1408 - Buy from Amazon: Theatrical Version or Two-Disc Collector's Edition
Recently John Cusack said that he's only made 10 good movies during his entire career. This is one of them.

(On a side note, John Cusack has an average Tomatometer rating of 72% positive, which is very strong and I think he's underestimating the number of films he's been in that are good.)

John Cusack stars as Mike Enslin, a author who writers books about the most haunted places (Ten Most Haunted Hotels, Ten Most Haunted Mansions, etc.). However, he himself is a skeptic having never seen a supernatural event. One day he receives a postcard from the Dolphin hotel in New York City telling him not to stay in room 1408. ... He immediately ignores this piece of advice.

This is an old school horror film, one that creates scares through mood and character, not through gore and sadism. And as someone who has felt left out of the genre for a long, long time, I welcome this movie. (Just a word of warning, while Samuel L. Jackson seems to be given equal billing on the cover of the DVD, he's barely in the movie. However, he is incredibly effective in his short role and without him, I don't think the movie would be half as scary.)

I don't want to discuss the specifics of the movie too much since I don't want to spoil the film for others, but I do want to mention two points. Firstly, there is a brilliant fake-out part way through this movie. It worked so well that I thought it might be the real ending to the movie. The only reason I didn't completely fall for it was because I knew the movie wasn't that short. When the reveal was finally given, I went from totally pissed off, to very impressed in a second. Excellent move. Secondly, and this is my only real complaint about movie, I really want more movies where the skeptic is right. Scooby-Doo did it right; whenever you see a ghost, monster, alien, it is a man in a mask. Movies rarely even provide the voice of skepticism, and when they do, almost always they are proven wrong.

As for extras, the 2-disc set presents both the theatrical version and the extended cut (which is billed as a director's cut, but it's not). On the first disc there are just a couple short webisodes that don't have a whole lot of replay value. On the other hand, disc 2 has an audio commentary track on the extended cut with the director and the two writers. There's an excellent mix of information given including discussing the process of adapting the short story by Stephen King, which is very short, and what they had to add to flesh out the movie. The track moves along nicely without too many pauses and has replay value (I particularly like how they just keep talking right through the end credits as it shows they were enthusiastic about the movie). Additionally, there are a few deleted scenes with optional commentary, and a quartet of short featurettes. (On a side note, there is talk about a different ending showing Tony Shalhoub that is not on the disc at all. Shame.)

An excellent old school horror film that sets up the mood and delivers the scares while having one of the best-executed twists of the year. Overall, the level of extras are not as high as other 2-disc sets, but that's because there are two versions of the movie and getting to see the alternate (or should that be original), ending is worth spending the $3. Highly recommended and a contender for DVD Pick of the Week.

Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer - Buy from Amazon: Sinlge Disc DVD, The Power Cosmic Edition, or Blu-Ray
A lot of people had very low expectations of Fantastic Four when it came out in 2005, but despite very weak reviews, it managed to beat expectations while helping end a record-setting slump at the box office. Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer had higher expectations, but were they too high?

Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer adds quite possibly to two most recognizable characters the Fantastic Four ever dealt with, The Silver Surfer and Galactus. However, like every movie with a lot of Fanboy appeal, this was both a blessing and a curse. While fans generally liked how The Silver Surfer was portrayed (there were some minor concerns over his powers displayed in the movie), Galactus faired poorly. I think it was that issue that hurt the movie the most at the box office.

On the other hand, the overall film was an improvement over the first in most areas. This includes the drama, but I think the action wasn't as strong as in the original (or perhaps it just didn't grow enough to justify the sequel. (Also, when it came to the final battle I was not as happy with it as with the first movie. Part of the problem is the lack of team play as Johnny Storm went all Super Skrull in the final fight.)

Moving onto the extras, the 2-disc set is very well done with two audio commentary tracks on the first disc (although neither features the cast). Disc two starts off with a handful of extended and deleted scenes with optional audio commentary, but the majority of the extras are featurettes including a healthy 45-minute long making-of featurette called Family Bonds. There are also several shorter featurettes on the Fantasticar, the powers of The Silver Surfer, the new makeup / suit for The Thing, and the scoring of the movie. Finally, there's a featurette on the comic book origins of The Silver Surfer, which is in my mind the best extra on the DVD.

Fans of the movie will certainly appreciate the 2-disc set and will want to pick it up. Granted, the film isn't as dramatically strong as some other recent super hero films, but it is entertaining.

Felix the Cat - The Complete 1958-1959 Series - Buy from Amazon
Felix the cat and his bag of tricks! It can do anything, except make the cartoons more interesting.

Felix the cat started in the 1920s during the silent era and is one of, if not the first cartoon characters to become popular enough to have real star power. However, the 1950s TV series lacks all of the charm that made the originals successful. There were two major problems with these cartoons. Firstly, they were made on a small budget and secondly, they were made for kids. The first problem led to a lot of repetition in the animation while the second led to a lot of repetition in the plots.

In the second episode on the DVD, Felix the Cat was trying to escape from the Professor's lab, but every time he reached a door or a window, bars would slam down. The fourth time this happened he said, "This is getting monotonous." Tell me about it. It was only the second cartoon and I had already grown bored with the repetitive nature of the show.

As for the extras, there are three in number. The first and most interesting is the original Felix the Cat short from 1920 called Feline Follies. This is the oldest cartoon I've seen, which certainly adds a sense of history. Next up is a brief, nine-minute look at the history of Felix the cat and finally, 2 minutes of promos for the show. It's not a lot, but it's better than most cartoon collections get.

