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Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island
- Zeta Alpha Rho is planning to celebrate its "Hell Night" at an
island resort but gay pledge Jack Jones (Tyler Farrell) has more
to worry about than coming out of the closet when a
"broad-minded" maniac in a clown suit starts stalking his
scantily-clad fellow pledges. DVD Release Date: April 20th,
2010
Pirate Radio
BD - The story proper, to
the extent that there is a story, begins when young Carl (Tom
Sturridge, with a self-image problem, if you can believe that!),
is sent by his mother to live on "Radio Rock" for a few months,
ostensibly to get him on track. Ha! Radio Rock is a fairly
sizable boat, anchored somewhere in the North Sea, home to a
handful of DJs, who, under the caring and daring management of
Quentin (a sublime Bill Nighy) broadcast rock music to a rapt
audience more or less forbidden to hear this music on the public
airwaves. Blu-ray Release date:
April 13th, 2010
Valley of the Bees - A
visionary and haunting medieval epic from the director of
Marketa Lazarová. Set in 13th century Europe this raw and
powerful moral fable of corruption and fundamentalism chronicles
the tale of a young boy made to join the Brotherhood of the
Teutonic Knights and how as a man he rejects their doctrine, and
the terrible price he must pay for that rejection. DVD
Release Date: March 22nd, 2010
The Italian Straw Hat -
René Clair’s sparkling comedy of manners is a witty, delicate,
inspired satire on propriety and behavior in the bourgeois
mind-set. Transposing the action of the perennial stage farce
from 1851 to a summer wedding day in 1895 – the birth of cinema
– Clair recalls detail, costume and design captured by the first
movies. DVD Release Date: April 6th, 2010
Deadly Friend - Teen genius
Paul (Matthew Laborteaux) has created a robot pal B.B. and moves
to town with his mother to take classes at the local university.
He immediately falls for next door neighbor Samantha (Kristy
Swanson). DVD Release Date: August 18th, 2008
Dr. Giggles - Dr. Evan
Rendell (Larry Drake) has been performing grisly experiments on
people in his neighborhood trying to cure his dying wife. When
the locals stone the doctor doctor, his son is saved by being
sewn into his mother's corpse. After an extended stay in the
nuthouse, Evan Jr. (also Larry Drake) follows in his father's
footsteps and begins gorily killing the friends and love ones of
young Jennifer (Holly Marie Combs) who needs a heart valve
replaced and must avoid stress, caffeine, and alcohol. DVD
Release Date: August 18th, 2008
Eyes of a Stranger - A
rapist is stalking and slashing his way through Miami and news
anchor Jane (Lauren Tewes) begins to suspect that a neighbor
(John DiSanti) who lives in the apartment across from hers is
the murderer. The police don't believe her so she starts spying
on her neighbor and even breaks into his apartment. She turns
the tables on him and begins to persecute him by phone but when
he recognizes Jane's voice from the television, he starts
stalking her and her sister Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh in her
first role) who has been blind and deaf since she was assaulted
as a child. DVD Release Date: August 18th, 2008
From Beyond the Grave -
Visitors to an antique store run by a kindly proprietor (Peter
Cushing) become the protagonists in four stories based on
stories by R. Chetwynd-Hayes (whose stories also provided the
inspiration for the last Amicus portmanteau film THE MONSTER
CLUB). In the first tale, Edward (David Warner) tricks the
proprietor into charging less for an antique mirror which is
inhabited by a spirit that needs the blood of innocent victims
to cross over into the world of the living. DVD Release Date:
August 18th, 2008
Someone's Watching Me -
Fleeing a bad relationship in New York, Leigh Michaels (Lauren
Hutton) takes a job as a live TV director in Los Angeles and
moves into a high-tech apartment in a mammoth high-rise. Soon
she begins receive strange phone calls at home and at work and a
non-existent travel company starts sending her strange gifts
ostensibly as part of a contest (starting with a telescope).
