Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF August 21st, 2017

Kia ora! A chock-full week with Blu-ray reviews of packages by Indicator (Powerhouse), Kino Lorber, 88 Films, Code Red of films by Vittorio De Sica, Sergio Leone, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack, William Friedkin, Robert Siodmak, Peter Medak, Jack Gold, Giulio Questi, Lamberto Bava, Mario Caiano, Massimo Dallamano and others!. Our Calendar has NEW updates of films-to-Blu-ray, including November Criterions and films by Jean-Pierre Melville, George Cukor, Terry Gilliam, William Dieterle, Anthony Mann, Leni Riefenstahl, Kon Ichikawa, Claude Lelouch, Carlos Saura, Miloš Forman, Sam Peckinpah, Jack Arnold, Seijun Suzuki, Jean-Luc Godard, Ridley Scott, Bertrand Tavernier, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Aki Kaurismäki, Sergei Parajanov, Billy Wilder, Ron Howard, Arthur Hiller and more. We have another new listings page and check-out a few incredible sale items below. Our Feature Blu-ray and DVD is posted for AUGUST and a CONTEST with a Criterion Blu-ray prize. Enjoy!!

LISTING PAGES:

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)

LATEST ARTICLES: Movies From... the End of the World,  The Beauties of Star Trek (TOS)

DVDBeaver has their own store at Movie Zyng - check it out! Many have $1 shipping - even overseas!

Feature Blu-ray and DVD chosen for the Month of AUGUST!

FOLLOW US on TWITTER! (where we post important reviews, contests - prizes, polls, calendar updates - plus much more...)

(Week of) August 21st CONTEST  identify the clip HERE to win a prize of a Criterion Blu-ray of Ronald Neame's Hopscotch Best of luck!

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

Gary at 2ze dot com

The Reckoning BD - Michael Marler (Nicol Williamson), determined to leave his criminal father and his Irish past behind him, abandoned Liverpool to pursue a more respectable career path. Now he's a wealthy businessman living in London, but his father's death draws a reluctant Michael back to his hometown. When he learns his father was killed in a fight with a young delinquent, Michael teams up with an old flame (Rachel Roberts) and a friend of his father's (Paul Rogers) to avenge the death. Blu-ray Release date: August 28th, 2017

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg BD - Playwright Peter Nichols adapted his own blackly comic 1967 Tony Award-winning play for this confrontational film version by director Peter Medak. Alan Bates and Janet Suzman play a married couple struggling to come to terms with their daughter's disability using comedy and cruelty to dispel the desperation of their situation. This uncomfortable, provocative film about marriage, children and life choices is startlingly funny as well as deeply moving. Blu-ray Release date: August 28th, 2017

Joe Bullet BD - When local soccer team The Eagles fall prey to a series of onslaughts from a mysterious gangster only a week before the championship final, the team turns to one man that can help save their chances at victory - Joe Bullet (Ken Gampu). Joe will have to battle against villainous henchmen, escape booby-trap bombs and bring his martial arts expertise to the fore in order to survive an attack from a deadly assassin. Blu-ray Release Date: September 11th, 2017

The Deadly Affair BD - John LeCarre's Call for the Dead was the basis for this gloomy, complex spy story. James Mason plays a British secret agent puzzled by the sudden suicide of Foreign Office higher-up Robert Flemyng. Mason had worked on Flemyng's security clearance himself, and can't fathom what personality quirk he might have missed. The agent suspects that the dead man's wife (Simone Signoret), a concentration camp survivor, may hold the answer to Flemyng's despair, but the Foreign Office wants Mason to drop the case. Mason hires retiring Inspector Harry Andrews to do some private detective work. What Mason and Andrews find out is more insidious than they've imagined. Blu-ray Release date: August 28th, 2017

The Bride From Hell BD - A precursor to the fabulous horror-romances of eighties Hong Kong Cinema glory, The Bride From Hell is an atmospheric foray into Chinese Ghost Story territory by the visionary Shaw Brothers studios! Yunpeng (Yang Fan) and his servant stay at a country inn one dark evening to escape potential robbers and ghosts. But Yunpeng chances into something far more dangerous! He accidentally happens upon the comely Anu (Xing Hui) naked in bed, and to make up for his rudeness he has to marry her! Blu-ray Release date: September 25th, 2017

