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Posted at 11:18 PM in BD Impressions

The film: ** THUNK! THUNK! THUNK! ** Sorry, that was the sound of me pounding my head off my desk repeatedly. In the eloquent words of Roger Moore: "I thought it just went too far - and that's from me,...

Posted at 1:50 PM in BD Impressions

Image quality: This is a difficult one to rate because, while this is technically a superb presentation - a flawless one, even - it differs in some key ways from the version of THE LION KING that was released in...

Posted at 4:18 PM in BD Impressions

The film: I suspect there was probably a time when it would have been fair to call Timothy Dalton the most underrated Bond and LICENCE TO KILL the most underrated Bond film. Thankfully - and no doubt in part inspired...

Posted at 3:23 PM in BD Impressions

The film: THE AMERICAN is described as a "sexy suspense thriller" on the back cover, but I'd be lying if I said I found it particularly suspenseful or particularly thrilling. The "sexy" component is provided by a variety of glamorous...

Posted at 12:22 PM in BD Impressions

The film: I've always thought TORSO was the missing link between the giallo and the later US slasher movie movement, far more so than the usually cited BAY OF BLOOD. (Mikel J. Koven makes a similar argument in his book...

Posted at 11:09 PM in BD Impressions

Sorry for maintaining radio silence for so long. You know how it is - busy busy busy! I've bought a new laptop (full story later - it's not pretty), been working on both my academic and scripterly writing ventures, and,...

Posted at 9:35 PM in BD Impressions

The film: The original TRON left me cold. The sequel, oddly enough, impressed me more despite suffering from a raft of problems of its own. The plot is as generic as they come - augmenting the original's "defeat the evil...

Posted at 4:26 PM in BD Impressions

The film: Pixar and Disney creative lead John Lasseter credits TRON as the film that inspired him to explore CG animation - if memory serves (and I'm paraphrasing here), not because of what he saw but because of the POTENTIAL...

Posted at 8:37 PM in BD Impressions

The film: As I suspect most people know by now, Ralph Bakshi originally planned to adapt Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS as two films, only the first of which ever saw fruition. Despite Part 1 being a box office...

Posted at 2:06 PM in BD Impressions

The film: THE RETURN OF THE KING is a somewhat frustrating film for me, arguably more so than either of the previous instalments in Peter Jackson's trilogy. It remains the only instalment for which the extended material is really a...

Posted at 3:12 PM in BD Impressions

The film: It's probably safe to say that THE TWO TOWERS is a much harder book to adapt than its predecessor. Not only does it have to contend with being the middle child of the trilogy and thus lacking a...

Posted at 5:47 PM in BD Impressions

The film: I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS when I was in primary school. If you asked me a decade ago, I would probably have described it as my favourite book, and although I've become more...

Posted at 8:54 PM in BD Impressions

"Why don't you go grab a goddamn aeroplane like everybody else?" The film: THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE is one of my favourite films of the 70s - a brilliantly efficient, genuinely tense and incisively witty thriller about...

Posted at 7:33 PM in BD Impressions

Few films can claim to have as troubled a history as Fritz Lang's M. Heavily cut by the censors, altered by a succession of distributors and subjected to numerous incorrect presentations on video, LaserDisc and DVD over the years, it's...

Posted at 2:09 PM in BD Impressions

The film: MACHETE is probably about as good a film as can be expected from something that began life as a three-minute gag. That gag was a trailer for a non-existent "Mexploitation" film attached to the start of GRINDHOUSE, Robert...

Posted at 7:06 PM in BD Impressions

The film: At one point, Dario Argento was quoted as saying that THE CAT O' NINE TAILS was his least favourite of his films, and while I personally think he's being a tad harsh, it does stand out to me...

Posted at 2:13 AM in BD Impressions

The film: As Mike Sutton says in his review of BLACK SWAN at The Digital Fix, Darren Aronofsky's latest movie is essentially "high-trash melodrama". It's frequently over the top and absurd, and revels in all sorts of daft clichés about...

Posted at 1:50 PM in BD Impressions

The film: I'm decidedly late to the party, having only seen TAXI DRIVER for the first time last night. As such, I very much doubt there's anything I could say about it that hasn't been said before. I really enjoyed...

Posted at 3:46 PM in BD Impressions

The film: There are some good ideas in LONDON BOULEVARD, William Monahan's adaptation of the Ken Bruen novel of the same name - itself something of a take-off of SUNSET BOULEVARD, mixing the story of a man who becomes infatuated...

Posted at 10:03 PM in BD Impressions

The film: OK, how to put this politely? This is a big ol' pile of shit. It's a passable enough distraction up to a point, but it's easily the most brain-dead movie I've watched recently. I've got nothing against but...

Posted at 9:30 PM in BD Impressions

The film: Supposedly, Christopher Plummer hated doing THE SOUND OF MUSIC. He called it "The Sound of Mucus", which I suspect many would agree is an apt description. And yet, in spite of its sickly sweetness, simplistic world view and...

Posted at 11:09 PM in BD Impressions

The film: A number of Disney features have had what are known in the trade as "troubled productions", but TANGLED has got to rank as one of the rockiest of them all. Originally set to be the directorial debut of...

Posted at 10:33 PM in BD Impressions

The film: See my review from a couple of years back here. 8/10 Image quality: This is the fourth BD release of INFERNO so far, with UK, French and Japanese versions having preceded it. (A fifth, from German label Camera...

Posted at 2:19 PM in BD Impressions

Note: Time constraints prevent me from doing a full review of PHENOMENA, as I have done for other recent Argento BD releases like INFERNO, TENEBRAE and DEEP RED. At some point in the future I might come back and add...

Posted at 2:59 PM in BD Impressions