4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011/IFC/MPI Blu-ray)/Bad Ass (2012/Fox DVD)/Brake (2011/IFC/MPI Blu-ray)/On The Inside (2010/Anchor Bay Blu-ray w/DVD)/Steve Niles’ Remains (2011/Shout! Factory Blu-ray)/Thin Ice (2011/Fox DVD)

 

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

 

 

Now for a new group of genre films.

 

 

Able Ferrera’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011) is his answer to the current “end of the world” cycle, this one with Willem Dafoe in New York City as the world will end at the time in the title the next day.  How will he spend that time?  With whom?  What does he have to still do with so little time remaining?

 

Since we have seen al this before, it is nice to have some good actors involved and the way it is shot is not bad, but save some nudity and sex, there is nothing new here to offer the cycle and add that Ferrera is trying to be somehow profound does not make this better than a standard genre work.  At least it is not a total bore, just not very memorable.  A trailer is the only extra.

 

 

Craig Moss’ Bad Ass (2012) has Danny Trejo as an older man on a bus who gets harassed by two young men threatening violence and strikes back.  This is digital recorded, put on the Internet and becomes a big regional story.  Based on an actual such event, this could have been a deep character study of the matter and Trejo does give a good performance, but the makers decide to go for some comedy and subplots that throw off too many possibilities including conflict with a tough older gangster type (Charles S. Dutton) that may be amusing, but puts this too much over the top.

 

Ron Pearlman also shows up and this does have some good moments worth giving it a look if you are really interested, but at only 89 minutes, it could have delivered more.  Extras include a 6+ minutes featurette and feature length audio commentary by Director Moss.

 

 

Gabe Torres’ Brake (2011) is yet another bad, tired “stuck in a” thriller that we have been seeing too much of lately.  Ironically, Tarantino did this best as an episode of CSI (see Grave Danger (2005) on Blu-ray elsewhere on this site) and Ryan Reynolds did this in Buried (2010, also reviewed on the site) so now we have the grittier Stephen Dorff doing it here, but we get nothing new (save things are sometimes colorful) and the script is an idiot plot that when all is said and done, really does not add up and tries to emulate the series 24 too much.

 

Instead, it is just too smug for its own good, for which we will blame the bored Director Torres.  Unless you really like Dorff, skip it.  Extras include a feature length audio commentary by Director Torres, Trailer, Music Video (?) and making of featurette.

 

 

 

Equally gritty is Nick Stahl who fares a little better in the prison tale On The Inside (2010) where he gets put away for a revenge murder, though the one twist is that he killed the wrong man.  At first locked up in a more serious place, he eventually gets to be in a more lenient part of the prison, but trouble ensures when two fellow prisoners want to escape and worse.

 

There is some fine casting here and all can act, but this eventually becomes too convoluted in the latter half and falls apart, though the actors hang in there to the end.  This had more potential if it had just offered more character study and less action/plot tendencies, but it made its choice and does not add up like it could in the end.  The only extra is a feature length audio commentary by Director D.W. Brown and actors Joanne Baron and Daniel Frazier.

 

 

Steve Niles’ Remains (2011) remains one of the lamest and most boring of the endlessly boring zombie films that keep getting made, with this one taking place in Reno, Nevada.  Based on a graphic novel from the writers of the overrated 30 Days Of Night (reviewed elsewhere on this site) with an unknown cast, the blood and gore effects have a huge competition with predictability and clichés that are the only true horror (as in horrible to watch) in the whole, very long 88 minutes here.

 

How they finished this without falling asleep is beyond me and Director Colin Theys is just going through the motions which are dead in more ways than one.  Unless you are some kind of diehard zombie fan, skip it.

 

Extras include a feature length audio commentary, TV Spots, Trailer, Comic Con Trailer, Bloopers (which sometime seem like the actual feature) and a short film prequel that is also very, very, very dull.

 

 

Finally we have Jill Sprecher’s Thin Ice (2011 aka The Convincer) which cannot escape the shadow of The Coen Brothers’ Fargo as an insurance agent (Greg Kinnear) conducts business as usual and is somewhat unscrupulous until the possibility of making a fortune by stealing a rare violin from a client (Alan Arkin) presents itself and he gets really greedy.  To get to the instrument, he has to get the help of a neurotic security man (Billy Crudup) who is installing a security system in the elder man’s house.

Then they kill a nosy neighbor!

 

From there, this has some amusing moments, but gets lost in itself as it turns out to have an idiot plot that wastes some fine actors in solid performances.  Would it hurt to actually write a script instead of cheating and just offering dumb, obvious and not-as-clever-as-they-think twists?  Brake (above) has this problem even worse, but too many productions in general do and most would have never made it to be greenlit just a decade or so ago.  Now it is a free-for-all and you wonder why people don’t go to the movies like they used to.  Lea Thompson also stars.

 

Extras include about 10 minutes of Deleted Scenes, a Sundance premiere clip and behind the scenes featurette at about 25 minutes.

 

 

The 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers on all four Blu-rays are not great, but Earth and Brake are the best on the list despite some motion blur and intentional styling.  The same on Inside and Remains have more blur, more detail issues and additional issues (Remains goes out of its way to look bad at times) that put them barely above a better DVD, but the anamorphically enhanced Inside DVD is the worst performer on the list by being very soft.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on the Bad and anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Ice are soft, but about even and look fairly good, though they could both look better and their Blu-rays likely would deliver better image playback.

 

The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Stereo (rough, but with Pro Logic-like surrounds) lossless mix on Remains, DTS-MA 5.1 lossless mixes on Earth and Brake, plus Dolby TrueHD 5.1 on Inside all sound better than if they were lossy codecs, but Brake is the only one with a consistent soundfield, especially since the makers need to rely on audio information with limited visuals.  The rest of the Blu-rays are a little more towards the front channels than I would have liked, have some recording issues and inconsistent soundfields.  The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on the Inside DVD is the poorest on the list, while the same mixes on Bad and Ice DVDs are more active than expected and can compete with most of the Blu-rays.  Bet they sound better on Blu-ray in DTS.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo