David Carradine is much on my mind recently, having just finished up his rather excellent “Kill Bill Diary” — a thorough, intellectually rangy and assuredly entertaining read of his time spent on Quentin Tarantino’s two-part revenge epic. A workaholic without necessarily the most discerning taste, Carradine’s sudden death at the age of 72 (in June, 2009, he was found nude in the closet of a Thai hotel room, the result of accidental autoerotic asphyxiation) nonetheless put the brakes on what just might have been one of the more interesting sunset career reinventions of modern Hollywood. After all, here was a worldly, well-read guy with a reawakened fire in his belly and a love of both genre and high art and literature. Or maybe, even after the bump in profile afforded by “Kill Bill”, Carradine — idiosyncratic and headstrong, to say the least — would have continued to trade mainly in low-budget indie fare.
Two of his final films also hit home video recently, serving as a sort of unusual reminder of the gulf between Carradine’s personal gravitas and appeal, and the type of material in which he frequently appeared. The last of his many collaborations with producer Roger Corman, “Dinocroc Vs. Supergator” is a campy, higher-thought-free romp through and through, starring Carradine as Jason Drake, a multi-millionaire who, along with his hench-gal (Lisa Clapperton), underwrites some genetic research that (of course) goes horribly awry and produces the two creatures of the title. Enter a mercenary clean-up man (Rib Hillis), plus an inquisitive FBI agent (Corey Landis), and then stir, with copious cheesy effects but a clear sense of purpose.
Starring Dominique Swain as a single mother, Christie Wallace, who witnesses the latest brutal murder of a serial slayer known as the Picasso Killer (Udo Kier) and then gets trapped in an office building during a citywide Christmas Eve blackout, “Fall Down Dead” is a predictable little thriller that plays out its string of grisly dread, with Carradine’s cop trying to piece together the puzzle as Swain’s character lives out her nightmare. Not much by way of execution or acting recommends director Jon Keeyes’ movie (Kier is the nutty attraction, like he’s auditioning for a Rob Zombie movie), but it is interesting, in little snatches, to watch Carradine again deploy that ineffable Carradine-ness that he wielded so many times throughout his long, varied career. Some guys have “it,” even when the material isn’t there. Carradine was one of those guys.
The former title comes to Blu-ray in 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p, with a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features consist of an audio commentary track with executive producer and director Jim Wynorski, as well as the movie’s trailer. “Fall Down Dead”, meanwhile, hits DVD in 1.78:1 aspect ratio, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Apart from chapter stops, the only extras are a collection of auto-play trailers for other releases from distributor Image Entertainment.
A pair of genre exercises arrive within a couple of weeks of one another in the form of the slightly Westernized “The Warrior’s Way” and next week’s “Bodyguards and Assassins”, starring Donnie Yen. The latter, directed by Teddy Chen and costarring MMA fighter Cung Le, is set in the bustling metropolis of Hong Kong in 1905, against the backdrop of revolutionary change threatening the corrupt Qing dynasty. As Sun Yat-Sen (Yen) prepares for a historic meeting that will help bring about change for his country, a disparate group of… well, the title characters do battle in clashing efforts to alternately derail and protect his plans. Time and again, most recently in the “Ip Man” films also starring Yen, Eastern filmmakers have shown a penchant for mixing period piece political intrigue and action, and Chen accomplishes that here in satisfying fashion. The movie has relatable, personal stakes, but also feels legitimately attached to something greater. Yen, too, is a great anchoring presence. “Bodyguards and Assassins” comes to DVD presented in a letterbox widescreen format that preserves the aspect ratio of its original theatrical presentation, along with Mandarin language Dolby digital 5.1 and English stereo audio tracks, and optional English subtitles. In addition to the international trailer, five behind-the-scenes featurettes and extended interviews with cast and crew provide nice details about the film’s production.
Less successful is “The Warrior’s Way”, a visually rich but lumbering, narratively confused genre hybrid that feels like a grand missed opportunity for East-meets-West action mayhem. Dong-Gun Jang’s overseas star status helped the movie make some noise internationally, but this tale of a legendary swordsman who refuses to kill the last member of enemy clan, and instead escapes to start a new life in the American badlands feels strange and unsure of itself. Kate Bosworth and Geoffrey Rush are on hand to inject feminine spitfire and “color,” respectively, but lackluster pacing and ill-defined dramatic stakes make this movie a tough sell even for its martial arts-happy target demographic, no matter its sprays of CGI blood. “The Warrior’s Way” arrives on DVD on a dual-layer disc, in 2.40:1 widescreen, with English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and optional subtitles in those languages, plus Spanish. A cursory behind-the-scenes montage offers up yawns, but 12 minutes of deleted and trimmed scenes are also included.
