Author: Ben Tucker

Demon Pond (1979) [Criterion Collection] Blu-Ray Review

Gakuen (Tsutomu Yamazaki) is a teacher and botanist who travels alone through the wilds of rural Japan, eventually stumbling across a drought-stricken village so desperate for water that breast milk is used as a substitution. He meets in this village an old friend, Akira (Go Kato), who is married to a mysterious woman named Yuri…


Family (2017) [Indiepix] DVD Review

Lily Brooke (Veronica Kedar) frantically arrives at her therapist’s house one evening demanding a session. The therapist is out but her bitchy teenage daughter Talia (Tommy Baremboem) is there and is willing to listen albeit in as judgmental a way as possible. Well, Lily needs someone to listen to her family problems, and Talia will…


The Convent [Synapse] 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

It’s 1960 and we watch as a catholic school girl named Christine walks into a nunnery, takes a swig of whiskey and proceeds to kill the shit out of every nun in the place, smashing them with a baseball bat, covering them in gasoline and setting them on fire and blasting them apart using a…


Blackout (2023) [Dark Sky Selects] Blu-ray Review

Painter Charley Barrett (Alex Hurt) has been having these blackouts lately and waking up in the woods covered in blood. It’s just one more thing to worry about in addition to his father having recently died. Plus the town he grew up in is being bought out by a greedy capitalist who thinks he owns…


The Million Eyes of Sumuru [Blue Underground] 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

Like the Christopher Lee-starring Fu Manchu films that Harry Alan Towers produced concurrently in the ’60s, The Million Eyes of Sumuru features a character torn from the pages of the novels of Sax Rohmer. Sumuru (Goldfinger Bond girl Shirley Eaton) is a dastardly yet sexy mastermind who is hell bent on world domination by systematically…


Cheeky! [Cult Epics] 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Review

Carla (Yuliya Mayarchuk) is out looking for an apartment to rent in London with her boyfriend Matteo (Jarno Berardi). She meets a sexy real estate agent named Moira (Francesca Nunzi) who is willing to rent Carla an apartment in exchange for certain…favors… Meanwhile Matteo discovers some old letters and pictures that Carla had kept from…


Blue Desert [IndiePix] DVD Review

Ele (Odilon Esteves) is a man unmoored in life in the distant future. Each day he boards some sort of space flight, the routine a kind of numbing influence on his life. He wanders across a desert where he meets an old man (Chico Diaz) who desire to spray paint the sand blue. Ele does…


Killers: Unrated Director’s Cut [Synapse Films] Blu-ray Review

Notorious killers the James Boys, Odessa (Dave Larson) and Kyle (David Gunn), who murdered their parents in cold blood, have escaped from San Quentin and find themselves on the run from a nationwide manhunt in a turbulent thunderstorm. They decide to seek shelter in a random suburban household, taking hostage the ‘gee golly’ All-American nuclear…


Tótem [Janus Contemporaries] Blu-ray Review

Seven-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes) is preparing to celebrate her father Tona (Mateo Garcia)’s birthday along with her mother, aunts and other relatives at her grandfather’s house. Casting a pall over the entire event is the fact that Tona is terminally ill and does not have much longer to live. Amid the stresses and the hustle…


A Man On His Knees [Radiance Films] Blu-ray Review

What would you do if you suddenly and inexplicably found yourself the potential target of a hitman? This is the precise situation that Nino Peralta (Giuliano Gemma), simple husband and father who works at a coffee stand, finds himself in when he is told that he is one of eight targets for elimination by one…