DVD Review – Assault On Wall Street (2013)

Reviews

Assault On Wall Street depicts the story of Jim Baxford (‘Prison Break‘ star, Dominic Purcell), an ex-military man. He’s adapted to life back home working in security, he’s got some coffee shop drinking buddies, a nice little home and a loving wife, Rosie (Erin Karpluk). Rosie is overcoming a fatal brain tumour and is now hoping to start planning a family with Jim. However, the radical medical treatments that Rosie needed exceeded the limit of the couple’s medical insurance.

Jim looks to cash in his war pension which he put in the stock market; his broker admits they lost the money in a bad investment. Seeking advice from a high price attorney about getting his money back, he has to borrow a further $10,000 before the attorney will help. Surprise, surprise the attorney can’t help him, and events unfold further pushing the once happy husband to a man over the edge. Wait, let me rephrase that, a man over the edge with an assault rifle in his closet!

Uwe Boll the man, the monster, behind several movie adaptations of ’90s PlayStation games (House Of The Dead, Alone In The Dark) directs the story of a man driven over the edge by the fat cats of Wall Street. So my question is, why is this film such a slow burner? The film runs near 100 minutes, but Dominic’s character doesn’t bring out the heavy artillery until the last half hour of the movie. You have to sit for an hour and watch this man get his life ruined in all directions, to be honest I would imagine that most of you would rather just kill yourselves 45 minutes in.

You could almost describe this movie as star studded; it’s filled to the brim with stars from yesteryear. You’ll be delighted to see the likes of Edward Furlong, John Heard, Keith David, Eric Roberts and Clint Howard haven’t all washed up dead somewhere after escaping the gusty jaws of Sharknado.

There are zero Special Features on the DVD but the film itself is decent enough, probably a higher standard for Uwe Boll compared to some of the other films he’s churned out over the years. Want my honest opinion? Wait until it is streaming online or, as they said in the old days, wait until it’s on the telly. It’s not worth getting burned with a purchase.

2/5

Blu-ray Review – Delivery Man (2013)

Reviews

Delivery Man is a film starring Vince Vaughn which is the remake of the French-Canadian movie Starbuck, which is based on a book! Sounds like it has more substance than the standard Vaughn outing? Lets find out.

David Wozniak (Vaughn) is the average American Joe, working as a delivery man for his family butcher. His girlfriend Emma is pregnant and he’s also being shaken down for $80,000 from loan sharks. When returning home one day he’s confronted by a lawyer who is representing a sperm bank who informs him that the donations he clocked in over his college days have gone on to father over 500 children. 142 of those children have come together with a class action lawsuit to reveal the identity of Starbuck, the alias David used when donating. He’s presented with the profiles of the 142 children he’s fathered and goes on a journey to look into their lives and finds himself acting as their guardian angel.

Vince Vaughn plays Vince Vaughn once again, but hell the story is actually rather good! It’s heart-warming and funny, the several young adults we’re introduced to playing Vaughn’s children make the film surprisingly more interesting. When it comes to the cast, Vaughn has a strong supporting crew including Chris Pratt (‘Parks And Recreation‘), Cobie Smulders (Avengers Assemble) and everyone’s favourite drunken uncle, Bobby Moynihan (‘Saturday Night Live‘). Pratt knocks it out the park as bumbling sidekick lawyer/ father of four wild children. Smulders isn’t focused on enough for my liking and ends up easily forgettable until the last ten minutes.

For the Blu-ray we’re given two sets of Special Features, one consists of cast interviews and a Blooper Reel that is pretty amusing. The other feature is just a deleted a scene. So it’s surprisingly slim pickings for this release. This is the type of content you would expect on the DVD, being grateful to the dying platform. It’s a shame really.

The film is a surprise, it’s better than the standard Wedding Crashers type comedy, yet the extra content lets it down.

4/5

DVD Review – Squatters (2014)

Reviews

Squatters tells the tale of two tramps, Kelly (Gabriella Wilde) and Jonas (Thomas Dekker). They spend their nights sleeping on the beach and their days stealing food to survive. Jonas discovers that a wealthy couple are going on holiday leaving their luxurious beachside home unattended to. The pair break into the home and assume the couple’s wealthy lifestyle of expensive booze, fast cars and fat wads of cash. Kelly becomes familiar with the family by falling down a rabbit hole when watching their home movies whilst Jonas looks to make the most of this opportunity and starts selling off anything valuable he can get his grubby hands on. But suddenly their new lifestyle comes to a screening halt when the couple return home early from their vacation.

