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