Quite a lot of good stuff this week. Get your wallets out or pull up your Netflix queue:
The top TV pick is Doctor Who: The Specials, featuring the five TV movies that ended David Tennant’s run as the renegade Time Lord. The specials are also available separately, and the set is available as well in Blu-Ray.
Camp fans may wish to check out the jokier syndicated horror / comedy / romance show She-Wolf of London. It comes with “ten dollars of movie cash,” by which I think it features a voucher for a movie ticket to The Wolf Man, out this week. There’s also a re-release of the classic The Wolf Man this week that offers the same thing.
Also out: Dragonball Z S3; Dynasty S4, Mr. Ed S2. There are also a bunch of sets of classics game show compilations coming out, including sets for Password, Matchgame, Family Feud (with Richard Dawson) and others.
Delightful Forest and Heroes Shed No Tears: The two latest Shaw Brothers martial arts releases.
Horror Collector’s Set, Vol 6: Echo Bridge’s latest set features Prom Night (Jamie Lee Curtis), The Nurse, Skeleton Man, The Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe, and Ghoulies IV.
House of the Devil: This lively recreation of an ’80s style horror flick was much beloved by the horror sites last year. (A cute gag is that, because it’s such a throwback to the ’80s, the film also comes in a DVD / VHS copy bundle.)
Ice Castles: The most prominent of the string of late ’70s / early ’80s ‘damaged women’ tearjerkers hits DVD. Still no release of The Promise yet, though.
On Bak 2: The Beginning–An apparent prequel to the earlier martial arts hit.
Planet Hulk is the latest DTV Marvel animated movie. These seem to be getting a bit better lately, or at least the nifty double bill Hulk Vs. disc was. This one animates one of the major Marvel storylines of recent vintage, in which a Hulk secretly shot into space by some of the most bigwig superheroes returns seeking some extremely destructive revenge.
TCM is putting out more of their extremely useful ‘four classics’ sets. This week’s best is their Marx Brothers set with A Day at the Races, Room Service, At the Circus and A Night in Casablanca. Only Races is among their best work, but still essential stuff for any old movie fan.
Another TCM set is Sci-Fi Adventures, featuring Them! and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, along with World Without End and Satellite in the Sky. Those last two are hardly essential, but if you don’t already own the first two, shame on you.
Universal Solider: Reanimation somehow raised the gigantic sums required to bring back both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren to the series. It’s also, like most every new movies, available as well in Blu-Ray.
Zombieland: I’m not the biggest zombie fan in the world, but it’s amazing how many really good zombie movies have been made in the last decade or so. This reportedly belongs on that list.
Lots of older films are hitting Blu-Ray this week, including An American in Paris, Casablanca, The Godfather (I and II) Unforgiven, March of the Penguins and Live and Die in LA.
