Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) Blu-Ray

Stars: Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker, Thayer David and Gertrude
Director: Henry Levin
Composer: Bernard Herrmann

Released by Twilight Time
Limited Edition of 3,000 units
Available exclusively through www.screenarchives.com

Reviewed by Steven Ruskin

In an age where technology moves as fast as the wind it’s refreshing to spend a few hours with scientists who set out on an expedition driven by such an innocent and wholesome sense of adventure. We’re taken to a prestigious University in Victorian times in an age of enlightenment and invention. The thirst for discovery is palpable and the competitive drive to get there first is powerful. Journey to the Center of the Earth is one of those early tales of science fiction written near the turn of the century. Long before Tolkien thought of Hobbits and Middle Earth, Jules Verne spun an amazing tale of a journey deep within the bowels of our world. His other books include Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island. Arthur Conan Doyle known for his Sherlock Holmes stories published The Lost World. H.G. Wells contributed First Men in the Moon and The Time Machine. All of these tales have inspired many motion pictures from the silents to the recent 3-D craze. They all stimulate a youthful sense of wonder and adventure. They all have a journey, an odyssey and a triumphant return. There was a time, not too long ago, when students would rush to a series of upscale comic books to get them through book reports. Classics Illustrated was the Criterion of the comic books then. All of these can be found in those glorious collections of abbreviated text and tantalizingly drawn panels. What is it about these stories that have brought them back again and again? They contain the classic search for what is out there? What is deep under the sea, beyond the stars, in the future, buried in the past or at the center of the earth .

One of the neatest things a movie can do is take you somewhere you have never been before. Journey to the Center of the Earth first takes us back in time to get us properly in that mood. We begin at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland as geology professor Oliver Lindenbrook has just been knighted. James Mason plays him with an impassioned combination of grumbling impatience and eccentric wanderlust. He couldn’t care less about knighthood and is off on an expedition at the drop of a hat. The choosing of the crew for the expedition and the assembling of the proper equipment has become a ritual in these kinds of films. The professor’s top student is Pat Boone who sings, too. Arlene Dahl is the love interest and the woman’s perspective. The heavy lifting is done by Peter Ronson as Hans who insists on bringing along Gertrude the Duck. There is a scene where James Mason shows off the state of the art in special lamps designed for miners. You wind them up and they can conceivably put out light forever. Once equipped, we see them spread out along the horizon line all in silhouette. They gaze down into a crater looking for a sign. As the journey starts Pat Boone breaks out the concertina and they engage in a four-part harmony as they trek ever downward. That someone had been there before and left signs to follow was an intriguing plot device. However having a cunning descendant of that person skulking in the shadows to be glimpsed almost as a ghost on the way down was inspired. Thayer David as Count Saknussem is pure evil. He’s got these long sideburns, deep-set eyes and is frequently seen half covered in shadows. It’s worth noting that he went on to appear in both House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows

This imaginative film is blessed with the tremendous cinematography of Leo Tover (Day The Earth Stood Still). This Blu-Ray is in love with his work here. Colors pop with a vengeance. The mushroom garden they encounter is right out of Alice in Wonderland. The purple of Arlene Dahl’s skirt is bold as can be. The textures of the walls and stalagmites are reach out and touch them detailed. The set design is wildly creative and yet mixes well with the Carlsbad Caverns where many of the scenes were shot. This has got to be the best use of fins glued onto the back of a lizard in any movie. The “dimetrodons” here easily best Irwin Allen’s sailboat lizards in The Lost World the year after in 1960 and the ones that Victor Mature dodged in One Million BC (1940). The film was nominated for three Academy Awards including art direction and special effects.

Video –
1080 P, 2.35:1 This Cinemascope presentation is a simply stunning experience. If one was pressed to nit pick there was one emulsional scratch spotted when Count Saknussem gets his first close up in the caverns. There is grain apparent but it is friendly grain. There is a great measure of detail to be appreciated. The deep wools that Pat Boone wears in the beginning practically make you itch just to look at them. The color palate in the costumes is perfectly rendered as are the panoply of colors that sparkle in the underground caves. The art direction here will often stop you in your tracks.  The publicity shots here do not reflect the quality of the Blu-Ray disc.
Audio –
English 4.0 DTS-HD. No Subtitles are offered
So much of Bernard Hermann’s wonderful score lives in the lower regions of the mid range speakers and nestles comfortably in the bowels of your subwoofer. Hermann uses a two chord descending riff that just reverberates through you. It sounds like deep reeds, bass clarinets, saxophones, a church organ and a horn section that come from well below the knees. He then sprinkles glissandos from a harp over this. It’s got a magically captivating sound. Watching this on TV or VHS there was no hope of recreating the theatrical experience. Twilight has produced a track that a good home system will gulp down with a smile. The new 4.0 track on this disc is powerful and lustrous. Hermann, well known for his work on Alfred Hitchock and Ray Harryhausen pictures, has chosen a blend of wind driven instruments to carry the soundtrack. The organs, reeds, and horns seem perfectly matched to the currents of air that cascade down the otherworldly crevices and crannies the cast crawl through. When we finally reach the ocean at the middle of the earth he’ll stand your hair on end. Play this one loud.

