Now THIS is interesting.  According to various insider reports and seemingly confirmed by Bill Hunt over at The Digital Bits, the UK release of James Cameron’s The Abyss on 4K UHD discs has been canceled.  Why?  One single reason.  There is a scene in which a pet rat is submerged in a fluid that actually allows the animal to breathe underwater.  It’s a thing that’s actually being worked on by scientists.  But nope, censors in the UK felt that this scene depicted animal abuse and demanded that the scene be cut.  Disney wanted to comply, but James Cameron and his production company, Lightstorm Entertainment weren’t having it.  So, Cameron told the UK censors, “fuck you” and canceled the release.  And you want to know something?  He’s right.  That particular scene is not animal abuse.  It is a demonstration of the fluid that Ed Harris’ character would end up using towards the end of the movie.  James Cameron has always been on the cutting edge of science and technology for his movies, and this underwater breathing mechanism was one of those aspects.  The UK censors are spineless imbeciles.

Look, the censors in the UK are very sensitive when it comes to certain subject matter in movies.  The whole “Video Nasties” thing during the late 70s and 80s is a prime example of that overreaction.  The more they tried to censor or ban those movies, the more people were interested in seeing them.  Far be it for me to tell another country how to do things, but censorship is backwards thinking and shortsightedness at its worst.  Would the removal of that scene actually impact the rest of the movie?  Probably not, but that’s not the issue that we’re dealing with here.  What we are dealing with is artistic integrity.  By forcing the removal of one scene, you are essentially compromising an artist’s vision for the film, even if it only lasts a couple of minutes.  A couple of minutes can make all the difference in the world of film-making.  James Cameron was not going to stand for somebody messing with his movies unless he himself decided that there was some way in which his movies could be improved.  This situation is censorship, pure and simple, and James Cameron is well within his rights to refuse to sell his movies in a country that would alter his vision.  This is one of the issues with the UK government that a lot of people don’t like.

The solution to this problem is obvious: Import the 4k disc of the movie.  4K discs are region-free, so people shouldn’t have any issues playing the movie on their 4K players.  All the censors had to do was suck it up, but nope, they’re going to deprive the UK people of a physical 4K copy of The Abyss.  Now, consumers in the UK are going to have to shell out extra money to import the film.  It’s ridiculous.  I hope people over there a launching complaints about this.

Umm….this is something new.  It seems that Disney wants to do one of those Little Golden Books but with Alien.  Most people will recognize the Little Golden Books from their childhood.  A bunch of them were adaptations of Disney’s animated movies.  I remember them, and my mom remembers hers.  This is a bizarre choice for a Little Golden Book.  I don’t want to say that I’m surprised because Disney bought out 20th Century Fox, whose IPs included the Alien franchise.  I fully admit, I’m curious as to how they’re going to do this.  I mean, how do you dumb down something as rapey as the xenomorph?  I would imagine that parents are going to scratch their heads at this, because the movies featured a creature that epitomized rape and sexual dominance.  That was one of the big themes of the original movie.  Every aspect of the creature had a sexual component to it, from it’s phallic-shaped head to the secondary jaw that it used to penetrate people’s skulls.  The symbolism there is clear.

Since Disney bought out Fox, jokes and memes have been made about the xenomorph being turned into a Disney princess.  So, I guess this book is going to be a “light-hearted” reimagining of the original movie.  I don’t know who was smoking what, but this is mind-boggling to me, especially since 20th Century Studios is set to deliver not just another movie in the franchise, Alien: Romulus, but a TV series as well.  These are going to be full on R-rated stories.  Now, to be fair, when James Cameron’s Aliens was released, the movie managed to get all sorts of merchandise, from novelizations and comics to action figures and other toys.  Great, you’re getting your kid action figures for a movie that really isn’t kid-friendly, and now we’re going to have a Little Golden Book based on a movie that deals with some really adult material.  The book is available for pre-order and will be released on July 9, 2024.  I’m morbidly curious enough about it to buy it when it comes out.  I mean $6USD is actually a pretty good price for something like that.

Since they’re doing one for Alien, are they going to do one for Predator?  Why stop there?  They can do one for Die Hard or The Fly or The Hills Have Eyes.  The possibilities are endless!!  I think that’s enough internet for tonight.  I’m going to bed.

