Category: DVD Pick of the Week

Escape From New York Is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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I love a good genre movie. Whether it is a western, a horror flick, a film noir, a sci-fi film, or something else, genres give us a set of rules to follow. There is something comforting in knowing the basic elements of a film before it even begins. And yet, of course, the best genre films upend the rules and do something different.

John Carpenter is one of the greatest genre filmmakers ever. He remains one of the great masters. His best films – The Thing, Halloween, The Fog – I’ve seen dozens of times. They are endlessly entertaining.

Strangely, I’ve only seen Escape From New York once, and that was years ago. I remember loving it, but for reasons I now can’t fathom, I’ve never returned to it. I think with this new 4K UHD release from Shout Factory that will be rectified soon.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Godzilla 4K UHD: Criterion has released this film a few times, once as a Blu-ray with their usual set of extras, then again as part of their big Godzilla boxed set (I own both of those) and now again in 4K (I won’t be purchasing this one).

White Christmas 4K UHD: My wife absolutely adores this musical starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Rosemary Clooney. I could live without it.

The Crow: This remake of the cult classic has gotten terrible reviews from both fans and critics.

Trap 4K UHD: A pretty fun, if ultimately quite goofy little thriller from M. Night Shyamalan. You can read my review here.

I Love Lucy: The Complete Series: I’m sure I’ve seen many episodes of this classic sitcom, but I can’t remember any of them. It just wasn’t a series I paid much attention to when I was a kid (when they endlessly reran it, I’m not old enough to have seen it when it originally aired.)

The Wizard of Oz 4K UHD: An undeniable classic gets yet another repackaging. I can’t count the number of times this has been released in a variety of formats.

Orphan Black: Echoes. The original series was utterly original and interesting and fantastic until it wasn’t. My wife and I watched the first few seasons and then it started getting bogged down inside its own endless conspiracy theories and we tuned out. I’m interested in this sequel series if only because it stars Krysten Ritter whom I love.

Columbia Classics Collection: Volume 5 is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

My wife has some extended family in the Nashville, TN area. Whenever we visit them, or even just pass through we stop at a store called McKays. McKays is a giant used book/movie/music/collectibles store. I love it. We wander the aisles for an hour or so picking out everything our budget will allow (we never enter until we’ve agreed on a spending limit, otherwise we’d go broke).

They have a very nice classics section in their DVD department and I usually wind up with a handful of films from there. My favorites are the boxed sets. There is always an assortment of old DVDs packaged together in some way or another. Sometimes it’s by genre, or all the films star a certain actor or were directed by the same person. Other times it will be films put out by a particular studio.

They don’t seem to do that type of thing as often with Blu-rays and 4K UHDs, or maybe I’m just not looking hard enough (or quite possibly my bank account can afford it so I ignore them). My pick this week is a nice-looking set of films from Columbia Studios. I can’t figure out if they have any other commonalities, probably not. As per usual with this sort of thing, some films are better than others, but I love me a boxed set and I’m adding this one to my Wish List.

the films included are All the King’s Men 4K / On the Waterfront 4K / A Man for All Seasons 4K / Tootsie 4K / The Age of Innocence 4K / Little Women 4K / The Scarlet Lady 4K / The Desert Bride 4K / Ladies of Leisure 4K / The Belle of Broadway BD.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Deadpool & Wolverine: The X-Men films have been a very mixed bag, but the best ones are some of the best comic book films ever made and Hugh Jackman has consistently been excellent in his portrayal of Wolverine. I quite liked the first Deadpool as it was a refreshing breath of (vulgar) air from the muck of comic book films we’ve been experiencing for the last decade +. The sequel was just okay. Which is to say I’ll probably watch this at some point, but not anytime soon.

Hellraiser: Quartet of Torment: I’m not a huge fan of the Hellraiser films. They tend to rely too heavily and the icky-freaky factor and not enough on creating a good story. But they have their fans and this set of the first four films from Arrow Video looks great.

Twisters: I’m from Oklahoma. We know a lot about tornados. The original Twister knew very little about them. That ruined the film for me. They made so many stupid mistakes. I’ll probably continue to skip this one.

Cuckoo: I keep hearing good things about this one. I’ve been avoiding information on it so that I can come to it fresh.

Gummo: Harmony Korine’s weird little drama about lonely people living lonely lives in Ohio gets the 4K treatment from Criterion.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Kino Lorber is giving this silent horror classic (that I still haven’t seen) the 4K treatment.

Cheeky!: Tinto Brass is famous for having directed Caligula and refusing to insert hard-core pornography into it and then he spent the rest of his career making medium-core erotic flicks. Cult Epics is giving this one the 4K treatment.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4K UHD is the new Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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After my glowing review, it should come as no surprise that my pick this week is the 4K UHD release of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I truly do love it and it truly does look fantastic in this new addition.

There are some other good horror releases coming out this week and some complete collections of television shows. Click here to view them all.

I Walked With a Zombie/The Seventh Victim is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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Val Lewton was the producer of low-budget movies for RKO during the 1940s. But while his movies were made for very little money, they never looked cheap. Many of them are true classics.

The Criterion Collection is releasing two of Lewton’s best films in a nice little double-bill. I Walked With a Zombie is one of the first films to feature the walking dead, though they are decidedly different here than they would become in the films popularized by George A. Romero. Here they are bound up in a story about voodoo and melodrama.

The Seventh Victim finds a woman looking for her lost sister and discovering a satanic cult. Both films are pretty terrific and Criterion has loaded them with their usual extras.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

A Quiet Place: Day One: A Quiet Place is a pretty terrific horror film in which John Krasinski and Emily Blunt battle aliens with super hearing. This is the third film in the series that shows us the initial invasion. But instead of the quiet farm in which the first two films take place, this one is set in New York City. Lupita Nyong’o stars.

MaXXXine: The third film in Ti West’s X trilogy (X and Pearl being the other two). Once again Mia Goth stars as Maxine a porn star with dreams of crossing over into Hollywood. In X she was just getting started but here she’s found success in the X-rated industry but has yet to get a shot at making mainstream films. But there is a killer on her trail and things get weird. This is still a fun film, but it doesn’t lean hard enough into its 1980s setting and three films into the series, and things feel more adrift than ever.

Late Night with the Devil: Pretty good little horror flick about a late-night TV host who unleashes evil into the world (don’t they all?) You can read my full review here.

Sleepy Hollow: Tim Burton’s underrated The Legend of Sleep Hollow story has Johnny Depp in the Ichabod Crane role. Paramount Pictures is giving it the 4K UHD treatment for its 25th anniversary.

Kinds of Kindness: Yorgos Lanthimos is the maker of eccentric, funny, utterly bizarre films. His latest tells a trio of stories that I don’t want to know anything about. I find it is best to go into these things not knowing. It stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, and Willem Dafoe.

Robot Dreams: Animated film about a dog that builds a robot companion. I’ve been hearing good things about it.

Thelma: Delightful story about an elderly woman (June Squibb) who is conned out of a bunch of money over the phone and sets off to find the culprit.

Subservience: Megan Fox is an evil robot helper. You can read my full review here.

The Blob (1988) is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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October 1, is the start of spooky season, or as I like to call it 31 Days of Horror. I’ll talk more about that in another post, but for now, I get to be excited about all the horror movies that will be released this month. I haven’t looked ahead but in the weeks to come I suspect we will see a great many cool horror sets get released on home video.

For now we get a pretty great remake of a pretty silly 1950s monster movie. I’m talking about The Blob. I wrote my pick of the week for Cinema Sentries yesterday (which you can read here) and that led me to watch The Blob this afternoon (sorry just the streaming version I won’t be reviewing the Steelbook).

I am happy to say it is as much fun as I remembered.

Body Double is the Pick of the Week

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Over the last decade, Brian DePalma has become one of my favorite directors. His movies aren’t always great, some of them aren’t even good, but they are always interesting. In the 1980s he made a string of films that paid homage to Alfred Hitchcock, while also updating them to modern times and adding a thick layer of sleaze.

Body Double takes large doses of Rear Window and Vertigo, throws them in a blender, adds in lots of sex, nudity, pornography, and violence, and comes up with something utterly original, and absolutely fascinating.

For its 40th anniversary, it is getting a lovely looking 2-disc Steelbook in 4K UHD with loads of extras including multiple featurettes on the making of the film and lots of interviews.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Longlegs 4K UHD: Pretty good horror film about a police officer investigating a series of murders. Nic Cage gives one of his most odd and unhinged performances. You can read my full review here.

Happiness: Todd Solandz’s sad, dark, disturbing film takes a look into the lives of some lonely, sad, sometimes disturbing people and makes you empathize with them. It can be a difficult watch, but also a rewarding one. Criterion has the release.

A Man On His Knees: Italian drama about a car thief who attempts to change his life for the better after doing a short stint in prison, but finds himself entangled in some mob drama. My review can be read here.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die: I really can’t remember if I’ve seen any of these or not. I wanna say I watched the first one when it first came out on home video but didn’t love it. Hot Fuzz, a movie I love and have seen often, references Bad Boys 2 several times and it always makes me wanna watch it. Now there is a new one because everything with any kind of fan base that is more than ten years old gets a reboot/sequel thing.

