CHILDREN OF THE CORN Blu-ray

Walking the VHS rows as a kid, I’d always fascinate myself with all the chapters and sequels of all those venerable horror franchises. I’d daydream and hyperbolize just how good the first film in each franchise must be to spawn so many sequels. Everyone knew about the quality of the originals when it came to Psycho or Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street, but for every series spawned on a classic, there were a dozen or so that weren’t. The Amityville Horror, Ghoulies, Witchcraft, Pumpkinhead, and even Saw today, each have spawned never ending franchises on by most accounts terrible first films. Unlike drama or action, it’s not the strength of the cast or crew that makes these franchises last, but instead the mere strength of the concept. A possessed house, people forced to kill themselves, a punishing farm demon, goblins that come out of the toilet. Well, okay, not even the concept works in Ghoulies’ favor, but part of what makes horror so intriguing is the way franchises just never seem to die.

Not only does it happen with quite regularity that horror franchises reach the five film landmark, but it’s often the case that many of those sequels are completely different than the others. It’s always the roll of the dice with franchise horror. Sometimes you get sequels that have nothing to do with their originals – Troll 2, Halloween 3, Zombi 2, and sometimes you get sequels that by all accounts eclipse the originals – Ghoulies II, It Lives Again, Dawn of the Dead. Becoming a horror aficionado means taking the pledge to sift through the endless sequels in search of those diamond in the rough follow ups. It’s a hell of a sift for those brave enough to visit the Children of the Corn – seven films later and it’s still thriving on the direct-to-video market. What about the one that started it all? Anchor Bay’s released it twice before on DVD and now it hits the disc a third time on Blu-ray. The 20th Anniversary DiviMax has been upgraded with new features on Blu-ray for the 25th but is this franchise father closer to Amityville than it is Halloween? Time to start the harvest and find out!

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DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK Warner Archive DVD

There’s a sub-genre of horror films that is all but extinct today: Housewife Horror. With women’s lib in the late sixties and early seventies, it seemed like women truly would get a fair shake in society. Yet, old customs, preconceptions and prejudices have made the journey to absolute equality a much longer battle. To address those cases of progressive minds stuck in homemaker houses was the genre practically birthed by Polanski with Rosemary’s Baby. Others would soon follow, like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Images, Season of the Witch, and The Stepford Wives all in the early seventies. Television certainly wasn’t off limits either, with two notable entries fusing female frustrations with tiny tormenters. Many remember the second, Trilogy of Terror, for the segment where Karen Black is tormented by a possessed Zuni fetish doll but before that there was an entire telefilm devoted to that same concept. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark has long been a TV movie favorite and now finally, like favorite Bad Ronald before it, it’s finally coming to DVD via the Warner Archives. Is it worth dusting off, or should this sleeper stay bricked in the fireplace?

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TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: 25th Anniversary Collector's Edition Blu-ray

If you grew up in the eighties, the term “Ninja Turtles” was about as ubiquitous as “please” or “thank you”. Children the world over would get up early every Saturday morning to get a glimpse at what those zany, pizza-eating mutants were up to this time. For my little brother, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was so all encompassing that he’d refer to the entire batch of Saturday morning cartoons simply as “Ninja Turtles”. If we were watching He-Man is was “Ninja Turtles”. If he wanted mom to tape G.I. Joe it was “Ninja Turtles”. So from 6 A.M. until noon, everything on television was effectively “Ninja Turtles”. And looking back, it’s tough to blame him for the misconception.

Turtles were everywhere. Comics, cartoons, video games, Halloween outfits, audio tapes, action figures, music videos and Vanilla Ice. The guys basically steamrolled the wants and desires of all young boys. Like why do I still remember the phrase “Check Splinter – he’s a radical rat!” but I can’t even remember my first communion or my fifth birthday? Even things that didn’t have the turtles name on it still undeniably had the turtles stamp. One video game I remember playing as a kid was Blaster Master, where a kid’s little frog escapes the aquarium, lands on some weird ooze and ends up mutating into a monster. It was practically awesome before it even started because of the similarities to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon prologue. There is no denying it – until the turtles went to feudal Japan, they were on top of the world.

It’s now, unbelievably, the 25th anniversary since their comic book inception and now the guys in green are finally going Blu. Warner Brothers has put together once of the coolest collectable (nay, gnarly) packages the Blu-ray medium has yet seen, and has bundled together all three original live-action films as well as the recent animated reimaging. There’s even a comic, character cards, a signed sketch and a beanie (that the collector in me refuses to remove from the package) to make this the ultimate Ninja Turtle nostalgia experience. One thing, though…how do these movies hold up after all the years? Is it really something worth revisiting? I certainly don’t have any desire to track down an old Stretch Armstrong or Nerf gun, but hey, maybe these reptiles named after Italian artists are worthy of similar canonization. As my little brother would say ever Saturday morning…"It’s Turtle Time."

By the time the first film came out, it already had a multitude of parallel franchises to appease. There were already comics, cartoons, video games and action figures . The comics were darker, in debt to the Frank Miller neo-noir style, while the cartoons and video games appealed to a much younger demographic. The movie thus had two vastly different audiences it had to straddle, or to speak in pizza terms, it needed something with the works. Like they did with Critters four years prior (it gets a fun, self-deprecating nod as Raphael scoffs when he sees it on a movie marquee), New Line manages to make a film for everyone. Kiddy and goofy enough to never leave the kids without some catch phrase to blurt or ninja move to mimic, while dark enough to appeal to those raised on other comic book adaptations like Robocop or martial arts imports. What other kids movie features a James Cagney impression and a nod to The Grapes of Wrath?

