Brute Force (1947/Universal/Arrow U.K. Region B Import Blu-ray w/DVD)/Cannibal (2014/Film Movement DVD)/Fear In The Night (1947/Film Chest DVD)/The Reckoning (2013/Anchor Bay DVD)/The Scribbler (2013/XLrator DVD)/Throwdown (2013/Lionsgate DVD)/Werewolf Rising (2014/Image DVD)

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

PLEASE NOTE: The Brute Force Region B Import Blu-ray is now only available from our friends at Arrow UK, can only play on Blu-ray players that can handle Region B locked Blu-rays and can be ordered from the link below.

Now for a wide ranging selection of all kinds of thrillers, old and new...

Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947) is an underrated jail drama with Burt Lancaster as one of several prisoners sick of the very tough warden (Hume Cronyn in a great turn you need to see if you only know him from his later work) who loves torturing prisoners and this prison is hell on earth with its overcrowding and underfunding. Between the social commentary as relevant as ever and great performances in this earlier prison drama, Universal came up with a winner and the kind of film that would eventually make them a major studio.

With a script penned by Richard Brooks, the film never lets the situations become a celebrated ugliness or wallow in any sleaze, being more concerned with its characters and the situation while saying what it has to say. It is great that Arrow U.K. has issued this strong Region B Import Blu-ray of the film that deserves rediscovery as much as ever. It holds up very well against other films of its kind, including similar British productions, including various Angry Young Man films. I also credit a great cast that includes Ann Blyth, Yvonne DeCarlo, Charles Bickford, Jeff Corey,. John Hoyt, Jay C. Flippen, Howard Duff, Whit Bissell and an uncredited Charles McGraw also star.

Of course, it also shows us how smart such films can be and why Lancaster became such a big star. Miklos Rozsa did the solid music score and Director of Photography William H. Daniels, a veteran of Great Garbo films whose other work includes Ninotchka, The Naked City, several Thin Man sequels, Winchester '73, Some Came Running, Jumbo, In Like Flint and Valley Of The Dolls, lensed the film. His work here is that good, especially obvious in this new HD transfer. See it!

Extras include a DVD version, a nicely illustrated booklet on the film including informative text and new writing on the film by Frank Krutnik, author of the great book In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity, and Swell Guy, an obituary of Brute Force's producer, Mark Hellinger, by its screenwriter, Richard Brooks, illustrated with original stills, a reversible cover in the Blu-ray case, while the Blu-ray adds Burt Lancaster: The Film Noir Years, an in-depth look at the actor's early career by Kate Buford, author of Burt Lancaster: An American Life (38:46), Stills gallery and an Original Theatrical Trailer.

Manuel Martin Cuenca's Cannibal (2014) is an interesting attempt to do a smarter film on the title subject with a clothing tailor Carlos (Antonio de la Torre), who happens to be a serial killer of women. Instead of being a gruesome killer film, it is trying to be a Kubrickian character study of sorts of Carols, down to some of the camera shots. However, Ridley Scott already did that better in the underrated Hannibal (2001) and the script cannot escape the shadow of that film, Kubrick's films or Silence Of The Lambs. However, it is intelligent and somewhat ambitious, so I was still impressed by what was tried here.

I also was impressed with the thoughtful camerawork and the overall consistency and some suspense we get, so it is worth a look if you are interested, especially if you are a horror genre fan. However, it is not as gruesome as many films like it to its credit, though still graphic at times.

Text on the makers and Jean-Charles Paugam's short film Ogre are the extras.

Maxwell Shane's Fear In The Night (1947) has a very pre-Star Trek DeForest Kelley (looking a bit, and being filmed as if he were a variant of James Stewart) as Vince, a man who dreams he is a murderer, dreams so vivid, it is as if he really did the killing. Then he wakes up to find marks on him he never saw before and clues that he might not be dreaming. I saw this one a ling time ago and get a kick out of the locales, optical printing, ideas about mental illness and the overall mystery. It is not a great film, but it is a true Noir and always interesting.

Kelley is also doing his best to carry the film, which he is not bad in (look out William Shatner) and this was his first feature film. Paul Kelly, Ann Doran, Kay Scott and Charles Victor are pretty good in supporting roles, but this runs a short 72 minutes and has aged unevenly. Still, you should see it once for Kelley and the Noir twists.

