WRONG TURN 4 -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 10/6/11

 

Everybody likes a good origin story, and if you're a fan of Three Finger, Saw-Tooth, and One-Eye, then WRONG TURN 4 (2011)--subtitled "Bloody Beginnings"--could be the prequel of your dreams. 

The rousing pretitles sequence finds our three inbred hillbilly-cannibal brothers as rambuctious young 'uns who are already the most dangerous inmates in the asylum.  They don't stay locked in their cell for long, though, and once they've escaped and let all the other loonies out as well, the hapless asylum staff are in for a day of total bedlam climaxed by the drawing and quartering of poor Dr. Ryan. 

This jaw-dropping scene, as well as the rest of the film's gore, is done with state-of-the-art practical effects with a minimum of CGI, which should make old-school gorehounds giddy with delight.  With Dr. Ryan's screams still ringing in our ears, we then plunge directly into a sex scene involving two couples, one hetero, one lesbian.  Writer-director Declan O'Brien (WRONG TURN 3) clearly isn't wasting any time ringing the standard slasher-flick bells and whistles here, and once fully sated the two couples and their friends immediately set off for a snowmobiling weekend in the woods which we know isn't going to end well.

Taking a "wrong turn" on the way to their cabin, they end up having to seek shelter from the freezing cold in the old abandoned asylum, which naturally is the current home of our grown-up hillbilly cannibals.  Before you can say "no cell phone reception", they're in party-hearty mode amidst clouds of cannabis and pairing up for the night.  It doesn't take long for one of them to wander off on his own and come face-to-hideously-deformed-face with Saw-Tooth, whereupon we're treated to our first peek at what goes on in the asylum's kitchen these days. 

Once the entire gang of kill-fodder college chums is clued in that they're in big trouble, WRONG TURN 4 segues into the usual routine in which everybody runs around being terrified as they get picked off one by one.  This gives O'Brien and his crack effects team the chance to stage a series of bravura death scenes (one victim is hanged by barbed wire until her head pops off like a cork) culminating in what is known as the "F**ked-Up Fondue." 

Here, the extremely unfortunate victim is tied to a kitchen table and taken apart piece by piece as the hillbillies dip each morsel into sizzling oil before gobbling it up.  Actor Dean Armstrong displays an outstanding vocal range with some of the best screams ever recorded, and the SPFX artists are equally good as they pull of some queasily convincing effects that should please even the most demanding gorehounds.  Definitely one of the sickest sequences I've seen in a while, it's enough to have even Herschell Gordon Lewis wondering what the hell he hath wrought.

Meanwhile, the rest of our cast of idiots are voting whether or not to go help their friend even as his blood-curdling shrieks resound up and down the corridors.  These are not the brightest characters ever written, and if you're in the right mood you may enjoy watching them scurry around making one incredibly dumb move after another as director O'Brien manages to record their antics with some style.  Once they've exhausted their full range of indoor stupidity the action moves outside, with the survivors being harrassed by hillbilly cannibals on snowmobiles until the surprise (ehh) ending.

The good-guy cast do what they can with characters and dialogue that are--how should I put this--"lacking in depth", adequately depicting their assorted stereotypes.  Jennifer Pudavik is appealing as Kenia, who comes off as "final girl" material from the start, while Dean Armstrong gets my vote as "Scream King of the Month."  Extra points go to actor/stuntmen Sean Skene and Scott Johnson for their double acting duties--Skene plays both college boy Vincent and psycho Three Finger, and Johnson, in addition to being one of the orderlies eaten in the pretitles rampage, also assumes the role of the adult Saw-Tooth.

The DVD from 20th-Century Fox Home Entertainment is in 1.78:1 widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.  Extras include a director-producer commentary, a making-of featurette, "Director's Die-ary", "Lifestyles of the Sick and Infamous", deleted scenes, and a music video.

So far, my favorite film in this series is the second one with its wantonly over-the-top gore and sick humor.  But while WRONG TURN 4 doesn't quite match up, it's still packed with enough action and carnage to make it a worthwhile turn for gore addicts to take.

WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 9/23/09

 

White water rafting finally makes its first appearance in a WRONG TURN movie! One of the major reasons why city folk venture into crazy-hillbilly country (in the movies, anyway) is their insatiable urge, a la DELIVERANCE, to go white water rafting in the most remote locations possible. That way, they can be stalked and murdered by the invariably inbred and psychotic local yokels until the last of them finally decide to fight back. At least, that's how it usually goes.


In the case of WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD (2009), the key elements for this kind of film are taken care of within the first five minutes--stupid city youths in the middle of nowhere, the aforementioned white water rafting, dope smoking, a good girl with a nice boyfriend, a slutty girl who doffs her top to reveal some really big boobs, a lecherous boyfriend who avails himself of them right before they both die horribly, and, last but not least, three consecutive "WTF?" kills that should have gorehounds squirming with delight. Woo-hoo! This baby's off and running.


And then, with this mini-movie out of the way, WRONG TURN 3 becomes a different movie altogether. Now it's about a busload of hardened criminals being transferred from one West Virginia prison to another and taking a shortcut through crazy-hillbilly country to get there. The worst of them are Latino badass Chavez (Tamer Hassan), ill-tempered skinhead Floyd (Gil Kolirin), and deranged goofball Crawford (Jake Curran). One convict is a semi-good guy named Brandon (Tom McKay) and another is undercover officer Juarez (Christian Contreras). The guards consist of aspiring law student Nate Wilson (Tom Frederic), bus driver Walter (Chucky Venice), and another guy whose name doesn't matter because he's the first one to get killed.


With all these characters established, along comes our old friend Three Finger, the craziest inbred mutant hillbilly of them all, who runs the bus off the road with his wrecker truck and over an embankment in a spectacular crash that's like something out of THE FUGITIVE. And for the rest of the film, the now-armed convicts and their captive guards must trudge their way through the woods as Three Finger picks them off one by one in creatively horrible ways.


Not quite as serious as the first film in the series, yet much less awesomely over-the-top insane than the second one, WRONG TURN 3 focuses a lot on the interplay between the convicts and the guards and what happens after they stumble upon a wrecked armored truck full of cash. A whole non-horror action-suspense thriller could have been made using just this part of the story, and for long stretches of screen time, that's exactly what we get. Chavez bullies and threatens everybody, Floyd tries to out-alpha male Chavez, and guard Nate is kept alive only because he's a native of the area and knows the way out. With all of this going on, we sometimes forget that old Three Finger is even out there somewhere.


Still, there are some occasionally exciting kill scenes. Three Finger baits one of the convicts into a nifty full-body barbed-wire snare with his truck's winch and takes the unfortunate fellow on a high-speed drag down a paved road. Another convict has his skull opened like a pop-top and his brain feasted upon like a Jello mold. There's the old "drop the spear out of a tree while a guy is looking up at it" impalement gag, not to mention those old stand-bys such as knives, hatchets, arrows, and a nasty meat hook.


Before it's over, we end up in Three Finger's ghastly lair of death where he's holding the last survivor of that opening sequence, good girl Alex (Janet Montgomery), while Nate rushes to her rescue. This leads to a prolonged hand-to-hand combat scene (one of several in the film), not to mention another exciting vehicle-crash stunt, and finally one of those "he's dead...he's not dead" endings which leads to yet another twist ending.

One thing about it, this is a suspenseful, action-filled movie that doesn't get boring. Compared to the breathtakingly splatterific extravanganza that came before it, however, it seems a tad mundane. I could've sacrificed the more involved prison-bus storyline if only the creativity and unpredictability of the opening sequence could've been maintained. Maybe this series works better with simpler young-people-in-peril plotlines serving as a basis for more interesting variations on the mutant hillbillies and their outlandish activities.


