Mill Creek Ent.; Amazon

For those of you who don't already know, The Thing was re-released to Blu-ray on Oct. 29th by Mill Creek Entertainment.

No, I'm not referring to the John Carpenter's 1982 classic scifi-horror flick, which is a remake of the 1951 classic The Thing from Another World and an adaptation of the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr., but instead I'm referring to the 2011 prequel film of the same name. Confused yet?

Directed by Matthijs Heijningen, the prequel was originally going to be titled The Thing: Begins. However, due to producers and behind-the-scenes drama (more on that later), the film was released as The Thing, which made moviegoers believe it was a remake of a remake.

Set in the winter 1982, the prequel centers around Kate Lloyd (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a paleontologist who is sent to an isolated Norwegian research station in Antarctica to investigate a possible buried alien spacecraft. The expedition is lead by Dr. Sander Halvorson (played by Ulrich Thomsen) and his assistant, Adam Finch (played by Eric Christian Olsen). After excavating a body frozen in the ground, they accidentally release a lifeform that takes control and mutilates its victims. The movie also stars Joel Edgerton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Kristofer Hivju.

The director shot the prequel in 35mm film so it would have the same look as the 1982 film.  Animatronic special effects were used for the creatures to match the 1982 effects. However, studio politics interfered and all of the traditional effects were replaced CGI. Add in additional reshoots, which changed many scenes (especially the ending), as well as the title change, the movie ended up flopping at the box office.

Blu-ray Bonus Features include:

• Feature Commentary with Director Matthiijs van Heijningen and Producer Eric Newman
• The Thing Involves
• Fire & Ice
• Deleted/Extended Scenes
• Trailer

Final Thoughts

• To Hell and Back: The Making of 3 From Hell
(Blu-ray Only - 4-Part Documentary)

Final Thoughts

AMAZON

I'm the only person in the world who believes Dark Horse's Hellboy is cursed! There have been three film adaptations - Hellboy (2004), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), and Hellboy (2019) - and all of them have more or less flopped at the box office.

Why is this?

I have absolutely no clue! There are many die hard fans for both Mike Mignola's comics and Guillermo del Toro's films.

Hellboy's reboot/remake was released to theatres back in April with Neil Marshall in the director's chair and David Harbour taking over the half-demon. The film was executed by the mainstream critics and bombed at the box office. Plus, Avengers: Endgame coming out a few weeks later didn't help much either.

Lionsgate Home Entertainment is releasing Hellboy (R; 121 minutes) on 4K Ultra HD ($42.99), Blu-ray ($39.99), DVD ($29.99), and Digital HD on July 23rd. The film borrows bits and pieces from the comic books  Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, The Storm and the Fury, and Hellboy in Mexico. It ignores the del Toro's movies and gives Hellboy a new origin tale.

The reboot begins with the half-demon Hellboy being sent to the English countryside to track and kill a trio of giants. However, things aren't exactly how they appear, resulting in Hellboy barely making it out alive. He quickly learns that the thought-to-be-dead sorceress"Blood Queen" Nimue (played by Milla Jovovich) has been brought back to life, piece by piece. Along side an Irish medium, Alice Monaghan (played by Sasha Lane), and a B.P.R.D. soldier, Ben Daimio (played by  Daniel Dae Kim), Hellboy is hell-bent on stopping Nimue and her army of demons from destroying the world.

Special Features include:

• 4KUHD, Blu-ray & DVD:
• Deleted Scenes
• Previsualizations
• Blu-ray Exclusive:
• Tales of the Wild Hunt: Hellboy Reborn (3-Part Documentary)

Final Thoughts

AMAZON; WALMART

Why is it movies based on video games always tend to suck?

Doom, Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Street Fighter, BloodRayne, Silent Hill, and many other games have been poorly adapted to the big screen, so my expectations for Dead Trigger were pretty low to begin with.

Dead Trigger is a 2017 low-budget adaptation of the first-person zombie-themed 2012 mobile game by Madfinger Games. Writer-director Mike Cuff began filming a feature film based on the game in May 2016 and was later removed from production due to creative differences. Scott Windhauser replaced him as director. The film premiered at the Moscow Film Festival in 2017 and over the last two years it has been released in other countries.

Dead Trigger landed on Blu-ray + Digital in the United States last week from Saban Films and Lionsgate Home Entertainment. It's a bare-bones release with absolutely no special features or bonus extras.

The 92-minute horror action flick is set in a world where billions of people where killed by a mysterious virus that turns the victims into mindless zombies! Sounds original, right?

The government created a zombie survival game called Dead Trigger with the purpose of finding the best zombie killers from around the world. Yeah, that's a brilliant idea!

The top Dead Trigger gamers are briefly trained by Captain Kyle Walker (played by Dolph Lundgren) and Rockstock (played by Isaiah Washington) just before being sent into the undead zone to rescue Tara Conlan (played by Autumn Reeser), a scientist who could possibly have a cure for the outbreak.

Final Thoughts

AMAZON

This year marks the fifty anniversary of mass murders that were committed by the Manson Family. And, of course, Hollywood is going to make new Manson-themed movies, including Once Upon A Time In Hollywood from director Quentin Tarantino (though it's only a subplot) and the horror flick The Haunting of Sharon Tate (R; $21.99; 95 minutes).

Written & directed by Daniel Farrands, The Haunting of Sharon Tate stars Hilary Duff (Yep, Lizzie McQuire!) as pregnant actress Sharon Tate who had a premonition dream involving the death of her friends and herself. With her husband, Roman Polanski, directing a movie in another country, Sharon's friend (and former lover) Jay Sebring (played by Jonathan Bennett), screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski (played by Pawel Szajda) and his lover  Abigail Folger (played by Lydia Hearst) are looking after Sharon at her rented Los Angeles home.

Sharon has disturbing visions of a man named "Charles." Her friends try to console her, but it doesn't help a bit as she keeps having more detailed premonitions of three strangers breaking into the house and brutally murdering them. She must use her sixth sense to save their lives and change history.

Blu-ray Special Features include:

• Audio Commentary with Writer-Director Daniel Farrands
• Premonitions: The Haunting of Sharon Tate

AMAZON

Believe it or not, there are now eight films in the horror-comedy Leprechaun series, which began with the 1993 cult classic (filmed in 1991) which starred a pre-Friends Jennifer Aniston. Warwick Davis played the wisecracking villain for six films, with the last being 2003's straight-to-video Leprechaun: Back 2 the Hood. The franchise was rebooted in 2014 in the-name-only Leprechaun: Origins and the less I talk about that disaster the better!

The franchise got another reboot with Leprechaun Returns ($14.99; R; 93 minutes), which ignores the original sequels and the 2014 reboot. It's a direct sequel to the 1993 film with Linden Porco taking over role as the Leprechaun! The film was released to VOD in December 2018 and premiered on SyFy in March 2019. It'll be making it's way on Blu-ray (+ Digital) tomorrow from Lionsgate Home Entertainment.

Directed by Steven Kotanski, the film is set 25 years after the original and centers around college student Lila (played by Taylor Spreitler) who's joining the sorority house Alpha Upsilon. The sorority recently decided to go "green" and moved their house to an old farmhouse (the same one from the original movie). After getting a ride from Ozzy (Mark Holton reprising his role from the 1993 film), Lila meets her new sisters - Rose (played by Sai Bennett), Meredith (played by Emily Reid), and Katie (played by Pepi Sonuga), as well as Katie's boyfriend Andy (played Ben McGregor) and the tech-geek Matt (played by Oliver Llewllyn Jenkins).

After getting a bit too close to the farm's old well, Ozzy weirdly and grossly resurrects the Leprechaun. Once again, the Irish killer is on a deadly mission to retrieve his pot of gold. And, of course, he's going to have a little bloody fun with the college students.

Special Features include:

• Going Green with Director Steven Kotanski
• Leprechaun Returns Behind-the-Scenes Footage
• Still Gallery

 

  Final Thoughts

AMAZON

I have a bad habit of attempting to read books that are soon to be adapted as a movie or television series but never actually doing it. Well, I guess I finally broke my procrastinating streak because I pushed myself to read the epic horror novel NOS4A2 by Joe Hill (a.k.a. Stephen King's son) before the series debut's tomorrow night.

If you've ever watched AMC recently, then you would've seen the countless teasers for the NOS4A2 series; which prompt me to seek out the novel at my local library. The novel is nearly 800 pages, so it took me a little bit longer to read it than I'd originally anticipated. The good news is that at least I got it finished before the series starts.

The novel begins in 2008 at a hospital where a nurse has a bizarre encounter with the supposedly comatose Charles Manx, a child abductor, and then it quickly flashes back to 1986 where us readers are first introduced to a young Victoria "Vic" McQueen, the heroine of this story. She has the ability to ride her bicycle through the Shorter Way Bridge, which can take her to anything her heart is seeking.

Vic isn't the only one who has the ability to use the Shorter Way Bridge. Charlie Manx can drive  "The Wraith" Rolls-Royce on the Bridge. He kidnaps children from troubled homes and takes them to a place called "Christmasland," where they can be happy forever. Assisting Manx is a psychotic chemical planet worker named Bing, who's in charge of getting rid of the children's parents.

In 1996, a now teenager Vic encounters Manx and barely escapes thanks to Lou Carmody, a motorcycle rider. She eventually get romantically involved with Lou and later gives birth to his son, Wayne. Fast Forward to 2012, where Vic must once again take a ride on the Shorter Way Bridge in the attempt to rescue her son who has been kidnapped by Manx.

Final Thoughts

Mill Creek Entertainment; Amazon

There was nothing better to do on a stormy night than to stay up late and watch a double feature that consisted of two low-budget 1990s' horror gems - Mindwarp and Brainscan!

These flicks will be arriving on a Sci-Fi Double Feature Blu-ray ($19.98) on June 4th from Mill Creek Entertainment.

Directed by Steve Barnett, Mindwarp (1992; R; 96 minutes) was the first of three movies in the early 1990s produced by Fangoria Films. Set in the year 2037, the film takes place in a world where the ozone layer has mostly been destroyed. There are highly radioactive areas called Death Zones, which are filled with mutated cannibalistic Crawlers and a few Outworlders, humans who haven't been affected by the radiation. Then there are the Dreamers, a group of humans who live in a computer controlled biosphere called the Inworld. The Dreamers have implants on the back of their necks that lets them plug into a virtual reality world where they can live out their wildest fantasies.

After rejecting the virtual reality from within her own mind, a young woman, Judy (played by Marta Martin) is kicked out of the Inworld and tossed into the Death Zones. Upon arriving she is attacked by a Crawler, but luckily for her she is rescued by an Outworlder named Stove (played by the legendary B-movie man Bruce Campbell). Sparks fly rather quickly between the two, but the romance is cut short when more Crawlers attack; which leads to Judy being kidnapped by the Seer (played by the late great horror icon Angus Scrimm) and of course Stove has to rescue her again.


Directed by John Flynn, Brainscan (1994; R; 96 minutes) centers around Michael Brower (played by Edward Furlong), a sixteen-year-old who's basically been taking care of himself ever since his mother was killed in a car accident several years prior. The accident also resulted in permanent leg damage for him. Now as a teenager, Michael has a become a big horror and video game nerd. After hearing about the new mind-bending video game Brainscan, he eagerly orders the first game disc.

While at first glance Brainscan looks like a ultra-realistic POV slasher game, Michael quickly learns the game is actually real. And it's possible Michael might have committed real-life murders.

Why doesn't Michael just quit the game?

Well, the game is controlled by a demon called The Trickster (played by T. Ryder Smith), and a player cannot quit the game. The game has to be played out to the very bloody end!

Final Thoughts

Mill Creek Entertainment; Amazon

One of my favorite movie directors is John Carpenter, who happened to direct and co-wrote my favorite movie, Halloween. Mr. Carpenter made several "classic" horror and science fiction films during the 1980s. However, the 1990s weren't too good for the director, as almost every one of his films during this decade were complete flops; though over the the years many of them have become cult classics. His last two efforts (I'm not counting the two Masters of Horror episodes!) were 2001's Ghosts of Mars and 2010's The Ward.

Ghosts of Mars was originally planned to be the the third entry in the Snake Plissken film series with Kurt Russell returning as Snake. The title would have been Escape from Mars. After Escape From L.A. flopped, the film's title was changed to Ghosts of Mars and Snake was renamed to James 'Desolation' Williams with Ice Cube playing the character. The movie was released to Blu-ray (R; 99 minutes; $14.98) last week by Mill Creek Entertainment.

The film is set during the 22nd Century where Mars has been terraformed 84% and humans can walk around without having to wear a spacesuit. The plot involves Commander Helena Braddock (played by Pam Grier), Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (played by Natasha Henstridge), Sergeant Jericho Butler (played by Jason Statham), and a few other officers being sent on a mission to retrieve the criminal "Desolation" Williams (played by Ice Cube), who's in a prison cell located in the remote region of the planet. Unknowingly to the squad, the local mining workers had stumbled upon a Martian ancient crypt and unleashed evil spirits who have now taken over the bodies of the workers.

To escape Mars, the squat must work with Desolation, so they can find a way to stop the evil Martian spirits.

Special Features on the Blu-ray include:

• Audio Commentary with Director John Carpenter and Natasha Henstridge
• Video Diary: Red Desert Nights
• Featurette: "Scoring Ghosts of Mars"
• Special Effects (SFX) Deconstructions

Final Thoughts

Mill Creek Entertainment; Amazon

Are you deeply afraid of snakes?

Personally, I like snakes. (Don't ask me about spiders!) Yes they can be a bit creepy (and crawly), but I have nothing against them. Snakes is my favorite genre of creature flicks and my favorite title is 1997's Anaconda starring a young Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Owen Wilson, Jonathan Hyde, Kari Wuhrer, Vincent Castellanos, and Eric Stoltz, along with a cameo by Danny Trejo.

I remember skipping school just so I could watch Anaconda on day it was released on VHS in 1997.

FYI: It was video rental.
Side Note: Kids, please don't skip school!

Anaconda (PG-13; 89 minutes; $14.98) has beenre-released  on Blu-ray (+DVD) from Mill Creek Entertainment. It was previously released on Blu-ray in 2014, which I did review on this blog. (Read my review here!)

Directed by Terri Flores, the film centers around a documentary film crew, lead by anthropologist Steve Cole (played by Stolz) and director Terri Flores (played by Lopez), who are searching for the long-lost Shirishamas tribe on the Amazon River. On their journey, they rescue a snake hunter named Paul Serone (played by Voight) from a sinking boat.

Shortly after Serone's arrival, Cale is stung by wasp, which leaves him unconscious. Serone takes charge of the situation and says he will captain their boat to a hospital. However, Serone has another plan that involves hunting a deadly Anaconda.

Final Thoughts