Rick's Flicks Picks on AWN

When expecting a new child anxieties run high. You worry about them being healthy. You worry about how they will turn out. Larry Cohen's creepy horror flick takes those anxieties and blows them out into terror. How would you you feel if your new baby was a savage monster?

Frank (John P. Ryan, BOUND) and Lenore Davis (Sharon Farrell, THE STUNT MAN) are an expecting couple. They already have an eight-year-old son Chris (Daniel Holzman), who is looking forward to being a big brother. Sitting in the waiting room with other expecting fathers, Frank seems the bastion of calm. But then screams echo down the halls. And he witnesses the blood bath in the delivery room where his wife is still strapped to the table. The baby has killed the doctors and nurses and fled the hospital.

One shouldn't beat around the bush when it comes to reviewing this film. It's about a mad surgeon who wants to surgically connect three humans mouth to anus, making one long, gross gastric system. Like a long car ride it really sucks to be in the middle.

Like thousands of other horror films, two pretty young women, Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie), are on vacation when their car breaks down along some out of the way stretch of road. They wander through the woods and come upon house of Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM). Before letting them in the house, he asks them if they're sisters, and when they say they aren't, he seems disappointed. Creepy. But they go in anyway and end up drugged and then tied to an operation table. Eventually they' re joined (at first figuratively and then literally) by the unfortunate Japanese tourist Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura, PORNO).

There are so many elements of this film that make it cult. It's a high school sex comedy that is pitch black. The director is BARBARELLA auteur Roger Vadim and the writer/producer is STAR TREK creator Gene Roddenberry. The star is Rock Hudson as the football coach who beds his underage female students on a daily basis. Come on you can't write irony better than that.

Hudson is Tiger McDrew, a local hero who just has women fawning over him when he walks into a room. In between sleeping with every hot girl in the school and spending time with his wife (Barbara Leigh, JUNIOR BONNER) and daughter, he takes forever-young football team manager Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson, THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN) under his wing. The boy has a problem; he has a constant erection. Especially in the class of new teacher Miss Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson, RIO BRAVO). So all Tiger needs to do to get the older woman to teach Ponce the sexual ropes is to ask. Oh yeah, the pretty co-heads are turning up dead.

Nicole Holofcener, who made the wonderful WALKING & TALKING and LOVELY & AMAZING, is a writer who understands people and knows precisely how to show an audience these people. Particularly she knows how to write women characters. They act like women and more importantly they feel like women. And by that I mean they feel a range of emotions.

Kate (Catherine Keener, LOVELY & AMAZING) and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt, DIGGSTOWN) run a vintage furniture shop in New York City. They buy their product from the children of the recently deceased. Kate feels guilty for everything. She’s the kind of person who looks for homeless people to give money to. They have bought the apartment of the old woman Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert, GRUMPIER OLD MEN) next door, giving her the right to stay there until she passes.

Marriage and life sometimes seem to get in the way of each other. You meet the right woman, fall in love, get hitched, have kids and end up wondering how you got stuck in some routine. The routine tests marriages. The one's that last are often the ones that can take a moment to break free from the routine and remember what sparked it all in the beginning. For the Fosters, blackmailers, gangsters, corrupt cops and a deviant DA really do put a spark in their relationship.

Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell, THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN & Tina Fey, TV's 30 ROCK) are in that kind of rut. Their best friends the Sullivans (Kristen Wiig, TV's SNL & Mark Ruffalo, THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT) are getting a divorce, because they got in a rut. This scares Phil, because he loves Claire, but he can see their light fizzling out. He tries to make their date night special by taking her to a trendy new restaurant in NYC on Friday night without a reservation. No luck getting a table. So Phil acts spontaneously and takes the reservation of the Tripplehorns, who don't seem to be there. Not a great call.

For this film, 80-year-old Clint Eastwood looks at death. Based on a script from Peter Morgan (FROST/NIXON), the film weaves together three different experiences with death — a near death experience, the loss of a loved one and a metaphysical look at the issue. Each is told on a haunting emotional level. No matter what your own personal beliefs are about the afterlife, this film actually reinforces the most important part of life.