For slightly older guys out there, there are plenty of other attractive titles — quite literally, in the case of “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2011: The 3-D Experience”. A sort of short-form video catalogue that chronicles the eponymous publication’s Maui photo shoot, the title really pops on Blu-ray in 1080p high definition, which nicely showcases the pristine beaches and stunning cliff overlooks of Hawaii in addition to a trio of pin-up beauties from the magazine: Julie Henderson, Alyssa Miller and Russian-born cover girl Irina Shayk. Photographer Bjorn Iooss shares his thoughts throughout, but the interspersed chat segments with the ladies are most revealing. Shayk, though a stunner, makes known through speaking that words should be the last thing in her mouth; Henderson, meanwhile, is far and away the most attractive and interesting, sharing thoughts (modest though they may be) on the photographer/model relationship, and how they work in concert (with and without music) to capture personalities and moods. The title’s Blu-ray presentation, meanwhile — available on the same disc in 3-D for enabled players, or 2-D for regular Blu-ray audiences — serves another important function as well. In showcasing the lithe Henderson in close up, one sees her freckles and moles, plus a small bruise and what looks like a mosquito bite. And she’s all the more beautiful for it — striking a blow against Photoshopped, plasticine skin, and a victory for young women as they really are. A full complement of 14 language subtitle options highlights the disc’s, umm, universal appeal, and while there are unfortunately no special features save chapter stops, viewers can bookmark the half-hour feature, and sort through those flagged portions later.
If basketball is your thing (or merely basking in a hatred of the Los Angeles Lakers and/or Miami Heat), then the NBA’s official “2011 NBA Champions” DVD, celebrating the first world title for the Dallas Mavericks and owner Mark Cuban, is definitely worth a spin. A lean but engaging watch, at under 80 minutes, the film — narrated with appropriately sycophantic gusto by Ahmad Rashad — recaps the Mavs’ regular season and playoff run, deftly splicing up game clips and never-before-seen practice footage with post-season interviews from all of the major players. The disc is presented in 1.33:1 full-screen, with a Dolby digital stereo track. Bonus features consist of a quartet of two-minute player spotlights (including one on Dirk Nowitzki, one on Jason Kidd, and another on Jason Terry that follows him coaching his daughter’s seventh-grade hoops squad), a strange 30-second celebration montage with costume-clad Dallas fans (from their celebratory parade?), and the last eight game minutes, nicely vacuumed free of commercials, of the Mavericks’ stunning Game 2 comeback from 15 points down on the home court of the Heat. It’s mainly a release for Texas homers, yes, but the solid insights and shared feelings of Coach Rick Carlisle and others (especially Nowitzki and Terry) make this a nice docu-keepsake for NBA and hoops fans more generally as well.
If up-close-and-hair-raisingly-personal nature is your thing, but the mauling in Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” presents too unsettling a finale, the DVD and Blu-ray release of “Bears of the Last Frontier” — a three-part PBS series spotlighting three of the eight bear species in the world — offers up an amazingly intimate experience. The title follows adventurer/ecologist Chris Morgan (and his intrepid cameraman) on an odyssey deep into Alaska’s still-wild bear country, as they bear witness (no pun intended) to the resiliency and adaptability of these remarkable creatures. Morgan is enthusiastic, but not overly so, or in an off-putting manner. The information and on-camera narration here is more anecdotal than biological, but since Morgan is literally on the ground with the bears (though at an appropriate remove), his observations (that brown bears, for instance, use their noses as barcode scanners) come across more often than not as cleverly informational “bon mots”. The first hour-long episode, “City of Bears,” spotlights the brown bear, and the relative social complexities that result from so many animals sharing the same breeding meadows year after year. Subsequent episodes, meanwhile, spotlight the black bear and polar bear, respectively. Stephen Colbert may be terrified, but this is an engrossing and entirely worthwhile documentary for the inquisitive nature lover in your family.
Two other manufactured-on-demand titles, from distributors MGM and 20th Century Fox, allow cineastes to delight in the rescue of the relatively obscure. “Hell Bound”, from 1957, and starring John Russell, June Blair and Stuart Whitman, concerns the waylaid scheme of a no-good roustabout to nab war-surplus narcotics from a ship in the Los Angeles harbor. Things boil over (shockingly) when, seeking backing, he shows a 16mm promotional film outlining his plan to a bunch of gangsters. Whoops. Bad call. Too streamlined (69 minutes) to be of weight or consequence, and too on-the-nose in terms of plotting and dialogue, the movie is a weird relic, nothing more. It certainly doesn’t help that Russell — mostly a second banana in Westerns who achieved some notoriety on ABC’s “Lawman” in the late 1950s and early ’60s — is a fairly unengaging lead. Director Bruce Gellar’s “Harry in Your Pocket”, meanwhile, is more entertaining. James Coburn headlines the free-floating grifters’ tale, in which a team of charming professional pickpockets roam various North American cities. In Steven Soderbergh’s world, “this” would be the movie that Danny Ocean or Rusty Ryan would watch the night before a big scam. Both of the aforementioned films come on a DVD-R; the former in full-screen, the latter in widescreen. There are no supplemental features.
Finally, John Singleton’s blazing 1991 urban drama, “Boyz N The Hood” — which rang up critical support en route to over $57 million at the box office — hits Blu-ray for the first time, in maximum high-definition, six times the resolution of DVD. Pegged to the movie’s 20th anniversary, this tale of three friends growing up on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles launched not only rapper Ice Cube’s movie career, but also an entire and vital cinematic field, the new African-American urban crime saga, that (perhaps to the consternation of Spike Lee) was one of the decade’s most reliably profitable subgenres. The performances here are invested and top notch, and the film comes by its emotions sincerely. The bulk of the bonus material on this new 1080p transfer Blu-ray release (audition videos, a commentary track from Singleton, deleted scenes, etcetera) are imported from the movie’s previous DVD special edition release, but there’s also a superlative new featurette, exclusive to this release, in which Singleton and cast members take a look back on the movie and reflect on its enduring popularity and significance.
Written by: Brent Simon
