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Recent Reviews

Dead Souls (Blu-ray)

Up till now, Scream Factory's release slate has been anchored almost entirely around '80s horror flicks...y'know, movies that are part of iconic franchises, were helmed by some of the genre's biggest names, or by all rights should've

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been cult classics. By a margin of nearly a quarter-century, Dead Souls is far and away the most recent production to claw its way into Scream Factory's catalog, and...well, some things are better left buried.

Adapted from the novel by Michael Laimo, this 2012 Chiller TV original opens with a priest puttering away at his family's farmhouse. His tween-aged daughter is bopping to Depeche Mode in her bedroom, Mom's struggling with a nasty tummyache, and little Daniel is palling around with his year-old baby brother. All of a sudden, Pop snaps. He ends the family dog's incessant barking with a whack of a shovel. From there, he walks into the house proper and, one by one, coldly and calmly murders every last trace of his flesh and blood. Unable to find wherever it is that the since-slaughtered David hid baby Bryan, Father Conroy approaches his homemade crucifix, wraps a length of rope around his waist, and doesn't so much as grunt as he hammers the first nail into his palm.

Johnny Petrie (Jesse James) spent the next seventeen years growing up around all sorts of crazy, but nothing like the grisly fate the rest of his family suffered. Hell, he didn't even know the truth about his parentage until an estate lawyer contacted him out of the blue. With the nutjob he thought was his mother (Geraldine Hughes) in the looney bin, there's nothing to stop him from making the drive up to Maine. The lawyer (Jaiden Kaine) just wants to get a couple of quick signatures and dump this sprawling chunk of farmland on the market; still reeling from learning that...[read the entire Blu-ray review of Dead Souls]

Adventure Time: The Complete First Season (Blu-ray)

What time is it? It's...well, it's about time is what it is. (See what I did there?) It was a long and mighty journey for the first season of Adventure Time to hack-'n-slash its way onto DVD, and this Blu-ray release

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lagged behind that overdue collection by right at a full year. ...but hey! I could sit here and moan and stuff, or I could jump up and down with glee 'cause Adventure Time!

As if you need a primer, Adventure Time is set in the Land of Ooo, the perfect place for a couple of pals like Finn the Human and Jake the magical stretchy dog to adventure-as-a-verb. Together, they might....oh, I don't know, play Herbert West and have a mishap with a Re-Animator-type serum and bring sugar-crazed zombies back from the dead, and then throw a Saved by the Bell-style slumber party where they try desperately to prevent all the folks in Ooo from realizing they're under siege by the walking dead. They hangglide on an enormous dollar bill after kicking a vomiting, oversized ogre in the nards. A little while after that, the two of 'em have to discourage the Ice King from eating his bride-to-be, and then they're forced to go househunting when a color-suckin' vampire takes over their treehouse. You've got a supergenius, disembodied, maybe-or-maybe-not malevolent heart with a penchant for romance! Pigs worn as kneeguards! Brooms eaten as part of a ploy to gain magical powers! Overzealous unfrozen businessmen to help lighten Finn and Jake's load and shore up that gauntlet-dock! Butter-pranks! A man-lorette party! A lycanthropic lumpy space princess! Little house people getting gnawed on by a small army of why-wolves! I could keep going, but there are 26 of these suckers, and that'd make for a really long list.

Don't fret, Mom and Dad; there...[read the entire Blu-ray review of Adventure Time: The Complete First Season]

The Emperor's New Groove / Kronk's New Groove (Blu-ray)

Geez! Disney sure has been on a tear recently. With this latest stack of stuff, every theatrically released Disney animated feature since the turn of the century has gotten a Blu-ray spin-'n'-polish. Heck, by the time the year's out, we'll be a few titles shy of having high-def releases for every Disney animated feature from the past four decades.

I know I just spent a whole paragraph chanting "Disney! Disney! Disney!", but the thing about The Emperor's New Groove is that it owes less to Walt and company and way more to Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. I

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mean, when you get right down to it, most Disney movies are about family an' love an' big, sweeping emotions, and the moral message you're supposed to take away goes something like "You're special! Be proud of who you are!" The Emperor's New Groove shrugs off every last bit of that.

C'mon, it has to! We're talking about a movie where the central character is a self-obsessed Incan emperor who fires people all willy-nilly, has an old dude chucked out a window for breaking his groove, and wants to level an entire village 'cause it's the perfect spot for an epic swimming pool. That's who Kuzco is, and that ain't nothin' to be proud of. Kuzco hands a pink slip to the wrong enchantress, there are some confusingly labeled poisons, and bing, bang, boom, the emperor's been transformed into a talking llama. Ugh. A minor inconvenience, though, right? Yzma can change him back in a jiffy. It's just that Kuzco is blissfully unaware that the only person who can turn him back wants the guy dead and has seized his throne and all that. Whatever Kuzco winds up doing, he's gonna have to do it back at the palace, and the journey there is long and fraught with danger. I think that's how you spell...[read the entire Blu-ray review of The Emperor's New Groove / Kronk's New Groove]

More reviews...

Stuff I've Watched Recently

6/19: The Howling (Collector's Edition) (Blu-ray)
6/17: Seven Chances (Ultimate Edition) (Blu-ray)
6/17: Medium Cool (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
6/16: Naked Lunch (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
6/16: Wrong (+ Digital Copy) (Blu-ray)
6/15: A Good Day to Die Hard (Blu-ray / DVD + Digital Copy) (Blu-ray)
6/15: Dead Souls (Blu-ray; Commentary)
6/15: Dead Souls (Blu-ray)
6/14: Repo Man (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
6/9: Life Is Sweet (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
6/9: Adventure Time: The Complete First Season (Blu-ray; Commentary)
6/9: Adventure Time: The Complete First Season (Blu-ray)
6/9: Gate of Hell (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
6/9: Band of Outsiders (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
6/7: Kronk's New Groove (Blu-ray)