Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF January 7th, 2019

Warner Archive are having a sale - 4 for $44 HERE - many great Blu-ray deals for only $11!

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Last time we posted our Discs of the Year for 2018 and this week we have Blu-ray reviews by Masters of Cinema, Elephant Films, Millcreek, Twilight Time, Turbine, 101 Films... of three seventies TV series, films directed by Cecil B. DeMille, Robert Aldrich, the Coen brothers plus our Calendar has last newsletter's updates of films-to-Blu-ray, including March Criterions of films by David Mamet, Robert Wise, Edgar G. Ulmer, Ted Wilde, Carlos Reygadas, Robert Zemeckis, Ingmar Bergman, Lewis Allen, Luigi Bazzoni, Terence Young, Virgil W. Vogel, Claude Lanzmann, Mario Bava, Jack Lemmon, F.W. Murnau, Michael Powell + Emeric Pressburger and more. We have our Feature Blu-ray is posted for JANUARY Enjoy!!

LISTING PAGES:

Discs of the Year for 2018, The TOP 100 DISCS, Ingmar Bergman's Cinema, HAGSPloitation, BLAXPloitation, OZPloitation, 'WOMEN IN PRISON' CINEMA, CREATURE-FEATURES (on Blu-ray!), PRE-CODE FILMs (on Blu-ray!), SILENT ERA FILMs (on Blu-ray!), HAMMER Studios (on Blu-ray!) The 100 BEST Neo-Noirs (on Blu-ray!), The GREATEST 100 Westerns (on Blu-ray!), Giallo on Blu-ray!, ESSENTIAL NOIR on Blu-ray!, Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.FR (France), Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.DE (Germany) and our LATEST ARTICLES: Movies From... the End of the World,  The Beauties of Star Trek (TOS)

Feature Blu-rays chosen for the Month of JANUARY!

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NOTE: If there are DVD or Blu-ray titles you'd like us to cover - please feel free to recommend!

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ONE VOICE (not Ellsworth Monkton Toohey): Let's talk nostalgic 70's TV out of the gate. Turbine's Blu-ray boxset of the complete collection of the sci-fi/adventure/spy series The Six Million Dollar Man is primo. "Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better...stronger...faster." Wonderful memories. I was a pretty big fan of The Rockford Files and the The Mill Creek 22 Blu-ray complete collection boxset is bare-bones and the price reflects that. "This is Jim Rockford. At the tone leave your name and message. I'll get back to you." Elephant Films bring us the complete series on Blu-ray of The Incredible Hulk with Bill Bixby which capitalized on The Fugitive TV series with David Jansen - both with a 'doctor on the run' for a murder neither committed (well, The Hulk allegedly committed). So each episode he travels and interacts with new characters, situations, adventures - generally helping people as he seeks a resolution to his problem (that of turning into a savage green-skinned creature, with a sub-human mind and superhuman strength. "Don t make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." Masters of Cinema have a new Blu-ray of Robert Aldrich's hagsploitation crime-mystery Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte with Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead. Delicish. In the same vein I loved the occasionally hokey Portrait in Black, now on Blu-ray from Elephant Films, a glitzy, glossy, murder-suspense picture starring Lana Turner, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart, Sandra Dee and John Saxon. Noiry elite. Speaking in the vicinity, The Cooler, a neo-noir gem that centers on the lives of characters within the Vegas casino milieu. 101 Films have seen fit to make their new Blu-ray part of their Black Label series. Do we all have a chance with Maria Bello? Enjoyable film. Elephant Films also bring to Blu-ray Cecil B. DeMille's Unconquered is an epic adventure in 1760s pioneering US with stalwart Gary Cooper and a lusty Paulette Goddard with a saucy bath scene - as they fight native Indians in Colonial Virginia. The Coen's The Hudsucker Proxy with Paul Newman, Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh is more of their brilliant filmmaking and Turbine have produced a new special edition steelbook Blu-ray that advances beyond the bare-bones Warner Archive. Lots to like about X Y and ZEE a campy soap opera starring Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, and Susannah York that has made it to Blu-ray thanks to Twilight Time.

"A gentleman is simply a patient wolf..." Lana Turner

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Unconquered BD - To avoid execution on a trumped-up charge, Abby (Paulette Goddard) agrees to be enslaved in the British colonies of North America. The captain of the transport ship, Martin Garth (Howard da Silva), has his eye on her, but he is outbid by Capt. Chris Holden (Gary Cooper), a Virginian. After setting Abby free on shore, Holden learns that Native Americans are plotting to attack the settlers. Holden, suspecting that Garth is in on the scheme, aims to stop them before all the colonists are killed. Blu-ray Release Date: May 2nd, 2018

Portrait in Black BD - As the health of tyrannical but gravely ill shipping tycoon Matthew Cabot (Lloyd Nolan) declines, he relies on pain medicine injected by his physician, Dr. David Rivera (Anthony Quinn). What Cabot doesn't know is that his frustrated wife, Sheila (Lana Turner), is having an affair with the doctor and has conceived a plan to do away with her husband. David agrees to go through with the murder, but threatens to confess their crime when Sheila begins receiving anonymous letters from a blackmailer. Blu-ray Release Date: May 2nd, 2018

The Rockford Files BD - "This is Jim Rockford. At the tone leave your name and message. I'll get back to you." The original and quintessential anti-hero detective, Jim Rockford, is on the case! Primetime Emmy Award-winner James Garner stars as the former crook turned investigator who stays under the radar and takes on the cases of the lost and the dispossessed, chasing down seemingly long-dead clues on the sunbaked streets and seamy alleys of Los Angeles. Blu-ray Release Date: June 27thth, 2017

The Hudsucker Proxy BD - Paul Newman, Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh star in filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen's darkly comic look at big business. When the founder of Hudsucker Industries leaps to his death from the 44th floor boardroom window the board of directors panics. But there is a plan: install a complete imbecile as president of the company and devalue the stock so the board can acquire a controlling interest for themselves. But where can they find such a guileless patsy? Enter Norville Barnes. Fresh off the bus from Muncie, Indiana, as a graduate of the 1958 class of the Muncie College of Business Administration, Norville is ready to start at the bottom and work his way up to the top of the corporate world ... he just never imagined it would happen so quickly. Turbine Blu-ray Release date: December 21st, 2018

X Y and ZEE BD - Edna O’Brien adapted her own novel for X, Y and Zee (1972), a campy soap opera starring Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, and Susannah York as the three points of a triangle that has very little to do with love. Taylor’s a sharp-tongued vulgarian, determined to break up her architect husband’s latest affair, even if it means seducing his mistress herself. Director Brian G. Hutton coaxes out every bit of sophisticated/smartypants humor his trio of superb stars can provide; cinematographer Billy Williams and composer Stanley Myers bring on the gloss. Blu-ray Release Date: December, 2018

The Incredible Hulk TV Series BD - David Bruce Banner, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician and scientist employed at the Culver Institute who is traumatized by the car accident that killed his beloved wife, Laura. Haunted by his inability to save her, Banner, in works at studies people who summoned superhuman strength in order to save their loved ones. Banner hypothesizes that high levels of gamma radiation from sunspots contribute to the subjects' increase in strength. Impatient to test his theory, Banner conducts an unsupervised experiment in the lab, bombarding his own body with gamma radiation. This triggers his transformation into a 7-foot-tall (2.1 m), 330-pound (150 kg), green-skinned savage creature, with a sub-human mind and superhuman strength. Blu-ray Release Date: December 4th, 2018

The Six Million Dollar Man BD - Grievously injured in the crash of an experimental aircraft, Colonel Steve Austin’s shattered body is covertly rebuilt via the miracle of modern science known as bionics. Equipped with atomic-powered limbs that make him “better, stronger, faster” than the average mortal, Austin (Lee Majors) can now run at speeds exceeding 60 miles per hour, overturn cars with ease, and spot an encroaching enemy from over a mile away. Under the watchful eye of OSI director Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson), Steve repays his debt to the taxpayers by taking on perilous missions of a highly classified nature. It chronicles Steve Austin’s amazing metamorphosis from “a man barely alive” to cyborg to patriotic superspy. Blu-ray Release Date: November 30th, 2018

Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte BD - When he successfully teamed fading film goddesses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), director Robert Aldrich kicked off a cinema cycle waggishly referred to as "Grand Dame Guignol," wherein aging leading ladies reclaimed the box-office clout of their youth by headlining shock films that were modestly budgeted and, by the prevailing standards of the day, surprisingly lurid. First to capitalize was Aldrich himself, who sought to reunite Davis and Crawford for another adaptation from the oeuvre of Baby Jane author Henry Farrell. Crawford would bolt in mid-production, and Olivia de Havilland hurriedly signed as a replacement. Still, the finished product, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1963), stands as one of the better examples of the genre... Blu-ray Release Date: January 21st, 2019

The Cooler BD - Truly down on his luck, lonely single guy Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) works at a Las Vegas casino, where he uses his innate ability to bring about misfortune in those around him to jinx gamblers into losing. His imposing boss, Shelly Kaplow (Alec Baldwin), is happy with the arrangement. But Bernie finds unexpected happiness when he begins dating attractive waitress Natalie Belisario (Maria Bello) -- and when his contentment starts to affect his job, Shelly seeks to end the relationship. Blu-ray Release Date: December 24th, 2018

Next 2 weeks on the Calendar