Extras –

Isolated Score Track. American and Spanish trailers. Booklet with
artwork and an essay. The isolated track is a very nice addition.

On a scale of Poor, fair, Good, Excellent, Classic:

Blu-Ray – Excellent

Movie – Excellent

Haywire DVD
Stars: Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Bandreas
Director: Steven Soderbergh

Released by Lionsgate

Reviewed by Steven Ruskin

This is a disappointment. The elements just don’t mix together very well to make a good movie. Soderbergh won an Academy Award for directing Traffic and has made a lot of George Clooney movies. The only film in his background that would seem to suggest he would be suited to make a balls to the walls action film with MMA sensation Gina Carano might be Out of Sight. However that was another George Clooney film based on a terrifically plotted Elmore Leonard book. The script for Haywire written by Lem Dobbs is frankly terrible. It is a jumble of spy film clichés that are very out of date. None of the narrative’s revelations serve to pull you in at all. The dialogue is hopelessly banal. Only Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas seem to make their lines work, almost by virtue of their wonderful voices and pacing. Poor Gina Carano gets thrust into this mess and has no chance of carrying it.

On the plus side the film looks tremendous. Soderbergh working under the pseudonym
Peter Andrews shoots a very classy looking film. During one of the first chase scenes he flips from color to black and white, from sweeping movements to still frames and creates a giddy contemporary looking montage that is a joy to behold. Probably the best realized sequences in the film are the lovely scenes of Gina Carano running across the European rooftops. She runs with a passion and leaps from point to point with a grace and determination. This is no double so Soderbergh lets us stay right with her, only moving back to cut to overhead shots so we can appreciate the panorama of her trek. Watching those scenes is a heady joy.

The main reason people will grab this disc is to see the action and fight scenes. The action, referring to the gunplay and car chases was average. Only one bit with Gina driving a car backwards through the snow covered back roads is saved by the gorgeous cinematography. The main draw here and the only reason this film got made is the attraction of seeing Gina Carano bring her MMA muscle to the fore in some thrilling hand to hand fights. There are at least four main encounters. The first one in a restaurant shoe horns too many wrestling moves in to completely work. Ms. Carano definitely has a go-for-it quality and she brings a genuine intensity to all of her fight scenes. There is a very pretty battle set on a beach under a glistening sunset. Very pretty. The moves though just don’t connect all that well. The one scene though that truly delivers is the fight between Michael Fassbender and Gina. They are dressed to the nines. As they walk down the hotel hallway Gina takes her high heels off and as soon as they enter the huge hotel suite he sucker punches her and the fight is on. This is the one sequence where fight choreographer J.J. Perry and his team truly shine. They smash each other into mirrors, glass cases, and flat screen TV’s. Every available piece of bric-a-brac is cracked across their bodies and heads. This fight moves! They work through the hallway, crash over a sofa, spill into walls and finally Gina grabs his neck in her powerful legs and applies a familiar MMA move that chokes him into semi consciousness. The final coupe de grace is delivered by the traditional pistol shot through a pillow held over his face. It’s a few minutes of probably everything one hoped this movie would be. That the fight is done in spiffy evening clothes adds a nice touch. Gina comes across as such a tomboy that it’s a kick to she her so dolled up yet still dishing it out. Kudos, J.J.! This is the best scene in the whole film.

Too much of the rest is made up of spies and agents whispering Barcelona like it was a secret code. We see an endless array of people racking back the slide on pistols and automatic weapons. We see Gina Carano run a lot. There is a plethora of scenes of her blasting down streets. This was truly a job for a B movie director who really knows how to put together action sequences and make stars look cool. Those first four Steven Segal films had just the right combination of cool fights, witty lines and cold hard stares. Chuck Norris, Cynthia Rothrock, Jean Claude van Damme, and many others have made a truckload of fun films. These cheap B movies are much harder to make than it looks. Here an Academy Award winning director takes a beautiful and photogenic MMA star and gives us one great scene out of 93 minutes.

Video – 2.40:1. This is a stunning looking film. Soderbergh as a DP has an incredible talent. Black levels are deep and lustrous. Colors are strong when they need to be and washed out to whatever degree has been decided. The whole film looks as though everything was done on purpose to give each scene exactly what was called for. It is impressive to see how good this DVD looks. As is so often the case, it is down to the source material. Soderbergh has controlled the lighting so well it’s exquisite looking.

Audio – Dolby Digital 5.1 English. Subtitles available in English and Spanish. Closed captioning. This is a nicely done soundscape. Whenever Antonio Banderous speaks his voice teases the subwoofer into appreciative support. The action scenes are strong but do not rock the house.

Extras – Gina Carano In Training lets us see how her fight scenes were choreographed in advance and trained. We also see her shoot guns and play war with the boys. She comes off so much more natural here than in the actual film. The Men Of Haywire lets us see the talent that surrounds her in the film.

DVD – Excellent

Movie – Fair

Mother’s Day (2010) Blu-Ray, DVD
Stars: Rebecca De Mornay, Jaime King, Briana Evigan, Shawn Ashmore
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Released by Anchor Bay Films

Reviewed by Steven Ruskin

Not only are we celebrating Mother’s Day with this release but the day that someone actually went ahead and remade a Troma film. Director Darren Lynn Bousman is most well know for continuing the Saw franchise with Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV. Not exactly cutting edge films.
The film starts out like a nice mix of Desperate Hours and Reservoir Dogs. A group of scruffy criminals has just committed a bank robbery. However one of them is shot badly and they have lost the loot from the job. What to do? Go home to mother’s house where they were all raised. The catch is mother’s house has been foreclosed. A young twenty something couple bought the place taking advantage of a great deal before it went on the market. That’s a nice acknowledgement of the current housing crisis. They are having a party with three other couples when mother’s boys come home. Not quite what either expected. The film plays a
pretty good game of hostages and deranged criminals for awhile. A couple of them are unhinged with one able to keep his cool. The rules of cinema state that if you invade a home you must take along at least one loose cannon that will threaten the hostages. An opportunity arises to keep a lid on the terror when one of the party guests turns out to be a doctor. Shawn Ashmore (X-Men) as George the doctor turns in one of the better performances. He patches the GSW by melting a plastic lid and a spatula into the wound. Wow, that’s a pretty savage med school he must have gone to. During all of this you can catch Troma head honcho Lloyd Kaufman’s smiling face on a TV left on in the living room. Hi Lloyd.

Things move along entertainingly if not terribly originally. The party guests try to formulate a plan to get out and the bad guys start to slowly crack as panic sets in. Into this mix come mother and her daughter. This is when the film rides off the rails and detours into Mommie Dearest territory. Rebecca De Mornay (Risky Business, Runaway Train, Wedding Crashers) plays a very tightly wound and controlled mother to these ruffians. She loves her boys but is obviously twisted. De Mornay, who could always act well, delivers a taught performance. Like a snake she waits, coiling choosing her moments carefully to lash out suddenly with venomous precision. Apparently the boys had been mailing cash from their spree of bank robberies home. Mother is sure the new owners have intercepted these envelopes after she was forced to leave her home. There is a lame explanation offered as to why the boys never knew this and continued to send the money there anyway.

At this point director Darren Bousmen can’t resist going torture porn on us. Up to this juncture the film worked pretty well. Now it just descends into scene after scene of bloody humiliation with Darren betraying his sawed-off roots. Hostages are pitted against each other. Two men are picked to have a knife fight to decide which of their girlfriends gets raped by the dying son before he bleeds out. Mother is so certain the money is stashed there she starts in on the new owners. We get to see boiling water poured into an ear. A girl gets half her hair ironed off. Nail guns shoot without being hooked up to a compressor. During the inevitable run to the ATM machine two girls spot the bad guy and his hostage. He simply places a knife between them and says the one that stabs the other can go free.  And where did they get the miles of saran wrap that everyone gets tied up with?  The inconsistencies and contrivances pile up but one doesn’t care anymore.

Video – 2.40:1, Everything looks fine. Nothing of note stands out.

Audio – Dobly TrueHD 5.1 on the Blu-Ray , Dobly Digital 5.1 on the DVD. Subtitles are offered in English and Spanish on both. A very serviceable track.

Extras – Commentary with the director and Shawn Ashmore, one of the actors.

DVD – Good

Movie – Fair/Good

The Killer Nun (1979)

by Troy Howarth

D: Giulio Berruti; S: Giulio Berruti and Alberto Rarallo; MP: Anita Ekberg, Paola Morra, Joe Dallessandro, Lou Castel, Massimo Serato, Alida Valli

Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg) tries to hide her deteriorating mental state before eventually spiralling into madness and murder…

The ‘nunsploitation’ subgenre found much favor in heavily Catholic countries, notably Italy and Spain, during the 1970s.  Inspired, no doubt, by the world wide success (and infamy) of Ken Russell’s masterpiece The Devils (1971), these films sought to explore fetishistic fantasies of what must ‘really’ be going on behind those convent walls.  None of the films came close to replicating the impact or quality of Russell’s altogether different picture (which can only be lumped in with these films by default), but a few managed to generate a legitimate frisson or two.  This cannot be said of The Killer Nun, which somehow found itslef on the UK’s much trumpeted ‘video nasty’ list, despite a general paucity of sleaze and gore.

Anita Ekberg tops an eclectic cast, and she’s most certainly a long ways from her early career pinacle, dancing in the Trevi Fountain with Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1959).  By this stage in the game, Ekberg had graduated to full ‘cougar’ status, specializing in older sex pot roles which merely sough to capitolize on her image as a sex kitten.  Ekberg still proves capable of commanding an audience, but the role requires far more of her than she is capable of giving.  An actress with some real dramatic chops might have made Sister Gertrude into a fully realized psychological case study; in Ekberg’s hands, however, it comes off as shrill and melodramatic at best.  The actress teases the audience with some near nude views, but for the most part, hysteria is the name of the game – and she approaches this with gusto, if not much in the way of conviction.  Paola Morra (Behind Convent Walls) provides the film’s quota of naked flesh, and she certainly is impressive to behold.  Like Ekberg, however, the role requires more of the actress than she is able to deliver.  Morra goes for broke when required to ratchet up the sex appeal, but her portrayal of the (not so) closet lesbian protege of Ekberg is one note in the extreme.  Joe Dallessandro (Blood for Dracula), never the most accomplished of thespians, is required to emote and keep his clothes on – and if his films for Paul Morrissey proved one thing, it’s that he had ample screen presence, but was best when used as something of a hunky prop.  This is especially abundant here, with the actor badly miscast as a compassionate doctor who comes across as neither compassionate nor especially knowledgable.  Accomplished veterans like Massimo Serato (Don’t Look Now) and Alida Valli (Lisa and the Devil) are on hand to lend some class, but they are given precious little to do.

Director Giulio Berruti had earlier had a hand in writing such cult items as Baba Yaga (1972) and They Have Changed Their Faces (1971), but The Killer Nun would remain the second of only two titles he would direct.  His handling of the material is by no means disastrous, but he fails to really energize the proceedings.  The pacing is slow, there’s some pseudo-pretentious attempts at bargain basement artisness to distinguish it from the ‘typical’ exploitation film, and apart from one memorably meanspirited sequence (the killer sadistically killing off a victim after torturing her with pins) there’s no real shock value.  The ‘twist’ ending is especially feeble, being fairly easy to predict early on.

On the upside, Alessandro Alessandroni contributes a decent soundtrack and the production values are above average.  The cinematography by Antonio Maccoppi is professionally realized, and if the film lacks much in the way of atmosphere, at least it comes off as polished.  The Killer Nun is by no means the worst of its subgenre, but it doesn’t offer up the juicy sensationalism that makes some of its less distinguished progeny so much fun to watch; and at the end of the day, a sense of fun is precisely what this picture is lacking.

Video:

Blue Underground continues to unleash some of their less exciting catalogue titles to blu ray, but at least the upgrade in video quality is noticable.  The Killer Nun looks far more detailed and vivid than it did on DVD, though it does suffer from some of the strange ‘grain’ issues typical of some of their other Italian BD releases, including The Stendhal Syndrome and Django.  The print is in very good shape overall, though a handful of shots flutter noticably, and colors appear to be accurately rendered.  The film is fully uncut and the image is sharp and nicely detailed.  The grain issue is most noticable during the darker scenes; since much of the film unfolds in brighter lighting, however, this isn’t too much of a distraction.

Audio:

Audio options include the English and Italian dubs, both in dts-HD mono.  The English track is wooden as hell, and none of the actors provide their own voices – not even Dallessandro.  The Italian dub is a bit better, and it does appear to at least retain Valli’s distinctive voice, but in the end it’s basically a matter of personal preference.  Both tracks are in good shape, with obvious source-and-age-related limitations.  English subs are included for the Italian track, as are English captions for the deaf and hard of hearing.

Extras:
Extras include a trailer, a poster and still gallery and a featurette interview with writer/director Berruti.  Berruti looks back on the film with fondness, though he seems to be rather bitter on the way the film was received and how his subsequent career panned out.

Overall:

A mediocre nunsploitation item gets a decent upgrade from BU.

Film: ** out of *****

Video: *** out of *****

Audio: *** out of *****

Extras: *** out of *****