Carjacked (2011/Anchor Bay Blu-ray)/The Nickel Ride/99 & 44/100% Dead (1975/Shout! Factory DVD Set)/The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974/MGM Blu-ray)

 

Picture: B-/C+/B     Sound: B/C+/C+     Extras: C-     Films: C-/C/C+/B

 

 

And now for some lesser known older thrillers and a new one that had potential.

 

 

Without a doubt, Maria Bello and Stephen Dorff can act, but in John Bonito’s Carjacked (2011), they cannot save the familiar set-up from its script.  We start with Bello and her son being abducted by Dorff on the run from a bank robbery that goes wrong.  At first, this is not bad and they are able to get past the child-in-jeopardy problem, but halfway through, the writers give up and this becomes a spoof if itself very quickly.  Like bad 1980s enemy-from-within thrillers, it gets so dumb that you can imagine the bored audience yelling at it and that is not a good thing.  After it jumps the shark, it never finds its way back to being taken seriously and the end is just totally idiotic.  The characters are increasingly idiotic all around and even Joanna Cassidy showing up cannot make this more interesting.  The only extra is a Behind The Scenes featurette.

 

 

Shout! Factory is back with another double feature on DVD, this time combining two Fox thrillers from 1975: Robert Mulligan’s The Nickel Ride and John Frankenheimer’s 99 & 44/100% Dead.  Though neither are great, they are at least realistic and have some real talent involved.  The Nickel Ride is a con game film has Jason Miller (The Exorcist) as a smart thief known as “the key man” due to his amazing collection of keys that can open anything, but a mob run-in causes him new troubles including having to deal with Bo Hopkins as his nemesis.  Slow-moving and mixed, it was never that good and has dated better than expected, though it is a curio since Miller’s career ended sadly sooner than it should have due to personal reasons making this a curio.

 

99 & 44/100% Dead is Frankenheimer’s explicit attempt to do with gangster films what Stanley Donen did with spy movies in Charade (1963) and Arabesque (1966, both reviewed elsewhere on this site).  The title is a play on one of the most famous and successful ad campaigns of all time for a bar of soap, but in this case, it is about the dead bodies gangsters dispose of and usually encased partly in cement.  From its pop art/colorful Charade-esque title sequence to a great cast including Richard Harris, Edmond O’Brien, Bradford Dillman, Ann Turkel and Chuck Connors essentially as the same kind of one-armed killer George Kennedy played in Charade (both in the Dr. No mode for that matter) makes for an interesting film.  Unfortunately, it cannot exceed the boundaries set and lands up being one of Frankenheimer’s weaker films.  At least he tried a change of pace.  Trailers are the only extras.

 

 

After a weak TV movie version and the Tony Scott/Denzel Washington/John Travolta attempt that also did not work, Joseph Sargent’s original The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974, written by Peter Stone of Charade and Arabesque) remains the best version of one of the 1970s more underrated thrillers and sports a great cast with Robert Shaw nasty as the head of a gang taking an entire subway car of people hostage until he gets the money he wants.  Walter Matthau is the subway transit head who has to outwit him to save as many lives as he can and even in this age of digital communications, this remains a strong thriller because it is edited with suspense in mind and is consistent throughout.  Thanks to the remakes, it has become a curio and I am especially glad to see it finally arrive on Blu-ray so people can see how fine a film it really is.  Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, Jerry Stiller, Doris Roberts, Julius W. Harris, Tony Roberts and Sal Viscuso round out a great cast.  A trailer is the only extra, but go out of your way to see this one.  You won’t be sorry!

 

 

The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers on both Blu-rays are good, but Carjacked can be lacking in definition due to its stylized approach that wears thin quickly and some shots look much better than others.  They should have left the resulting footage alone.  The AVC @ 39 MBPS image on Pelham is richer and better despite being 37 years older from a solid print and was shot in real anamorphic 35mm Panavision by Director of Photography Owen Roizman of Exorcist and French Connection fame.  This was made to look grade A and still does.  It also looks better than the recent remake.  The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 on the DVD set’s films come from decent prints with good color, but they are both softer than I would have liked.

 

The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix on Carjacked is easily the best sound mix of the four films here and the only one even in stereo.  We don’t hear many TrueHD mixes anymore, but they can be good when done well like this one is and it is the default highlight of the whole release.  The DVD movies have lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono mixes that show their age and can have some distortion.  That leaves the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 lossless Mono mix on Pelham sounding good, but is a little disappointing with the David Shire score sounding a bit rough and may have been sourced from older, even second-generation sound materials.

 

In this case, we have the limited edition CD soundtrack to compare to that sounded exceptionally good, which you can read more about here:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/242/Taking+of+Pelham+1-2-3+(1974/Limite

 

Rights issues notwithstanding, someone needs to get these music tracks and do a lossless stereo upgrade to the film sometime down the line when MGM intends to do more than a basic Blu-ray of the film.  In the meantime, it is the hands-down winner on this list.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo