Impulse Pictures graces vintage porn collectors with newly restored versions of some of the rarest adult films ever released, offering digital remasters from the original 35mm materials. “Sex Roulette” from director Alan Vydra was heavily edited and censored for years, and Impulse provides the long cut this time around. If you’re really in to an adult movie centered on an elderly man and an African American dwarf getting in to all kinds of sexually aggressive adventures, then you might like “Sex Roulette.”
The Shallows (2016)
Jaume Collet-Serra‘s survival thriller feels like a movie that was written in 1980 and just now saw the light of day as a vehicle for Blake Lively. It doesn’t have any of the beaming self importance of “Open Water” or “127 Hours,” which makes it a lot more fun than it has any right to be. Lively is gorgeous and charming as American tourist Nancy Adams, a medical student still reeling from the death of her mother after a long losing battle with cancer. Taking a hiatus from work and all of her responsibilities, she travels to Mexico to relax and surf on the beach. While waiting for some waves, she’s attacked by a massive shark that knocks her off of her board, and leaves her to plunge in to the tide where she cuts her leg open, hobbling any and all efforts to swim back to shore.
Realm of Souls (2013)
A group of filmmakers go ghost hunting at a site reputed for sightings and paranormal phenomena. Once on the site, they take a quick tour and set up before finding cameras and equipment from a previous group. What they find on the recordings is disturbing and also a warning.
Written and directed by Chase Smith, Realm of Souls is a mix of found footage and traditional footage with a touch of night vision and false damage on the found footage. The story is typical of the found footage ghost story/demon sub-genre in horror. It goes in the expected ways: Team goes in woods, investigates, films, disappears, second team finds their work. The writing and directing here are decent but the story feels a lot like “been there, done that”, especially for anyone who watches a lot of horror movies.
The characters or people (as we are supposed to think of them as real people, and not actors playing parts) here are fairly run of the mill for the sub-genre with the added touch they are filmmakers so the found footage is halfway decent, shot in a more stable camera style (thankfully), and with decent focus. There are a few original twists and turns, but most were a bit predictable still. The dialogue needs to be notes here as it does come off mostly natural and not forced or grating as in many found footage films recently.
The cast is composed of some of Chase Smith’s regulars and new faces. Most of them are not going to be familiar to most viewers, which is something absolutely necessary for found footage films to work as a famous face can throw the viewers out of the story and the experience. Once again, Smith works with a big cast here, making it harder for anyone to stand out unless they are absolutely magnificent or completely dreadful. Neither happens here, however no one being really bad is a good thing as so much rests on the cast in this type of films.
The special effects are decent for what can be seen in the found footage and night vision scenes. None of it will revolutionize effects or the genre, but what is there fits with the movie and looks nicely bloody. Added effects that this reviewer could have done without were the fake damage on some of the footage and the blue screens between some of the scenes. The former was an annoyance while the latter just takes the viewer right out of the film while wondering why this is happening. This breaks any kind of tension there might have been and kills the mood of the film far too often. These do not add anything really to the film and distract way too much from the story.
The idea of filmmakers going to tramping grounds to film paranormal phenomena is interesting but the way it’s exploited here makes it lose most interest as the pace of the film is beyond slow, spending far too much time on its too numerous characters instead of the actual creepy and scary parts of the story. The film takes a very long time to get going and but the time it truly does, it’s too little too late and not enough time is spent on building dread and fear to make the reveals any kind of impactful.
Realm of Souls is a well shot but wasted with found footage effects, such as night vision and fake damage, which will most likely only appeal to hard core fans of the sub-genre. The casual viewer and those not into this style will most like be quite bored by the proceedings.
Realm of Souls was produced by Spirit World Films.
A Home of Our Own (1993) [Blu-Ray]
Director Tony Bill’s “A Home of Our Own” is one of the more underrated dramas about the pursuit of the American Dream. While the 1993 family drama about poverty in the early twentieth century isn’t perfect, it does a damn fine job of portraying the consistent pit falls of poverty, and often times it’s tough to really charge forward when life is so relentlessly unfair. “A Home of Our Own” strives for inspiration and positivity despite falling occasionally in to painfully depressing material, and is a very good drama that places the brilliant Kathy Bates front and center.
Something of a second hand “Grapes of Wrath,” Bates plays the fierce widowed matriarch of the Lacey clan Frances, who has had enough of living in Los Angeles and slumming it in an apartment building. After getting fired from her factory job for reporting sexual harassment, Frances decides she wants to uproot her family and seek her fortune with her own property in the form of her dream house. The events aren’t as ideal as she pictures, as the narrator Shayne (played as a young man by Edward Furlong) chronicles how tough it was to trek across country and deal with having to become the man of the house. There’s the family squeezing in to a beat up car, sharing a big jug of Kool Aid, and Shayne’s declaration “For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we ate nothing but egg salad sandwiches.
I never ate one again, and hadn’t since.” Frances, with a quick tongue and using her children as bartering tools, manages to talk her way in to buying a skeleton for a potential house, which she begins to build with her long suffering children. Along the way they befriend land owner Mr. Moon, a tough Asian man who begins slowly taking a shine toward the family, all the while Shayne struggles with poverty, and having to endure being handed responsibility he never asked for. Furlong is very good in the role as Shayne, a young man given major responsibility who has a tough time finding his place in the family. Too often he’s given the tasks of an adult by Frances who then punishes him like a child, and this creates an eventual rift and surefire tension between him and mom Frances.
Once Frances begins meeting a new man and begins dating, the tension is dialed up as Shayne begins to resent her, prompting a family feud. Frances is at once an idealist and a realist, who wants to pursue her idea of the American dream, but has no interest in accepting charity or pity. This results in a lot of interesting sub-plots, including her trip to a church second hand store, as well as a scene where the local reverend attempts to deliver presents to the children during Christmas Eve. While I’m not a huge fan of the pat happy ending, “A Home Of Our Own” is a compelling and entertaining drama about the lower class and trying to achieve the American dream in an unfair world, as well as the power of the bonds of family.
Despite the movie finally being on Blu-Ray, this is a bare bones release with not even the original trailer from the 1993 movie. All there is is a small catalogue from Olive Films.
Dèdalo (2016)
I hope director Jerónimo Rocha eventually turns his idea for “Dèdalo” in to a feature length horror film. While I love “Dèdalo” all on its own, I’d love to learn more about the specifics behind this narrative, and how these monsters spawned. The monsters presented in this nightmarish feature seem almost bred out of oil and muck, and they seem to infect those around them with this crude substance that makes their victims deformed prey. “Dèdalo” begins on a very strong note as we witness young Siena climbing along the side of a Space Freighter/Refinery.
Wounded and very torn after what seems like a hellish fight for survival, she seeks out a medical kit lying alongside the body of one of her shipmates. While one of the disgusting beasts on the ship feasts on a lost comrade, she looks to inject herself with some kind of antidote that can perhaps cure her of what seems to be an infection that’s made right hand black as coal. But the situation become more difficult as she tries to cure herself without being heard, and out wit the creature only inches away from her.
“Dèdalo” has a marvelous atmosphere and sense of mood behind it, making it feel like a nightmare. It definitely draws its inspiration from “Alien” even borrowing the strobe light effect that gives director Rocha’s short an added layer of menace and terror. “Dèdalo” is a wonderful short horror film that uses its apparent influences to enhance its narrative and concept; I’d love to see director Jerónimo Rocha use this as material for a feature length production. I think “Dèdalo” could become a classic.
Adventures in Babysitting (2016) (DVD)
What a difference from 1987 to 2016, isn’t it? In the original “Adventures in Babysitting,” our intrepid heroes led by their babysitter are evading a group of car thieves anxiously trying to get back their notes that they scribbled on a playboy that one of the characters stashed accidentally. Here, the group runs afoul two inept pawn shop clerks that want the camera character Lola has after taking a picture of their illegal exotic animal. Disney’s newest stars Sabrina Carpenter and Sofia Carson are charming in their co-starring roles as high schoolers competing for a photography internship.
