Bullet Collector (2011/Artsploitation DVD)/End
Game (1975/Umbrella Region 4 PAL Import DVD)/The Factory (2009/Warner DVD)/Nobody
Gets Out Alive (2012/Image DVD)/The
Package (2012/Anchor Bay Blu-ray w/DVD)
Picture:
C/C+/C+/C/B- & C Sound:
C+/C+/C+/C/B- & C+ Extras:
C/C/D/C-/D Main Programs: C/C/C/C-/D
PLEASE NOTE: The End Game DVD is a Region 4 import PAL
DVD, will only play on machines capable of such encoded discs and can be
ordered from our friends at Umbrella Entertainment at the website address
provided at the end of the review.
Here next
is an odd mix of new genre releases…
Alexander
Vartanov’s Bullet Collector (2011)
is a strange attempt to do a coming of age film where the 14-year-old lead
self-mutilates himself often (cutting and bleeding specifically) trapped in
what he feels is a dead end life (abusive guardians) in current Russia. He is also violent, the film is also in faux
black and white and it is more predictable than it is ever shocking or has any
serious points to make. This translates
into bullying by his peers and criminal activities.
Truffaut
and Kubrick would have nothing to worry about as we have seen this all before
and unlike similar genre films from overseas, the change of locale to a non-USA
setting does not add anything to this since Russia is never really shown or
made into a character of any kind, nor does the script have much or enough to
say about Russia today, so we get two hours of nothing new and with a limited
effect, atmosphere or mood. Some will
likely still enjoy this, but I am not one of them.
Extras
include a 12-page booklet inside the DVD case on the film, while the DVD adds a
Making-Of featurette, Deleted Scene that would have made no difference and cast
audition interviews.
Tim
Burstall’s End Game (1975) is a
low-budget Australia thriller that also wants to be some kind of odd character
study about a man named Mark (John Waters) who picks up female hitchhikers and
kills them, but we never totally find out why and the motivations get odder and
odder and the screenplay (based on Russell Braddon’s book) is more interested
in skewing guilt, a single villain and just juggles too much for its own good.
Mark has
a paraplegic brother Robert (George Mallaby) who has a mixed relationship with
him and possible bitterness in how their late father set up his will. Mark then takes a spare wheelchair and takes
the dead girl to a movie house (playing Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange!) and dumps the body there. Enough blood is here to qualify it as
Oz-Ploitation, but every time I kept expecting this to add up and make sense,
it did not despite a good cast, locales and its potential. It was still worth seeing and is as good as
anything on this list, but I can see why it is only so well known.
Extras
include a Stills Gallery, Theatrical Trailer and Interviews with Waters and
several behind-the-scenes crew including Director of Photography Robin Copping
whose tales include trouble with new color film stocks.
Morgan
O’Neill’s The Factory (2009) is yet
another female abduction film with John Cusack and Jennifer Carpenter as cops
who are investigating the case when his daughter is accidentally picked up
after running away from home to see a boyfriend who is trying to put their
relationship on hold. I liked the
casting, acting, atmosphere and there are some good moments of suspense. I even liked some of the camerawork, but the
script gets entangled in too many twists to the point that it does not add up,
work or make sense, but in less logical ways than End Game did.
Here too
we have a film that had some serious potential and the underrated Cusack is
more than a match for his role. There
are no extras, but I would have been interested to hear how people felt about
the making of this one.
Even
worse than all of those is Jason Christopher’s Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012) which is simply another teen (or just
post-teen) couples go to the woods and get abducted, tortured and killed
formula flick, but not a very well done one and with limited suspense and other
issues, gets bad very early on including more torture porn (always the poorest
substitute for a story or suspense) than any of us needed.
Even
genre fans will find it hard to find anything new in this dud with its unknown
cast (save Clint Howard) and could not even make the most of a very short
(though it feels much longer when you watch) 78 minutes. Lightyears from similar films form the 1970s
and even 1980s, maybe they ought to rename it “nobody get out awake”!
Extras
include Outtakes, a Making Of featurette and (believe it or not) a feature
length audio commentary track.
Last and
least is Jesse V. Johnson’s goofy actioner The
Package (2012, not to be confused with the mixed gene Hackman film of years
ago) with a bored-looking Steve Austin (the wrestler) and ready-to-laugh-any-moment-when-he-should-not
Dolph Lundgren as the main villain. The
“plot” involves Austin’s
soldier-turned-bouncer taking a package to the killer villain when he starts to
become a target and has to fight his way out of all kinds of messes, like the
script!
This one
runs 95 minutes and at least Lundgren is here longer than he was in the last Universal Soldier, but this is dumb,
cheeky, boring and surprisingly sloppy considering the two known names
attached. This is one video “package:
you should not open and there are no extras.
The 1080p
1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Package is the best performer on the list here, but that is by
default as it has shots that are too dark, have crushed Video Black, have
motion blur and are generally sloppy down to some of the editing in what I
would not consider a fixed style. The
anamorphically enhanced DVD included is softer and is as soft as anything on
the list, including the anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Collector and Alive. That leaves the
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Play
and 2.35 X 1 image on Factory the
second best here.
The Dolby
TrueHD 5.1 mix on Package is the
sonic champ as well, but it does not have the best overall recording and the
lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on the DVD version is closer to it in quality than it
should be, though it is better than the Dolby 5.1 on Alive which is very badly mixed, a mess and has compression and
distortion issues throughout to the extent that the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo on Collector and even Dolby
2.0 Mono on Play actually sounds
better. The rest of the DVDs have lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes that are good, but not great.
As noted above, you can order the import version of End Game exclusively from Umbrella at:
http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/
- Nicholas Sheffo
