Sorcerer 4K UHD is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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I’ve been writing this column (or something similar) off and on now for well over a decade. It has been interesting to see home video move from DVD to Blu-ray to 4K UHD and then struggle with the advent of streaming video.

I’d like to say this has gained me some secret knowledge as to how the companies that produce home video decide how and when to release things, but it really hasn’t. Other than things pick up in the post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas period, and slow way the heck down in the weeks following Christmas, I have no insight into what any of these companies are doing. And last year, even that simple insight failed as there wasn’t as big of a push just before Christmas, and we got some amazing releases during the normal winter doldrums.

Streaming was a game-changer. The truth is, most people are happy to watch Netflix or Hulu or whatever and no longer have the need to buy physical media. What’s left are collectors. People who desire the physical media, who want something to put on their shelves. Collectors are a strange breed (I count myself as one of them.) We are willing to spend inordinate amounts of money on something we could easily watch for free.

Lots of amazing Boutique Labels have sprung up to meet our needs. Companies like Arrow Video, Kino Lorber, and Severin are now putting out fantastic sets of all sorts of films, both popular and obscure.

I still don’t know the ins and outs of what they decide to release and when. But we now have more options than ever before.

That’s a long-winded way of saying this is an incredible week for physical releases.

There are a lot of films to talk about. We’ll start with my favorite. Sorcerer is a loose remake of the classic French thriller Wages of Fear (1953). Directed by William Friedkin, it follows four misfits from around the globe (including Roy Scheider and Bruno Cramer) who are tasked with transporting some highly unstable dynamite across the vast South American jungle.

It is one of the most intense films ever made, with our heroes driving these big trucks across terrible terrain, never knowing if a turn or a bump in the road will cause them to explode.

The Criterion Collection is releasing it with a new 4K UHD transfer and loads of nice extras.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

A Minecraft Movie 4K UHD: I’ve never played Minecraft, but my daughter loves it. Actually, what she really loves is watching hardcore Minecrafters play the game on YouTube. When this film came out, she and her friends went to see it opening weekend. They loved it. I think they loved it ironically, but she’s a teenager, and it is hard to tell. She made me watch it the other night, and it’s not terrible. I mean, it is a movie based on a game in which you basically just build stuff, and I’ve grown increasingly tired of Jack Black’s schtick, but Jason Momoa is a lot of fun playing against type.

Lethal Weapon 4K UHD: One of the great action flicks from the 1980s gets a UHD upgrade.

Total Extermination: The Peter Cushing Doctor Who Collection: The original Doctor Who series was an immediate success upon its launch in 1963. The Daleks were introduced in only its second story, and they became a sensation. So much so that in 1965, a full-fledged Technicolor movie was commissioned starring Peter Cushing as The Doctor. Doctor Who and the Daleks pretty much follows the original Dalek story with some minor changes. A year later, Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD was made, this one following yet another Dalek story from the TV.

They are oddities, and not necessary viewings, even for fans, but I quite like them. Severin Films is releasing them both in a boxed set, giving them a 4K upgrade with loads of extras.

Doctor Who: Season One: When Disney acquired the rights to Doctor Who for some stupid reason, they reverted the season numbers back to One. I have to admit I didn’t love this season, it felt a little too juvenile, and…well, Disneyfied, but I own all the others, so this will definitely be a pick-up by me.

Dark City 4K UHD: I don’t remember liking this dark science fiction noir when it first came out, but people I respect seem to really like it so I need to give it a revisit. Arrow Video is giving it a nice upgrade.

The Monkey 4K UHD: This loosely based on a Stephen King short story horror flick from Osgood Perkins is light on story and heavy on complicated deaths (and fun). You can read my full review here.

Novocaine 4K UHD: This rather silly action film has an interesting premise – its hero cannot feel pain. He isn’t indestructible. He still bleeds, burns, and can break bones; he just can’t feel any of that happening to him. The film takes this premise to pretty ridiculous (and ridiculously fun) extremes, but I enjoyed it.

Palindromes 4K UHD: Todd Solondz makes difficult films full of terrible characters that you somehow still manage to empathise with. I’ve not seen this film, but Radiance Films appears to have done their usual remarkable job with this release.

The Invisible Swordsman 4K UHD: Arrow Video presents this Japanese film about an awkward Edo-era swordsman who meets a spirit who says he can help him avenge his father’s death (by turning him invisible, of course).

The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost: Radiance Films is releasing this Japanese tale about a Samurai trying to win his wife back, and supernatural vengeance.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

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28 Days Later was one of the first movie reviews I ever wrote for this blog. With the new legacy sequel, 28 Years later, coming out this weekend, I thought it would be fun to revisit the first film and its original sequel 28 Weeks Later.

I find I mostly still agree with my original review of the first film. I like the first half better than the second, but my opinion of the second half improved a little, and my thoughts on the first half declined. I think I appreciate what it was trying to do with the military stuff more, and the zombie stuff no longer feels all that fresh or original.

My memory says I hated the sequel, but I rated it 3.5 stars out of 5, so I guess my feelings were mixed. I didn’t write a review of it, so I don’t have the details of those feelings written down for posterity.

This time around, I mostly liked it.

It begins with completely different characters from those who were in the first film. We find a group of people huddled inside a small but rather fortified cabin, hiding from the zombies. This includes Don Harris (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). The zombies attack, and at first, Don plays the hero, fighting back the zombies while everyone else runs.

But then he runs and ultimately finds himself separated from his wife and a small child. The zombies attack them, and instead of fighting, he runs. We see him fleeing the house while his wife pounds on the window, presumably about to get eaten.

The film spends a lot of time painting that action as completely cowardly and Don as a horrible person. He is completely grief-stricken. The thing is, I kind of found myself on his side. It was a horrible situation, and there wasn’t a whole lot he could have done to save her.

Movies teach us that everybody should always risk their lives to save others, and while that is a noble sentiment, it is also perfectly human to be scared out of your mind in these types of situations, and not always be the hero.

I’m going to avoid spoilers, but something happens to rub that guilt in, and then it totally doesn’t matter because the film takes a different turn.

Anyway, flash forward to 28 weeks later, and the zombies have all died out. They apparently never escaped England, and all the humans either were bitten or escaped. The zombies eventually died of starvation.

Now they are trying to repopulate the country. NATO forces (led by Americans) have set up a fortified camp on the Isle of Dogs, an isolated peninsula near London. Don’s children, Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) have just arrived, where they are reunited with Don.

There is some interesting subtext about Americans and militarization. They act like they have complete control of the situation, full of bluster and ego, and then everything goes haywire, and they are mostly completely useless to stop it.

The film takes its time before the zombies come back, but once they do, things kick into high gear. There are several terrific set pieces that I enjoyed a lot more than the original film. 28 Days Later used a lot of handheld camera work, and I often got lost in what was happening to whom, but here the action is much better balanced.

There is a lot of nonsense in where the plot goes, and so many characters make so many dumb decisions, it is hard to take it seriously, but if you can set that sort of thing aside, this makes for a good little zombie sequel. It helps that the cast is completely stacked. Besides those already mentioned, we’ve got Idris Elba, Jeremy Renner, and Harold Perrineau as soldiers and Rose Byrne as a military doctor.

Murder, She Wrote: The Complete Series is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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The wife and I are big fans of cozy murder mysteries. There is just something nice about sitting down after a long day and watching interesting people solve a murder. I never watched Murder, She Wrote when it originally aired, but we’ve recently started watching it, and I just love it. I think that officially makes me an old man now.

You can read about it and all the other interesting releases coming out this week here.

What Is It Good For: War Movies In June – The Wild Geese (1978)

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I wrote about this for a Now Watching segment but since it is a war movie I wanted to expand upon those thoughts here.

I’m usually a big fan of these men-on-a-mission type films. You know, the ones where a disparate group of men come together to perform a nearly impossible task. Movies like The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone are great fun, but The Wild Geese fails at nearly every turn. It isn’t the fault of the cast, which is pretty well stacked, featuring Richard Burton, Roger Moore, and Richard Harris amongst others. But I found it interminably dull.

Burton plays Allen Faulkner, a retired British Army Colonel turned mercenary. He’s tasked with rescuing Julius Limbani (Winston Ntshona), an imprisoned African President who is set to be executed by the military leaders who arrested him during a coup. Faulkner recruits Captain Rafer Janders (Harris), Lieutenant Shawn Fynn (Moore), and a host of others.

The men receive some training from a hard drill sergeant, and then are flown to the prison location and parachute in. They attack the base, rescue Limbani, but have trouble escaping. Later, there will be a (completely) obvious twist.

The plot is so basic, I knew pretty much what was going to happen once it began. You know exactly which of the main cast will die from their introductions. The script plods. There are lots of action sequences, but they are so dully directed that one hardly notices.

The film makes faint nods towards anti-colonial, anti-racist sentiments, but they are poorly done. One of the men is an out-and-out racist, throwing around the N-word and making sarcastic remarks towards the Limbani. But then he gets a scene in which he sits and talks to Limbani, and the President’s calm manner and reasonable discussions miraculously turn the racist around.

Limbani is regularly described as a great man, but as a character, he’s given very little to do and very few lines to say. He’s just someone these kind, white, British people have to rescue, not a real character.

You could almost forgive that if the action was any good. Or if you actually cared about any of these characters. Instead I just scratched my head at it all and hoped it would soon come to an end.

Now Watching: Drug War (2012)

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Drug War (2012)
Directed by Johnnie To
Starring: Louis Koo, Honglei Sun, and Huang Yi

Synopsis: A drug cartel boss who is arrested in a raid is coerced into betraying his former accomplices as part of an undercover operation.

Rating: 8/10

This is the type of film that will keep bringing me back to Johnnie To. The plot is convoluted and a little crazy, but also endlessly interesting with cops, informants, and bad guys switching allegiances and sides like a roulette table. The action is fierce, chaotic, and meticulously staged.

There is a scene late in the film where a cop handcuffs himself to a guy’s leg. Then the cop gets killed, so the bad guy has to run around dragging the cop’s corpse along with him. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this film, I don’t know what will.

Now Watching: Breaking News (2004)

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Breaking News (2004)
Directed by Johnnie To
Starring: Richie Jen, Kelly Chen, and Nick Cheung
Synopsis: After a disastrous failure to stop a robber gang, the police attempt to redeem themselves through a series of publicity stunts and shootouts.
Rating: 7/10

I’m quite behind on these. They are easy to write and I always mean to write them right after I watch, but then something comes up and I forget. I watched this one five days ago. I’ll try to play catch-up this weekend.

Johnnie is a Hong Kong director whose name gets tossed around quite a bit in my circles, but I’d never seen one of his films until now. The Criterion Channel is running a whole bunch of them, and I chose this one pretty much at random. It was good enough to make me watch another one the very next day and then a third a couple of days later.

It begins with an incredible 7-minute-long one-take shot. It follows a man into a building (the camera cranes to a top floor and into a building, then back out again), followed by a shootout with the cops. This goes poorly for the cops, and they decide they need to put on a “show” for the media. Basically, they start using their own PR department to create videos to send to the news to indicate how awesome they are.

The action scenes (and there are quite a lot of them) are all staged really well. The media stuff feels very dated and has not aged particularly well. But as I said, there is enough to love here that I immediately watched another film from To.

Now Watching: Wallace & Gromit:Vengence Most Fowl (2024)

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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)
Directed by Merlin Crossingham & Nick Park
Starring: Ben Whitehead, Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Reece Shearsmith, and Diane Morgan

Synopsis: Top dog Gromit springs into action to save his master when Wallace’s high-tech invention goes rogue and he is framed for a series of suspicious crimes.

Rating: 8/10

We’re big fans of Wallace & Gromit here at The Midnight Cafe. They have this wonderful blend of nostalgic conservatism and modern progress. The claymation is all handmade, which makes it both not quite exactly perfect and absolutely beautiful.

The setting of all these films and short films is intentionally opaque, with much of it feeling like the 1960s but with plenty of modern technology. Wallace seems like an old-fashioned, traditional conservative, while Gromit, his dog, is much more modern. I’m making it sound like these are political films, and they are decidedly not. It’s more like an updating of a British Norman Rockwell, but with anthropomorphic animals, Rube Goldberg machines, and lots of cheese. Anyway, if you’ve never seen a Wallace & Gromit film, I highly recommend them.

This one finds Wallace inventing a robot gnome that can do your household chores. When one of them gets switched to “Evil” mode by a malevolent penguin, things get a little bit crazy.

It is wonderfully funny, boisterous, and filled with loads of action. I have a hard time ranking any of these films because I just lovely them so wholeheartedly.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Baron Blood (1972)

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Apologies for getting this out late. My daughter had a sleepover last night, and I decided to stay up late watching a French adaptation of an Agatha Christie story with my wife rather than write this. I think you will understand.

Baron Blood was directed by the great Italian genre director Mario Bava. It was made late in his career (he’d only direct three more films before his death) when he was having trouble getting financing for any film. Beloved as he is now, Bava’s films rarely made much money when they were released.

As such, the film has plenty of style and looks amazing, but falls fairly flat in the storytelling department.

Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora), an American university student, comes to Austria to visit his ancestral castle. While there, he learns that his Great-Grandfather was a notorious sadist who tortured and killed hundreds of villagers, earning him the nickname Baron Blood. Legend says that the Baron burned a witch at the stake, but before she died, she cursed him with a spell that would allow him to rise again from the grave only to be eternally tortured by her.

Naturally, our hero, along with his friend Eva Arnold (Elke Sommer) enacts the curse and raises the baron from the grave.

But first, Joseph Cotton.

Although he is top billed, the legendary actor doesn’t appear until at least half an hour into this 90-minute film. He plays Alfred Becker, an eccentric millionaire who buys the castle at auction.

Actually, no, my timeline is off. Peter and Eve do use an incantation to raise the Baron from the grave before Becker shows up. They do it at midnight, but the clock strikes 2 ( the exact time when the Baron was murdered), and blood runs under the door, but they don’t actually see the Baron. Before they can read the recantation, a wind knocks the scroll into a fire, and it is lost.

Although they do not know it, the Baron has risen, and he kills the previous owner of the castle, hence the auction, hence the showing up of Alfred Becker.

He kills a few more people, and our heroes try to find a way to lift the curse. Etc. The plot follows a pretty standard path from there.

Cotton feels out of place here, like he’s not quite sure what he’s doing in this film. He was in his late 60s at the time, making a string of low-budget horror movies, which I can only assume was a low point in his career. Sommer seems to be the only one having any real fun, and she’s a delight.

What makes it worth watching is the setting and Bava’s usual fantastic use of color, light, and shadow. Shot on the grounds of a real castle, he makes great use of the gothic setting, complete with a tower, torture chamber, and lots of enormous chambers that give the director plenty of interesting angles to shoot from.

It is far from Bava’s best work, but even average films from him are well worth watching.

Now Watching: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

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The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Directed by Wes Anderson
Starring: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Bill Murray, and Danny Glover
Synopsis: The eccentric members of a dysfunctional family reluctantly gather under the same roof for various reasons.

Rating: 10/10

I remember watching this movie in the theater, having no idea what to expect. I can’t remember if I’d seen Rushmore more this or not, but if I had, I hadn’t really connected it to Wes Anderson. He’s one of the most famous auteurs these days, but this was just his third film, and he wasn’t so well known outside of cinephile circles.

I was completely knocked out by it. I loved every minute of it. The film is so assured in its style, its rhythms, and its own sense of existence. I never wanted to leave the theatre.

Anderson is now beloved for his signature visual style, but this is the first film that truly perfected it (Rushmore got close, but isn’t quite there). Every inch of the screen is filled with interesting things to look at, and their placement is well thought out and conceived. The music is exquisite and I’d argue this is the best script he’s ever written (it was co-written by Owen Wilson).

The entire cast is brilliant. Every single actor does some of his/her finest work. I’ve seen it half a dozen times since that initial theatrical viewing and it remains a personal favorite.

Five Cool Things and Brian Wilson

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My new Five Cool Things is out over at Cinema Sentries. This time I’m talking about The Eternaut, a new Netflix series about apocalyptic snow, Age of Defense, my favorite Tower Defense game, David Byrne’s wonderful new song “Everybody Laughs,” a podcast about the Satanic Panic, Whistable Pearl, a cozy British mystery show, and the life of Brian Wilson.

You can read all about it here.