Django Kill, If You Live Shoot BD - Tomas Milian stars as a half-breed bandit double-crossed and left for dead who rises from the grave to seek his revenge. But when his quest leads to a bizarre town called 'The Unhappy Place,' he is plunged into an odyssey of gruesome torture, graphic violence and relentless sexual depravity. This is the landmark movie that fans and critics still consider to be the strangest - and most controversial - 'Spaghetti Western' ever made. 88 Films Blu-ray Release date: September 25th, 2017

Delirium BD - Voluptuous Italian starlet Serena Grandi stars in this uneven but memorable giallo from director Lamberto (Demons) Bava as Gloria, a former centerfold model who inherits her dead husband’s sex magazine; Pussycat. One day during a photo shoot, she receives lewd phone calls from her paraplegic teenage neighbor. Gloria dismisses his calls because she feels sorry for him, but when he calls saying that one of her models just got pitchforked to death, she calls the police. It seems that there is a lunatic on the loose that has a grudge against Gloria and is intent on murdering all of her models. Blu-ray Release date: May 15th, 2017

Eye in the Labyrinth BD - ulie is a foreign girl living in Milan who has long been cared for by her psychoanalyst Luca Berti, who is also her lover. One night she has a nightmare visage of a sadistic death. In fact, the doctor has disappeared and Julie is the key to solving the mystery. During the search she meets many people with secrets that include murder, blackmail and rape. A worthy Giallo thriller by Mario Caiano (Nightmare Castle and The Real Decameron). Blu-ray Release date: March 21st, 2017

Two Women (De Sica) BD - American cinema never learned how to exploit Loren's voluptuously earthy appeal, as revealed here in her Oscar-winning performance - the only actress to win this award for a foreign-language film. The performance and the powerful narrative made the film one of the few foreign pictures to enjoy real success in the USA. It told the story, set in Italy in 1943, of a widowed mother and her teenage daughter surviving enemy attack, deprivation and rape by Allied Moroccan soldiers. The film is actually a rather old-fashioned melodramatic star vehicle, meant originally for Magnani as Loren's mother, but Magnani flatly refused. Blu-ray Release Date: October 24th, 2017

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly BD - For three men the Civil War wasn't hell... it was practice! By far the most ambitious, unflinchingly graphic and stylistically influential western ever made, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a classic actioner shot through with a volatile mix of myth and realism. Screen legend Clint Eastwood returns as "The Man with No Name," this time teaming with two gunslingers to pursue a cache of $200,000 and letting no one, not even warring factions in a civil war, stand in their way. From sun-drenched panoramas to bold hard close-ups, exceptional camerawork captures the beauty and cruelty of the barren landscape and the hardened characters who stride unwaveringly through it. Blu-ray Release Date: August 22nd, 2017

A Black Veil For Lisa BD - When a narcotics detective finds out that his beautiful wife (who is an ex-criminal) is cheating on him, he hires a professional hitman to bump her off. However, things don't go quite according to plan. The detective was involved in investigating a string of drug-related murders, and when he finally catches the killer Max Lindt, instead of arresting him, he surprises him by asking him to murder his unfaithful wife. Instead of killing the woman, the hitman ends up sleeping with her, and they begin an affair. Blu-ray Release date: October 27th, 2015

Custer of the West BD - Opening with a montage depicting its subject's Civil War exploits, Custer of the West carries us across four years of fighting in less than four minutes of screen time. The Civil War ended, George Armstrong Custer (Robert Shaw) longs for action and to hold onto his rank of general, so General Phil Sheridan (Lawrence Tierney) sends him West, admitting that there will be no nobility to his cause there -- the government and the people want the land, and that means getting the Indians off of it by any means necessary. Blu-ray Release date: September 12th, 2017

