The Big I Am (2009/E1 DVD) + Caged Heat/Jackson County Jail (1974, 1976/Corman Double Feature/Shout! Factory DVD) + Consinsual (2010/E1 DVD) + Meskada (2010/Anchor Bay DVD) + Urgency (2008/E1 DVD)

 

Picture: C/C+/C/C+/C     Sound: C+     Extras: D/C+/D/C-/D     Main Programs: D/C+/D/C-/D

 

 

B-movies used to be looked down on, back in the day, they still had to be somewhat aspiring to be better, whereas now it is just about making anything to distribute no matter what the case.  We look at six films from then and now to show the differences.

 

Nic Auerbach’s The Big I Am (2009) is a not-so-big wanna be slick gangster flick that takes place in London.  That alone should have guaranteed that this would be half-interesting, but it is so busy trying too hard to be a genre piece that it throws Britishness out the window too much and lands up coming across like so many bad U.S. gangster wanna bees.  Mickey (Leo Gregory) is insignificant in the crime world until he finds a bigwig player (Vincent Regan) in a car trunk as a war is breaking out.

 

Suddenly, he wants to be part of bigger, dirtier things, but he has plenty of competition and these people will be affecting each other in permanent ways.  Too bad it is a cliché fest that Michael Madsen (playing to type) only reinforces.  Even an appearance by the great Steven Berkoff could not save this and it is pretty boring and unconvincing throughout.  Too bad.

 

Then we have the latest Roger Corman Double Feature on DVD.  Part of the prison exploitation cycle, Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat (1974) and Michael Miller’s Jackson County Jail (1976) as good examples of the innocent person or person guilty of a slight crime going through hell in a rotten, corrupt prison system, usually placed in the middle of a small, backwards town.  These are both part of the “women’s prison” subgenre of the cycle.

 

Caged Heat involves criminals who are caught in the act and we follow one of them (Erica Gavin) to an awful prison, but she will find friends and fight back, even finding some outlandish opportunities she does not expect.  Barbara Steele and Roberta Collins make this one effective and Demme was already making a reputation for himself on this films success.  Jackson County Jail has no less than Yvette Mimieux as the victim who was simply driving from Los Angeles to New York when she is mugged by some hitchhikers she should have avoided, then goes to jail for stupid reasons and her life is ruined forever.  Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Carradine, Howard Hesseman and Mary Woronov also star.  Both show how to make a B-movie situation go as far as it can, versus what else we see here.

 

Consinsual (2010) is as silly as the name suggests and odder is the fact that no director’s name appears on the case, which is bad news and maybe a first for a DVD we’ve reviewed.  A marriage will be compromised by adultery, lying, bizarre role-playing and even a rape!  An exploitation mess that thinks it is being clever, but never works despite briefly looking like it might have something to offer early on.  Soon however, it is a mess.

 

Josh Sternfeld’s Meskada (2010) is a crime thriller that also could have worked and is not a total disaster as Nick Stahl plays a detective investigating the situational murder of a young boy during a robbery.  However, this ugly event will unleash a return of the repressed and all hell breaks loose.  Too bad it is like too many other hells we have seen on screen over the years.  Stahl is an underrated actor and this cast is trying, but I never bought the writing or the character development.  The death of the young boy could have been intriguing, but as usual in such plot points, it was desperate and this plummets downhill from there.  At least it was not a total disaster.

 

On the other hand, Urgency (2008) is the oldest of the more recent releases and wow, is it bad.  Directed by someone who calls themselves Kantz (which always indicates someone who thinks they are slicker than they are, usually a music video director), it stars Brian Austin Green (yes, I laughed hard too) as a pharmaceutical executive (still laughing?  Yep!) whose wife is kidnapped (one already considers she is staging this to get away from him) and is being held for $50K ransom.  Can he deliver it in time?  Can he act?

 

Only because it is not as exploitative and stupid like Consinsual is this not the worst release here, but it comes close.  It is bad at the beginning, moves on with zero credibility and can never end soon enough.  Green is boring and well past what little prime he ever had and if you really become annoyed, you’ll root for the villains.

 

All five DVDs have anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 presentations and most look too soft, much softer than new productions should look and even come across as amateurish, but Meskada and the older Corman films look better, with color, detail and a solid look even the better B-movies used to have all the time.

 

All have Dolby Digital sound with 5.1 on the recent productions and 2.0 Mono on the Corman DVD.  Amazingly, the newer productions are very limited in soundfield and even have amateur sound production flaws, but all lack a soundfield.  Meskada is very narrowly better with distortion form its low budget, but it is slightly better.  That leaves the Corman films sounding decent for their age, though they can have their own aged sound and distortion, they are surprisingly full and clear for older productions seeming as professional as any of the new productions.  Odd.

 

The only extras are a trailer on Meskada, while the Corman set has feature length audio commentaries, Leonard Marlin interviews Corman and theatrical trailers for their respective films, plus other New World releases.  Heat adds a Poster & Still Gallery, while Demme is joined by Gavin and Director of Photography Tak Fujimoto on their commentary.  Producer Jeff Begun and Director of Photography Bruce Logan join Miller on theirs.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo