Mew Releases for Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011

Posted Oct 29, 2011 by John Allman

Updated Oct 29, 2011 at 02:58 PM

What’s new in stores and on video shelves this week:

A Serbian Film
Genre: Horror/Torture
Directed by: Srđjan Spasojević
Run time: 102 minutes
Rating: Unrated
Format: DVD

The Lowdown: More graphic than “8mm,” more depraved than “Hostel,” more bleak than any film possibly ever made, “A Serbian Film” is not a movie that you will soon forget.

It’s quite possibly a movie you won’t even make it all the way through to the end.

There’s a certain dedication that is required from the outset, a determination not to look away, not to press Stop on the remote, not to grow angry then offended and finally depressed.

This is not torture porn. This is snuff porn with political undertones, an artistic statement and indictment of one man’s native country and the atrocities that have been heaped upon its people. Director Srđjan Spasojević does not flinch. He shows, through sex and violence and the depths of depravity that exist in man’s soul, how Serbia has been reduced to numbness, how years of oppression, strife and war have created a cultural anesthesia.

What better vessel to illustrate this point than a retired porn star whose claim to fame was that he never lost his erection, no matter what was happening around him.

The retired porn star, Miloš (Srđan Todorović), lives with his wife and son. He catches his son watching one of his old films, and it’s a brutal sex film, devoid of passion, Milos as an animal attacking his weaker female counterpart.

Milos receives an invitation to come out of retirement to make a huge payday. A group of investors have asked a director to make a custom art film. The only catch is that Milos can know nothing about the movie in which he will star.

The film, and the harrowing spiral into madness and hell that begins the first day Milos sets foot on the set, is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. This is like jacking into the dreams of a serial killer and being forced to watch as he plays out his sick fantasies.

As much as he indicts his home country, Spasojević doesn’t seem to be saying the same thing about his audience. Unlike Tom Six who went out of his way to make a statement about the people clamoring for him to make “The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence,” Spasojević doesn’t seem to be saying that we, the viewers, are as sick and disgusting as the acts being portrayed on screen, simply because we’re still watching those acts be portrayed.

But that doesn’t stop him from pushing boundaries, crossing lines and, in one sequence, showing an image of something so grotesque, so abdominal, that he likely would be condemned to death for his art in certain counties.

If it’s a challenge to keep watching, I implore you to accept. This is a movie that should be watched until its chilling conclusion. That doesn’t imply or suggest you should or will enjoy it. But I think “A Serbian Film” is worthy of appreciation.

It takes full license of the right to free speech and then it guts the First Amendment and leaves it gasping on the floor, its entrails in a steaming pile.

I’ve never seen a movie like “A Serbian Film.”

I don’t know that I ever want to see anything like it again. In a lesser filmmaker’s hands, this type of creativity could prove dangerous.

But I will tell you this much, and I am aware of what it may say about me as a person and a decent human being: While I never want to see anyone else attempt this kind of movie, I would and will watch “A Serbian Film” again.

The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Yes.
Nudity – Gratuitous.
Gore – Gratuitous.
Drug use – Yes.
Bad Guys/Killers – The wealthy and the depraved.
Buy/Rent – Buy it.
On the Web – http://contrafilm.net/

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Oscilloscope Laboratories, 83 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): When you watch a lot of movies, and so many of those movies end up ripping off elements from other movies, sometimes you forget the simple joy that comes from discovering a truly original film that creates its own rules and springs from a place that can’t be copied.

“Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale” is such a film, and it is remarkable.

The best part is that it’s not a horror movie, per se, although it certainly has some horrific moments. It’s like director Jalmari Helander and his crew watched a marathon of Amblin Entertainment movies from the 1980s, particularly “Gremlins” and “The Goonies,” and then set out to one-up all those classic films that most of us remember so fondly from our youth.

“Rare Exports” concerns an excavation project taking place in Finland’s Korvatunturi mountains, also known as the home of Father Christmas, according to Finnish lore. Residents of the nearby community begin to discover strange occurrences as Christmas creeps closer. Electronic devices and space heaters begin disappearing. Next, the community’s children disappear, all except one boy, Pietari, the son of local butcher Rauno.

Rauno and his pals, Piiparinen and Riley, hope to make enough money to get out of debt and start a business for themselves. Rauno’s relationship with his son is strained. The two don’t think as much of one another as they should because they are alone, having lost the guiding, calming force of Pietari’s mother.

