Mike Spring
What’s New in Home Video & Pop Culture – October 8th, 2024
While it’s a pretty varied week in terms of genres and titles this week, there’s no doubt that the Halloween crush has started, with no less than four horror movies out — as well as a horror themed tabletop game! The fourth quarter holiday releases are also kicking off, as we see two massive television Complete Series box sets have dropped. There’s lots to choose from, so read on for all the details!
A Quiet Place: Day One
The Movie: I’m not generally a fan of the concept of “damning with faint praise,” so I want to be clear right off the bat that I did enjoy A Quiet Place: Day One quite a bit. That said, the Quiet Place franchise has thus far been a series of diminishing returns for me. The first movie is an absolutely pitch-perfect sci-fi thriller/horror movie. The second one is an excellent continuation of that story that isn’t quite as good, but that I still loved. A Quiet Place: Day One is a really tense and enjoyable movie… it’s just the least effective of the three. The film goes back to the first day the aliens land on earth, and we follow Sammy (an outstanding Lupita Nyong’o), a young woman with seemingly terminal cancer as she tries to survive the invasion, along with fellow survivor Eric (Joseph Quinn of Stranger Things fame.) Changing the location from a farm in the country to New York City certainly gives the filmmakers a new dynamic to play with, and it does lead to some pretty intense sequences. They biggest problem with the film is the writing, which keeps having our lead characters do things that seem foolish, the kinds of things that make you want to yell at the screen. There’s also some internal logic flaws in the script; we know that the creatures can’t swim, but there’s a sequence in the film that sure makes it seem like they can, which only makes a later sequence where that inability to swim becomes a major plot point seem disjointed. Those complaints aside, I still really enjoyed the film, but if I’m ranking the trilogy, it’s the third-best movie in the series.
The 4K Video/Audio: A Quiet Place: Day One looks and sounds great on 4K Ultra HD. I usually start off by discussing the video first, but let’s look at the audio first here because no other movie series in recent years relies so much on audio as a part of the story as this one does. The surround soundtrack does an excellent job of replicating the movie theater experience. While, yes, there are large portions of the film where everything is silent, this is easily the most “noisy” film in the series, as the city environment just creates a lot more opportunity for potential sounds, all of which are directionally placed in the soundfield with expert care. The silence is almost deafening, and when the action kicks in, all of the surround channels come to life with activity. The picture quality also excels, with razor sharp imagery, bright and vibrant colors, and a nice, deep black level. All in all, this is a terrific effort.
The Bonus Features: There are five making-of featurettes here, along with a collection of deleted and extended scenes, all of which run a little under an hour. The film is also available in a very sharp-looking Steelbook case as well as a standard 4K Ultra HD edition (and, of course, Blu-ray and DVD), but I can say with the Steelbook in my hand that it’s the way to go if you like that kind of thing, which I do.
Digital Copy Included: Yes
The Wrap-Up: Again, I don’t want it to seem like I’m saying there’s anything wrong with A Quiet Place: Day One when I compare it to the first two films. Honestly, if it was the first movie in the series and we didn’t have the other two to compare it to, I’d probably be loudly exclaiming how exiting it is. But it’s not, and so comparisons are inevitable. All that said, this is still definitely a movie worth being in your collection.
Harold and the Purple Crayon
The Movie: Harold and the Purple Crayon is a kids’ movie. And I know, I know, that seems kind of obvious, but what I mean is that it’s a 100% for-kids movie, not a movie that’s equally aimed at both children and their parents. You know how a lot of kids movies these days have layers built into them that adults will appreciate and wry inside jokes or asides that are funny for the parents but that go right over the kids heads? Yeah, that’s not this movie. This one is made squarely for kids in that 5-8 year-old range, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It just means that the adults watching it will have to put up with it being aimed at their kids and not them. The story sees Harold from the iconic children’s books by Crockett Johnson turns into an adult and eventually become curious about the real world. He draws himself into the real world, followed by his best friends Moose and Porcupine (who turn into humans) and gets involved with a young boy and his mom. The movie has shades of Elf to it (which is somewhat ironic since Zooey Deschanel plays the mom here), but it’s a much simpler story. Harold tries to navigate the sea world and the machinations of a librarian who wants Harold’s power for himself. It’s a fun little movie, but there are some parts that hard to reconcile as an adult, such as when Harold draws a skate ramp in a crowded park and all the teenagers around just start skating on it rather than freak out because they just witnessed a guy literally creating a skate ramp out of thin air. Again, it’s geared for kids, not adults who will think about these things.
The Bonus Features: There are just a few, a short promo featurette that runs about two minutes, a how-to-draw featurette, a music sing along, and six deleted scenes.
Digital Copy Included: Yes
The Wrap-Up: Ultimately, I found Harold and the Purple Crayon to be enjoyable, but I watched it with my ‘seeing things through kids eyes’ lenses on. As a family movie to be watched with young kids, I think it will be enjoyable. As a ‘grown-ups without kids around watching it because they loved the books as a child’ experience, it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
The Night Agent: Season One
The Show: The things you learn when you sit down to review a show or movie. For example, I had no idea that The Night Agent was Netflix’s number-one streamed show of 2023. I remember seeing the trailer and wanting to watch it, I remember not getting around to watching it (as I’m too busy watching review titles 99% of the time), and then I remember thinking, “Well, someday I’ll watch it.” But apparently, while I was doing that, everybody else on the planet was watching The Night Agent. And now that it’s a review title for me (as it’s been released on DVD by Sony), I made the time to watch it, and I can say that it’s easy to see why it was so popular. The show focuses on FBI agent named Peter Sutherland who works in a windowless room in the basement of the FBI monitoring a phone line that never rings. Rose Larkin is a software executive staying with her aunt and uncle when they are murdered. Before they’re killed they give her a phone number to call for help, and she ends up on the phone with Peter, who brings her to safety. But her aunt and uncle weren’t nobodies, and there are forces at the government who are out to keep Rose from sharing anything she might have overheard. The show starts off strong with a good first episode, but the second episode is where it kicked into really high gear for me. It mixes action with suspense and conspiracy theories, and you get a blend of good guys on the run, bad guys chasing them, shadowy forces conspiring against everyone, terrorist threats, and ties to the characters’ pasts all mixed together. It’s a really sharp show, and it moves at a good pace, and I really dug it a lot.
The Bonus Features: Netflix shows released on home video are notorious for dropping completely bare bones, but The Night Agent actually does include some extras. You get an audio commentary for the first episode with producer/writer Shawn Ryan, a collection of a dozen deleted scenes, two featurettes on the visual effects in the first and last episodes, and a blooper reel. So that’s pretty cool!
Digital Copy Included: No
The Wrap-Up: I always like when Netflix lets its shows get released on home video. If you’re not a Netflix subscriber or you just want to have The Night Agent: Season One in your collection because you liked it to much, this new set is worth the pick up, My only complaint is that this is a show that really needed a high definition Blu-ray release and only got a standard def DVD release, which was a huge disappointment. Hopefully they’ll fix that in the future.
Kinds of Kindness
The Movie: At this point, I kind of can’t even criticize Yorgos Lanthimos movies anymore, because even though I quite dislike them, it’s clear that he’s not making movies for me. I’m the furthest person in mind when he makes his movies. There is apparently an audience out there for the notorious director’s oddball and offbeat brand of storytelling — which I’ve heard described as absurdist and surreal, among other things — and I am not it. His follow up to last year’s award-winning Poor Things is Kinds of Kindness, a triptych anthology movie that tells three different stories, each one featuring the same cast in different roles. In the first one, a man named Robert (Jess Plemons) is ordered to kill another man in a car “accident” by his lover/benefactor (Willem Dafoe) who apparently controls literally every minute of Robert’s days and life. When Robert refuses, his life begins to spiral out of control. The second story sees Plemons playing a police officer whose wife, Liz (Emma Stone), has gone missing when her research vessel disappears. When she comes home, questions about where she was and what happened abound, and something seems different about her. In the third part, Plemons and Stone play a married couple in a cult who are searching for a person who can reanimate the dead. Here’s the problem I have with Lanthimos’s films: generally, while I watch them, I’m rolling my eyes and constantly thinking about all the things I dislike about the movie… but there’s just enough of a curiosity factor to want to see it through the end to figure out where everything is going. And then — then! — the payoff is completely not worth it. I spent almost an hour trying to figure out why Jesse Plemons’ Robert was allowing Willem Dafoe’s character to run his entire life in the first story, only to find out that that is never addressed when the story wraps up. It’s wholly unsatisfying. So not only are the films ridiculous, but the payoff you’re sitting through the movie to get to is completely absent. Lanthimos also does this thing where he will often have the supporting actors who only appear in a scene or two seemingly act in a completely stiff and unnatural way, and it’s really bothersome. I don’t know if he just hires bad actors or he doesn’t bother to direct the non-marquee talent or he does it on purpose to accentuate the main performances, but it’s disjointed and distracting.
The Bonus Features: There is a making-of feature that includes interviews with the cast and crew and a collection of deleted scenes, in case the two-hour-and-44-minute running time wasn’t enough weirdness for you.