Director Martin Weisz (The Hills Have Eyes 2) delivers a lacklustre tale of drifters getting a taste of the good life. My expectations of this film were looking for a more sinister tone to the film, I expected the drifters to be more like most movie drifters, evil creepy bastards! But these two are more needy emo types, the worst kind.

Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss will comes across as the only noteworthy star appearing in this direct-to-DVD feature. He comes across as the quirky, too cool for school dad. Hell, his character even loves Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. To be honest one of my highlights of the film was when the film stopped and they showed up a couple minutes of The Kid playing in a cinema.

The film runs for 106 minutes and it feels overlong, at one point in the second act I thought they had just completely forgotten about Thomas Dekker’s character. Unfortunately we then get a ‘gritty’ subplot where Jonas gets into trouble with a camp Jason Statham style cross-dressing mobster.

Squatters is a strange film, well, it’s strange calling this a “film”; stuff happens, it goes in strange directions and hell it decides to get overly violent for no reason really!

DVD Special Features? Don’t be silly! This is a direct-to-DVD, be lucky that we got previews of other movies.

1/5

Blu-ray Review – Porkys (1981)

Reviews

Set during the 1950s, Porky’s follows a group of high schoolers who band together to get their wimpy mate laid. After a couple of failed attempts they discover that there’s a strip club out of town known as Porky’s, where it’s the place to “get it”. The lads find themselves royally screwed over and embarrassed by the sleazy club owner and his brother, the local law enforcer. When the crew at Porky’s take it too far with the lads, they devise a plan of revenge on old Porky and his redneck crew.

Who knew that famous shower scene from the eighties actually had another 90 minutes tied onto it?! Written and directed by A Christmas Story director Bob Clark, I’m surprised to see that this is actually quite a nice little comedy. It’s not overly crude or demeaning to women and there’s genuinely fun scenes in the film.

The aftermath of the shower scene where Coach Balbricker gets her hands on one of the “lads”, she’s begging the principal to have the students line up and drop their drawers, the stifled laughter from the male coaches and the principal himself is hilarious.

When watching the Special Features it highlights several positive messages behind the film, as they tackle racism and anti-Semitism! Doesn’t sound like the same film where Kim Cattrall gets turned into Lassie, does it?

The Special Features also include a full audio commentary with the film’s director Bob Clark. They also keep him around for a 15 minute interview where he dishes out the gossip on his production woes. Nudie website tycoon “Mr. Skin” hosts a feature titled Skin Classics where he laments on his fondness for Porky’s and delves into the details about raunchy teen flicks from the eighties onwards.

Arrow has even paid particular attention to the trailers; 9/10 trailers on your standard DVD/Blu-ray release usually include the main feature’s trailer and several other trailers from their current catalogue. Arrow included the original trailers for Porky’s as well as the original trailers for the sequels; Porky’s II: The Next Day and Porky’s Revenge! Nice touch!

4/5

DVD Review – The Guillotines (2012)

Reviews

Set during the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese Emperor assembles a team of soldiers equipped with deadly cutting edge weapons. The group of soldiers are titled “The Guillotines” and are sent on a quest to eliminate the rebel leader known only as Wolf.

At first they manage to overcome Wolf’s men, but a member of the team is captured by Wolf, and this member happens to be the daughter of the Emperor. The Emperor demands that the remaining Guillotines plan a full assault on the Wolf and his rebel army rescuing his daughter at all costs.

Director Andrew Lau hops on the bandwagon with every other Chinese director nowadays, shilling out his Chinese war period piece. Whilst the initial plot seems straightforward, the pay off in the second half of the story is quite interesting. Shawn Yue, Li Yuchun, Huang Xiaoming and Ethan Jung do deliver the necessary acting chops needed for the film. I always know that Shawn Yue is a safe bet in movies, but the rest of the cast do well also.

The film itself is decent, but it has the same trouble as most films of this type do, it tends to get pretty dull at points. It’s just shy of two hours and damn, if they could only have tightened it to 90 minutes, we’d have a stronger movie. I do feel a good quarter of this film is people grieving, grieving and even some slow-motion grieving, slavers and all!

The action sequences are decent, but rely on a fair use of CGI, which isn’t surprising as the contraption they are flinging around looks a lacrosse stick mixed with a frisbee rejected from the last Saw movie. The use of CGI during battle scenes also gives the director a chance to be all screw-ball-scramble with the camera angles and quick-cutting MTV style editing.

Overall The Guillotines is a decent watch for fans of Asian cinema, but it’s nothing new.

2/5

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