asdfMTV Geek > Reviews

Blu-ray Review: 'Resident Evil: Retribution 3D' - My Alice Panic

Posted 12/28/12 5:00 pm EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Horror, Movies, Reviews


Even as the resident "Resident Evil" movie apologist, it's hard not to acknowledge the problems with the series' fifth entry "Resident Evil: Retribution," which serves as a deliberate return to some of the elements found in writer-director-producer Paul W. S. Anderson's 2002 film. "Retribution" resurrects and recycles characters and ideas from the previous movies, making it the first to really acknowledge the continuity of the past films but without expanding on them in any way.

It's weird to say this, but for the first time, I was actually...disappointed in a "Resident Evil" movie.

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: 'Wu Dang' Man, It Ain't Nothin' To Mess With

Posted 12/21/12 5:30 pm EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


Somewhere, high up on the top of Wu Dang mountain, there's a rumor of seven ancient treasures that could offer immense wealth to the person smart enough to find them and tough enough to brave the martial artists guarding it. In the 1930's, two treasure hunters--a western-educated expert on antiquities and a thief--compete and ultimately team up to find the prize in director Patrick Lueng's "Wu Dang."

What could have been a romantic martial arts comedy gets weighed down by dull melodrama and some scattershot storytelling, not at all helped by fights that just aren't that well-executed.

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: Hope, Hushpuppy, And Giant Monsters In 'Beasts Of the Southern Wild'

Posted 12/20/12 4:59 pm EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


The fantasy-as-Katrina allegory "Beasts of the Southern Wild" could have been terrible--on the one hand, it wants to be a heartfelt drama about a little girl discovering her place in the world in the flood-ravage ruin of her home while at the same time trading on the catastrophic imagery of a devastated bayou and its mix of poor black and white inhabitants. And from the start of director Benh Zeitlin's film, you're worried about the movie's motives or how easy it might be for a well-meaning indie blending magical realism and abject poverty to crash and burn with an excess of the kind of creepy/irritating/simple mythologizing of the poor that sometimes wash up on our screens.

But it's not that movie. In fact, this beautiful film, anchored by non-professional actors inside of a wrecked world is one of the most wrenchingly wonderful fantasies of 2012.

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: The Awesome Exploitation Excess Of 'Ninja Scroll' (1993)

Posted 12/20/12 3:35 pm EST by in Animation, Anime, DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


It's hard to overstate the importance of "Ninja Scroll" in the U.S.. The Madhouse-produced feature was one of those titles that--for a certain segment of the population--was the first mainline injection of anime into their lives. Instead of something more artful or thoughtful like the works out of Studio Ghibli, the 1993 film was a shot of bloody, oversexed, fast-moving exploitation brilliance to a generation whose exposure to Japanese animation up to that point involved transforming robots.

Nearly 20 years on, Sentai Filmworks/Section23 Films has re-released "Ninja Scroll," and for this fan, it still feels as essential as ever.

Read More...

Manga Review: Tezkua Takes On the Reich In 'Message To Adolf, Pt. 1'

Posted 12/19/12 5:06 pm EST by in Manga, Reviews


If we'd had a category for best re-release or collection among our Best of 2012 lists, Tezkua's WWII-era thriller "Message to Adolf" would likely be at the top. Not only is this first installment of the cross-crossing stories of two boys living in Japan named Adolf and a determined reporter out to avenge his brother's death an excellent read, but yet again, Vertical has reproduced one of the master manga-ka's work in a handsomely bound hardcover.

The story, which starts in 1936 and follows Japan and German's path to war, with Tezuka setting his murder mystery against the backdrop of the rise of his country's nationalistic fervor in time with the rumbling's of German's war machine and persecution of the Jewish people. Like his "Ayako," it's a story of murder and obsession as well as a cultural critique, although a broader look at its given period than the latter work.

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: 'Total Recall' (2012) - Different, Yet Strangely Familiar

Posted 12/18/12 6:33 pm EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


It's tough to address "Total Recall" 2012 without first going through all of the tortured motions of acknowledging that it's a remake and any debts it might owe to the 1990 film by the great director of bombast, Paul Verhoeven. It might be easy to separate the two movies, as different as they are, if the 2012 version didn't go out of its way to call back to its predecessor, a curious move that robs the update of a little of its identity while inviting unwelcome comparisons in terms vis a vis "who did it better--Len or Paul?"

Let's try to untangle the two movies from one another, though and see how director Len Wiseman's ("Underworld") take acquits itself.

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: Beauty, Survival, And Heartbreak In 'Grave Of the Fireflies' (1988)

Posted 12/18/12 10:02 am EST by in Animation, Anime, DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


There's something beautiful and horrible about seeing children being brave and fending for one another. Beautiful because even at an early age, the smallest and weakest of us already have the strongest character and instinct to protect others; horrible because no child should be in life-or-death circumstances.

Based on the WWII memoir of Akiyuki Nosaka who wrote the story to chart his and his sister's own hardscrabble struggle to survive the American firebombings of Japan, this film isn't easy to watch but it's essential viewing among the great works of animation--or really of all film, for that matter.

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: 'The Island' (1980)

Posted 12/17/12 2:00 pm EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews



Image source: FMV Magazine

So there was that one time that Michael Caine starred was in an 80's movie where he was being terrorized by inbred pirates in the middle of the Caribbean based on a novel by the author of "Jaws" from the man who would go on to direct "Fletch" and "The Golden Child." And it's hard to imagine the movie in anyone's mind conjured up by the description synching up with 1980's "The Island," the latest thriller unearthed by Scream Factory and released to Blu-ray.

Read More...

DVD Review: Elections, Extinction, And Butterfly Fights In 'Futurama: Volume 7'

Posted 12/14/12 4:30 pm EST by in Animation, DVD and Blu-ray, Reviews, TV


In its third, post-revival season, "Futurama" has finally found its footing again. While the previous seasons of the series have tried to play catchup with the near-decade of pop culture the series missed while it was off the air (or going direct-to-DVD), 2013's batch of episodes have settled back into the groove of observational and sci-fi humor with one of the best voice casts currently working on TV.

Read More...

Blu-Ray Review: 'Death Valley' (1982) - Kid Vs. Killer

Posted 12/11/12 11:58 am EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Horror, Movies, Reviews


"Kids in peril" horror and thrillers have always been the most fascinating to me. A precocious young person matching wits against a charismatic killer in something like "Night of the Hunter" or even a literal murderous creature of pure as in "Silver Bullet" or the first two "Child's Play" films. I find the best of these kinds of movies play on us in two ways: first, by gaining our sympathy for the weakest among us and second by playing on some of our own buried childhood fears about very real boogeymen stalking in the night.

One-time photographer turned filmmaker Dick Richards took a stab at this mini-genre with the 1982 road kill thriller "Death Valley" with varying degrees of success, represented here in a pristine (if not feature-rich) disc from "Scream Factory."

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: 'V/H/S' - Getting Lost In Gory Found Footage

Posted 12/4/12 2:58 pm EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Horror, Movies, Reviews


I've complained in the past about the found footage format often being the last refuge for filmmakers who don't like to set up a shot, writers uninterested in crafting dialog (all while trying to convince us that the person holding the camera would absolutely, never put it down), and actors not all that into delivering dialog beyond meandering "um's" and "like's." The horror anthology "V/H/S" mostly puts lie to that complaint with a series of clever (if not always fully-formed) horror shorts by a group of indie directors which makes use of the this particular style of feature and finds a way to draw horror from the low-resolution formats. Read More...

Blu-ray Review: J, K, And K Save The Future In 'Men In Black 3'

Posted 11/30/12 3:40 pm EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


Even though it's been ten years since the last "Men In Black" movie gave us a Burger King in MIB HQ, Frank the Pug in a suit, and Johnny Knoxville's second talking head, the stink of the second movie in the series hung around just long enough to make the possibility of another one seem like more of a threat. And as news trickled out about "Men In Black 3"--Tommy Lee Jones was getting sidelined for most of the movie, chief among the problems--every indication was that we were headed for another disaster.

But this time traveling plot, which sees Will Smith's Agent J hurtle back to 1969 to save his partner and the timeline, doesn't just get the series back to its roots, but ends up being... touching?

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: 'ParaNorman' - Sweet And Scary Stuff

Posted 11/27/12 12:30 pm EST by in Animation, DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


Like its villainous witch, "ParaNorman" is scary but it also has a warm good heart about it. The latest from Laika, the stop-motion animation studio behind "Coraline" is an original feature about tolerance and understanding that just happens to have ghosts, zombies, a vengeful witch, and some of the most gorgeous stop-motion work I've seen in a while.

The small New England town of Blithe Hollow is all set to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the execution of the notorious witch Agatha, who cursed her accusers and has become a kind of grotesque mascot for the town. Our hero is poor put-upon Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee) whose problems include a sister that's perpetually embarrassed by him, a father that doesn't understand him, and the ability to see and talk to ghosts which make him an outcast--laughed at by his classmates and bullied by local tough Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse).

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: The Most Non-non-non Heinous 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' (1989)

Posted 11/23/12 11:23 am EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


If you see one movie with Abraham Lincoln this year, see Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln." If you're hankering to see two, revisit "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure."

"Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" has always had the rep of a poor man's, stoned-out "Back to the Future," and to a certain extent, it's true. Director Stephen Herek's 1989 feature, from a script by writing duo Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon makes its greatest complication the delayed thought processes of its two stoners without being stoned heroes, but that's kind of part of the fun. The plot, if you'll recall, sees would-be rockstars Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) on the verge of failing their history class and given a time machine the future wise man Rufus (George Carlin) in order to complete their final report so that they might fulfill their destiny of uniting the universe with their music.

Read More...

Blu-ray Review: XOXO For 'Tarantino XX'

Posted 11/20/12 1:32 pm EST by in DVD and Blu-ray, Movies, Reviews


Hey, Tarantino fans, Lionsgate just collected his entire filmography in a 10-disc Blu-ray boxset, which includes all eight of his solo efforts and two discs of special features.

So has the studio done right by 20 years of film history with this collection? Well, it can't be called comprehensive (his contributions to "Four Rooms" and "From Dusk Til Dawn" qualify both of those movies places here), but what's here, largely discs from Lionsgate's own catalog, is thorough.

Read More...

12345678910

Top Categories

SPONSORS
AD:
©2013 Viacom International Inc. All Rights Reserved. MTV and all related titles and logos are trademarks of Viacom International Inc.