Home Video

Arrow Video brings to Blu-ray THE BLOODHOUND,a thriller/mystery tale loosely re-imagined from Edgar Allen Poe's classic tale, FALL OF THE HOUSE OF THE USHER, written and directed by Patrick Picard in his feature-length directorial debut.

Francis (Liam Aiken) returns to the home of his long-time childhood friend, JP (Joe Adler), after hearing of JP’s waning health from an unknown affliction. Francis quickly begins to question this decision after seeing how JP has changed from when they were children. Living a life of seclusion off the family’s trust fund, JP and his twin sister Vivian (Annalise Basso), who is locked up in the basement of the home, set the stage for Francis’ downward spiral into the madness that overtakes him every minute he stays.

MVD entertainment brings to Blu-ray this month the 2008 film, Bryan Loves You, written and directed by Seth Landau.

Bryan Loves You is a found-footage movie told from the point of view of the main character, Jonathan (played by Landau), thru the lens of his camcorder and various security cameras positioned thru ought the film. Copying the style of The Blair Witch Project film that was insanely popular at the time, and packed with an all-star cast of horror and B-movie icons (George Wendt, Tiffany Shepis, Tony Todd, Brinke Stevens, and Lloyd Kaufman), this movie was sure to be a hit…right?

The Supergirl series is one that will be remembered as beginning with an entertaining, if light, introductory season, before spiralling uncontrollably into overworked, overwrought, identity-driven episodes. And, like most CW shows, once the series migrated from NBC to the CW, it was yet another opportunity for a lead character to take a back seat to a team of lesser heroes loosely based on other DC Comics trademarks.

The sixth season opens with what would have been the final episodes of the fifth season, cut short for Covid precautions. Kara (Melissa Benoist) must face down a now god-level Lex Luthor (Jon Cryer), sacrificing herself to the Phantom Zone, where she remains for a few episodes until her friends get her out.

It's hard to believe it was nearly 20 years ago that The Batman debuted on television (and don't even get me started on how many yesterdays it was since Batman: The Animated Series began!), but fans of the show can now binge the entire series with this 6-disc Blu-ray collection from Warner Brothers.

Kurt Russell reprised his surly Snake Plissken in John Carpenter's dystopic Escape From L.A., the sequel to his much better effort, Escape from New York. In this sequel, California has been destroyed by a cataclysmic earthquake, leaving the city of Los Angeles as an island. The rest of the union has fallen to the rule of a theocratic President (Cliff Robertson) who has turned the disconnected city into a prison for the nation's undesirables -- those who engage in activity that run counter to his faux-Christian fascism.

Snake is called into duty when a terrorist (Georges Corraface) entices the First Daughter, Utopia (A.J. Langer) to join in his revolution. Snake's mission is to retrieve Utopia and foil the terrorist's plans. But Los Angeles is a minefield of criminals, and the true motives behind Plissken's mission are even more twisted than the island's inhabitants.

Troma has rereleased its 1987 break-out film, SURF NAZIS MUST DIE, to Blu-ray. The loving fans of this low budget, highly insane, cult classic can once again grace their collection shelves with yet another repackaging of one of Troma’s highly touted first films.

Set in the wake of a deadly earthquake, California is now a desolate wasteland overrun by neo-Nazis, surf punks, and hooligans. Rival gang members are in constant struggle to gain control of what’s left of the beaches to dominate the people who remain.

The DC Animated Universe projects have been a little hit-or-miss lately, largely when they tried to stay within a cohesive universe that was almost-but-not-quite the New 52. More recently, however, they have had successes with one-off stories that focus more on the tale at hand rather than with how to make it fit into the rest of the DCAU. The 70s grindhouse style Batman: Soul of the Dragon is a good example of this.

With Catwoman: Hunted, director Shinsuke Terasawa brings together several fun, nostalgic elements, delivering an anime-aesthetic film full of 1960s spy-caper style. The result is surprisingly fresh interpretation of the characters that doesn't diminish them but rather enhances.