The movie gives us an in to the turtle legacy via Channel 3 news reporter April O’Neil (Judith Hoag) when they rescue her from a mugging. Not really dissimilar from the same year’s Robocop 2, Manhattan is overrun with crime, and even the kids are in on it. Through April we learn through some really blurry stop motion flashbacks that the turtles bathed in some radioactive ooze (didn’t all misunderstood heroes in the eighties?) and that splinter got his ear cut off by Shredder. There’s also Canada’s finest export, frequent Cronenberg and Egoyan collaborator Elias Koteas, leading the way as the brawn over brains Casey Jones. Fitting that the Canadian is identified by his hockey mask and stick. Anyway, the rest is more or less fighting, Asian mysticism and pizza.

While all the clunky jokes and forced catch phrases certainly put the picture in a time and place, the film still separates itself from the pack of kiddy fighting franchises by its insistence on preaching mind over matter. While the Splinter here is clearly a Yoda clone, it’s still impressive that much of the first half of the movie is spent stressing how violence should be a last ditch effort rather than a go to solution. The bought between Raphael and Casey Jones, where he essentially calls out Jones for his brute sadistic tactics is actually progressive. How did we go so wrong with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers? It ain’t high art, hell, it’s even a bit racist (“Amy I behind again on my Sony payment, or what?” April says to one of Shredder’s ninjas) but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has that hip, irreverent charm that made New Line Cinema the king of independent eighties entertainment.

Before the first was even finished oozing out profits, New Line already had the second storming theaters in the spring of 1991. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. To make sure you know you aren’t in an arthouse film, the film begins with a lengthy montage of people all over Manhattan eating pizza. Cops, yuppies, Italians, blacks…everyone loves pizza, and everyone loves the Turtles! Cowabunga! Sorry about that. Anyway, Shredder’s back from the dump and he’s got his hand on the ooze that mutated the turtles, and now he’s planning on mutating some monsters of his own. The turtles must address their origins and Shredder must address his greed, but know that the pizza conquers all.

So what’s new for round two? Well, April got a whole lot hotter, this time played by Paige Turco (now that’s the babe I remember from the cartoons!). Corey Feldman passes this time on the Donatello voiceover duties, while Casey Jones is all but forgotten. The bigger budget means the turtles team up most infamously with Vanilla Ice for the legendary “Ninja Rap” finale (“Have you ever seen a turtle get down?!”). The bigger budget requires a broader appeal, so the film has a noticeably lighter tone, although it doesn’t really get any goofier than the first. It’s more accessible but it doesn’t entirely abandon its darker roots; in fact, all the story involving the ooze and its history is certainly meatier than the tiny plot anchovies of the first. By almost all accounts this is a first-rate follow-up to the first, except for one thing…

I’ll never forget how disappointed I was when I first saw the live action Bebop and Rocksteady. That memory alone pretty much supersedes any other memory I have of the second film. I mean, just look at the screenshot above. These guys are supposed to be a fucking rhino and a pig. What the hell is that? A werewolf and a dinosaur? Okay, so they weren’t actually “Bebop” or “Rocksteady” (actually Tokka and Rahzar) but every Turtle fan knows they were supposed to be. They were such a seminal part of the television show, the fact that they weren’t included in the original was already a massive oversight, so with Ooze we all thought they’d get it right. No. Instead, two of the biggest loser henchmen to ever grace the movies. Even back then my brother and I knew it was sacrilege to even touch their action figures when Bebop and Rocksteady were in their presence. B&R were the hip antithesis to the turtles (like Shredder was to Splinter) and without them the balance of the world is just totally off. New Line sure faltered there, but at least the series would never get as bad as Critters 4, right?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time is a piece of shit. We know now that a series always jumps the shark when the central characters get displaced to a gimmicky alternate world (just ask Critters 4, Leprechaun 4, Jason X, et al.) but I guess in 1993 nobody knew. Somehow, someone at the house of Shaye thought “Hey, let’s send the turtles back to feudal Japan!” They had Casey Jones back, they had Feldman returning as Donatello and they hung on to the better April from Ooze. The stars had aligned for the ultimate Turtle fable, but instead they sent them the Kurosawa route for a third grade knockoff. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Hell, even the Ghoulies got to go to college.

Instead, some guy who’s not Shredder (at least make him an ancestor, or something!) working with some corrupt British imperialist. Proving his worth as an actor, Koteas also plays a dual role , one a bearded British prisoner and the other briefly as Mr. Hockey Mask back in Manhattan. Speaking of Manhattan, the priests that were displaced through time in exchange for the turtles are starting to get restless in various fish out of water, you-mean-I-can’t-go-inside-the-television kind of things. Keeping the Oriental racism from the first film, the monks memorably dance at a night club to Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy” to reaffirm that non-whites are feral, unlearned creatures. The Turtles get Vanilla Ice though, so I guess being white ain’t all that much better. The green guys get their own turtle out of water stuff as well, learning tender lessons like how to fly a kite and how to eat seaweed.

As bad as it sounds, it’s not really the story that makes Turtles in Time by far the weakest of the live action trilogy. It’s the fact that the story is so generic – you could place any hero in the turtles’ place and the story really wouldn’t change much. Put in Tom Cruise and you get The Last Samurai. They find out zero history about themselves, their arch nemesis or anything that isn’t some lame buzz word. The other part that really grates is that the turtles have turned into walking pop culture regurgitation. Every sentence they say pays lip service to some terrible catch phrase we would have like to have left back with the Teletubbies. “Help, I’m a turtle and I can’t get up?” Really, Donatello? They even say “Shwing!” when April converts her costume to a dress. Any personality they used to have has been replaced with a shallow sense of hegemony, with them mere mouthpieces for control, capitalism and all other things that help them sell merchandise. When they all reconvene at the end for a dance to some techno tune from the soundtrack the turtles effectively dance themselves to the grave.

What a long burial it turned out to be. While it only made a quarter of what the original film made, and close to half of what the sequel did, Turtles in Time still turned a tidy profit. Still, from what Wikipedia describes as “development hell”, it took 14-years to revive the reptiles from shell shock. Gone are the live action, Jim Henson's costumes and instead the turtles make their way through CGI in TMNT. Although the title may suggest a return to the roots, these aren’t the turtles we remember. Leonardo is a gravel voiced renegade, Donatello does tech support and Michelangelo eats pizza and does children’s parties. Raphael is a biker and April now lives in Central America (where racism this time comes in the form of bad “The jungle can be a very dangerous place!” Tony Montana-isms). It’s the present day, so the turtles do recognize the fact that they are getting old. So old in fact that instead of doing battle with a contemporary like Shredder, they’re instead fighting prehistoric demons revived at an art exhibit. I guess they just couldn’t shake that time travel stuff from the third film, could they?

Seriously, what do we have to do to get a turtles movie with Shredder? It’s like making a Star Wars movie without Darth Vader or, uh, a Critters movie without Don Opper. Even if it’s back in Manhattan and filled with all the good guy regulars, this still can’t help but feel like a diversion before the real story gets back on track. The CGI is all too textured and motions too fluid, it too feels more like a videogame cut scene rather than the real thing. Even the third live action film had a tangible charm to the way these big rubbery creatures were interacting with real humans in real environments. It gave the turtles a special quality, they were something truly different in an ordinary world. There was even a degree of performance art in the way the stunt men could get those giant suits to still do back flips and roundhouse kicks. Call me old fashioned, but there’s always something special about the real thing.

In a way, TMNT is more notable as being the true document of New Line’s death. The old pulp that independent juggernaut used to churn out in the eighties and nineties was something really special. They always had a penchant for the perverse, their movies always taking familiar genres or stories and mixing them up with weirdness, whether it be turning the slasher into a deadly dream world in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Gremlins into swearing, space traveling aliens in Critters or hard nosed rap into positive party flicks via House Party. Then they made Lord of the Rings and squandered the rest of their last ten years trying to emulate that success with the flops that bankrupt them like The Golden Compass or Bob Shaye’s own The Last Mimzy.

When New Line Cinema died, so too did that punk presence they had, and now we’re left to watch all their classic properties cleaned up and sanitized under the larger Warner wing. TMNT is the first big casualty, a soulless and empty tech demo of a movie. Sad to say, but I’d much rather be back in feudal Japan than with these hollow shells of what once was. I don’t know if the world has grown too old for big animals in suits, but I hope for the sake of the series that the turtles go back to being tubular in those big rubber outfits. Maybe then will “Ninja Turtles” go back to meaning something more than just the Saturday morning cartoons we all remember as kids.


presentation...

All four films are VC1 encoded in 1080p, with the live action films 1.85:1 and the CG film 2.35:1. The first three look noticeably better than those old New Line DVDs but still have some problems. The first looks the worst, with a layer of grain throughout and an overall softness to the image. Nothing ever really pops. Also, the stop motion flashbacks look really bad, like VHS worthy, with a muddy, blurry appearance that’s almost tough to make out. Secret of the Ooze has a little less grain but still looks softer than it should. Again, it looks clean but nothing really jumps out. Being made a few years later and with a bigger budget, Turtles in Time actually looks a large leap better than the previous two films. The opening silhouettes over the rising sun and everything else, really, bursts with vivid colors and solid sharpness. You can see all the little textured dimples on the turtle faces and sometimes it really looks like they are right there rather than on a screen. Grain is almost non-existent and overall Part III looks fantastic. The CG TMNT naturally is without grain or blemish, being all computer rendered, and it looks as synthetic and smooth as it should. That I don’t like the overly textured world is more a preference rather than a fault of the visuals. The first two films could still use some serious restoration work, but they still do benefit from the Blu-ray upgrade.

The sound also gets a nice Blu-ray boost with new Dolby TrueHD 5.1 remixes for all four films. While there isn’t much or any separation between channels, and the dialogue stays staunchly up front, the sound space has really been beefed up. The LFE really works hard, maybe too hard, in bassing up the punches, kicks and musical cues throughout. A bit of ambience also makes its way to the backs as well, although it’s still not really discrete or directional. For a retro remix, these are some of the better mixes out there – remaining faithful to the initial stereo mixes, but amping them up with a fuller sound. TMNT was naturally released in 5.1 and it is easily the best sounding of the bunch – but who wants to watch that, anyway?

extras...

First thing’s first – the packaging on this sucker is just awesome. The pizza box actually has grease stains on the front and back and is made in full out cardboard. The discs look like pizzas and even the character cards are housed in something that looks like a food menu. There’s a huge comic book of the first film included, a sketch with a reproduction signature and even a beanie toque to show your turtle fandom loud and proud. With an initial impression like that the extras have to be awesome, right? It’s the turtles’ 25th anniversary after all! Trailers. Yep, that’s all we get for the first three films. Trailers. And an ad for the Wii game. What kind of anniversary is that? Where is my Corey Feldman commentary? Where is my Elias Koteas walkthrough of Manhattan? Where my video apology from Stuart Gillard for directing Turtles in Time (and RocketMan and Paradise while he’s at it)? Sadly, there’s nothing.

Even the Blu-ray menus are as bare as they can get, with a static image and a virtually empty pop-up menu. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the highest grossing independent film of all time, how can it not have had a single extra after all these years on home video? It was such a monumental film for New Line, you’d think they’d do it justice by celebrating it with at least a retrospective doc if not commentaries and the like. How cool would it be to see that notoriously awful “Behind the Shells” concert VHS tape? Or how about hearing creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman talk about what they thought of the films, the franchising or just Ninja Turtles in general. Even if they wouldn’t do it, almost everyone who had a significant part in these movies hasn’t really done a whole lot else other than television, so it shouldn’t be too tough to get them to relive the magic. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be.

