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 Black Book
by Gerry Donaghy
Paul Verhoeven is a man who lives to work in extremes.
From the psycho-sexual angst of The Fourth
Man to the intergalactic fascist
guignol of Starship Troopers, he has
created films that polarize audiences and pushes the limits of
their endurance. After working in America for over two decades,
Verhoeven has returned to his native Netherlands to produce a
film that manages to be not only his most mature work to date,
but one that successfully exploits his ability to shock audiences.
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 Blade
by Gerry Donaghy
After Joel Schumacher’s dreadful couplet of Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, it was reasonable to expect that any superhero-themed film was going to be box office poison. Both films were critically lambasted and exemplified the law of diminishing returns with regard to the studio‘s coffers. However, less then a year following the Caped Crusader’s inglorious retreat from the screen, a new superhero film was released. Most moviegoers flocking to see it didn’t know they were going to see a film based on a comic book character, albeit a minor one. In fact, so potent was the Batman-backlash that one suspects that the studio went out of its way to avoid mentioning this hero’s comic book origins.
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 The Conformist - Extended Edition
by Gerry Donaghy
Marcello (Jean Luis Trintignant) is a young man in Fascist Italy trying his best to fit the square peg that is his psyche into the round hole that is totalitarian society. “I don‘t understand you . Everybody wants to be different, and you want to be the same as everybody”, his friend and party apparatchik Italo (Jose Quaglio) says to him. For reasons that become more evident as the film progresses, Marcello is pursuing what he views as a straight (in more ways than one) , bourgeois life: marrying a vibrant, yet vacuous woman (Stefania Sandrelli), and obtaining a respectable civil servant position. In Marcello’s case, the position is one where he can ingratiate himself into the company of an ideological enemy of the state (Enzo Tarascio), who lives in self-imposed exile in Paris, and reporting his activities back to the government. On his way to begin his mission, which coincides with his Parisian honeymoon, he is told that its parameters have changed. Instead of merely spying on his former professor, he must now assassinate him.
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 Disturbia
by Gerry Donaghy
Kale (Shia LaBeouf) is a troubled teenager. Having recently lost his father in a car wreck, he has become sullen and withdrawn. His breaking point is reached when he decks his Spanish teacher in front of the entire class. Trying to give the kid a break, a judge sentences Kale to three months of house arrest, forcing him to wear a LoJack-like device around his ankle that tells the police of his whereabouts at all times. Boredom quickly forces Kale into voyeurism; spying on his neighbors’ comings and goings, paying extra special attention to his comely new next-door neighbor Ashley (Sarah Roemer). Eventually he begins to suspect that his quiet and fastidious neighbor Mr. Turner (David Morse) is in fact the serial killer he’s hearing so much about on television. But, when Turner becomes aware of the attention he's receiving, he turns his murderous gaze at Kale and his friends.
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 Dragon Heat
by Gerry Donaghy
There was a time not so long ago where Hong Kong films dominated the
world market, except for the United States. But, in the late 1990's,
as the region began to hemorrhage talent to the West, its profile in
world cinema began to wane, with the final nails for its coffin being
reserved for video piracy, which is rampant and seemingly unstoppable.
Filling the void were Japan, which became a farm team for Hollywood horror,
and South Korea, which thanks to laws that limited the number of films
that could be imported, was able to create an idiosyncratic yet vibrant
film industry. Hong Kong filmmakers attempted to utilize many Western
techniques, such as extensive use of green screens and CGI, but to little
avail. Johnny To and Stephen Chow are very high profile exceptions to
this diminishing exposure, but even they suffer from being relegated
to the arthouse ghetto.
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 Face/Off (Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition)
by Gerry Donaghy
When John Woo arrived in America after his final Hong Kong film Hard Boiled, there was eager anticipation about what he would do given a Hollywood budget. That anticipation was rewarded with the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target, a film that not only featured the worse mullet and faux-Cajun accent in cinema history, but also set the stage for Van Damme to somehow get first dibs on each subsequent Hong Kong expatriate director to arrive in America (Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam), with execrable results.
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 The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky
by Gerry Donaghy
Chilean-born Alejandro Jodorowsky began his career as a mime (working in Paris with Marceau Marceau). From there, he progressed into avant-garde stage productions, and eventually worked his way into writing and directing films. Thanks to an endorsement from John Lennon, El Topo played to marijuana-soaked crowds at New York's Elgin Theater for an entire year, and secured for Jodorowsky financial backing for his next picture The Holy Mountain, courtesy of Lennon's manager, Alan Klein. When Klein proposed adapting Pauline Reage's erotic novel Story of O as his next project, Jodorowsky vehemently disagreed and the subsequent fallout took over thirty years to dissipate. Klein withdrew prints of the films from circulation, keeping them out of cinemas and off of home video. As a result, Jodorowsky's films have been discussed more than they've been seen. For the past thirty years, the only way to glimpse these films has been through grainy pirate videos, produced from negatives Jodorowsky himself provided to the bootleggers.