So from that simple set-up, Helander and Co. allows their imaginations to just run wild. And the remaining residents learn why the real legend of Santa Claus is far different from the mythology that people have been fooled into believing. What if Santa could know if you had been bad or good, and what if he chose to punish the bad with a far worse fate than anyone might expect? What if Santa’s elves weren’t the pint-sized, pointy-shoed present wrappers that you’re used to seeing on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” What if Santa’s helpers were grizzled, naked, extremely dangerous old men who had spent countless years blindly following their leader?

There’s so much to explore with this film, and so much to appreciate. I loved how a movie about discovering the truth behind the myths of Christmas also turned into a timely parable about parents needing to trust their children, and allow them to assume responsibility, even at a young age, because they can handle it. The father-son relationship story at the heart of “Rare Exports” is both touching and slightly cold, which I think can be attributed to the film’s Finnish origins. There’s a foreign sensibility that is lacking in most American films because, let’s face it, our country and culture is extremely different from other places, and our children are coddled for far too long before they are allowed to stand on their own. That’s not how life is in Finland, apparently, and I was thrilled when, in the amazing third act, “Rare Exports” played with those themes and turned its tiny protagonist, Pietari, into a combat-ready hero the likes of which you rarely see portrayed.

Ho ho kudos, indeed.

Attack the Block (Sony, 88 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): It’s like crossing over to the freaky alterniverse of “Fringe” where Hindenburg-sized blimps ferry people across the city and the Twin Towers still stand.

“Attack the Block,” the deliriously enjoyable, immensely inventive UK mashup, plays like a parallel world version of “Super 8,” the wonderfully entertaining, darkly whimsical alien invasion summer hit from writer/director J.J. Abrams.

Only “Attack the Block” doesn’t feature a ragtag group of cute pre-teens living in rural Americana in the still-innocent early 80s, struggling with parental expectations and the pangs of puberty that threaten to tear them away from monster movie magazines and force them to interact with girls and confront real world terrors. It’s only after an alien from outer space escapes a government facility and begins wreaking havoc on the town in its bid to go home that the boys, and girl, of “Super 8” learn whether they have what it takes to be heroes.

No, Joe Cornish’s magnificent debut isn’t like that at all. And yet it is, completely and totally, just like that.

Cornish’s “Attack” features a ragtag group of teen hoodlums living in a gritty, dangerous section of low-income South London, who rob and steal from anyone they can menace, who all but exist without parental supervision, getting by only on their street smarts and the strength of their friendship. It’s only after aliens from some distant galaxy begin dive-bombing the streets and parks of South London and wreaking havoc in a bid to take over the planet that the boys, and girl, of “Attack the Block” learn whether they have what it takes to save their neighborhood, their block, and be recognized as heroes.

This is as fresh and exciting as movies get. Where Abrams’ “Super 8” seemed like a love letter to the Amblin Entertainment films of his youth where the stars always survived and lessons were learned, regardless of what danger or threat was defeated, Cornish seems to relish the opportunity to dig deeper, to go darker and grittier and to thrust his pint-size pack into mortal danger at every turn. 

Kids fight and die defending this “Block.” They work for drug dealers and thieves. They live by their own code, but they can’t find it within themselves to abandon a young girl who needs their help to make it through the night.

Everything, from the creature designs and FX to the vibrant young cast to Cornish’s whipsmart dialogue and steady hand behind the camera, elevate “Attack the Block” to rarified status.

There’s a reason this movie was in such demand this past summer, why online campaigns revved up in earnest to plead for the film to finally be released in their respective towns.

This is one you just have to see. Go, find it. Now.

Roger Corman’s Cult Classics Triple Feature: Lethal Ladies Collection (Firecracker, TNT Jackson, Too Hot To Handle) (Shout! Factory, 234 minutes, R, DVD): This is quite possibly one of the best releases to date in Shout! Factory’s epic Roger Corman’s Cult Classics series, which has been releasing dozens of Corman’s best films for more than a year.

And that’s saying something with a series that featured all-new transfers of such drive-in greats as “Battle Beyond the Stars,” “Piranha” and “Jackson County Jail.”