Friday the 13th. The original Friday the 13th was nothing more than a cheap knock-off of Halloween. But it was successful so they made a sequel, then another one, and another one. Jason, the hockey mask-wearing psycho became a horror icon. They took him to Manhattan and to space and fought him against Freddy Kreuger. In 2009 they rebooted the franchise with this film that’s now getting a 4K release from Arrow Video. Honestly, I don’t think any of the films are very good, but I kind of love them just the same.

Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy: Gregg Araki took the typical teen movie formula and infused it with Gen X sensibilities while amping up the sex and violence. Criterion is releasing three of his films – Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere in a nice-looking boxed set.

Tattooed Life: Radiance Films is releasing this Seijun Suzuki drama about a hitman forced to run for his life while his brother tags along.

The Threat: Kinji Fukasaku’s drama about two escaped criminals who kidnap a baby and then make a decent family man collect the ransom, gets the Arrow Video treatment.

Torso is the Pick of the Week

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I recognize that no one really cares what my Blu-ray pick of the week is. Out of the few hundred people who will even see these articles there’s probably only a dozen or so that actually read them. And I can’t imagine any of them are in any way influenced by my choice.

I’m not an influencer. I don’t have millions of followers. You don’t have to click here and subscribe. And that’s okay. I’m fully satisfied with my tiny little corner of the internet.

So, yeah, I totally get that these picks aren’t in any way important. And yet. And still. I take them seriously. I actually do sit and think about what release is my pick.

This is why I must admit to you that this week, I messed up. I picked the wrong thing. Let me explain. What I actually picked this week was Torso, the pretty great, and stylish, and admittedly rather sleazy Giallo from director Sergio Martino. It has a new 4K upgrade from Arrow Video and they’ve loaded it with some new extras.

Normally that would be a great pick. But normally there aren’t nice releases of a Martin Scorsese film celebrating its 25th anniversary. The thing is I saw that release, but assumed it was just another bare-bones release.

That’s what makes these picks so difficult. Everything gets multiple releases now. There were DVD releases and Blu-ray releases, special editions, and anniversaries. Now there is 4K UHD. It never stops. I’m not smart enough to be able to keep up with all the releases and which film has come out in what format with which special features.

But that Bringing Out the Dead release looks pretty fab.

Anyway, my pick is Torso and you can read about it here.

Inside Out 2 is the Pick of the Week

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I assume most of you saw my message on the music site. I’m having hard drive trouble so that site is on pause for now. Dealing with that nonsense is likely gonna slow my writing down on this site. But it is Tuesday and I know everybody is desperately waiting to tell them my Pick of the Week, so here we go.

For a very long time, Pixar was one of the greatest animated studios around (depending on the day I’d put them or Ghibli at #1). They are still great, but certainly, they’ve had a few duds from time to time. I don’t know if it is that, or the fact that my kid has gotten older and is less interested in animated movies, but we’ve not gone to see the last few Pixar films in the theater.

Honestly, we hardly see anything in the theater so maybe that’s the problem.

I did get to go to a special screening of Inside Out in 2015 and it quickly became one of my favorite films of the year. I wasn’t exactly hot with anticipation over a sequel, as the original ends on a perfect note, but Pixar has a great track record with sequels, so I am excited to finally see it.

It really was a film I kept saying we should go see in theaters, but for one reason or another, we never made it. I’m thrilled to get a chance to watch it on home video.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1: Kevin Costner’s 3-hour epic tells the story of America from just before, during, and just after the Civil War. I’ve heard very mixed reviews, but I’m interested. I like Costner quite a lot.

Super Friends: The Complete Series: I am old enough to remember Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons. I am certainly old enough to lament their demise. There was something special about coming home from school or waking up on a Saturday morning and watching episode after episode of your favorite cartoons. Superfriends was just slightly before my time. I remember them, but not super-well. Still, having them boxed up like this is a treat.

All of Us Strangers: Andrew Scott stars in this drama about a screenwriter who returns home to find his parents living their lives just as they were when they died…30 years prior. The Criterion Collection has the release.

The Strangers: Horror film starring Liv Tyler about three strangers who terrorize a newlywed couple in their remote house.

To Kill a Mastermind: 88 Films has been steadily putting out Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies. This one is about a secret crime syndicate and the guys hired to stop them.

The Golden Lotus: Another Shaw Brothers film being put out by 88 Films, this time it isn’t so much a Kung Fu martial arts flick but an erotic melodrama. That ought to be interesting.

Batman 85th Anniversary Collection: Gathers together ten animated films celebrating the Dark Knight. The films are all in 4K and as follows: Mask of the Phantasm, Year One, Assault on Arkham, The Killing Joke, Gotham by Gaslight, Hush, Soul of the Dragon, The Long Halloween, The Doom That Came to Gotham, Batman and Harley Quinn.

