Month: November 2023

For those of us that love physical media, the last few years have been outstanding.  Here’s the thing, though.  The quality DVD’s, Blu-Rays, and 4Ks haven’t been coming from a lot of the major studios, because THEY’VE been focusing on streaming, which isn’t doing very well right now, except for Netflix.  No, the best physical releases have been coming from the boutique labels like Shout! Factory, Criterion, Kino Lorber, Grindhouse, Blue Underground, MVD Releasing, Vinegar Syndrome, and many others.  Now is the best time to be a fan of physical media.  2023 has seen a HUGE number of outstanding releases.  With streaming in its current…predicament, it’s important to remember that physical media still has an important part to play in the world of movies, and it will for at least another decade.  With that out of the way, let’s take a gander at some of the stuff I’ve picked up since the last haul.

The Vincent Price Collection – Scream Factory

For some bizarre reason, I decided I needed some Vincent Price in my life, so…I picked up the Vincent Price Collection.  This was the first of three collections that became available.  Vincent Price is one of the legendary actors of the 50s and 60s, known mostly for his gothic horror films where he played villains.  He would be the first person to tell you that he doesn’t have much range, but what he gives us is fantastic.  This collection has 6 movies spread over 4 discs: The Pit and The Pendulum, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Haunted Palace, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, and Witchfinder General.  These are all classics in their own right.  I might do a review on Witchfinder General later, because this was not your typical horror film.  Most of the films in this collection are based on Edgar Allan Poe’s work, but Witchfinder General really wasn’t.  It was inspired by the notorious real-life witch hunter, Mathew Hopkins, during the 17th century.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 – Paramount Pictures

To say that I’m a fan of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible movies is a gross understatement.  I love all these movies, especially the more recent ones like Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout.  Tom Cruise has made a habit of upping the ante with the stunts that he does, because he does them all.  But these are great spy capers that are a lot of fun, although, I will admit that MI: 3 was the weakest of the bunch, in my opinion.  But this latest entry: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 takes things to a whole new level in terms of action and stunt-work.  The story is kind off…eh.  But we all go to these movies to see what shenanigans that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt gets into, and they don’t disappoint.  For a movie that’s 2.5 hours long, it doesn’t feel like that.  It moves pretty quickly.  While I can’t wait to see Part 2 when it comes out, Part 1 didn’t do very well at the box office.  The budget ballooned like crazy because of Covid, but it’s still an awesome action movie.  I just wish the special features were more in-depth then they were.

Meg 2: The Trench – Warner Bros.

Never let it be said that Jason Statham kicking a giant shark in the face is a bad thing.  The first Meg was a surprising amount of fun.  Giant sharks are awesome, but my biggest issue with the film was that there wasn’t enough carnage with the megalodon.  Well, you definitely get more carnage with this movie and that makes it a bit more fun.  Perhaps the most interesting addition to the film was Wu Jing.  Most western audience aren’t going to know how this guy is.  He’s a martial arts actor who made his break in Hong Kong’s kung-fu movies during the 90s and early 2000s.  He’s FAST, but he doesn’t do any martial arts in this movie.  He’s actually got pretty good chemistry with Statham, so these two are a blast to watch.  Don’t listen to the critics who hated this movie, it’s a lot of fun.  Special features-wise though, this release is anemic.  Two featurettes that don’t even hit 30 minutes total.  Lame.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter – Universal Studios

When it comes to legendary monsters in literature, you don’t get more infamous than Dracula.  There have been so many adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel over the past century.  The most famous of which is Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi.  But one of my favorites was Nosferatu, which was released in 1922.  Between Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman, the eponymous vampire has endured.  With The Last Voyage of the Demeter, the film-makers explored a part of the book that most would probably gloss over: Chapter 7.  In this chapter, the captain’s log of the Demeter describes the last days aboard the schooner.  The film-makers decided to turn this story into an Alien-style thriller.  You know what?  It worked.  This is one of the best thrillers of the year, and I just wish that Universal Studios gave it more attention.  It bombed at the box office, and the marketing for the home video release was sparse.  It’s too bad, this is one of the most underrated movies of the year.

Crocodile – Synapse

In 1975, the world’s first summer blockbuster hit the silver screen around the world: Jaws.  It was one of the biggest movies of that year.  It was amazing, because it wasn’t just about the shark, it was about people dealing with the shark.  Steven Spielberg made his name with that movie.  Jaws fever gripped the world, and film-makers were eager to capitalize on the film’s success.  One of the first ones was Piranha.  It was quite the knock-off.  But it wouldn’t just be the United States that would rip-off Jaws.  Thailand would get one of the more bonkers movies in Crocodile, or Crocodile Fangs as it was known overseas.  This featured a giant crocodile as a result of nuclear testing, and it follows the Jaws formula to a tee.  Except that the two main leads lose their loved ones to the beast.  Other than that, it proceeds just like Jaws.  I love this movie.  The carnage is over-the-top and plentiful, despite the odd quality of the miniatures.  During the final act, the size of the croc changes.  It’s not a good movie, but it IS a great time.

John Carpenter’s Vampires – Scream Factory

Of all the vampire movies I’ve seen over the years, and I’ve seen a lot, John Carpenter’s Vampires was not one of his best movies.  At least, not when I first saw it.  I thought it was alright.  When I picked it up on Blu-Ray, I had a lot of fun with it.  Whatever you think of James Woods’ politics, he’s an electric actor, and his performance in this movie is wild.  Thomas Ian Griffith as Valek, almost steals the show.  He’s pretty terrifying.  The other actors including Tim Guinee and Daniel Baldwin did a pretty good job.  It’s definitely a bloody movie, and it starts off with a bang and ends with a bang.  The special features are pretty good here, including a commentary by the man himself, John Carpenter.

John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness – Warner Bros.

This one was available from Scream Factory, but I bought the WB version instead.  It was cheaper.  Still, it’s a decent disc.  In The Mouth of Madness is the second John Carpenter film on this list, but it’s also directly inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s got a solid cast including Sam Neill and Jurgen Prochnow as Stephen King-style author Sutter Cane.  Things really start taking a turn for the bizarre when Trent goes in search of a town called Hobb’s End.  The closer that he gets to Cane, the more off the rails the world seems to go.  It’s the best H.P. Lovecraft movie that’s not H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s bonkers and at times really funny.

And that’s all I’ve got for this haul, but don’t worry, there’s more coming out next week including Saw X and Oppenheimer.  Until then: Ciao!

About an hour and a half ago, as of this writing, the Screen Actor’s Guild brought their strike to an end following a tentative deal with the AMPTP(Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers).  While the details of the deal probably won’t be released until Friday, what we do know is that the actors will see pay increase of 7 percent, which is 2 percent higher than the director’s and writer’s guild got.  Also part of the deal is a “streaming participation bonus” as well as increases in health contributions and pensions.  Overall the deal is valued at about 1 billion dollars.  It’s pretty significant.

One of the biggest sticking points during the strike was the use of AI or artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.  What the studios had proposed initially was a one-time pay-off to an actor so they could use their likeness in any way they wanted essentially forever without compensating the actor or their estate if the actor dies.  That was the one issue that SAG was not willing to budge on, and I’m glad they didn’t.  The irreparable harm that could have been done to the industry would be catastrophic.  Look, AI is a part of our every day reality.  But the way it is used is something that requires further study and discussion.  Laws need to be put in place for certain protections against the abuse of the technology.  It’s something that’s going to affect ALL industries, not just Hollywood.

It never should’ve gotten to this point.  The movie and TV studios got greedy and they were called out on it by the DGA, WGA, and SAG.  The DGA and WGA got their deals earlier this year, but the actors really pushed to make sure that they had proper protections against the abuse of AI.  The fact of the matter is, this is the studios’ fault.  One hundred percent.  A bunch of Wall Street-owned jackasses got the idea that they could screw actors out of what they’re owed and what they’ve worked so hard to build.  Look, union negotiations can get heated and compromises have to be made on both sides.  That’s how things are done, but at the end of the day, nobody’s going to be completely happy, which means something got accomplished.  It’s going to be another 3 years before the contracts are up.  Once I get more details on the deal that was struck between the studios and SAG, I’ll post it here with my thoughts. Just thought I’d let people know what’s up.