DVD Release Date: August 18th, 2008
The Hand - At the time of
its cinema release, this early directorial outing for future
A-list film-maker Stone, about a cartoonist (Caine) being
haunted by his severed hand, was a welcome relief for horror
aficionados from the apparently endless production line of
identikit stalk 'n' slash movies that were clogging up local
cinemas. DVD Release Date: August 18th, 2008
Prince Valiant
BD - Have you read any good
comic books lately? Do you know what's going on with Prince
Valiant, his close friend, Sir Gawain, and the other knights of
King Features' Table Round? If you do, then you have a good idea
of what to expect from the big CinemaScope film that Twentieth
Century-Fox has concocted from Harold R. Foster's "Prince
Valiant" cartoon. Blu-ray
Release date: April 26th, 2010
IMAX: Blue Planet
BD - Despite the title on
the box this is really a double feature, both filmed in IMAX and
transferred to Blu-ray in the early days of the medium. The
"main" feature, Blue Planet, examines our planet in orbital
vistas that alternate with supportive images from the ground.
The narration wants to support the one with the other, at times
to show its wonders, at other times to show the threats to those
wonders. Blu-ray Release date:
July 31st, 2007
An Education
BD - Based on a memoir by
Lynn Barber, this coming of age soufflé flirts with the idea of
becoming a romantic comedy. Paul Englishby's buoyant
introductory music is a ruse, for despite the wit of Nick
Hornby's screenplay, which makes certain we are entertained as
well as educated, An Education is more serious than whimsy.
Perhaps the function of that music is to reassure us that
nothing really dreadful happens, but to a teenager on the verge
of a likely acceptance to Oxford University, her flirtation with
"the good life" nearly drowns her as we imagine it must have
with other girls less centered. Blu-ray
Release date: March 30th, 2010
All the King's Men - [All
the King's Men] has to be sort of a borderline Noir, although
Spencer Selby's bookplaces it in the Noir canon. The style of
the movie is sort of semi-documentary, with the story being told
mostly through the eyes of Jack Burden (John Ireland), a
newspaperman who became a "true believer" in Willie Stark
(Broderick Crawford) when he was a poor but honest (and
ultimately unsuccessful) County Treasurer candidate several
years before running for Governor. DVD Release Date:
September 5th, 2006
Anna Karenina - With Vivien
Leigh, still popular thanks to the success of Gone with the Wind
(1939), in the title role, the production had built-in appeal.
Despite impressive work from the set designer, art director and
a sterling performance by Ralph Richardson as Leigh's jilted
husband, the movie turned out to be an expensive flop. DVD
Release Date: April 24th, 2007
The Heirloom - Architect
James (Jason Chang) has returned from England to Taiwan to
discover that he has inherited a massive old mansion from
distant relatives. He thinks the house is the perfect place
start a family with dancer fiancée Yo (Terri Kwan) who does not
want to settle down yet. Yo relents and moves in but things get
weird fast. There's a giant family shrine on one of the upper
floors. Wet footprints appear in the hallways. Friends Yi-Chen
(Yu-chen Chang) and Ah-Tseng (Tender Huang) keep popping up in
various rooms of the house after they have left with no memory
of how they ended up back there. DVD Release Date: April
25th, 2006
The Bloody Ape - When
carnie Lampini's (Paul Richini) simian friend Gordo (George
Reis) disappears from the circus, he decides to take out those
who've done him wrong (including a fraudulent mechanic, a Rabbi
who tried to sell him a fake ring, and his girlfriend who walks
out on him) with a gift of bananas (or banana soap) to attract
the rape-happy escaped ape. DVD Release Date: February 3rd,
2009
Royal Wedding - Not,
thankfully, a documentary about a couple with cotton wool in
their mouths, but a lively Technicolor musical (produced by
Arthur Freed), with Astaire and Powell as a brother-and-sister
musical act who travel from America to London at the time of the
Queen's wedding (then Princess Elizabeth, of course), and both
find romance, he with a dancer, she with a lord. DVD Release
Date: July 24th, 2007
Sous le soleil de satan -
Positioned somewhere between Bresson’s immortal Journal d’un
curé de campagne and Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster,
Maurice Pialat’s staggering Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the
Sun of Satan] addresses the torrent of spiritual and
intellectual turmoil unloosed among the denizens of a little
country parish. It is a film by turns calm and violent, buoyant
upon the tears of mercy and gurgling with the blood of the Lamb.
