DVD Review: Dark Angel (1990)

OCTOBER 25, 2011

GENRE: ALIEN

SOURCE: DVD (!) (OWN COLLECTION)

AT LONG LAST! I have been bemoaning the lack of I Come In Peace on DVD ever since they started releasing library titles on the format, and… well, I still haven’t gotten it. No, MGM has actually gone back and put the film out on disc (via their “on-demand” service) under its original title: Dark Angel. Personally I think I Come In Peace is the better title, and it’s certainly the one most people know it under by this point (plus no one will confuse it for a stupid Jessica Alba show), but who cares what it’s called? It’s here!

And this isn’t some lame VHS transfer – the film is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and enhanced for widescreen TVs, which means that not a single frame of this amazing movie has been compromised. It’s a pretty good transfer too – nothing award worthy, but there’s detail and vivid color that I had long since forgotten about, and the stereo sound makes U-Krew’s “Ugly” sound better than ever. The trailer is also included, and while it spoils way too many of the film’s awesome lines, it does have the best opening voiceover. “It’s Christmas. Someone special’s coming to town. And it’s NOT Santa Claus!”, which followed by an equally hilarious “Jack Cain. A cop who does things his OWN way!”

But the movie itself is the real bonus. Not only is it possibly the pinnacle in Dolph Lundgren’s career, Dark Angel is simply an awesome movie in pretty much every way. It’s from 1990, but few films define the 80s as well as this one. You get pretty much every generic action movie plot (revenge for partner killed, mismatched partners, drug dealers, and for the hell of it, aliens) rolled into one, and all the usual plot devices (cop being taken off the case, girlfriend who is sick of the hero’s lack of commitment, etc.) to boot. But through it all, the plot is actually pretty original – an alien drug dealer (!!!) has come “in peace” to Earth, in order to extract endorphins from human beings and mix them with heroin, which creates an incredibly potent drug that he will presumably sell on his homeworld to alien crackheads. There’s also a good alien out to stop him.

Dolph, of course, is the cop. He teams up with Brian Benben (then sort of popular due to Dream On; I recall the audience cheering with laughter when he was first introduced), making it one of the few white/white buddy cop combos as well. Dolph even has his hair dyed black (leftover from The Punisher), so they don’t even have different hair colors. But Dolph is of course, a supercop who plays by his own rules, and Benben is a bureaucratic nebbish who wears a suit and won’t drink on the job. But even this is played against type; instead of the usual messy apartment with pizza boxes lying all around, Dolph’s apartment is pretty ritzy, and he has vintage wine to offer. We never see Benben’s place though, but maybe his was a shithole, to offer another difference.

I also love how the drug dealers in the movie are presented as white collar yuppies. They have a boardroom and everything. Dolph infiltrates their headquarters by setting off their car alarms, which sends them all into a panic. Then the head dealer guy (played by Bernard from Lost!) bemoans how his partner had to fly coach on a recent flight to Rio. Hahaha, awesome.

Speaking of Rio, he’s there because he killed Dolph’s partner (Dolph got distracted by a liquor store robbery, a scenario sort of lifted by Seagal in Out For Justice). And he’s still there at the end. The dead partner turns out be a Macguffin, a rarity in a B-movie like this. However, at the end of the film Dolph suggests they vacation in Rio, so maybe I Also Come In Peace will just be about that, without any alien shit whatsoever.

And of course – the weapon: KILLER CDS! When I was 10 I had no appreciation for the foreshadowing in the first scene, in which a yuppie fiddling with his CD player is “attacked” by an overzealous eject CD button (as a kid I was just mesmerized by the idea of a CD player in the car; I don’t think the family car even had a tape deck at this point). It doesn’t get used much in the film, but when it does, oh man. Has there ever been a more awesome weapon in a movie? It even got ripped off in the game Revolution X.

