Out now on both sides of the pond in similar editions is Michael Mann’s latest, Collateral. This stars Tom Cruise playing a hitman taking a taxi ride to all his targets, and it’s a fine performance once you can shake the idea that he looks like Swiss Toni.

Jamie Foxx seems to be the flavour of the moment but his cabbie character is given too many stupid lines to make him sympathetic, and I can’t be alone in wanting the bad guy to win. Still, it’s Michael Mann, so it’s all perfectly composed and lit (even if it is in orange), and the music is used perfectly especially in the unlikely climax. It’s been widely praised by the same critics who didn’t like Mann’s earlier work, but for me it lacks the scope and ambition of say Manhunter or Heat, although it’s still a pleasure to be treated as an intelligent viewer for a change.

The 2-disk version contains an hour or so of documentaries and an unadvertised commentary by Mann.

Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars
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A buddy cop story with the novelty that one of the cops is a zombie.

Director Mark Goldblatt is better known as the editor of action movies such as Terminators 1 & 2 and Armageddon. Anchor Bay have spent considerable time doing justice to this zombie movie which became moderately popular during the strange early days of home video.

Dead Heat stars the great Treat Williams and stand-up comic Joe Piscopo, and it’s a buddy cop story with the novelty that one of the cops is a zombie – he really should have known it was coming, as he’s called Roger Mortis. It’s one of Vincent Price’s last movies, and the supporting cast also includes Darren McGavin. The highlight is a scene in a Chinese butchers where our heroes have to fend off attacks by various joints of meat.

Every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, and like the cop, maybe things like this are best left to memory. Having said that, it’s a very good DVD, with all manner of extras, and it’s cheap, so you could do a lot worse.

Rating: 2.8 out of 5 stars
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Directed by William ‘One-Shot’ Beaudine towards the end of his career, this is almost unwatchable, although the ‘concept’ drags it through and some scenes have a camp value.

It kicks off as a standard Western in Arizona, and you can spot Jim Davis (later to star on TV in Dallas) as one of the assorted cowpokes. I’m not quite sure why but Butch Cassidy is renamed ‘Butch Curry’ here, although the titular hero and the Wild Bunch don’t escape that easily.

Back to the plot: Jesse’s brother Hank (eh?) takes a bullet and is taken to a monastery in Arizona, where he is looked after by Frankenstein’s daughter Maria and her elderly assistant, who have moved from Europe to take advantage of the regular Arizona lightning and supply of cheap Mexicans.

At one point Maria confesses during the movie to being Frankenstein’s grand-daughter, presumably that idea was forgotten in case the title became even more cumbersome.

Keep up. Hank becomes Igor with the help of cheap effects, including what looks very like a cycling helmet, and the big finish eventually limps into view when the posse catches up with the outlaws.

I got to see this legendary mess courtesy of a DVD release supported by Joe Bob Briggs>. If you aren’t familiar with Briggs, he’s the world’s foremost drive-in movie critic, and this is the first of a new series featuring his commentary tracks. The movie is awful, as if you couldn’t guess from the title and my review, but no-one’s buying it for that. Briggs’ commentary is both funny and informative, and I’m looking forward to future releases from the guy from Grapevine, Texas.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
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Another old classic re-release in an improved R1 version is Q The Winged Serpent.

This was made in 1982 by Larry Cohen (writer of the more recent Phone Booth), and features the title character killing assorted NYC residents as well as a whole lot of other plot points which would look crazy if I wrote them down.

Michael Moriarty’s piano-playing crook is his finest hour and he’s supported well by David Carradine and Richard Roundtree, even if they all look puzzled as to exactly what they’re doing in the movie.

The image here isn’t much better than on the previous DVD release, but we now get a commentary by Cohen, who proves to be almost as entertaining as the movie.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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A mismatched crew and passengers are stranded in the desert, and try to build a new plane to escape.

This is a remake of the old Robert Aldrich movie which starred Jimmy Stewart and Richard Attenborough and which often turns up on Sunday afternoon TV. This time, instead of Cold War tension, we get Dennis Quaid as the pilot and assorted bickering supporting characters covering all diversity bases, including the obligatory ex-rappers and stage actors.

Giovanni Ribisi is supremely annoying as the plane designer, Hugh Laurie plays a rugged mechanic (OK, he doesn’t, he plays a bumbling middle-manager) and all the cast do well, though Quaid has played this part many times before and seems to be on auto-pilot (oops, sorry). It was a bit of a bomb at the US box office, but it’s very entertaining, has a clever-ish twist towards the end and only falters when it tries to introduce some irrelevant action, although Irish director John Moore directs the set-pieces well.

The R1 DVD includes an excellent and surprisingly frank making-of documentary, where all the cast lose patience with living in the desert and Moore seems permanently on edge.

