Briefly, for those that don't know, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a show about a ordinary Joe, or Joel, and his two wise-cracking robots. The trio are stuck in space by a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester, where they are forced to watch bad movies. It began in 1988 on cable access in Minneapolis, then ran on The Comedy Channel which quickly morphed into Comedy Central. The show was briefly canceled after its seventh season only to be picked up by the SciFi Channel for three more seasons before ending its run in 1999. Further, MST3k did one feature film and the various teams of hosts, actors, writers, etc. have gone on to other flick chaffing projects like Cinematic Titanic, Rifftrax, and The Film Crew.

Vol. XVI is Shout Factory's fourth Mystery Science Theater 3000 release since they picked up...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Attack Girls' Swim Team vs. the Undead sounds like it is a zany, off kilter Japanese zombie movie. Hiding under this inviting exterior, though, is a soft core porn film with a limp zombie framework thrown up around it.

The film centers around Aki (Sasa Handa), new girl at a Japanese high school, and her new friend Sayaka (Yuria Hidaka), who is on the swim team. There is a strange new virus running through the school, making lots of folks sick (though mostly not the swim team members) and everyone is required to go to the nurse's office and receive an inoculation. Aki and Sayaka elect to hang out on the roof and take a shower instead of getting their shots. During the shower (the film never misses a chance to show a bared breast) they find that they both have the same bruise-like birthmark on their chest, and mole on the back of their neck. This strange coincidence convince...Read the entire review

A fascinating combination of "Survivor" and a History Channel documentary (or, alternately, a really hot - literally - version of "The Alaska Experiment"), "Expedition: Africa" is a fascinating series from producer Mark Burnett (of "Survivor") fame. The series is a grand experiment, and it's too bad that it was only seen on the History Channel, as the intense and fascinating series could probably have found a home on network TV, possibly as a double-billing with Burnett's "Survivor".

The idea behind the series is fairly straightforward: a group of four well-regarded modern explorers are given the task of following the journey of Henry Morton Stanley and his search for Dr. David Livingstone in the deepest reaches of Africa. Given the tools and modern gadgets of today, the trip would be a bit less intense, right? Well, that's true, but there's a problem: they won't be getting any of those thin...Read the entire review

In all honesty, Clannad was a treat that I totally wasn't expecting. Prior to its appearance in America I heard good things about the series, but didn't really jump at the chance to check it out upon release here. Man, do I wish I did! This show turned out to be a real charmer and it quickly became one of the best series I've seen in a long time!

Clannad originated as a PC game by developer Key, who also worked on Air and Kanon (two other successful franchises). Since I haven't played the game I cannot compare the anime version to that title, though I must say that when stacked up against the other aforementioned animated works by Key, Clannad is every bit as good. It would seem that the developer has a real knack for creating characters and drawing you into their worlds. As you watch you come to truly care for the kids here and t...Read the entire review

The Show:

For those of us who were mere rugrats back when Saturday morning TV was as sacred as a Barbie Townhouse or a Mike Schmidt rookie card, the notion of reliving that experience via DVD is damned near irresistible. Alas, nostalgia-addled fare like Saturday Morning Cartoons 1970s, Volume 2 inevitably falls short of expectations. Revisiting the boob tube of our formative years never truly matches the innocence and excitement of sepia-toned memories -- especially when such things are at the mercy of Hanna-Barbera.

Then again, this collection of Seventies-era cartoons doesn't go quite far enough. One wishes the producers had taken a cue from, say, what the flick Grindhouse did for replicating a unique moviegoing experience. The patchwork of cartoons here is fine and fairly representative of the period, but how much more fun would it be had it included vintage commer...Read the entire review

THE FILM

With two direct and developed lead performances from Michael Caine and young Bill Milner, it seems unfair to watch their efforts wasted on an uneven, unsatisfying picture like the tear-jerker "Is Anybody There?" It's a simple case of acting trumping splintered storytelling, with most, if not all scraps of character vulnerability and empathy emerging from the measured talents of the actors, not the interminable, shapeless motion picture.