I hope everybody’s having a great holiday season, unless you’re in retail, then I hope that you merely survived.  As of this writing, it is Christmas Eve.  Next week will be New Year’s leaving 2023 in the dust and ushering in 2024.  2023 was an…odd year for movies.  Stuff got pushed back because of the strikes, but we’ve also seen a large number of big-budget failures.  It’s not that the movies were bad, they were just too expensive.  But the physical media side of things couldn’t have been better.  Despite Best Buy exiting the physical media arena, DVD and Blu-Ray are still doing pretty well.  But you didn’t come here to read me wax poetic about the state of things.  No, you came here to see what I nabbed for the end of the year.  Well, I’m the granter of wishes, so let’s dig into what I’ve got.

The Exorcist: Believer – Universal Studios

The original Exorcist from 1973 is absolute classic of a horror film.  It was shocking and it re-wrote the rules of the horror genre.  The sequels, though, not that great, although Exorcist III was pretty good.  Well, despite all the negative reception that Believer got, I decided to pick this one up.  You know what?  It ain’t that bad of a movie.  I’m not saying it’s going to be a classic or anything.  Hell, I wouldn’t even rate it among the top-tier movies about exorcism, but the movie had some interesting ideas.  For example, the movie postured that exorcism was not the exclusive playground of the Catholic Church.  Nope, you had people of different faiths coming together to help the two girls that were possessed.  The idea that a single demon could possess two or more people is also interesting, I just don’t think these ideas were fleshed out very well.  The acting is amazing, with the girls stealing the show, but everybody else, including Leslie Odom, Jr. were outstanding.  Bringing in Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair felt more like stunt-casting.  You could take those two characters out and the movie wouldn’t be affected.  Yeah, I enjoyed this one.  Again, it doesn’t come close to the original, but it’s rare for legacy sequels to do that.  There’s some pretty decent special features here, so I think it’s worth checking out at least.

P.O.W. The Escape – Scorpion Releasing

The late David Carradine got put on the map with Kung-Fu, where he played a Shaolin monk named Caine.  Ever since then he had been in a number of B-movies, but mostly as a supporting actor.  He wasn’t a bad actor, but he just didn’t really have the charisma and screen presence to carry a movie.  P.O.W. The Escape shows you exactly why.  This is definitely a Cannon Films production, but it still has some merit.  David Carradine plays the hero, and Mako plays a corrupt Vietnamese captain.  We’ve also got Steve James from American Ninja here, so the cast is pretty decent.  It’s a pretty standard Vietnam-era action movie, but it does have some pretty big explosions, so there’s that.

Lone Wolf McQuade – Scorpion Releasing

I had this one on Blu-Ray before, but it wasn’t a particularly a good copy, so…I opted for the newer Scorpion Releasing disc, which includes new interviews with actors like Robert Beltran and the late L.Q. Jones.  This is a movie I grew up with and why I really loved Chuck Norris movies.  So what you will about the guy now, but during the 80s, he was putting out some real bangers, including this one.  One of the biggest highlights of this movie was the fight between Chuck Norris and David Carradine, who plays a fairly nasty villain in this one.  This played to Carradine’s strengths as an actor.  The action is slick and hard-hitting, even for a movie that was rated PG(it came out before the PG-13 rating was invented).  It fires on all cylinders and has an outstanding musical score by Francesco De Masi.  I consider this movie to be one of Chuck Norris’ and David Carradine’s best movies.

Sound of Freedom – Angel Studios

If you can ignore the controversy surrounding Angel Studios’ film about human trafficking, you might actually a pretty decent thriller here.  I’m not going to get into the controversy, as I’ve already made several posts about it, but this movie does have stuff going for it.  First of all, the acting is pretty good.  Jim Caviezel delivers a pretty solid performance as Tim Ballard and Bill Camp as a former Cartel boss turned liberator.  It’s well-shot with some pretty good cinematography and the pacing is pretty decent.  Again, your enjoyment factor could depend on whether or not you’re willing to ignore a large number of inaccuracies that the film throws at you and the issues surrounding the film and Tim Ballard.  It’s worth a look.

Oppenheimer – Universal Studios

Leave it to Christopher Nolan to craft a thrilling biopic about the father of the atomic bomb.  I’m not kidding when I say “thrilling.”  The movie is paced like a tight thriller.  It doesn’t feel like a three hour movie.  Honestly, the movie could’ve ended with the Trinity Test and I would’ve been happy, but nope, there’s more to the story after that, and it’s tragic.  Cillian Murphy inhabits the role like no-one else.  There’s a lot of great performances here, including one from Robert Downey, Jr.  If he doesn’t get an Oscar nomination at least, it would be a crime.  He’s phenomenal.  But there’s a real surprising performance from Josh Hartnett, who dropped off the radar years ago.   He’s great as Ernest Lawrence.  It’s also very clear that Nolan cares about physical media, because this release has over three hours of content aside from the movie.  I think this could be one of the best physical media releases of the year.