Digital Copy Included: Yes
The Wrap-Up: Despite an extremely talented cast that includes the aforementioned Plemons, Stone, and Dafoe as well as Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, and Joe Alwyn, Kinds of Kindness is the kind of movie that will likely only appeal to people who are already fans of the director’s style. I’m not one of those people and I found myself having the same reaction to this movie that I have to most of his other ones: head-scratching and annoyance.
The West Wing: The Complete Series
The Show: Over the course of seven seasons, The West Wing went from being a show at the bottom of the ratings chart in its first season to one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed series of all time in its last. Amazingly, in an era where politics were becoming more divisive than ever, The West Wing managed to place a dramatic series inside the White House and take on political issues without ever being overtly political, or at least overtly partisan. Now — amazingly on Blu-ray for the first time — the entire show has been collected into a fantastic box set that includes all 156 episodes and hours and hours of bonus features. It blows my mind that the show started in 1999… that’s 25 years ago. I had no idea it had been that long. And I was rewatching the show (and watching many of the episodes for the first time as I was not a die-hard viewer back in the day), I was struck by two things: 1) Just how good the show is, and 2) There’s no way this show could succeed nowadays. If politics were divided in 1999, they are downright fractured now. There’s no way a show like this could get on the air nowadays without being savaged by internet armchair critics for being too political. So it’s a good thing this show came out when out did. With an A-list cast that included Martin Sheen, Rob Lowe, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, Dule Hill, and Janel Moloney — plus guest stars and other cast members who were all stellar — the show is simply incredible. Great drama, smart writing, terrific performances, sharp humor… The West Wing had it all. Being able to start at the beginning and work my way through the episodes in order and without missing any has been a fantastic experience. The West Wing: The Complete Series sees the show’s first Blu-ray collection, and it includes all 156 episodes on 28 discs.
The Bonus Features: There are tons of bonus features included, and they’re spread out throughout each season. Over 20 episodes have audio commentary tracks on them with cast and crew, plus you get over 15 featurettes and making-of documentaries. You also get collections of deleted scenes and blooper reels, giving you a lot of bang for your buck for diving into extra beyond the episodes themselves.
Digital Copy Included: No
The Wrap-Up: The West Wing is one of those shows that may represent a certain time period but feels timeless at the same time. Sure, some of the cell phones and computer screens will place the show at the turn of the 21st century, but the drama, the characters, and the performances transcend a year or a date. This is what good television is all about.
Young Sheldon: The Complete Series
The Show: I have to admit, I’m a little floored that Young Sheldon lasted seven seasons. I get that people miss The Big Bang Theory; I’m one of them. It was a show that I loved. But Young Sheldon never felt like a good replacement for it, and it’s definitely never been a show that I particularly enjoyed. It’s not awful or anything like that, but I just never connected with the characters or the storylines the way I did with the mothership show. Say what you want about The Big Bang Theory, it was a heck of a lot funnier to me than Young Sheldon is. The cast here tries to do their best with weaker material, but the writing is largely sophomoric, and the supporting characters just aren’t interesting enough to make up for the fact that Sheldon Cooper by himself can’t really carry a show, as a kid or an adult. I know a lot of people watched and enjoyed Young Sheldon, but it was always mediocre for me. That said, I always watched the show in random spurts, and going back and giving it another chance in episodic order does give me a little bit of a new appreciation for it. I can see now how much more narratively structured it was, with storylines that carried on for much longer than a single episode. It doesn’t change my overall opinion of the show, but I can at least say I’m a little more positive about it than I used to be. Now the show has released in a Complete Series box set that includes all seven seasons, 141 episodes, in one place for the first time. If you’re a fan of the show, you can now own it on DVD or Blu-ray (we received the DVD for reviews instead of the Blu-ray release, unfortunately.)
The Bonus Features: There is one making-of featurette for six of the seven seasons. All told, they run about 45 minutes, which is kind of slight, but it’s better than nothing.
Digital Copy Included: No
The Wrap-Up: Young Sheldon wasn’t ever really my cup of tea, but it was a ratings hit in its first season and stayed near the top of the charts for its entire run, so it clearly has a huge audience out there. While this set won’t offer up much new for you to enjoy, it is a great way to revisit a show you might have loved.
Creepshow: The Suspense Building Game
The Game: Creepshow was a 1982 movie by George A. Romero and Stephen King that’s a cult classic of the horror genre, loosely based on the EC horror comics of the 1950s such as Tales From the Crypt. It’s also been a TV series and now it’s a tabletop card-based game. Eschewing a traditional game board, this card game sees players trying to tell a story and build “suspense,” the dynamic through which players try to score points. I always struggle to explain a game even when I’m playing it, so I won’t try to go into too much detail here, but essentially, each player has to try and complete three acts of a story and build up as much suspense as they can through what cards they play and what choices they make. When the ending comes around, having more or less suspense will determine how many points you or your opponent gets. As with pretty much every tabletop game I’ve ever played
The Artwork: The game cards all feature artwork either from or inspired by various Creepshow comic books, and they look great. The colors are superb, and the graphics, lettering, ad design all evoke those classic 1950s horror artwork we know so well. The box the game comes in is barely larger than a deck of cards, so it’s a nice, compact game that can travel with you anywhere. This is one sharp-looking product.
The Wrap-Up: Creepshow is a fun game that’s mechanic really does allow you to “build suspense,” as the title promises. Not knowing which way things will go or how many points you’ll end up with based on your choices does feel tense and suspenseful. Check it out if you’re looking for a fun game to bring to this year’s Halloween parties!
Exhuma
The Movie: This is a hard movie to write about. In one way because I don’t want to spoil anything, and in another way because it’s, well, a bit weird. The Korean horror film Exhuma sees a pair of Shaman’s summoned by a rich patron who wants them to discover the origin of and disperse a curse on his family that affects the first born of every generation. But then, about halfway through the movie, the film goes in a different direction that is related but also different, and it’s hard to go into details without spoiling the events to follow. Suffice it to say that Exhuma is a well-acted and non-traditional horror movie that adds in family dynamics, themes on greed, and a dark sense of humor. It’s kind of just like the Oscar-winning movie Parasite except that it’s also completely unlike the Oscar-winning movie Parasite. I don’t know how to explain it better than that.
The Bonus Features: There is a making-of featurette and a trailer.
Digital Copy Included: No
The Wrap-Up: Viewers wanting a horror movie that goes to new places and offers up a unique spin will probably find a lot to like in Exhuma. Viewers looking for a traditional haunted house horror film will probably be disappointed. I think it’s a unique movie that’s worth a watch to decide for yourself.
Killers: Unrated Director’s Cut and The Convent
The Movie: Synapse Films gives us two new Blu-ray releases this week of cult classic films from director Mike Mendez, who gave us the modern-day cult classic Big Ass Spider (a film I’m a huge fan of!) Killers was his 1996 debut, about a pair of on-the-run criminal brothers who hole up in a family’s house, only this family is far from normal. The Convent was his 2000 follow-up, about a group of of college students breaking into a haunted abandoned convent only to find themselves besieged by supernatural forces. Only Adrienne Barbeau’s Christine (who killed a bunch of nuns in said convent as a young woman) can save them. Both films are horror movies that color outside the lines, with no small amount of Quentin Tarantino influence evident throughout them. Both films are also released on Blu-ray for the first time, and Killers arrives in an uncut version; it was originally censored in its limited release at the time, but now we get it in all its gory glory. For me, the gore isn’t my favorite part of his movies, but I do love the sense of fun and visceral action that Mendez brings to his films. Sure, they’re low budget, but the movies don’t shy on action or humor simply because of that. These two discs are a huge treat for fans of the director, who hasn’t always had his films available on home video.
The Bonus Features:
Killers – In addition to the director’s cut, you also get audio commentary with Mendez and a horror journalist, an alternate ending, trailers, and liner notes in a booklet.
The Convent – Includes a cast and crew commentary track, a secondary audio commentary, a location featurette, two archival making-of featurettes, a deleted scene, gore outtakes, trailers, and a booklet with new liner notes.
Digital Copy Included: No
The Wrap-Up: Both Killers and The Convent are over-the-top horror movies that bring a sense of fun and a bit of action movie flair to the proceedings. These two new releases from Synapse Films will make a lot of fans happy; not just because they’re finally available on home video, but because they’re such great releases in their own right.
Family
The Movie: This 2017 Israeli film by director Veronica Kedar is… unique. It begins with a young woman named Lily showing up at her therapist’s house to explain why she killed her family. The movie then begins a non-linear trip through the past that allows us to understand who Lily is, and more importantly, who her family was. The story unreels layer by layer until the end, where you understand what happened and, primarily, why it happened. The movie goes to some disturbing places, and as everything comes to light, you will find yourself thankful for your own family, no matter how dysfunctional they might be. The film is in Hebrew, and at an hour and 44 minutes it does come in a little long for my tastes, but overall it’s an effective thriller that takes on a unique style to tell its story.
The Bonus Features: As with most IndiePix releases, there are no bonus features.
Digital Copy Included: No
The Wrap-Up: Family won’t be for everyone, but it’s different and it doesn’t feel like something we’ve seen a million times before. Even though it was released in 2017, this home video release will mark the first time most audiences in the US and UK will have a chance to see it. It might just be up your alley.