There are unfortunately no extras.

John V. Soto's The Reckoning (2013) is an Australian thriller that wants to combine the police procedural with a missing persons narrative and found footage, but it uses the badly-realized found footage way too often (it is never convincing) in a tale with limited suspense or mystery. It does make nice use of the locales and the cast is not bad, lead by Johnathan LaPaglia and Luke Hemsworth, but it has limited form as well and disappoints when its 85 minutes are up.

There is actually a good film in here somewhere, but the gimmickry gets in the way and if they had rolled back the found footage severely and added some exposition otherwise, I could see this one working. It just does not.

A trailer is the only extra.

John Suits' The Scribbler (2013) is even worse, wanting to be a bad copy of the highly overrated bomb (look out for that cult following) Sucker Punch by Zack Snyder, plays way too loosely with mental illness as Suki (Katie Cassidy) tries to eliminate her multiple personalities (if you can call them that) with an advanced shock treatment machine. It fails, much like the script to this mess that trivializes everything it should not, runs with sloppiness and is not believable for a minute.

The title refers to her inability to talk when she is at her so-called craziness (reflection of the writers perhaps), but this does not even work on the level of a good exploitation flick as it is all over the place and never adds up. Gina Gershon, Michelle Trachtenberg, Eliza Dushku, Michael Imperioli and Billy Campbell show up to give this some kind of credibility and they try to help, but to no avail. Like actual scribbling, it eventually amounts to nonsense and is to be skipped.

A trailer is the only extra.

Timothy Woodward Jr.'s Throwdown (2013) is a bad action film thinking it is making some kind of points about law, justice and the legal system, but Vinnie Jones is wasted here, Mischa Barton does not have enough to do, Danny Trejo is here in his worst role in years and Luke Goss is also wasted as we are in this mess of a crime romp. Good intentions cannot begin to save this one and it is also shot and edited badly.

That's a shame because these are actors who deserve better and we as an audience deserve better too. It is especially amazing how forgettable this one is.

A trailer is the only extra.

B.C. Furtney's Werewolf Rising (2014) is one of those B-movie so bad that the art on the box offers a creature in a drawing that is far superior to the bad make-up/bad hairy outfits we get in this goofy mess where a young lady returns to her hometown (Melissa Carnell as Emma) only to find out her town holds a secret. Guess the title gives some of it away.

Her family is connected to it, as are some others and she becomes a target, of course. The script and its lame music are derivative of everything we have seen before (including Carpenter's Halloween of all things) as we get little suspense, sloppy production values, nothing scary, a few unintentional laughs and blood & gore that never impresses. Like most productions of the last few decades, werewolf stories are dead, at least for now, and awful releases like this will keep them from truly rising again. Yawn.

There are sadly no extras.

The 1080p 1.33 X 1 black & white, digital High Definition image transfer on Force is the on e Blu-ray here (we did not get the DVD, so it is not be reviewed) and though the print can show the age of the materials used a little bit, this is far superior a transfer to all previous releases of the film with some nice shots even above the letter rating. Many will be surprised the film is as old as it is. The 1.33 X 1 black & white image on the Night DVD is unfortunately the opposite, looking rough as one would expect from an orphan film, despite the work Film Chest did to fix it up.

So it should be a bit of a surprise that the HD-shot, anamorphically enhanced image on Cannibal, Reckoning, Scribbler (all three 2.35 X 1) and Werewolf (1.78 X 1) are all unusually soft and even have motion blur, not being much better than Night. Cannibal has the best picture stability of the four and likely would best benefit from a Blu-ray release. That makes the anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Throwdown the second-best performer on the list with a warmer, richer, more consistent playback throughout.

Then comes the sound, where despite its age, the PCM 2.0 Mono on Force is the best-sounding release here. How? Well the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on Night is the roughest and hardest to hear with harmonic distortion and brittleness throughout. The rest of the DVDs have lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes, so they all fall in between the two except Werewolf, which has so many recording and mixing issues, you might think it was in old analog Ultra Stereo. That has it tie with Night as the worst sonic presentation here.

You can order the import Brute Force Region B Blu-ray along with other Arrow UK Blu-rays that have exclusive content you'll find nowhere else at this link:

http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/

- Nicholas Sheffo