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John Allman

If you’ve ever wandered the aisles at the video store or surfed the DVR pay-per-view options and seen a bunch of movies that you’ve never heard of, chances are John has watched them. Why? He loves movies. All kinds of movies. Good, bad, so-bad-they’re good, even the truly unwatchable ones. He mostly loves horror and science-fiction and drive-in exploitation movies that most upstanding model citizens wouldn’t dare watch. Then he writes up his thoughts so you can decide - watch, don’t watch or avoid at all costs. Sometimes he even gets to talk to the cool folks who make some of your favorite films.

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John Allman

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New Releases for Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2010

Posted Aug 6, 2010 by John Allman

Updated Aug 6, 2010 at 12:15 AM

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

After.Life
Genre: Horror
Directed by: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Run time: 103 minutes
Rating: R
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: There are but two reasons to watch “After.Life,” a confounding and poorly-paced examination of the hereafter that is neither scary nor compelling.

Those two reasons, and they’re pretty good reasons: Christina Ricci’s boobs.

Oh, how I have long loved me some Ricci. From her sexy, white-trash turns in “The Opposite of Sex” and “Black Snake Moan,” to her tightly-dressed, buxom beauty in “Buffalo ’66.”

Ricci is as good a reason as any I know to sit through even a middling movie just to see what she does with the material, and in “After.Life,” she does wonders with a role that requires her to be completely nude for more than half of the time she graces the screen.

She pouts, she schemes, she scampers about a big, not very scary funeral home in her birthday suit, locking horns with a creepy mortician (Liam Neeson, who gives this material way more gravitas than it is worth) while waiting for her should-be fiancé (a slightly annoying Justin Long, basically playing the exact same character he played in “Drag Me to Hell,” but not as convincingly) to realize she’s not dead.

Is she dead? Is she in purgatory? Is she a victim of a crazed undertaker who fancies himself a grown up version of the creepy kid from “The Sixth Sense” who can commune with the recently departed?

I still don’t know, even after laboring through writer-director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo’s debut feature. I don’t know that Wojtowicz-Vosloo knows either. If he did have a point, it got lost somewhere while writing dialogue like, “You’re a corpse. You don’t have an opinion!” and “Why am I here? What are you doing to me?” which Ricci is forced to say several times, as if Neeson’s first answer, “You’re dead and I’m helping prepare you,” didn’t sum it up pretty neatly.

But, still, how the camera lingers on Ricci’s pale, porcelain skin as she lounges on a cold metal table, waiting to meet her maker, her ample bosom heaving with each objection to the mortician’s efforts to make her presentable for her viewing.

Ah. Yes. Plot? What plot? If you’re a fan, it’s completely unnecessary.

The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Christina, she’s Ricci hot.
Nudity – So gratuitous it’s like being on a nude beach.
Gore – No.
Drug use – No.
Bad Guys/Killers – Death.
Buy/Rent – Rent it.

Open House (Lionsgate, 88 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): Director Andrew Paquin didn’t have to pull too many strings to get the best hook possible for his directorial debut. He cast his sister, Academy Award winner Anna, and her real-life co-star and fiancé Stephen Moyer (both from HBO’s white-hot “True Blood” vampire series), in small roles in this variation on home invasion. “Open House” doesn’t rise to the level of “Funny Games” or “Straw Dogs” or even “Last House on the Left,” the original, not the tepid remake, but it does feature Tricia Helfer of TV’s “Battlestar Galactica,” which might be enough to pull the remaining pop culture geeks not swayed by Anna and Stephen. Overall, it’s not bad, but it’s not great, and ultimately lacks enough tension and edge to really distance from an overcrowded genre pack.

Heroes Season 4 (Universal, 812 minutes, Unrated, Blu-Ray): Otherwise known as, “The Season where Sylar threatens people, Matt Parkman blusters and does little of any use, Claire fights with, and disobeys, her father, Noah waffles between being a good guy and a bad guy and the Petrelli brothers argue until Peter sulks off to pout.: Or, as I like to call it, the same storylines that have been playing over and over in a perpetual, maddening loop since “Heroes” first wowed fans during the first half of its first season. Yes, there’s a bunch of voiceovers from Mohinder. Yes, Niki never seems to run out of siblings who look and act just like her. Sure, Hiro and Ando will squabble and bounce back and forth through time, always doing exactly what they’re instructed not to. Oh, and a bunch of new characters will be introduced without any sort of proper purpose, only to take a backseat to Sylar’s tempestuous tantrums as he deals with his issues. This time, the newbies are a bunch of “extraordinary” people who run a traveling carnival and they’re led by T-Bag, er, Samuel Sullivan, who wants to woo the heroes to the dark side. Season 4 will be remembered as the final seasons of “The X-Files” after Mulder got abducted and that guy from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (Yes, I know his name is Robert Patrick) tried and failed to fill his shoes. It’s a limp exit for a once white-hot show that never felt confident enough to kill off main characters and explore new storylines, even as its loyal followers fled to other programs week after week.

The Breakfast Club 25th Anniversary Edition (Universal, 97 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): Wow, I feel old. I was 15 when John Hughes’ classic teen angst drama first opened in theaters, but “The Breakfast Club” remains an all-time favorite. You know the catchphrases, the characters and the stereotypes that they so perfectly skewered. But I wonder if teens today will feel the same sense of resonance watching it. They deal with the same issues as the original Club’s members – violence, sex, alienation – but the circumstances have been ramped up to epic proportions by the onslaught of technology and social networking, so much so that a day in detention likely doesn’t resemble this film anymore at all. The anniversary edition comes loaded with extra goodies, including a 12-part documentary, a very good featurette, “The Most Convenient Definitions: The Origins of the Brat Pack,” and a new commentary featuring Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall. Given Hughes’ recent passing, the nostalgia factor could be high.

Charlie’s Angels (Sony, 98 minutes, PG-13, Blu-Ray): If only “Terminator Salvation” has been as good as McG’s big-budget debut, one of the few TV-to-Blockbuster success stories, and also one of the unlikeliest. Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu are perfectly cast as the Angels, Bill Murray is a riot as Bosley and Crispin Glover can count his role as a hard-to-kill henchman as the beginning of his second-career comeback. Oh, and then there’s Sam Rockwell, who went from “Who’s that?” to in-demand actor following his breakout, bad guy turn.

James and the Giant Peach (Disney, 79 minutes, PG, Blu-Ray): Henry Selick and Roald Dahl, with an assist by Tim Burton. A match made in subversive animation heaven. “James and the Giant Peach” may not have created the cultural tsunami of Selick and Burton’s first collaboration, “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” but it’s just as dark and exciting and original.

A Prophet (Sony, 155 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): A dark, unflinching, daring look at the makings of a criminal boss, “A Prophet” wowed critics and fans and earned an Oscar nomination last year for Best Foreign Language Film. This is one not to be missed.

Also released:

Piranha (Shout! Factory, 92 minutes, R, DVD): Review coming soon.
Humanoids from the Deep (Shout! Factory, 82 minutes, Unrated, DVD): Review coming soon.
Deathsport/Battletruck (Shout! Factory, 82 minutes/91 minutes, R and PG, DVD): Review coming soon.
Kick ##### (Lionsgate, 117 minutes, R, Blu-Ray): Review coming soon.