Marie LeLay (Cecile De France, HIGH TENSION) is a famous French newscaster. On vacation with her boyfriend/producer Didier (Thierry Neuvic, TELL NO ONE), she goes out to a street market to buy gifts and is swept away as a sudden tsunami strikes. She is pulled from the water, but not before experiencing the classic near death experience of the bright white light and sense of weightlessness.

Read my original review of THE EXORCIST!

This Blu-ray release transfers both the original theatrical cut and the 2000 never before seen cut into 1080p for the first time. For a film from the 1970s, the look is impressive in HD. While wide shots contain noise, many close-ups and medium shots are pristine. Dirt and damage has been cleaned up almost completely. Details pop in things like fabrics. For the most part more details emerge in the brighter lit scenes. The picture problems are fleeting. Black levels are a bit inconsistent and some shots are soft.

As for the sound, the extended cut is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 6.1 surround and the original cut is DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track. The soundscape was intended to mix the bombastic with moments of eerie silence. The LFE emphasizes the unearthly sound moments from furniture flying across the room and the unnatural voices that possess Regan. The 360 experience is nice as unsettling sounds emerge from the rear speakers than sweep across the room like an apparition. Like the picture transfer, most of the problems with canned or hollow sounds are most likely a result of the aging originals.

The third and best film in the RED RIDING trilogy reveals the mysteries and conspiracies that surrounded the first two films. In the process, it unveils the sick depth of the cover-up. What distinguishes this entry from the others is its emotional center. The previous two films followed a crusader looking to uncover the truth. This film puts us into the shoes of one of the conspirators as he struggles with the guilt of what he's done.

Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey, THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL) was a supporting character in the other two films, appearing only briefly. But, especially with his actions at the end of the first film, knew had a much bigger role to play. He was part of the police conspiracy to cover-up the crimes of businessman John Dawson (Sean Bean, LORD OF THE RINGS), because he was poised to make them rich in a land scheme. Now Jobson is confronted again with the child murders of 1974 when another little girl goes missing.

Having been based on Jeff Kinney's young adult book, which was based on a collection of comic strips, I wondered how the film would work as a feature film. With its stream of consciousness style, the book doesn't have the narrative structure that a feature would need to sustain momentum. But with a few tweaks to the original text, the film finds a focus, giving Kinney's keen middle school observations even more punch.

Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon, THE BROTHERS BLOOM) is about to start middle school and his anxiety is growing by the minute. He believes it is the dumbest idea ever invented because it mixes kids who haven't hit their growth spurt like him with gorillas who have to shave their bodies twice daily. He worries about saying or doing the wrong thing. Making matters worse is his best friend Rowley (Robert Capron, THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE), who still plays with toys, listens to boy bands and is completely oblivious to the rules of tweendom. His older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick, LAND OF THE DEAD), a high schooler in a band called Löded Diper, puts the fear into him by saying he won't even survive his first day.

Some of the best elements of Jan Kounen's real-life love affair tale are the cinematography, production design and costumes. They are exquisitely represented in this Blu-ray. Coco Chanel's monochromatic style is rich with deep blacks and pearly whites. In 1080p, the picture is crisp and detailed, while retaining the original film grain feel. When splashes of color are introduced, the picture quality remains firm and rich within the cool ascetic the film is trying to create.

As for the soundtrack, the disc is presented in DTS-HD MA 5.1 lossless. Even though this is a quiet drama, the soundscape is filled with the noises of the environments. Claps and jeers fill the room during Stravinsky's disastrous first performance of "The Rites of Spring." The sounds of the woods fill the outdoor scenes at the estate. Stravinsky's bombastic music moves the LFE track. All the elements from dialogue to sound effects to music are perfectly balanced.

The king of all movie monsters comes to Blu-ray this week. Superheroes, real life artists, war and other indie fare grace this week’s column as well.

Pick of the Week
King Kong
The original giant ape comes to Blu-ray for the first time. Now I haven’t seen a film from the 1930s presented in 1080p, but what could be a better title to start with? The epic adventure has stop-motion animation and special effects that are still impressive today. How did they make the spears thrown at Kong seem so fluid? Fray Wray as Ann Darrow the woman who charms the savage beast is an iconic figure in cinema do to this one film. Even those who haven’t seen the picture know the imagery of her being carried up the Empire State Building. While Peter Jackson did an amazing job re-imagining the film, nothing can replace the original, which made us care about the monster more than the humans he terrorized.