DVD Corner

“Halloween: Unrated Director’s Cut” – Rob Zombie’s remake is a misreading of everything that made John Carpenter’s low-budget, 1978 classic work – attention to its two main characters and especially to a landscape that allows suspense to mount. Unlike Zombie, who numbs with his overbearing use of gore, Carpenter didn’t rely on excessive violence to build momentum. Instead, he leaned on the energy generated by his spellbinding score and the idea that in the heartland, a bogeyman with a thing for butcher knives and Halloween masks could wreak such havoc. This new “Halloween” is mostly about back story. Unlike its inspiration, here we get a movie that pummels us with all the reasons 10-year-old Michael (Daeg Faerch) went on his killing spree. Naturally, his family is at fault – and what a family. Every one of them is poison. His mother (Zombie’s real-life wife, Sheri Moon Zombie) is a pole stripper, his stepfather (William Forsythe) is an abusive alcoholic and his sister is the typical self-involved teen who’d rather have sex than be nice to her brother. To keep his mind off them, Michael, who favors a clown mask, takes to torturing animals, which Zombie shows us in detail because, you know, it’s all for the screen, not for the imagination. Flash forward 17 years and Michael (now played by Tyler Mane) has escaped from a mental institution. His aim is to reconnect with his long-lost sister, Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), who has none of the sweet awkwardness Jamie Lee Curtis possessed in the original, though getting in his way is his psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell, awful), who is determined to stop him. Will Loomis get to him in time? Since it’s at this point that “Halloween” becomes a near play-by-play of the original, albeit with much less finesse, tension and subtlety, it doesn’t exactly take a genius to figure it out. Boo. Unrated. Grade: D

“Man on Fire” Blu-ray – So burdened by its chaotic, quick-cut editing, there’s the sense that director Tony Scott doesn’t trust his story, his characters, his actors. This is a film in which even the subtitles are restless – they zigzag about the screen in a jumbled attempt to evoke an edgy style. It’s unnecessary because the story behind the movie doesn’t need the false energy Scott’s style promotes. The performances sell the movie, beginning with Denzel Washington’s excellent turn as Creasy, a down-on-his-luck bodyguard living in Mexico City who has come to love the bottle more than life itself. He’s ready to give up everything when Lisa and Samuel Ramos (Radha Mitchell, Marc Anthony) – a wealthy couple saddled with rococo taste – hire Creasy to protect their young daughter, Pita (Dakota Fanning), from an inevitable kidnapping. The last half of the movie is a bloody revenge fantasy, with Creasy rising as an avenging angel to make those responsible for Pita’s kidnapping and possible murder pay the ultimate price. Taut action, jolts of humor and a fantastic supporting performance by Rachel Ticotin as an investigative reporter lift the film to a compelling ending. Rated R. Grade: B

“Resident Evil: Extinction” DVD, Blu-ray – One scene is effective. You were seeking more than one? Wrong movie. The scene involves crows – tens of thousands of undead, squawking zombie crows – and when it starts to dig in for the grisly long haul, just watch yourself sit up and take note. The scene is a ripoff of Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” and while it has none of Hitchcock’s dark humor or wit, it does feature some well-done special effects. Otherwise, the film follows the previous two “Evil” movies in that it is a convoluted scattershot of hyperediting best served for fans of the franchise or for junkies of the computer game on which the movies are based. Or both.

Once again, Milla Jovovich is Alice, who returns with her poreless skin and vicious death moves to take on the Umbrella Corp. in yet another effort to shut them down. Some will remember that the Umbrella Corp. is responsible for creating the virus that now has overspread the world, laying waste to most of its inhabitants, who now roam the Earth in various stages of death and decay. What Umbrella’s evil kingpin, Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), wants from Alice is her blood and her DNA to do all sorts of bad things, none of which is worth exploring here. What matters in “Extinction” are the zombies, their hunger for flesh, and Alice’s attempts to bring them and the Umbrella Corp. down. Not a terrible movie, but certainly you sense that at this point, the series is facing extinction itself. Grade: C-

“SeaQuest DSV: Season Two” –

Sci-fi via the deep, with some characters sporting gills, others able to bend objects with their minds, and a talking dolphin named Darwin who likes to have his say (though sometimes you wish he wouldn’t). Throughout the second season of this ill-fated series, the echoes of “Star Trek” are intentional, with Roy Scheider and company exploring the United Earth Oceans and taking their share of heat in the mid-21st century. The effects are better this time around, but the writing collapses in the face of the very good first season. What we have here is an almost entirely new cast (the show’s behind-the-scene melodramas are more interesting than the series itself), a newish theme song, and plots that lean more heavily on science fiction. The fact that the show’s third season, renamed “SeaQuest 2032” was canceled midseason says it all for how this series was troubled from the start. Grade: C

“Shoot ‘Em Up” DVD, Blu-ray –

This swift, enjoyably rank movie presses against so many limits, it achieves the threshold of a new limit. It likely will offend plenty, but most of those folks won’t be in on the joke the movie courts. With its tongue planted firmly in cheek, “Shoot ‘Em Up” has its gut in grindhouse, though with superior production values and a somewhat larger budget. It’s a live-action cartoon, a fact director Michael Davis underscores throughout since he employs carrots so often as instruments of death. Clive Owen is Mr. Smith, who intervenes on behalf of a pregnant woman who is about to be undone by a gun-toting tough. This leads to a dramatic series of events that finds the woman giving birth while the thug and his assailants assail them both. Let’s just say it’s a memorable scene (you don’t want to know how Smith cuts the umbilical cord), but when one of the stray bullets strikes the woman dead in the forehead, Smith is left at a crossroads. Should this gruff loaner leave the child to die, or should he scoop it up and be saddled with it for the rest of the movie? Naturally, he does the latter, which proves significant for a few reasons, the main one being that plenty of people want to get their hands on that baby, chief among them the hit man Hertz (Paul Giamatti). Just why won’t be revealed here – it would spoil a plot that already is dangerously thin – but it’s safe to say that political reasons are involved, as they tend to be these days. With Monica Bellucci as the hooker who joins Smith so she can feed the baby (and smolder with Smith in a romantic subplot), the movie bulldozes forward, comfortably earning its title as it cuts its bloody swath across the screen. Rated R. Grade: B