/sex picture, and I'm not sure any of them are translated to film properly, with the helmer striving to create a cold- blooded feature that's covered in blood and other bodily fluids, making strange points about sexual anxiety and resentment while teasing titillating visuals. "A Woman's Torment" is an odd endeavor, caught somewhere between a need to thrill and repulse, resulting in exploitation that's interesting to analyze but difficult to endure.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

According to "Rolling Vengeance," when life gives you lemons, you retreat to your farm and build a fire-belching monster truck capable of killing anything in its path. The 1987 revenge picture has a special way of doing business, trying to sell the specialty of a monster truck used as a lethal weapon, and why not? It gets the job done, with as much property damage as possible. It's an amusing premise, but screenwriter Michael Thomas Montgomery doesn't know the fine line between manipulation and punishment, keeping the feature on the nasty side when all it truly takes to inspire pushback is a lot of attitude and some mild maiming. The movie could do with less child murder and rape, but for those capable of absorbing overkill, "Rolling Vengeance" eventually becomes the film the marketing promises, pitting dim-wits against the might of an enormous truck stocked with weapons.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Nearing the end of his illustrious filmmaking career, Billy Wilder attempts one from the heart with 1972's "Avanti," which still rings loudly with his particular sense of timing and silliness, but strives to be more than just a series of jokes. Wilder's had greater success with this type of tone before, but all is not lost with the painfully overlong "Avanti" (which runs 144 minutes), which offers pronounced charm from leads Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills, while the screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond (adapting a Samuel Taylor play) remains interested in twists and turns, working to keep the audience engaged as the pair refuse to trim any tangents and bad ideas.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Most low-budget horror pictures tend to play it safe with narrative construction, keeping things simple to appeal to a wide audience, trusting in frights to define the viewing experience. 1983's "Blood Beat" does away with story altogether, submitting what should be an abstract extravaganza where anything goes because it simply can. It's filmmaking without rules, but something tells me the pronounced confusion of "Blood Beat" wasn't intentional. Writer/director Fabrice Zaphiratos has ideas but no real clue as how to implement them into a dramatic saga of psychic forces, deer hunting, and samurai armor. Instead of giving it all some thought, he makes a mad dash through nonsensical scenes and empty characterizations, almost relishing how little clarity the endeavor has to offer its audience. Perhaps some viewers will get off on the confusion, but to reach a point of comfort with Zaphiratos's randomness takes a substantial amount of patience I doubt few are willing to give. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

1948's "Portrait of Jennie" is a romantic fantasy that's very careful to introduce elements of the unreal, opening with narration that debates existential questions and offers two quotes from philosophical minds to help set the mood. It's a lot of introductory work, but "Portrait of Jennie" is a strange movie (adapted from Robert Nathan novella) that requires the viewer to let go and join the narrative flow, leaving few answers to many questions. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

"Demon Wind" is not a great movie, but it's a fun movie. The 1990 release explores the mess of an evil encounter at a rural location, offering another helping of young people heading where they shouldn't, unable to successfully defend themselves during monstrous encounters. Perhaps everything in the film makes sense to writer/director Charles Phillip Moore (making his helming debut), but he's not especially skilled at providing proper exposition to help secure critical turns of plot. However, bouts of incoherence tend to add to the viewing experience, which is loaded with gore zone visits, macabre encounters, and bewildering events, keeping "Demon Wind" just absurd enough to enjoy. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It's a story told time and again, but only once by the Nazis. 1943's "Titanic" is a German production personally overseen by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who sought to undermine faith in the British Empire by detailing one of the most famous disasters in world history, only here the focus is not on loss of life, but English greed. More of a curiosity than a true extravaganza, "Titanic" doesn't come close to other dramatic interpretations of the incident, but it has a specific point of view that's perhaps interesting for students of history and German cinema. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

"A Closer Walk with Thee" is described as a "Homoerotic Evangelical exorcism film." Perhaps that's all the review certain viewers will need. It's a curious effort from writer/directors John C. Clark and Brie Williams, who are clearly after something with the work that concerns the uncomfortable relationship between religion and desire, with longing mutating into supernatural events during what's largely a static thriller. The helmers aims for a Lynch-ian mood of unease and askew sexuality, but they don't have the technical seasoning to pull off a few wilder ideas, keeping "A Closer Walk with Three" limited in its ability to beguile and terrify. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