To help make ends meet, 10-year-old Edward (Bill Milner, "Son of Rambow") has watched his parents (David Morrissey and Anne-Marie Duff) turn their house into a senior citizens home, filled with an assortment of shy and sickly residents who inch closer to death every day. Unearthing a curiosity with ghosts and the afterlife, Edward studies and tapes the elderly tenants to piece together a larger understanding of mortality. Into t...Read the entire review

As a character, Tony Stark/Iron Man has always been a little too much for me to swallow. Fine, Superman's from another planet and has a catch-all array of superpowers. Batman is "just a man," but a very wealthy one with a memorable dark streak. But Tony Stark? Well, he's basically Howard Hughes - if Howard Hughes had an atomic heart implant keeping him alive, a superhuman command of the practical applications of physics, and of course enormous wealth and a king-like command of immeasurable corporate resources. Oh, and plus: Stark flies around in a rocket-powered exoskeleton that gives him the strength of ten men and access to every piece of technical data in existence.

So he's a superhero. But that's a lot of "special powers." Still, the 2008 blockbuste...Read the entire review

It will be interesting to see how those invested in the Harry Potter franchise (Scholastic and Warner Brothers, mainly) choose to release the inevitable spate of ancillary products and doodads as the seventh and eighth films draw nigh. The books are deservedly beloved, and each one of the films has been carefully crafted, thrilling, and beautifully designed. But subsidiary products have been lacking and joyless, and I'm sad to say that the Harry Potter: Wizarding World DVD game continues that unfortunate trend.

Organized around fourteen challenges, the game basically boils down to nonstop screen-to-screen navigation - there's a static one which allows the player to choose a direction to move using his or her remote control, and an animated one that transitions the player to the next static screen. The challenges include using the Marauders' Map to sneak through Hogwarts, ...Read the entire review

I recently read an article about an 11-year-old boy from Boston who moved to India after Buddhist monks there identified him to be the reincarnation of a Lama who died in Tibet nearly 800 years ago. This story begs the question: how are enlightened old souls discovered if they transmigrate? Director Nati Baratz helps provide some answers in the remarkable film Unmistaken Child.

This documentary follows the 4-year journey of Tenzin Zopa, a gentle 28-year-old monk tasked with finding the reincarnation of his renowned Tibetan master (Lama Konchog) who died in 2001. Tenzin is provided a variety of clues: there are signs in the cremation ashes and a Taiwanese astrologer predicts that Lama Konchog will return to a region with the letters TS and be born to a father whose name begins with an A. Equipped with these leads, Tenzin searches for his master throughout the astonishingly beautiful country...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

All conflicts involve people. Even the largest and messiest international battles, at their most basic, involve one person squaring off against another. This is what Eran Riklis' Lemon Tree seeks to remind us. No matter how heated the conflict between Israel and Palestine, there are still individuals who are just trying to live their lives.

Hiam Abbass, recently seen in The Visitor and The Limits of Control, stars in Lemon Tree as Salma Zildane, a widow whose children have grown and who spends her time tending to a lemon grove planted by her father. Her world is turned upside down when the Israeli Defense Minister (Doran Tavory) moves in next door. Soon there are armed guards, secret service agents, and surveillance came...Read the entire review

A month or two ago, I watched "Crime Scene University", a Discovery Channel show about forensic investigation. Some of it was pretty interesting, but a good portion of the show was overproduced and clearly hacked to pieces in order to create dramatic arcs for each episode. Now, we have Discovery Health's "Dr. G: Medical Examiner", following Orange County medical examiner Jan Garavaglia as she investigates the bodies that are brought in for autopsy. Once again, the show is fairly interesting, but the voice-over narration, bumpers, and editing are all somewhat desperate grabs for viewer attention. "Dr. G" also introduces an all-new factor: the inability to show the majority of what the show's actually supposed to be about.

IMDb shows that these episodes are surprisingly old: "Dr. G" has been on the air for five years, and this first season set collects 12 episodes that were first broadcast between Octo...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Alternately known as The Great Girl Robbery (the title card on the print used for this transfer confirms it!), Cheerleaders Wild Weekend is one of those odd drive-in films that mixes comedy and sex with a few slightly darker and dramatic moments. It makes for a pretty weird viewing experience, as it delivers all of the tits and ass you'd expect but also some slightly more serious content in between.

The premise for the film is pretty simple - there's a cheerleading competition going on soon and so three different troupes of girls from three different schools all wind up on a bus together as they head out to strut their stuff and hopefully win the competition. Of course, there's tension between the groups, we see this immediately when they try to one up each other by teasing a horny hillbilly passing by in his truck, the lucky recipient of some quality flas...Read the entire review

Most of us here at DVD Talk also happen to be parents, and I think it's safe to say that while my fellow writers and I have widely varying tastes in movies and television shows, as a whole we'll sometimes snap up children's DVDs not so much out of aesthetic curiosity but rather nothing more or less than as a source of something to watch with the kids. I think it's fair to say most of the children's videos tossed onto our screener pile are utter rubbish (Barbie's 'A Christmas Carol' anyone?), but on rare occasions something like Scholastic's Treasury of 100 Storybook Classics comes along. While it's no substitute for actually reading real books to your child, this is a pretty fair alternative, the kind of massive collection of short film and direct-to-video adaptations of classic children's stories one can either watch with your child in small doses (versus long stretches with them glued t...Read the entire review

My Sister's Keeper:
There's no denying the powerful themes on display in My Sister's Keeper; parents will have some hard times watching the movie about a childhood leukemia victim. On the other hand this movie, adapted from Jodi Picoult's novel, has been fairly radically altered from its printed form - the gist is the same, the ending quite different - something that may rankle purists looking to see a faithful adaptation. Another aspect that keeps this movie from being the truly devastating tear-jerker it ought to be is screaming Hollywood-ization, the kind that places Cameron Diaz in the pivotal mother's role, (not that she does a bad job, it's just that she's Cameron Diaz, if you know what I'm saying) and further distances viewers emotionally with a number of knee-jerk movie tropes that will have critical or cynical viewers heaving little exasperated sighs when they'd rather be sobb...Read the entire review

Michael Ritchie's debut feature, Downhill Racer (1969), is a quietly thrilling, beautifully-shot film about a particularly American theme. What does it mean to be a champion? Is it a worthy goal in and of itself? These questions are posed in a far more elegant fashion within the film, but what's interesting about them is the fact that they are in a "sports film" at all.

Usually the key question for characters in films about athletics is, "How do I win?" We watch, we wonder, and we wait, hoping that they figure out what it takes to persevere and triumph. In Downhill Racer, Robert Redford plays a character driven to achieve those same heights - but without knowing himself, without knowing why he wants to win; winning, for him, is messily tied ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

"You don't speak Spanish, right?"

There is a metafictional scene in the first act of The Limits of Control where Tilda Swinton, decked out as a 1960s blonde cowgirl of some kind, seemingly lays out the entire thesis of Jim Jarmusch's movie for the writer/director. She is talking to Isaach De Bankol , telling him about the kinds of movies she loves. She mentions the sense of unknowing evoked by Hitchcock's Suspicion, the narrative knot of Welles' The Lady of Shanghai, and less specifically, movies that appear to be dreams and the quiet cinema of two people simply talking. In one short scene, she gives the viewer everything she needs to know about The Limits of Control and quite possibly obfuscates the movie's meanin...Read the entire review

THE FILM

Just in time for the holiday season comes "Make the Yuletide Gay," a softer, lighter romantic comedy from a genre not known for its restraint. Eschewing heavy dramatics, "Yuletide" makes an admirable attempt to remain buoyant, sustaining the festive Christmas mood as far as humanly possible. However, the material eventually falls apart, caught between the mechanics of an out-of-the-closet farce and a tender story of personal and familial acceptance. The festivities kick off with a hearty ho-ho-ho. They end with a disconcerting no-no-no.

