MELROSE PLACE: The Fifth Season, Vol. 2 DVD

While it’s curious that CBS chose to split Melrose Place, Season Five into two separate volumes, especially considering Beverly Hills 90210 and all the MP prior had been full season sets, it sort of makes sense. Season five was tumultuous with a huge hemorrhaging of the main cast and a big influx of new residents. While the show stayed as steamy as ever, the demographics certainly changed a lot between the first and second halves of the season. The adage of season five truly was “out with the old, in with the new”. Also leaving with the old, though, were viewers, and season five marked the start of a steady ratings decline after the peak of the explosive season opener in season four. Should fans who have collected the series thus far on DVD follow suit, or do the new season five residents more than pay their rent? They definitely do enough of it on their back, at any rate!


I’m going to spare the lengthy synopsis, since if you’ve made it to the second half of season five, you know your Melrose. That and I’ve already written about it at length for the previous volume of season five. Instead, I’ll try and dodge major spoilers and instead just give you an appraisal of the real estate for this season’s second half. Jane (Josie Bissett) is gone and Kimberly (Marcia Cross) will be making her exit shortly after, too, but even on her death bed she keeps the love triangle between her, my main man Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro) and Megan (Kelly Rutherford) alive and kicking. Just as soon as Kimberly is gone (and typical of Melrose’s ability to one-up itself, another person leaves the same episode!) there’s a new tenant in LA, Jennifer (Alyssa Milano) who happens to be of the Mancini persuasion. Like her older brother she isn’t afraid to scheme to get what she wants, and she’s got her eyes set on a few tenants on Melrose. Jake (Grant Show) and Alison (Courtney Thorne-Smith) are still falling in and out of love, Matt’s dealing with the sudden appearance of his abandoned niece, Taylor’s (Lisa Rinna) out of Kyle’s (Rob Estes) place and into the bed of many others and Sydney (Laura Leighton) settles down, first with one man and then another in white. Suave sonofabitch Peter Burns (Jack Wagner) is playing cat and mouse with Michael for control over Wilshire memorial, and Billy (Andrew Shue) and Sam (Brooke Langton) face hardship as her jailbird daddy comes back asking for favors. That leaves us with the queen of the show, Amanda (Queen Locklear), who tackles both marriage and divorce in the same season and a bunch of other side investments.


It’s in this season that the favorite Melrose hangout, Shooters, is finally retired and Kyle’s new dig, After Dark, takes its place in full jazz fashion. Other than Marcia Cross, all the other full-timers make it to the end, but whether they die or make it out of Melrose amicably (yes, it actually can happen!) , the end of the season sees the last of, count ‘em, Grant Show, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Laura Leighton and, if you discount the one episode farewell at the start of season six, Doug Savant. That’s a big hit, but under the wing of Frank South, who was promoted to head writer after creator Darren Star left in season four, the season proves that big twists and sharp dialogue can always trump big changes and sharp exits. Because so much of the cast does leave this season that makes for a lot of good drama on its own, but the new cast certainly gives some new blood, too. Craig Field (David Chavert), who by my estimation provided the best drama for the first half of season five with all his office scheming with Amanda, continues to smarm it up, and bringing in Alyssa Milano as Michael’s sister was the perfect way to both flesh out Michael’s otherwise untapped family (every other main character has had some major run-ins with family) and to add in another feisty, passionate female lead. Kyle and Taylor really start to settle into their parts by the second half after the whole Taylor-Peter subplot finally resolves itself. While Megan is nice if not entirely exciting, the sore thumb is definitely Sam, who really drags Billy into the clenches of boredom for all their parts this season. It’s only at the end where she really, uh, crashes, the party.


While none of the major twists match the wig-tearing, building blowing, head-smashing rise-from-the-grave fun of previous seasons, this season, and particularly this half, certainly has its share of big twists. Even if there are more bumps in the road this season than ones past, it still comes together for a grand two-hour finale. The problem, though, is that the bar was just set too high with the wild and sensational seasons three and four, so by the time they hit five, where the focus shifted more to the spicy personal drama of season two, it just seemed a little…anti-climactic. There was no shortage of climaxing this series, though, with the bed hopping that made the series famous still in full swing. It all ends bittersweet as many of the characters say goodbye (either suddenly or not) to their longtime roomies, and don’t worry, Melrose fans, the last two seasons don’t really give you much time for remorse. From this half of Melrose Place onwards, each season has a completely different feel and cast, but bask in this, the last of the old and the start of the new. If transition is tough, don’t worry, Michael Mancini never changes his smug, selfish ways throughout the entire show, so as long as he’s aboard (and that stands again now for the recent revamp) I’m there. Consider this my deposit.


presentation...

