The Digital Dread Report for June 18th

What a week for releases! In addition to our Pick of the Week, there are no less than five Blu's hitting shelves today that we can't resist picking up, not to mention a strong crop of rental fodder... we're really going to have to start budgeting better...


We've been waiting anxiously for this day for months now, because we get not one, but two new Shout Factory Blu-ray's in our hot little hands! The Howling has been MIA on Blu-ray for way to long, but no longer. We're dying to get our hands on this one today (Amazon needs to hurry), and give it a spin. Ditto for the Tobe Hooper cult classic, Lifeforce. We always had a soft spot in our hearts for this 1985 space-vampire flick, and we just know that Shout did it great justice. Both of these are absolute must own Blu-ray titles.

American Mary is a solid little flick that we were surprised to love way more than we thought we would, same goes for Stoker, and they both deserve some collection love.

I'm going to just come right out and say it: Jack the Giant Slayer was a pretty good flick. Sure, it had its cheesy moments, and it's mainly a kids movie, but it was an enjoyable, family-friendly fantasy that deserved better than bombing at the Box Office like it did. Catch this one at a good sale price, and it's definitely worthy of a buy.
 
Come Out and Play is a decent enough remake of one of a movie we reviewed WAY back when called Who Can Kill a Child? It's worth checking out, although we much prefer the 1976 original.

As for the rest of the week's rents, most of their trailers looked decent enough to pique our curiosity, so there you have it.

The stand-out title here though is The Evil Clergyman; it's a 30 minute short of an H.P. Lovecraft story which was shot way back in 1987 as part of an anthology... and it stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton! Good Lord we need to see this asap.

  In all fairness, it’s hard to say that a movie is going to be complete shit just from seeing a trailer, but you know what, the Horror genre has too many people making shit films on camcorders these days for us to be too optimistic about them, especially when their trailers look awful.

The Amazing Adventures of The Living Corpse looks as if its animation was done on somebodies home computer. I am personally not much on animation anyhow, so to see a trailer for an animated flick that looks really cheap just puts me off even more. Could be just me.

The trailers I've seen for Blood For Irina are about :40 seconds long, and consist of a woman staring into a camera and snarling in slow motion. No thanks.

The Last Exorcism, which is the weeks worst "Big Movie", just plain old sucked. We loved the first movie (I think we were in the minority on that one), and we expected more out of its sequel. They reeally dropped the ball on this one.

100 Below Zero is the new project from The Asylum, and while we give them credit for getting better as they go, the whole "bad on purpose" shtick isn't our thing. If it were, we'd see this one without hesitating. Many will surely love this one.

Abducted and Jersey Shore Massacre just look cheap and shitty, while No One Will Know looks cheap and bland.

I have to admit that Plastic could be a fun watch on some level; sure, it looks just as cheap and shitty as the rest of this weeks skips, but the trailer had a few promising spots in it, so you never know.

Finally, we have Prank. I'm not at all interested in seeing a movie about disenfranchised teens killing people for revenge, because we have enough of that shit going on in real life in this Country. This one just rubs me the wrong way, and I'm good never wasting my time sitting through it.