The largely English cast is uniformly fine and the director, Declan O'Brien, knows how to make this stuff look really good. (His only other credit that I know him from, strangely enough, is as a producer and writer for the light family film ALICE UPSIDE DOWN.) This time around, the cool makeup and practical effects are augmented by some obvious CGI, which in some cases is a bit of a letdown. As evidenced by the first two films of the series, this kind of graphic gore often looks better when it's done for real, with a minimum of digital trickery.


The DVD from 20th-Century Fox looks and sounds good, with 1.85:1 widescreen, 5.1 English Dolby, and Spanish, French, and Portugese Dolby Surround. (Subtitles are available in all four languages.) Extras consist of two brief deleted scenes and an 18-minute featurette, "Wrong Turn 3 In Three Fingers...I Mean, Parts." The three chapters are titled "Action, Gore, and Chaos!", "Brothers in Blood", and "Three Finger's Fight Night."


I would definitely recommend this to fans of the series--it's a solid horror flick and a fun, exciting continuation of the Three Finger saga. But this time, the wonderfully go-for-broke wildness of the second film has been reined in and WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD only sporadically gets as mind-boggling as we expect it to.

WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END (Blu-Ray) -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

(Blu-Ray comments by Ian Friedman. Originally posted on 9/30/09.)

 

A raucous, tasteless, over-the-top, unapologetically schlocky gorefest--not quite what I'd call the first movie in this series, but that description fits the sequel, WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END (2007), like a bloody glove. Once I stopped worrying about how it compared to the previous film and realized that this is pure exploitation filmmaking of the sincerest kind, I allowed first-time director Joe Lynch and his enthusiastic cast to carry me away on a wave of pure giddy Monster Kid fun.

Kimberly Caldwell, who plays herself (she's supposed to be some kind of well-known TV personality, right?) dies real good in the film's stunning opening sequence, in which she takes--you guessed it-- a wrong turn while driving through rural West Virginia. First thing I noticed was one of those great shots where the camera circles all the way around a moving car and settles into a closeup of the driver. I love those! And when Kimberly is distracted while yakking to her agent on her cell phone and rams into a pedestrian, there's an impressive shot of him flying right over her head. So I already know that we have a capable director and DP at work here, and in just a minute it's clear that we've also got some really demented guys working on the makeup and practical effects as well.

This becomes apparent when the guy Kimberly just hit with her car turns out to be an inbred mutant freak who bites half her face off shortly before his equally monstrous Pa chops her right down the middle with one stroke of his axe. Guts splatter, and the two maniacs gleefully drag the neatly-bisected Kimberly away into the sunset. And that's just the beginning!

There's just enough story set-up to get a bunch of clueless city folk into the backwoods so that a whole family of cannibalistic mutants can terrorize, slaughter, and devour them. Henry Rollins does a great job chewing the leafy scenery as Dale Murphy, an intense former Marine hired to host a "Survivor"-like reality show that gets really real when the contestants and crew come face-to-face with "The Family"--Ma, Pa, Brother, Sister, and our old friend from the first film, Three Finger (played here by Jeff Scrutton).

But first, the contestants split up into teams of two and scamper off into the woods. The likable, down-to-earth Mara (Aleksa Palladino) and spooky Goth vegan Nina (Erica Leerhsen, who played "Pepper" in the TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE remake) find themselves hiding in a broken-down shack where they witness a horrendous birth as Ma squirts out another monster-baby on the kitchen table. Sister spots them peeking through the bedroom door and suddenly the two girls have the whole horrible family after them. This leads to another imaginative kill scene.

Meanwhile, the goofy slacker dude Jonesy (Steve Braun) and the gung-ho military chick Amber (Daniella Alonso) come across an unattended campfire where a big hunk of sizzling barbecue is cooking. The hungry campers share their ill-gotten feast with another contestant, frustrated football player Jake (Texas Battle), until one of them happens to spot Kimberly's tattoo on it. They've been eating her leg!

That's pretty gross, but even worse is when Brother and Sister murder yet another contestant and the act gets them all hot and bothered for some frenzied mutant incest. When our hapless campers stumble across the revoltin' scene, they find out that coitus interruptus is a killin' offense in that neck of the woods and the chase is on. One thing about the mutant makeup--it isn't quite as good as the Stan Winston creations in the first movie, but it's still very effective. These psychotic hillbillies make great monsters and the actors portraying them are totally convincing. The females make an especially interesting new addition to the clan and are just as bloodthirsty and feral as the males.

As the cast gets whittled down--literally--Murphy fights back with dynamite-laden arrows and blows up a few mutants real good. The survivors take on the remnants of The Family in a frenetic showdown within an old abandoned paper mill where a hilariously horrific grinding machine comes into play. Director Lynch, who can often be seen beaming with fanboy glee in the behind-the-scenes featurettes, throws in an obvious homage to the dinner scene from TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE as well as other references to the 70s and 80s horror classics that he grew up with.In fact, watching this film is like running barefoot through an old issue of "Fangoria."

This 20-Century Fox DVD has an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and is in English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 with Spanish and French Dolby Digital 5.1. It's a little softer and grainier than the WRONG TURN Blu-Ray, but I think thats because it was shot on digital as opposed to film. It's pretty good, but not as good as the first. I do think that is partially due to the reality show setting. Colors are a little muted compared to the first one, then again it could be intentional.

There's an interesting commentary by director Joe Lynch and actors Erica Leerhsen and Henry Rollins, and a less interesting one with writers Turi Meyer and Al Septien. Featurettes include "More Blood, More Guts: The Making of Wrong Turn 2", the fun and educational "Making Gore Look Good", and something called "On Location with P-Nut", which I was unable to even begin to care about.

WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END succeeds in being what it sets out to be--a spectacularly gory and perverse splatterfest that's like a rollercoaster ride through a charnel house. As a horror fan who doesn't always require subtlety and good taste in my entertainment, sometimes that's more than enough.

 

 

WRONG TURN (Blu-Ray) -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

(Blu-Ray comments by Ian Friedman. Originally posted on 9/30/09.)

 

When in tarnation are them thar city folks gonna learn to stay out'n them thar woods? In WRONG TURN (2003), six tenderfeet--two camping couples plus a recently-dumped girlfriend named Jessie (Eliza Dushku) and a stranger named Chris (Desmond Harrington) who just plowed his Mustang into their minivan on a dirt road and stranded them all in the deep middle of Nowhere, West Virginia--find out the hard way that they should've stayed home that week.

This mishmash of elements from the likes of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, DELIVERANCE, and a couple dozen other backwoods thrillers still manages to seem fresh thanks to good acting, a taut script, excellent makeup effects from the shop of producer Stan Winston, and an imaginative director, Richard Schmidt, who films it all with style and never allows the pace to let up. The formula of city slickers in hillbilly hell has yielded a truckload of half-assed, boring movies over the years, but when the filmmakers put some effort into it there's no reason they can't come up with a cracking suspense thriller like this one.

The first couple goes down pretty quick--their unfortunate purpose is to clue us in on just how crazy and bloodthirsty these inbred yokels are. Schmidt stages an early scene in which the good guys are hiding in closets and under beds while the hillbillies go to work on one of their first victims. It's horrible stuff, but the director shows us just enough to inspire ghastly mental images of the rest.

As we get to know the characters better, the stakes become higher and each death is more painful. One particularly shocking demise, a decapitation which comes suddenly at the end of a nailbiting stalking sequence in the deep, dark woods, is dazzling in its design and execution. Equally impressive are the makeups devised for the killers, which render these monsters believable yet utterly revolting.

Experienced at hunting for their supper, they're expert killers, too. One massive ogre-like beast, Sawtooth, wields a shotgun, while One-Eye strikes with deadly accuracy using a bow and arrow. The most demonstratively deranged of the bunch is a blade-wielding scarecrow named Three Finger, who resembles a redneck Ork. These single-minded psychos trail our heroes tirelessly through the woods and pick them off one by one until finally they capture the fair maiden Jessie and drag her back to their cabin. I won't tell you exactly how things turn out, but the finale is a well-staged free-for-all of bloody, fiery mayhem.

The new Blu-Ray disc from 20-Century Fox is in 1.85:1 widescreen with English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and French and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1. Subtitles are in English and Spanish. The picture quality is pretty good--a little soft at times, but nothing horrible. The bit-rate for the video is in the upper 20's, if not the 30's.

Extras include a commentary track by director Rob Schmidt and stars Eliza Dushku and Desmond Harrington, deleted scenes, and a trailer. There are four brief featurettes: "Fresh Meat: The Wounds of Wrong Turn", "Making of Wrong Turn", "Eliza Dushku: Babe in the Woods", and the aptly-titled "Stan Winston Featurette." These are the same features that appeared on the previous DVD release.

One of the best-made examples of this kind of film that I've seen in years, WRONG TURN easily climbs right into the upper echelons of the hillbilly-stalker genre, a mere rung or two down from the classic 70s shockers that inspired it. I don't mind seeing a rehash of familiar ingredients as long as they get the recipe right, as they do here.

KALIFORNIA [Blu-Ray] -- DVD Review by Porfle

(Blu-Ray comments by Ian Friedman. Originally posted on 10/21/10.))


Seeing the tense road thriller KALIFORNIA (1993) shortly after it first came out is the reason that I never viewed Brad Pitt as just another pretty-boy actor.  This was the one of the first movies I ever saw him in, and his character, a sleazy, parole-jumping serial killer named Early Grayce, is about as unglamorous as you can get. 

David Duchovny, trying to get a film career off the ground just as "The X-Files" began to take off, plays a psychology grad student named Brian Kessler who's writing a book about serial killers.  He decides to drive from Atlanta to California with his girlfriend Carrie (Michelle Forbes, "Homocide: Life on the Streets") and stop off at various famous murder scenes along the way for research.  But in order to share expenses for the trip he invites none other than Early and his ditzy girlfriend Adele (Juliette Lewis) along for the ride, getting way more than he bargained for. 

Director Dominic Sena (SWORDFISH) keeps things interesting as Brian and Carrie begin to discover just how dangerous their traveling companion is.  At first, Brian likes having such a colorful character to observe and is intrigued by his violent nature, which is demonstrated when Early beats the crap out of a guy in a bar.  Soon, however, he discovers that Early has been leaving a trail of bodies during their journey.  When Early kills one cop and then insists that Brian finish off the other one, the not-too-bright college boy realizes too late just how deep he's gotten himself into. 

If you've never seen this side of Brad Pitt, his portrayal of scum-of-the-earth Early may come as a real surprise.  (One thing's for sure--this is probably the only time we'll ever see Brad blow his nose through his fingers.)  As Adele, Juliette Lewis plays her patented dingbat character to a tee, gaining our sympathy with her childlike naiveté and constant desire for acceptance not only by Early but also by the intellectual Brian and Carrie, whom she regards as her betters.


Michelle Forbes, a fine actress known almost solely for her television work (she was Ensign Ro on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and more recently played Admiral Helena Cain on "Battlestar Galactica") does what she can with the role of Carrie.  David Duchovny is his usual low-key, somewhat unremarkable self as Brian--sort of like Fox Mulder as an overconfident doofus.  Unfortunately, this film didn't do much for his big-screen career, and he's barely featured in the film's advertising these days if at all.

KALIFORNIA arrives on Blu-ray from 20th Century Fox/MGM with the unrated version of the film in HD. The movie looks nice in it's original 2:35:1 scope and has a normal amount of grain. The picture and detail are sharp and the colors are neither over or de-saturated achieving a good balance allowing for an accurate representation of the original movie-going experience. There were no noticable compression errors. This film was never a summer blockbuster experience, but it still looks very nice on Blu-ray. The English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix is acceptable as the movie is more character-driven than heavily action-oriented your sound system doesn't really get a heavy workout.

You just know that sooner or later Early's really bad side is going to turn against his fellow travelers, and when it does, KALIFORNIA delivers a violent and fairly satisfying conclusion which takes place on a nuclear test site in Nevada.  It's not really what I'd call a classic, but with a good cast and a pretty involving story, it should keep you in suspense till the journey's end.

GENTLEMEN BRONCOS -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 3/8/10

 

I imagine that comedies about total nerds appeal to two seperate groups--the cool people who look down on the characters and laugh derisively at them, and the total nerds who can identify with them. Personally, I've always aspired to be part of a third category--the "cool nerd"--and thus able to enjoy GENTLEMEN BRONCOS (2009) from both perspectives. (Yeah, I know--all nerds think they're cool.) Either way, it's an exceedingly funny and inventive film that anyone can appreciate in one way or another.

Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano) is a high school nerd who lives with his widowed mother Judith (Jennifer Coolidge), a really bad clothing designer. Benjamin loves cheesy sci-fi/fantasy novels and has just finished his own epic entitled "Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years." During his stay at a writers' camp known as Cletus Fest, he submits his story in an amateur writers' contest which will be judged by legendary author Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement) of the famed "Cyborg Harpies" trilogy. The stuffy and conceited Chevalier, who has run out of ideas and is about to get the boot from his publisher, goes ga-ga over Benjamin's manuscript and submits it as his own work, whereupon it becomes a huge bestseller.

Angarano wisely underplays the role of the introspective, world-weary but guardedly optimistic Benjamin, serving as the outwardly calm center for the storm of goofball characters swirling around him. Clement's bad-sci-fi author Ronald Chevalier is the quintessential full-of-himself minor celebrity who is as pretentious and self-important as he is achingly banal. Two fellow nerds whom Benjy meets on the bus to writers' camp are Halley Feiffer as the friendly but manipulative Tabatha and Héctor Jiménez as overtly eccentric amateur filmmaker Lonnie Donaho (Jiménez pulls the most awesomely extreme fish-face in every shot) who end up making a hideously awful videotape version of "Yeast Lords" with Lonnie playing the female lead.


Fans of Sam Rockwell (GALAXY QUEST, THE GREEN MILE) should have a ball watching him play two wildly different characters here: first, he's Benjy's mental image of the "Yeast Lords" hero Bronco, a bearded, long-haired wild man (based on Benjy's late, lamented father whom he barely knew) whose potent gonads are sought after by bad-guy Daysius as cloning stock; and second, as Chevalier's altered version of the character (renamed "Brutus") as a mincing, platinum-blonde transsexual who looks like a cross between Captain Kangaroo and one of the Nelson twins. Scenes from both versions of Benjy's sprawling saga supply some of the most outrageously funny moments in the film.

Best of all is the great Jennifer Coolidge (AMERICAN PIE, BEST IN SHOW) as Benjy's equally nerdy mom, Judith. Her dream is to be a clothing designer specializing in nightgowns--when she proudly displays her sketches, they're deliciously awful. She also makes horrible matching outfits for Benjy and herself, which, to his credit, Benjy wears without protest because his eternally supportive mom is also his best friend. Coolidge plays the role with utter sincerity which makes her that much funnier, and she's a joy to watch. (The outtakes reel features some of her hilarious ad-libs breaking up the cast and crew.)


The blissfully spaced-out Dusty (Mike White), a member of the "Guardian Angel" program at Judith's church whom she has enlisted to be a friend to Benjy, teaches him how to use a homemade blowgun, and when Benjy accidentally fires a dart into Judith's left boob, her screaming reaction is priceless. Later, Judith is molested by a rich buyer who has expressed interest in her designs, and when Benjy leaps to her defense, the guy starts shooting at them from the balcony of his mansion as they cower behind their car.