TMNT does have some extras, but it’s a real blasé assortment of press stuff and work in progress renders. Writer/director Kevin Munroe does a commentary on the film and he starts it off by talking about how “cool” it is to do a commentary. Ugh. Since the movie was made by guys sitting in front of computers, there really isn’t much story to tell. Munroe finds things to talk about, though, but none are much of interest. Munroe also voices over most of the other supplements, which include three additional rendered scenes, two storyboard to CG sequences, a rough alternate ending (where Casey Jones proposes!) and a better, more comic-inspired intro to the movie. It would have been nice to watch these pieces with their original tracks, since it’s tough to figure out what’s going on with Munroe’s voice talking over the production sound.

Lastly, there are a couple of short, puffy featurettes, one of which has to be particularly embarrassing for Sarah Michelle Gellar, Laurence Fishburne and Patrick Stewart. There is no pain like seeing Gellar ramble on about the story and how progressive her April character is, or in hearing the hypocrisy of Stewart actually saying “The story line in this is very strong.” Really, Patty…really? “TMNT: Voice Talent First Look” (5:04) is really more the voice talent trying to plug the film, and it’s embarrassing on all accounts. “Donny’s Digital Data Files” (1:57) is a quick look at the rendering work the crew had to do, but is too short to hold any weight. To top off the pain, these extras are also interlaced. Not really the finest tribute to the quarter century of some of art’s most recognizable heroes.

wrapping it up...

From Baltimora to Vanilla Ice, from Manhattan to feudal Japan, from live action to CGI – the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have had quite the journey over their four forays on film. The first two are both still fun today, and even the third has its moments when compared to the blasé Sonic Adventure cut scene that is TMNT. The packaging for this 25th anniversary is pretty standout, and the sound has been nicely upgraded to 5.1, but the rest of the treatment on this set leaves much to be desired. The first three films only get a trailer, and the last film is snore city when it comes to the supplemental ingredients. The video on the first two films is still soft, grainy and at times even hard to decipher proving that Warner wasn’t willing to go the extra mile with New Line’s big franchise. While watching these childhood favorites again is a nice way to remember the New Line that was, it’s literally burial in a cardboard box rather than the lavish send off New Line, and the series, deserves. Nostalgic, yes, but gnarly, it ain’t.

overall... Content: B Video: B- Audio: B+ Extras: D+ Final Grade: C

HARPER'S ISLAND DVD

Whodunit television as we know it today was probably conceived when pop culture the world over wondered just who shot J.R. on popular nighttime soap Dallas. After that cliffhanger, they coddled the mystery for another four episodes, leaving people guessing, in suspense and just generally frantic to figure out how it would all come together. It took about ten years, but Twin Peaks finally took that Dallas plot thread and pushed it to the center, where the entire series was solely about discovering who wrapped young Laura Palmer in plastic. Of course with David Lynch behind it it ended up becoming so much more and less all at the same time, but regardless of how surreal it got, fans still demanded an answer. Special Agent Cooper’s appraisal of pie certainly had its followers, but quickly pop culture tired of Twin Peaks when it strayed away from the formula that brought it first into the mainstream.

While there were certainly shows since inspired by the Twin Peaks mold, like Push, Nevada, it proved more to be a creative one-off than the lasting genre that showed so much promise in the Dallas days. Along came Harper’s Island earlier this year to change all that, though, with the simple premise of a murder an episode as a killer stalks an island wedding party. No season cliffhangers, just a slasher whodunit spread lightly over 13 episodes. The formula seemed to work for TV, but how does it transition to home video. Does it become the most long-winded slasher in history with redundant recaps from episode to episode, or does the guaranteed quota of grisly deaths it still translate to good entertainment? Let the island lighthouse shine light on the truth!

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FRENCH CONNECTION II Blu-ray

With Billy Friedkin knee deep in Israel laboring over a masterpiece nobody would even see, and with financial and critical success necessitating a sequel, someone new would have to come in and direct French Connection II. Only, the director they chose was far from the new blood they had previously sought when they chose Friedkin. The producers went with John Frankenheimer, one of the underrated “action verite”, as I like to dub him, directors of the sixties. Ticking up classics like The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds, he was the proven talent that eccentric Friedkin wasn’t. Would that mean, then, that French Connection II would deliver on an old, reliable, predestined formula? Absolutely not!


The high concept for the sequel is this time bringing New York cop to French drug ring. Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is still chasing Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), only this time the location is different. Popeye quickly learns that the France police force is just as corrupt and mismanaged as his own, although en francais he can’t just beat down his man. There are politics. Brutal, constricting politics. Before he even gets a taste of that, though, he’s getting a taste of a more dangerous dead end.


Alain is well aware of Doyle’s presence on his turf, and sensing Doyle’s threat to his drug cartel, Alain decides to fight fire with fire. He kidnaps Doyle, and instead of killing him, gets him hooked on drugs. Seriously. Once Doyle become reliant on the needle, they start pulling away long enough to make the withdrawals really count. After all the merde Doyle stirred up in New York, they are going to make sure he never toys with their operation again.


Eventually Doyle escapes, thanks to the hands of the France police force, and we know what that means. Chase sequence after chase sequence, right? Doyle shouting bigotry while the camera zigzags in and out of choreographed cat and mouse games. The stuff taught action is made of. No. Instead, Frankenheimer goes internal on Doyle. Determined to make drug addiction more than just a prime mover in terms of plot, Frankenheimer puts it front and center to show the devastation it can bring on even the most resistant of users.


We get scene after scene of Doyle going in and out of sanity, drooling, pleading and absolutely miserable for the bulk of the film. As far as sequels go, it’s one of the biggest U-turns in cinematic history, but considering the first film played by an entirely new rule book to begin with, why can’t Frankenheimer’s?


