Tuesday, May 14, 2013

DVD Review - 4 Movie Collection: Anatomy/ Anatomy 2/ Double Vision/ April Fool's Day

4 Movie Collection: Anatomy/ Anatomy 2/ Double Vision/ April Fool's Day
Directors: Steven Ruzowitzky, Chen Kuo Fu, The Butcher Brothers
Starring: Franka Potente, David Morse, Tony Lueng
Studio: Mill Creek Entertainment
Release Date: May 7, 2013
ASIN: B00BUWD7NY
Running Time: 6 hours 42 minutes
Rating: R/ Not Rated

Review:

One of my favorite movies from my childhood was the 1986 horror comedy April Fool's Day. I was unaware that there was a direct-to-DVD remake released in 2008, but I recently watched it in the 4 Movie Collection: Anatomy/ Anatomy 2/ Double Vision/ April Fool's Day from Mill Creek Entertainment, which I received free of charge in exchange for my honest review.

April Fool's Day (2008) stars Josh Henderson (TNT's Dallas) and Scout Taylor Compton (Rob Zombie's Halloween I & II) and it barely resembles the original as it drops most the fun and turns it into a slow contemporized slasher film. The plot rip-offs other horror movies: A year after a prank goes wrong at the annual April Fool's Day party, the Cartier siblings and their friends are being tormented by a crazed killer. There are a few twists and turns leading to an offbeat ending. Despite its unoriginal plot, it is still better than the other pointless remakes, like Prom Night.

Double Vision stars David Morse and Tony Leung Ka-fai in this Chinese thriller, which contains mostly English subtitles. Huang Huo-tu has lost the respect of his friends and co-workers. His young daughter is mentally ill, due to being in a hostage situation, and his wife is filing for divorce. He takes a job as a Foreign Affairs Officer, where he teams up with FBI agent Kevin Richter to try to solve a string of bizarre murders, all which lead them to suspect that some kind of supernatural force is involved in the killings. I have seen many horror movies, but this movie is strange. Running at nearly two hours, the pacing was a little slow for me, though I did end up liking it.

Franka Potente plays a medical student, Paula, in the German thriller Anatomy. She has been accepted into a prestigious anatomy class, but almost as soon as she arrives, her classmates are turning up in the morgue, which all of them died of bizarre deaths. Paula suspects fowl play and begins her own investigation that leads her to uncover the secret society known as the Anti-Hippocratic Society. This movie is English-dubbed, which is almost laughable at times as the voices don't match the characters at all. The plot is original, though the violence reminds me of Saw (which came out a few years later), but the third act falls into the typical slasher cliché.

Anatomy 2 is set at the Berlin research department at a famous hospital, where Joachim Hauser has been accepted to complete his practical courses. His father had died from Muscular Dystrophy, which has also crippled his brother. Jo gets into Mueller LaRousse's top secret research group. The group experiments with different drugs and procedures that would be banned anywhere else. Jo wants a cure for his brother and volunteers to be a guinea pig for the procedures. Suddenly, a few of his classmates die. Paula Henning (from the first movie) is now a police investigator and she believes the deaths are connected to the Anti-Hippocratic Society. Unlike the first movie, the sequel has English subtitles instead of being dubbed. Some sequels tend to be copycats of the first, but the plot here is original as it gets, though it is a little weird.

There are no bonus features on this two-disc set. The picture quality comes in great. Though these films aren't perfect, I still enjoyed watching them.




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