Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

This French animation did not need an English redub to attract some of film’s most successful behind-the-scenes names. The crew list boasts the likes of character designer Nicolas Marlet (How to Train Your Dragon) and composer Bruno Coulais (Coraline) among others. Universal have now ushered in a cast of American actors for the subsequent release of an English version.

Mune (Joshua J. Ballard) is chosen to be the world’s Guardian of the Moon. A bad day at the office sees him lose both the moon and the sun. He teams up with Sohone (Rob Lowe), the narcissistic Casanova that is the Guardian of the Sun, to go and get them back. They are joined by the adventurous and knowledgeable Glim (Nicole Provost), who is made of wax and will melt if she gets too hot. 

The animation is impressive, if almost overshadowed by some dodgy voice dubbing (particularly that of Leeyoon, Mune’s rival for the Guardian role). Even the finer details like the reflection of the moon in Mune’s eyes are beautiful to watch. At some points, Mune swaps from 3D imagery to 2D drawn cartoons, which possess a charming attractiveness in their simplicity. The audience can share in the amazement that the characters have for their own world, and there is an innocent joy in that.

The level of thought put into it makes this world full of magical creatures strangely believable. There is a strong sense of spirituality, tied into the natural world, which helps to give this story a feeling that the outcome really matters. It also stops this feeling too much like a movie for little kids, even if there are some cringe worthy moments blatantly included to incite hysterics among younger viewers.

The characters are likeable – if somewhat generic or, as Glim’s overprotective father is, occasionally underused. Sohone is the typical figure of the misogynistic macho man who attracts the adoration of every girl he meets, although Lowe does a good job of making him entertaining. Glim was seemingly meant to be the strong and independent female character but this status is undermined by her frequent pleas for help. That and she freezes, making her reliant on the others simply for moving around. Crucially though, the relationship between her and Mune feels very real, especially when they become closer to one another. 

This beautiful world, feeling like a child friendly version of Avatar’s Pandora, is what makes Mune a very easy film to enjoy. Some of the characters could do with more work, and the dubbing is not of the greatest quality, but is hard not to smile at what is a great example of creativity and world building. 

MUNE: GUARDIAN OF THE MOON / CERT: PG / DIRECTORS: ALEXANDRE HEBOYAN & BENOÎT PHILIPPON / SCREENPLAY: JÉRÔME FANSTEN & BENOÎT PHILIPPON / STARRING: JOSHUA J. BALLARD, NICOLE PROVOST, ROBE LOWE, JONATHON LOVE, CHRISTIAN SLATER / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

If you have a hankering to watch a film about a guitar-playing Mastiff who accidentally writes a smash hit for a feline ex-Rolling Stone while saving a bunch of Tibetan sheep from some pin-suited wolves, you could do far worse than this one.

As the most expensive exclusively Chinese financed animated feature to date – albeit an outlay of $60m against a return of only $20m worldwide – Rock Dog is no This is Spinal Tap. And maybe that’s its problem. By attempting to appeal to a cross-section of audiences, from the very young to the grizzled rocker, Ash Brannon’s film never really settles on a tone or demographic of its own – and never manages to find that crucial golden middle ground so well mined by the likes of Pixar. As a result the comedy and characters are rather hit and miss, only landing sporadically for any but the broadest of tastes.

It’s the story of an adolescent dog raised to follow in his father’s footsteps, protecting the sheep of Snow Mountain from the wolves that would prey on them. Bodi, however, has a taste for rock music and leaves for the nearby city in order to pursue his dreams. But the lupine gangsters follow Bodi into town, hoping to use the chief guard’s son as a means of getting their way on Snow Mountain. Meanwhile Bodi takes up with rock legend Angus Scattergood, suffering songwriter’s block on the eve of what was supposed to be his big comeback. Cue enough crossed wires and crossing paths to ensure a happy ending for everyone, and some lovely scenes set on a double-decker bus.

Based on a graphic novel by Chinese rock star Zheng Jun, Rock Dog combines nursery rhyme imagery with record industry satire to often-great effect. The sight of half a dozen sheep wearing crayon Mastiff masks bulking up the protective guard on Snow Mountain is tremendously funny, while Eddie Izzard’s turn as a sort of semi-retired Jagger-meets-Bowie character is hilarious. But there is also a fair amount of awkward slapstick, and the scenes set in Rock and Roll Park won’t really mean anything to younger audiences – or even many older ones. If Luke Wilson (Bodi) is always an engaging presence, the appearance by Sam Elliott reprising his narrator from The Big Lebowski will go over the heads of most. 

