DVD Review

Continuing the tradition of games turned into movies, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider received a lukewarm critical response. Angelina Jolie does her best – apart from her obvious qualifications, her English accent is so good it’s disconcerting – and her dad turns up in a few scenes, presumably cos he fancied a holiday. There’s also Chris Barrie, completely miscast as Lara’s butler, a pre-fame Daniel Craig not registering much, and assorted supporting victims who don’t do a lot except sit around on sofas. The stunts are amazing, it’s very well made, but there’s hardly any film there to criticise, and...

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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (snappy title eh?) is the second directorial effort by Tommy Lee Jones, who also stars. He plays an aging cowboy whose friend is killed in suspicious circumstances. When the local authorities cover things up, our hero takes things into his own hands, digs up the body and forces the main suspect to accompany him on a nightmare trip to Mexico to give his friend the burial he deserves. As you can tell, this owes a lot to Sam Peckinpah, in particular Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, but Jones and d.p. Chris...

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John Carpenter’s last cinema feature (prior to 2011′s The Ward), Ghosts of Mars was an attempt to recreate the success of his second outing, Assault on Precinct 13, by relocating a western plot to a modern genre setting. In this case, he puts a Hawks-like ensemble cast on Mars and yet manages to incorporate a prison set and a train chase straight out of a ’50s backlot. Ice Cube plays killer convict Desolation Williams, a less impressive version of Darwin Joston’s Napoleon Wilson from Assault, teaming up with cop Natasha Henstridge and assorted b-movie faces including Jason Statham, Clea...

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Some big-budget idiocy in Evolution, which started life as a thriller but ends up as a lazy Ivan Reitman comedy, carrying on the vogue for fart jokes as a guaranteed way of making morons laugh. It’s a shame as there are some clever ideas, very good effects, and a few good jokes, and Duchovny builds on his nice quiet line of humour along sidekick Orlando Jones. Sadly we also get Julianne Moore doing an impression of Norman Wisdom; falling over has never looked less funny. Make sure you get the American disk: it has a commentary, deleted scenes and...

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C.H.U.D. was a big hit in the early days of home video and has now been cleaned up by Anchor Bay on DVD (although again this seems to be a different cut than the one I remember all those years ago). It’s a low-budget tale of monsters created in the New York drains by toxic waste, and is mainly notable for the number of actors who went on to greater things – John Heard, Daniel Stern, John Goodman, Kim Greist and Jon Polito among them. Heard and Stern turn up on the commentary track, which is one of the...

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Dwight Yoakam’s directorial debut is unsurprisingly a western, South of Heaven :West of Hell. For fans of the offbeat, this is a bit of a find, being closer in tone and content to High Plains Drifter and the TV series Deadwood than anything John Wayne might have appeared in. The characters are often incoherent and randomly motivated, and the pace is uneven: it ambles along uneventfully for an hour or so, then characters start to die unpleasantly with little logic and a heavy debt to Sam Peckinpah. It’s very well-made for such a cheap movie but is also very...

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Prince of Darkness is John Carpenter’s under-rated shocker from 1987, with the admittedly loopy story of the Devil’s son somehow being trapped under a church in LA in a giant vat of green shampoo. The budget doesn’t really stretch far enough, the script is dreadfully patchy but some of the imagery is unforgettable, especially the liquid mirrors and the broadcasts from the future. And Alice Cooper kills someone with half a bike. Carpenter’s score is typically minimal but as always he knows exactly how to use it, especially in the movie’s opening and the frantic finale. The cast do...

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One of my favourite thrillers of recent years is David Fincher’s Panic Room, now out in R1 and soon in R2 as a 3-disc special edition. I’m in a bit of a minority with Fincher, as I find he over-reaches himself when he tries to be serious (see Seven and Fight Club) but I love his ‘less ambitious’ movies like The Game and now this. It’s the story of yuppie divorcee Jodie Foster and her diabetic daughter, who move into a large brownstone with, you guessed it, a ‘panic room’ where they can seal themselves off from intruders. You’ll...

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The Island , from much-maligned directorial superstar Michael Bay, had great word-of-mouth during previews, and then died a horrible and mysterious death at the US box office. Watching it on DVD, its faults are apparent but it’s still a bit strange that it wasn’t at least a moderate hit. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johannson star as a couple in a world very reminiscent of THX-1138, all gleaming chrome and long white corridors, who discover that they are just clones being bred for spare parts. (Those of us who have seen the 1979 low-budget mess The Clonus Horror will appreciate...

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