The Creator – 20th Century Studios

God, I love good science fiction.  I also like science fiction that takes risks.  The Creator took risks on an 85 million budget, and we got a movie that looks twice that amount.  From a visual standpoint, The Creator is a stunning film.  Narratively, it clearly borrows from other movies, but it works for what it is.  It doesn’t always land with its themes, but the overall film is pretty damn good.  John David Washington delivers one of his best performances and Madeleine Yuna Voyles makes her acting debut with an incredibly powerful performance.  I have issues with child actors, but Madeleine makes the most of it and goes toe-to-toe with the best actors in the genre.  She’s clearly talented and a natural.  She’s going to have a future as an actor, and I can’t wait to see where she goes from here.  The Creator is one of the more interesting science fiction movies to come out in the last few years.

Godzilla 2000 – Toho/Sony

What can I say?  I’m a huge Godzilla fan.  I’ve been watching these Kaiju movies for years.  The big G has been around for nearly 70 years.  Godzilla Minus One hit theaters in the states last month and is one of the best movies of the year, in my opinion.  So, I decided to go back and revisit some of the older films.  Godzilla 2000 is essentially retaliation for the 1998 Roland Emmerich film, which pissed Toho off to no end, and you know what?  It’s a lot of fun, regardless of which version you watch.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – Paramount/Disney

Here’s one of those “big-budget failures” that I mentioned.  At over 300 million dollars and waning interest in the franchise, there really was no way that Dial of Destiny was going to be profitable.  People stayed away after Crystal Skull and it’s a shame.  This is a pretty good movie.  The opening 40 minutes are pure Indiana Jones.  The de-aging on Indy works for the most part.  The whole movie is just good old-fashioned fun with a great villain in Mads Mikkelson.  But the movie also brings back John Rhys-Davies as Sallah, as well as introducing new characters like Antonio Banderas as Renaldo.  This was the first Indy movie to not be directed by Steven Spielberg, and I wonder what it could’ve been if he had.  Still, James Mangold managed to deliver a pretty solid final film that I think should’ve done better than it did.  There’s a 5-part documentary detailing the making of the film which is pretty good.  Give the movie a chance, you might like it.

Piranha II: The Spawning – Scream Factory

Even the greatest of film-makers had to start somewhere.  The legendary director of True Lies, The Terminator, The Abyss, Aliens, Titanic, and the Avatar films, James Cameron, made his feature-length directorial debut with a movie about flying piranhas.  Yep.  It’s just as ridiculous as it sounds, but when it comes to the underwater photography, it’s clear that Cameron knew what he was doing, because the underwater stuff is amazing.  The visual and creature effects are actually pretty good.  Lance Henriksen chews the scenery like it’s nobody’s business and it’s goofy fun.

Expend4bles – Lionsgate Studios

Boy, you want to talk about a massive failure on nearly every conceivable level, look no further than the 4th and most likely final entry in the Expendables franchise.  I fully admit that I enjoyed the movie, but this is the worst of the bunch by country mile.  The amount of green-screen on display here is absurd.  Some of the action is pretty good, especially the opening.  But good god, the CGI is fucking awful.  Not only that, Stallone is absent for most of the movie, which is ironic because he’s the guy that was responsible for the entire franchise.  Also when you bring in top-notch martial arts talent like Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais and don’t use them properly, you fucked up.  This movie was a result of one bad decision after another, and creative differences between Stallone and the film-makers.  Yet, I found myself having a blast during my second viewing.  Yeah, stick a fork in this franchise, it’s done.

Saw X – Lionsgate Studios

The Saw franchise is one of my favorites, despite how off the rails it went.  The original movie felt more like a detective thriller than a straight-up horror movie.  The sequels would eventually focus more on the traps and the brutality.  Saw X sees the return of Tobin Bell as Jigsaw and Shawnee Smith as Amanda.  The film takes place between the second and third movies and we get to see more of how and why Jigsaw does what he does.  While some people might scoff at the idea of Tobin Bell’s character being the protagonist, you have to understand the character’s motivations for what he’s doing.  The movie still has the gruesome traps, but it’s all grounded by a pretty strong story that sees Jigsaw evolve into the villain that everybody knows him as.  It’s the best film in the franchise since the original film, hands down.  I love ’em all, but this feels really satisfying.