Well, even when Friedkin’s was getting overly ambitious, it always at least defaulted to entertainment. Frankenheimer’s film, although certainly noble and daring, gets overly comfortable in languishing with its lead. The addiction commentary gets stale after awhile, especially considering the bulk of the second act is spent in a dank room. The first film was all about the energy of the city, all those chases on foot and the thrill of the chase. Here Doyle is chasing drugs with alcohol, and while it’s certainly a striking change of pace, it starts to burn out long before Doyle ever does.


The film may not flourish when it comes to action, but accolades must be given to Hackman and his dedication to character. This ain’t a pretty role, especially considering it was the original film that won him the Oscar, but Hackman descends face first into all the shadows of his character. His performance during the withdrawal scenes are rife with emotional energy, as if he’s pulling right from the dark pits of his memory to blurt out the stuff he’s saying. It’s a bare performance, and considering Frankenheimer lingers there rather than on the action, a much richer performance than even Hackman’s work in the original. Hackman rightfully got a Golden Globe nomination for this, just like he did with the surprisingly Oscar-snubbed The Conversation a year prior. As a film French Connection II may not come together quite as a satisfactory whole, but as a performance, Hackman’s has never been better.

presentation...


Like the previous film this Blu-ray disc is presented 1.85:1 1080p widescreen. Friedkin went to great lengths to color time his Oscar-winner to perfection, and considering Frankenheimer left us in 2002, this film gets far less lavish treatment. The overall image is a great deal softer than the original film – not nearly as flattering as it should be. It’s grainy, and even the colors just don’t seem to show like they did in the first film. Drab is more the word to describe this pretty pithy transfer.


There’s a DTS-HD 5.1 audio track, but it ain’t reference quality, that’s for sure. Pure and simple, it’s a glorified mono track, just like the first film. The mono track is included here for comparison, and really, there isn’t much difference. Dialogue is at least all audible, and Don Ellis’ score again sounds just as shrill as ever.


extras...

French Connection II was previously released on DVD as part of a two-pack with the first film. Now that it’s flying solo on Blu-ray, Fox has thankfully added a number of interesting extras. The best of which is a newly produced documentary on the career of John Frankenheimer, the 27-minute “Frankenheimer in Focus”. It features a fine recollections by such filmmakers as William Friedkin, Actor Bruce Dern and Editor Tom Rolf, in addition to his family.


Frankenheimer himself is very articulate, and he very much narrates the piece from clips from older interviews. The resulting piece really helps show the kind of groundbreaking directness that Frankenheimer brought to the action film and to cinema as a whole. Specific films are highlighted, including how the ending to Black Sunday was totally compromised, and it’s overall a treat for this late director. Frankenheimer had previously recorded a commentary for the 2002 DVD, and it’s here in its entirety as well. Again, well spoken, and he really provides a lot of information about his approach to the film and the way they all pulled it off. For prospective filmmakers, this is a must listen.


Surprisingly, the next commentary with Producer Robert Rosen and Gene Hackman is also a very revealing window into the filmmaking process. Hackman sort of mumbles his way through most of the parts (still in character?), but it’s Rosen who really remembers the production in fine detail, and his anecdotes, like how they used hidden cameras for most of the busy street exteriors, are fascinating.


The previous conversation with Gene Hackman from the original film extras is continued here, and while shorter, is still a great watch and a nice primer to the essence of the film. It’s Hackman against a black screen, but he’s vocal about his initial hesitation on making a sequel, and his interest in acting out the scenes of withdrawal. Good stuff.


The disc is rounded off with some trailers, galleries and another isolated score. This track is even more sparse than that of the original, and not as experimentally interesting, either. Still, a nice addition, proving once again that Fox is determined to use Blu-ray for more than just pumping out new transfers.

wrapping it up...


You won’t necessarily be feeling withdrawals from the first film watching this sequel, and that’s thanks to Frankenheimer’s dedication to character in letting Hackman take his Popeye Doyle into a deep, dark abyss. The only problem, though, is that the story goes down there with him and hardly recovers, resulting in a slow, morose travelogue that just doesn’t have the same impact of the original. It’s certainly different, though. The image is a good upgrade from the DVD, but not near the beaut that the remastering of The French Connection was. The extras, while not as decked out as the original, offer a few fine hours of film history and serve as a nice epilogue to Frankenheimer’s career. If Requiem for a Dream made you want to run through fields of daisies, then French Connection II is for you.

overall... Content: B- Video: B- Audio: C- Extras: B+ Final Grade: C

THE FRENCH CONNECTION Blu-ray Review

Before there was Paul Thomas Anderson, David Gordon Green or even Stephen Spielberg there was Hollywood’s first true wunderkind director of the American New Wave, William Friedkin. He got his first gig in the chair at age 21 directing for television. A stint on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” followed, and within a few more years he had a vast repertoire of commercial projects like Sonny & Cher’s Good Times and Britt Ekland’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s. He also started to carve an artistic niche for himself with a competent adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and the watershed in queer cinema, The Boys in the Band. It was with his next film that he’d bring together both commercial success and critical praise to become the youngest man to ever win best director. That is until it was found out that he was actually four years older than he said he was. The film, of course, was The French Connection.


No matter the merit of Friedkin’s best picture winner, it’s the phenomenal rise and fall of one of Hollywood’s hottest heads that remains the most interesting story. How his The Exorcist follow-up, and smaller-scale Heaven’s Gate, Sorcerer, flopped after years of delays. How he pissed off the entire gay community (when ten years prior they were embracing The Boys in the Band) by turning Al Pacino into a sadomasochistic closet case in the fascinatingly ambiguous Cruising. How he then descended into light drivel like the Deal of the Century and The Brink’s Job. How he actually kind of redeemed himself with the taught, ambitious amalgam of all his directorial themes, To Live and Die in L.A. and then how he pissed it all away once more with shit like Rampage and The Guardian. And then finally, how he decided to start boning Paramount Picture’s CEO, Sherry Lansing, in order to actually get his films distributed, of which there’d be four, including the Shaq-ified Blue Chips.


