Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

David Janssen (The Fugitive) is police Sgt Tom Valens, who shoots and kills a doctor while on a stakeout. While he’s convinced that he saw the doctor with a gun, it could not be found afterwards. This, along with the fact that the doc ran from him when he made his presence felt, Valens pleads his innocence in a court case. With his future in doubt, he follows his hunch to find out where the weapon went and why the doctor got in the line of fire.

Directed by Buzz Kulik (The Hunter), Warning Shot is a riveting watch, even if it comes across as a more violent made-for-TV movie. The courtroom scenes add a new element to the gritty cop story, even though we find it hard to believe that Valens would have been allowed to conduct as much sleuthing when on suspension!

There’s a sense that the film is a precursor to movies such as Dirty Harry while maintaining an element of film noir. Keen viewers will have no problem figuring out what’s going on, but it’s still a fun ride getting there.

As well as Janssen, there’s a healthy line-up of acting talent. Ed Begley (12 Angry Men) is Valens’ surprisingly sympathetic chief, while Joan Collins is Valens’ ex-wife. Also popping up are George Sanders, Lillian Gish, Stefanie Powers, and Walter Pidgeon.

Imprint’s Blu-ray only boasts a commentary as a bonus feature, but it’s an interesting one that provides enough background to the film to keep fans happy.

Warning Shot is available on Blu-ray from the Australian label Imprint. 

Dishonoured and forcibly retired from the FBI on grounds of excessive brutality, Mark Kaminski (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is demoted to being a Sheriff in a small town, where his wife heads straight for the bottle and his career goes nowhere. However, when the son of an old friend, Agent Harry Shannon (Darren McGavin), is killed whilst guarding a mob informant against the criminal outfit led by Luigi Patrovita (Sam Wanamaker), Kaminski is given a second chance. Charged with infiltrating and single-handedly bringing down the mobsters from within without the protection of the FBI, Kaminski assumes a new identity and must resist the temptations of the mysterious Monique (Kathryn Harrold) and maintain his cover, with his eyes on the biggest prize of all – reinstatement and thus a return to the life that was taken away from him.

“You should not drink and bake.” Arnie is remembered for his one-liners, but Raw Deal only has the one. It’s an odd film; coming in between Commando and Predator. Schwarzenegger was eager to get out of his Dino De Laurentiis contract after the failure of Red Sonja and Dino was eager to make a fast buck in order to make his dream Total Recall project. The irony!

The script is as ready-baked as Bojo’s Brexit deal. A threatened gang war leads to… well nothing much at all. Wannamaker and the usually excellent Robert Davi are just bad-guy ciphers waiting to be violently dispatched by Arnie. It’s hardly a plot spoiler as any aficionado of ’80s action films will know exactly what’s coming and who it’s coming to.

Yet despite this, and despite the incongruity of Arnie attempting to fit in with the mob by slicking back his hair and wearing tailored suits, he actually makes Raw Deal watchable. It can’t be denied that Arnie has the same charisma as that of film stars that have come before. Bogart, Wayne, Eastwood, even though he may not have the thespian prowess of such stalwarts, Arnie certainly commands the screen.

The extras are oddly minimal for a Studiocanal release. We’re offered Arnold Schwarzenegger: The Man Who Raised Hollywood featurette, Raw Deal: A Generic Gangster Film featurette, and the obligatory original theatrical trailer. All of which comes in under thirty minutes which may itself seem like a raw deal!

Raw Deal is out now on 4K and Blu-ray. 

On April 16th, some 2000 Gerry Anderson fans – many of them, it must be said, of a very specific vintage – gathered at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham to enjoy a unique experience. This reviewer, squeezed into a very fetching Thunderbird 2 T-shirt, was amongst their number, by the way…  Stand by for Action: Gerry Anderson In Concert was the first time the music from Anderson’s Supermarionation and live-action shows – from The Adventures of Twizzle in 1957 right through to 2005’s CGI reboot of Captain Scarlet (Gerry’s last production to hit the screen) – had been performed live on stage with a full orchestra (all of them clothed in costumes based on characters from the Anderson canon) bringing the music, mostly by the late Barry Gray, to life and hosted affably by comedian and impressionist Jon Culshaw.

If the live concert itself was a shot of pure, undiluted nostalgia – and it was – then this new Blu-ray release is a permanent reminder of a very special event, a very special occasion. Anyone brought up in the Sixties who enjoyed the heyday of Gerry Anderson and Century 21 Productions can’t help but be transported effortlessly back across the decades to a simpler, kinder and more optimistic world by Stand By For Action. The concert itself is as cheerfully homespun as the shows it celebrates, with Culshaw enthusiastically introducing each section and unable to resist the temptation to drop in the odd impression from Boris Johnson, Patrick Moore, the Third and Fourth Doctors from Doctor Who and, at one point, UNIT’s Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s all good-natured stuff and it’s great fun to see the trio of backing singers giving their all as they sing the refrain to Torchy the Battery Boy and later bring the themes to Captain Scarlet, Stingray and Fireball XL5 to life with gusto.  Anderson fans all have their favourite shows and their favourite music, of course, but there’s no denying the power of the classic Thunderbirds March and, of course, the frenetically-exciting theme to the brilliant UFO. In the second half of the show composer Richard Harvey takes to the stage to conduct the superb orchestra through a rousing suite of music from Gerry’s “comeback” show in 1983, the oft-derided Terrahawks. The show itself may divide audiences but it again demonstrates its creator’s ability to match thrilling, heart-stopping music to his shows, realising that if you grab the audience from the off with a powerful and memorable theme and title sequence, half the battle is won.

We will most probably never see a genius the like of Gerry Anderson working on British TV again and Stand by For Action is a wonderful warts-and-all reminder (the odd orchestral bum note and stumble from Culshaw left intact) of an event that was exciting, joyously life-affirming and, now and again, a bit emotional. Here’s to the next one… the Thunderbirds T-shirt is ready, even if it seems to have shrunk a bit since its last outing…

Standby For Action is available now on Blu-ray and DVD from Anderson Entertainment

In 2009, cinema audiences were introduced to vicious pint-sized 9-year-old psychopathic serial killer Esther in Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan. Towards the end of the film we learned, in the film’s agreeable twist, that Esther wasn’t actually 9 years old (and wasn’t even called Esther) but was in actual fact  Leena Klammer, a 33-year-old Estonian woman suffering from a rare disorder that has stunted her physical growth and that she has spent her life posing as a young girl. 13 years later and here comes the sequel  – or rather, the prequel – in the shape of Orphan First Kill, set in 2007 and offering up an explanation as to how Leena became known as Esther and a murderous exploit she became involved with before the events of the first film. If you’re worried that the film’s USP was blown out of the water by the reveal of Esther/Leena’s condition in the first film then don’t worry; First Kill delivers a doozy of a twist some forty minutes into its running time that sends the film spinning off into an entirely different direction and of course, we’re not going to spoil it here.

As the film begins we’re at the Saarne Institute in Estonia where Leena engineers an escape by hiding in the car of visiting art therapist Anna Troyev (Gwendoline Collins). Later accessing the internet Leena matches herself physically with an American missing girl called Esther Albright and is soon “reunited” with the wealthy Albright family in Connecticut. The family have come to terms with the loss of their daughter but the girl’s mother Tricia (Julia Stiles) quickly suspects that something isn’t quite right as there are certain facts about the family that Esther seems to have no memory of and she is now displaying a previously unexpressed interest in painting, an interest that brings her creepily close to her “father” Allen (Rossif Sutherland). Tricia and the couple’s son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) have their own reasons to be suspicious of Esther…

