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Scores:
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THE
WILD GEESE - U.K.
- Switzerland (1978)
Tango Entertainment
Rated R |
Color |
134 Min. |
R1 - NTSC
DVD released September 27, 2005
.........
Ye olde whip
a disparate group of men into an elite commando team and send
'em on a mission formula, only with a not-so stiff British
upper lip and a distinct African flavor. And it all works quite
well. Richard Burton is Colonel Faulkner, the veteran mercenary
hired by an industrialist (Stewart Granger) to rescue an imprisoned
political leader from the clutches of a brutal African dictator.
Faulkner assembles a force of experienced mercs, including old
buddies Flynn (Roger Moore) and Janders (Richard Harris), for
the daring but meticulously planned raid, which in the end turns
out a rather bloody, bollocks-upped affair. This is a solid if
undistinguished action-adventure film done the old fashioned way
(no digital explosions!), elevated by a cast of familiar, likable
actors and a closer adherence to the real world. Nobody does anything
superheroic or impossible (even with 007 himself on hand), and
the high body count ultimately includes a significant number of
the mercenaries themselves. The film even addresses the subject
of racial politics in post-colonial Africa without getting preachy
or slowing down the gung-ho narrative. Like The
Dirty Dozen, it's the antithesis of the "chick flick"
— this is purely a guy's movie, the
kind you knock back in the Barcalounger with a cold brewski to.
(If you're a guy, that is.) The impatient under-30 crowd may get
a bit antsy during the first hour, though, as virtually all the
action is saved for the second half. •
• • The only release I've seen to date by Tango, the disc
presents a mediocre 1.85:1 transfer —
while the source print is nearly pristine, it's not anamorphic
— and a 5.1 Surround mix that's decent
enough but nothing more. A wide array of extras compensate, ranging
from the worthwhile (a documentary on producer Euan Lloyd, an
audio commentary with Lloyd and Roger Moore, some 40 minutes of
radio interviews) to the downright goofy (the "Interactive
Combat Menu" lets you sample individual kill scenes, which
aren't even the best ones in the movie). -
B. Lindsey
Update
Severin released a remastered Blu-ray/DVD combo pack of The
Wild Geese in December 2012. Read the EC review HERE.
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Film:
7 |
DVD: 6 |
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PIRATES
-
Tunisia - France (1986)
Manga Films
Not Rated |
Color |
114 Min. |
R2
- PAL
DVD released 2005
.........
Captain
Red (Walter Matthau) and his sidekick the Frog (Cris Campion)
battle the Spanish Crown in their quest for gold... Originally
devised as his next project after Chinatown
(1974), Pirates sat on the shelf
for over ten years as Roman Polanski battled legal problems and
ultimately fled the country to find refuge in Paris. The project
seemed a natural to mark the director’s return to filmmaking after
a six year absence (following the release of Tess)
but it would seem that it had gotten a little stale in the interim.
Independently financed by a Tunisian producer, Pirates
ended up becoming an expensive bomb, and it has since attained
the generally accepted reputation of being its gifted director’s
worst film. While it is certainly his weakest effort on the whole,
that should not suggest that the film is without merit. Polanski’s
extraordinary visual sense permeates the film —
some of the shots are beautiful enough to frame and hang on a
wall. The humor treads a fine line between the grotesque and the
farcical — it’s hardly surprising that gags like Captain Red and
the Frog being forced to divvy up a freshly killed rat and eat
it for the benefit of a sadistic Spanish nobleman didn’t set audiences
roaring with laughter — but while some of the humor falls flat,
a lot of the film is amusing in a whimsical way. On the downside,
the casting isn’t entirely right. It’s hard to imagine anybody
further removed from Jack Nicholson (the original choice for the
role; he would have played it had it been made after Chinatown
as planned) than Walter Matthau, but the veteran actor does wonders
with the part. With a theatrical Cockney accent and wooden leg,
he transforms Captain Red into a lovably amoral buccaneer. Polanski
also managed to assemble some first rate character actors for
smaller roles, including Ferdy Mayne, Roy Kinnear and Anthony
Dawson, but the younger leads are woefully miscast in the form
of Cris Campion and Charlotte Lewis. The mind toys happily with
the idea of Polanski playing the Frog (this was the intention,
but by the time cameras rolled the director feared he was too
old), especially since Campion has all the presence of a wet blanket,
while Lewis is all superficial gloss and no substance. Its missteps
are enough to put it below the high standard delivered by Polanski
in his other films, but Pirates still
has enough to warrant a solid recommendation. •
• • Only released to VHS in America
via a long OOP (not to mention horribly panned and scanned) edition,
Pirates has surfaced in widescreen
on R2 DVD via a Spanish and a German release. The German disc
is to be avoided, as it removed about 20 minutes of material,
but the Spanish release from Manga is worth importing. The 2.35/16x9
transfer is a revelation compared to VHS, though the image looks
a little overly bright. Colors are vivid, however, and print damage
is minimal. Audio options include a dubbed Spanish track as well
as the original English track, though the latter has forced Spanish
subtitles (there is a way of getting around the subtitles, however:
simply start the film in English then go back to the menu and
hit the no subtitles icon; then hit resume film —
not start film — and the subtitles will be disabled). Extras
are negligible, but it’s just nice to have an uncut, widescreen
edition of the picture.
- T. Howarth
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Film:
6 |
DVD: 5 |
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CUL-DE-SAC
-
U.K. (1966)
Anchor Bay U.K.
Rated C-12 |
B&W |
107 Min. |
R2 -
PAL
DVD released August 25, 2003
.........
Two
wounded gangsters (Lionel Stander and Jack MacGowran) take a middle
aged milquetoast (Donald Pleasence) and his sexy wife (Francoise
Dorleac) hostage... After making a big splash with his tense debut
Knife in the Water (1962), Roman
Polanski fled his native Poland and found refuge in swinging London.
Looking to establish himself as a commercial filmmaker, he and
partner Gerard Brach decided to concoct a screenplay for a horror
picture. After being turned away by Hammer Studios, Polanski found
a home at Compton —
a low rung company that previously specialized in sexploitation
pictures. There he made the dazzling Repulsion
(1965), a letter perfect study in paranoia and mental deterioration.
The film's success allowed Polanski to follow up with a more personal
project, Cul-de-sac. An absurdist
dark comedy in the style of Samuel Beckett (it can really be read
as a deeply personal take on Waiting for Godot), it mixes
razor sharp tension, flawless performances and darkly disturbing
comedy to unsettling effect. Polanski has often cited it as a
personal favorite in his body of work, and it's easy to see why
— to this day it remains one of his most distinctive and satisfying
achievements. The small cast is perfection: Donald Pleasence,
with a shaved head and occasionally done up in drag, never gave
a stronger performance on film — he transforms his difficult-
to-sympathize-with character into a tragic clown to be pitied;
expatriate American actor Lionel Stander also has a field day
as the more dominant of the two gangsters, with Jack MacGowran
(later promoted to the lead in Polanski's Fearless
Vampire Killers) providing plenty of wry humor as his ailing
associate; Francoise Dorleac, sister of Catherine Deneuve (the
star of Repulsion), is appropriately
sexy and bitchy as Pleasence's all-too-mismatched bride. With
its stark cinematography by Gilbert Taylor and terrific jazz score
by Krystof Komeda, Cul-de-sac
bends and blurs the lines between genres and works as a completely
unique slice of cinema. •
• • Anchor Bay's release of Cul-de-sac,
also available as part of a highly recommended (but now difficult
to obtain) Polanski box set, is a godsend. Never released officially
to video, laser or DVD in the U.S., it presents the film fully
uncut and in its original 1.85 aspect ratio. Compared to the fullframe
gray market tapes that have circulated, the image is a revelation
—
the image is sharp and appropriately moody, and the restored info
gives new life to the compositions. The mono English soundtrack
is clean and clear, but there's also a 5.1 remix that is to be
avoided. Extras include a fascinating featurette with newly filmed
interviews with Polanski, Taylor and some of the surviving cast
(sadly, all the principal players have since passed away).
- T. Howarth |
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Update
In August 2011 Criterion is releasing a deluxe North American
edition of Cul-de-sac on both DVD
(R1 - NTSC) and Blu-ray.
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Film:
9 |
DVD: 10 |
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THE
PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
-
U.K. (1970)
MGM Home Entertainment
Rated PG-13 |
Color |
125 Min. |
R1 - NTSC
DVD released July 15, 2003
.........
Newly
unearthed documents from the late Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely) shed
a new light on the private life of his friend and associate, Sherlock
Holmes (Robert Stephens)... Devised by producer/co-writer/director
Billy Wilder as a an epic road show production along the lines
of How the West Was Won, The
Private Life of Sherlock Holmes ended up becoming his most
heartbreaking experience as a filmmaker. After courting Peter
O’Toole and Peter Sellers to play the leads, he went with comparative
unknowns in the form of Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely. The
loss in star power didn’t affect the film’s lush production values
and lengthy shooting schedule, however, and Wilder delivered an
epic blend of humor and pathos, as sharp and incisive as his best
work. After turning in his original cut, running roughly three
hours, the producers decided that the road show angle had been
played out —
rather than risk only being able to book the film for limited
engagements due to its excessive length, they took advantage of
the film’s deliberately episodic structure to cut it down to a
more manageable two hour running time. Wilder was devastated by
the cuts, but even in its present form, Private
Life is virtually a masterpiece. By far the most lyrically
beautiful of the director’s films, it tempers his customary cynicism
and wit with a strain of dark romanticism and a palpable sense
of loss. Stephens is ideal as Holmes — he plays the character
as very effete, leading to questions about his sexuality, and
he seems to be having a ball playing with Wilder’s intricately
constructed dialogue. Blakely is less satisfying as Watson, tending
to overplay the broader aspects of the character, but the supporting
cast includes good turns from Christopher Lee as Holmes’ pompous
older brother Mycroft and Clive Revill as a devious Russian. Miklos
Rosza’s magnificent score is the icing on the cake, making this
far and away the best Sherlock Holmes film ever made. •
• • MGM’s release is even better
than Image Entertainment’s previous laser disc edition. The 2.35/16x9
image is in very good shape – colors are appropriately muted but
beautiful, and the framing is correct. Print damage is limited
to some minor speckling. The mono soundtrack is clean and clear.
Extras include some footage cut from the film, and an engaging
new interview with Christopher Lee, who calls Wilder, in no uncertain
terms, the finest director he ever worked with.
- T. Howarth
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Film:
10 |
DVD: 10 |
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WAR-GODS
OF THE DEEP -
U.S.A. (1965)
MGM Home Entertainment
Not Rated / Color / 85 Min. / R1 - NTSC
DVD released November 20, 2001
.........
After a series
of mysterious occurrences in a seaside village — culminating in
the abduction of Jill Tregillis (pretty but bland Susan Hart,
who would appear alongside Price later the same year in Dr.
Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine) by a fish-man — mineral
specialist Ben Harris (Tab Hunter) and artist Harold Tiffin Jones
(Mary Poppins' David Tomlinson) descend
into the mysterious underwater city of Lyonesse to rescue her.
There, they encounter a race of amphibian gill-men led by "the
Captain" (Vincent Price) and his band of smugglers, kept alive
for 100 years by the strange properties of the undersea city's
air. The Captain's world is in danger of destruction from a nearby
volcano; unless Harris and Jones can find Tregillis and escape,
they too face death by either the destructive forces of an impending
volcanic eruption or at the tyrannical hands of the Captain...
