Three Clint Eastwood Steelbook 4K UHDs are the Pick(s) of the Week

Typically, I choose but one film or boxed set as my pick of the week. But every now and again, I simply can’t choose just one film, and I have to go with multiple picks. This week, three Clint Eastwood classics are getting UHD upgrades with nice-looking Steelbook cases, and I want them all.

Clint Eastwood is one of the great actors and directors out there. He’s been consistently making good films for sixty years, and he doesn’t seem to be willing to stop.

The three films – Dirty Harry (1971), Pale Rider (1985), and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) aren’t necessarily the very best of Clint Eastwood but they are all good films in their way (if I’m being honest I’ve not seen either of them in a long while so I don’t have anything intelligent to say about them at the moment) and they will make a nice addition to anyones collection.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Anora 4K UHD: This Oscar-winning film from last year is about a sex worker who marries an Oligarch and then faces the consequences when her husband’s family finds out.

Paddington in Peru: I’ve not seen any of the Paddington films but everyone says they are delightful.

Star Trek: Section 31: Michelle Yeoh stars in this Star Trek film about a secret division of Starfleet tasked to protect the United Federation of planets, but she must also learn to deal with some dark secrets. The reviews have been savage.

V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal: Arrow Video presents this collection of straight-to-video films from Japan. You can read my review here.

Murderrock 4K UHD: Vinegar Syndrome presents this ridiculously silly, gory, and surprisingly beautiful Giallo of Lucio Fulci in UHD. You can read my review of the movie here.

Awesome ’80s in April: Black Moon Rising (1986)

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This theme always makes me think about what makes an ’80s movie so 1980s? There are lots of ways you could answer that from certain visual styles, to the excessive use of those lightning bolt effects. There are themes and motifs films from the 1980s reflected on regularly, and genres that elevated the box office (think slashers and action flicks).

You could turn on your TV right now and find a movie already in progress that you’ve never seen before and determine pretty quickly that it was made in the 1980s.

Certainly, if the film you put on was Black Moon Rising and you saw this car roll across the screen, you’d know you were watching an ’80s movie.

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And if there were any doubts after that, once you caught wind of Linda Hamilton’s hair, you would know with absolute certainty.

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The film itself is a great big pile of 1980s cheese. Tommy Lee Jones plays Sam Quint a thief turned FBI subcontractor hired to steal a computer disk containing damning information about some big Las Vegas corporation. He easily steals the disk, but when he’s chased down by some goons, he slips it behind the tag of that totally awesome car pictured above.

That car is a prototype made by some super-smart nerds, and it can travel up to 350 MPH and runs on water. Before Sam can get his disk back, a thief named Nina (Linda Hamilton) steals the car.

Actually, she steals a lot of cars. She’s part of a car-stealing ring that is so bold they show up at a fancy restaurant, lock all the doors then drive away with a couple of dozen cars at a time. The ring is run by Ed Ryland (Robert Vaughn), who is so bold that he’s building two massive high-rises to run his car-stealing operation out of.

Naturally, Sam has to break into the well-secured high rises and steal the car back. Naturally, he romances Nina in the process.

It is all very silly and rather dumb, but Tommy Lee Jones makes it worth the watching. He could elevate even the stupidest material. I’d watch him in anything. The car is pretty fun too.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: Night of the Demons (1988)

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These days I meticulously log all the films I watch on Letterboxd. Before that I used to have a blog post where I listed out everything I watched. I also marked the films on IMDB as I watched them, and I often tried to remember everything I had ever seen and marked them as watched and rated them as best I could remember.

Often, after I’d watch a movie, I’d click on an actor and then scroll through all the films they’d ever been in, carefully marking the ones I’d seen as watched and rating them. It wasn’t a perfect system. I’m sure there are lots of films I never marked down – movies that I watched as a kid and have long since forgotten, etc. And there are probably some movies I marked as watched that maybe I hadn’t actually seen. Memories are weird like that.

As I get older, I find there are a lot of films I’ve marked as watched, but then when I sit down with them again I realize not a single scene is familiar. I have no idea if I actually did watch them and have just forgotten everything in the film, or if I somehow thought I had seen it but actually had not.

Night of the Demons is a film I would have sworn that I had seen before. I remember watching it. Okay, I remember watching some of it. Well, alright, I remember one particular scene in which one of the actresses got topless. What can I say? I would have been about 14 at the time, pubescent and horny.

But watching it tonight there wasn’t a single moment that seemed familiar. Most of the actresses do get topless, but none of them rang that memory bell. And it seems like I would have probably remembered multiple instances of sex and nudity and not just one scene. So maybe I watched one of the sequels. Or maybe it was something else and I somehow conflated it with this film. Possibly I remember the movie poster for this (which I definitely saw many times at the local video store) and watched something else and my memories of the film got mixed in with the cover art. Or maybe I just watched part of the movie and had to turn if off for some reason (possibly my mother caught the nudity and yelled at me for watching it).

None of this matters, of course. You’re probably wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about this. I’m just forever fascinated by how my brain processes all the movies I’ve seen.

