There’s not a lot going on right now in DVDland, but all you need is one good thing, and this week it’s the long awaited release of the first season of one of my most fondly remembered shows, The Equalizer. Edward Woodward is a spy sick of the dirty business who quits, but ends up using his often deadly skills to aid those who have nowhere else to turn. The episode based on the Evan Hunter novel King Ransom ( also the basis of the typically superlative Kurosawa film High and Low), and starring an incredibly sleazy Adam Ant is a classic. Highly recommended. If buying isn’t your bag, give it a look through Netflix or your local library.
More modern viewers may grab the more recent Blade the Complete Series, the now canceled cable show that continued the adventures of the vampire hunter.
Other shows this week: Dallas S8; Family Ties S3; Girlfriends S3; Hotel Babylon S1; My Boys S1; Naturo Uncut Box 6; and Tell Me You Love Me S1.
On the movie front:
Charlie Chan Collection 4 The latest four movie set. Nice that these are still coming out, although I think this starts the generally inferior Sidney Toler run. Still, they do a nice job with these, with commentaries and little documentaries and other pleasures.
Doomsday: The Sinking of Japan This isn’t Tidal Wave from the ’70s, but a 2006 extravaganza on the same theme.
Gone Baby Gone is the well received Ben Affleck-directed adaptation of the terrific Dennis Lehane novel. Lehane started his print career with a simply marvelous series of very hardboiled detective novels, before, sadly, going straight (Mystic River, etc.). Anyone who digs detective novels at all should definitely check this series out, although don’t start with Gone Baby Gone, which comes later in the series. The first book is A Drink Before the War. Lehane stopped writing these books years ago, and I still miss them.
Primal is, believe it or not, a bad DTV Bigfoot movie. Paging Scott Foy! (Ouch!!!)
Zapped! For all you Scott Baio completists out there. A classic piece of ’80s junk cinema.