There’s been a lot of stuff on my Twitter feed about the new Blade film being rated R.  I recently reviewed the Blade Trilogy over the weekend, which was R-rated.  There are some places out there that are announcing that the new film will be rated R.  Screenrant says that the director of the new film, Yann Demange says that the movie will be the second MCU movie to have an R-rating, with the other one being Deadpool 3.  Here’s the problem: It wasn’t announced by Marvel or Disney, and this isn’t showing in any of the major trades like Deadline or Variety, at least not yet.  The reaction across twitter has been, “Hell yeah, the movie’s going to be rated R!  It’s going to suck if isn’t!”  Hold your horses, ladies and gents.  Let me throw some cold water on that: The rating of a movie does NOT determine its quality.  If the film’s rating was all that it took to be successful, then Expendables 4 should’ve been a box-office knock-out.  It wasn’t.  It was advertised as an R-rated movie because the third film was PG-13.  I can tell you that Expendables 4 was NOT a good movie, and it didn’t do well at the box office.  In fact, the movie ended its box-office run at 16 million dollars on a hundred million dollar budget.  That’s a catastrophic failure of a movie that pretty much ensured the end of that franchise.  The point is, is that whether a film is rated PG or R, it doesn’t guarantee a film’s success.  A film’s success is determined by how many people bought tickets to go see it, and the only way that can happen is if people are interested in it.  Also, word-of-mouth and reviews and all that jazz has an effect.

Don’t get me wrong: A lot of my favorite movies are R-rated films.  There’s a certain degree of freedom that you have with an R-rating, but it’s important to understand that the writing of a film and it’s story is what determines the film’s rating.  What is the intent of the film?  What audience is the movie for?  Historically speaking, R-rated have always done worse than PG-13 or PG movies, because those movies command a wider audience.  You don’t necessarily have to worry about your child seeing somebody get dis-emboweled, decapitated or an other horrific methods of death and destruction.  If all you have in your R-rated film is titties, f-bombs, and gore, it’s not going to be successful, at least not with your average film-goer.  There has to be context and subtext behind such things.  There needs to be a reason for it.  I’m all for a good splatter-fest, but gore for the sake of gore is boring.  There needs to be more than stomach-churning violence to be compelling.  Look at this summer’s Oppenheimer.  It’s an incredibly successful R-rated movie, but it didn’t rely on cheap tactics like gore and over-the-top violence.  It was rated R because of the story of the man who created the atomic bomb.  That’s inherently NOT a family-friendly story, yet it was incredibly successful.  Now that had a lot to do with people not able to get tickets for Barbie, but regardless, it was a smash hit.

Now, certain genres do lend themselves better to an R-rating than others.  Horror movies in particular tend to be R-rated.  But not all of them.  Some of the best horror movies are PG to PG-13.   Ghostbusters, Poltergeist, Tremors.  These movies didn’t need to be rated R to be amazing.  You also need to understand that the bar for what constitutes a certain rating has changed over the past 40 years.  There have been PG-13 movies released in the past 20 years that have pushed that rating to its absolute limits like The Dark Knight.  Not kidding.  If you’re going to the movies these days, don’t really worry about the rating unless the movie was made for it.  MPA’s rating system is all over the place.  The standards for what makes a certain rating changes like the weather.  My final point is this: Don’t get excited for a movie because it’s rated R.  Get excited for a movie for the experience you might get from it.  If the film happens to be rated R, then that’s just icing on the cake, but it shouldn’t be determining factor for seeing a movie.  That kind of mentality is really narrow-minded.  Open yourselves up to all kinds of movies regardless of the rating.

Released: 1998, 2002, 2004

Directors: Stephen Norrington, Guillermo del Toro, David S. Goyer

Run Time: 120, 117, 122 minutes

Rated R

Distributor: New Line Cinema

Genre: Action/Horror

Cast:
Wesley Snipes: Blade
Kris Kristofferson: Whistler
Stephen Dorff: Deacon Frost
Luke Goss: Nomak
Dominic Purcell: Drake
N’Bushe Wright: Karen
Leonore Varella: Nyssa
Jessica Biel: Abigail
Donal Logue: Quinn
Ron Perlman: Reinhardt
Ryan Reynolds: Hannibal King

Last week, I made a post about issues over at Marvel Studios/Disney.  I mentioned that there was a lot of internal issues surrounding the studio and their decisions.  The quality of Marvel’s movies over the past couple of years have been very mixed, to put it politely.  But one of the most anticipated projects, Blade, has had numerous issues including the departure of TWO directors and FIVE writers.  Apparently, the upcoming film’s star, Mahershala Ali was about ready to leave the project when studio executive Kevin Feige stepped in and brought in a brand new writer, Michael Greene to pen the new film.  I would not have blamed the two-time Oscar-winner for leaving because of some seriously shit scripts that were tossed his way.  One of them would’ve been the FOURTH lead in a movie about Blade.  So, hopefully Mr. Feige’s getting things sorted out over there, because I want to see Ali’s interpretation of Blade.  He’s a fantastic actor, and he deserves a shot.  But for now, we’ve got Wesley Snipes’ movies to watch.  All three of them, and that’s what I’m looking at today.  There will be spoilers so be warned.

