Release

DVD weekly: Death, cowboys, aliens, trolls and gifs

Matt

10th January 2012

DVD weekly is back! Following a brief hiatus brought on by festive over-eating and computer viruses, I can now return to bringing you the very best released of each week's DVD and Blu-ray releases. So let's play catch up.

Released: Monday 26th December 2011 - Monday 9th January 2012

Final Destination 5 (2011) DVD & Blu-ray
Buy the DVD on Amazon for £9.99

Final Destination 5

If 2011 has taught us anything – other than that we’d all go gay for Gosling – it’s that new life can be breathed into a diminishing film series. And if Fast Five can think bigger and better (by adding The Rock to its cast) then so can Final Destination 5 – a film that not only carries the momentum of a franchise stacked far away from the straight-to-DVD bargain bin, but manages to better many of its predecessors in the process.

The formula is very much the same as it has been since the original movie (now 11 years old): a premonition about an imminent disaster results in a handful of accidental survivors who must fend off a pissed-off Death, who is eager to correct the mistake. Add harbinger of doom Tony Todd and all of a sudden you have a campy, gory horror flick with one selling point: imaginatively gruesome and increasingly elaborate deaths.

Now standing at numero cinco, the Final Destination series has itself seemed to be dodging the Grim Reaper for at least two films and it probably wouldn’t have come this far if it wasn’t for a premise that taps right into the bloodlust of a whole generation. But thankfully, this fifth instalment seems most at ease with being a schlocky, kill-for-kicks movie and is more fun as a result. Dialling down the frankly less-important exposition and ramping up the tension in slow death set-ups, Final Destination 5 knows exactly how to entertain its audience (ie with lots of stabby-stabby).

And, with a chaotic opening sequence that details a bloody bridge collapse on an impressively large scale, it’s clear that the budget has been well spent on near-seamless special effects that can match the writers’ morbid fantasies. This goes for CGI trucks crashing towards the screen as well as for a more low-key – but just as effective – body-crumpled gymnastic landing that shows the human form twisted at an angle you’ve never seen before. And I don’t even want to think about the acupuncture scene again, which made me realise a nightmare I never knew I had in me.

Overall, it’s accidental murder by numbers, with the pay-off thankfully making the formulaic plot and slow build seem more than worthwhile. And, with a clever twist ending that belies its otherwise dumb roots, this instalment of the gory series shows that it actually has enough smarts to make you look forward to Final Destsixation, or whatever they’ll call it.

Read the original review
Cowboys & Aliens (2011) DVD & Blu-ray
Buy the DVD on Amazon for £12.97

Cowboys & Aliens

There are some plot premises that need very little else added to them to ensure awesomeness, e.g. dinosaurs in space, ninja wizards at war with nazi monkeys, and Megashark Vs Giant Octopus. Ok, maybe these aren't the best examples, but you'd think that it would be extremely difficult to get Cowboys & Aliens wrong. It's COWBOYS fighting ALIENS. And yet, this tentpole summer release managed to disappoint on a fundamental level: it forgot to be fun.

Quite how this happened, God only knows. Iron Man director Jon Favreau cast James Bond as a mysterious hero, Indiana Jones as a scowling sheriff - a role that no one realised he was born to play until casting was announced - and the hot chick from Tron Legacy as the hot chick from Cowboys & Aliens. Add it all up and you get buckets of cool.

But somewhere along the line the film got overcooked in awesomesauce and we ended up with a distinctly average, fairly slow-moving alien invasion film. This isn't to say the film is bad – it certainly has its merits – but I almost wish it had bombed spectacularly like, say, Green Lantern. I would rather this film was outright terrible and could therefore be enjoyed as a bad movie than be 'just meh'. I realise that makes little to no sense

Read the original review
The Skin I Live In (2011) DVD & Blu-ray
Buy the DVD on Amazon for £12.99

The Skin I Live In

Pedro Almodóvar's quirky psychological melodrama could easily have appeared in our Top 20 movies of 2011. Why didn't it? I dunno - ask Ali. He had final say. But the point is, that this twisty, headfuck of a film not only has an engrossing plot - reeling you in with a jigsaw-piece narrative until everything eventually falls firmly into place - but it is also exquisitely made.

Everything in The Skin I Live In spells out award-winning movie-making, from the superb performances (Banderas in particular has rarely been better), to the tension-wringing violin score offset against fluid camera movements and off-centre framing. And, to top it all off, the mid-film twist is right up there with 'Bruce Willis is a ghost' standards of WTF-ness. This isn't just a must-see movie, it's a must-see-twice movie.

Read the original review
Kill List (2011) DVD & Blu-ray
Buy the DVD on Amazon for £9.97

Kill List

I haven't seen this film but I have heard good things - very good things. In fact, this whole part of the DVD weekly is completely pointless unless I can offer you some kind of judgement, so here are a few choice excerpts from Ali's original review, which should help whet your appetites: "unpredictable, uneasy and, at times, almost unbearable", "the less you know, the better it is", "the best British horror film I've seen in years", "it goes to such dark places, you'll be gasping for light come its bugfuck insane finale", "the chances of a Rupert Grint cameo are pretty slim".

Good.

Read the full, intact, original review
Troll Hunter (2010) DVD & Blu-ray
Buy the DVD on Amazon for £10.99

Troll Hunter

This Norwegian comedy horror is supposed to be great fun, but I can't help to think that we missed a trick here at The Shiznit by not Photoshopping the poster to insinuate that the film was about hunting internet trolls. Or indeed, rename it the 'LOL Hunter' or something. The possibilities are endful.
Arena (2011) DVD & Blu-ray
Buy the DVD on Amazon for £7.49

Arena

A meathead from Twilight ends up in a modern-day gladiatorial tournament, run by a should-be-ashamed Samuel L Jackson, and must fight to the death. I'll be honest, this sounds awful, but I've included it here because I really wanted to reuse Luke's gif from his post about the trailer:


That is all.
Also out this week

A Lonely Place To Die DVD & Blu-ray
Apollo 18 DVD & Blu-ray
Arrietty DVD & Blu-ray
Cell 211 DVD & Blu-ray
Devils Double DVD & Blu-ray
Elite Squad: Enemy Within DVD & Blu-ray
Colombiana DVD & Blu-ray
Faces In The Crowd DVD & Blu-ray
In A Better World DVD & Blu-ray
Lethal Justice DVD & Blu-ray
Project Nim DVD
The Big Picture DVD & Blu-ray
Videodrome Blu-ray

More:  DVD Weekly
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