But this triple feature, the “Lethal Ladies” collection, very nearly blows them all away if only because the featured films are so obscure yet so entertaining and, in the case of “Too Hot To Handle,” a near masterpiece of B-movie greatness.

“Lethal Ladies” spotlights three exploitation action films from the 1970s and early 1980s featuring strong, violent women in the leads. There’s “Firecracker” from 1981, the tale of a martial arts instructor who travels to the Philippines to find her missing sister and ends up infiltrating a brutal crime syndicate that makes money off pitting fighters in a battle to the death; “T.N.T. Jackson” from 1974, about a young black female karate expert scouring Hong Kong to avenge her brother’s death; and “Too Hot To Handle,” the 1977 cult classic about a female assassin in the Philippines.

“Too Hot To Handle” is the standout of the bunch. I imagine this is the film that B-movie lovers like Quentin Tarantino play for guests when they come over for movie night.

Cheri Caffaro, one of the genre’s exploitation queens, stars in her final role as femme fatale Samantha Fox, a hit woman who relishes her job. Fox lives on a boat in the Manila harbor. She gets off on killing her victims. She’s more than a little dangerous, clinically psychotic and loves to wear revealing, see-through tops with no bra.

“Too Hot” literally has everything you could ever want from an exploitation classic:
• Copious nudity, including one of the better sex scenes I’ve ever seen in a mainstream movie (literally, it borders on porno);
• Lots and lots of blood;
• Lots and lots of Kung Fu;
• A sadomasochistic torture death in an S&M playroom;
• A brutal cockfight used as foreplay;
• Its own signature ballad, “Lady Samantha,” played during the borderline porno scene;
• And some of the best dialogue ever written for a film of this kind.

Want an example?

Here’s two classic exchanges from the first meeting of our bad girl Fox and her would-be captor, Chief Det. Domingo De La Torres (the hysterically cheesy, and furry, Aharon Ipale).

De La Torres: Feel like taking a walk through the gardens? It sure as hell beats making out here.

Fox: Why not, as long as you promise if you rape me, you’ll work the case.

De La Torres: It’s a promise.

Minutes later, as they emerge from their garden walk, the second exchange:

Fox: You were pretty damn polite in the garden. What’s the problem, chief? All wind up and no delivery?

De La Torres: No, that’s not it. You might find it hard to swallow, but, when I was a little kid, my mother would take a strap to me every time I came home with dirty clothes. As a result, when I grew up, I never felt comfortable in the bushes.

This is a prime example of why it’s so hard for today’s directors to try to recreate the same sense of style that these movies exuded back when they were released.

“Too Hot” never wavers from its mission. There is no big epiphany at the end. Samantha Fox doesn’t grow a conscience, although she gives De La Torres the opportunity to live, if he’s smart enough to survive.

You get the sense that had Caffaro wanted to continue acting, this might have been a franchise similar to Cleopatra Jones, featuring more sex, more karate battles and more delicious bon mots of dialogue than any B-movie lover could possibly stand.

Zombie and House by the Cemetery (Blue Underground, 91 minutes and 86 minutes, Unrated, Blu-Ray): Two classic Lucio Fulci epics arrive in high-definition, just in time for Halloween. There’s the two-disc, overstuffed with awesome extras, edition of “Zombie,” the unofficial 1979 Italian sequel to George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” and then the 1981 supernatural slasher “The House by the Cemetery.”;
Having never seen either film in its entirety (I know, let the hating begin), I purposefully experienced both films back to back over two nights. I started with “House,” which might seem like sacrilege, but I felt like I had already experienced “Zombie,” with its creepy tagline, “We are going to eat you.” As it turns out, I was in for quite the surprise. Not only did I really enjoy both films, but I came away with a new appreciation for Fulci’s contribution to horror, Italian or otherwise.

“House by the Cemetery” is the lesser of the two films, if only because it’s less cohesive, if that’s even a logical criticism of Fulci’s work. Rarely, if ever, has this director been accused of following a traditional narrative structure. That’s part of the charm of experiencing a Fulci classic, experiencing those jarring transitions and sudden blasts of gore that seemingly come out of nowhere. “House” suffers a bit from its repetitive structure. Anyone who enters the ominous house by the cemetery gets brutally slain by a demonic, half human-half zombie creature in the basement. Then there’s the ghost whispering child who receives regular visits from a young girl warning him not to move into the house with his mother and father. The gore is impressive, the story meanders a bit much, but overall this is a fun haunted house/slasher mashup.

“Zombie” is a classic. And it’s finally making its Blu-Ray debut, and the results are fantastic. The film transfer is crisp, the sound quality excellent and the gruesome gore all the more disgusting in high-def. And this set boasts not one, but two discs, including tons of bonus features, interviews and analysis of the film.

This is Fulci’s masterpiece presented in the best possible way. It spotlights all the signature elements that have kept him atop the list of most popular and iconic Italian horror directors, even as it allows for a practical examination of the impulsive decisions that often detract from his work. There are few flaws to be found here, if anything, just minor quibbles not even worth discussing at this point in the film’s history.

What I walked away from “Zombie” with was a genuine appreciation for Fulci’s craft, for his unrelenting flesh-eating hordes who just kept rising from the ground, for the impressive practical effects and for the zombie design, which is decidedly unlike most American undead films. Fulci’s zombies are horrific, blind, worms and maggots in their eye, shambling sacks of flesh who only want to eat the living. 

The best bits aren’t just the most iconic – shark versus zombie, anyone? – but that sense of anything goes, no holds barred filmmaking gives “Zombie” a crackling energy.

There’s not much here that would cause someone seeing it for the first time to knowingly connect Fulci’s work with George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” which this film was marketed as a direct sequel.

But the final scene with hordes of the undead shuffling across a bridge toward downtown New York City with an accompanying voiceover radio report of the living dead apocalypse, is pretty spot-on. It invokes not only Romero, but WWII and the Nazi threat, storming across Europe in a bid for world domination.

Bloody Disgusting Selects: Atrocious (The Collective, 74 minutes, R, DVD): The “found footage” genre takes a step back, and Bloody Disgusting releases the first clunker of its up-until-now undeniably audacious and wildly successful Bloody Disgusting Selects series.

It’s not that “Atrocious” is a bad film, per se. It never even crossed my mind to go with the easy ‘Here’s a movie that lives up to its name…’ review because, honestly, that’s not the problem. Writer/director Fernando Barreda Luna does his best,  and he makes the most of the Ace up his sleeve, which is the creepy as can be labyrinth that serves as the focal point for much of the “found footage” action.

The problem with “Atrocious” is it sets up a premise that crumbles under the weight of its less than stellar climatic reveal. For most of its brief run time, you’re expecting something entirely different than what you get, and what you get likely pales next to what you imagined.

The basic gist is that a family moves into a creepy farmhouse that has the aforementioned labyrinth adjacent to the house. The house is the childhood home of the family matriarch. There’s also multiple, ominous mentions of the surrounding woods and the labyrinth and how no one should ever venture out into either at night.

What happens next? The teenage brother and sister venture out at night, of course, after having trekked around the labyrinth and gotten lost during the day. Pretty soon, everyone is running around the labyrinth carrying their own handheld recording devices, which makes little sense.

By the time people start dying, you’ve lost whatever interest you had when “Atrocious” began.

Faces in the Crowd (Millennium Media, 102 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): “Faces in the Crowd” is the kind of film that Brian DePalma used to specialize in – a highly stylized but totally ridiculous noir thriller starring a handful of actors you know and love from other films. Think “Body Double” or “Blow Out.” Granted, “Faces” isn’t in that same league. It’s too lightweight for its own good, even though it offers an interesting premise and a great pair of leads, Milla Jovanich, looking radiant, and Julian McMahon. It’s nice to see Milla outside of her annual return to Raccoon City to battle zombies. She usually has a good eye for low-budget genre fare, as evidenced by “The Perfect Getaway,” and she always manages to class up even the few stinkers she picks, see “Stone.” In “Faces,” Milla plays Anna Marchant, a young teacher dating Bryce, a professional guy her girlfriends don’t like, because he keeps intruding on their “girl” time. One night, while walking home from a night out with the girls, Anna witnesses a brutal crime, the latest murder by the serial killer dubbed Tearjerk Jack. Anna runs for her life but gets caught and is thrown over a bridge, striking her head so hard in the fall that she loses the ability to recognize people’s faces, even her own. It’s a real but rare condition, Prosopagnosia, and writer/director Julien Magnat has fun employing a bunch of camera tricks to keep all the faces changing before our eyes, much like Anna’s perspective. “Faces” loses steam the longer it goes, though, and by the end, once you’ve gotten past so many red herrings, and the big reveal of Tearjerk Jack comes, it doesn’t carry the same heft as, say, John Doe’s reveal in “Se7en.” This is an OK movie with a great cast of popular TV actors from McMahon (Nip/Tuck), Sarah Wayne Callies (The Walking Dead/Prison Break) and Michael Shanks (Stargate: SG1).

Also Available:

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings – The fourth film in the continuing saga of One-Eye, Saw-Tooth and Three Finger, the backwoods mutant hillbilly cannibals who have terrorized dozens of stupid young people just out for an adventure in the backwoods of West Virginia since the franchise’s 2003 debut, is a prequel. It’s also written and directed by Declan O’Brien, the guy responsible for SyFy Original Movies like “Rock Monster,” “Cyclops” and “Sharktopus.” Oh, yeah, he also wrote and directed “Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead,” which was not at all like the superior, Joe Lynch-directed “Wrong Turn 2: Dead End,” which took the original’s premise and ramped up the gore for a satisfyingly bloody good time. Nope, this isn’t like that at all. In fact, this series should have stopped at Part 2.

Jurassic Park Ultimate Trilogy – “Jurassic Park” remains the torchbearer for the wonder that computer-generated image technology can invoke. With one film, director Steven Spielberg made us feel as if dinosaurs were real again. He captured the awe and terror that such massive prehistoric creatures could inspire, and he managed to do it within a family friendly, there’s a moral at my core popcorn movie that made buckets of money and blazed the trail for two sequels. Neither the second or third installment lived up to the promise of the original, but there was much to appreciate and enjoy about both. All three films are collected here in a special edition boxed set that likely will be on the wishlist of every fan boy out there because of the collection’s treasure trove of special features, including an all-new, in-depth documentary with interviews with much of the talent in front of, and behind, the camera.

Marvel The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes Volumes Three and Four – Is it too early to start cashing in on the anticipation for next summer’s Biggest Superhero Movie of All Time? I think not. Fans Assemble! And fork out cash for the next two installments of this animated Marvel series based on The Avengers.

Winnie the Pooh – Oh bother. Pooh, I still love you.

Pawn Stars: Volume Three – Why? Is this what a recession brings? We not only go to pawn shops to sell all of our crap to make enough money to keep the lights on because our pay has been slashed and our jobs are in constant peril, but we also feel compelled to watch television reality shows about the guys who run the pawn shops who never give us full price for our valuable possessions, regardless of how bad we need the money?

Barney Miller: The Complete Series – One of the best television series of all time comes to DVD in a massive boxed set. “Barney Miller,” which ran from 1974 to 1982, an impressive 171-episode lifespan, featured one of the best ensemble casts ever gathered with Hal Linden, Max Gail, Ron Glass, Steve Landesberg, Ron Carey and Abe Vigoda. The sitcom, based around the lives of a group of NYC detectives inside their precinct house, deftly balanced broad comedy with serious character development and, often, unexpected human drama. This 25-disc series from Shout! Factory comes in a handsome and cool collectible box, shaped like the door to the precinct, and features commentaries, interviews, a 32-page retrospective booklet, the original Pilot episode and the entire first season of “Fish,” the popular spinoff series featuring Abe Vigoda’s character.

Shaolin – Historical drama set in China with lots of kung fu.

Father of Invention – Kevin Spacey, making a comeback. Well, maybe not in this particular film, but did you see him in “Horrible Bosses”?

Mothman – Not to be confused with the scary as hell “The Mothman Diaries,” one of the few films I still to this day cannot watch with the lights off.

A Little Help – Poignant family drama starring Jenna Fischer from “The Office.”

The People vs George Lucas – A pretty riotous takedown of all things George by the very fans who once would have given anything just to be in his presence. Few directors have ever rankled fans the way George Lucas did when he began tinkering with his beloved “Star Wars” franchise, and then he went one worse – he gave lifelong fans, grown men and women who remembered seeing “Star Wars” at the earliest of ages, the Prequel Trilogy, which all but exposed Lucas as the Wizard, an empty suit behind a camera fresh out of ideas. This documentary explores the anger that fans feel, why Lucas’ original trilogy still resonates so much with those fans and how fans often express their love by creating amazing tributes to the films that defined their childhoods.

---