The thing I hate about renting DVDs is, at least 25% of the time I get a screwed up on that some cretin has messed up and dumped on to the next renter. I’m sure that has happened to most people reading this and here are some tips to help you get it to play correctly.
If you love H.P. Lovecraft or Horror Movies and can rent DVDS by mail, you should definitely rent the Dunwich Horror, a 1970 movie starring Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee adapted from a short story by the legendary H.P. Lovecraft. I have seen many of H.P. Lovecraft’s works made into movies and TV episodes and this is the best one I’ve seen after the legendary, Re-Animator. The movie was written by Curtis Hanson who directed L.A. Confidential and is one of his earliest works.
If you’re ever a bit bored and you love horror movies like “Re-animator”, I suggest you rent or buy “Frankenstein Created Woman” on DVD, an incredible retro horror movie from Hammer Films starring the great Peter Cushing made in 1967.
A while back, Netflix
To all you sci-fi fans of Time Travel and/or the Stargate SG-1 TV series, I think you’ll be very happy with the latest Stargate direct to DVD movie, Stargate: Continuum.
Continuum deals with a whole bunch of time travel concepts including “the grandfather paradox” - if you kill your grandfather, would you cease to exist, and the plot is basically Ba’al, Stargate’s arch enemy, travels back in time and prevents the Stargate program from ever being started causing the time line to change leaving the SG-1 team, the ones who haven’t vanished, left to try to restore it. This is where things get really interesting
Out of boredom and fearing the worst, I just rented “Superhero Movie Extended Edition”. I may be wrong but I assumed “Superhero Movie” was made by the people who did “Date Movie”, one of the worst movies I’ve ever rented and after reading the bad reviews on “Superhero Movie” I almost didn’t rent it. To my surprise, this was actually a pretty good movie, not great but not terrible either, a solid “B”. It was like a “Poor Man’s Scary Movie 1″. In all fairness I should mention that if you don’t have a minimum knowledge in comic book lore you might not find this movie funny. Likewise, if you are a total Fanboy, you might find Superhero Movie’s humor too subtle and lame for you. It walks a fine line.
The best thing about DVDs is they’re a great way to kill a couple of hours with if you’ve got nothing else to do, provided their entertaining! Entertaining does not always mean good though sometimes a film is both entertaining and good. A few of the movies I have listed are actually good enough that you probably would have been seeking to rent or buy them on DVD on their own if you knew anything about them. Anyway, here’s my list for you in alphabetical order. The main criteria being that they provide entertainment.
I’m constantly amazed at how truly entertaining movies with no redeeming social value always seem to get lousy newspaper reviews while artsy fartsy movies get great reviews. “Vantage Point” is the opposite of a chick flick, it’s the kind of movie guys who like an adrenaline energy rush, love and cool, hip women like but uptight women probably hate even though there was no sex or sexual exploitation in it. Oh well, you can’t have everything!
If you love movies with mindless violence and no redeeming social value, “Battle Royale”, originally made and released in Japan in 2000, is the movie for you. Think “Last House on the Left” with a better budget and cinematic quality but 8 times as many teenagers with a bit of “Scream” tossed in! I normally can’t watch movies with subtitles but this movie is the exception. It is incredibly easy to follow with the subtitles because of the simple “cartoon like” violence. I really wasn’t aware of this awesome film, originally titled “Batoru Rowalaru” in Japan until I heard about it online.