Why am I having this recurring vision of E.T. Atari 2600 cartridges, piled high in the desert?

Strange…

…but, anyway, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve done a 2nd run of The Grand Horror on DVD and the movie is once again available for ordering.

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I’m pleased to report that the non-contest entries came in quickly and the winners have been chosen. I’m actually taking the first 4 entries rather than the first 3 because a couple of them came in just seconds apart.

I’ll get your “prizes” (I use the term loosely) sent out soon. A few of the DVD cases have chew-marks in them from when my 1-year-old daughter got ahold of them, but I’m sure you guys won’t mind

Thanks!

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Update: Thanks to everyone who entered the non-contest; I’m pleased to report that all of the awful, crappy cool prizes have been spoken for.

I need to give a big shout-out to ArsonCuff, a cool guy who posts on our forum. He sent me a few DVDs that he had reviewed and didn’t need anymore, just as a nice gift. I want to keep the good vibes going, so I’m similarly going to send out some of my stupid, old and crappy DVDs that I don’t watch very often as a gift to you, our loyal readers.

This is a totally easy non-contest. All you have to do is send me an e-mail. I’ll take the first three e-mails that I get and those people will each get a small grab-bag of DVDs.

I don’t want to get you too excited, but there might be a copy of Tango & Cash in the mix.

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We are excited to announce that we have sold out our initial online stock of The Grand Horror on DVD! The response we’ve gotten has been amazing and I’ve done my best to get everyone’s orders out quickly. I’m sure we probably haven’t heard the last of The Grand Horror, so stay tuned!

Thank you!

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This is a photo from our shipping department (aka my kitchen table) of the last of our TGH DVD online stock. We’ve been very pleased with the DVD sales so far and we’re down to just 10 copies left to sell here on the website. Visit the ordering page to get yours! C’mon, it’s only ten bucks!

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I just watched the unrated DVD version of the 2006 Black Christmas remake. I avoided it when it hit theaters last year because it was getting terrible reviews. I’ll talk more about it when we do Splattercast #57 early next week, but for now I’ll say that I was pleasantly surprised and would recommend any slasher fans check this out over the holidays if you haven’t already seen it.

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I managed to watch a few DVDs this weekend and wanted to share some thoughts. I guess I should write up full-fledged reviews for these, but I don’t have that much to say about them so here are some quickie reviews..

The Redsin Tower (2006) This is the first “traditional” movie from Fred Vogel’s Toetag Pictures, whose previous endeavors didn’t really have a plot or narrative and were mostly faux-snuff showcases for grisly fx work. The Redsin Tower follows a group of teens as they have a rowdy beer-and-pot party in the titular tower. Some dude named Redsin did horrible experiments in the tower many years ago, so it’s naturally haunted. The malevolent spirits are roused by the airhead teens and carnage ensues. Strong points are Toetag’s trademark gore work and higher-than-usual production values for a straight-to-DVD indie affair. Weak points are some of the performances, a puzzling ending and an unbelievably wacky jilted lover character. Overall, I can recommend it for a single viewing on a lazy weekend - 5/10.

Vacancy (2007) This is sort of like a “torture porn” movie processed into a more mainstream and slightly higher-brow flick. A very small cast is headlined by relatively big names Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, who play a husband and wife whose marriage is falling apart over a family tragedy. They take the scenic route on a long road trip and wind up at a remote hotel in the middle of nowhere. The hotel management has made a cottage industry of producing snuff films. It’s a short movie with a very small-scale story and only a few characters. I thought it worked pretty well and I’d say it’s a solid rental - 5/10.

Necropolis Awakened (2002) I watched this because Steve listed it as one of several zombie movies that were available as we prepare for a zombie-themed episode of the Splattercast (look for that soon). This is one of those shot-on-video micro-budget indie horror flicks. I’ll save some thoughts for the Splattercast, but I will say this one was has a couple noteworthy things going on. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a terrible movie, but I liked the amount of car-chase action they did; you don’t see a lot of vehicle action in these movies. Also, the characters/actors are some of the most remarkably obnoxious I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s like they’re so obnoxious that you give them props for pulling off that level of obnoxiosity - 2/10.

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Okay, I know I’m really late to the game on this one, since the movie’s been out for many months, but I finally watched Hostel 2 on DVD last night. I must say, I liked it quite a bit. I think it’s a great companion to the first movie, and is probably the better of the two. Once again I have a starkly different opinion than most of the other fellas on the site. For reference, here are links to Mat’s reviews of Hostel 1 and Hostel 2 (quick summary: he hated them both). So, anyway, for what it’s worth here are my thoughts on Hostel 2…

You could say that this is just the same as the previous movie except with young women as protagonists instead of young men, and you’d have a point. However, I think that H2 is more than just a crappy cash-in. I’m not saying that Roth didn’t strike while the iron was hot (and so what if he did?) but even so, H2 is pretty decent.

Right off the bat, the girls are far more likeable than H1’s very douchey “arrogant American” male leads. Yeah, Bijou Phillips’ character is trampy, but she’s more than tempered by Lauren German and Heather Matarazzo’s polite, nice girl characters. Maybe it’s just me as a guy feeling bad for pretty girls, but the leads in H2 were much more tragic than the guys in H1. You can come out of H1 and sort of say “Those dicks were asking for it!” but that element is nowhere in H2. Which maybe makes H2’s characters even less complex than H1’s, but that’s not what I’m trying to say.

H2 also features a subplot that follows a pair of clients, two American businessmen, as they travel from the U.S. to Europe for a pay-to-slay vacation. Their plot converges with the girls’ plot at the movie’s climax. I loved this part of the movie. There’s a little twist with these two guys that I probably should have seen coming, but I didn’t, and I thought it was really cool as it unfolded.

I dunno, I guess I shouldn’t go on too long here. I think maybe my sunny assessment of Hostel 2 is partly a reaction to the overwhelmingly negative things I’d heard prior to seeing it for myself. Mat has spoken often about how a big hype machine around a movie tends to repel him, and I think the opposite has happened here with me and Hostel 2. I’d heard so many negative things - call it “anti-hype” - that when I watched the movie and it turned out to be even a little enjoyable, then the result is me being very positive about it. Sort of like when we did the Uwe Boll special for Splattercast #50. Set against the hyperbolic things I’d heard, watching a Boll movie and having it not be a total black hole of awfulness left me with an even more positive view of the film than I would have had if I’d been able to go into it with a purely neutral frame of mind.

It’ll never happen, but I’d actually love to see a third and final Hostel film where the Beth character from H2 uses her fortune to hire some badass contract killers to go destroy the hunting club. I envision a sort of action-horror mix, heavy on the action. Tons of shooting, bloody squibs everywhere and with Beth winning in the end.

So, yeah, Hostel 2… I thought it was worth watching.

Filed under: Commentary, DVD, Movies | 5 Comments »

I’m setting up some affiliate pages with Amazon.com so that you can buy junk through Dead Lantern. Basically the way it works is: if you order something from Amazon.com and you click to their site through our links, we’ll get a couple pennies.

I’m not going to beat anyone over the head with it. Panhandling is always annoying, even when done electronically

But if you were going to order something from Amazon anyway, you could do us a favor and check out our links. There’s a shopping page that currently has a search box, and a separate custom store that focuses on horror DVDs. I hope to tweak these, get them looking a little better.

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The good: I got issue #1 of Marvel Zombies 2 today. It was a fun, albeit quick read with very little substance to it. Which works just fine for #1 of a five part series. It takes place forty years after the first series and revolves around the Galactus-powered zombies returning to Earth after eating the entire universe. We also get a quick peek at what the remains of humanity have been up to on Earth all this time. Actually, the people on Earth have a lot more screen…er…panel-time than the actual zombies. The whole Marvel Zombies Civil War angle isn’t touched on at all in issue one but I’m guessing it will revolve around the Galactus zombies battling a few remaining zombies on Earth who have kicked their human flesh addiction like it was a drug habit. But who knows, it’s early. Either way I can’t wait to read more.

My prediction, a zombie version of Ego, The Living Planet tears ass through everything at the end.

The Bad: I watched the Transformers movie for a third time tonight. I decided to rent the DVD in the hopes that somewhere on it would be some sort of special feature or maybe some deleted scenes that pull the story together (and make it interesting) in a way that the theatrical version failed miserably to do. I was denied. Not one single special feature on the DVD. What a goddamned travesty. If anything I found even more problems with the movie this go around. I keep hoping that once I finally go into this movie expecting absolutely nothing, it will actually be fun. It was foolish of me to hope. How could things go so wrong? I blame the writers, who are now saying that Barricade’s (the Decepticon police car) mystery disappearance is a “thread for movie 2″. Which translates to me as, “oh shit, we forgot to film an entire scene! Now we have to explain it away in the sequel and try not to make ourselves look incompetent.”

Bastards.

I do have to say that the movie is much, much better when you can skip through all of the human heavy scenes. In fact, I realized tonight that I cannot physically sit through the first 45 minutes of this movie ever again. Ever. At least not all the way through. From now on, if I ever watch this film again, I’ll watch the opening Blackout attack, fast forward to the Scorponok fight scene in the desert, fast forward to the BumbleBee/Barricade fight, watch the Autobot introductions, and finally fast forward to the action at the Hoover Dam. Sure that only makes the movie like an hour long, but that just shows you how much of this film they could have not even bothered filming and then put that money into extended fight scenes, or, you know, actually making the Transformers the stars of there own movie. This is not Transformers. This is Sam and the Transformers with the “and the Transformers part of that title coming in a little tiny subtitle after the word “Sam” in gigantic letters. Well supposedly there are at least two more TF movies on their way. Let’s hope that the entire thing somehow takes place back on Cybertron and all of the humans from the first film have long since died. I hate Sam. And the military guys. And John Voight. And Mojo the fucking Chihuahua.

Filed under: Comic Books, Commentary, DVD, Movies | 3 Comments »

Somewhat obscure cult fave Night of the Demons 2 has finally hit DVD, but apparently it’s a pretty crappy disc. Oh well, it’s at least better than a worn-out VHS tape, right?

Filed under: DVD | 1 Comment »