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If the supernatural shenanigans of Damien seemed too subtle to you, maybe the Bad Seed antics of   Mikey   are more in your wheelhouse.     Part of the MVD Rewind Collection, which brings back popular rental store titles in clever VHS-style packaging, the film stars little Brian Bonsall (a late addition on   Family Ties ) as the titular 8-year-old who kicks things off by murdering his entire adoptive family in the first five minutes.     Ridiculous?     Impossible?     Downright comical?      You can call first time director Dennis Dimster-Denk's film a lot of things, but boring definitely isn't one of them. Cleverly cleared of any wrongdoing at his previous home, Mikey is adopted by the Trenton's, who are charmed with his wholesome good looks and warm disposition.  But psychotic cracks begin to show quickly, as Mikey becomes romantically obsessed with his next-door neighbor (Josie Bissett) and downright vin...

A run-down, renegade cop - complete with trench coat, shades and matching bad attitude - scours the urban underbelly in search of a brutal killer that just might be 'ol Scratch himself.  Oddly enough, that synopsis fits no less that  three  movies from the '90s:   The First Power ,  End of Days  and  Split Second .  All three are guilty pleasures for genre fans, but the latter is likely the most obscure, starring Rutger Hauer and Alastair Duncan as a mismatched pair of heavily armed police officers hunting down a demon through the flooded streets of a semi-apocalyptic London.     Obsessed with vengeance for his murdered partner, Detective Harley Stone (Hauer) is saddled with a straight-laced replacement (Duncan) that specializes in serial killers.  But the by the book approach isn't getting results as the killer leaves a trail of victims - their hearts torn from their ravaged bodies - and promises to add Sto...

  The facade of the American nuclear family was a common target for black comedies in the '80s.   Raising Arizona  mocked the lengths people go to achieve it,  Heathers  revealed its hilarious hypocrisy, and  Parents  suspected the family unit was eating itself alive...quite literally!  Even across the pond, the "me" decade was popping up as a source of socially conscious ridicule in films like the ironically titled  Life is a Long, Quiet River  (1988), the debut feature from French director Etienne Chatiliez.   In a mean-spirited act of romantic revenge, a nurse switches the identities of two babies at birth, with dramatic consequences when the truth is revealed twelve years later.  Momo (Benoit Magimel) has been living in squalor with a slothful family of sluts, miscreants and criminals: the Groseilles.  Meanwhile, Bernadette (Valerie Lalande) is a member of the Le Quesnoy family, a wealthy, well-adju...

  The disaster movie has been with us since the early days of cinema.  Once filmmakers realized the public's fascination with floods, fires, storms and asteroid-induced apocalypses there was no going back.  But for the man-made apocalypse of  Hiroshima  (1953), director Hideo Sekigawa, finally working without the censorship constraints of U.S. occupying forces, dodges the particulars of the blast itself and deals with the aftermath in a way that makes the emotional impact even more devastating than the physical one.     Structured as a flashback, the film begins with young students suffering from leukemia and assorted ailments from close proximity to the "flash-bang."  The event itself takes up the entire middle section of the film, documenting various survivors as they attempt to gather their families and escape the aftermath, a hellscape of flames, ruins and hideously burned bodies.  And, in the film's final flash-f...

1971's  Get Carter  established the modern British gangster film with a brutal economy of style.  Director M ike Hodges left all the rough edges in his feature directorial debut and reinvented the career of Michael Caine.     But it was a tough act to follow.     And while Hodges attained pop culture immortality with   Flash Gordon   (1980), it wasn't the sort of film to build a career on.   That career was in pretty dire straights by the time  Black Rainbow  (1989) trickled out onto pay cable, bypassing a theatrical release altogether despite a fairly recognizable cast.  Rosanna Arquette has the showiest role as Martha Travis, a reticent medium who plays to gullible crowds anxious to hear from their departed loved ones.  But the thing is, Martha isn't a fake.  And when she starts  predicting  deaths instead of speaking to the previously deceased, she and her father (Jason Robards) b...

After the rather disappointing Godzilla box set released by Criterion last fall, kaiju aficionados were holding their collective breath that Arrow Video's  Gamera: The Complete Collection  would stick the landing.   Happily, it's 10s across the board, from the gorgeous and colorful new transfers to the hours of new and archival bonus features.  If you're a fan of the terrible terrapin, this is  more  than you could have ever asked for!   The only real rival to Toho's kaiju monopoly, Gamera was a tougher sell to American audiences, lacking the early pathos and technical sophistication of Godzilla's shared monster universe.   But the third film in the series finally found a niche to exploit: turning the oversized turtle into "the friend of all children" and making sure each story revolved around a pair of precocious kids.  Once the films made their way onto American television (courtesy of a distribution deal with ...

A beloved action superstar in his native India for over 40 years, Rajinikanth is still virtually unknown here in the U.S.   And his English language debut in  Bloodstone  (1988) certainly wasn't the best introduction.  Produced by cut-rate action auteur Nico Mastorakis and directed by Dwight Little (who would eventually do better), the film aspires to be an international adventure / buddy cop movie with a hint of the exotic leftovers from the Indiana Jones series.   The result is closer to an episode of  The A-Team  with hammy acting, racist humor and sub-par stunts.  That said, Rajinikanth emerges pretty much unscathed, knife flips and all!   A newlywed couple gets some extra excitement on their honeymoon when a jewel thief slips a stolen ruby into their luggage.  The hunt for the missing gem involves a Clouseau-esque inspector (Charlie Brill), Dutch treasure hunter (Christopher Neame) and jack-of-all-...

After proving they could up the international zombie ante with  Train to Busan , South Korea certainly earned enough goodwill to try their hand at a "zom-com."  And, ironically enough,  Zombie for Sale  shares many surface similarities with last year's Best Picture winner,  Parasite , to boot, following a family of ne'er-do-well country bumpkins who make their fortune after discovering their pet zombie is actually a valuable fountain of youth.   The product of a drug experiment gone wrong, Jjong-Bi rises from his makeshift grave and stumbles into the sticks looking for an easy meal.  But his zombie skills aren't quite up to snuff and, after biting the Park family patriarch, he's mistaken for an ordinary hobo and locked up in the garage where he becomes a source of fascination for the equally ostracized daughter, Hae-Gul.   Their budding romance is interrupted by the discovery that Jjong-Bi's bite gives his victims unexpected youth and vi...