Another highlight occurs as we see Lonnie's dreadful screen adaptation of "Yeast Lords" get its grand premiere at a local movie theater, with Dusty starring as Bronco. This prompts Chevalier to threaten Lonnie with a lawsuit for plagiarising his new novel (which he stole from Benjy), setting up the final confrontation between Chevalier and an increasingly-indignant Benjy.


Some of the humor in this movie is so painfully deadpan that it almost dares us not to laugh. At other times, the unbridled absurdity abounds in waves of pure delight as we're treated to sights that might make you wonder what filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess (of NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and NACHO LIBRE fame) have been smoking. Much of the funny stuff is the kind that can be appreciated in an intellectually-stimulated silence, but now and then there are instances (usually involving Jennifer Coolidge) that provoke the kind of cathartic belly-laughs that make good comedy such a joy to experience.

The DVD from 20-Century Fox is in 1.85:1 widescreen with English Dolby 5.1 and Spanish and French Dolby Surround. Subtitles are in English and Spanish. Extras include outtakes, deleted scenes, a behind-the-scenes featurette, and a fun commentary track with Jared and Jerusha Hess and DP Munn Howell. (The Blu-Ray edition contains additional featurettes not found on the DVD--well, isn't that special?)

The opening titles feature a collection of wonderfully cheesy sci-fi paperback covers, one of which I actually remember seeing on the rack back in the late 60s or early 70s--something called "Gender Genocide", I think. My consumption of such literature at the time was mainly confined to "Star Trek" and the occasional Andre Norton novel, but it's still fun to see all of this old paperback cover art. The accompanying main title song is the soul-deadeningly horrible "In the Year 2525" by Zager and Evans, one of the most horrendously godawful songs ever written and thus exquisitely appropriate in this context.

I had a great time watching GENTLEMEN BRONCOS and, admittedly, identifying with a lot of it. Heck, it's fun to be a nerd sometimes, which Jared and Jerusha Hess seem to know quite well, and when Benjy finally, really smiles for the first time during the triumphant last scene, their obvious love for this oft-maligned class of people is infectious.

THE CLEVELAND SHOW: THE COMPLETE SEASON ONE -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 9/26/10

 

I watched the first episode of "Family Guy", hated it, and never tuned in again.  So when I heard that creator Seth MacFarlane had spun off one of the characters from that show into his own series, "The Cleveland Show", I wasn't exactly thrilled.  But about halfway through the first disc of THE CLEVELAND SHOW: THE COMPLETE SEASON ONE, I had to admit that, despite its faults, I was actually enjoying it.

"The Cleveland Show" breezily mocks the familiar stereotypical sitcom style, complete with a saccharine opening theme song by Walter Murphy and funky bumper music.  Cleveland Brown (Mike Henry), a pudgy, Reginald Veljohnson-type black guy who is much nicer and less cynical than his former neighbor Peter Griffin, has returned to his hometown of Stoolbend, Virginia to marry his high-school sweetheart, Donna Tubbs (Sanaa Lathan), and settle into suburban life. 

Cleveland's rotund son, Cleveland Jr. (Kevin Michael Richardson), a sensitive, kindhearted nerd, joins Donna's much hipper kids Roberta (Reagan Gomez) and precocious tyke Rallo (Mike Henry again) to form an oddly-matched new family.  They live across the street from a redneck couple named Lester and Kendra Krinklesac.  Cleveland's other neighbors include Holt Richter, a lonely middle-aged bachelor who lives with his mom, and a couple of very large bears named Tim and Arianna.  Yes, bears.  MacFarlane himself plays Tim, while Arianna sports the unmistakable voice of Arianna Huffington.  And they're bears.
 

The show whisks us through a rapid-fire series of off-kilter takes on the usual sitcom cliches, plus some not-so-familiar ones such as the time Cleveland and his hunky cable-guy partner Terry stumble into a bachelorette party and are mistaken for male strippers.  The groaningly obvious puns of "Family Guy" continue here as Cleveland remarks "I guess there's no harm in showing a little helmet", whereupon he reaches into his underwear and pulls out--you guessed it--a tiny football helmet.  "Look, it's the Redskins!  Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"  Groan!!!

In the same episode ("Brotherly Love"), Junior seeks romantic advice from preschool playa Rallo after he falls for a pretty classmate named Chanel.  Rallo, the show's "Stewie" equivalent but not nearly as obnoxious, takes one look at Chanel, goes ga-ga, and starts scheming to sabotage Junior's efforts to woo her.  But they're both thwarted when Chanel's boyfriend Kenny shows up and challenges Junior to a rap contest.  (Kenny is voiced by Kanye West, who, surprisingly, lets Junior finish.)  Meanwhile, Terry has graduated from stripper to male prostitute, with a delighted Cleveland getting to be his "pimp."  That's a plotline I don't think they ever went into on "The Cosby Show."

The Black History Month episode has some fun moments, with Cleveland getting into a race-fueled slugfest with his white trash neighbor Lester and ending up being charged with a "hate crime."   Later, Lester's morbidly obese wife Kendra falls off a stool in her kitchen and lands butt-first on Rallo.  Trapped beneath half a ton of bloated flesh, the diminutive Rallo must find a way out of this death-trap before he's crushed.  When Donna gets wind of the situation she hijacks a "Brotherhood" parade float that Cleveland and Ernie were court-ordered to build together, screeching her way through the other floats in a nicely-animated action sequence. 

The show boasts a heavily-populated supporting cast, ensuring a wealth of storylines, and several characters are voiced by well-known names.  David Lynch appears as Gus, the bartender at the bar where Cleveland and the gang hang out.  Jamie Kennedy is Roberta's white rapper boyfriend Federline, and Jason Alexander appears as his father.  Other guest voices include Bruce McGill, Stacy Ferguson, Bebe Neuwirth, Seth Green, Stockard Channing, Jennifer Tilly, and Hall and Oates as Cleveland's good and evil angels. 

Unlike similar cartoons of years past, the limited animation style of "The Cleveland Show" is augmented by computer effects that give the movements of characters, automobiles, etc. much more of a "full animation" feel.  Vivid colors and beautifully-rendered backgrounds richly enhance the visuals in each episode, giving the show a strong aesthetic appeal.  Occasional musical interludes include the lavish and soulful "Balls Deep" (not what you think) in which a lovesick Junior is joined in song by NBA star Scottie Pippin.
 

While "The Cleveland Show" manages to radiate some of the same warmth as the standard family sitcom and its characters become more endearing over time, the show is still bursting with the same caustic frat humor of its predecessor.  Each line is a potential set-up for the next visual aside, which may consist of anything from an aging Clint Eastwood flushing his own balls down the toilet to the ghost of Bea Arthur screaming "God'll get you for that, Rallo!" from beyond the grave. 

These rapid-fire throwaway gags are so plentiful that the belly-laugh bullseyes make up for the frequent groaners.  Blacks, whites, Asians, gays, Jews, Eskimos--everyone is fair game.  The writers don't pull any punches, offering up merciless visual puns regarding Nicole Kidman and Meg Ryan's plastic surgeries or tossing off lines like this:

"Hey, you want another cold one?"
"Does Amy Winehouse pick at her skin a lot?"

The death of Cleveland's ex-wife Loretta is presented in rather graphic terms with guest star Peter Griffin delivering the tasteless coup de grâce:  "Hey, look at her gross boobs!" (The unused alternate line is even worse.)  I won't even hint at what happens to her after Peter's friend Quagmire is charged with delivering the body to Stoolbend for the funeral. 

But perhaps the most over-the-top aspect of the show is its staunch dedication to gross-out humor.  Whether or not you like "The Cleveland Show" will depend a lot on your tolerance for some of the most extreme fart, vomit, and toilet jokes ever seen on television.  A prime example of this is the Thanksgiving episode, in which the Browns host Cleveland's parents along with Donna's weird and extremely flatulent Aunt Momma, who isn't quite what she seems.  The aftermath of an impromptu sexual tryst between Aunt Momma and Cleveland's macho father, Freight Train, involves literally gallons of vomit being retched like there's no tomorrow.