The Birthday Party BD - The movie, like the play, forces us to accept a horror story that has no reasonable antecedents: Stanley (Robert Shaw) is the only guest at a rundown, seaside boarding house owned by Meg (Dandy Nichols) and Petey (Moultrie Kelsall). Into their lives of placid desperation come two strangers, Goldberg (Sydney Tafler), tackily urbane and garrulous, and McCann (Pattrick Magee), a faithful goon. They have been sent by someone named Monty and "the organization" to retrieve Stanley. Blu-ray Release date: September 5th, 2017

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? BD - A total of nine Academy Award nominations went to this wildly acclaimed, allegorical drama set amongst the contestants in a marathon dance contest during the Great Depression. Gig Young stars as Rocky, the obnoxious emcee for a dance marathon that offers prize money of $1,500, a small fortune during hard economic times that brings out the worst in several participants. Among them are Gloria Beatty (Jane Fonda), a malcontent who's partnered with a drifter, Robert Syverton (Michael Sarrazin); a pregnant farm girl (Bonnie Bedelia) and her husband (Bruce Dern); a sailor (Red Buttons); and an aspiring actress (Susannah York). As the marathon winds into a staggering second month, suspicion, doubt and insecurity rages among the competitors and even the decaying and increasingly manipulative Rocky, leading to a shocking crime. Blu-ray Release date: September 5th, 2017

Tobor the Great BD - To avoid the life-threatening dangers of manned space exploration, Professor Nordstrom (Taylor Holmes, Quicksand) creates a highly advanced form of artificial intelligence capable of piloting a starship to other worlds. In order to transmit alien data, the extraordinary robot is infused with a powerful telepathic device that enables it to instantly read and even feel emotions. Danger strikes when a sinister band of covert agents kidnaps Gadge (Billy Chapin, The Night of the Hunter), the professor's 10-year-old grandson. But Gadge has a powerful ally, for he has developed a psychic, emotional bond with his grandfather's robot, Tobor. Blu-ray Release Date: September 12th, 2017

One Dark Night BD - In this spooky horror outing aimed at teen audiences, the innocent new girl in town tries to become friends with a rough but cool crowd. They are all pretty mean, especially the young woman who is mad that the girl stole her boyfriend, and they decide that the girl must survive an ordeal before they let her join their gang. They send her to a funeral home to spend the night by herself. Unfortunately, none of them realize that it is inhabited by a murderous ghost just waiting to suck the life out of all of them. Blu-ray Release date: August 15th, 2017

Dicte - Crime Reporter - Season One and Season Two - Newly divorced journalist Dicte Svendsen has returned with daughter Rose to her hometown of Aarhus where she is trying to escape the past and build a new future. But working as a crime reporter, she soon finds herself caught up in a case that is destined to open old wounds when she discovers the body of a murdered young woman. Brash, quick-witted, and not afraid to put herself in danger, she will do what it takes to uncover the truth, throwing herself into each investigation, jeopardizing not only her life, but sometimes the lives of those around her. DVD Release Date: August 14th, 2017

Inseparables - Felipe, a wealthy businessman who has become quadriplegic due to an accident, is looking for a therapeutic assistant. Although Felipe has sevearl qualified candidates to do the job, he decides to hire Tito, who does not have the abilities or the conditions needed to do the job. The people closest to Felipe strongly try to convince him not to hire Tito, but Felipe remains firm in his decision. Tito is the first person in a long time who doesn't treat him with pity. In a short period of time, Tito helps Felipe to connect again with the meaning of life that his condition has deprived him of. He starts living again, and to enjoy it, something he had almost forgotten. DVD Release Date: June 27th, 2017

Kept Boy - Interior designer and reality show star Farleigh Knock has a knack for keeping beautiful things, including Adonis-like Dennis, around his home. So when Farleigh gives him an unthinkable ultimatum for his 30th birthday--to get a job or get out--Dennis goes from Kept Boy to Lost Man. George Bamber directs this dark gay comedy that shows life with a sugar daddy is bittersweet. DVD Release Date: August 8th, 2017

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