MCN DVD Reviews: May 12, 2009

The Wrap Up ...

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans: Blu-ray

While not the most financially lucrative of all horror franchises, Underworld has shown no signs of slowing down after losing its vampire warrior (Kate Beckinsale) and original director (Leon Wiseman), and making the now-requisite journey back in time to the story’s roots.

New to the prequel Rise of the Lycans were special-effects specialist Patrick Tatopoulos and sexy Rhona Mitra as Sonja, the daughter of vampire czar Viktor (Bill Nighy) and paramour of the first enslaved werewolf, Lucian (Michael Sheen).

Sonja ultimately is required to choose between caste and kin, and the hairy brute she loves, in a war of liberation. It’s great fun watching such fine actors as Nighy and Sheen – who’s recently played British PM Tony Blair, twice, as well as Nixon interrogator David Frost – muck around in such hi-tech genre fare as Rise of the Lycans. It’s their picture as much as the first two belonged to Beckinsale, but Mitra manages to hold her own.

Fans of the series reacted favorably to the third installment, so, in due course, there likely will be a fourth. Marketing costs being what they are, the next chapter could easily go straight to DVD. If so, it shouldn’t be taken as an insult.

Exclusive! Behind the Castle Walls: An engaging Picture-in-Picture track starts things off properly, immediately delving into every conceivable aspect of the production. Candid behind-the-scenes footage, interview segments, and concept art arrive in succinct fashion, rarely running out of steam or momentum. Lycans benefits greatly from the Blu-ray transfer, which accentuates the ominous color scheme and visceral sounds of war. Also included in the package – the previous two Underworld episodes have also been re-released in Blu-ray -- are commentary; the featurettes, The Origin of the Feud, Re-creating the Dark Ages and From Script to Screen; an interactive map with factoids about werewolf-related phenomena; a music video; BD-Live functionality; a digital copy; and the text-based, Cinechat, which allows fans to chat while watching the movie.- Gary Dretzka

Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy

It’s difficult to ascertain precisely whether the creator of Family Guy and American Dad! uses his You Tube site as a proving ground for gags that could find their way to prime-time, or if he’s generously sharing his doodles with insatiable fans. In the DVD compilation, Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,Seth MacFarlane delivers a mixed bag of cartoon blackout sketches, ranging from a few seconds to around two minutes, and, from the merely stupid and obvious (Fred Flintstone Takes a Shit) to the delightfully profane and unexpected (What Happens If You Feed a Dog Chocolate While He Wears a Tin Foil Hat in the Microwave).

The best ones combined the twisted social and pop-culture satire of a Mad or Cracked magazine, circa 1960, with the punch of a dirty limerick as written by Gilbert Gottfried and recited by Mother Teresa. The DVD package arrives with a stills gallery and decidedly lame celebrity red-carpet featurette. It would have been more contextually entertaining if they’d booby trapped the interview area with dog poop, but that might have been crossing a line. - Gary Dretzka

Galaxy Quest

A Galaxy Far Far Away: 10th Anniversary Edition

|It wasn’t until Mel Brooks began his one-man assault on cinematic clichés – in Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, Silent Movie -- that Hollywood allowed itself to reflect on its contributions to world culture and deemed them worthy of parody. Spaceballs would arrive 10 years after Star Wars and nearly two decades after Star Trek debuted on NBC.

By 1987, however, the Star Trek movie franchise would have reached its sixth installment and The Next Generation would be on its way to the small screen. Still the best comic homage to the genre, though, is John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s little-seen Dark Star, which, in part, would inspire the central creature in Alien. By the time Trekkies, Galaxy Quest and A Galaxy Far Far Away, it was difficult to tell the parodies, documentaries and mockumentaries from the various syndicated and cable sci-fi series that multiplied like rabbits.

The huge opening of the new Star Trek movie this week reminds us that the original Trekkies have gone forth and multiplied, as well. If any of them have a sense of humor – and there’s little demonstrable proof they do – the Trekkies might enjoy revisting Galaxy Quest, in which a spaceship full of Thermians arrive on Earth, begging the cast of a sci-fi series to be saved from a reptilian villain threatening to destroy their home planet.