Wesley Snipes plays Blade, a half-human half-vampire that can survive in sunlight, hence the name Daywalker.  He was born a Daywalker because his mother was bitten by a vampire while he was in utero.  So, he was born with all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses, except for the thirst for blood, which he quenches using a form of serum.  The first film sees a couple entering a rave party that literally becomes a blood bath.  Enter Blade as he lays waste to the vampires in spectacular fashion, which ends with him immolating Quinn, the second-in-command of one Deacon Frost.  In the film, it was Deacon that bit Blade’s mother.  He has a mentor, Whistler, who spared him when he was a kid and trained him to fight vampires.  It seems that Deacon is trying to awaken an all-powerful Blood God named La Magra and needs Blade to do it.

The second film sees Blade traveling to Prague in search of Whistler, who ended up shooting himself after being bitten, but didn’t actually die.  So, with a new partner, Scud, Blade finds Whistler in a vat of blood.  Their hideout is attacked by two assassins trained to kill Blade when they offer him a truce by vampire nation’s ruling lord.  It turns out there’s a new threat on the streets called the Reapers, a new vampire off-shoot, so they recruit Blade to lead a team to hunt down and destroy the threat that’s being led by Nomak.  The final film has Blade facing off against the vampire nation when they bring in the ultimate vampire: Dracula.  Teaming up with Whistler’s daughter, Abigail and her partner Hannibal King, Blade goes to war against the vampires.

It’s remarkable how well the Blade movies hold up after 20+ years.  Well, the first two movies anyway.  Trinity has…problems.  But the first movie gave us our first black superhero.  It was also the first comic-book movie since Tim Burton’s Batman that audiences took seriously.  Yeah, Bryan Singer’s X-Men was important in supercharging the genre into what it is today, but Blade was the first truly successful Marvel movie.  And it was rated R.  It took audiences by storm.  It also solidified Wesley Snipes as a bonafide action star.  He’s simply magnetic to watch, and it helps that he’s a legitimate martial artist in his own right, holding multiple black belts in several different disciplines.  The movie has OTHER interesting characters like Whistler, played by Kris Kristofferson.  N’bushe Wright plays Karen, a bite victim that Blade saves and becomes a crucial part of his crew.  She’s fantastic because she’s not a damsel in distress.  She can handle herself.  As far as the villains go, Stephen Dorff just nails it as Deacon Frost.  He’s charismatic, charming, and an absolutely vile blood-sucker.  Quinn is basically the comic relief, played to perfection by Donal Logue.  It’s a fantastic film that holds up incredibly well.

Blade II takes a more horror-oriented approach thanks to the brilliant mind of Guillermo del Toro.  This movie takes everything that was good narratively about the first film and ups the ante considerably.  Introducing a new breed of vampire in the Reapers gives the film that horror flavor that the original film kind of lacked.  But this film also opens up the world of the vampires even more with the introduction Damoskinos, the vampire overlord.  We get to see the hierarchy of the vampire nation.  Bringing in a new team for Blade to lead, the “Blood Pack” brings a whole new level of tension.  It’s led by Reinhardt, played by Ron Perlman.  The film also gives us Donnie Yen as Snowman, a silent sword-wielding warrior.  Nyssa, one of the two assassins that fought blade in their warehouse, ends up becoming something of a potential love-interest for Blade, even though she was born a vampire.  But that angle is wisely not fully explored.  Now, while the overlord and the Blood Pack are villains, it’s Nomak that steals the show here.  Played by British pop-star Luke Goss, Nomak is not only as capable a fighter as Blade, but because he’s a Reaper, he’s even more of a threat.  Yet, as the movie progresses, we see Nomak as more of a victim than an outright bad guy, which makes him more tragic.

And that brings us to Blade Trinity, the final film in Wesley Snipes’ trilogy.  After the events of the second movie, Blade and Whistler end up back in the States doing what they do best, only this time they’re set up by the vampires when Blade kills a human that he mistook as a vampire.  Right from the start, we’ve got problems.  See, in the original film, Blade told Karen that he knew how to spot vampires from the way they moved and the way they smelled.  How could he not tell the difference here, considering his senses are leagues beyond what humans have?  Not only that, they kill off Kris Kristofferson’s character…again, only to bring in the character’s daughter, who was born out of wedlock.  The connections to the original film are flimsy at best right from the start.  Bringing in Dracula as a villain was actually a really smart move, as it feels like a natural progression in terms of enemies that Blade has to face.  The film basically lays out that Dracula’s origins are shrouded in mystery, dating back over 6,000 years, and being the first of the vampire race.  Not bad, I could go with that, if the film did anything worthwhile with him.  Instead, he’s relegated to being just another henchman.  You don’t fucking do that with Dracula.  Dracula is THE vampire, and the film takes its focus off that confrontation with Blade by giving us side-characters that we don’t care about.  Jessica Biel does what she can with material she was given as Abigail, but Ryan Reynolds was simply obnoxious as Hannibal King.  WWE star Triple HHH is not a screen actor.  He’s awful, and Parker Posey’s character is a shrill little banshee that might as well be wearing a mustache.  The only actor to carry his weight as a villain is Dominic Purcell, as Drake/Dracula.

The action in the first two movies are second to none.  The opening blood rave sequence that introduces us to Blade is iconic.  It shows us how bad-ass he is and how much of a threat he poses to other vampires.  He can clear a room single-handedly.  The pacing of the film is also pretty fast, with some decent set-pieces that lead us to Blade’s final confrontation with Deacon Frost, which is one of the greatest finales in modern action cinema.  By bringing in Donnie Yen in the second film, you have that added flair of the Hong Kong cinema to a certain extent.  Yen not only plays Snowman, but he’s also one of the martial arts choreographers aside from Wesley Snipes and HIS stunt double.  The fights are less flashy and more grounded in a street-fighting style which adds to the brutal nature of action sequences.  The opening action sequence in Blade II is another strong introduction to the character.  Then the movie ups the ante with another spectacular sword-fight in the warehouse with the two assassins, wonky CGI aside.  Then it just gets crazier as the movie goes which culminates in the final battle between Blade and Nomak.  The action in the first two movies was spectacular.  Again, Blade Trinity drops the ball with the action.  The fight choreography is just…BAD.  It lacks the hard-hitting edge of the first two movies.  Also, this movie doesn’t really have a standout fight sequence like the blood rave from the first movie or the fight between Blade and Reinhardt’s henchmen.  No.  The fights lack the emotional heft that drove the fights in the first two movies.  The only standout here is Wesley Snipes, because he knows exactly what he’s doing.  I don’t think anybody else did, and the overreliance on CG is painfully obvious.

Ultimately, Blade Trinity was a real mess.  It’s come to light over the past several years that there were some serious problems between Wesley Snipes and the film’s writer/director, David S. Goyer.  Word is, is that it got physical between the two at one point and Snipes would only communicate with Goyer via sticky notes.  I don’t know how true all that is, but what you see on screen is the result of really bad decision-making in terms of writing and directing.  Yet, for all the film’s problems, I still found it be a good deal of fun.  It’s not in the upper-pantheon of action films, but it’s far from the worst.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a great movie, and even worse sequel.  The trilogy deserved an ending better than this, and I wish that Dracula had been treated a hell of a lot better than he had.  The fact that the movie’s still kind of fun speaks volumes about how dedicated most of the cast and crew were about making the movie, and THAT comes across on screen, which is a good thing, and the fact that it doesn’t ruin the first two is a miracle in and of itself.  If you decide to skip this one, you’re not missing much.  The first two movies are action masterpieces.  Trinity is just…odd.

Yeah, the Blade trilogy didn’t exactly end with a bang, but these movies are still worth watching today.  Honestly, I hope that Marvel and Kevin Feige can do the character justice.  It’s the one Marvel movie, aside from Deadpool 3, that I’m interested in right now.  So, those are my thoughts on the Blade trilogy.  2 out 3 ain’t bad, and those two still hold up 20 years later.  That’s pretty damned good, in my opinion.