1996's "Hype" is a documentary that explores a musical movement while also participating in it. The subject is grunge, the groaning subgenre that rose from the depths of Seattle to take over a nation, giving birth to several artists that conquered the charts, while two, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, managed to dominate musical tastes for a few years. Director Doug Pray embeds with the artists, critics, and personalities of the northwest to achieve a greater understanding of the new dawn, giving "Hype" plenty to work with when shaping a study of sudden cultural domination threatening to suffocate a once vital and fiercely private music scene.   Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Whatever one thinks of "Dudes," it's certainly not the work of a director who wasn't prepared. By the time she got around to helming the 1987 picture, Penelope Spheeris already created an indelible portrait of the punk rock scene with 1981's "The Decline of Western Civilization," using her experiences with antisocial and depressive behavior featuring the youth of the day to inform her next two movies, 1983's "Suburbia" and 1985's "The Boys Next Door." She was already well-versed in the language and stance of a disillusioned generation, making her a natural fit for the extended oddity of "Dudes," which blends the primal scream of punk rock with the cowboy liberation of life in the Old West. Granted, she's not completely able to tame screenwriter Randall Jahnson's wily imagination, and perhaps nobody could. The film is a mess, but a fascinating one, smashing genres together to create its own identity as a revenge feature that's more about the journey within than the squeeze of a trigger.   Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

"Rawhead Rex" was initially born in Clive Barker's "Books of Blood," a multi-volume collection of short stories that mined the darkest depths of depravity and horror. 1986's "Rawhead Rex" is a ridiculous movie, and a production Barker provided the screenplay for but has since disowned, and it's easy to see why. The author's insatiable appetite for poetic unpleasantness and violent sexuality is basically turned into an Ed Wood picture by director George Pavlou, who doesn't have the money or the time to treat Barker's imagery with the patience its deserves. Instead, he's made a monster mash with creature that resembles a man in a Halloween suit, and while the basic appeal of a B-movie is hard to discount, "Rawhead Rex" could've been so much more with the right filmmaking materials and concentration. On the plus side, the endeavor's aesthetic and thematic wipeout did inspire Barker to claim complete control of his directorial debut, "Hellraiser," released a year later.   Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 1988, titans from the Blaxploitation era (including Isaac Hayes, Bernie Casey, and Jim Brown) reunited for "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka," a parody production from director Keenan Ivory Wayans that triumphantly pantsed the absurdities of the subgenre and embraced some of its effortless cool. In 1996, director Larry Cohen, a player in the Blaxploitation game with movies such as "Black Caesar" and "Hell Up in Harlem," reunited most of the gang for "Original Gangstas," which drops any ounce of intentional silliness, attempting to stage a traditional vigilante actioner with old faces and fists. Results are uneven at best, but when "Original Gangstas" fails, as it often does, there's always the thrill of seeing some of these meaty actors onscreen again, delivering poundings to a younger generation that's been raised without rules and respect. For that alone, the feature is worth a viewing, but it takes considerable patience to get there, as Cohen isn't too concerned with throttling supporting performances, and the messages of Aubrey Rattan's screenplay are confusing, seemingly celebrating a thuggish mentality the protagonists of the story are struggling to extinguish.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Jeff Baena has made a positive impression during his emerging career, pulling off a horror comedy with "Life After Beth," and achieving a cinematic miracle with "Joshy," a movie about male bonding that wasn't basted in ugliness. "The Little Hours" proves to be his greatest tonal challenge yet, mounting a comedy that's not always pursuing laughs, and its target is repression found in organized religion. It's a gamble from Baena, likely alienating a great number of potential viewers right out of the gate, but he mostly sticks the landing, finding ways to scrape out the blasphemy by playing it all so broadly, making a film that certainly has the potential to reach farcical highs, but pulls back a bit too often, perhaps afraid to really dive into the weirdness of the material. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After years of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg enjoying the mysteries and excitement of space through big screen fantasy, the producers of 1986's "Space Camp" were looking to achieve the same sense of awe, only from a slightly more realistic perspective. During the shooting of the movie, the American space program and all things NASA were red hot, inspiring a tale of adolescents interested in the astronaut program accidentally shot into space. The premise was pure fiction, but director Harry Winer puts some effort into authenticity, grounding what amounts to a wish- fulfillment endeavor that's generally better with procedure than extravaganza. "Space Camp" has its dramatic issues, but there's a sense of time and place that's endearing, and the screenplay dares to provide focus on intelligent young characters put to the test, tasked with saving themselves and the space program as they conquer what they previously thought to be an impossible set of mechanical and survival responsibilities.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For his second directorial outing, Garry Marshall taps into the golden memories of his youth. 1984's The Flamingo Kid" feels like autobiographical work from Marshall (who co-scripts with Neal Marshall), helming a low-energy coming-of-age dramedy that's thick with atmosphere and generally attentive to characterization. There's plenty of charm to go around in the feature, which hits on all the teen horndog trends of the era, but does so with restraint and good taste (earning the distinction of becoming the first movie to be rated PG-13 in the process), finding Marshall more interested in perfecting the screen details of the setting, stepping away from crude hijinks to make a sincere endeavor. Granted, Marshall's oeuvre isn't littered with gems, but "The Flamingo Kid" is one of his best pictures, showing a relaxed approach to jokes, relationships, and setting, making it catnip for viewers who enjoy nostalgia and tales of dented maturity.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com