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Sat
07
Aug

Flight to Mars Lands on Blu-Ray Thanks to Film Detective

Flight to Mars on Blu-ray

Flight to Mars is one of the earliest Atomic Era science fiction films that capitalized on the dream of interstellar flight. Being a product of its era, the story has an inherent charm in its simpllicity, and yet still delivers a story with political intrigue and raw action and romance.

Dr. Jim Barker (Arthur Franz) heads up a team of scientist who will be making the first manned mission to the Red Planet. Also accompanying him will be his scientifically capable assistant, Carol (Virginia Huston), who carries a torch for him that he's too blind to see. But Steve (Cameron Mitchell) sees it, and he works to get Carol to see that he's the right guy for her, even though he's just an embedded journalist there to document the flight and not a brainy rocket scientist.

Fri
06
Aug

The Herculoids Assemble on Blu-ray

The Herculoids Complete Series on Blu-ray

Somehere in space live The Herculoids. That somewhere happens to be the planet Quasar, a quaint little rock inhabited by civilized cavemen and bizarre creatures. It's not much of a tourist attraction, but it must have immeasurable resources because the only visitors it ever gets either want to conquer the planet, take its resources, bury treasure on it, or enslave the inhabitants.

No wonder The Herculoids are such separatists. You land on Quasar, you get one warning and then you're done.

Thu
29
Jul

Almost Famous Gets Paramount Presents Blu-ray Release

Paramount Presents Almost Famous

Almost Famous tells the story of William Millier (Patrick Fugit), a high school music journalist whose work gets noticed by Rolling Stone magazine, who then assign him his first story: a profile piece on an up-and-coming band, Stillwater. What the magazine doesn't realize, however, is that William is only 15 years old, having been promoted through school early due to some odd machinations by his mother (Frances McDormand) to obscure his age.

Touring with the band, William's experiences are both everything you would expect from living a rock-and-roll lifestyle, but also everything you would not expect, as the stereotypical band members and groupies are humanized through their personal struggles and foibles. Yes, there's the drugs and sex, but director Cameron Crowe shows this in a near tragic light, with all the consequences that come along with a life of excess.

Wed
28
Jul

Pennyworth Season 2 Not Worth a Dime

Pennyworth SSN2

When I first heard that Gotham was going to be followed up by a series called

Pennyworth, I thought, "Okay, Gotham was a wee bit of a stretch, going back to a pre-Batman version of the setting, but going back to Alfred's younger days is probably beyond a capable grasp."

I believe I was correct in this assumption. Even with Bruno Heller attached, Pennyworth seems to very little connection to the Fox series.

In this second season, Alfred (Jack Bannon) is something of a war profiteer. He runs a night club catering to both sides of the war, and puts his former military skills to the test by taking on the odd mercenary job here and there. Some of these jobs are at the behest of CIA field agent Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge), who enjoys a tenuous romantic relationship with resistance fighter, Martha Kane (Emma Paetz).

Tue
27
Jul

Arrow Video Presents Daimajin Trilogy: Part Samurai, Part Kaiju, All Fun

Damaijin

Arrow Video finally brings to Blu-ray the DAIMAJIN films. All shot in 1966 and produced by Daiei’s Kyoto studios, these films brought together two of Japan’s most popular film genres at the time: the samurai films in the vein of Zatoichi, and the giant monster kaiju films ala Godzilla and Gamera.

All three Daimajin movies are presented in this single boxed set (that has been long overdue for a Blu-ray release in America) and this will be the first time ever this short-lived series will be available to be viewed in the UK.

Fri
16
Jul

Chris Rock Heads SAW Spin-off, SPIRAL

Spiral DVD

Darren Lynn Bousman's torture machine continues to crank out product, this time branching out of the SAW franchise into an inspired copycat storyline: SPIRAL. And with this iteration, Bousman brings in some of Hollywood's big guns to lend their faces to the project.

Detective Zeke Banks (Chris Rock) is a pariah on the force, seen as disloyal to the blue because he turned on a dirty cop and had him put away, when his father, Marcus Banks (Samuel L. Jackson)  was in charge of the precinct. It's made him angry, and it's made him take risks, something which is difficult for his new partner, Detective William Schenk (Max Minghella), to accept.