The four-disc set from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, containing all 21 first-season episodes, is widescreen with English 5.1 Dolby Digital sound.  Subtitles are in English, Spanish, and French.  Several episodes feature cast and crew commentaries, deleted and alternate scenes, and both censored-for-TV and uncensored versions (the latter retaining the unbleeped profanity).  "Meet Cleveland" is an entertaining featurette.  Earth, Wind, and Fire appear in a Christmas video for the song "Get Your Hump On", which is followed by a "making of" short.  Of particular interest is a table-read for the entire "Brotherly Love" episode.    

Even with its endlessly puerile "let's see what we can get away with on TV" humor, "The Cleveland Show" still manages to connect on an emotional level (albeit a superficial one) from time to time, making it considerably less disposable than it might have been.  Cleveland himself is a basically decent, likable lug who may remind you of a black Homer Simpson, and his family, aside from the underdeveloped Roberta character, is a fun bunch.  But the main goal of THE CLEVELAND SHOW: THE COMPLETE SEASON ONE, aside from being genuinely funny at times, is to be as outrageously offensive and tasteless as it can possibly be.  As such, I found it similar to an inflamed zit--it sorta grows on you.

IN THE NAME OF THE KING 2: TWO WORLDS -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 12/2/11

 

Confession time again: this is my first Uwe Boll movie.  Of course, I've heard a lot about the widely-reviled director on IMDb and other film-related forums, and have been curious to see a sample of his work that's supposed to be so inept.  So now that I've watched IN THE NAME OF THE KING 2: TWO WORLDS (2011), I have to say--yeah, it's pretty bad.  But this sword-and-sorcery yarn is bearable as a mildly entertaining direct-to-DVD time waster if you watch it with absolutely no expectations whatsoever.

I'm still not exactly sure what it's about, but a 21st-century Dolph Lundgren (as ex-soldier "Granger") gets yanked through a time vortex into the Medieval era and is tasked by a young king (Lochlyn Munro) to kill an evil, plague-spreading sorceress known as "The Holy Mother" because, somehow, he is "The Chosen One."  And destiny, and fate, and yadda-yadda-yadda. 

Dubious Dolph sets off through the (Canadian) forest medieval with a pretty female doctor named Manhatten (Natassia Malthe) and the even more dubious king's guardsman Allard (Aleks Paunovic), who thinks Dolph's fulla beans, and discovers along the way that all is not what it seems and his fate-decreed task has taken a twisted turn.



The opening sequence is the most accomplished part of the film, with a sorceress from the past named Elianna (Natalia Guslistaya) being pursued through the woods by black-garbed assassins before turning on her heel and making short work of them with knives, an old-school grenade, and some slightly anachronistic kung fu moves.  At the end of this nicely-done vignette she bursts out of the forest whereupon the camera pans around to find her running toward the skyline of modern-day Vancouver.  The sequence is well-directed and looks good, and viewers should savor it while they can because it's pretty much the last time that those terms will apply.

The rest of IN THE NAME OF THE KING 2: TWO WORLDS is done in the same markedly uninspired "point 'n' shoot" style my Dad used to use making 8mm home movies of us when we were kids, with a constant jiggling motion that makes even the quieter dialogue scenes more annoying.  You know an action scene is underway because the camera bobbles and whips around even worse, although the action is so blandly directed that this is probably for the best. 

The low-budget sets--a modest walled-in fortress, an encampment or two--are adequate, while a lack of extras makes the film look underpopulated.  Dolph's quest to find something called "The Catalyst" leads him face-to-face with a winged, fire-breathing CGI dragon which is pretty well-rendered, in a better-than-usual SyFy Channel sort of way.  This belligerent beastie's fiery attack on the king's fortress is one of the better sequences in the film, livening things up after a number of rather dull stretches in which the plot and dialogue are less than scintillating.



The screenplay fails to exploit the "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" possibilities inherent in the situation, although we do get a number of mild verbal gags (Dolph puzzles his medieval hosts by saying things such as "You mean I'm going in there with zero intel?" and using words like "screwed").  Aside from basic fighting prowess, his character doesn't do anything particularly modern in battling the bad guys or use any advanced ingenuity to solve problems.  He doesn't even have a boomstick!

Familiar actor Lochlyn Munro (UNFORGIVEN, SCARY MOVIE) is kind of fun to watch as the callow King--whose motives we're never sure of at first--as is Natassia Malthe as Manhatten, who naturally falls for our beefy hero.  Aleks Paunovic as brave Allard and Heather Doerksen as Dunyana, a noble, strong-willed woman Dolph encounters along the way, acquit themselves well.  Probably the best performance is given by Christina Jastrzemska (as "The Holy Mother"), an older actress with enough skill and experience to make her dumb dialogue sound like it almost makes sense. 

As for Dolph, he's a solid performer in the right kind of role and I always enjoy watching him.  But after an early scene in which he wistfully toasts his fallen battlefield comrades on the anniversary of their death, he spends the rest of the film looking like he's one step away from hitting the craft services table or hopping into the nearest jacuzzi.

The DVD from 20th-Century Fox Home Entertainment is widescreen with Dolby 5.1 sound and subtitles in English and Spanish.  Extras include director and writer commentaries plus two featurettes on the making of and writing of the film.  Special mention goes to composer Jessica de Rooij, whose bombastic, almost Albert Glasser-like score makes the film seem more exciting than it is.

IN THE NAME OF THE KING 2: TWO WORLDS returns to the present day for its finale, but by then it's too late to make us care very much about what happens.  While okay for frittering away an hour-an-a-half in an offhand way, you'd be better off getting your "modern guy in medieval times" jollies by digging out an old copy of ARMY OF DARKNESS.

MALICE IN WONDERLAND -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 5/9/10

 

Here's a fun idea--take the classic "Alice in Wonderland" story and update it by adding a bunch of gangsters, whores, junkies, and other assorted freaks, and cleverly alter the title (yet again) to MALICE IN WONDERLAND (2009). Only it really isn't such a fun idea after all, when you find yourself trying to sit through the resulting mess without hurling a copy of Lewis Carroll's original novel through the TV screen.

In this version, Alice Dodgson (a bland Maggie Grace, "Lost", TAKEN, THE FOG) is a poor little billionaire's daughter from New York fleeing from her manipulative parents into the dark world of London's sleazy underbelly, intent on finding someone about whom we don't learn until much later. She loses her memory after being struck by a cab driven by Whitey (Danny Dyer, OUTLAW), who's late for a very important date--the get-out-of-jail party of London's biggest crime boss, Harry Hunt (Nathaniel Parker), who is about to select a few good men for a lucrative bank robbery that Whitey wants in on.

The crooked-but-goodhearted Whitey wants to help Alice while helping himself to the $10,000,000 reward for her safe return, but they get separated. As the night wears on, Alice runs into a succession of weird underworld characters (while somehow inadvertently becoming a hooker) until she ends up in the hands of the greedy and ruthless Harry. Only with Whitey's quick thinking and a little supernatural help can Alice return to her own world and complete the mysterious mission she was on before losing her memory.

Alice is zonked most of the time on some pills Whitey gives her "for her head" (no use having thinly-veiled drug references when you can just dispense with the veil altogether), so we never know what's real or imagined and things don't have to make any sense. One moment the film wants to be one of those pulpy crime comedies where you expect Vinnie Jones to burst in and start popping caps, and the next moment a Cheshire Cat-like DJ named Felix is purring mellifluously from a billboard or stopping time to allow Alice to regain a crucial lost fifteen seconds.