Orphan First Kill is quite bonkers in so many ways but it’s hugely entertaining. The new twist is glorious, utterly wrong-footing both its audience and Esther (played again by Isabelle Fuhrman who was ten when the first film was made) and the melodrama that plays out is positively Gothic in its unashamed high-camp absurdity. Director William Brent Bell (whose CV includes the largely-execrable The Boy movies) deftly works his way through the unlikely twists and turns of the plot and there are, horror hounds will be pleased to learn, a couple of wince-inducing moments of gore and violence and an ending that borders on the hysterical. Yet it all seems to work and hang together despite some gaping plot holes and inconsistencies because everyone is taking it all terribly seriously and they’re all obviously well aware that they’re playing in a very heightened horror sandbox. The underrated Stiles is brilliant as Tricia but the real star here, as in the first film, is Fuhrman and the film cleverly recreates the young character with the same, older actress over a decade later not with dodgy CGI or digital de-ageing but by using well-placed body doubles and utilising forced perspective in certain sequences.  Orphan First Kill doesn’t especially benefit from the 4K format; it’s a dark, sepia-tinged movie and not exactly bursting with colour and the only special feature is a perfunctory 2-minute Electronic Press Kit ‘making of.’ If you can turn off your critical faculties and let yourself be swept away by Orphan First Kill’s idiocy (and its own giddily-unexpected twist) you’ll surely find that this is a  bracingly-enjoyable 99 minutes of hoary horror hokum.

Orphan First Kill is available now on 4K and Blu-ray

Fears that Reservoir Dogs – the first film by Quentin Tarantino – might have become dated or in danger of showing its age a troubling thirty years since it (and Tarantino) exploded onto the cinema scene are thankfully utterly unfounded thanks to this glorious new 4K transfer And its accompanying Blu-ray disc loaded with new special features. In fact, the film not only retains its power but seems even more important now in an era where films like this just don’t get made anymore or if they do they dwell in the murkier corners of the indie sector and rarely get the opportunity to break through to a larger and potentially more appreciative audience. Reservoir Dogs is and always will be a game changer.

The film demonstrates all those qualities that will forever be associated with Tarantino and that in many ways have become his trademarks; the pop culture savvy, whipcrack-smart dialogue, the non-linear story structure, eye-watering violence and a peculiar form of internal justice that applies to his stories and his characters alone. We won’t insult you by reminding you of the story beyond the fact that it chronicles the aftermath of a meticulously-planned heist by a gang of colour-coded street gangsters that goes catastrophically wrong when it becomes apparent that one of their number is an undercover Police officer. Running to just 100 minutes it’s easily Tarantino’s tightest, punchiest movie – he’s undeniably become a little more self-indulgent as his career’s progressed but as his films remain absorbing and engrossing because nobody else makes films like him we tend not to mind too much – and it’s all the better for its brevity. The film possesses a stomach-churning urgency following a deceptively languid opening where Tarantino’s camera prowls around the table of the diner where the gang are spit-balling as the final plans are laid before events spiral out of control and our ice-cool protagonists take refuge in an old warehouse to ponder their next move as one of their number bleeds out from a stray gunshot wound. The performances are stunning, of course, from Harvey Keitel’s tough nut Mr White, the only one of the group displaying a hint of humanity, Steve Buscemi’s weaselly Mr Pink, Tim Roth as the fresh-faced Mr Orange, Chris Penn as the surly, swaggering Nice Guy Eddie and, of course, Michael Madsen’s terrifyingly psychopathic Mr Blonde.  It’s Madsen, of course, who delivers the film’s signature sequence, the scene that sealed Tarantino’s reputation as, left alone in the warehouse with an injured Police prisoner, Mr Blonde proceeds to torture and mutilate him before threatening to set him on fire. It’s a scene that still shocks and repulses in equal measure and it’s a stone-cold cinema classic moment.

Reservoir Dogs itself, of course, is also a cinema classic. Looking startlingly sharp, vivid, and grain-free on this new 4K transfer (presented in a special SteelBook edition for those who collect such things) it’s supported by a Blu-ray (unavailable for viewing for this review) that includes deleted scenes and two new featurettes Playing It Fast and Loose and Profiling the Reservoir Dogs. But the film’s the thing and never more than here, finally given the quality home entertainment it deserves (although Tarantino would surely be happier with a VHS release)  as one of the greatest films of the late 20th century, the film that launched the career of one of cinema’s most uniquely maverick and iconoclastic directors.

Reservoir Dogs is available now as a limited edition 4K SteelBook