All that and I’m still missing a bunch, like how he’d form the short-lived The Directors Company with Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich. Each of those two directors would direct arguably their best films under the production company (Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon and Coppola’s The Conversation), but Friedkin would fail to finish a picture before it closed shop later on in 1974. Then there are all the temper tantrums, infidelity, egomania and bullishness documented in Peter Biskind’s take-it-or-leave-it Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Tough to imagine a guy who today looks like an overweight William Fichtner crossed with a pitbull was in the seventies getting women left right and center pregnant and aborted. Such is the life of one of the most fascinating figures of Hollywood royalty.


But, uh, yeah, The French Connection. Great flick. Watching it again today, it’s uncertain what the Academy actually saw in the Oscar-winning story, since it’s essentially one long string of chase scenes and spy choreography, but as a testament to pure, unbridled filmic energy, The French Connection stands all its own. Owen Roizman’s grainy, kinetic and rough cinematography would singlehandedly create the gritty aesthetic employed by virtually every other actioner to follow and Gene Hackman’s racist, sexist, cocky but somehow endearing Popeye Doyle would set the mold for the anti-hero of the seventies. Less a film than a coalesce of effective and memorable moments, The French Connection is the kind of film Friedkin always wanted to make, for as he’s said before “For me, the greatest thrill in the world, the only thrill, is getting 20 seconds on the screen that really gases you.”


In The French Connection there are more spontaneous eruptions of this said gas than even Jack Black’s The Klumps parody, "Fatties Fart II" in Tropic Thunder. The bit with Hackman and Frenando Ray back and forth on the New York subway. Doyle’s first big bust in the all-black bar. The stripping of an entire car in a search for cocaine. Doyle’s famous wave when he finally gets his man. The gunshot lost in a Tarkovskian backdrop of urban decay. And of course, the chase scene to end all chase scenes, culminating in the cowardly shot to the back that would end up the film’s poster. These bits owe nothing to story, but are instead a testament to what Friedkin could do with visual space when he brought his A game. Two years ago he showed that he still kind of had it when he managed to turn the one-room stage play of Bug into a visual kaleidoscope that would effectively address all our paranoias about government surveillance post-9/11.


Sure, the guy’s got an ego more extroverted than Kevin Bacon’s penis in the nineties, but I’ve got to say it – when Friedkin’s not phoning it in for his wife, he’s good. Damn good. Friedkin’s made better, more fully realized pictures like To Live and Die in L.A. and his unfairly ignored nihilistic masterpiece, Sorcerer, but what a fine firecracker of energy The French Connection was and still continues to be. Forget spewing pea soup, calling out Satan and pissing on the carpet – with The French Connection Billy Friedkin found a way to make even the most mundane of regular human exchange interesting, and that’s cause célèbre.

presentation...

The French Connection has always been notoriously grimy, but this new HD is still nonetheless Blutiful. In the color timing process, which is fascinatingly documented in the supplements, Billy Friedkin tried out a special technique to achieve a harder, desaturated look. The effect is one of effective, creamy pastels, which really lends well to the cold, decrepit New York aesthetic that is predominant throughout the film. The grain still dances around more than Busby Berkley, but the colors finally come through with a calculated detail never before seen from the film on video. The New York aesthetic for the film is mostly browns, but it’s those blue cars or those sudden bursts of bright red blood that still possess the shock that they should. The sharpness is totally there, too, with many moments nearly window clear despite the fluttering grain. Fox has thankfully avoided trying to digitally soften the grain or to artificially enhance edge detail. Like Dark Sky’s Blu-ray transfer of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this is a gritty film that still looks like a gritty film, and it’s movies like these, where all the random grain requires the higher bitrates afforded by Blu-ray, that really showcase the strengths of this new format.


Sound wise, the 5.1 DTS-HD audio included here doesn’t sound all that much better than the included mono mix. Don Ellis’ memorable orchestral score still hits all the right notes, but sound strangely constrained in this not-really 5.1 remix. The majority of the film is played out to more realistic ambiance of urban New Yawk, but even then this track fails to expand the soundspace outside of the front channels. There is hardly any separation from left to right, and virtually no use of the rears. Essentially this sounds just like a mono mix from 1970, which I guess it should and really that’s all that we should be asking for. Still, if you’re going to spring for DTS…use it.

extras...

The French Connection was one of the first big benefactors of Fox’s sadly shortlived Five-Star DVD series that saw interactive, multi-disc treatments for top-tier titans in their catalog like M*A*S*H, Die Hard, Cleopatra and, uh, Independence Day. That release saw two-discs complete with extras like a feature length commentary with Gene Hackman and the now deceased Roy Scheider, another with Friedkin, deleted scenes, and a couple lengthy documentaries. Determined to prove its worth other than for a lavish picture restoration, this Blu-ray disc retains all those great extras and a bunch more. Notable inclusions are an introduction by Friedkin, an isolated score and a trivia track on disc one, and on disc two (yeah, two blu-ray discs!) a whole bunch of new short featurettes. The best of the bunch is “Anatomy of a Chase”, where Friedkin and Producer Phil D’Antoni go back and revisit all the locations for the film’s infamous chase scene, with Friedkin verbally acting it all out complete with comparisons of the locations from old to new. There are some nice bits where he mentions how some of the thrills were manipulated, and how others came on unsafely by accident. In his determination to entertain, the 73-year old Friedkin even runs up those notorious stairs where Doyle made his most iconic of kills.