The final 13 episodes are presented in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Sadly, they are also presented in their original interlaced exhibition, which makes for a less than flattering HDTV viewing experience. Other than that self-imposed softness, there’s added softness in the overall image too. It’s not the sharpest picture, and that might be due to the fact that each dual layer disc is pushing three and a half hours. Thankfully the image is nice and vibrant, so colors hold up quite well. Some scenes are darker than they should be, and every so often some grain permeates the frame, but overall it’s like most any other nineties show on DVD – watchable, but definitely no knock out. Chalk it up to old video tape archival.


Sound wise, the episodes are presented in English Stereo. Don’t go looking for some left to right separation, even during some of the inevitable explosions that happen throughout this second half. Dialogue comes through nice and clear, and the music is adequately mixed. It should be noted that again, music has been changed from the original airing. While I normally don’t have a problem with it, since I understand the complexities of copyright management in the digital era, a show like Melrose Place¸ which was always garnished with the hottest tracks, certainly suffers without them. Some of those post-opening credit music beds are really, really tacky. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when season seven rolls around, when bands like Tal Bachman and Hanson were playing live at Kyle’s bar.

extras...


Any extras that were planned for this second set have been evicted. Or maybe the whole extras department has been condemned, since there hasn’t been a supplement on Melrose Place since season three. Too bad.

wrapping it up…


While it’s sad to see so many regulars go at the tail end of this fifth season, the series hardly bothered to look back, moving forward with sexy, saucy and scandalous melodrama. New tenants like Rob Estes, Lisa Rinna, David Chavert and Alyssa Milano really add some good personality, and it’s fun to see how all the old favorites bid farewell. At only 13 episodes (compared to the 19 of this season’s previous volume) it’s kind of tough to recommend this set at the same price point (especially since previous full length, 30+ episode seasons retail for the same), but if you’ve enjoyed Melrose Place thus far, don’t jump ship. There are still plenty of delights in season six and seven. In Mancini We Trust.

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

ORPHAN Blu-ray

It’s kind of perverse the draw we have to killer kid movies. What is it about us that gets off in seeing prim children doing terrible things? Is it because we bide in the belief that all children are inherently good? Is it some sort of wish fulfillment for the power we ourselves lacked as weak kids? Is it a way to challenge order and normalcy? Hate for procreation? For parents? I don’t know, but no matter the motivation, I always get some sort of primal satisfaction with these kinds of movies. Orphan, released earlier this year to theaters, purported to be different. It offered a twist. Just what was wrong with Esther? To add to that now on home video, is there anything wrong with this Blu-ray? Read on, children.

Click here to read the full review at HORRORDIGITAL.COM

NATURAL BORN KILLERS Director's Cut Blu-ray

Natural Born Killers began innocently enough as a script by Quentin Tarantino. Like its sister script, True Romance, which Tarantino also sold to Warner Brothers to fund Pulp Fiction, Killers is a testament to everlasting love in the midst of violence. While Tarantino wrote Killers as more of a classical throwback to road on the run romances like Badlands, once Oliver Stone came aboard it turned into a completely different animal. The script quickly evolved into a shouting, exaggerated satire of violence and its symbiotic relationship with American media. Building on the quick cut, multi-format menagerie of JFK and utilizing Trent Reznor and a Bible’s worth of stock sound effects and music cues from all sources, Stone took the script even further by to make it full-fledged assault on the senses. It’s long been a subject of contestation, on the one hand praised as an audacious indictment of television, and on the other an irresponsible glorification of violence.


Whatever the opinion, it still remains relevant, and has had more home video releases over the years than almost any other film from the nineties. Warner recently released a nice book style Blu-ray of the theatrical cut, but if you wanted the uncut director’s cut, you had to go to Lionsgate because of Warner’s strict policy against non-rated material. I don’t really know what that policy is, since they have and do release unrated material, like Rest Stop or Beerfest, but at one point they must not have, hence leasing the sought after director’s cut of Killers to Lionsgate. Whatever the case, it’s back at Warner now, and they’re now debuting the cut on Blu-ray and DVD simultaneously, now with a new featurette and introduction. Fans have been waiting for the miracle a long time, and it appears to have finally struck. Let’s take a look at Stone’s stoned out film.


Oliver Stone treats the material like television right from the start. Not television in the derogatory sense of lesser production value or second-rate story, but television as a medium rather than a genre. We start into the film chronologically out of order, as if we just channel surfed to a show midway through. Mallory (Juliette Lewis, Cape Fear, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) is dancing away to some jukebox hits, while Mickey (Woody Harrelson, Cool Blue…okay and The People vs. Larry Flint and White Men Can’t Jump) is sitting at the diner counter eating some key lime pie. A couple hicks flirt with Mallory, Mickey finishes his bright green sliver of desert, and the two congregate to shoot the shit out of everyone in the diner. They are a couple of serial killers who kill for the thrill and the media is always there one step behind them.


