DVD Review

DVD reviews originally written for the Barclays in-house SF magazine

Deja Vu (2006)

Reunited with director Tony Scott for the third time, Denzel Washington plays a New Orleans ATF agent brought in to investigate the bombing of a car ferry. A shadowy FBI agent played by Val Kilmer introduces him to the latest surveillance technology, which can look in detail at the events of exactly four and a half days ago (no, don’t ask me). The movie then becomes a combination of romance, police procedural and time/space paradox story, all filmed with Scott’s usual over-cranked style. As with Man On Fire, there’s a terrific score by Harry Gregson-Williams and inventive visuals courtesy...

Paradise Lost (2006)

Originally titled Turistas, this was retitled Paradise Lost for its UK cinema release. It’s the cautionary tale of a group of young and under-dressed backpackers who end up marooned in the Brazilian jungle. After a bit of wandering around in nice scenery, it all gets nasty enough to make you cancel that trip to Rio and go to Skegness instead, as it turns into a cross between Wish You Were Here and a ‘70s Philippino mad doctor slasher movie (come on, I know you’ve seen a few). I suspect that some scenes, and one in particular, have been added...

Just after the release of Man On Fire, I dug out an old Tony Scott movie called Revenge. It makes a very interesting companion piece to the later movie, treating a similar story as one of revenge rather than redemption. Kevin Costner stars as a fighter pilot who has an affair with Madeleine Stowe (unfortunately married to rich Mexican gangster Anthony Quinn), setting up a series of violent incidents. Although the movie is coated in Scott’s trademark style of the time (this was just after Top Gun), and the first half is more or less a standard romantic melodrama,...

The Far Side of Jericho (2006)

This month’s Western is The Far Side of Jericho, directed by Tim Hunter who made a big splash with River’s Edge (sic) back in the 80s, but who has seemingly been exiled to TV ever since leaving Robocop 2 over ‘creative differences’. One of his TV jobs was directing episodes of Deadwood, and this takes a similar deconstructive attitude to the Western, emphasizing the hardship and cruelty of living in a land with no justice. Three women are forced to go on the run after their husbands are hanged, and they are pursued by assorted character actors, including Patrick...

As a bit of light relief, I watched The Jacket, which is a sort of SF movie directed by obscure English film-maker John Maybury. The good news is that it’s a thought-provoking and surprisingly moving story which is well worth putting the effort in for. Adrien Brody stars as a veteran of the first Gulf War who is treated for his mental problems by wacky doctor Kris Kristofferson and his sensory-deprivation tank. Then it all gets a bit weird, involving flashbacks, flashes forward in time to 2007, Keira Knightley, or maybe none of the above. There are a couple...

For less than fifteen quid, I picked up Anchor Bay’s R2 box set, The Blind Dead Collection, which covers Amando de Ossorio’s 4-film series made in Spain in the early 70s. These must have been inspired initially by the success of Night of the Living Dead, and are not without their attractions: the blurb claims ‘a relentless onslaught of creepy atmosphere, shocking violence, forbidden sexuality, and the still-chilling icons of Euro Horror: the eyeless undead who hunt by sound in their quest for human flesh’. For once the blurb isn’t far off, though it fails to mention the terrible...

I expected a lot from Bruiser, a new movie from my old pal George A. Romero, which arrived on Belgian (?) DVD with very little fanfare. It’s a nice concept, about a man who is ignored to the point where he wakes up with a blank white mask for a face. The cast includes several strange choices: Jason Flemyng plays the lead without ever really earning our sympathy, or explaining why a Cockney is working in Toronto, and Peter Stormare plays the ‘villain’ with more charm than the part deserves. There’s the political subtext and the deliberate pacing and...

As late as the ‘eighties, before the studios knocked any genuine individuality out of their ‘product’, and before Tarantino made it hip to drop lots of cultural references for no good reason, it wan’t unusual to sit there surrounded by a largely baffled audience, most of them wondering if confusion was a good enough reason to ask for your money back. A case in point was Big Trouble in Little China, John Carpenter’s affectionate tribute to Oriental action movies. On the plus side – Carpenter’s usual visual panache (assisted by the great Dean Cundey) and thumping synth score, some great...

For the uneducated, this is a story of a traffic cop in Arizona with aspirations to become a detective, hampered by his corrupt bosses and the fact that he’s only five feet four inches tall. It’s the only movie directed by music producer James William Guercio and is stunningly photographed by the great Conrad Hall...

Another true story (said with tongue firmly in cheek) inspired The Mothman Prophecies. What we’ve got here is an X-Files-type story with a bigger budget, wrapped around the actual event of a bridge falling into a river in Ohio in the late ‘60s. This is connected to several appearances in the weeks before the disaster of a winged creature with red eyes. (In fact, wasn’t there an episode of the X-Files based around the mothman, or did I dream it?) Anyway, this version is relocated to recent years, and has Richard Gere as a bereaved reporter drawn to a...

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DVD Review

Deja Vu (2006)

Paradise Lost (2006)

Revenge (1990)

The Far Side of Jericho (2006)

The Jacket (2005)

The Blind Dead Collection (1971)

Bruiser (2000)

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Electra Glide in Blue (1973)

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

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