Eligio Herrero’s 1983 film Human Animals is set in a world where the bombs have finally dropped, and the end of the world has arrived. Into this nuclear apocalypse are 3 individuals 2 men and one woman who awaken seemingly in the middle of a desert environment. One of the men and the woman appear…
Blu-ray Review – Wrath of Man – Warner Brothers
Review—Wrath of Man (MGM/Warner Bros.)Author: Palo SionopliaWrath of Man is not your dad’s Guy Ritchie. Roughly two decades ago, Ritchie and I parted ways. While I could see the talent in idiosyncratic crime comedies like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, I thought the Coen brothers and Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) made better…
Blu-ray Review – The Designated Victim – Mondo Macabro
The giallo was big business in Italy in the early 70’s. Yeah, it got its start in the 60’s, but it seems once Argento took flight with his Bird with the Crystal Plumage the genre really boomed. Hundreds of the films were made just in the 3-4 years after Bird…, and while not everyone took…
Blu-ray Review – Skinned Deep – Severin
Review—Skinned Deep (Severin) Author: Palo Sionoplia In the early 2000s, Fangoria films rode the direct-to-video wave with a spate of films under the company’s newly-minted “Gorezone” imprint. While none of these films broke new ground, they gave young directors the opportunity to develop their craft and release material that was too quirky for the multiplex….
Blu-ray Review – Siege – Severin Films
Review—Siege (Severin)Author: Palo Sionoplia In 1983, Canadian genre cinema gave the world its answer to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 via the aptly-titled thriller Siege. In hopes of creating a film with strong commercial appeal, co-directors Paul Donovan (who also wrote and produced the film) and Maura O’Connell concocted a lean, mean work of…
Blu-ray Review – Swordgai – The Animation – Complete Series – Sentai Filmworks
Swordgai – The Animation takes place in a world where incredibly violent and powerful weapons exist. These weapons are demonic in nature, and either possess their wielder, or begin to slowly control them. Into this world comes “Gai”, whose Mother had come into contact with one of these weapons “Shiryu” when she was pregnant, but…
Blu-ray Review – Chihayafuru – Season 3 – Sentai Filmworks
Chihayafuru surprised me, I mean, really surprised me. When I looked at the case the artwork looked nice and simple, but reading the back I did not expect to find myself caring that much about an anime that follows a character playing a competitive poetry based card game that I had never even remotely heard…
Blu-ray Review – Overboard – Severin Films
Overboard follows Joanne (Goldie Hawn) and Dean (Kurt Russell). Joanne is a rich heiress, who is currently running around the world in a yacht with her equally snobby husband Grant. Grant and Joanne arrive in Elk Grove, OR. Where Joanne hires Dean to remodel her shoe closet, when she is not pleased with the work,…
Blu-ray Review – Mirror – Criterion
Can I just say FINALLY? I know Mirror has been out via Artificial Eye in the U.K. For years now, but is a relief to have all of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work available on Region A Blu-ray, and sealing up the collection this month is the director’s autobiographical Mirror. Mirror is one of the Tarkovsky films…
Vengeance Trails – 4 Classic Westerns (Arrow Video)
This has been a pretty amazing year for box sets, and next on the chopping block is an Arrow Video entry “Vengeance Trails – 4 Classic Westerns”. This box set takes some lesser known western entries, by some better known directors like Lucio Fulci, Antonio Marghetiri, Maurizio Lucido, and Massimo Dallamano, and puts them together…