DVD Release Date: March 22nd, 2010
Capitalism: A Love Story
BD - Michael Moore’s
“Capitalism: A Love Story” is anything but — something you, I
and everyone who has ever watched him shamble into action,
megaphone to mouth, know from the start. He might have had a
crush on capitalism early on, yet anyone who thinks that the two
have been on friendly terms for a while hasn’t been paying
attention. Blu-ray Release date:
March 9th, 2010
Summer Hours
BD - Universally acclaimed
by critics, the multiple award-winning Summer Hours is the great
contemporary French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’s most personal
film to date. Three siblings, played by Juliette Binoche,
Charles Berling, and Jérémie Rénier, must decide what to do with
the country estate and objects they’ve inherited from their
mother. From this simple story, Assayas creates an exquisitely
nuanced drama about the material of globalized modern living.
Naturalistic and unsentimental, Summer Hours is that rare film
that pays respect to family by treating it with honesty.
Blu-ray Release Date: April 20th,
2010
The Booth - While his usual
studio is being remodeled, radio lovelines DJ Shogo (Ryuto Sato)
must broadcast his show from Studio 6 which has been unused
since a previous DJ committed suicide years before. In the midst
of his show, Shogo starts receiving disturbing calls (describing
incidents from his own past where he has hurt others) as well as
interjections from a woman's voice calling him a liar and starts
seeing apparitions of a co-worker (who he has been sleeping
with) who mysteriously did not show up for the broadcast. DVD
Release Date: May 23rd, 2006
Father of the Kamikaze -
The plot for Father of the Kamikaze revolves around Takijiro
Onishi, a Vice Admiral in Japans Navy during World War 2. He is
most remembered for being the driving force behind using
"special attack forces" aka suicide bombers as a weapons against
the Allied forces who at the time the film begins where
challenging Japan's ability to occupy the Philippines. DVD
Release Date: January 13th, 2009
The Lost World of Tibet -
After the popular and successful TV and DVD collaborations The
Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon and The Lost World of Friese-Greene,
the BFI and BBC have co-produced a new programme The Lost World
of Tibet, broadcast on BBC Four on 3 March 2008. This DVD
features the 90-minute Director's Cut. DVD Release Date:
March 10th, 2008
Kirikou and the Sorceress -
''Mother, bring me into the world,'' demands Kirikou, the infant
protagonist of the animated fable ''Kirikou and the Sorceress.''
Like its tiny hero, ''Kirikou'' proceeds at its own pace, and
that pace is a more willful and slower piece of storytelling
than children are accustomed to getting from American animated
films, in which emotional crises are worked out like story
problems (if Buzz and Woody need to get to point A . . .). The
director Michel Ocelot's belief in his film is as winning as his
title character's confidence, even though ''Kirikou'' is
probably a story more suitable for younger children than for
older ones. DVD Release Date: December 1st, 2003
A is For Autism - Director
Tim Webb's experience as an animator led him to realise that
there was a quality in some autistic children's drawings that
would lend itself to animation. In 1991 Channel 4 Television
commissioned him to explore the possibility of making a short
film for their 'Disabling World' season to give a general
audience a small window into the condition of autism. DVD
Release Date: April 26th, 2004
A Nightmare on Elm Street
BD - "1, 2, Freddy’s coming
for you." And here he is, phantom fiend Freddy Krueger in all
his razor-fingered infamy. Wes Craven (Scream movies) directs
this trendsetting first in the slash-hit series. The premise is
simple: Freddy (Robert Englund) homicidally haunts the sleep of
Elm Street teens. The results are terrifying and mind-blowingly
innovative. There’s another film debut too: Johnny Depp.
Blu-ray Release Date: April 6th,
2010
Kapo - Before he left his
mark on cinema forever with the revolutionary The Battle of
Algiers, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo directed this
audacious World War II drama about a young Jewish woman (Susan
Strasberg) in a Nazi concentration camp, who saves herself from
death by assuming another’s identity and becoming a ruthless
warden. The Oscar-nominated Kapò was one of the first films to
depict the horror of the Holocaust, and it does so with
brutality and daring emotional complexity. DVD Release Date:
April 13th, 2010
Vivre sa vie
BD - Vivre sa vie was
a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most
dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic
character study. The lovely Anna Karina, Godard’s greatest muse,
plays Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but
instead ends up a prostitute; her downward spiral is depicted in
a series of discrete tableaux of daydreams and dances. Featuring
some of Karina and Godard’s most iconic moments—from her movie
theater vigil with The Passion of Joan of Arc to her seductive
pool-hall strut—Vivre sa vie is a landmark of the French New
Wave that still surprises at every turn.
Blu-ray Release Date: April 20th,
2010
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