DVD Review: Double Feature: The Pack & Razorback

By Brad Henderson

There are many “animal attack” films but most are really subpar. Either they pick goofy animals for the attacks or the special effects are just awful. Warner Archive, however, has put out two great films that deal with that subject. One is The Pack, and the other is Razorback. I’m reviewing both of them here because I believe they should be watched as a double feature.

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DVD Review: Bob And The Monster: The Story Of Bob Forrest

By Melissa Bratcher

How does a man go from being self-described as one of the “biggest assholes ever to live” to being credited with saving numerous lives as a drug counselor? How did he go from leading L.A.’s premier “drunk rock” band to being the subject of a moving, thoughtful documentary in which music’s luminaries eulogize him warmly without him even being dead?

First, Bob Forrest did a lot of drugs. Then, he hit rock bottom. Then, he did some more drugs and had to hit rock bottom again. Eventually, he rebuilt himself into a sometimes respected, sometimes controversial addiction specialist.

Director Keirda Bahruth spent six years making Bob And The Monster, a documentary of Bob Forrest’s journey of addiction and redemption. Told with archival footage, claymation, and animation, as well as new music from Bob Forrest, it’s a touching, sometimes infuriating, and illuminating movie.

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DVD Review: The Walking Dead, Season Three

By Less Lee Moore

For a while, it seemed like The Walking Dead was dead to me. While Season Two had its good points, an overall sense of frustration with the static nature of the narrative made me leery of staying loyal to the show. Cutting the cord a couple of years ago meant that I couldn’t watch The Walking Dead air in real time nor on the Internet (and I’m not into torrents). The third season of the show, however, has reminded me of everything I loved about it in the first place and also managed to surprise me in ways I did not expect.

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DVD Review: The English Teacher

By Less Lee Moore

Withing the first ten minutes of The English Teacher, I thought, “This is a good, light-hearted comedy.” It’s the tale of Linda Sinclair (Julianne Moore), a high school English teacher who decides to help her former student, a failed playwright suffering from a crisis of confidence, produce his play with the help of the high school’s drama teacher Carl (Nathan Lane).

The film immediately sets up Linda’s character as a single, middle-aged woman—plain but pretty—who watches A Room With A View at home while eating organic food, and its clever voice over narration won me over. Then things got weird. I don’t mean David Lynch weird, but The English Teacher was definitely not the movie I thought it was going to be.

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DVD Review: V/H/S/2

By Jeffery X Martin

Here’s a fun experiment to try! Sit ten people around a campfire on a moonless night and start telling scary stories. Everyone takes a turn. What you’ll find quickly enough is that not everything scares everybody. One person may be frightened by ghost stories. Another may be terrified of demonic possession tales. One never knows.

That’s the joy—and the potential for failure—found within any horror anthology film. They’re all scattershot. Even the most ambitious of them (I’m thinking The ABCs of Death) have sections that miss the mark completely (although “D is for Dogfight” was a harrowing piece of storytelling).

2012’s V/H/S was the most consistently enjoyable of the new wave of anthologies, gathering together a conclave of great directors, such as Ti West and Adam Wingard, and letting them do what they do best: scare the shit of people. There are some genuinely unsettling moments in the film (that final sequence, directed by Radio Silence, still haunts my thoughts).

This year’s sequel, V/H/S/2, is better in every regard. The framing device is tighter, the stories are better and the scares are more frequent and more intense.

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DVD Review: Gimme The Loot

By Chelsea Spear

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
—Anton Chekhov, 1904

Chekhov would probably find Gimme The Loot a frustrating venture. If he stuck it out through the final reel, unfazed by the colorful vernacular of working-class Brooklyn youths and their attempts at petty crime, he would probably gnash his teeth at writer/director Adam Leon’s failure at resolving many of the enticing leads promised in the film’s opening scenes. At a closer glance, however, the set-ups Leon has created for his protagonists serve as excuses to tail some teenagers through the New York boroughs and take a closer look at graffiti culture.

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DVD Review: Simon Killer

By Less Lee Moore

How long has it been since you’ve come across the term “”mise-en-scène” (film students excepted). If most of the film reviews you read come from websites and blogs, it’s probably been a while. Although mise-en-scène, which “refers to everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement—composition, sets, props, actors, costumes, sounds, and lighting” is applicable to every film, it’s the gestalt of these individual aspects that differentiate a regular movie from the work of an artist in full command of the medium. Simon Killer belongs, wholeheartedly, in the latter category.

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DVD Review: Fire In The Sky

By Brad Henderson

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
—Arthur C. Clarke

In 1975, Travis Walton was abducted by aliens, and his abduction is one of the most well-known close encounters in history. Not only was a film made out of it, but those who conducted tests and the officers that were involved have also said it was not a hoax. This was due to the results of polygraph tests taken by those who witnessed the abduction.

In 1993, a film was made that scared the freaking crap out of me: Fire in the Sky. I was nine at the time of its release, and it has stayed with me to this day. If my memory serves me correctly, I saw it at the theater and again on a late night showing on HBO. I think being alone and watching it on HBO was what really did me in.

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DVD Review: No One Lives

By Less Lee Moore

It’s surprising that horror movies and wrestling haven’t combined forces until recently, seeing as there is such a crossover between fanbases. No One Lives, a WWE Studios production, premiered at TIFF’s infamous Midnight Madness program last year and is now available on home video.

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