This is no Toy Story or Monsters Inc, the comedy and plot beats aimed at mostly only specific targets rather than ones general enough to hit home with mainstream cinemagoers. That’s a huge shame, because in spite of some fairly middling song writing and relatively average animation, if you’re in the right frame of mind Rock Dog is actually rather a blast. 

Special Feature: trailer 

ROCK DOG / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: ASH BRANNON / SCREENPLAY: ASH BRANNON, ZHENG JUN, VARIOUS / STARRING: LUKE WILSON, EDDIE IZZARD, J.K. SIMMONS, MATT DILLON, SAM ELLIOTT / RELEASE DATE: 16TH OCTOBER

Chris Rodley first contacted Patrick McGoohan as a 13-year-old in February 1968 when he wrote to the actor asking what The Prisoner, recently concluded on ITV, had all been about. Like many others who’d done the same, he received back a printed signature on a postcard encouraging him to think for himself.

In 1983 Rodley, now a fledgling filmmaker did just that and made The Prisoner the subject of his first documentary. The result, Six into One: The Prisoner File, was welcomed by fans hungry for more information on the cult series and its legendary star that – white-shirted against a California sunset – had consented to be interviewed. What viewers didn’t realise at the time was the tortuous, sometimes hilarious struggle Rodley had endured making the film, up against both his legendarily recalcitrant boyhood hero and a hopelessly incompetent local crew. In exorcising a least some of the demons from that period, In My Mind is finally the film about Patrick McGoohan that Chris Rodley can be proud of.

Rodley is a wryly engaging narrator and expert storyteller – well aware what he is presenting here is equal parts tragedy and comedy. As technical issues mount up and the novice filmmaker finds himself too nervous to intervene, an unsettled McGoohan goes off-piste and starts calling the shots himself. Rodley’s dream descends into a nightmare; he’s in his very own episode of The Prisoner and No.6 himself is out to break him. Luckily for us, Rodley kept the camera running. What we witness is a great actor fearfully close to the edge, for whom the struggle is the spur, a prisoner of the incredibly high expectations he set for himself and wilfully tested upon others. Oh, and he’s funny, bloody funny.

In every sense, what took place over those few days of cat and mouse in Pacific Palisades was another performance from Patrick McGoohan; three performances, in fact. That first, ultimately abandoned interview where Rodley and crew get a white-knuckle introduction to Planet Patrick at his most tricksterish takes place in a large empty house; the second – the one with the white shirt – is a far more laid-back and benign hilltop encounter that seems calculated by the actor to be the mirror opposite of the first. Finally, and most, bizarrely, there’s the ‘LA Tape’, a video McGoohan sent to Rodley at the 11th hour in the hope it could be used in place of everything that had gone before. It’s a self-directed oddity, surreally blurring the line between McGoohan and his famous creation. Rodley quite rightly rejected it, but it makes for a fascinating coda to a bizarre series of encounters between the two men.

Rodley also spoke to many key Prisoner personnel in 1983 including writer-producer David Tomblin, art director Jack Shampan and writer Lewis Griefer and utilises candid unseen footage from these sessions to lend some much-needed, often darkly humorous, perspective on their former boss. The only new interviewee is McGoohan’s daughter Catherine, who chooses her words so carefully we end up learning more from her pained expressions and what she doesn’t say about her tortured father than what she does.

You should never meet your heroes, apparently. You’ll be glad Chris Rodley did. Neither a tribute nor a celebration, In My Mind is an often deeply moving act of reparation by a filmmaker who, for all the obstacles and madness McGoohan threw in his path all those years ago, always wanted to do right by him. Patrick McGoohan was at once funny, frightening and fascinating. So is this.

IN MY MIND / DIRECTOR: CHRIS RODLEY / STARRING: PATRICK MCGOOHAN, CHRIS RODLEY, CATHERINE MCGOOHAN / RELEASE DATE: 30TH OCTOBER SEPERATELY AND AS PART OF ‘THE PRISONER – 50TH ANNIVERSARY BOX SET’ FROM NETWORK DISTRIBUTING

Amat Escalante takes a turn deep into the woods lately occupied by Hansel and Gretel in this brutal, mature, explicit and pondering left-turn of a film that disguises itself as a sci-fi horror, and yet focusses much more conspicuously on the small town social commentary that is obviously where Escalante’s interest lies. What’s remarkable is in how well achieved the extra-terrestrial intruder is, when we finally meet it face to tentacle.