Some filmmakers seem to favor Lewis Carroll's original work because, like L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz", it's a ready-made wacky story with cool characters into which they can easily insert their own alterations and variations without having to give it much original thought. Unfortunately, you need more than a tiresome overabundance of Dutch angles and assorted lowlifes acting like fruitcakes to turn a dark, dreary urban setting into a wonderland. And there isn't much that's magical about a pedestrian gangster tale laced, seemingly at random, with vulgar whimsy and crude modern counterparts of the original characters and events.

Among Alice's obligatory encounters are a car ride with a rapping, dope-smoking Caterpillar (his "hookah" is a hooker--get it?), a visit to the all-seeing Duchess who sits in a room surrounded by monitor screens, and a tea party with a dwarf who brags about his sexual prowess and a loathsome madame named Hattie (Bronagh Gallagher, who was Trudi in PULP FICTION and a Republic cruiser captain in THE PHANTOM MENACE). Hattie shanghais Alice into her tractor-trailer whorehouse on wheels which Alice manages to make her escape with (she steals the "tarts"--get it?). The film's seemingly willful lack of charm can be summed up by one hooker's observation about a passing john: "I've seen more meat on a budgie's cock." It's like a tasteless "Mad Libs" version of the story concocted by snickering fourth-graders.

Aside from the ubiquitous tilty camerawork, the film's style seems to consist mainly of a visual confetti of ADD-friendly quick cuts that never allow us time to settle in and develop any feelings for the main characters, or allow the characters to develop much themselves. In this movie, a contemplative scene is one that contains a shot lasting over five seconds. By the end of the story we're meant to feel warmth toward Alice and Whitey, yet they're so superficial that even a last-minute attempt to pull a sappy ending out of left field and jerk a few mock tears out of the viewer falls flat. Even the most "magical" moments of the film are about as visually and emotionally compelling as a Filmation cartoon.


The DVD from Magnolia's Magnet label is in 2.35:1 widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 sound. Subtitles are in Spanish, with English closed captions. Extras consist of a ten-minute "making of" featurette and a photo gallery.

MALICE IN WONDERLAND is like one of those Andrew Dice Clay versions of a Mother Goose rhyme, except Dice doesn't pretend to be charming and witty when he tells them or top them off with a curdled dollop of bathos. Crass and unappealing, this modern "take" on Lewis Carroll's classic story is enough to make me swear off modern "takes" on things in general, once and for all.

Two Goofy Extras in "Sword of Lancelot" (1963)(video)

This King Arthur movie has some great battle scenes.

But a couple of not-so-great extras.

One's just chillin' out with an arrow sticking out of his chest.
When his buddy decides it's time to take a dive, he plops down too. 

Hard to get good help these days!

Originally posted on 4/26/18
I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

Greg Brady: STONED (For Real!) On Camera (video)

Greg Brady got caught smoking a cigarette in the episode "Where There's Smoke..."

Of course, that was just Barry Williams going by the script.
But that's nothing compared to the time he was stoned on weed...for real...during a scene!

It seems some visiting friends got Barry high once on his day off from filming.
But wouldn't you know it--he got called in to do a scene.

He starts it off by tripping over his bicycle pump.
And then he doesn't know what to do with himself.
...grinning like a loon...
...and looking at "Cindy" like she had two heads. 

Better stick to cigarettes, Greg!

(And dim those headlights.)

 

Originally posted on 4/11/18
I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

Dr. Smith At His Grooviest! ("Lost In Space: The Promised Planet", 1968) (video)

Dr. Smith is captured by teenage aliens called "Youngers"...

...who turn him into a Space Hippy!

He really gets into the groove! It's a freak-out!

Originally posted on 4/23/19
I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

THE BEST OF CAROL BURNETT: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 8/5/19

 

If you were watching CBS one night 50 years ago, chances are you saw the premiere of "The Carol Burnett Show." And if you were like me, you loved it and her, even though you probably didn't suspect that it would go on for another eleven years (1967-1978) and that 50 years later you'd be able to watch it all over again on DVD.

Time-Life's 21-disc boxed DVD set THE BEST OF CAROL BURNETT: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION allows us to do just that, with 60 episodes on 21 discs that also contain a wealth of bonus features, along with two illustrated menu booklets and a collectible memory book offering a colorful text history of the show.

The box contains three separate volumes, the first being THE BEST OF THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW (10 discs). This one gives us a chance to relive that first fateful episode and then takes us on a trip through the rest of the series with selected highlight episodes.

The early Carol is a delight as she has her first question-and-answer session with the live audience to open the show--which would become a revered tradition (as would her patented "Tarzan yell")--and wins them over with her easy charm, humility, and bubbling sense of humor and fun. 

Already an experienced performer (she'd just come off "The Garry Moore Show", where I first became a fan as a kid), we get to see her initial awkwardness work in her favor as she gradually becomes a more and more seasoned performer, as do beloved cast regulars Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, and Lyle Waggoner. (Frequent guest Tim Conway would later join as well.)

Her audience rapport and sense of fun in the skits and musical numbers to follow establish Carol's ability to relate to viewers on a personal level with no barrier between them.  She also proves willing to improvise and ad-lib her way through the skits, giving the show an enjoyably casual atmosphere where anything can happen.

The skits themselves are a hit-and-miss affair, some screamingly funny while others either don't quite click or are absolute clunkers.  But there are just so many of them that we're always entertained, especially when we get to see favorite continuing characters such as Mr. Tudball and Mrs. Wiggins, The Old Folks, Carol and Sis (lookalike Vicki Lawrence often played Carol's younger sister), and the blackmailing Girl Scout.

There's also the insufferably nagging wife, the soap opera spoof "As The Stomach Turns", Tim Conway's "The Oldest Man", and of course "The Family", with Carol and Harvey as Eunice and Ed Harper and Vicki Lawrence really coming into her own as Eunice's grouchy and eternally disapproving Mama in some of the show's most brilliant and memorable scenes.

In addition to the continuing segments are a wealth of commercial spoofs, Broadway and movie tributes, and other one-shot skits that range from yawners to side-splitters. Most of them are delightfully lowbrow, willfully unsophisticated, and packed with silly fun.  Not only that, but the cast delight in making each other burst into helpless laughter, especially when Tim and Harvey get together. 

Like most variety shows of the time, there's also a resident dance troup who perform semi-weekly song and dance numbers that viewers who appreciate such things will no doubt enjoy. As for me, these are excuses to exercise my chapter-skip button, something I wish I'd had when I was a kid and wanted to get back to the comedy.

I love the mischievous air that pervades the show, with the cast often playing on-air pranks on each other. One episode occurred during a musicians' strike so everyone has to hum the show's incidental music. 

Carol's all-star guests are a stellar line-up of actors, singers, and comedians who represent some of the best and most popular names in the entertainment industry at the time. These include Rita Hayworth, Bernadette Peters, Soupy Sales, Ella Fitzgerald, Sid Caesar, Andy Griffith, Mel Torme', Imogene Coca, Martha Raye, George Gobel, Ken Berry, Cass Elliot, Diahann Carroll, Nanette Fabray, Ray Charles, Carl Reiner, Roddy McDowall, The Jackson 5, Steve Lawrence, Dinah Shore, Ben Vereen, Neil Sedaka, Rock Hudson, and Carol's favorite guest, Jim "Gomer Pyle" Nabors.

The second 10-disc volume in the set, THE BEST OF THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW: 11 YEARS, TOGETHER AGAIN, is another wonderful collection of 27 shows from Carol's 11-season run on CBS. This time guests include Lucille Ball, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Eddie Albert, Nancy Wilson, Chita Rivera, Burt Reynolds (who performs an amazing stunt gag), Don Adams, Lesley Ann Warren, Flip Wilson, Vicki Carr, Carol Channing, Ruth Buzzi, Jack Jones, Lily Tomlin, The Pointer Sisters, Dick Van Dyke, Sammy Davis, Jr., Madeline Kahn, Stiller & Meara, Eydie Gorme, and Hal Linden.

The third volume, THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW: THE FINAL SHOW, is Carol's sentimental swan song, which, in addition to the live-audience performances, also features taped reprises of some of the show's highlights over the years.

Mr. Tudball and Mrs. Wiggins appear for the last time as they prepare to move to a new office, while the final "Family" segment shows Mama disrupting Eunice's much-needed session with her therapist.

There are outtakes, TV and movie parodies, and appearances by such guests as Liza Minelli, Perry Como, Bob Hope, and several more. The sudden appearance of a surprise guest, Jimmy Stewart, gives Carol one of her biggest thrills of the show's entire run.

After a tearful goodbye rendition of the show's theme song performed by Carol's beloved "Charwoman" character, she's surprised by a procession of past well-known friends of the show including Harvey Korman, who had left the show sometime before.

Bonus features consist of a cast-reunion featurette, "The End of 11 Years: Saying So Long" and an interview with Carol.

Several of the other discs in the collection also include bonus features too numerous to mention.  These include all manner of outtakes, cast and guest interviews, and a variety of informative featurettes of interest to fans of the show.

Not all of the episodes are complete--some have shorter-than-average running times, but the deletions are probably limited to some of the show's less exciting dance numbers. Pictorially, the shows are in very good condition.

THE BEST OF CAROL BURNETT: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION is a gold mine of entertainment for fans of the show and a great introduction for those who've never seen it before. And as good as the skits and musical numbers are, it's those times when Carol just stands there visiting with the audience in her friendly and totally unassuming way that really make this set a joy to watch. It reminded me of why I've loved her for the last fifty years.


TECH SPECS:

Type: DVD (21 Discs)
Running Time: 58 hours, 51 min.
Rating: N/A
Genre: TV DVD
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (4:3)
Audio: Stereo

HANCOCK -- Movie Review by Porfle

(NOTE: This review was written during the film's initial theatrical run and originally posted on 9/3/11.)


HANCOCK (2008), this year's big-budget 4th of July offering from Will Smith to his fans, is neither as much fun as MEN IN BLACK or INDEPENDENCE DAY, nor as horrible as WILD, WILD WEST.   It sorta bounces around between those two extremes, entertaining me for a few moments here and there before lapsing into passages that had me not really caring whether or not I even finished watching the whole disappointing thing.

Hancock (Smith) is a surly, alcoholic bum whom we find sleeping on a sidewalk bench as the movie opens.  But when he's told that there's a van full of heavily-armed criminals in a high-speed pursuit on the freeway, he grabs his bottle of cheap booze and drunkenly flies to the scene.  While he succeeds in stopping the bad guys, his crude, haphazard methods also cause millions of dollars worth of damage and public outrage. 

Later, when kindhearted, green-livin' public relations man Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) finds himself stuck on the tracks with a freight train bearing down on him, Hancock flings his car away and stops the train cold, causing--you guessed it--millions of dollars worth of damage.  Unlike Superman, this sad-sack superhero just doesn't bother to think his heroic deeds through before wading into action.  However, the grateful Ray invites Hancock home to dinner to meet his lovely wife Mary (Charlize Theron) and admiring son Aaron (Jae Head), and to give Hancock some pointers on how to improve his public image and more efficiently use his super powers without leaving such wanton destruction and negative publicity in his wake.



The superhero stuff, of course, is what makes HANCOCK intermittently entertaining.  It's fun to watch this comic variation of the Bruce Willis character in UNBREAKABLE blundering his way into tense situations and handling them in the most egregious, irresponsible ways possible.  It's also exciting and funny when, after finally donning the superhero costume Ray gives him and following some of his helpful advice, Hancock polishes his image by heroically saving the day when a group of ruthless bank robbers with hostages wired to explode begin shooting up a whole city block. 

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't really know what to do with itself when fun things like this aren't happening.  An earlier sequence which finds Hancock in prison for his misdeeds doesn't really go anywhere, and one particular scene in which he inserts a convict's head into another convict's ass, aside from being rather juvenile, is downright farcical.  I might accept such gross absurdity in a MEN IN BLACK-type live-action cartoon (maybe), but HANCOCK also wants to turn all heartrending and semi-realistic before it's through.  It's almost like a collision between "Heroes" and POLICE ACADEMY. 

A surprise plot-twist that occurs shortly before the halfway mark leads to vague, mystical revelations about Hancock's HIGHLANDER-esque past and some increasingly straight-faced melodrama.  It also results in a superhero battle right out of the tiresome Neo vs. Agent Smith showdown in MATRIX:REVOLUTIONS (complete with half-baked CGI weather effects slathered on for no good reason), by way of SUPERMAN II, with the sort of supercharged personal conflicts that are better suited to an X-MEN story.  To make up for the fact that there's no super-villain, we also get a bland trio of regular criminals out for revenge against our hero, but they end up serving merely as a plot contrivance.



Thank goodness, Will Smith is good enough to finesse his way through it all without much trouble.  Charlize Theron is also effective as Mary, mainly because her character is pretty consistently serious throughout, although she has her share of absurd moments. I was surprised when the closing credits revealed that Ray Embrey was played by Justin Bateman--wow, I thought he was still a teenager or something.  Anyway, he does a good job of making Ray warm, likable, and funny.  As Ray and Mary's son, Aaron, Jae Head has an appealingly natural quality.  Nancy Grace appears as herself in an unwelcome cameo.

Most of the special effects are pretty good, especially in the opening freeway chase, the train rescue, and the bank robbery sequence.  But then there's that hinky, cartoonish CGI that takes me out of the movie every time.  When multiple tornados and other weather anomalies descend upon the city during the big battle scene, it's just plain crummy-looking.  Really, this kind of stuff needs considerable refinement if filmmakers are going to continue relying on it so much.  Worse, Peter Berg's direction of the quieter scenes is clumsy, and the poor cinematography and editing often make the movie look much cheaper than it is. 

HANCOCK has its crowd-pleasing moments of big summer fun, but they're scattered within an inconsistent hodgepodge of comic book superheroics, somber pathos, and outlandish farce.  Although the ending tries to evoke stirring memories of SPIDERMAN, Tim Burton's BATMAN, and, surprisingly, DAREDEVIL, I found my interest in this particular tale waning long before any hopes for a sequel.  Not only did I not walk out of the theater eager for the impending DVD release, but the main image from the movie that lingered in my mind--regrettably--was that of a guy with his head rammed up another guy's ass.

SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 7/20/09

 

If you're trying to think of a grandiose name for two dullards trudging around in the wilderness for a couple of hours, then I guess SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA (2007) is about as good as any.

Orn (Tony Stone) is the lead singer for a hair-metal band, and Volnard (Fiore Tedesco) is the bass player. Okay, they aren't, but they certainly resemble that more than the badass Vikings from the year 1007 that they're supposed to be.

After the rest of their party either get wiped out by the Skraelings (Native Americans) or hightail it back to Norse-ylvania, the two stranded scouts ask "Dude, where's my ship?" and decide to try and walk cross-continent until they run into either another expedition or a bunch of polar bears, whichever comes first. After observing these guys in action for awhile, you may start to suspect that it wasn't any accident they were left behind.

Anachronism is sometimes used in an attempt to give the characters a more contemporary appeal. One scene begins with the generously-maned Orn greeting the morning by actually headbanging to Judas Priest outside their makeshift enclosure. Elsewhere, a dialogue exchange around the campfire might've been scripted by the guys from MST3K:

"I caught this f**king fish so don't be trying to hog it all."
"Ah, shut the hell up."
"This fish is really killer."

Lots of wood-chopping and even more trudging are interrupted here and there by a few meager plot points, heralded by chapter titles such as "Stranded", "Camp", "Conquest", "Encounters", "Separation", "Reunion", etc. After stumbling across a couple of Christian monks who have escaped Norse captivity and constructed a humble log chapel in the forest, Orn and Volnard slay the two and burn down their chapel.

Actually, Volnard secretly releases his monk back into the wild, still feeling guilty after once killing a Christian who converted his sister only to witness her suicide leap from a cliff in response. Volnard decides to abandon Orn and travel with the monk (David Perry) instead, intrigued by his new religion.

Devout Odin-worshipper Orn, meanwhile, is followed by one of those unbelievably hot Native American babes that exist only in the movies (Noelle Bailey)--she gazes at him from afar in standard serial-killer POV--until she finally decides to lay him out with some knockout berries, transport him to her dwelling, stake him out, and rape him.  Well, you know those hair-metal groupies.

In an interesting dream sequence, Gaby Hoffman of "Uncle Buck" fame appears as Orn's wife and tells him what a total failure he is, with which most viewers by this time will heartily concur. After a few more random occurrences, including an eventual reunion with Volnar, the rambling storyline finally drops dead of exhaustion.

In tone, SEVERED WAYS seems to be going for a cross between James Fenimore Cooper, "Jeremiah Johnson", and "Quest for Fire." Although at times, it also looks like the result of a collaboration between The Discovery Channel and shock filmmaker John Waters, as demonstrated by a couple of scenes that shoot right to the top of my list of "Things I Really Didn't Need or Want to See."

The runner-up is the sequence in which Orn catches a chicken and then proceeds to behead, pluck, and gut it. I know this happens to chickens all the time, but for some hapless fowl to sacrifice its life in the making of this movie seems above and beyond the call of duty.

But that's nothing compared to what is without a doubt the most memorable scene in the film, in which we get to watch Tony Stone take a dump. Yes, movie fans, you heard right. He takes down his pants, allows his bare butt to precipitously hover just long enough to make us think "Oh, no you're not", and then, sure enough, he does--copiously, in fact--and we're treated to a graphic image that will linger in our minds for the rest of the film, if not our lives. This isn't acting, it's just some doofus heaving a Havana.

Even without such dubious cinematic milestones, Stone's hyperactive directing style is all over the place, and too much of it consists of getting a really tight shot of someone or something and then shaking the hell out of the camera (the film often resembles "The Blair Viking Project"). Stone also has an affinity for lens flares that might have you grabbing for your shades.

Admittedly, there's an awful lot of visual beauty in this film, but considering the consistently gorgeous wilderness locations (in Vermont and Newfoundland) this would seem unavoidable. At times, the camera lingers on certain images for so long that they're obviously meant to have a hypnotic effect on the viewer. Unfortunately, it's the kind in which you hear a guy's voice saying, "You are getting sleepy..." That's where the soundtrack comes in handy, because we never know when the next blast of heavy metal or strident prog-synth is going to jar us out of our stupors.

The DVD's 2.35:1 widescreen image is good, although the film sometimes has that noticeable digital video look. Sound is Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0, with the occasional dubbed Old Norse dialogue subtitled in English and Spanish. Bonus features include a couple of deleted snippets, some nice footage shot at an actual Viking settlement in Newfoundland, four brief "video fireplace"-type ambient scenes representing the four elements, and, for some reason, an extended slow-motion look at the burning of that log chapel.

Rounding out the bonus features are two of the film's trailers, which are very well-done and promise an epic entertainment which SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA is unable to deliver. It's an intriguing premise which might have made for an interesting film if actor-writer-producer-director Tony Stone hadn't allowed it to become such a self-indulgent ego trip. Not only that, but he deserves a swift kick for tricking us into watching him pitch a loaf on camera. (Gee, how come Hitchcock or Kubrick never thought of that?) This is the kind of film that's often lauded as an alternative to the usual Hollywood "cookie-cutter" fare, but in this case, I'll have a cookie, thanks.

DAMON AND PYTHIAS -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 8/14/12

 

I was expecting the usual comic-book-level sword 'n' sandal yarn with DAMON AND PYTHIAS (1962), but this Italian/USA co-production--released by MGM--aims to be a sober, respectable historical tale and in its own relatively modest way manages to hit that mark pretty well.

When the ruler of Athens dies, Pythias (Don Burnett) is sent to Syracuse to fetch his replacement, a missionary named Arcanos (Andrea Bosic) who is there preaching brotherhood and equality while being hunted by the guards of tyrannical emperor Dionysius (Arnoldo Foà).  Pythias falls victim to and then befriends a charismatic street thief, Damon (Guy Williams), who finds inspiration in Pythias' bravery and beliefs. 

When Pythias is captured and condemned to death by Dionysius, Damon offers himself as a substitute so that Pythias may return to Athens to visit his ailing wife Nerissa, with the promise that he will return in two months' time.  Dionysius agrees, confident that Pythias will never return and thus disprove the Greek's liberal philosophies in the eyes of the people when Damon is publicly executed. 

Filmed partly at Cinecitta studios in Rome, DAMON AND PYTHIAS is colorful and eye-pleasing, with attractive sets and some scenic locations along with several impressive and authentic-looking subterranean interiors.  While the sword 'n sandal flicks that this closely resembles seem inherently juvenile, this production succeeds in presenting its story with maturity and restraint but can't avoid also being rather dry and slow-moving.  Only when the substitution deal is made does the plot take a suspenseful turn that puts some spark into it. 

With so much dialogue, it's good that the writing is fairly sharp and most of the cast are able to carry it all off well.  Arnoldo Foà's subtlety and lack of the usual villainous traits make his Dionysius interesting to watch--he even bursts out with delighted laughter at an insult the captive Damon levels at cruel head guard Cariso (Carlo Giustini), and shows fatherly love for his son even while earnestly teaching him the most vile philosophies.

It's fun to see Guy Williams of TV's "Zorro" and "Lost in Space" as one of those cheerful rogues who constantly taunt and elude authority figures while running around doing roguish things.  His evolution into a more thoughtful and responsible person under Pythias' influence is touching.  As Damon's steady gal Adriana, the beautiful Liana Orfei proves as adept at playing a fiesty peasant woman as she is at being the Queen herself, as in HERCULES, SAMSON, AND ULYSSES a year later. 

Don Burnett makes a rather bland Pythias, especially next to Ilaria Occhini as his emotional wife Nerissa. Her deliciously overwrought performance is a delight, with Occhini becoming wonderfully unhinged during her final scene with Burnett, perhaps the film's dramatic highpoint.  Fans of THE GREAT ESCAPE will recognize Lawrence Montaigne as Damon's flute-playing accomplice in thievery.

German director Curtis Bernhardt, whose other credits include MISS SADIE THOMPSON, THE MERRY WIDOW, and KISSES FOR MY PRESIDENT, gives the entire production a stately veneer but manages a few effective action sequences.  In the film's final moments, Pythias attempts to return to Syracuse only to be headed off by Dionysius' guards, later engaging in a hand-to-hand clash with Cariso himself. 

Best of all is the sequence midway through the film in which Damon, Pythias, and Arcanos flee from a band of guards via horseback and horse-drawn cart, staged thrillingly by Bernhardt with some amazing stuntwork (including, alas, one of those cringeworthy horse-tripping stunts).

The "manufactured on demand" DVD from the Warner Archive Collection is in 16x9 widescreen with Dolby 2.0 sound.  No subtitles or extras.  The print used looks pretty good to me, although as I've said before I'm not nearly as picky about such things as the usual videophile. 

What might've been a much more emotional ending is simply cut short abruptly--there's no follow-through to send DAMON AND PYTHIAS home with a genuine emotional catharsis.  Then again, the film doesn't gush all over us to get its message across, but states it simply and succinctly before bowing out.  I may not have been deeply moved, but I felt pretty good overall about having watched this surprisingly thoughtful and mature film about the true meaning of friendship and brotherly love.