Kindred The Embraced

By Jessica Dwyer

With approach of Halloween and the recent influx of vampire shows on TV this year, I thought I’d go back to an oldie but goodie bloodsucker series that’s available on DVD. And no, I’m not talking about Dark Shadows. Back in 1996 White Wolf, the role playing company, was running strong with its Vampire The Masquerade game. Its popularity is still pretty strong, but back then it was hitting its stride…becoming for some a way of life.

The stories and mythos were amazing and have led to many of the new popular films and takes on the vampire and werewolf legends. But back then, Fox decided to give it a go and capitalize on the new love of this form of entertainment with an hour long drama based off it called Kindred: The Embraced.
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Cujo: 25th Anniversary Edition

What works on paper doesn’t always necessarily work on screen – it’s a time-proven fact that movie adaptations of successful novels often gauge correctly, and just as often spectacularly fail to grasp. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, tweaks the timeline of Tolkien’s books perfectly to sustain the drama that is necessary to make Peter Jackson’s films work; similarly, most of the successful adaptations of Stephen King rely on anything from minor (Carrie) to significant (The Shining) changes for a winning film experience. This week, Cujo is released in a special edition DVD and… well, it swings both ways with this one.
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The Land of the DVD clone - War of the Worlds

By Jessica Dwyer

You may be asking yourself, “What is a DVD clone?” Well let me explain it to you. A DVD clone is a film with very similar attributes to a theatrical release (sometimes the exact same title) that is released on DVD simultaneously with its bigger budget brother. This happens far more regularly of late, with the independent filmmaker’s piggy backing onto the big studios for a quick buck. And it works apparently since there are MANY of these clones running about at your local Blockbuster.

For this first time out, we’ve chosen War of the Worlds, the many times remade story by HG Wells, but never perhaps with more infamy, than by Tom Cruise. The year was 2005, and Tom Cruise’s career was being overshadowed not by giant alien spaceships, but by his own religion, Scientology. Which…actually…has its own share of alien spaceships, but I digress.
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Death Proof: It’s frustrating to recommend anything when you know how much greater it could have been. For the time being, however, we might as well give up on the notion of seeing Grindhouse reach DVD properly, with both features and all the trailers intact – after all, Tarantino’s been promising us ‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’ for ages now, so he’d better deliver that first. Instead, we get Tarantino’s neo-slasher opus this week and Rodriguez’s zombie splatterfest Planet Terror in a month or so. Of course, this version of Death Proof is QT’s longer unrated cut, with the “missing reel” reinstated (but that was such a good joke!) and other additional material.
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Return of the Living Dead: Collector’s Edition

It takes a very special film to impinge upon a classic canon of a genre and wind up as beloved as Return of the Living Dead. In 1985, just as George Romero was concluding his initial zombie trilogy with Day of the Dead, any old upstart that not only sends up the series but trods upon some of its core mythology might have been outright disdained by horror fans everywhere. But Dan O’Bannon’s lovingly gory parody is damned fun, and sick to boot, and this week it gets a brand-new special edition that improves on the previous release.
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Night On Earth

Long available overseas, it’s about time we got Night On Earth in Region 1; though not considered one of Jim Jarmusch’s landmark works, it was a significant title upon its release in 1991 and predates the similar anthology format that the director used in Coffee and Cigarettes by over a decade. Nevertheless, the loosely-linked quintet of tales in Jarmusch’s earlier work has aged quite well over the years and is given the special edition treatment by Criterion this week.
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