Both girls end up in a variety of misadventures as babysitters caring for a small group of rambunctious kids after a cell phone mix up. Over the course of the night, they cross criminals, mean car towers, and even have to talk their way out of a police station when they’re accused of committing a crime. They now have to get their car back home before midnight hoping to beat the parents of their charges home. While I’d still watch Columbus’ original with my family, Disney takes great lengths to tone down a lot of the menace and hazards from the original. This means no college party, no drunken girl hitting on one of the characters, no gang war in a train, and no one mistaking one of the babysitters for a Playboy centerfold.
Considering co-star Sabrina Carpenter is barely eighteen, that’d be painfully creepy, so that’s not a huge omission, all things considered. That said, “Adventures in Babysitting” is a solid diversion with some neat adventure and antics, even if it isn’t one of Disney’s best original films. It garners solid performances, kid friendly antics, and includes a lot of its own twists on the original film’s events, including a huge chase through a Laundromat, and an impromptu performance that results in a rap battle. With Disney Channel Original Movies, you have to take the good with the bad, and thankfully this remake offers a lot more good than bad.
It’s certainly better than “The Descendents.”
The DVD only comes with a two minute blooper reel, and a fridge magnet that doubles as a picture frame and a check list for babysitters. Frankly, I’m surprised Disney didn’t make a bigger deal out of their one hundredth television movie for this home release. If you’ve watched the Disney Channel for the last three months, they’ve had behind the scenes segments, interviews with Sabrina Carpenter and Sofia Carson, a music video with the pair, and a “making of” with the pair recording the film’s theme song.
Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988): Special Edition [Blu-Ray]
Good God, it’s usually around the fifth movie in a horror series where the writers start poking fun at themselves, not the first sequel. John Astin is a mad professor named Gangreen who is secretly engineering tomatoes to be able to transform in to humans set to various genres of music, and plans to unleash another invasion on the world. Ten years after the events of “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” tomatoes are outlawed and anyone that is found with them is arrested. So naturally the big joke centerpiece of the film is that we follow a young pizza delivery man named Chad who helps operate a pizza place that uses every ingredient except tomato sauce.
Chad, who constantly makes deliveries to Gangreen’s mansion, is in love with his assistant Tara, who happens to be a tomato. When Tara escapes Gangreen’s clutches due to him attempting to kill a fuzzy tomato mutant, Tara seeks Chad’s help. Meanwhile Gangreen goes looking for her with his muscle bound killer tomato commandoes. “Return of the Killer Tomatoes” is one of the very few meta-science fiction comedy spoofs that sometimes don’t even seem to try to tell a story. It’s a movie so tight on budget that there are never actually any rampaging killer tomatoes here. This is more a romantic comedy with a Frankenstein twist involving a killer tomato that can turn in to a hot woman, who begins falling in love with a normal pizza delivery man.
It’s almost like tuning in to watch “Friday the 13th” and only see people talk about Jason Voorhees, and never actually seeing him on screen at any point. “Return of the Killer Tomatoes” spends a lot of time spoofing its own premise that it never actually takes the time out to unfold a narrative. That doesn’t make the film terrible, but it does hinder any efforts director John De Bello has to aspire toward the comedic lengths of “Airplane!” Characters break the fourth wall, co-star George Clooney breaks character, and there’s even a gag involving product placement. It comes out of nowhere and is blatantly tacked on, but it is quite a funny segue, all things considered.
Every cast member works in different wave lengths in the film, with Starke playing his character as goofy as possible, while Clooney is mostly a straight man who tries tongue in cheek comedy every now and then. Astin is nearly loses teeth chewing the scenery, and his comically uneven turn is quite the attraction. “Return of the Killer Tomatoes” could very easily have been an awful film, but its sheer relentless absurdity and embracing of its low budget compensates for the fact that there aren’t really any killer tomatoes in the film.
Along with a reversible slip cover, there’s also a new interview with star Anthony Starke, who discusses his experiences working with George Clooney. True to form, Clooney was a prankster on set, and the pair had a good time partying. There’s a two minute still gallery, the original theatrical trailer, and a thirty second TV Spot. Finally, there’s a brand new audio commentary with writer and director John De Bello who, with host Michael Felsher, discusses his history with the movie series, and how he went about making the film on such a miniscule budget. This is an informative commentary with some fun anecdotes.