Can the cast members, weary of appearing at fan fairs and other promotional appearances, suck it up for this real-life crisis? Queen of Space Sigourney Weaver was joined in the cast by Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Daryl Mitchell and Enrico Colantoni, while Stan Wilson supplied the creatures.

A Galaxy Far, Far Away spent the months preceding the debut of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace searching for intelligent life among the fans of George Lucas’ sci-fi juggernaut. Although the Star Wars fanatics we met were marginally less creepy than the Trekkies who thought it appropriate to dress like their favorite characters while on jury duty, or committing mass suicide, they did willingly camp out for weeks in front of theaters that would show the movie. If “Episode I” had actually been worthy of their fanaticism, the same fans might have repeated their missions before the second and third episodes. They didn’t. – Gary Dretzka

Passengers

The Grudge 3/The Grudge: Blu-ray

Plague Town

While it’s possible that attractive young mental-health professionals can find work messing with people’s heads in other parts of the world, apparently there are more opportunities for them in Hollywood movies than anywhere else. In Rodrigo Garcia’s psycho-supernatural thriller, Passengers, 26-year-old Academy Award-nominee Anne Hathaway plays a therapist hired by an airline to counsel survivors of a plane crash. Although she meets with most of the survivors in group sessions, Hathaway’s therapist agrees to meet the most handsome of them individually, away from the clinic.

As portrayed by Patrick Wilson, the passenger is one of those rare guys for whom near-disaster served as an emotional laxative. His personal liberation, in combination with his Paul Newman-esque physique and smile, proved irresistible to the seasoned professional, who could barely wait 48 hours before accepting a key to his apartment and taking a moonlight cruise with him on a stolen sailboat.

Meanwhile, Hathaway’s patients begin to disappear, dogs howl at odd moments, newspapers dance in the wind and David Morse and Dianne Wiest act nuttier than they usually do in movies like this. Not surprisingly, perhaps, something freaky occurred the night the plane crashed near a large body of water in the Pacific Northwest. There would be nothing for me to gain by revealing what is behind all the heebie-jeebie stuff in Passengers. Suffice it to say that the most of the characters have taken up residence in M. Night Shyamalan’s corner of the Twilight Zone.

Passengers won’t make anyone forget The Sixth Sense, but less picky fans of the genre might enjoy being manipulated to within an inch of their credulity threshold. Still, would it have killed anyone at the studio to cast someone a tad older than Hathaway in the lead role? As it is, the movie practically made a non-stop flight to DVD. (Heck, it was better than Hathaway’s other winter picture, Bride Wars.) The bonus features add deleted scenes, commentary and a pair of making-of shorts.

Grudges don’t frighten me nearly as much as curses, hauntings or vendettas. The trio of English-language movies adapted from Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on series has less to do with grudges than deadly rages that are spread like viruses to inhabitants of a specific house in Tokyo. As is the tradition, the American remakes have been less atmospheric and foreboding than the originals – even if Shimizu was recruited to direct two of them – but they could brag of having the estimable Sarah Michelle Gellar in the lead.

The third, direct-to-DVD edition stars scream queen Shawnee Smith, a fixture of the Saw franchise. By now, the curse has settled in an apartment building in Chicago and people are still being driven nuts by Kayako. If it makes any difference, this edition is the first to go out “R.”

Meanwhile, the original American version, in which Gellar played a nurse living and working in Tokyo, has been released in Blu-ray version. Among the extras are commentary with Shimizu, producers Taka Ichise and Sam Raimi, and actors Takako Fuji and Gellar; deleted scenes; a production designer’s notebook; a pair of Ju-on shorts; and the featurettes Myth of the Ju- on, Under the Skin: A Medical Explanation of Fear Response in Film and Sights and Sounds: The Storyboard Art of Takashi Shimizu. The Grudge 3 DVD contains deleted scenes, an explainer on the Bulgaria-for-Chicago location and The Curse Continues making-of short.