Repo Man is the Pick of the Week

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It is a fairly tame week for new releases. I only found a few films that I was interested in. The main one is the pick and that is Alex Cox’s hilarious punk rock flick Repo Man. The late, great Harry Dean Stanton teams up wit a young Emilio Estevez in a movie that just has to be seen to be believed.

The Criterion Collection is giving it a new 4K Transfer.

You can read about it and the other movies coming out this week here.

Tokijiro: The Lonely Yakuza is the Pick of the Week

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I’m American. I’m middle-class, male and white. I suppose I feel a certain sense of duty every once in a while. I work. I try to take care of my family. I pay my taxes. But I’ve never felt that innate sense of duty for anything that would make me forsake everything I hold dear in order to fulfill it.

I’m always fascinated with movies in which a character is willing to do completely insane (to my way of thinking) things due to a sense of duty.

In Tokijiro: The Lonely Yakuza the hero agrees to kill a man he doesn’t know, a good man, simply because someone gave him shelter for the night and asks him to commit murder. And that man he kills completely understands the situation. He fights for his life, but he doesn’t argue that murdering a stranger out of a sense of duty is completely nuts.

From there our hero has to take care of th dead man’s wife and child because the guy he killed asked him to. That concept is so foreign to me, and yet I love it just the same. The movie is pretty great all around. Filled with some great fight scenes, and rather moving emotional components.

I reviewed the Blu-ray here.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: While I have a very softspot for the original Planet of the Apes and its numerous sequels, I’ve never much cared for the more recent trilogy. I never even bothred with War For the Planet of the Apes. Can’s say I’m too excited about this one either.

Castle of Blood: Barbara Steele stars in this Italian haunted house thriller where a writer accepts a bet that he cannot spend the night alone in an old castle and finds himself visited by several people who were murdered there.

High Crime: Franco Nero stars in this pretty good little Italian crime thriller about a cop out to stop a crime syndicate. You can read my full review here.

Thieves Like Us: Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall star in this Robert Altman directed period drama about a couple of convicts who escape prison and go on a bank robbing spree. Vinegar Syndrom of all companies has this new 4K release.

Last Year at Merinbad: Kino Lorber gives this French classic the 4K treatment.

A Man Called Tiger: A very silly Hong Kong actioner (though it is set in Japan) which was originally suppossed to star Bruce Lee now stars Jimmy Wang Yu as a man who infiltrates the Yakuza in order to find out who killed his father. It ends with an amazing battle where Yu battles a bunch of dudes with hatchets and that’s all I need to say about that.

Tremors: 7 Movie Collection: The original Tremors (1990) is a wonderful blend of horror, comedy, and action packed thriller. It is about a small town beset by giant, under ground worm-like creatures. It is a bid-budget, b-movie that makes great use of everything (including a cast that includes Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Victor Wong, Michael Gross, and Reba McIntire. I’ve never seen any of the sequels, but this Wal-Mart exlusive Steelbook set might make me get there.

Door to Door Maniac: Johnny Cash stars as a crazed villain who holds a banker’s wife hostage while his partner robs the bank. You can read my full review here.

Succession: The Complete Series: I really need to watch this HBO series about a highly dysfunctional (yet ridiculously successful) family. All my online friends love it.

Nintendo Quest: Silly looking documentary about a couple of guys who try to collect all 678 officially licensed NES video games. As a guy who loved my NES (and SNES) back in the day this sounds fun.

The Mexico Trilogy: Robert Rodriguez made a name for himself with the ultra low budget El Mariachi. He became a star when he essentially remade that film with a bigger budget and called it Desperado. He finished the trilogy with Once Upon a Time In Mexico. I loved Desperado back in the day but I suspect it doesn’t really hold up. But if you dig these films then Arrow Video has a nice looking boxed set of all three.

Alphaville: Kino Lorber presents Jean Luc Godards masterful, wild, and weird science fiction classic with a new 4K transfer.

Real Life: Albert Brooks is one of those guys whom I feel I should really love, but I’ve never really bothered with. He wrote and directed this film about a documentary filmmaker who persuades a family to let him film their “real lives” and then constantly interjects himself in order to make it more interesting. Criterion is giving it their usual amazing looking release.

Mother: Another Albert Brooks comedy getting a Criterion release. This ones about a writer who moves back in with his mother to solve some personal issues.

The Watchers: Dakota Fanning stars in this thriller about a woman who gets lost in an Irish forest and is stalked each night by mysterious creatures.

Drive: I just rewatched this Nicolas Winding Refn drama about a stuntman who moonlights as a wheelman for a gang of thieves and it still holds up amazingly well. Sony Pictures is giving it a 4K release in a nice looking steelbook.