There are a lot of fans for this show, but I can bet almost all of them grew up watching the show as kids. As an adult enthusiast, the show is just too cheap to be enthusiastic about and the level of repetition kills any replay value it might otherwise have. I can't recommend anything more than a rental, and that's purely for nostalgia.

The Film Crew - Buy from Amazon: Killers from Space and Wild Women of Wongo
DANCE!

Two more direct-to-DVD releases from the folks that brought us MST3K. This time they are giving audio commentary tracks to Killers from Space and Wild Women of Wongo. DANCE!

Killers from Space is your typical low budget 50s sci-fi offering featuring invading aliens. You can tell they are aliens because their eyes bug out. Well, either that or they are related to Marty Feldman. There are a lot of great jokes in this episode, but the movie does get tedious and repetitive at times, which slows the pace of the humor somewhat. As for extras, the lunch break is marginally better than in Hollywood After Dark as was the end of the show bit. The only extras on the DVD was Did you know...?, which gives some humorous alternatives to the backward speech heard in the movie.

Wild Women of Wongo, on the other hand, is a film about a tribe where all the men are ugly and all the women are beautiful while their neighboring tribe has all beautiful men and all ugly women. I would say it's some complex social commentary, except it's just really bad. (Strangely in the end the tribe of ugly men fall for the ugly women preferring them to their own beautiful women. This makes no sense. Then again, none of the movie makes a whole lot of sense. It does provide more opportunity for mocking than the previous film and it even gets a little creepy during the skinny dipping scene, which adds to the enjoyment. The host segments are arguably the best with the Map of the World being explored during the lunch, while there's the find-a-mate at the end (again, the beginning bit is the weakest of the three). There are also two short bits as extras Goodbye, Wongo Style and the more surreal and funnier Make Film Crew Dance. Clearly these people have not been on a dance floor in a long, long time. DANCE!

As a fan of MST3K, I'm very happy these three are back mocking movies. I also enjoy the more adult edge to the humor (that's not to say it's R-rated, or anything like that, but there are some innuendos here). The extras are light, but the they are still worth picking up.

And, as an added bonus, this Friday we have a contest featuring all three of the releases so far, which we will be giving away, one each to three different winners.

And, one more time...

DANCE!

The Jungle Book - Two-Disc 40th Anniversary Platinum Edition - Buy from Amazon
Another special edition release from Disney that is only going to be out for a limited time before being locked back in the vault. I'd be a lot happier with these releases if they didn't used that particular marketing strategy.

The movie is a very loose adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling story; in fact, Walt Disney instructed the crew not to read the book while they were working on the movie. However, while this might upset purists, the resulting story is one of the last Disney classics. (This was the last film Walt Disney worked on before his death.) Because of this, the film became something more than just a movie for the filmmakers and it shows in the end product.

Since this is a special edition, the extras are of the utmost importance in determining the value of the DVD, and here we have lots of extras that are divided between those aimed at adult collectors and those aimed at kids, with an emphasis on the former. Things start off with an audio commentary featuring several participants (including some archival audio). The first disc also contains a featurette on the lost character and a short look at Disney's conservation effort. The rest of the features deal with the songs and include the music for the original, darker version as well as karaoke versions of the songs and a music video that I couldn't even make it through just one time. Disc 2 starts off with a making-of featurette that clocks in at a healthy 45 minutes while there is a 15-minute featurette that goes over the differences between the movie and the novel. There are two additional featurettes on the animators, one archival with Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, who were the primary force behind the movie, and the other with a few of today's animators talking about how the movie influenced them. Finally, there's a look at Bruce Reitherman, who voiced Mowgli in the movie, and his career as a nature documentarian.

Additionally there are several games / educational sections for younger kids.

The Jungle Book wasn't one of Disney's biggest hits or most-remembered classics, but it deserves to be included in the golden age of Disney animation and this 2-disc set is worth the upgrade.

Top Gun - HD-DVD - Buy from Amazon
Tom Cruise stars as fighter pilot Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell in this ode to all things macho. Oh boy, has this film not aged well.

Scenes that were meant to show how tough Tom Cruise is come off as corny now. The dramatic scenes are laughable, as is the romance. Yes, the dog fighting scenes are still cool to watch, but the rest of the movie can't support them. After watching this movie, I has an uncontrollable desire to watch Hot Shots! to cleanse the pallet. I can't believe I liked this movie when it first came out, but in my defense, I was only 12 years old at the time.

Moving onto the extras... there are none. And I mean none. There's not even a menu. What the hell? If you are trying to push a new format, you don't release a movie with fewer features than the previous DVD release. If this is the kind of release we're going to get from Paramount, they were overpaid when they were given $50 million to become HD-DVD exclusive. Hell, this kind of release may help Blu-Ray win the Format war.

Skip it.

The War - Buy from Amazon
A seven-part mini-series documenting World War II, which is probably the most documented war in history. However, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick find new ways to talk about it.

The mini-series is arguably the most in-depth look at the war, and considering its 15 hours long, it should be. Its greatest strength is telling stories that are not normally told. Veterans and others tell stories that really show the reality of war, which is the heart of the show, but there are also an incredible amount of still footage, vintage newsreel footage, home movies, radio broadcasts, etc. The sheer amount presented here can become overwhelming at times. (This is not a program that you can watch in one sitting.)

Extras are also impressive with an audio commentary track featuring co-directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, who fill the track with information on how they made the series, the process of finding the footage, getting the interviews, etc. Additionally, there is a making-of featurette, deleted scenes, extended interviews, and image galleries. Everything you would expect from a documentary.

This is not the kind of documentary that tries to praise World War II, as one interviewee states, as a good war, but shows it to be a necessary war. It is powerful and worth repeat viewing. The only concern is the price, however, you get what you pay for and it is certainly worth buying.