What drove them to such absolutes? Before we blame it on the media, we get a wonderful scene, perhaps the standout in the movie, that parodies the fifties era sitcom, titled “I Love Mallory”. Rodney Dangerfield plays type and against all at once as her perverted, incestuous father barking vile threats and vulgar catcalls to Mallory while a studio audience laughs on. Mickey walks in and the audience cheers, and Harrelson even gives a humble smirk and a beat to the camera to really sell the shallow vapidity of such sitcom constructions of everyday life. Mickey and Mallory meet, drown the father and burn the mother, and then head off on their cross country trek for drugs, fame and maybe even a little meaning.


On their trip they get married, run into a Native American, whose detachment from media hegemony makes him the martyr of the film, sensationalist crime journalist Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr., Less Than Zero, Chaplin), who will do anything to interview the lovers to boost his own fame, corrupt FBI agent Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore, Saving Private Ryan and that sex tape he was in a few years ago) and tart, mustachioed prison warden Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones, Under Siege, Black Moon Rising), among many others. They get bit by a snake, search for drugs, get arrested, break out of prison, rape a hostage and finally get a one on one with Wayne Gale. Only after the Gale interview only one is left standing. It ain’t Wayne.


If Marshall McLuhan, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sam Peckinpah (take that, scorpion!) made a movie together, it would probably be something like Natural Born Killers. It’s one of those grand, multi-leveled films where the visuals alone can speak to a disconcerting audience, the violence can speak to another, and then the complex semiology of visual and audible symbols another still. It takes jabs at the American zeitgeist via its mosaic of visual pastiches, whether it’s those old Hollywood driving scenes set to disconnected backdrops (like those sequences at the start of The Naked Gun movies), rabid rabbits right out of Night of the Lepus or laugh tracks from old sitcoms. When it’s not taking up the full screen, these visual signifiers to our media culture are playing behind windows, in the sky or on the television – regardless of whether Mickey and Mallory are paying attention, they’re being inundated with consumption culture.


Stone gives consumption a color, too, via the green that makes itself prominent on a few select objects and scenes in the movie. Mickey’s vibrant key lime pie, junk food in a junk culture, the jukebox that Mallory plays her canned pop hits to help goad her sexuality (it's green when she's eaten out on her car, too), and the drug store (“DRUG ZONE” as it is not-so-subtly blown up as), where the two seek out treatment for their condition. Green appears once more during a tinted scene in the prison riot, suggesting, finally, that violence is America’s last major form of consumption. So whether he’s using old media, different film stocks, contrapuntal sound cues or even single colors, Stone is constantly layering his film with levels of metaphor, context and understanding.


The film has the pacing and the structure of a couch potato with his finger on the dial, surfing back and forth between film stocks and even story points. All the subliminal editing with demons, fire and negative image animals all culminate to the grand, indicting finale. After Mickey and Mallory have their grand face off with media and television literally with Wayne Gale, the channel then changes, and we are given a channel surf summary on the sensationalism of American media, with shots of the Menendez, Simpson and Bobbit trials, as well as a Tonya Harding skate. That end film montage does the opposite of what detractors of the film say about Natural Born Killers – rather than turn the two into heroes it instead makes them a flash in the pan. Film naturally glorifies or inflates its subject, but after two hours the “heroes” become nothing more than a channel worth changing. We never find out what happens to them, not because it matters, but because our A.D.D. information generation couldn’t be bothered for the follow up. There’s other stuff on TV.

presentation...


Considering the film is shot on 17 different exhibition formats, from 8mm to 35mm, black and white to video, it’s pretty tough to guage image quality. The cinematography is so stylized and over-processed that it’s never fully clear, but even in the flurry, the reality of the transfer is that it is soft. Even the 35mm color footage lacks edge sharpness and detail. There are never any scenes that provide the window effect of looking at reality, but perhaps that’s just as well considering it’s a film about the obtrusive hegemony of television. The one thing that this new Blu-ray really does offer over past DVDs is the boost in color. Robert Richardson’s cinematography is unkempt with a flurry of vibrant primary colors, with each color rich with many intertwined metaphors. Colors are so important in Natural Born Killers, and here they’ve never been more expressive. This 1.78:1 anamorphic 1080p VC1 encoded transfer may not be top quality, but the cinematography still is and it’s preserved well enough here.


Natural Born Killers is presented in Dolby TrueHD 5.1, and the mix is a forceful one. Gunshots, rioting yells and some heinous laughing all really shoot out with force, and the LFE always gets a workout because of it. There’s an amazing selection of music here, from light fifties pop to Leonard Cohen’s perfectly nihilistic anchoring. Cohen supplies three songs for the film, all during the key moments (start, end and the riot climax) and if anything I’ll remember the sound for that rather than any sort of envelopment. There is some nice effects work moved to the rear speakers, although dialogue stays stuck in the center speaker. It’s a wild, abrasive film, and it has a soundtrack to match.

extras...

All the extras from the theatrical cut Blu-ray have been brought over for this new Blu-ray, including the 44-page booklet that was built into the packaging previously. Now it’s a booklet inside a regular Blu-ray case, along with a new 2009 introduction, but the content is otherwise the same. Extras from the previous release include the standard definition, interlaced:

• Theatrical trailer
• Twelve minute Charlie Rose interview with Stone
• Audio commentary with Oliver Stone
• Around 27-minutes of deleted scenes, including a memorable comedic rant on Mickey and Mallory by Denis Leary and other performances by Rachel Ticotin, the Barbarian Brothers and Ashley Judd. All scenes have optional introductions on their exclusion by Oliver Stone
• Alternate ending with optional Stone introduction
• It never made the previous Blu-ray, but the documentary from the original DVD, “Chaos Rising: The Storm Around Natural Born Killers”, is also included here in its 26-minute entirety.


On those extras: The deleted scenes are interesting, especially the Leary rant. Shame that couldn’t have made it into the final cut. The deleted scenes are otherwise of little consequence. The alternate ending is pretty contrived, and offers too much structured closure on a film that prides itself on its anarchy. All deleted scenes are presented full screen. The commentary is a lull, and really, it points to the idea that Stone is vastly overrated as a creative mind. The images and ideas he put on screen are certainly wonderful provocations, but when he’s forced to explain, as he tries to do here, he comes off as almost oblivious to the messages he seems to be getting at. Rather than dissect the meaning behind the many symbols in the film, he’ll instead say something like “I liked that shot” or something of that vapidity. The commentary was a big letdown, and the Charlie Rose interview is more an ego rest stop to push controversy rather than cut to the core of the man or the film. “Chaos Rising” offers a lengthy look at the making of the film, with most of the principal cast and crew weighing in on both the making-of and the controversy surrounding the film. It’s quite well made.


What’s new? Well, we get a short video introduction from Stone that is presented in HD. Through the nature of editing, this 4-minute introduction ends up coming off a lot more articulate than Stone does in any of the other pieces. There is also a new documentary, also in HD, called “NBK Evolution: How Would it All Go Down Now?” Running a TV-friendly 22-minutes, this is a fascinating documentary that manages to shed light on both the film and the media culture Stone was satirizing. It has several interviews both from the inside and outside, talking to filmmakers like Stone, Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as well as those in the media, from Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter representatives to Tila Tequila and Joey Buttafuoco of all people. The editing is very good and complements the film quite nicely. The first half offers a nice look at the scandal of Natural Born Killers from today’s perspective, and the second half, on what it would be like today is interesting, if a little silly.

wrapping it up...


Natural Born Killers is a roughly sewn patchwork of violence, pastiche and television, yet as realized by Stone’s highly symbolic vision, Robert Richardson’s lucid cinematography and Leonard Cohen’s nihilistic prose, it ends up forming some beautiful fire blanket of American values. Winona, this is how you build an American quilt! The director’s cut is presented in full and with a bevy of extras new and old, some extras are better than others, but the set provides a good mélange of material. Killers is a film so packed with information that it can speak for itself more than anyone explaining it ever could. Hearing Stone shallowly deconstruct his fierce work only further signals that the less said about this nineties masterpiece the better. The image quality on the Blu-ray is acceptable, but soft, but the audio is at least an audible assault.

overall... Film: A Video: B- Audio: B+ Extras: B Final Grade: B

KARLOFF & LUGOSI: Horror Classics DVD

Nowadays, actors use horror films as a calling card, starring in one to kickoff their career and then never looking back. Rather than embrace the genre, successful stars that started out in horror, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Travolta and Kevin Bacon, try instead to ignore it. It wasn’t always this way, though. God bless the greats, like the first two icons of fright, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, who did nothing but embrace their iconic horror presences throughout their careers. In the classical era of Hollywood, typecasting wasn’t a boon – it meant a career! Celebrating these two men who celebrated the genre, Warner presents here four films with the two legends on a two disc set. Let’s take a look at “Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics” and see just how classic these films really are.

Click here to read the full review at HORRORDIGITAL.COM