The film itself is a silly bit of 1980s horror. Some dumb teenagers (all played by actors who are clearly well out of high school) go to a party in an abandoned funeral parlor and accidentally unleash a demon which, one-by-one, possesses them and does a bit of light murdering.

The film isn’t big on specifics. There are some vague murmurings about the place being haunted due to some crazy murder taking place there sometime in the past. They unleash the demon by doing a half-assed seance and looking into a mirror.

The kids are all paper thin in their development and they are almost all obnoxious. Especially Stooge (Hal Havins) who loudly complains all the time, calling all the girls, “Bitch.” 1980s horror icon Linea Quigley is probably the most interesting, but that might just be because I know her from other films.

But the special effects are good. I’m a sucker for practical horror effects and there are some good ones here. Quigley’s character has a scene where she rubs red lipstick over her chest in circles and then pushes it completely into her breast. Which has got to be the most low-budget 1980s horror special effect ever.

I have no idea if I watched this movie back when I was a kid. But I’ll definitely be watching it again. It is by no means a great movie, or even a good one. The plot is barely there, the characters are annoying, but it’s still quite entertaining in that dumb ’80s horror way.

The Awesome ’80s in May: Castle in the Sky (1986)

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I feel like I don’t talk enough about Studio Ghibli. As I say this I look back and see that I’ve written about four of their films and not a single movie from Pixar so maybe I’m not quite telling the truth. But I do love Ghibli and I watch their films over and over again, moreso than pretty much any studio.

Castle in the Sky was the very first film produced by Studio Ghibli and it was directed by one of its founders (and its most famous name) Hayao Miyazaki. It was not the first film directed by Miyazaki (he’d been in the industry by this point for over a decade, working in television and as an animator in movies – he’d also directed a few feature films) but it was still early days in terms of him having full control over what he wanted to make.

You can already see the themes and characterizations he’d carry with him throughout his career being formed. This is a film that is anti-war, pro-nature, with a strong female protagonist. It also does something really interesting with its antagonist. It begins making you think one group of pirates are the enemies, but soon enough they’ve become friends with our heroes. Miyazaki is famous for having sympathetic antagonists. Here he does find some true enemies, but that switch with the pirates is wonderful.

I actually wrote about the time I got to see this film on the big screen a few years ago for Cinema Sentries so I don’t feel I need to talk about it much more, but it is a wonderful film and I do recommend it highly.

V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayals

I grew up in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I have many, many fond memories of going to the video rental store looking for something interesting to watch. I went enough that I had generally seen all the big new releases so I often went digging through the old stuff. I loved finding weird, low-budget genre films full of sex, and violence, and goofy action.

In Japan these straight-to-video releases were called V-Cinema and Arrow Video has just put out a cool little boxed set full of them. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

The Last of Us: Season One

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Just in time for Season Two hitting the small screen Season One of this terrific television series dropped a couple of weeks ago in a swell looking 4K UHD steelbook.

If you don’t know, The Last of Us is based on a popular video game series about a zombie like apocalypse and how two people – a middle-aged man and a teenage girl – survive it. I’ve never played the game but I love the series. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Tombstone 4K UHD Is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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My admission with this week’s pick is that I’ve never been a huge fan of Tombstone. I remember when it came out all of my friends just loved it. They constantly quoted it. I was late to watching it and I remember when I finally caught up with it I thought to myself, “this is it?” I’ve seen it a couple of times since then and it has grown on me.

Val Kilmer gives a terrific performance and there is some good stuff in their. I think it was a case of it being hyped so much that it just couldn’t be as good as it had been built up to me in my mind.

I do think it is about time for me to try it again, and this nice looking disc might be the way to do it. You can read all of my thoughts here.

Sadie McKee (1934)

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Sadie McKee is a Pre-Code film starring Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone. It is a weird film in that is profers Crawford three bachelors to choose from, but it seems to want her to love the one most ill-suited to her. He’s a jerk, one who literally leaves her at the altar, but hey its true love so its all okay, I guess.

It isn’t a great film, but Crawford is great in it. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXV Blu-ray Review

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I’ve reviewed so many of these sets I don’t know what else to say about them. This one has three films from Republic Pictures directed by John H. Auer, whom I’d never heard of before.

The films are The Flame (1947) a melodramatic Double Indemnity-esque caper with too many characters and a couple of blondes I couldn’t tell apart. City That Never Sleeps (1953) is a docu-style drama filled with loads of interesting characters and some terrific noir cinematography. Hell’s Half Acre (1953) is an exotic noir set on the mean streets of Honolulu.

They are all pretty good, actually, and you can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Career Opportunities (1991)

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If you are of a certain age and a certain persuasion the you’ve probably got an image of Jennifer Connelly riding a mechanical horse in a white tank embedded in your brain. The image is from a lesser known John Hughes scripted movie, Career Opportunities. Kino Lorber just dropped the 4K UHD on us and I’ve got the review.

It isn’t a great movie, but it is definitely more than that endlessly Gif’ed image.

You can read the review here.