Another in the 'pseudo-Poe' series, with only the most tenuous
of connections to the author's works (Price evocatively narrates
Poe's poem City Under the Sea at various points throughout
the film), War-Gods is a disappointing
would-be actioner let down by wooden performances and a lethargic
script. Both Hunter and Hart are bland in the lead roles, while
Tomlinson displays his knack for out-of-place comic relief while
paired with an insufferable hen for the length of the picture.
(Named Herbert, the bird gets special mention in the end credits!)
Even Price appears unusually leaden in his customary villain role,
conveying a weariness that seems sadly all too real. Although
only 85 minutes, the film moves at a crawl; even the climactic
underwater pursuit drags on at a snail's pace. Coming from Jacques
Tourneur, director of the classic Curse
of the Demon, the lackluster final product is surprising.
This is not to say that there are no good touches in War-Gods.
The undersea sets, in spite of a low-budget, are actually quite
lavish looking with different styles of architecture worked throughout,
such as Roman-style columns and pillars and what look like Egyptian
hieroglyphics on some of the walls. The underwater photography,
while unspectacular, is competently handled. That said, many of
the miniature shots are unconvincingly photographed and the gill-men,
looking like shabby cousins to the Black Lagoon creature, disappoint.
For Vincent Price buffs and Poe completists only.
• • • As I've come to expect from
MGM, War-Gods looks gorgeous, with
the exception of a couple of scenes bearing noticeable print damage
that resembles jagged vertical lines. (The 2.35:1 widescreen transfer
is 16x9 enhanced.) The DVD sports the usual theatrical trailer
as a bonus.
-
L. Micromatis
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THE
MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD
-
U.S.A. (1957)
MGM Home Entertainment
Rated G |
B&W |
84 Min. |
R1 - NTSC
DVD released August 28, 2001*
.........
The 1950s were
a big decade for science fiction films: big insects, big reptiles,
big Colossal Men and Women, and now big mollusks! In this underrated
thriller from 1957, swimmers are mysteriously disappearing and
it's up to Lt. Twillinger (Tim Holt, saddled with what has to
be the oddest hero's name of the decade) to find out why. The
answer comes in the form of giant prehistoric mollusks, stirred
from their dormant state by that old stand-by, radiation. Hunting
for food, the slithery slug-like critters find no better a source
than nubile swimmers and, in one case borne of desperation, a
crusty old night watchman. It's up to Twillinger and a daffy doc
(Hans Conried, unusually restrained for this type of picture)
to put the kibosh on these invaders from the ocean depths before
us humans are all turned into tasty treats for the malevolent
mollusks. Clearly patterned after the best big bug flick of all
time, 1955's Them!
(right down to the obligatory "let's-stop-the-film-to-watch-a-nature-reel-on-the
critters" sequence), Challenged nevertheless
succeeds on its own terms as a solid, satisfying monster picture.
Holt, Conried, and Audrey Dalton as the requisite love interest
all perform earnestly in their roles. In a welcome change from
the norm, the major characters are particularly well rounded.
Even Conried, who's known for slicing the ham thick as steaks,
is quiet and understated. The mollusks themselves (or itself,
rather, as only one mock-up was constructed) are very well realized.
Like Them!'s full-sized ants, the
creatures are fully articulated and, with their skull-like features
and googly eyes, are really creepy. There are also a couple of
well-executed scare scenes that still jolted even this jaded viewer
on the second viewing. • • • The
film looks great on DVD; the black and white photography is rich
with no noticeable speckling or scratches. As for extras — well,
coming from MGM's Midnite Movies line one would expect
the obligatory trailer but, alas, that's missing from this release.
In spite of the bare-boned nature of this disc, however, Challenged
is a hugely satisfying monster pic and the under thirteen smackers
price is just righty. -
L. Micromatis |
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*Update
Although the DVD reviewed here was discontinued
by MGM in 2005, a double feature edition was issued that same
year pairing Challenged with
1957's It!
The Terror from Beyond Space.
A way cooler deal! The cover art/product link above is for this
newer disc.
| Film:
7 |
DVD: 7
(2005 double feature
edition) |
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SHAOLIN
VS. LAMA -
Taiwan (1983)
Ground Zero
Not Rated |
Color |
90 Min. |
R0 - NTSC
DVD released April 24, 2001
.........
There's
nothing particularly special about this Formosan fu-fest yet I
vividly recall watching it on VHS back in the early 1990s. Perhaps
it's the combination of energetic fight scenes, goofily dubbed
dialog and colorful costumes — no, those same elements are present
in a host of virtually interchangeable martial arts flicks. So
what is it about Shaolin vs. Lama
that was memorable? Sure, every well-worn kung fu movie cliché
in the (I Ching) manual is trotted out, but this one seems to
get 'em mostly right... achieving balance in a sort of cinematic
feng-shui. It presents the eyerollingly familiar in a pleasing,
entertaining package: the fight scenes are above average and a
satisfying number of unintentional laughs are to be had. 1978
World Tae Kwondo champion Chang Shan (Swordsman's
Adventure; Kickboxer) makes
a nifty villain as the evil, ruthless Gold Lama. If furious old
style martial arts combat and humorously dubbed bald guys with
big bushy eyebrows are your idea of a fun kung fu flick, then
this bargain-priced disc should fit the niche. Be warned, though
— what the old master does to hero Sun Yu Ting (Mafia
vs. Ninja's Alexander Lo Rei) with his gnarly, leprous-looking
foot may put you off food for a while! •
• • This DVD presents the same Pan and Scan transfer (in
which the panning is about nil) used for the bargain bin VHS tape
I watched in 1992. Some of the action is therefore cropped off
on the sides; it's routine dialog scenes that are more often adversely
affected rather than any of the fight sequences. Picture is grainy
but colors are vivid and bright.
-
B. Lindsey |
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Update
This DVD went OOP sometime in 2005-6.
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MESA
OF LOST WOMEN - U.S.A.
(1953)
Image
Entertainment
Not Rated |
B&W |
70 Min. |
R0 - NTSC
DVD released December 26, 2000
.........
What
a sorry-ass movie. The narrator doesn't shut up — just annoyingly
keeps yapping away — for the first five minutes. The flamenco-style
musical score quickly becomes akin to nails on a chalkboard; be
warned that it plays virtually non-stop for a full hour, takes
a break for a minute or so, then finishes out the flick's yawn-inducing
climax. The script is terrible, the acting is terrible and production
values strictly low-rent. Only during the sultry dance routine
by raven-tressed Tandra Quinn does the film flicker briefly to
life. Sadly, moments of unintentional humor are few and far between...
despite the presence of dwarves, giant spider puppets, women in
bad wigs and Jackie Coogan (TV's "Uncle Fester") as
a mad scientist with a huge facial mole. Such a waste of potential
— an unpardonable sin! Mesa of Lost Women
is 100% endurance test, 69 minutes of sheer hell. I believe it's
a diabolical form of torture, as your willpower will be gravely
tested to keep from hurling the handiest nearby object at the
screen rather than just hitting the stop button. It's just that
goddam awful. • • • Image's DVD
is sub-par. No effort was made to clean up the dark, damaged print
used for the transfer, or to find a better one. (Maybe there isn't
one — and is that really a bad thing? This is one film that definitely
does not need preserving.) Ironically, the movie's trailer
looks better and brighter than the "reel" thing. Speaking of trailers,
Image does include a nice little Easter Egg on the disc. In the
Main Menu, cycle down to the "atomic" symbol and press Enter.
You'll now be able to access five Wade Williams Collection movie
trailers: Carnival of Souls, The
Cosmic Man, Giant from the Unknown,
Robot
Monster and Teenagers from
Outer Space.
-
B. Lindsey
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