It's the sequel fans waited three decades to see, but in the end Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the torch-passing movie that holds up to the expectations set by Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2. 

While everything about Ghostbusters: Afterlife has the flavor of the originals, there are some story elements that make this ride less-than-smooth. Don't worry, we'll get to those, soon enough.

The 1960s to early 70s were a golden age of Kung Fu films. From the classic films of Bruce Lee to the comedy of Jackie Chan, no other studio has a deeper understanding of the genre then the Shaw Brothers. Producing hundreds of films in that era, they revolutionized the genre by putting the best talents they could find in front of and behind the camera, and gave us some of the most iconic martial art films ever to grace the silver screen.

This first ever definitive series by Arrow Video karate-kicks off volume one and karate-chops the competition, putting to shame every other release of these films.

Each film in the set is given the royal treatment: all twelve movies are painstakingly remastered and, in some cases, completely retooled to incorporate footage long thought lost to the home video gods of yesterday.

Arrow Video presents another installment of its Giallo Essentials series with three suspense-filled Italian films, beautifully packaged in this stunning yellow slipcase box set.

Riding high from the praises of the previous RED Giallo Essentials set, Arrow bumped the packaging up a notch and added a few more well-known titles to this one, as well as giving the slipcase an outer sleeve that showcases key scenes from each of the films contained.

In Massimo Dallamano’s What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974), Inspector Silvestri (Claudio Cassinelli) and rookie Assistant District Attorney Vittoria Stori (Giovanna Ralli) investigate the apparent suicide of a teenage girl, leading them to a sordid prostitution ring whose abusers occupy the highest echelons of Italian society.

Featuring:

Dan Aykroyd, Kim Basinger, Jon Lovitz, and Alyson Hannigan star in Richard Benjamin’s offbeat 1988 comedy My Stepmother is an Alien, which is finally getting a long-overdue Blu-ray release in January 2022.

Panned by critics for casting Dan Aykroyd in a romantic lead, the movie failed horribly at the box office, grossing only $13.8 million dollars of its $19-million-dollar budget. Only after it was released on home video did it find an audience (mainly young teenage boys looking to catch a glimpse of the young starlet, Kim Basinger, in her alien birthday suit).

In the 1970s, America grew nostalgic for, of all things, the Great Depression. And so they sat down in droves in front of their TV screens to watch the weekly adventures of The Waltons, a close-knit nuclear family of eight (not counting the grandparents) who lived on Walton's Mountain. And while the series was about the entire family, the central focus was driven by the narratory -- the future version of aspiring author, John Boy Walton, who was played by Richard Thomas.

Thomas puts in an appearance in this new release, The Waltons: Homecoming, a brand-new Christmas story that introduces the Walton family to a new generation. And while the cast is brand new, by necessity, the casting department and the acting performances really brings the original characters to fresh life without despoiling too much the versions that older audiences know and love.

I'm an animation snob. I grew up in an era when cartoonists hand-drew twenty-four frames  on celluloid to produce one second of movement, with attention given to background and basic anatomy. As the styles trended more toward the CalArts method of bean-mouthed strobe-animated characters, I felt no compunction in shunning these new shows, shows like Steven Universe, The Regular Show, and others. And while Rick and Morty didn't have quite the same lazy approach to visuals, a sort of 'guilt by association' rubbed off on it, such that my first real, true, sit-down-and-watch exposure of it came with the opportunity to review this fifth season steelbook Blu-ray collection.

Rick Sanchez is a world-weary, cynical old man who's seen it all and done it all -- on this planet and every other. He's invented science miracle devices just to see what they would do and what kind of adventures he could have with them.

Twenty-five years ago, two animated heavy-metal morons played baseball with a frog -- and MTV was off to the races in becoming more than just a music channel. The hyperactive Beavis and his dim-witted pal Butt-Head were virtual music jockeys of a sort, sitting on their couch and watching videos on their dilapidated television while offering commentary on why it was cool or why it sucked. And when they weren't doing that, they were idiotically destroying Mr. Anderson's lawn or forgetting how to pee.

