Hi, Bryan Here….

Got a late start on this column due to screenings and being on a short vacation, which was AMAZING.  But alas, the weekly column you all look forward to is out.  Sorry for the delay.  Quite a bit of great titles this week including Indiana Jones on bluray.    As usual in this article, you will get some info about the disc and the extras that come with the movie as well as a personal opinion about the movie and a picture-link to purchase the film over at AMAZON where you can save quite a bit of money, and it will give a small percentage kick back to this site so we can continue bringing you excellent stories and bizarre tales. So click on the pictures and start saving.

Enjoy and Here We Go!!

BAIT (3D BLURAY+2D BLURAY+DVD)

When a monstrous freak tsunami hits a sleepy beach community, a group of survivors from different walks of life find themselves trapped inside a submerged grocery store. As they try to escape to safety, they soon discover that there is a predator among them more deadly than the threat of drowning-vicious great white sharks lurking in the water, starved hungry for fresh meat. As the bloodthirsty sharks begin to pick the survivors off one by one, the group realizes that they must work together to find a way out without being eaten alive.  Stupid fun schlock. This will go nicely with your Sharktopuss and Dinocroc films.

EXTRAS

– Still Gallery

BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (BLURAY)

Actually a good little film.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel follows a group of British retirees who decide to “outsource” their retirement to less expensive and seemingly exotic India. Enticed by advertisements for the newly restored Marigold Hotel and bolstered with visions of a life of leisure, they arrive to find the palace a shell of its former self. Though the new environment is less luxurious than imagined, they are forever transformed by their shared experiences, discovering that life and love can begin again when you let go of the past.

EXTRAS

• Behind the Story: Lights, Colors and Smiles
• Casting Legends

• Welcome to the “Real” Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
• Trekking to India: “Life is Never the Same”
• Tuk Tuk Travels

BLACK SUNDAY (BLURAY)

Always the highest recommendation for Italian Horror.  Maria Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’ is very good. In an absolutely mesmerizing performance, Black Sunday stars Barbara Steele as Asa Vajda, a beautiful woman tortured and executed as a witch–but not before pronouncing a curse upon those who have condemned her, a curse that is fulfilled some 200 years later.   Great release from Kino.

EXTRAS

• Audio commentary by Tim Lucas, author of Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark
• Original theatrical trailers from this other Bava films

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (BLURAY+DIGITAL COPY)

This is a great horror/sci-fi/mystery film.  Joss Whedon produced this, so you know it’s AWESOME.  If you didn’t get a chance to see this in the theaters, I highly recommend you buy this.  It’s amazing.  Five friends go to a remote cabin in the woods. Bad things happen. If you think you know this story, think again. From fan favorites Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard comes The Cabin in the Woods, a mind blowing horror film that turns the genre inside out.  Highest recomendation.

EXTRAS

• Audio commentary with writer/director Drew Goddard and writer/producer Joss Whedon
• We Are Not Who We Are: Making The Cabin in the Woods
• The Secret Secret Stash two-part featurette
• Wonder-Con Q&A with Joss and Drew
• An Army of Nightmares: Make-Up & Animatronic Effects
• Primal Terror: Visual Effects
• Theatrical Trailer

• It’s Not What You Think: ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ Bonus View Mode
• Bookmarks

CHILDREN OF PARADISE (CRITERION COLLECTION BLURAY)

Criterion Collection yet again knocked it out of the park with this release.  Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis), widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimonde, filmed during World War II, follows a mysterious woman (Arletty) loved by four different men (all based on historical figures): an actor, a criminal, a count, and, most poignantly, a street mime (Jean-Louis Barrault, in a longing-suffused performance for the ages). With sensitivity and dramatic élan, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert resurrect a world teeming with hucksters and aristocrats, thieves and courtesans, pimps and seers. Thanks to a major new restoration, this iconic classic looks and sounds richer and more detailed than ever.  Amazing.

EXTRAS

• Audio commentaries by film scholars Brian Stonehill and Charles Affron
• Video introduction by director Terry Gilliam
• Once Upon a Time: Children of Paradise, a 2010 documentary on the making of the film
• New visual essay on the design of Children of Paradise by film writer Paul Ryan
• The Birth of Children of Paradise, a 1967 German documentary that visits Nice, where the film was partially shot, and features interviews with cast members Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur; production designer Alexandre Trauner; and others
• Restoration demonstration
• U.S. trailer
• A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Dudley Andrew and excerpts from a 1990 interview with director Marcel Carné

THE DO-DECA-PENTATHALON (BLURAY)

This is so much fun.  It’s kind of like that show ‘Kenny Vs. Spenny’.  Two grown men take sibling rivalry to new heights of hilarity in this winning comedy with heart. All bets are off during a family reunion when estranged brothers Mark (Steve Zissis) and Jeremy (Mark Kelly) secretly resurrect a decades-old quest to be the best. Determined to complete 25 outrageous events in order to crown a true champion, the exhausted pair find themselves leg wrestling, ping-ponging, and laser tagging to the finish line…while learning a few life lessons along the way. Written and directed by the comically competitive Duplass Brothers (Cyrus), The Do-Deca-Pentathlon brings home the gold – and the laughs!  Yes one of the Duplass brothers is on the FX show ‘The League’.

EXTRAS

• Rock, Paper, Scissors with the Real Brothers
• Meet the Real Brothers

ED WOOD (BLURAY)

One of my favorite Tim Burton films.  I’m so happy this is finally on bluray.  Every actor in this is phenomenal.  Hollywood visionary Tim Burton pays homage to another Hollywood visionary, albeit a less successful one, in this unusual fictionalized biography. The film follows Wood (Johnny Depp) in his quest for film greatness as he writes and directs turkey after turkey, cross-dresses, and surrounds himself with a motley crew of Hollywood misfits, outcasts, has-beens, and never-weres. The real story, however, is his friendship with aging, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), whom he tries to help stage a comeback.  Must own.

THE GAME (CRITERION COLLECTION BLURAY)

I loved this film.  What a cool concept and it was executed perfectly.  Not sure why Criterion wanted to add this to their library, but they did.  Director David Fincher followed the success of his dark and atmospheric crime thriller Seven (1995) with another exercise in stylish film noir, this time lifting the pallid atmosphere a notch to indulge in a fast-paced trip through the cinematic funhouse. Michael Douglas plays Nicholas Van Orton, a Scrooge-like San Francisco investment banker following in his father’s Scrooge-like footsteps. On Nicholas’s 48th birthday (the age at which his father committed suicide), his younger, free-spirited brother Conrad (Sean Penn) blows into town and gives Nicholas a special gift for “the man who has everything” — a ticket to CRS (Consumer Recreation Services), a company that constructs games custom-fit for each participant to provide, as CRS salesman Jim Feingold (James Rebhorn) cryptically puts it, “whatever is lacking.” Nicholas’s secure life begins a downhill slide as CRS masterminds a series of elaborate pranks, harmless at first, that quickly become malicious and life-threatening. Stripped of financial resources and convinced that he can trust no one, Nicholas begins to wonder if CRS is a front for a more covert operation, and if the game is in fact an attempt to steal his fortune and leave him for dead. Determined to fight back alone, Nicholas infiltrates CRS in order to “pull back the curtain and meet the wizard.”  I could watch this movie seeral times a year and never get tired of it.

EXTRAS

• Audio commentary by Fincher, Savides, actor Michael Douglas, screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris, digital animation supervisor Richard “Dr.” Baily, production designer Jeffrey Beecroft, visual effects supervisor Kevin Haug, and visual effects producer Robyn D’Arcy
• An hour’s worth of exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and film-to-storyboard comparisons for four of the film’s major set pieces, with commentary
• Alternate ending
• Trailer and teaser trailer, with commentary
• A booklet featuring an essay by film critic David Sterritt

HALLOWEEN 2 (BLURAY)

Just in time for Halloween.  While John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween irrevocably changed the style of horror cinema with its simple but relentlessly tense story, it triggered more than a decade’s worth of uninspired, exploitative knock-offs, and one could easily list Halloween II among these failures. As with its predecessor, this film was written and produced by Carpenter and Debra Hill, but the terse style and unbearable suspense of the first film are missing, replaced by a more simplistic stalk-and-slash scenario. Directorial duties were handed over to Rick Rosenthal, whose lack of expertise is quite evident (though he managed to hit his stride two years later with the prison actioner Bad Boys). The plot picks up exactly where the original left off: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), shaken and injured from her battle with unkillable psycho Michael Myers, is taken to the Haddonfield Hospital for observation, while Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) continues his desperate search for his monstrous patient. An interesting plot twist has Loomis’ investigations revealing Michael’s true identity (some of these sequences incorporate footage of young Michael originally shot for the television version of Halloween, which contained scenes hinting at the link between Michael and Laurie).After slashing his way through the town, Myers manages to track Laurie to the hospital, where the remainder of the action takes place. Numerous night-shift employees are slaughtered in a variety of gruesome ways before Loomis catches up with his quarry, leading to an explosive — and seemingly conclusive — confrontation. Pleasence is compelling as usual, but Curtis, who made an auspicious debut in the original, is sadly wasted here, her character reduced to shuffling half-drugged through darkened hospital corridors and screaming helplessly. Carpenter’s active involvement in the Halloween franchise continued to dwindle steadily from one sequel to the next, getting scarcely a mention by the time producers Hill, Moustapha Akkad and Irwin Yablans revived the series in 1988 for three more sequels.