While free to life openly as a gay man at college, Olaf Gunnunderson (Keith Jordan) is reluctant to return home for the holidays, where his Midwestern parents Anya (Kelly Heaton) and Sven (Derek Long) are unaware of his sexual preference, pushing their son towards a spunky neighbor girl (Hallee Hirsch). Removing all traces of ho...Read the entire review

Though considered "the Sunshine City" by its Chamber of Commerce, snowbirds and retirees, St. Petersburg, Florida is a "a dirty, dirty town by a dirty, dirty sea" according to the disaffected youth of Loren Cass. A debut film by St. Pete native Chris Fuller who wrote, directed, edited, and stars in this low-budget indie, Loren Cass is set just after the race riots of 1996 sparked by the killing of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officers during a traffic stop. Its three principal characters are white teens: skinhead Jason (Travis Maynard), greasemonkey Cale (Fuller), and waitress Nicole (Kayla Tabish). Jason drifts about boozing and brawling, Cale slogs through spirit-breaking dead-end work, and Nicole spreads her legs for whomever will have her.

Shot on Super 16 color film over two weeks in 2004, with sound design added over the following year and a half, Loren Cas...Read the entire review

THE FILM

A mild character drama, "The Open Road" pairs the established, celebrated, legendary acting chops of Jeff Bridges with the pipsqueak stance of Justin Timberlake. The match-up isn't as hilariously one-sided as feared, but "Open Road" isn't the most convincing domestic drama on the market, only truly enlivened by Bridges and his direct hit of foggy parental reluctance. The picture contains a few inspired moments of antagonism and redemption, but it's hard to get energized about a feature film that positions Timberlake in a leading role. The movie practically begs for more Bridges.

A failing minor league baseball player, Carlton Garrett (Justin Timberlake) is called to his mother's bedside for a favor. Before Katherine (Mary Steenburgen) is brought into surgery to repair her heart, she wants to see her ex-husband, Kyle (Jeff Bridges), again. At first refusing, Car...Read the entire review

Mutants:
I'll often look for an 'angle' to 'get into' a movie review. Trust me people; this stuff only looks easy! So, even though Mutants is such an inept movie that no matter the angle from which it's observed there's really nothing positive to say about it, I'm still going to find a positive entrance into this review. Since Mutants headlines (not stars) steely-faced genre vet Michael Ironside, we'll nominate this review as a Michael Ironside appreciation effort.

Aside from the presence of the badass dyspeptic one, Mutants has less than zero going for it. Plot-wise, I suppose the old 'evil sugar company' trying to turn the beloved sweetener into something "more addictive than cocaine and caffeine combined" can be forgiven. Of course those business-crazy knuckleheads keep getting the formula wrong as they test it on human abductees. The lucky ones turn into zombie-type...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

In time frame of just over eight months after it's theatrical release, Zack Snyder's "Watchmen" has seen three separate DVD releases: a single disc theatrical edition, a two-disc extended director's cut (which I previously reviewed here), and now a five-disc behemoth titled, "Watchmen: The Complete Story" or "The Ultimate Cut." When I sat down to review the extended director's cut a few months back, I had already seen the theatrical edition of "Watchmen" two times. Now, as I write this review, for the even longer "ultimate cut," I've seen the film a grand total of five times. The kicker is, "Watchmen" isn't even my favorite film of the year, but that doesn't stop it from being a fascinating adaptation of a once thought, un-filmable graphic novel.

Rather than rehash my previous review and only add a paragraph ...Read the entire review

The Second Season

Before we begin, I need to confess that I have never watch Private Practice. I have also never had a chance to see the parent series Grey's Anatomy that this show is a spin off. Nevertheless, I am quite familiar with intense melodramas and found Private Practice's second season to be a lot of fun. While the show takes on many soapy, over the top qualities typical with the genre, it is pretty rich with its characters and has genuinely fun moments.