One last thing I must mention, because someone will bitch if I don’t – the film’s final exchange between the alien and the Dolph. For the final time, the alien says “I come in peace!” (which is all he ever says in the movie; though the other alien seems to have a pretty good grasp on the English language), and Dolph, after loading up the cool-ass alien gun (not the CD one though; which would have been more awesome but lacked an explosion), replies “And you go in pieces, asshole.” It’s the “asshole” that really sells it, but in theaters it was hard to hear because everyone was already cheering and laughing from the first part of the line. But if you think about the greatest one-liners of the type in history, they are all punctuated by profanity: “Smile you son of a bitch.” “Get away from her you bitch!” “Yippie Ki Yay mother fucker!”, etc. Dolph just happened to have one that was awesome even without it.

What say you?

DVD Review: Dark Angel (1990)

By: Abdallh Gamal on: 5:00 PM

DVD Review: Scream 4

OCTOBER 4, 2011

GENRE: SLASHER

SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

While I knew Scream 4 wouldn’t live up to either the quality or the financial success of the first two films, I wasn’t expecting it to outright tank either, barely matching its 40 million production budget (getting trounced by Insidious in the process). Talks of a 5th film continue, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, at least not with the core team returning; a DTV “Wes Craven Presents” film with a cameo from David Arquette is probably the best Scream fans can hope for unless sales for this DVD are astronomical. Is it worth the purchase?

Well, yes and no. As I explained in my original review, the film is an improvement over 3, and it’s great to see our trio again. But a second viewing has also revealed other problems, and even though the disc comes from Anchor Bay and not Weinstein’s own label, there isn’t a lot of behind the scenes info or dirt on the production’s well publicized problems (i.e. the rewrites; Ehren Kruger, who is likely to blame for every single one of the movie’s script issues due to the fact that he is a terrible, terrible writer, isn’t mentioned once), so those looking for a candid look at the film’s shooting/editing will be disappointed.

The main problem is that the movie never successfully blends its two main storylines. The new kids (Hayden Panettiere, Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, etc) are actually pretty fun and likable for the most part (only weak link is the guy playing Roberts’ boyfriend), but they never get the time/chance to come into their own because the movie has to devote too much time toward bringing Sid, Dewey, and Gale back into the fold. Add in the other new characters: the pair of cops, Marley Shelton’s lovestruck deputy, Roberts’ mom (Mary McDonnell), Alison Brie’s bitchy assistant, etc – and you just have way too many characters for a film like this. As much as I hated the deaths of Randy and Cotton, it’s good that they’re no longer around or else the movie would be even MORE overstuffed. Plus, as it is a whodunit, they are forced to try to paint every character as a possible suspect until their demise, which again takes time away from really developing our real heroes. Excising 3-5 of these characters (the two cops and Olivia in particular) might have resulted in a lower body count, but a better film for sure.

The movie also suffers from the usual Dimension bullshit, such as the fact that Bob Weinstein clearly thinks we’re all idiots. A plot thread would have had the killer recreating the murders from the first film, right down to even having the 3rd victim die with a doggy door around her neck (a la Tatum), but Weinstein ordered it dropped because he didn’t think anyone would get it. Does he think that the audience for Scream 4 is going to be made up of newcomers that wouldn’t understand a fairly obvious reference to the first film? So this stuff is dropped, along with other scenes, resulting in several plot holes and a pace that never finds its groove.

Still, it’s a decent enough slasher, and again, much improved over the last entry. The humor is much more in line with what I’d expect from a Scream film, and even on a second time I found myself chuckling at some of the dialogue and references. Panetierre steals the film away from even Campbell and the others, playing a girl who looks like a typical best friend bimbo at first but is also as much of a horror nerd as Randy was, which was a nice play on expectations. The reveal of the killer is a reasonable surprise, though the logic of both their motive and their size with regards to Ghostface is best left un-thought about.

Anchor Bay has provided a standard set of bonus features, with the most interesting being the nearly half hours’ worth of deleted scenes, most of which deserved to be left in the film. Nearly all of them were apparently cut for time according to Craven (who provides optional commentary on all), except for those few aforementioned scenes that were taken out because we’re all too stupid to understand a reference to the previous film(s), according to big Bob. Another tells us that Sid’s dad has passed away, a minor question mark in the theatrical version, though it hardly seemed necessary to kill him off. We also get to see the original versions of two of the early death scenes, both of which are superior to the dragged out, less exciting theatrical versions. It’s funny that so many scenes were cut for time; had they not needlessly added 5 minutes to the runtime with these reshoots, maybe some of these other moments could have been left in. There is no extended version, unfortunately, but this being Anchor Bay I wouldn’t be surprised to see a “director’s cut” release of the movie next year.

The rest of the stuff isn’t particularly essential. The “making of” is largely generic interviews taken from the junket, the gag reel isn’t particularly funny (though it’s fun to see the actors getting scared by Ghostface popping out somewhere he isn’t supposed to be), and the video game promo (actually listed as a bonus!) is just a still image telling you how to access the game on your iPhone. That leaves the commentary, which might have been OK if Wes was alone and providing insight, but alas he is joined by Panettiere and Roberts, who mainly repeat their dialogue, giggle at the jokes, and discuss OMG, how hard it was to shoot this or that scene (oh, and everyone in the movie is “great”, in case you were wondering). Campbell also pops up for about 45 minutes’ worth of the track, phoning in from London, but she doesn’t have the movie in front of her, so Wes has to tell her what’s going on (“Neve, we’re at the scene where Marley gives David the lemon squares”) – needless to say, her brief comments are hardly necessary, and you probably wouldn’t even notice she was gone until Wes points out that she had left. Again, the rewrites, Kevin Williamson’s departure, etc are never mentioned, but apparently Matthew Lillard stopped by, which delighted one of the girls very much because she had a very big crush on him from the first Scream (I say “one of the girls” because I couldn’t tell them apart unless they were specifically discussing their own character).

Picture and audio quality are sufficient for a modern film, nothing blew me away but I didn’t have any issues either. I should note that even though the reliable Peter Deming came back to shoot the film (he shot the other films as well), this is hardly the best looking film in the series; frankly, it looks cheap. And I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but the halo-y lens flares around the numerous cop cars in the movie drove me up a wall, making every shot of them (and there are many) look like a cut-scene from a PS1 game.

Ultimately the biggest problem with the film was that it was too little, too late. After 11 years, they had plenty of material to work with both from a character standpoint (they never actually explain what Sidney has been DOING for the past decade) as well as a chance to send up the modern horror trends, but instead it just largely felt like another rushed sequel, with new technology and the current state of horror given little more than cursory references before returning to the same old shit. Hell, if you remove maybe a dozen lines of throwaway dialogue then there’s nothing about this movie that couldn’t have been done in 2002. Improving on 3 might be enough for one viewing, but they needed to do more than that to give the film the sort of longevity that the original has; now that this review is done I’ll probably never watch it again, though I’ll still pull out the first 2 from time to time. Hopefully they will let the series die, or at least drop Sidney from the proceedings for a while – there’s just no way in hell I will buy yet another killer with a voice box pulling off the murders of a dozen people just to get back at her for everything that’s gone wrong in their life. Frankly, she’s not all that interesting anymore.

What say you?

DVD Review: Scream 4

By: Abdallh Gamal on: 11:05 PM

DVD Review: Supernatural Season 6

SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

GENRE: TELEVISION

SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Having been on board with Supernatural since the show premiered back in the fall of 2005, I was very skeptical about this 6th season. For starters, its closest cousin, The X-Files, fell apart starting with its own 6th go-around, and they had the benefit of a new location (they moved from Vancouver to LA) and more money. But even more worrying was the fact that Supernatural was more or less designed to be a five year show, with a very specific overall arc building toward what would be the ultimate fight between good and evil, pitting brother against brother in the process (with Sam on the evil side and Dean on the good).

But dammit, people just love the show too much, and even though its ratings are never impressive, it must make enough dough for the CW to keep it going, so the last couple episodes of Season 5 were reworked a bit, leaving a cliffhanger for the 6th, unplanned season. Also, it apparently worked OK enough, because S7 starts in two nights, so those among you who STILL haven’t given it a chance are up for another year of being asked why (no, seriously – why? If you read this site you like horror, right? Supernatural has offered up consistently good/great horror on TV- for free - for 6 years now).

As somewhat expected, the season got off to a shaky start. The show always had its initial plan to fall back on, and now they were sort of back at square one, albeit with continuing story threads to guide them a bit as opposed to the actual beginning, where the characters weren’t really well established yet and there was no beloved supporting cast (Bobby, Castiel, Crowley, Rufus, etc) to pick up some of the slack. Thus, episodes like “Weekend At Bobby’s” were much needed diversions; taking chances that fans could appreciate while the producers/writers worked out the kinks behind the scenes. And really, it’s about damn time that Bobby got his own episode! Offering up a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildernstern style take on a typical monster of the week tale, the episode largely ignored Sam and Dean (in the latter’s case, this allowed Jensen Ackles to direct for the first time) while showing a case from Bobby’s point of view, which means a lot of sitting around looking through books and making phone calls while the boys drive around and have all the fun. But it also has a fun B-plot that has nothing to do with anything (a female neighbor who has taken a liking to Bobby), while also resolving a nagging plot thread from the previous season.

Basically, it’s the sort of episode that makes up for a stinker like “Two and a Half Men”, which actually has some lame Three Men and a Baby humor and just sort of treads water, plotwise. Or “Live Free Or TwiHard”, which has a few amusing (if easy) jokes at Twilight’s expense but seems to exist solely to reveal a tiny clue about what happened to Sam during his stay in Hell, and the nature of his seeming resurrection. These episodes are problematic in two ways, in fact. One, they weren’t all that great in terms of action or cool monsters, with "TwiHard" seemingly just swiping plot points from Blade II at random, making them letdowns on a week to week basis. But also, they don’t really work in the season as a whole once you know how everything has turned out. The idea of the “Alphas” was basically abandoned around the halfway point of the season, and Sam’s actions don’t fully jive with the later reveal (spoilers ahead).

As we learn in episode 607, “Family Matters”, Sam has come back sans his soul, which is an interesting plot idea and introduces both great ideas/episodes as well as some fun spins on the usual dynamic between the brothers (particularly when Sam doesn’t understand why he can’t just go bang some local girl while Dean is missing and he has no leads to find him). The problem is, the way that Sam acts prior to the reveal is very different from after, which doesn’t make a lot of sense – why would a guy with no soul put on an act? It’s like in 24 when they introduce a plot twist near the end of the season that renders pretty much everything that the character did earlier in the day to be highly illogical if not downright idiotic. I understand the need to draw out the mystery a bit, but they could have handled it a bit better I think.

Luckily once all that stuff is out of the way and the season’s real arc begins, things pick up. The nice thing about having less of a plan in mind is that they were seemingly willing to take more chances – this season has more “high concept” episodes than in any previous one. In addition to the Bobby ep, there’s also a Western (“Frontierland”), an all Castiel episode (“The Man Who Would Be King”), and even a comedic meta episode called “The French Mistake” in which Sam and Dean are tossed into our world, where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, starring in a show called Supernatural. The show has always flirted with meta humor, going all the way back to S2 or 3 when they visited a haunted film set and made jokes about Gilmore Girls (Padalecki’s former job), and of course the character of Chuck has been turning their adventures into a series of novels for years. But this one blows it wide open, mocking not just the actors but the behind the scenes crew as well (Eric Kripke is called in to solve a problem even though he’s busy with his dream project: Octocobra). It’s the sort of thing that you just have to go with, which I gladly did (it’s worth it just for the scene where they try to act – Padalecki in particular is wonderful with his body language here).

And the great thing about this show is that these high concept episodes actually fit into the overall mythology – it’s not like they just reset at the end and forget all about it. For example, the Western episode, while it has its own self-contained, Old West-centric story, the driving force behind it is Sam and Dean’s need to obtain Phoenix ashes in order to fight an enemy in the present day. In “French Mistake” we discover that their little trip was the result of Balthazar using them as a decoy to distract one of their mutual enemies away from him while he put things in motion that build toward the end of the season. On X-Files, it always seemed like the alien threat was forgotten about during the monster of the week episodes, so it’s nice to see that they have found a way to keep the show’s serialized nature much more consistent. You can miss an episode or two and still keep up (the show’s lengthy “Previously” clips at the top are a big help), but there are no throwaway tales either – every episode offers SOMETHING toward the big picture.

OK, well then why should someone buy it on Blu-ray if they’ve already watched them? Well, for starters, the image quality is vastly superior to the HD broadcast (and without annoying bugs or promos for Smallville crowding the bottom of the screen!). As I’ve said numerous times, I think this is the best looking show on TV, and I loved seeing it in full high def glory (especially the episode with the goddess Veritas, for obvious reasons). The sound mixes won’t blow anyone away, but again, they are an improvement over their broadcasts.

As for the extras, I think it’s a pretty good selection. At first I was a bit bummed to discover that only two episodes had commentaries (I’m currently going through the Community DVD set, in which every single episode has commentary, so maybe I’m just spoiled), but the two that are there are kind of dull. Both have the same participants (Sera Gamble, Robert Singer, and Ben Edlund), and both have lengthy gaps of silence as well as a load of ass-kissing. Maybe the die-hard fans who pay 230 bucks to get photos with the boys at the Creation cons will eat this shit up, but I’d rather hear more about the FX, how the actors respond to the material, etc (or they could just let the hilarious Misha Collins do a couple, which would probably be the best thing on the disc). Likewise, I was excited to check out the Anime episodes that were created in Japan and remake the events of the first two seasons, but after about 10 minutes of one I gave up – it’s awful. The boys don’t really have the same spirit they do in their live action performances (nice way of saying that they just read the lines), and apparently Ackles is only on a couple of episodes anyway, leaving a standin for the rest. The animation isn’t even all that great either, so I just fail to see the point – why watch stripped down remakes of existing episodes? At least if they told new tales I could see some appeal, but trust me, you’ll want to stick with the real deal.

The rest of the stuff is better. Outtakes on “The French Mistake” are just as funny as what’s left in, and there’s a nice 30 minute piece on Ackles directing debut. It’s a bit fluffy (apparently, he never ran into a single problem! Good for him!) but it’s still a fun look behind the scenes, and much more in depth than I was expecting. Then there’s a pretty interesting look at the nature of the soul, in which we hear from some theologians and other “experts” for a while before they segue into discussing how it applies to Sam/the show. The gag reel seems a bit in-jokey (I think it was put together for the crew) and runs a bit too long, but it’s got a number of good laughs.

And exclusive to Blu-ray is a “Hunter’s Guide”, which is also the best of the lot. Set up as an interactive replica of their leather guide, we get two pieces on each episode; one that runs 3-4 minutes, the other 1-2. The long one will focus on one aspect of the show (location scouting, the score, the editing, the FX, etc) and go into detail of how it applies to a particular episode (not always the one its linked to in the menu; there are like three that focus largely on “Frontierland”). The other is usually a quick interview or outtake of some sort, or just a lame ass photo montage, but still adds some insight/context to the episode that the other features do not offer. It’ll take about two hours to go through it all, but it’s worth the effort (there’s no “play all” – keep your remote handy). Watching everything also unlocks a few Easter Eggs, which are more behind the scenes clips that you can access on the “back page” of the guide. I unlocked three, not sure if there any others.

So overall it’s not the show’s best season, but considering that they were a bit rudderless being the 6th year of a 5 year show (and also having showrunner Kripke take a backseat to Gamble), it could have been a disaster. After a shaky start they found their footing and delivered a season that was consistent with the others, and while I wasn’t a big fan of the final episode’s reveal, it certainly sets up an interesting concept for Season 7 – can’t wait to see how they handle it.

What say you?

DVD Review: Supernatural Season 6

By: Abdallh Gamal on: 8:06 PM