EXTRAS

• Audio Commentaries
• Featurettes
• TV Version of Film (DVD)
• Still Gallery
• Deleted Scenes
• Alternate Ending
• Trailers

HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH (BLURAY)

You know, I’ve been too hard on this over the years.  And after watching this again, I have come to conclude that Halloween 3: The Season of the Witch is fucking awesome.  Yes, this does not contain the villain from the first two films.  There is no Michael Myers in this film.  The studio wanted this film to turn into an anthology that was about different monsters and different kinds of horror.  But the thing was, they didn’t change the name, the billed it as a sequel, and nobody told anyone that this was the start of a supposed anthology film without Michael Myers.  Needless to say, after terrible reviews and angry people, they brought Myers back.  But, let me assure you, this film is awesome.  Get it.  The only installment of the Halloween series to abandon the Michael Myers story line, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is an intricate sci-fi horror hybrid. A week before Halloween, an older man named Harry Grimbridge (Al Berry) is wounded by a mysteriously dispassionate group of assailants in an industrial parking lot. After receiving treatment at a local hospital from Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) — a hard-drinking divorced father of two — Grimbridge is killed by an assassin who later sets himself on fire. Blowing off his own kids, Challis teams up with Grimbridge’s daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), to find out why the middle-aged toy salesman was murdered. The duo’s search soon leads them to a Halloween-mask factory run by inventor and practical joker Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy). In between bouts of passionate lovemaking, Ellie and Challis begin to realize that the sinister old businessman has something other than treats in mind for America’s kids — something to do with the Silver Shamrock masks that Challis’ children and thousands of other youngsters have bought for the holiday. Original screenwriter Nigel Kneale, whose scripts for Britain’s Quatermass TV series made him a beloved science fiction fixture, sued the producers of Halloween III to have his name removed from the credits after seeing the gory finished product; director Tommy Lee Wallace ultimately received screenplay credit. John Carpenter, director of the first Halloween film, co-produced the third installment with Debra Hill, who would later soldier on without Carpenter for additional, belated sequels.

EXTRAS

• Audio Commentaries
• Featurettes
• Still Gallery
• Trailers
• Theatrical trailers and TV spots
• *A limited edition – less than 500 copies made – poster if Halloween III is purchased at Shout Factory’s website

HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON (BLURAY)

More Italian horror films. Hooray.  Stephen Forsyth stars as John Harrington, the head of an affluent fashion house, who harbors an uncontrollable bloodlust for women in bridal veils. Only by murdering a succession of them, each in a grisly manner, can he delve deeper into his subconscious and bring to light the primal scene that spawned his very specific homicidal fetish. With its director doubling as cinematographer, Hatchet is one of Bava’s most visually sumptuous films.  Definitely get it.

EXTRAS

• Commentary track by Tim Lucas (Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark)
• Original theatrical trailer
• Other trailers

INDIANA JONES: THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES (BLURAY)

All four Indiana Jones films are finally on bluray in one set.  Well at least the ones that matter.  This collection includes: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Must own. Just get it.

EXTRAS

• Documentaries
• Featurettes
• Trailers

JUDGE DREDD (BLURAY)

Just in time for the new Dredd film.  Was not a huge fan of this film.  In a time when all-powerful and coldly efficient “Judges” act with the supreme authority of both the police force and legal system, Judge Dredd (Stallone) is the most feared law enforcer of them all. But when a former judge hatches a sinister plot to overthrow the government and eliminate the Judges, Dredd is framed for murder!  If you’re a fan you’ll get it, but I can’t recommend it.  And, do you know how they use the three seashells?

LES VISITEURS DU SOIR (CRITERION COLLECTION BLURAY)

Criterion hits a home run with this release.  A work of poetry and dark humor, Les visiteurs du soir is a lyrical medieval fantasy from the great French director Marcel Carné. Two strangers (Arletty and Alain Cuny), dressed as minstrels, arrive at a castle in advance of court festivities—and it is revealed that they are actually emissaries of the devil himself, dispatched to spread heartbreak and suffering. Their plans, however, are thwarted by an unexpected intrusion: human love. Often interpreted as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France, during which it was made, Les visiteurs du soir—wittily written by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche, and elegantly designed by Alexandre Trauner and shot by Roger Hubert—is a moving and whimsical tale of love conquering all. Amazing.

EXTRAS

• L’aventure des Visiteurs du soir, a documentary on the making of the film
• A trailer
• A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Michael Atkinson

THE MAGIC OF BELLE ISLE (BLURAY)

Morgan Freeman as you’ve never seen him.  Amazing film.  Reuniting with director Rob Reiner from the hit film, The Bucket List, Freeman plays Monte Wildhorn, a famous Western novelist whose struggle with alcoholism has sapped his passion for writing. He takes a lakeside cabin for the summer inpicturesque Belle Isle, and befriends the family next door – an attractive single mom (Madsen) and her young daughters – who help him find inspiration again.  Great addition to the collection.

EXTRAS

• Audio Commentary
• HDNet: A Look at
• Deleted Scenes
• Original Trailer

MODERN FAMILY: SEASON 3 (BLURAY)

The third season of the award winning tv series is here.  I think this show has run its course.  It’s all redundant now.

EXTRAS

• A Modern Family Christmas
• Behind-the-scenes featurettes
• Deleted and extended scenes
• Deleted family interviews
• Gag reel

That’s all for this week.