La Región Salvaje actually translates more literally as “The Wild Place”, a much more appropriate name for a film which analogises the unsatisfied sexual organ with an unfulfilled life. And The Untamed is replete with unfulfilled lives. It starts with the friendless Verónica (Bucio), one of life’s outsiders and, as it transpires, suddenly having to cope with rejection, receiving sexual gratification from something unidentifiable and serpentine. We are then introduced to Alejandra (Ramos), a mother of two whose husband, the outwardly homophobic Ángel (Meza), is – as she will discover – having an affair with Ale’s brother Fabián, a nurse who came to the small town in which they live in order to look after his sister. The dissatisfaction that governs the lives of all is palpable, and the ironies in the ways each of them attempts to deal with it inescapable.

The unravelling of Ale’s life begins when Verónica seeks treatment at the hospital after her rejection by the unexplained creature is substantiated as an injury, coming to the attention of Fabián, whose wayward, covert and confined sexual existence is superseded by an encounter with the alien, freeing Fabián from his emotional restrictions but literalising his status as having no more value than as an inconsequential encounter. Ale then starts to investigate the violent physical assault on her brother, just as Verónica settles into her new, unrecognised status as essentially a provider of potential sexual partners for the thing that lives in a shack just outside of town.

The first two-thirds of Escalante’s slow, still and exquisitely shot film are almost entirely absorbed by Ale’s domestic situation and the incidental manner in which Verónica inveigles her way into it, and he deliberately casts two childlike, yet quietly lugubrious women as his protagonists, exaggerating the film’s theme of characters whose realities are no match for their dreams, and who will willingly surrender to multiple punishments in order to keep those dreams alive.

The Untamed – in a sensational Blu-ray transfer, which includes an 85-minute production documentary – is a stark, Catholic warning about the brutal cycle of life, and our insignificance within it. It takes the idea of the grass being greener on the other side, and examines it fully and figuratively, arriving at a depressingly honest and yet somehow beautifully expressed conclusion.

Special Features: The Making of / Escalante’s first short film Ammarados / trailer

THE UNTAMED (LA REGIÓN SALVAJE) / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: AMAT ESCALANTE / SCREENPLAY: AMAT ESCALANTE, GIBRÁN PORTELA / STARRING: RUTH RAMOS, SIMONE BUCIO, JESÚS MEZA, EDEN VILLAVICENCIO / RELEASE DATE: 9TH OCTOBER

Arriving a year after Beyond Thunderdome and a decade after Logan’s Run, D.A. Metrov’s Solarbabies (renamed Solar Warriors in the UK) is an appalling, amateurish mess of a movie, a sub-children’s TV effort with an artless plot and toe-curling dialogue, that attempts to marry the cynicism of Mad Max with the wonder of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial so haplessly that it is at times quite shockingly slapdash, and yet that has somehow managed to gain for itself a cult following – and not, surprisingly, among the kind of people who might celebrate its ineptitudes. 

Taking place some years after a nuclear war has rendered the entire surface of the Earth as desert, a surprisingly effective juvenile cast are living in a training camp (for skateboarders, apparently) belonging to the Protectorate, the organisation that controls the planet’s water supplies and rules with a fairly limp iron fist. When Witness’ Lukas Haas – here playing the other kids’ previously-deaf “mascot” – discovers a Chocky-alike stranded alien glowing globe with magical powers (that extend to creating rain indoors in one of the film’s many embarrassing scenes, and one that should have stopped the plot dead), the new arrival becomes the catalyst for change and thus a target for the Protectorate. And so our varyingly callow protagonists get on their skates, heading into a desert landscape dotted with shanty settlements with names like Tiretown, populated by leather-attired, eccentrically-coiffed characters called Malice and Dogger and the like.

The most striking thing about the film (co-writer and wannabe director Metrov was replaced at the helm by executive producer Mel Brooks’ Springtime for Hitler choreographer Alan Johnson, after Solarbabies’ budget began spiralling out of control) is its absolute lack of sophistication; almost every single plot and production decision reeks of an almost inconceivable ingenuousness, such that the cast – who were apparently close to mutiny thanks to director and material, until Brooks himself visited the set threatening to fire them all – are almost visibly bewildered by dialogue that reaches a nadir with Jamie Gertz’ “Get out, you creature of filth!” riposte to another character’s unwanted advances. The costumes, especially on “Strictor” Grock and Servalan substitute Shandray, are so elaborately exaggerated they make the rest of the 1980s look improbably austere by comparison. Apparently a Strictor is an official who administers strictness, by the way.