The production values are high, the cast is good and if you don’t expect too much, you’ll find it entertaining.

(Since this review was written, Hugh Laurie has proved his range with his fine TV performance in House. My apologies for originally implying he was a toff with a limited range…)

Rating: 3.2 out of 5 stars
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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (snappy title eh?) is the second directorial effort by Tommy Lee Jones, who also stars. He plays an aging cowboy whose friend is killed in suspicious circumstances. When the local authorities cover things up, our hero takes things into his own hands, digs up the body and forces the main suspect to accompany him on a nightmare trip to Mexico to give his friend the burial he deserves.

As you can tell, this owes a lot to Sam Peckinpah, in particular Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, but Jones and d.p. Chris Menges make it all look great and the landscapes (most of them on Jones’ ranch, apparently) are striking. The big surprise is Barry Pepper as the bad guy, who initially plays his usual annoying persona but who eventually wins you over. Dwight Yoakam is funny as always as the local police chief, and joins Jones on the serious DVD commentary track. It’s slow and occasionally a bit too quirky, but if you’re looking for a thoughtful and stylish movie, here it is.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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Lawrence Kasdan has adapted Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher. You’ve got a director with a serious pedigree tackling unexpectedly populist material, and the difference here from say, Ang Lee, is that Kasdan embraces the stupidity of the whole thing and has created a classic of B-movie cinema, albeit with a massive budget and high production values.

There are two scenes of genius (the animals leaving the forest, and the helicopter attack on the alien ship) but you’re more likely to remember Jason Lee trying to keep an alien trapped inside a toilet, or English actor Damian Lewis playing an American inhabited by an alien with a Dick Van Dyke Cockney accent. Then again, you’ve got Morgan Freeman’s stunt eyebrows competing with Tom Sizemore’s stunt wig, and a whole range of crazy slimy aliens and disgusting bodily function effects.

The disk contains a different ending and the odd deleted scene, but these fail to make any more sense of the story. This is the first story King wrote after being hit in the head by a truck, which explains a lot, and if you thought the book was crazy, get the movie. A Lifeforce for the new century.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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Just after the release of Man On Fire, I dug out an old Tony Scott movie called Revenge, released on DVD in both theatrical and director’s cuts. It makes a very interesting companion piece to the later movie, treating a similar story as one of revenge rather than redemption.

Kevin Costner stars as a fighter pilot who has an affair with Madeleine Stowe (unfortunately married to rich Mexican gangster Anthony Quinn), setting up a series of violent incidents. Although the movie is coated in Scott’s trademark style of the time (this was just after Top Gun), and the first half is more or less a standard romantic melodrama, it’s notable for an amazingly downbeat and serious second half which demonstrates the pointlessness and emptiness of revenge as a motive. Fine performances from the leads and from a great supporting cast, including Miguel Ferrer, Tomas Milian and John Leguizamo.

Rating: 3.6 out of 5 stars
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A team of crack scientists (ouch) drills to the earth’s core to prevent a global disaster.

The Core takes parts of several better movies (mostly Armageddon, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Fantastic Voyage) and comes up with something very average, with the occasional inspired moment.

The only surprising thing is the art-house cast, led by Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhardt and Stanley Tucci, who all struggle bravely fighting off clichés and the odd one-liner. In Tucci’s case he also has to contend with a bizarre wig and at least he looks like he’s in on the joke.

The science is nonsense, the set design is nice and the effects are patchy (the subterranean sequences seem to take place inside a video game for budget reasons), but on the DVD commentary, director Jon Amiel seems to think he’s made something much better than he actually has. For the rest of us it’s an agreeable way to spend 90 minutes.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
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Years ago I remember spotting the Alien head in the Predator 2 spaceship, and since then we’ve had comic books and video games linking the two franchises, so it was inevitable that Alien Vs Predator would turn up as a movie.

Surprisingly the director chosen was Paul W.S. Anderson, who is the target of much fan-boy ire on the net, but he does a serviceable job and certainly makes the movie look good. The problem is mainly the script which has a few neat ideas but fails to create any memorable characters. Unsurprisingly Lance Henriksen walks off with the movie as Charles Bishop Weyland, current ancestor of the android designer from Alien III and his invention from Aliens, and presumably founder of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (hope you’ve been paying attention here). The rest of the cast try their best as alien fodder.

The other main problem is the much-publicised decision to make a PG-13 movie, so although it’s very violent for a half-kids movie, there’s no really extreme gore. Anyway it passes the time and could have been a whole lot worse. Or better. And you can get a really good plush face-hugger as merchandise.

The DVD in the UK is better than the US one for a change, although the ‘extreme edition’ only contains some extra character stuff so doesn’t strike me as very extreme at all.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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