The other new extras include an interview with Gene Hackman on his Popeye Doyle character, who addresses his “Never trust a Nigger” line and much of his admiration for Friedkin’s process. Then there’s the aforementioned color timing with Friedkin where he speaks about trying to recreate the Moby Dick pastel Technicolor look. More than just extras about the cast and crew themselves, there is also a quality “Rogue Cop: The Noir Connection” where several familiar film historians deconstruct The French Connection and compare and contrast it with the popular noirs that helped define the genre decades before Friedkin’s film burst on the scene. “Scene of the Crime” was filmed the same day as Friedkin did his “Anatomy of a Chase”, and this is again another nice revisiting of the Brooklyn bridge and how that infamous traffic jam was achieved. Of note, we also meet the cop whom Friedkin based his controversial Al Pacino character in Cruising.


Friedkin makes the most of his day of filming by also meeting up with technical consultant and actor in The French Connection, Sonny Grosso, to revisit the true story behind the film. They both recollect of all the characters that permeate the film and how they are both similar and different than the actual characters. There’s also a surprisingly interesting look at Don Ellis’ score, where a music historian describes Ellis’ groundbreaking approach to music – how he specifically got a four key trumpet produced so he could explore the quarter tones that were always underexplored in music. It’s these tones that help give the film the unsettling, shrill and moving music that has become such an identifiable part of the film.


It’s a lot of content to mull over, and considering the variety of each individual supplement, it doesn’t get much better than this. My one gripe, and this seems to be the trend these days, is the axing of the trailers that were originally included on the DVDs. Trailers are an art form in themselves, and I wish companies wouldn’t cut corners to avoid any royalties by removing them from the film to which they should be so intricately connected.

wrapping it up...


While Friedkin’s ego may prove more timeless, The French Connection still endures as one hell of a collection of rousing action scenes and skillful director moments. The grainy visuals really pop with the addition of high definition, even if the sound still sounds same ‘ol. Fox went over and above with their two discs of extras, nearly doubling the content of the already packed Five-Star edition DVD from a few years prior, and packing it with extra after extra of great content. This should now be the final word on the connection francais, and with Warner’s excellent edition of Cruising from a few years prior, that leaves only Sorcerer of Friedkin’s classical period up for high definition remastering. Universal, if you’re holding it back for fear of stroking Friedkin’s self-love hard on, then at least do it for Roy Scheider. Hell, do it for Tangerine Dream. Just do it.

overall... Content: A Video: A- Audio: B Extras: A Final Grade: A

MELROSE PLACE: The Fifth Season, Vol. 1 DVD

Truly, madly, deeply, I’m in love with Melrose Place. I grew up watching Beverly Hills, 90210 on TBS afterschool, and had perfect attendance throughout the other teen soap runs of Dawson’s Creek, The O.C., One Tree Hill and Degrassi, but little did I know it was all child’s play. It wasn’t until I moved into the Place Melrose when it hit DVD in 2006 that I truly started to live. Somehow in my teen years I lived oblivious to the whole pop culture phenomenon, instead basking contently in le triangle d’amour of Brenda-Dylan-Kelly. I never felt a void for not including a dollop of Melrose in all those sudsy baths of television soaps. I was in high school, and I was content. Who needs a spin-off of 90210 when you could have the real thing at West Beverly?


This was more than just a spin-off, though…this was graduation. This was higher education into just how outrageous, sexy, fun and catty television could be. Of course I didn’t know that, but with the 2006 DVD debut looming, some of my friends on set began talking. Reminiscing in all the great Melrose memories – of Marcia Cross blowing up the building, Patrick Muldoon coming back from the dead or Heather Locklear watching her father get blown to smithereens. “But Donna kept her virginity all throughout high school…” I’d mumbled defeated. Whatever. I’ve got my show, and all this Melrose talk will cease come once production wraps.


Well, as it turns out, my next film project following was to be camera trainee on some crummy Nora Roberts Lifetime movie. Refuge from all these Melrose musings? No, it was the breaking point. As fate would have it, Heather Locklear was to star, and I’d spend the better part of the month taping down her marks. There was no escaping this now – I had to jump feet first into the melodrama, L.A. style. I bought the first season, and hook line and sinker I was immediately reeled in by all the mile a minute plot twists. Of course the series began more humbly than the prime time soap du jour it would become, but that’s a tale for a different review. The fifth season here, sadly truncated into only the first half for this DVD release, marks an important turning point in the series. Let’s talk about the Melrose magic, and just what happened to it when the series went from ratings juggernaut in season four to barely being renewed in season six.


If you ask series connoisseurs, of which I can proudly consider myself a part two short years later, the series Jumped the Shark at the end of the fourth season. It was always a series characterized by jaw dropping plot twists at every cliffhanger finale, but no matter how outrageous, they always seemed grounded in some sense of reality. Cross’s Kimberly was a loon, but even when she was blowing up buildings there were repercussions. By the end of the fourth season, though, the series had nearly drowned in its own soap bubbles as Kimberly kidnapped smarmy and smug doctor, Peter Burns (current beau of our favorite Locklear, Jack Wagner), and somehow managed to have him committed to an insane asylum where she was not only running under one of her deranged split-personalities, but where she also had the authority to give him a full frontal lobotomy in front of, who else, Priscilla Presley. And then, meanwhile, Muldoon’s evil fashion mogul Richard Hart closed off the episode by reaching his hand up from his grave to come back to get revenge on his killers, Sydney and Jane Andrews (Laura Leighton and Josie Bissett, respectively). It was damn fun, but so over-the-top that no future twist could ever top it without breaking the fourth wall. With all its outlandishness, Melrose Place had painted itself into a corner.


