You have to love Bruce Campbell’s attitude toward “Ash vs. Evil Dead.” He’s like that angry dad who you keep asking for bike for your birthday and he keeps telling you that he has no money, and to shut your trap, or he’s locking you in the basement with the other bad kids. Then on your birthday, he shows up with a brand new bike and says “Well I got it because… you know… you’re a good kid, and you wouldn’t shut up about it. Now go get me a pack of smokes.” Bruce is that kind of man who loves his fans despite the gruff exterior and rewarded us with “Ash vs. Evil Dead” because we wouldn’t shut up about it. And because, you know, you can’t have Ash without Campbell. Just in time for Halloween, “Ash vs. Evil Dead” gets everything right about the “Evil Dead” movie series.
Author Archives: Felix Vasquez
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: The Complete First Season [Blu-Ray/Digital]
DC and Warner beat Marvel to the punch by comprising a superhero team made up of some of the most popular bit players from the DC television-verse, ending in a pretty mixed result. Season one of “Legends of Tomorrow” is a scattered and pretty crazy series of episodes that finds a rag tag group of DC’s heroes and villains coming together to stop the evil Vandal Savage. Along with the confusing time paradoxes, the writers and producers seem to be scrambling to also keep up with their long list of team members, conflicts, sub-plots and the like resulting in only a mediocre start from out of the gate. What happens when people like The Flash and Arrow are busy with their own enemies?
Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues [Blu-Ray/DVD]
Your enjoyment of “Queen of Plagues” will depend on your love for motion comic books. Shout Factory has shown a love for the format of motion comics in the past, and they continue that trend with adapting Gail Simone’s miniseries from Dynamite! Despite the draw back of animating certain panels that just look awkward in motion, “Queen of Plagues” is an engrossing adventure where we meet Sonja once again in battle. After the noble King Dimath raids and conquers a kingdom in a bloody battle, he enters a dungeon and decides to free the two remaining prisoners and let them go without trial. One of them is Sonja.
Brix and the Bitch (2016)
Director and Writer Nico Raineau’s award winning “Brix and the Bitch” is a remarkable drama about the powerful love two women share, and how it can potentially decide their future when one of them is stuck in a terrible situation. Dre Swain is fantastic as Bitch, a martial artist who engages in a near endless string of fights for an illegal gambling circuit. Despite her girlfriend Brix’s insistence that she stop before she’s killed, Bitch engages in bone shattering fights every night.
Red Sonja (1985)
I’m not ashamed to admit that “Red Sonja” is a childhood favorite. As a TV junkie, I spent a lot of my childhood watching movies on network TV and I constantly tuned in to “Red Sonja.” It was such a departure from the normal movies I watched as it sported a female heroine, Ernie Reyes Jr. trying his best to kick ass, and an unusual narrative that feels like a mix of “Barbarella” and “Wizard of Oz.” Of course this being 1985, you can sense Dino DiLaurentiis also trying to build his own movie series a la “Star Wars,” even featuring a battle with an underwater monster in a cave. I never caught on to it before, but this is also one of the rare action movies from the eighties where there is a heavily implied sexual affair between heroine Sonja and villainous Queen Gedren.
Session 9 (2001) [Blu-Ray]
Brad Anderson’s supernatural thriller is perhaps one of the most criminally overlooked genre entries of the early aughts. In a time where most audiences are embracing cinema about the supernatural, “Session 9” deserves another look and so much more praise than ever. Director Anderson doesn’t opt for cheap jump scares and shocks, so much as he does a slow boil and uneasy thriller that culminates in a rather disturbing explosion. Upon first viewing “Session 9” it’s safe to say the climax threw me for a loop and kept me thinking about it for days. “Session 9” feels so much like a real life dramatization of actual events, thanks to director Anderson’s digital photography and tendency to film in one setting for the duration of “Session 9.”
Clown (2016) [Blu-Ray/Digital]
For such a unique premise and concept, it’s surprising how unremarkable “Clown” ends up being, in the end. Despite its best efforts, “Clown” feels like a short film that perhaps should have stayed a short film, as most of its narrative feels spread out to fit a hundred minutes. And I don’t know how they’ll pull off a sequel, if the final scene is any indication. “Clown” probably watches a lot better as a short film, but it breezes through the premise in the first thirty minutes and stops being interesting by the end of the first hour. Kent is an average dad who finds out the clown he had booked for his son’s birthday has cancelled. Anxious to keep his promise of a clown, Kent goes rummaging through his basement and finds a clown suit locked in a mysterious chest.