Monsternado – Uncork’d Entertainment

When Sharknado hit the scene a decade ago, it was unlike anything anybody had seen before.  It was ridiculous and it was made by one of the most notorious “mockbuster” companies in cinema history: The Asylum.  Here’s the thing, though.  It delivered on its premise.  It really did.  Yeah, the CGI was crap, but the concept was just so damn ridiculous people couldn’t help but tune in.  It was popular enough that it got 5 sequels, each one more ridiculous than the last.  But it wouldn’t stop there.  There would be a number of monster-based tornado movies since 2018.  The one that came out THIS year was Monsternado.  I’ve seen some serious shit in my time, but Monsternado takes the cake here.  It’s BAD.  A tornado comes out of the sea with monsters in tow and havoc ensues.  Yet, people don’t seem overly concerned about it.  Uncork’d Entertainment is known for their low-budget B-movies, but this is easily the worst they have ever put out, and not in a “so bad, it’s good” kind of way.  It’s abysmal.  Oddly, Monsternado feels like a Sharknado rip-off.  I want you to consider the irony of that statement.

The El Mariachi Trilogy – Sony Pictures

When people talk about director Robert Rodriguez, most people tend to think about movies like From Dusk Till Dawn and the Spy Kids movies.  But for action movie junkies, it goes back further than to Desperado.  What your average film fan may not realize is that Desperado is a sequel.  The original movie is called El Mariachi.  It was released in 1993 and was a very low-budget indie film.  It was about a traveling musician trying to make a living playing at bars when he inadvertently gets involved with a gang.  It’s pretty good, but it was Desperado that put Rodriguez on the map.  It’s also the movie that made Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek household names.  Desperado is the best of the trilogy, hands down.  It’s slick, it’s stylish, and it’s gloriously violent.  Once Upon a Time in Mexico is…fine, but outside of the incredible cast, it’s almost the same movie as Desperado.  Still, these movies are still worth picking up.

And…that’s going to conclude this edition of Recent Blu-Ray Hauls, I hope you folks might have found something worth checking out.  Not everything I get is good, obviously, but having a physical copy is preferable to going to digital-only.  I hope everybody has a safe and wonderful Christmas.  I might do something for Christmas, but I haven’t made a decision, yet.  In the meantime, y’all take care now, ya hear?

 

At this point last year, it looked like 2023 was shaping up to be a hell of a year for movies.  It was a hell of a year, alright.  Just not in the way I was hoping.  While there have been some bright spots this year for movies, the rest of the time was marred by a string of high-profile failures, especially from Disney.  Let’s start there.  Disney/Marvel had a really rough year with the only real success coming from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.  But not since 2014 has Disney failed to put out a single billion dollar movie.  There’s a number of reasons for that.  The pandemic was certainly a huge factor, but so was the change in leadership at Disney when Bob Chapek took over for Bob Iger as CEO.  A lot of the shows that came out this year also failed to live up to expectations, but let’s look at some of the high-profile movies that didn’t make a splash.  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was the highly anticipated final adventure for the titular character, barely made under 385 million dollars in its world-wide run.  The movie’s budget? 300 million dollars.  Personally, I love the movie, I think it’s a fitting final adventure to Harrison Ford’s run as the famed fictional archaeologist.  But the fact is, is that most people were not interested in seeing it.  A lot of people were not particularly happy with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so not even director James Mangold could help that.  Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was another low point for the House of Mouse.  It didn’t even hit 500 million, garnering mixed to negative reviews from both audiences AND critics. Marvel Studios The Marvels also received a less-than-glowing reception.  This film is expected to end it’s theatrical run with the lowest box-office take in the MCU.  One of the big reasons for that was the fact that you needed to watch some of the Disney Plus shows to understand what you were watching, and most people didn’t.  Disney did NOT have a good year.  Disney wasn’t the only studio to suffer massive failures.

Warner Bros also hit some major bumps with The Flash and Shazam: Fury of the Gods.  Both movies made a grand total of less than 400 million dollars.  What happened with Disney and WB when it comes to comic book movies is that people are sick of mediocre comic book movies that feel more like they just came off an assembly line.  I only saw The Flash this year for comic book movies.  I liked the movie, but the film’s issues with its main star and its multiple delays just killed any interest that people may have had.  The GOOD news for Warner Bros is that Barbie was the biggest movie of the year bringing home 1.5 billion dollars.  Run-away success much?  It’s an outstanding movie so, that success is well deserved.  Universal also released Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on the same day.  Which brings us to the trend of the year:

Barbenheimer.  Yes, you read that correctly.  This is an unusual situation for a number of reasons.  First, people lined up to see Barbie, but when the tickets ran out, people went to Oppenheimer instead.  These are both great movies, but I have never seen a situation in film history where one successful movie lifts the other one up as well.  It’s utterly ridiculous the amount of memes that were created because of this.  The film-makers had no idea that this would happen.  If they did, that was brilliant marketing, because Barbie and Oppenheimer are the two most successful movies of the year.  Nothing like this has happened before, and is unlikely to happen again.  If it does, we can dub it the Barbenheimer Effect.  While a lot of the movies this year have not met financial expectations, that doesn’t they were bad movies.  What happened with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 was really nobody’s fault.  It got delayed and delayed because of Covid, and the costs just ballooned.  There really was no way that this movie was going to be as successful as the others.  But it also highlights another issue with the costs involved with a lot of these big-budget blockbusters: They’re too expensive.  A lot of them cost anywhere from 180-300 million dollars.  The more expensive a movie is, the harder it is to break even let alone be profitable.  But there’s another issue that threw a monkey wrench into the works:

The strikes.  It wasn’t just SAG, but the WGA and the Director’s Guild, too.  A lot of the contracts were up this year, and because of streaming and AI issues, the union just weren’t willing to take what the AMPTP was offering, so they went on strike.  While I agreed with the strike, there was a lot of collateral damage as a result.  It wasn’t just that movies like Dune Part II were pushed back until 2024, but a lot of businesses in Hollywood that relied on these unions and their workers ended up taking the brunt of the impact with some businesses closing their doors permanently.  Now, the strikes have been resolved to the best that they could be, but the damage was done.  Again, I’m not faulting the actors, writers and directors for wanting better benefits in their contracts, but the reality is that these strikes have had a wide-reaching effect.

Earlier this year, it was widely reported that Creed and Ant-Man star Jonathan Majors was arrested and charged with domestic battery against his ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari.  Jonathan Majors struck it big in HBO Max’s Lovecraft Country and would end up starring in films like Creed III and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.  He’s incredibly talented, but the allegations against him were clearly serious enough to charge him.  He was dropped by his agency and PR firms as a result of Majors’ alleged abusive behavior.  Unfortunately for Mr. Majors, evidence was recently introduced in the form of text messages alleging that Majors did, in fact, assault his girlfriend.  I’m no legal analyst or lawyer, but this is not a good look for him.  Obviously, defendants should always be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but these text messages are not helping his case.  Whether or not he gets convicted is almost immaterial at this point, as he will be found guilty in the court of public opinion.  As I said, he was dropped by his agency and PR firms.  I don’t really see a way for him to come back from this, not at this stage in his career.  Before anybody mentions it, Mel Gibson was a fully-established A-level actor and film-maker before his complete breakdown in 2006.  While his career never fully recovered, Gibson still managed to get some pretty respectable projects out the door like Hacksaw Ridge and Edge of Darkness.  But that’s because Mel Gibson still has some sway in Hollywood.  Jonathan Majors doesn’t.  He doesn’t have that kind of footprint for his career.  This case could cut the man’s career short.  Everybody loves a comeback story, but Majors has done some pretty serious damage to his own image.  Movie studios just aren’t going to want to work with someone who is accused of beating women.  His upcoming movie Magazine Dreams, about a bodybuilder, has been removed from Searchlight Pictures schedule indefinitely.  If Majors is convicted, what do they do with that movie?  They can’t put it out in theaters, nor can they just throw it on streaming.  Disney’s also been taking a wait-and-see approach with Majors as far as his character Kang The Conqueror is concerned.  The easiest thing that Disney could do at this point is just recast the character.

Sound of Freedom surprised the hell out of me.  I wrote a review of the film, which I eventually took down, because I felt that spending money on the film would see those dollars go to the wrong people.  The movie itself is actually quite good, if you can get past the massive untruths that the film tells you about child sex trafficking.  For a movie that was made for a paltry 15 million dollars, the movie ended up bring home almost 250 million dollars.  To understand the film’s success, you have to understand the controversy surrounding it, and I’ve done multiple posts about the film’s portrayal of the controversial Tim Ballard and his Operation Underground Railroad organization.  I’m not going to go into that anymore, so if you want to read up on that, you can check out my posts in the Opinions and News tab or you can just google it.

Between all these things and movie studio CEOs being assholes, 2023 has been a really weird year.  Video games, though, have had the best year they’ve had in years with games like Baldur’s Gate III, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Super Mario Wonder, Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1, Sea of Stars, and a whole slew of other titles that have been just crushing it.  2023 in a nutshell ladies in a gentlemen: Batshit Crazy.  2024 is going to be stacked for movies, provided that shit doesn’t go sideways like it did this year.  Also, get out and see Godzilla: Minus One if you can.  It’s excellent.