Sun
04
Jul

His Dark Materials Season 2 More Watchable Yet More Wandering Than Season 1

His Dark Materials Season 2

His Dark Materials is a series of books by Sir Philip Pullman which plays on the subject of parallel worlds that blend fantasy and reality, magic and technology, and quantum physics and religion. It's like a recipe card where all the ingredients sound delicious, but which have to be mixed just so in order for the final product to measure up to expectations.

While I am familiar with the books, I am not someone who has read them. Therefore, I cannot comment as to how closely HBO adheres to the story in their serial adaptation of the adventure, which finds Dafne Keen playing Lyra Silvertongue, the young heroine of the story. I can say that, having watched the first two seasons now, the live action version has done little to motivate me into reading the source material.

Mon
28
Jun

A Ghost Waits Like What if Kevin Smith Made a Haunted House Movie

A Ghost Waits

Arrow Video brings to you on Blu-ray the 2020 indie film by first time director Adam Stovall. Bringing together many genre's of film from Humor to Horror, from Drama to Romance, A GHOST WAITS has it all.

The story begins with Jack traveling to his next job as a handyman and caretaker for his company's properties. Desperately phoning his friends along the way to find a place he can crash for the next few nights due to his own place being fumigated, he arrives at the house he is to be inspecting and notices all the previous tenants belongings are still there. Confused by this, he phones his boss and discovers the home has a history of renters breaking their leases suddenly and without warning -- and it is now Jack's job to inspect the house from top to bottom to find any issues with this property so it can be rented out once more.

Tue
22
Jun

Batman: The Long Halloween (Part 1) Short on Closure

Batman Long Halloween Pt 1

The latest DC Universe animated epic has been released, this time adapting the Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale graphic novel that took a novice Batman and forced him to forge his detective skills. The connective thread of this adventure was that a killer was taking out people close to mob boss Carmine Falcone, establishing the pattern of commiting the murders on major holidays. The Holiday Killer was a mystery to be solved, and each of the 13 issues that made up the series carried the reader through the year in near real-time, with various Batman villains popping up where appropriate.

Mon
14
Jun

The Kaiju Who Meh'd Me: Godzilla vs Kong Comes to Blu-ray

GODZILLA VS. KONG is the fight we've all been dying to see, wrapped up in one hot mess of a plot salad. Yes, I've heard several fans say they didn't care about the plot, they just wanted to see the giant monkey fight the giant lizard. And that's fine. Unfortunately, in regards to the whys and wherefores of giving this gargantuan slobberknocker a reason to happen, an attempt was made, and so we have to consider it as well. So let's try to parse it out as best we can.

Sun
06
Jun

Arrow Releases Time-Travel Thriller 12 Monkeys on Blu-ray Steelbook

12 Monkeys Steelbook Arrow

There are a few different theories of time travel that fit into fiction. The first is that the past can't be changed. The second is that changing the past creates an alternate timeline. The third is like the first, but with the twist that whatever you change in the past is what causes the present problem you initially went back to fix.

Thu
03
Jun

Flawed but Fun: Freddie Highmore, Astrid Berges-Frisbey Crack The Vault in Jaume Balagueró's Caper

The Vault

Freddie Highmore (The Good Doctor) plays Thom, a brilliant engineering student on the verge of graduation and already turning down job offers from mulitple oil companies after a patent of his saved them millions in oil spill cleanup. But when he's approached by Walter (Liam Cunningham, Game of Thrones), a salvage ship captain who has had his most recent salvage taken from him by the Spanish government, he gets drawn into an engineering puzzle that he can't ignore.

Mon
31
May

10th Anniversary of Super 8 Gets Blu-ray Release

Super 8 holds the distinction of being one of the best 80s films not actually made in the 80s. Pre-dating Stranger Things, Super 8 is a wonderful sort of mash-up of Stand By Me, It, Cloverfield, and E.T.

A launch vehicle for the career of Joel Courtney, who plays Joe Lamb, the son of Deputy Sheriff Lamb (Kyle Chandler), Super 8 also starred A.J. Michalka (of the Birds of Prey series and the AJ half of pop duo Aly & AJ), and (already a veteran actor) Elle Fanning as Alice Dainard, the daughter of town drunk Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard). There's bad blood between Deputy Lamb and Louis Dainard that they push onto their children, setting up a sort of Romeo & Juliet dynamic between the two coming-of-age teens.