Plague Town describes what happened when a American family visited a remote village in Ireland where decades of in-breeding resulted in a generation of children with horrible deformities and blood lust. Sensing an end to their misery, the locals see in the tourists a strain of fresh blood from which normal breeding lines can be spring. Fans of gore will get their money’s worth, here. - Gary Dretzka

Lying

Unless one is pre-disposed to enjoying shapeless psycho-dramas about women left to their own devices on long weekends in the countryside, the only thing Lying has going for it is the presence of Chloe Sevigny, Jena Malone and Leelee Sobieski. The women, we learn, are virtual strangers, and one of them, at least, has a problem telling the truth. Beyond that, nothing else really happens. Clearly, freshman writer-director M. Blash was influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Robert Altman’s Three Women. He misses those classics by a mile, however. The DVD extra is an interview with the filmmaker by Todd Haynes. - Gary Dretzka

A Village Affair

Taking Chance

Judging solely from recent viewing of ITV’s A Village Affair and the BBC’s Tipping the Velvet, British television networks are far less frightened by the prospect of having to justify the broadcast of lesbian-themed dramas than their American counterparts. No surprise there, really. If the ladies of The L Word didn’t resemble fashion models – OK, not the bearded one – they probably wouldn’t have found a home on Showtime, either.

Tipping the Velvet was a highly entertaining mini-series about a woman who was sexually awakened by a lovely and talented male impersonator in a Victorian-era variety show. After discovering her own talent for singing in drag – a theatrical staple of the period – the woman becomes a star in her own right. Betrayed by her lover, the singer embarks on a path of self-destruction, before meeting a woman who reminds her very much of herself.

British TV regulars Rachel Stirling, Keeley Hawes, Jodhi May and Anna Chancellor all are terrific in a production that, save for its honest depictions of love making, easily could have fit on the Masterpiece Theater docket. If A Village Affair was nowhere near as ambitious, it was very well acted and set in a lovely British town. Based on the best-selling novel by Joanna Trollope, A Village Affair described the explosive chemistry that developed between the mildly depressed wife of a wealthy lawyer and an heiress who returns to the village from New York with a secret.

Initially, we’re led to believe that the flirtatious Clodagh (Kerry Fox) is intent on rekindling a relationship with the woman’s husband, who, with his family, also has recently returned home. Instead, her 20/20 gaydar is fixed on the man’s wife, Alice (Sophie Ward), whose marriage is running on empty. The unraveling of the truth, and betrayals by relatives and neighbors, create an atmosphere of deceit that extends to the lovers themselves. Jeremy Northam plays the coarse brother-in-law who can’t bear the thought of being rejected sexually by Alice but also being rebuffed by her lover. (A very young Keira Knightley plays one of the children.)

Kevin Bacon, who also wore the uniform of his country in Frost/Nixon, portrayed the real-life Lt. Col. Michael Strobl in the HBO movie, Taking Chance. The story describes the emotional journey embarked upon by Strobl after he volunteered to accompany the body of a marine killed in combat in Iraq. Strobl was based in Virginia when he learned that the marine, Lance Cpl. Chance Phelps, had once lived in his Wyoming hometown and needed an escort to his final resting place. The people Strobl meets on the trip surprise him with their outpouring of feelings toward the men and women fighting in their name overseas, which, in turn, makes him question his own decisions. Bacon, one of our finest actors, was in top form here.

Other TV series arriving in DVD and hi-def include: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Season One, which arrives in Blu-ray, a distinction that will increase in importance as we reach the point where the series were shot in hi-def; Red Green Is Special, which is comprised of Red Green’s We Can’t Help It: We’re Men, Red Green’s Of Cars and Men, Red Green D.V.D., Duct Tape Virtuoso Deluxe, Red Green’s Hindsight Is 20/20 and The Red Green Story: We’re All in This Together; the second season ofThe Jeff Foxworthy Show; and Penn & Teller Bullsh*t: Complete Sixth Season, which took on such topics as The War on Porn, NASA, Dolphins, Being Green and The Good Old Days. - Gary Dretzka

New to Blu-ray

Paramount has rolled out the carpet for a slate of popular titles new to hi-def, some have been packaged and re-packaged nearly to exhaustion are fresh: The include Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Major League, Wayne's World, Black Sheep, Enemy at the Gates, 3 Days of the Condor, The Machinist, Paycheck and Changing Lanes. Some arrive with a full menu of extras, while the earlier ones offer few bonus features. Enemy at the Gates and 3 Days of the Condor are the titles most likely to interest collectors.- Gary Dretzka