For those unfamiliar with the series, it is medical drama set in California. It highlights the drama of various individuals' personal and professional lives. They work at a small medical practice. As mentioned, it is a spin off series of the popular Grey's Anatomy with character A...Read the entire review

THE SHOW:

It's been a while since I was a teenager and although I imagine the specifics of teen angst have changed, the basics stay the same. They never feel like they fit into their surroundings. They have trouble recognizing their place in the world and hate being told what to do. They feign courage but are secretly terrified of letting down their guard and allowing someone into their inner world. They roam in small tactical groups with weapons and special powers employed to dispatch demons, zombies and other creatures of the night in order to keep their city secure. That last statement may not be true of me and you but it definitely applies to the teen protagonists of Tokyo Majin.

Tokyo Majin is an AIC Spirits Studio production that was first released by ADV in the United States before being transferred to Funimation in 2008. This review is of the Funimation relea...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

More often than not, if you've never heard of a picture that's chock full of people you know, well, there's a reason. Marquee stars turn up in films like Personal Effects or Powder Blue or Even Money, and someone strolling through a Blockbuster might pick up a copy and scratch their head and think, "Well, I just must have missed that one," unaware that they're holding, in their hands, the product of a mercy killing.

Poor Morgan Freeman has been in a shocking number of these straight-to-DVD films over the last couple of years (Read the entire review

If you enjoy ridiculously large breasts for the sake of watching them jiggle, then FUNimation's latest series will tickle your pickle. Dragonaut is a 2007 series that came from the production staff at Gonzo, and it embraces the concept of fan service to a ludicrous degree. Every female in the show has proportions that would make walking upright a challenge and even more perplexing is how all the boobage stays locked within their clothing. Now, normally I don't mind liberties taken in this regard, but in this particular case it stands out as a crutch to draw pubescent male viewers. The show that's built around the breasts just isn't strong enough to support them.

Dragonaut takes place far into the future where space travel is relatively easy and humanity has a colony on the moon. The series focuses on a kid named Jin Kamishina, who lost his family in ...Read the entire review

I don't know how long ago it was, but I have a vague memory of watching the sixth episode of "Fawlty Towers". Either I just happened to click over to it on late-night TV or I had dug up an old family VHS recording taped off of PBS, but watching the episode, called "The Germans", in which Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) gets knocked on the head and suffers a concussion, I laughed loudly enough that I was told to stop out of fear that I would wake my mother up. However, a couple of years later, I bought the DVD set to finally see the whole series, and it was a markedly different experience. I hate to admit it, "Fawlty Towers" is one of those shows I just don't love. I definitely don't dislike it, and I think John Cleese is a talented writer and physical comedian, but turning the show off that evening apparently put some sort of permanent damper in my brain, because I think the series' status as one of ...Read the entire review

The Rockford Files Movie Collection - Volume 1, featuring the first four of eight TV movies produced more than a dozen years after the 1974-1980 series abruptly left the air, is a wonderfully entertaining and nostalgic set. Made by virtually the same crew as the TV show - from the executive producers and writers to the grips and construction guys - these later 90-minute movies are, for the most part, quite wonderful. Unlike most reunion shows, the later Rockford Files TV movies play more like a continuation rather than a re-visitation, as if the series had never left the air, while acknowledging the passage of time in funny, often quite touching ways. The first, The Rockford Files: I Still Love L.A. (1994) may be the best reunion movie of its kind - ever.

The three other shows are subtitled A Blessing in Disguise (1995), If the Frame Fits (1996), and Godfather ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Love stories can be sappy regardless of the language, so just because your actors are speaking in French doesn't mean you can get away with pretentious, ironic commentary. Writer/director Julie Lopes-Curval would have us believe that because she knows the contrivances of her 2006 Toi & Moi are totally predictable, the playing field is clear for her to toy with them until her romantic heart is content. Not so, Julie! Not so!

