I love DVDs. Right after high school, I was buying at least a half dozen a week if not more. Yet there are several things that just pluck my nerves. This list is not in any particular order and certainly not inclusive. I am quite sure there could be a revisit to this topic eventually.

9. “Large Screen” Releases
Essentially, these are films originally in a larger aspect ration, usually 2.40:1, that are cropped during a certain group of scenes. Not only do I despise not watching movies in their original ratios, the way this was handled for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was quite poor, and I’m not only referring to the movie itself. The jump back and forth between scenes (and even different shots within the same scene) is quite jarring. I know a normal movie-goer might not notice but it is rather annoying regardless.

8. Delayed Releases
Now that Netflix and Redbox have caved to several studios’ demands to withhold new releases for almost a month after they hit DVD, the only way to see The Blind Side, Sherlock Holmes, and now Avatar on DVD is to either buy them outright or go to Blockbuster (and who really wants to do that) only to get a stripped down version lacking any extras. Not only does that make things more difficult for us at Movie Scum, Inc. to keep up with the newest films, regular consumers who might be looking for the latest generic rom-com from these studios in their normal venues might get discouraged and give up. Or if they are tech savvy enough, they will just download it illegally.

7. Cheaper DVD Cases
Back in the day, I could not stand those Warner cardboard cases but at least they fell relatively sturdy even if they just fell apart ten years later. Now, the latest trend is to take a regular case with a nice, happy recycle sign where the insert (remember those?) used to go. Allegedly, these are better for the environment as they use less plastic but every time I go to remove a disc, I feel like the whole case will either break in half or break the disc in the process of getting it out. Give me that extra three slivers of plastic back and go plant a tree or something to feel better.

6. Unskippable Previews
When I sat down to watch Sherlock Holmes, I was treated to at least eight to ten previews of some sort. They were mostly movie trailers with a few video game previews and even a non-smoking ad. The problem was the next chapter option was disabled and the only way to skip through was to fast forward. As every other preview started a new chapter which you had to then hit fast forward again, this was quite an arduous task that took about five minutes to get to the actual menu itself. So, for all the trailers and the mind-boggling thought involved, the menu did not even have a scene selection option. What the hell?

5. Stupid Floating Heads vs. Original Poster Art
There has been much written on this in other venues but it is still irritating when a perfectly good (and appropriate to the film) theatrical poster is jettisoned for the DVD release because it is not as flashy. I quite enjoy most all of the Nightmare on Elm Street series poster art (even for the crap ones) but for the single DVD releases, these awesome posters were replaced by the always popular floating heads and bad photoshop backgrounds. The same thing happened to the James Bond re-re-releases some time ago. I shudder to think of what an awesome, minimalist poster like The Thing would look like if released today.

4. Lackluster Collections
To mention the Sherlock Holmes DVD yet again, there was in one of the aforementioned trailers a collection of all of Clint Eastwood’s Warner Brothers films which actually looked quite good and thorough. However, most DVD collections leave much to be desired. This could be for a number of different reasons — lack of competing studio cooperation, lack of behind-the-scenes involvement, etc. — but most give you the same movies you can buy separately but with an additional disc for extras not available otherwise. So, you can buy all the films (including the ones you don’t want or already have) just for the bonus or miss out. And even worse, they are not “complete” collections which leave out the good stuff. I have yet to see any deleted scenes from the original Nightmare on Elm Street other than an Anchor Bay VHS from about fifteen years ago even after two collection releases and a standalone special edition. Not to mention that it took Paramount three tries (one single disc, one collection, subsequent “special-er” editions) to get decent releases of the Friday the 13th series.

3. Stupid “Special Edition” Names
I guess when you release the same movie countless times, there has to be a way to differentiate between each. Most of these DVD nomenclatures attempt to tie into the movie but, seriously? Pretty in Pink: Everything’s Duckie Edition; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (Those Aren’t Pillows Edition); 13 Going on 30: Fun & Flirty Edition. Whatever happened to just plain old Special or Ultimate Edition? Check here for some special edition names that may or may not come to fruition.

2. Rerelease Hell
You know that little movie Avatar that is being released on DVD this week? Can’t wait to see the quadrillion dollar grossing picture in lackluster at home 3D? Ah, you’re going to have to wait as that is being withheld for another version down the line. At least (some) consumers had the knowledge going in that a better version was coming out but what about the other films that are released almost bare with the intention to release a better version down the line. Studios are all about cashing in on popular franchises so it makes sense from their end to release whatever they can as fast as they can but for those fans who want, I dunno, promised special director’s cuts or more in-depth special features, they have to either be patient and wait for the in-the-pipeline better release or buy two versions of the same movie.

1. Same Movie, Three Different DVDs
The trend used to be different version for full-screen n00bs and widescreen which made it hell to receive a DVD as a gift from someone who does not know different. While that still happens, there are now separate releases for theatrical version, bare-bones uncut version with digital version, uncut version with special features, theatrical version full screen with a commentary only available on that disc. If you want to have everything available, you have to buy at minimum two discs, if not more! Whatever happened to that awesome seemless branching thing that DVDs were advertised with back in the day to allow different versions on the same disc? Is it really that much easier to have eight different SKUs for the same movie? Damn all that.

Post-publish addendum:
Dear Disney,
Remember all of those DVDs you released in your first year or two that are non-anamorphic, bare bones releases? If you can’t at least go back and add in a commentary or something, at least clean it up so a VHS bootleg copy doesn’t look better than your product.
Sincerely,
Puck

You’ve heard the phrase “Hugs not drugs,” right? Well, I urge you not to heed that advice. I am not advocating the use of drugs by any means, but just beware of hugging. Allow me to explain.

The Children is a delightful waste of time that begins at a nuclear power plant. The only 2 employees that are there must go find a drink so they leave. I assume that they have neglected something in their job description as some kind of leak happens and a big toxic fog forms. We then have a bus full of about 5 kids, having a merry time, singing the praises of the bus driver who approaches the dense mysteriously out of place fog with reckless abandon, and goes right through it. Later on, Sheriff Billy Hart finds the bus on the side of the road, engine running, but empty.  The Sheriff then visits the parents of the missing kids to see if they have come home. They have not. What they have done, is turned into some kind of mindless gang of zombies, whose fingernails have all turned black (except for one kid, which I will get to in a minute). These kids then seek out their families and give them hugs, which burn them to death. But only their flesh, not their clothes or anything that would make sense like that. The majority of the film is us watching as the Sheriff and John Freemont  (parent of Jenny, one of the hugging killers and Clarkie, who is unaffected because he did not go to school) discover bodies and piece together what is going on.

I fear that this review will not give you an accurate representation of how bad the movie is. It is laugh out loud horrible. It even screws up the most basic horror movie traits. You know the old “person is creeping around looking for someone, and gets scared by a house pet” trick that is designed to startle the audience? Well they try that, but the music and the animal are out of sync, so the dog shows up, the person jumps and there is split second of violin all in that succession. Embarrassing. Also, they try a similar gag where someone catches their reflection in a mirror, but there is no music that time, and the acting is so poor it just looks really awkward. Not one person in it can act. The audio is such garbage, it even has that clichéd record album sound where you can hear all the pops. The film skips in spots also. One thing about this film that I did not understand, is that all the kids but one, Janet, turn evil right away. She does not until near the end of the film. There is no explanation for that, but she does turn evil at a mighty convenient part of the movie. Also, AND THIS IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE SPOILER FOR THIS MOVIE: when John’s wife gives birth to a baby, it’s fingernails are black. What the fuck? How is that possible if  it wasn’t exposed to the radiation? Also, why doesn’t the mother’s flesh burn when the baby touches her? And speaking of the baby, possibly the most hilarious thing in the movie: While pregnant, John’s wife lights up a cigarette, takes a huge drag, looks at her belly, rubs it and says, “Sorry.” That scene and others displaying the deplorable behaviors of the killer children’s parents serve as, I guess, the “moral” of this film. One kid’s parents are smoking pot, and as the mother says, “do not rise before 10.” One kid’s sister apparently is a slut. So I guess this is some kind of commentary on bad parenting. Well, The Children, I have a comment for you. Usually, when someone is shot or their hands get chopped off, there is blood. I mean, you can’t fit corn syrup in your budget?

While this movie is utterly useless and has no redeeming qualities, I enjoyed watching those silly, huge grin wearing little psychopaths burn their parents alive. I saw this movie when I was very young and was never able to remember the name of it. Thanks to Jesusflix, I was able to stumble upon it, and gladly surrender 90 minutes of my life one more time.

I was very disappointed in Exorcist II, the obvious follow up to William Friedkin‘s 1973 classic The Exorcist. My aggravation with the movie though is likely different than the rumored reactions of audiences during the film’s premiere. Commissioned by PBF while reviewing Netflix’s awesome Watch Instantly collection, I went into the film expecting it to be quite horrid based on my readings of previous reviews about the film. Normally, I try not to have any preconceived notions about a film prior to watching it as sometimes it can be hard to separate what you’ve heard from what you actually see in the film itself. I am happy to report though that all of the bashers of the film hit it dead on.

Taking place four years after the original, Reagan (played by a remarkably cute Linda Blair) is undergoing psychiatric treatment to deal with repressed memories of her possession. During a really stupid looking hypnosis treatment, she is intertwined with Father Lamont who is investigating the circumstances surrounding Father Merrin’s death at the hand of the demon in the first film. As Father Lamont digs deeper into Reagan’s subconscious (and thus that of the demon possessing her), he finds a clusterfuck of seemingly unrelated plot points and developments with some rather deplorable writing. There may be more to it, but that’s about all I cared to get out of it.

Now, as I said, I expected this to be a horrendous abomination of a horror franchise and a complete failure of a horror film. In the end, I got all of that with the exception of the horrendous adjective. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is a bad movie, probably worthy of a good ripping from the folks at MST3K, but I’ve certainly seen worse films so I was disappointed that this movie just seemed to be incompetently made instead of butchered by a bunch of no-talent ass-clowns as I had expected. I fathom you can’t get the amount of talent on this film without at least starting good. From Richard Burton, Max von Sydow, James Earl Jones, and even all thirty seconds of Ned Beatty, there seems to be a good, or at least passable, movie desperate to get out. Whether this desire was squelched by director John Boorman‘s incompetence (unlikely for a guy nominated for several Oscars), studio tomfoolery, or retooling of the film late in the game remains up in the air. Allegedly though, the only reason Blair appears was due to a contractual obligation to the production prior to heavy rewrites.

Ultimately, the film falls on many fronts. For starters, as a sequel to a quite renowned and genuinely scary movie, Exorcist II had all the scares of a five-year-old’s birthday party. On the film’s Wikipedia page, Boorman is quoted in a mea culpa of sorts stating he did not meet the audiences expectations for a scary follow-up, instead going for a theme of journeys and goodness. In and of itself, this is a notable attempt to create a new advancement of the story without copying the original, but it certainly failed as it should have. Even though the movie may be shoe-horned into the expected horror genre does not mean it has to be a carbon-copy, there just has to be logical thought put into how to do it correctly. There is also the problem of the crazy aspects of the plot that come and go at will and do not add a thing to the story. Reagan has ESP abilities now? Oh well, there is no further expansion except a fleeting line an hour later. Lamont disobeys his orders to fly half-way around the world and meet a guy on a big boulder only to have rocks thrown at him. Yep, that was beneficial. Even the aspect of Merrin being investigated as a Satanist is never really resolved or even mentioned for the final thirty minutes or so. And for a continuation of a movie about demonic possession, I had expected Reagan to relapse and start the head-turning and spewing again or the demon to jump bodies or something. I think there was maybe a total of three minutes dedicated to someone actually being possessed.

Mostly, it seems that almost everything about the original was deliberately cast aside. Instead of a core group of a few characters, we now have a sprawling cast of decent actors with pretty worthless characters. So the original was mostly centered in one house? Let us go around the world now just to learn about the behavior of locust swarms. Now, admittedly it has probably been about six years or so since I last saw the original but I would likely have been less forgiving of this sequel if I had revisited it. So, in the end, we have what has been called the worst sequel ever but certainly not the worst movie ever meaning that I just watched two hours of this dreck for nothing. Instead of being able to make fun of the abysmal acting or story, I was just baffled as to why this movie was green lit in its present state. I hear Exorcist III is a much more worthy follow up so hopefully that will be the case when I get around to that.