Wasted inside this mess are the likes of Charles Durning and, inconceivably, Alexei Sayle – plus a score by Maurice Jarre – and almost all the younger members of the cast went on to better things afterwards. Which begs the question of how Solarbabies turned out quite so incompetently, a question it’s impossible to answer. Better to either wallow in the nostalgia, or boggle at the ham-fistedness of it all. 

SOLAR WARRIORS (aka SOLARBABIES) / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: ALAN JOHNSON / SCREENPLAY: WALON GREEN, DOUGLAS ANTHONY METROV / STARRING: RICHARD JORDAN, JASON PATRIC, JAMIE GERTZ, LUKAS HAAS, JAMES LeGROS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Despite only running for 26 episodes in the late ‘90s, Cowboy Bebop’s reputation as one of the most popular and influential anime series ever made continues to grow by the year. An arresting mash-up that might best be described as SF western noir, this beautifully animated saga of spacefaring bounty hunters would have been a guiltless pleasure even without its regular detours into the all-too earthbound hang-ups of its argumentative central quartet (plus dog).

One of the challenges facing this 2001 spin-off feature (also known as Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven’s Door) was that the series ended on such a dramatic cliff-hanger that a direct follow-up would’ve been a tricky sell for the uninitiated. The answer was to set it between later episodes of the series (the majority view is that it falls between ‘sessions’ 22 and 23) but not to hold onto any major plot threads from the telly version. This works a treat in a Thunderbirds Are Go (movie not woeful CGI show) sort-of-way; rewarding fans with a bigger version of the TV series and cleverly re-introducing the concept in a way that newcomers can easily pick up.

Shit gets serious when Vincent Volaju, a bearded weirdo criminal (think Jared Leto in cartoon form) stumbles out of a spectacular fuel-tanker smash without a scratch, but the explosion triggers a terrible bio-terror virus. Turns out the Mars government have placed a huge bounty on his head so in swoop the Bebop team. But they’re not the only outfit hunting the hairy dude; he’s the mentally damaged by-product of a military experiment to create immortal nano-soldiers, so the corporation that created him has dispatched its own super-agent Elektra Ovirowa to haul Vinnie back in. Fans of the series won’t be shocked to hear that floppy-haired leading man Spike finds her rather alluring. Like the series, the plot here is fiendishly convoluted but serves as a platform for the main characters to deliver on the quirks and quarrels we expect from them.

This 1-disc Blu-ray release from Umbrella Entertainment gets under the skin of the film with a wealth of short featurettes, storyboard and conceptual galleries. The movie was made as a traditional cell animation and the hi-def transfer makes the most of this, rendering the neon-flecked Bebop universe more beautifully down-and-dirty than ever before.

With a live-action American TV version in development (or should that be threatened?), now is a great time to get back into the original. While not the strongest story of the whole saga, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is an extended dip in a uniquely mind-bending pool.

COWBOY BEBOP: THE MOVIE / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: SHINICHIRO WATANABE / SCREENPLAY: KEIKO NOBUMOTO / STARRING: KOICHI YAMADERA, MEGUMI HAYASHIBARA, UNSHO ISHIZUKA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

A Certain Magical Index: The Movie The Miracle of Endymion is a thriller with magical girls and a space elevator. What those two things have to do with each other is something that becomes apparent as the main characters work to solve the mystery at the heart of the movie.

One key area in which the Certain Magical Index Movie succeeds is it’s pacing. The mystery surrounding the character of Arisa is one that unfolds as it needs to. The audience doesn’t learn anything too soon and this ensures that the story remains intriguing.

There are some action scenes. They always manage to come at the right time to punctuate the plot, and they also move at a suitable pace. Certain Magical Index is beautifully animated and these fights allow the movie to really show that off. The characters move quickly. Their movements are smooth, and natural.

Since this movie is a spin off from a series with two seasons it only makes sense that people who have watched said seasons will have a greater understanding of what is going on. While newcomers may not understand certain details of the world the characters inhabit, being unfamiliar with the show will not hinder viewers when it comes to understanding the plot. This is due to Certain Magical index dealing with universal themes such as loss, the desire for revenge, and the hope for a miracle. It also helps that while there is a mystery to be solved it isn’t overly complicated. The story is pretty streamlined, and there aren’t extraneous details bogging the story down.

