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V/H/S

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  • Title: V/H/S
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vhs-blu-rayLike most short film anthologies V/H/S is something of a mixed bag. Structured around a story of a group of criminals hired to retrieve a videotape from what they believe is an empty house, the group of thieves stumble upon the owner’s dead body and an insane collection of videotapes each with a different found-footage-style horror tale captured on film.

As the robbers search and plunder the house for what they’ve been sent to find, along with anything else of value they can steal, one member of the group starts browsing through five of the tapes giving us our five separate horror shorts.

In “Amateur Night” a group of frat boys attempting to make their own amateur sex tape get far more than they expected when one of the women (Hannah Fierman) they pick has a violent episode as the camera starts to roll. Although the set-up is far too long, the payoff works well and Fierman is certainly capable as coming off as creepy as hell on-screen when called upon.

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Beasts of the Southern Wild

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  • Title: Beasts of the Southern Wild
  • IMDB: link

beasts-of-the-southern-wild-blu-rayWriter/director Benh Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild is an unusual film set in the Louisiana bayou in the fictional locale of “Isle de Charles Doucet,” commonly referred to by its residents as the Bathtub. Adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from Alibar’s one-act play “Juicy and Delicious,” the film is centered around a six year-old girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) whose world is threatened by her father’s (Dwight Henry) sudden illness and an approaching storm which causes the outside world to encroach on the tightly-knit community.

Although the Bathtub doesn’t actually exist it was inspired by several small fishing villages along the bayou constantly threatened by hurricanes, a rising sea level, and erosion. Zeitlin gives us a fully-formed world without judgment or bias. The community of the Bathtub is an uproarious bunch who refuse to leave their homes even if doing so might save their lives from the oncoming storm.

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360

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  • Title: 360
  • IMDB: link

360-dvdWith 360 director Fernando Meirelles and screenwriter Peter Morgan offer an ensemble piece featuring several tangentially related stories about love, sex, and money. The idea to weave separate elements such as these together is hardly a new one, but (as is often the case with this type of film) not all the stories measure up, and despite the film’s insistence that it has some great wisdom to impart by throwing all these characters together, in the end 360 is still something of a mess.

The stories involve a man (Anthony Hopkins) searching for his lost daughter who meets a young woman (Maria Flor) who has recently broken up with her boyfriend (Juliano Cazarré) on a flight to the United States, an aspiring prostitute (Lucia Siposová) and her sister (Gabriela Marcinkova), a recently released sex offender (Ben Foster) stuck in a Colorado airport, a couple (Jude Law, Rachel Weisz) each having secret affairs, and a dentist (Jamel Debbouze) struggling with his feelings for his assistant (Dinara Drukarova) who is married to the driver (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) of a Russian gangster (Johannes Krisch).

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Doctor Who – Series 7 (Part One)

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  • Title: Doctor Who – Series Seven (Part One)
  • tv.com: link

doctor-who-series-7-part-one-blu-rayThe first half of Doctor Who Series Seven is collected here including The Doctor‘s (Matt Smith) final farewell to Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill), dinosaurs on spaceships, a cyborg assassin in the Old West, an invasion of mysterious black cubes, the introduction of Mark Williams as Rory’s father, and an entire planet of insane Daleks which teases the future introduction of Jenna-Louise Coleman as The Doctor’s new companion in this year’s Christmas episode.

Centered around single one-off episodes rather than an ongoing story arc, these episodes get the season off to a good start (even if the western episode is a little flat), before returning the Weeping Angels to their original glory and saying a tearful farewell to the Ponds. “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” is the real stand-out among the set which feels very much like a throwback to Doctor Who‘s old Douglas Adams days complete with an absurd premise and pair of quarreling robots.

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Transformers Prime – Season Two

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  • Title: Transformers Prime – The Complete Second Season
  • tv.com: link

transformers-prime-blu-ray-season-2The Second Season of Transformers Prime continues the animated battles of the Autobots and Decepticons on Earth as well as the robots in disguise home planet of Cybertron. The series adopts the look and style of Michael Bay’s (truly awful) Transformers franchise and recent video game releases that as a fan of the original toys, comics, and cartoon series, I will freely admit, doesn’t always please me.

This means we’re stuck with several problematic elements from the movies including a Bumblebee that still can’t speak (and is a Camaro instead of a VW Bug), the moronic monster-like design of several of the Decepticons, a lack of understanding basic differences between robots and humans, a scarcity of only a handful of Autobots heroes, and a near endless supply of nameless (not to mention useless) Deception cannon fodder warriors that rank somewhere between Stormtroopers and Cobra soldiers in the grand scheme of things.

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