Cinefantastique Online

The last few weeks of December are traditionally a bone-dry stretch for DVD, which always struck us as odd – wouldn’t you want tempting new releases on the shelves when people have to go in the stores for refunds and returns? Anyway, the releases for the next few weeks consist largely of repackaged catalog titles, but there are still a handful of major releases and a few interesting surprises.

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The week’s highlight release unfortunately comes at such a ludicrous price point that we’re almost tempted not to recommend it. Almost. The adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had been kicking around Hollywood for years before winding up in the lap of the obvious choice, Terry Gilliam. Trying to film gonzo columnist Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-fuelled, psychedelic (and occasionally rambling) road trip through the paranoid Americana wasteland of the early ’70s sent many filmmakers packing, but the heavily refracted lens of Gilliam was an inspired choice. A previous attempt at bringing Thompson to the screen, 1980’s Where the Buffalo Roam, features a better-than-remembered performance by Bill Murray as Thompson and an exhausting turn by Peter Boyle as Lazlo but was sunk by Art Linson’s flat, uninspired direction. 19 years later, Gilliam’s film followed the exploits of literary stand-ins, Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) as they tear through the bat-plagued desert into Las Vegas to write a freelance article on a motorcycle race. What follows is likely the closest that any film will ever get to transposing Thompson’s saber toothed prose to a narrative film. Depp is absolutely mesmerizing, embodying Thompson’s mannerisms (even wearing his clothes!) and managing somehow to pull the essence of the man out through the artifice. Del Toro, in an early high profile role, gained a substantial amount of weight for his role, completely altering his appearance in a Raging Bull-esque fashion. Like Depp, he effectively disappears inside his character. Many viewers, unaccustomed either to Gilliam’s exaggerated visual sense or Thompson’s jagged approach to traditional journalism are likely to be put off by the admittedly (and necessarily) episodic structure. But anyone familiar with the literary or cinematic waters will be rewarded with a constantly rich, often fragmented, thoroughly funny film. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had previously been issued on the now defunct HD-DVD format. It’s unknown whether or not the same transfer (which, even with instances of digital artifacting and compression issues, was a clear improvement over both Universal’s and Criterion’s standard-def DVD releases), is being used. What is known is Universal’s outrageously high $49.95 list price – a good $10 more than the highest rate going for a standard, non box-set release and without any special features of note (compare to Criterion’s cheaper, feature-rich 2-disc DVD edition). Fans of Depp, Gilliam, or Thompson will have to decide for themselves if the image upgrade is worth the price.

Also for fans of Depp, this week sees the release of a Johnny Depp Triple Feature box set, which includes two of his genre films, the heart-warming fantasy EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, and the grim horror offering FROM HELL.