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 Godzilla Raids Again
by Gerry Donaghy
When Godzilla opened in Japan in November 1954, it was an enormous success, selling over 9 million tickets. For Toho, the studio that produced the film, the next logical step was, of course, a quickie sequel. Arriving a mere six months later, Godzilla Raids Again would be the first of 27 sequels produced over the course of nearly fifty years, and while it lacks a lot of what made the original a masterpiece, it is definitely one of the better sequels.
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 Hard Boiled: 2-Disc Ultimate Edition
by Gerry Donaghy
Hard Boiled opens with a tight shot of a tumbler being filled with tequila, which is then topped off with a mixer, and covered with a napkin. The drink is picked up and slammed against the tabletop, whereupon it fizzes and is quickly consumed by our hero, played by Chow Yun Fat. This is an amazingly taught image, and one that fits Chow's reputation as an icon of Hong Kong action cinema. But then, he picks up not a gun, but a clarinet, and begins to swing out with a jazz combo. A viewer could be forgiven for thinking that they walked into the wrong film. Is this a kinder, gentler Chow Yun Fat they're seeing? Where's the heroic bloodshed that one would expect from a Chow Yun Fat/John Woo collaboration?
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 The Mario Bava Collection Volume 1
by Gerry Donaghy
When reviewing the Mario Bava Collection Vol. 1, I’m faced with a difficult task: do I examine the movies released in the set and compare them to the American International Pictures edits that were shown in the states, or should they be reviewed on their own? Black Sunday was mostly trimmed for gore, but a segment in Black Sabbath had its overtly sexual overtones removed and was reedited to make it a completely different story. Indeed, there were so many changes done to these films that they are far too numerous to list here. Also, I'm not familiar with every version of every film in the set. So, while it might be nice to lament the absence of Les Baxter’s scores, or Boris Karloff’s English language introductions on Black Sabbath, I’m only going to focus on the product at hand, which let’s face it, if you’re a Bava fanatic, you’re pretty much going to buy regardless of anything I have to say. And, if you’re not familiar with Italy’s first great horror f ilmmaker of the sound era, you can become acquainted with him and his films without any of that a priori knowledge interference.
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 The Naked City
by Gerry Donaghy
On a hot summer evening in New York City, Jean Dexter, an unemployed dress model, is found drowned in her bathtub. Homicide detectives arrive on the scene and attempt to find her killer. From this simple premise springs Jules Dassin's film The Naked City, one of the first police procedural films ever made and a masterpiece of film noir.
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 Robin-B-Hood - 2-Disc Ultimate Edition
by Gerry Donaghy
The British critic Cyril Connelly once wrote “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall”. While he was really saying that parenthood interferes with the creative process, I couldn’t help but think of this when approaching this film. Think of how many movies over the years that have been ruined by the introduction of children (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, I’m looking in your direction). It’s not that I’m against children per se, I just find that they add a needless layer of saccharine whenever they’re around in a picture. Maybe this is just me being a grouchy old man, but I have to admit that I had very dim expectations of Jackie Chan’s latest Hong Kong-lensed production Robin-B-Hood. Seeing the DVD cover, which features Jackie brandishing a baby’s bottle, and an infant looking like he just rolled off the set of a Huggies commercial, did little to boost my morale. I thought to myself “Dragon Dynasty hasn’t found the time to put out John Woo’s The Killer, but they have time for THIS?“ However, I was able to find time away from yelling at kids to get out of my yard to have a look at this DVD, and I’m happy to report that it was much better than I had any reason to expect.
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 Shanghai Express
by Gerry Donaghy
Teng (Sammu Hung) is a repentant n'er do well trying to show the citizens of his backwater hometown that he has really changed his ways. His path to redemption is a bit unusual, as he plans to blow up the railroad tracks that pass through town so that the passengers on the maiden run of the Shanghai Express train will have to stay for a few days and spend lots of money there. But Teng isn't the only person eyeballing the Shanghai Express: a group of bandits and a team of inept thieves are also anticipating lining their pockets, albeit through more felonious methods, courtesy of the moneyed passengers riding the train.
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 Twin Peaks - The Second Season
by Gerry Donaghy
The premise of Twin Peaks was simple: popular teenager Laura Palmer is found murdered, her body, wrapped in plastic, washed up on the banks of the river. An FBI agent arrives to investigate while the townspeople try to understand how such a tragedy could befall them. But creators David Lynch and Mark Frost had a larger concept at work, one that Lynch introduced in his 1986 film Blue Velvet, which was to examine what they imagined to be the dark, seething underbelly of Americana. The effect of the film and television show was akin to pulling back the canvas on a Norman Rockwell painting to discover that it covered one of Otto Dix's Lustmord images.
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 You Kill Me
by Gerry Donaghy
Frank Fluency (Ben Kingsley) is a hitman with a
severe drinking problem. While this sounds like the set-up for a joke,
it is more or less the plot of John Dahl’s newest film You
Kill Me. After botching a hit on a rival mobster (Dennis Farina)
because he passed out, his boss and uncle Roman (Phillip Baker Hall)
sends him to San Francisco (?) to dry out. While there, Frank gets a
job as an undertaker’s assistant, meets romantic interest Laurel
(Tea Leoni) and Tom (Luke Wilson), a Golden Gate Bridge toll collector
who agrees to be his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. As Frank reveals his
past to his new friends, while avoiding old enemies, hilarity ensues.
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