Julie Depardieu stars as Ariane, the author of cloying photo comics in the romance magazine Toi & Moi. Her scripts tell the twisty tales of lovers in peril, of heartbreak and the easy soothing of class division that comes with unexpected, but apparently all-too regular, financial inheritance. The implicatio...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It's a well known story. An elderly relative dies, and a young man has to return to his isolated home town to handle the will and finalize affairs. When this occurs in a horror movie, it's a sure bet that something bad will happen. German zombie effort The Beast Within, a/k/a Virus Undead is no exception. The film doesn't break any new ground or provide us with a startling new take on the zombie genre, but it does its job admirably, and serves up an hour and a half of creepiness.

The tale begins with Robert (Philipp Danne), a med student whose grandfather, eminent researcher Professor Bergen, has passed away. He takes the lonely car trip down with his two friends, Eugen (Nikolas Jurgens) a fellow med student, and Patrick (Marvin Gronen). They see an unusual number of dead animals, mostly birds, on the drive. Is it a coincidence that Professor Bergen had been studyin...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

During the summer of 1979, during her hiatus from Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner performed a live Broadway show featuring many of the popular characters she had invented for the subversive late-night comedy series. Produced and directed by SNL-mastermind Lorne Michaels, Gilda Live was a big hit with audiences. The year following, a film document of the comedienne's showcase, captured by legendary film and theatre director Mike Nichols, was released. Apparently, the reaction at the box office was lukewarm, the novelty of the live act not really translating to celluloid. I assume Gilda Live's questionable popularity is what caused it to be relegated to the Warner Bros. Archive Collection, their on-demand online initiative, rather...Read the entire review

Although "Family Guy"'s reliance on pop culture references can sometimes become a little tiring, rarely has it been as welcome as in one recent episode. In season 4's "Deep Throats", on a couple of occasions throughout the episode, Stewie screams the lyrics to the opening theme song of "Mr. Belvedere" in order to get everyone else in the room to be quiet so he could enjoy the show ("You know what else is fun? Watching 'Mr. Belvedere' without people talking so loud!")

While not exactly thought-provoking in a deeper sense, the mere mention of shows like "Mr. Belvedere" will likely result in anyone who grew up during the time period fondly remembering the kind of quality television that used to dominate prime-time. Although some shows from the time period certainly still get their share of pop culture references, it's too bad that some of the best of '80's ("Perfect Strangers", "Mr. Belvedere", "Co...Read the entire review

Bruce Timm's contribution to the larger canon of DC Comics' superheroes has grown from the surprise hit Batman: The Animated Series into a fully-fledged universe that has taken these characters on some fascinating adventures. After Batman: The Animated Series, Timm's most significant creation has been Justice League and Justice League: Unlimited--which are gathered here in this handsome set under the title Justice League - The Complete Series. Other "Timmverse" series and features are well worth watching, re-watching, and remembering (including Superman: The Animated Series, which I will be reviewing here shortly). But Justice League is one of the best superhero television series of all time. It has a very special charm, a sen...Read the entire review

Generic Pre-Review Wrestling Disclaimer: Long before my affinity for globetrotting documentaries, Martin Scorsese films and The Criterion Collection, I found a soft spot for professional wrestling. Don't ask me how this happened; it just did. Despite this declaration, I shower daily, all my teeth are accounted for, I have a college degree...and believe it or not, I have a wife with the same merits. I'm not alone, of course. The wrestling fans I know aren't slack-jawed yokels; they simply appreciate the spectacle and illusion that this genuine ...Read the entire review

When the original Dragon Ball hit DVD a couple months ago it was something worth celebrating. I mean, how many years has it been since anyone has seen the original from 1989? Honestly, I don't even know. Z has been re-released countless times, but the original simply hasn't been touched for a number of years. Needless to say when FUNimation announced they were coming out with boxed sets similar to the treatment we saw with Z and GT, I was excited.

The big thing that they are toting this time around is the fact that these episodes are uncut and remastered. They decided not to mess with the aspect ratio of the show and left it with a fullframe presentation, so if that was something you hated about their Z collection, then set your mind at ease. What's here is a loving cared restoration of the original. Presented on five DVDs, this ...Read the entire review