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In the interest of full disclosure, we believe that the appeal of Shia LaBeouf is highly suspect. We first saw him on the second season of “Project Greenlight”, where his presence in the lead role of The Battle of Shaker Heights was considered quite a coup for the fledgling production. Everyone on the set seemed to be sure that young Shia was destined for very big things, very soon, and it seems that their foresight was indeed correct. Shia’s first time out at the helm of a major feature (without Indiana Jones or giant robot co-stars) arrives on SD DVD and Blu-ray this week. Eagle Eye is a late entry in the techno-paranoia thriller category that also boasts the far superior 1998 vehicle, Enemy of the State, and can be traced as far back as 1995’s The Net. This is not to say that paranoia was born with the age of the personal computer – the very best film of this type is actually Francis Coppola’s The Conversation from 1974. It’s no coincidence that Gene Hackman was cast as the burnt-out, old school surveillance expert helping Will Smith in Enemy of the State; his character is an only slightly more ‘hinged’ version of The Conversation’s Harry Caul. Though modern tech gear is apparent in The Conversation (modern for 1974, anyway), Coppola focused on the inner life of Caul and the affect that his work had on his soul. And though Enemy of the State can hardly be called cerebral, director Tony Scott was smart enough to populate the film with enough terrific character actors to make you forget that the smoke-to-fire ratio was alarmingly high. Eagle Eye offers no such distractions (Shia is a decent enough actor, but he’s in a bit of an awkward stage of being too young to convincingly play adults and too mature for college-age roles) and, like the self-destructing tape in Mission: Impossible, seems to evaporate in memory only moments after exposure. Once Shia’s character, Jerry Shaw, arrives at his apartment to find a cache of weapons he’s never laid eyes on before and the FBI minutes from breaking down his door, he receives a call from a mysterious woman who tells him that he’s moments from being arrested and instructs him to get out as fast as possible. What follows is an endless parade of expensively filmed close calls and action set pieces as Jerry gets bounced around the city, one step ahead of just about every government agency except Control. What was designed as edge-of-your-seat thrills becomes quickly tiresome, as nearly every electronic circuit is hijacked and used as a means to spy on the protagonist. Director D. J. Caruso worked on several awfully good television shows, including Michael Mann’s sadly overlooked Robbery Homicide Division and The Shield, but there’s little evidence of the rough-hewn acumen of those shows here. The film is available on SD DVD in a single disc edition, featuring only a set of deleted scenes and a featurette, and a double-disc set featuring an alternate ending, a gag reel (glad someone had fun) and all manner of EPK making-of hullaballoo. The Blu-ray (preferable, in that the film seems to have been designed to show off home theater systems) includes all of the above, but presented in HD.

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Ghost Town succeeds largely through the efforts of star Ricky Gervais, the creator-writer-star of the original UK version of The Office. Gervais brings his trademark brand of laconic contempt for the world around him to the role of a New York City dentist who finds that he can now hear and see the recently dead (and they him) after dying for a moment during a routine surgical procedure. He becomes the focal point of NYC’s sizeable deceased community, unable to move on to the afterlife because of bits of unfinished terrestrial business that a living person could be particularly helpful with resolving. Gervais is an inspired choice to play someone quietly, utterly exasperated with the world around him, as unwilling to help a neighbor with an unwieldy parcel as he is to help an undead philanderer (Greg Kinnear) guide his former wife (Tea Leoni) out of the arms of the 21st century’s romantic comedy villain du jour – a smug, self-impressed attorney. Gervais admirably underplays the comedy – no goose eyed double-takes at the sight of “ghosts” or similar tomfoolery – and winds up faring far better than fellow countryman Simon Pegg did in the spectacularly unfunny Run, Fatboy, Run. The DVD and Blu-ray editions feature the identical special features, although the Blu-ray renders the featurettes in HD. The highlight is a commentary track with writer-director David Koepp (last seen helming the effective Stephen King adaptation Secret Window) and Gervais. Anyone familiar with Gervais’ hysterical podcasts will find much to love here (and won’t have to wait long for one of his infectious, high-pitched laughs).

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For those still clinging to the J-horror craze, hang on to your Macarena t-shirt, because Pulse 3 is also out this week. For those playing along at home, this would be the direct-to-video sequel to a direct-to-video sequel to a remake of one of the seminal Japanese horror productions of the last decade, Kairo (known outside Japan as “Pulse”). And while there’s every chance that Pulse 3 will be superior to the bewildering Pulse 2 (filmed almost entirely via the “green screen” method as a cost saving device), and we certainly can’t already be at the point where all the suspense has been wrung out of the ‘evil spirits entering out world through our own technology’ genre already, can we? Approach at your own risk.

The only other offerings this week are RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION, a direct-to-video follow-up to the RESIDENT EVIL franchise, available on DVD, Blu-ray, and UMD; and a DVD release of BAGHEAD, “a mumblecore horror film about people making a mumblecore horror film,” according to Cinefantastique’s Dan Persons, who interviewed the film’s creators here.

You can purchase these disks below, or look for more in the Cinefantastique Online Store.