Mon
31
May

Pixie No Fairy Tale

Pixie DVD

Pixie Hardy (Olivia Cooke, Ready Player One) is the daughter of a mob boss (Colm Meaney) who, with peace having existed between his rivals, spends his later years learning how to be the perfect homemaker and single father.. But Pixie wants more than "this provincial life," and concocts a plan to steal a large quantity of drug money from another mob, one led by Father McGrath (Alec Baldwin) and the gun-toting priests and nuns in his employ.

Wed
26
May

Thirteenth Season of Ancient Aliens Lands on DVD

Ancient Aliens SSN 13

When I was a kid, I gobbled up all my grandmother's discarded World Weekly News copies. The stories in them were so fantastic and inspiring, I was surprised they didn't make the nightly news. To be fair, this was around the time Close Encounters of the Third Kind was huge, and the Betty and Barney Hill story, and Project: Bluebook, glued me to my television set. I'd cut out all the articles and paste them in a scrapbook. I would later go get books by J. Allen Hynek and Erich von Däniken.

The aliens were here, and I was going to be prepared.

Sun
23
May

Justice Society: World War II Might Be DCAU Getting Back into the Multiverse Business

Justice Society: World War II

The latest offering from the DC Animated Universe is Justice Society: World War II. From everything I can discern, it is not adapted -- even loosely -- from any particular previously published story, although there are definitely elements lifted from other events and transplanted here.

Sat
22
May

Arrow Video Presents Nico Mastorakis First Film, Death Has Blue Eyes

Death Has Blue Eyes

With a career spanning over 60 years and 22 films, Greek Director Nico Mastorakis -- known for such films as Island of Death, The Zero Boys, and Bloodstone -- learned his craft on his own, starting in television work before graduating to music videos and feature films. His freshman feature, Death has Blue Eyes, is in no way his best work, but you can tell his television studies were paying off, and showing through this film that he did know how to shoot a scene like a seasoned director.

Death has Blue Eyes can only be summed up as a paranormal thriller, a buddy film, and a softcore porn that fails miserably at all three genres.  It starts as we follow a young con man and his friend into a few misadventures before they ultimately meet their match in the form of two women (one younger, one older) who have a secret themselves: they are psychics on the run from a group of men out to capture them.

Fri
21
May

25 Years Later, Mission: Impossible Still Makes Us Angry

Mission Impossible 25th Anniversary Bluray

In 1996, the cold war spy thriller series, Mission: Impossible, made the leap from fan-favorite television series to big budget theatrical production. The potential for a franchise out of this was great -- and realized, with several M:I films having been released since.

It was clear from the beginning that a torch was going to have to be passed from IMF leader Jim Phelps (with Jon Voight playing the role made iconic by Peter Graves) to the new guy, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Old time fans were prepared to accept that. But what they weren't prepared for was the absolutely disrespectful way Phelps was removed from duty. It's been 25 years, so I really shouldn't have to worry about a spoiler warning at this point, but if that sort of thing bothers you, this is the last paragraph you want to read of this review.

Thu
20
May

Tom and Jerry Asks the Question: What If the Whole World was Toontown?

Tom and Jerry the Movie

Tom and Jerry, the Hanna-Barbera cat-and-mouse frenemies, have had a fairly decent run of direct-to-DVD animated adventures, where our heroes get dropped into animated versions of classic movies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, or The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps this success emboldened the decision to make the jump to the big screen with Tom and Jerry: The Movie. If so, they might have stuck with the formula that was working, choosing to animate yet another classic movie with the titular characters running hijinks behind the plot.

Thu
06
May

Massacre Video's "The Underground" Will Leave You Wanting to Know More About Phil Schneider

The Underground

Massacre Video brings to you both the REMASTERED version and the original UNCUT version of The Underground: The True Story of Phil Schneider, along with a special BONUS disc of 4 of Phil’s 1995 lectures.

Believe him or not, Phil Schneider tells a fantastic tale that is truly out of this world.

Growing up the son of a U-boat captain for Hitler’s army, Phil's dad was captured by French military forces during World War 2 and then released to the United States, with his family, where he worked as a master machinist for the US Army.

Phil followed in his father’s footsteps, also working for the US military. He became a high ranking geologist and engineer, and his knowledge was put to great use during the 1970s when the demand for Deep Underground Military Bases -- or D.U.M.B.s -- were becoming more commonplace. In 1979, during one of his assignments for a geological dig on a site in Dulce, New Mexico, Phil’s life changed forever.

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