The special features on offer here are a mixed bag. Most of the items in the extra menu are just trailers. If you were following the marketing of this movie, or just like to watch trailers, then they might they might offer some fun viewing. But the problem with adding so many trailers of a movie to that movie is that they seem redundant when the full movie is already to hand. The one special feature that stands out is the audio commentary. 

The audio commentary features the main voice cast of the movie, the actors are clearly having a lot of fun watching the movie together and reminiscing about their time spent making it and the original series. The commentary has a very similar feel to the Q&A panel of a convention. It isn’t as informative as a more technically minded commentary but it is still fun to listen to the actors play off one another.

A Certain Magical Index: The Movie The Miracle of Endymion is a diverting combination of science fiction, and magical elements. The movie itself knows which emotional notes to hit at which moments. Add this to a commentary, which is enough of a fun treat to entice re-watching the movie almost immediately, and the result is a Blu-Ray worth buying. 

A CERTAIN MAGICAL INDEX: THE MOVIE THE MIRACLE OF THE ENDYMION / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: HIROSHI NISHIKIORI / SCREENPLAY: HIROYUKI KAMACHI / STARRING: MICAH SOLUSOD, MONICA RIAL, BRITTNEY KARBOWSKI, BRINA PALENCIA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

By the late 1950s genre cinema’s obsession with the Atom Age and its terrible, fanciful after-effects – irradiated supersized rampaging monsters, genetic mutation – was beginning to fade and a new technicolour era of fantasy cinema was thriving. Unsurprisingly the studios turned to the great early works of science-fiction literature to create the next generation of adventure films designed to show off the increasingly impressive fruits of their rapidly developing visual effects technology. HG Wells, the ‘father of science-fiction’ had already been plundered for 1953’s War of the Worlds and The Time Machine would make its screen debut in 1960. Jules Verne, sometimes-overlooked author of more tepid vintage adventure stories, had also seen his back catalogue raided for 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days and 1954’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Verne’s best-known work, Journey to the Center to the Earth, finally made it to the screen in 1959 and, with its luxurious production values and epic visuals (which have never looked better or more vivid than on this sparkling new Blu-Ray transfer from Eureka), it remains certainly the best adaptation of the story itself (let’s draw a discrete veil over the 2008 Brendon Fraser effort) and the best film crafted from Verne’s texts.

We’re in Edinburgh in 1880 and University Professor Oliver Lindenbrook (a wonderfully waspish James Mason) is given a curious piece of volcanic rock by one of his students. Inside the rock he finds a message from long-lost scientist Arne Saknussemm who, three centuries earlier, found a passageway leading to the centre of the Earth accessible via an Icelandic volcano. Lindenbrook tells a fellow scientist in Stockholm of his discovery but realises that his rival has already set off on a similar expedition. Racing to Iceland Lindenbrook and his student Alec McEwan (50s pop idol Pat Boone) find that their rival has been murdered. It seems that someone else has designs on reaching the centre of the Earth before them and will stop at nothing to bring Lindenbrook’s eccentric expedition – which now includes the widow of his late rival, an Icelandic hunk and…er…a duck named Gertrud – to a grisly end deep below the surface of the Earth.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is big, melodramatic fun and running at over two hours it’s in no hurry to reach its destination; we’re not far short of the sixty-minute mark before we get a real sniff of the group actually starting their journey proper but once they’re on their way the film really revels in its visuals; gaping chasms, field of giant mushrooms, a broiling subterranean ocean, the ruins of Atlantis and there are even a few monsters thrown in for good measure – albeit of the ‘lizards with bits stuck on their backs’ variety briefly favoured by genre films which couldn’t be bothered to give Ray Harryhausen a bell. But it’s all great rattling entertainment which takes its time to establish its characters before setting them off on their adventure and, as Kim Newman notes in one of the disc’s features, it’s one of the few Verne stories which actually has a sense of danger and urgency. Fans of Verne’s book might balk at some of the liberties taken with the text but then Hollywood’s never been a huge respecter of the written word. Journey is obviously dated but by and large it carries its decades well and it’s a fascinating landmark in Hollywood’s own journey to the big, brash blockbusters we enjoy/endure today.

Special features: Commentary / Kim Newman interview / restoration feature / trailer / isolated music and effects track

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1959) / CERT: U / DIRECTOR: HENRY LEVIN / SCREENPLAY: CHARLES BRACKETT, WALTER REISCH / STARRING: JAMES MASON, PAT BOONE, ARLENE DAHL, THAYER DAVID / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW