Review - Virgin Territory
VIRGIN TERRITORY [R/NR]
review by Jeremiah Tash
Virgin Territory, starring dull Vader himself Hayden Christensen, veteran Tim Roth and “The OC” star Mischa Barton, is some sort of half-baked pitch, like “‘American Pie’ meets ‘Romeo and Juliet’,” gone haywire. The film, ostensibly a sex-romp set in plague-ridden 15th century Europe, plays out like a bad episode of “As the World Turns” or “Melrose Place,” only without the sharp pacing.
After watching a solid 30 minutes, you still don’t really understand the plot (though there seems to be one involving Tim Roth duplicitous scheme to marry the virgin played by Barton). Sure there’s some nudity and something inherently kinky in Renaissance-style soft-core porn, but this does not make for a film. And there’s a good reason; in spite of the cast of familiar names, this thing wasn’t released in theaters (which was a real act of mercy).
(more…)
Original post by Robert Newton
Review - Surfwise
SURFWISE [R]
review by Robert Newton
In a way that HBO’s Shakespearean head-scratcher “John From Cincinnati” failed to capture the mysticism of surfing, HDNet’s portrait of a boarding family catches that wave and rides it all the way to shore (and yes, we used a surfing metaphor in a shameless attempt to become more blurbworthy).
The Paskowitz family — father Dorian “Doc,” mother Juliet, eight boys and one girl — became legends of the sport. This was due not only to the sheer number of them dominating competitions wherever their 24-foot camper trailer would take them, but their love for it and perseverance bred into them from birth by their unconventional Dad made them shine, too. The senior Paskowitz had rejected the cozy life of a Jewish post-War doctor, adopting a life in the froth after two failed marriages and an existential reckoning. An educated and principled man, he and Juliet home-schooled all […]
Original post by Robert Newton
Review - The Counterfeiters
THE COUNTERFEITERS [R]
review by Robert Newton
This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film is a curiosity of sorts; it is a Holocaust drama, yet its protagonist is an antihero. Soon after meeting Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (a captivating Karl Markovics), we realize that he is an opportunistic forger whose dubious skills and penchant for partying landed him in a concentration camp in 1936. A slightly abrupt flash-forward to the back side of the war has Sally tapped to create flawless copies of the pound and the dollar with which his Nazi captors will flood the British and American economies while funding a faltering Third Reich’s own war effort.
While the unconventional story waltzes occasionally with melodrama, it succeeds in becoming a survivor’s tale of an entirely different sort. Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky, taking a bold step up from the derivative genre fare of his Anatomy series, succeeds greatly in depicting Sally’s […]
Original post by Robert Newton
Review - Dark City: Director’s Cut
DARK CITY: DIRECTOR’S CUT [R]
review by Robert Newton
In Alex Proyas’s Dark City, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes one day to find himself in a hotel room with the body of a call girl. He knows not his name, let alone that of the hapless lass. A phone call from the enigmatic Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) alerts him to the impending arrival of “The Strangers,” an alien race capable of manipulating reality with mere thought — “tuning,” it’s called. The Strangers, who, with their pale skin, bald heads and black trench coats, resemble a gang of marauding undertakers, have used their powers to create Edge City, a human Habitrail of sorts in which its denizens are guinea pigs in a large-scale experiment which essentially reduces human nature to a series of Pavlovian stimulus-responses. Struggling for clues, Murdoch finds his alleged wife, adulterous lounge singer Emma (Jennifer Connelly), all the while being […]
Original post by Robert Newton
Review - The Inglorious Bastards (1978)
THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS: 3 DISC EXPLOSIVE EDITION [R]
review by Robert Newton
Anyone who is unclear on the definition of the word “fanboy” need only peep the interview that Pulp Fiction director does with Enzo G. Castellari, Italian director of the 1978 “macaroni combat” movie, The Inglorious Bastards: 3 Disc Explosive Edition on the new DVD. Tarantino, who has been writing a remake of the World War II actioner since 2001, gushes even more than a giddy Seth MacFarlane did when he interviewed George Lucas on the DVD of the Star Wars episode of “Family Guy,” Blue Harvest.
The movie itself is not top-notch. It’s a none-too-subtle Frankensteining of movies like The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes and Von Ryan’s Express (to name just a few). Bo Svenson plays a convicted American G.I. who escapes from a prison convoy during a German attack, and leads his motley crew to redemption by blowing up a […]
Original post by Robert Newton
Review - Jekyll & Hyde…Together Again
JEKYLL & HYDE… TOGETHER AGAIN [R]
review by Robert Newton
Another of Paramount sub-licensor Legend Films’ long-lost ’80s gems (see also our review of Student Bodies), 1982’s Jekyll & Hyde…Together Again is finally out on DVD, and man, is it a whole lot of fun.
The movie was a great showcase for comedian Mark Blankfield, the “Fridays” star who could have upstaged any of the pre-Eddie Murphy era cast members of ABC’s rivals on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” Blankfield, whom comedy fans will also know as the blind Blinkin from Mel Brooks’s 1993 spoof Robin Hood: Men In Tights, plays dual roles in this loosely based adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. (There’s actually a scene at the very end where the famous author actually rolls over in his grave.) While the mild-mannered man of medicine, Dr. Jekyll (Blankfield), is engaged to a pretty rich girl named Mary (Bess Armstrong) and lives […]
Original post by Robert Newton
Review - Student Bodies
STUDENT BODIES [R]
review by Robert Newton
Long the ’80s cable staple, this highly-sought 1981 horror spoof makes its way to DVD for the first time courtesy of Paramount sub-licensor Legend Films, which also just released 1982 riotous Jekyll & Hyde…Together Again. Over a dozen years before Scream parodied the genre, this one, by former Woody Allen co-scribe Mickey Rose, sent up the slasher flicks of its day like Halloween, When A Stranger Calls and Friday The 13th in rapid-fire, relentlessly funny style, and without the need for graphic violence, sex or language. In fact, it had so little of all those things that an announcer interrupts the film and points out that in order to receive the then-desirable “R” rating that a film had to contain an aggressive form of the f-bomb, upon which he tells the audience, “F*** you.”
The story concerns a string of murders at Houston’s Lamab High (nothing […]
Original post by Robert Newton
Review - Hitler: The Last Ten Days
HITLER: THE LAST TEN DAYS [PG]
review by Robert Newton
You’ve seen it before. The neighborhood video store gives up the ghost, unable to compete in a world dominated by Netflix, digital downloads and brick-and-mortar dinosaurs like Lackluster and Follywood. Those guys you see vulturing the aisles with a laundry list of movie titles (while the forlorn owner looks on in anguish) are one of two things: avid collectors or eBay speculators. Up until the long out-of-print (or “OOP”) 1973 title Hitler: The Last Ten Days was announced recently by Paramount pimp Legend Films, it would have been on that list, trading for final auction bids in excess of $50.00, a marvel considering that VHS is now an ex-parrot.
In the World War II drama, a pre-Star Wars Alec Guinness plays the self-aggrandizing syphilitic psychopath Adolf Hitler with all the nutty bluster one might expect of a pedigreed thesp like Guinness taking on […]
Original post by Robert Newton