Eventually, Mike Judge's creations went the path of all cultural phenomenons: the feature-length film. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America finds our heroes on a cross-country tour, kicked off by a misunderstanding. Muddy Grimes (voiced by Bruce Willis) is looking for someone to kill his wife, Dallas (Demi Moore). Mistaking the duo (who are in search of their stolen television) for the hitmen, Muddy sends Beavis and Butt-Head to Los Vegas, telling them to "do her" there.

Barry Sonnenfeld's The Addams Family movie could not have had a better cast. While I had (at the time of it's 1993 release) doubts about the casting of Raul Julia as Gomez Addams, I was pleasantly surprised at the way he handled the role made iconic by the manic John Astin. Meanwhile, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, Judith Malina, Carely Struycken, Christina Ricci, and Jimmy Workman all seemed to have been born for their Addams Family roles of Morticia, Fester, Granny, Lurch, and siblings Wednesday and Pugsley Addams. The big screen debut of Charles Addams's creepy, kooky characters was, visually, a success.

The sixth season of CW's time-travel farce DC's Legends of Tomorrow finds the storyline leaning more and more heavily into super-sitcom. The show has veered far off course from the premise of a team of expendable superheroes out to save the timeline to being a team of layabouts, some of whom have a superpower when they remember it, and John Constantine, who of all people fits into the team like a round peg into a square hole -- if the round peg were the diameter of Jupiter and the square hole was the opening to a breadbox. But hey, it gives us more Matt Ryan as the character, so there's that.

In a world where temperatures have dropped to hundreds of degrees below freezing, the last remnants of humanity remain alive aboard a passenger train that runs on a perpetual motion device, generating the heat and power needed to continue running. The train, Snowpiercer, was the brainchild of Joseph Wilford, who it was revealed in the first season did not make it aboard the train before engineer Melanie Cavill (jennifer Connelly) made the decision to close the doors and pull out of the station, leaving behind to die those who did not have a ticket or who did not otherwise get on board -- including her young daughter.

In 1988 William Lustig directed the film Maniac Cop, written by Larry Cohen, which received lackluster reviews and box office revenues at the time. But later, when released onto the home video markets, the film became a cult classic, spawning two follow up sequels which have recently made their way to a 4K release.

Two years after the first film, Lustig reassembled the cast to create Maniac Cop 2, again written by Larry Cohen and starring Robert Davi, Claudia Christian, Michael Lerner, and Bruce Campbell, with Robert Z'Dar returning as the baddie in blue.

Maniac Cop 2, which many see as an improvement on the first tale, is full of murderous mayhem, jump scares, and strippers, and continues the story of our undead detective on his mission of revenge and cleaning the streets of crime, leaving them washed red with blood.

If Ed Wood had lived in the bayous of Florida and dreamed of making films, his name would be William Grefé. Arrow Video collects Grefé’s exploitation films in this one spectacular box set which serves as a one stop shop to the mind behind the madness that is William Grefé.

First up from 1965 is Sting of Death, a Beach Blanket Bingo style horror tale that brings rock-and-roll obsessed teenagers face to face with a creature that dwells in the swamp and drowns as many as he can.

The 1966 horror film Death Curse of Tartu is the next feature, and it is a tale of an archaeology professor gone missing. His students take on the task of locating him, starting with the last place he was seen: an area infested with alligators, snakes, and a shapeshifting witch doctor.

The 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave has been talked about since the film’s creation; and now, 43 years later, Jennifer gets her revenge again in ultra-gory, High Definition, in-your-face 4K!

However, it does need to be said: “Just how many versions, cuts, and different pressings of this film do you really need?”  The answer is: just this one. Ronin Films has given us the definitive edition this year with this brand new 4K, and brings all the special features from the previous editions along for the blood-soaked ride.