For season five, the writers vowed to return the series to its, erm, roots, but moving away from rising from the grave storylines to the more plausible sexy trash that made seasons two and three dy-no-mite. It’s for this reason that those new to the show tread cautiously here, since this is no doubt a construction zone. A time of rebuilding. Original cast members were being phased out in favor of bringing new blood to the series. Kimberly was facing a brain tumor, gaybestfriend Matt Fielding (Desperate Housewives’ Doug Savant, who’d later marry Melrose alum Leighton) was starting an adoptive family, Jane was heading back to Chicago to deal with news of a different birth mother, and Allison Parker (Courtney Thorne-Smith) and Jake Hanson (Grant Show) were looking for residence outside of L.A. Even Sydney’s days were numbered. With six original leads sent packing by the end, just as many new tenants to the famous apartment complex needed to take up residency. So the season five cast was huge – the biggest the series cast would ever be. All this change and the series was supposed to return to its roots, too? Yikes.


Somehow, it managed, though. Highlighting the new additions was Rob Estes, who had just come off a successful run on the trashy Silk Stalkings (and who would later do Spelling proud with the patriarchal lead on the new 90210) and his big-lipped, big-mouthed wife, Lisa Renna (now doing workout videos in the Jane Fonda vein). Together they played the doomed McBrides who would jump in and out of love octagons with Locklear’s Amanda, Peter Burns and the rat to end all rats, Dr. Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro, the only guy to make it from first episode to last). Then there was David Charvet as Craig Field, the scheming little rich brat to try and usurp Amanda’s throne as queen (king?) of the advertising world. The mantra of Melrose was always “For Sex and Money”, and for at least season five the snotty weasel followed it to a T. Kelly Rutherford joined as call girl Megan Lewis, hired by Kimberly to fulfill Mancini’s sexual impulses while she battled it out with cancer. And remember, this is the series when it’s not over-the-top! Rounding out the new additions was the Southern nice girl with a white-trash past, Samantha Reilly (Brooke Langton), who aw shucks-ed her way into Billy Campbell’s (Andrew Shue) heart.


Basically, one of the many pleasures of Melrose Place is that eventually every tenant in the building would sleep with the other, sort of solidifying that Bulworth phrase that if we all just fucked each other then dichotomies of race, religion and difference would fall by the wayside. Of course, in prime time, nobody ever has kids though. It’s always abortions and adoptions and miscarriages before those little tykes force the show to grow up and the ratings to erode. So it was with all this new cast that we could finally set aside our old Melrose hang-ups about Billy and Allison and Amanda and Jake and finally just let everyone have it every which way on bed, desk or the totally awesome common area pool. My brother and I clocked it in one episode of this season, and there were no less than eight separate sex scenes from different cast members in a single episode. Try to find a porn with that much.


Of course there was more to the show than just sex. There was money. Dr. Mancini was always thinking of ways to get even more of it, and Amanda was memorably tearing down anyone who stood in her way from rising to the top of her ad company. Jake was looking to break from his blue collar roots by running the local hangout, Shooters, and even Matt, the man who in season one turned down many a promotion for social work with inner-city kids, was on his way to himself becoming a rich doctor. To get to the money often took scheming, which again made for great TV, or even sex, which made for even better TV.


Melrose Place was head of the pack because no matter what, it was never ashamed of being saucy, shallow or downright slutty. It embraced it. When most shows then, and even most today, were always copping out with happy endings and canonical ideas of romance and honor, Melrose Place was gleefully tearing conventions down with bitchy Amanda as its spokeswoman. Taylor is going to force Mancini to impregnate her not because of goals of maternity or of bringing a life into this world, but to make her ex-husband crazy jealous. That’s it, and that’s what Melrose is all about. Check your pretension at the door and prepare for the wildest soap opera residency you can imagine. I did, and kneeling down at Locklear’s feet to mark her camera steps felt not only natural, but earned. For in the nineties, her Amanda Woodward was Queen Bitch of prime time, and if everyone else could grovel at her feet, then I sure as hell could too.

presentation...

The first nineteen episodes of season five are presented in their correct 1.33:1 full frame aspect ratio. Like all other shows from the early nineties, these episodes have been preserved on horribly interlaced video, hampering any extra sharpness the DVD format provides. The episodes are mostly clean of defect, which is in a way amazing considering how they’ve used those same stock shots of the Melrose Place pool for five seasons now. In his own way the stock shot pool boy should be considered a regular on IMDb. Digressions aside, the image is perfectly acceptable, and at least a step up from the SOAPNET airings.


The music doesn’t fare so well. Like with all the previous seasons on versatile disc, these episodes have had their music swapped with royalty free garbage. Some of those post-credit tunes are just painful to sit through. The plus side is that no episodes have been edited content wise like they were in Season Two (when an entire Billy Campbell karaoke subplot was removed to avoid paying rights for a Neil Diamond song), but then again, there were no real songs incorporated into any of the narratives. Seasons six and seven get problematic when Kyle brings in a bunch of (at the time) big acts like Tal Bachman and those crazy MMMBoppers to his After Hours bar and jazz club. These guys were featured throughout the episodes, so I fear for the future of our favorite apartment complex on DVD. The episodes are supposed to be stereo, but I must have soap suds in my ears because all I hear is mon to the izzo.



extras...

There is little incentive supplement wise for paying the rent this season. Nadda.

wrapping it up…


There’s only one place I want to live, and it ain’t with Dawson, it ain’t in Beverly Hills or One Tree Hill and it sure as hell isn’t The O.C. Melrose Place is what prime time soap opera is all about, equally apt to taking a lead character over the deep end as it is taking them to bed with a different lover. The love triangles, squares and pentagons come as fast and furious as Paul Walker and with Locklear, Cross and Rinna en camp, there’s more bitch here than Lassie. The fifth season was so bulging at the seams from all the new characters that they’d virtually get a whole new sweater by the sixth season, but for old Melrose fans, this is the last of the original cast. While the sex, drama and sex here doesn’t compare with the heyday of seasons two to four, it’s still top notch TV that deserves to perch atop the soap opera canon. Heather, next time I’ll grovel at your feet without pay.

overall... Content: A- Video: C Audio: C+ Extras: F Final Grade: B