FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

If you grew up rent-scrolling the family section at blockbuster or your local mom-and-pop store in the late 90s, Peter Hewitt's 1997 adaptation of The Borrowers was an inescapable pick. It sat between Home Alone knockoffs and weird live-action Disney experiments, with a cover of a microscopic family peeking out from under a floorboard while John Goodman loomed over like an angry, suit-wearing thumb. It was a movie you rented when every copy of Space Jam was checked out, brought home on a rainy Saturday, and realized was actually just a weird, chaotic affair. Alliance Entertainment has put it out on a Blu-ray under their Retro VHS banner, complete with a heavy-cardstock slipcover to mimic a sun-faded tape box with fake sticker distress and black spine edges. Let us be real about what you are getting on the disc itself. It is a completely barebones package. You slot the disc into your player and get a dead-simple static menu with a play button and a scene selection menu. There are no...

Robert Benton's Nadine is one of those mid-80s studio comedies that passed everyone by as it opened in 1987, and eventually found a home on the cable television for the next decade. If you happened to randomly switch channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon in 1994, there is a good chance you caught the middle forty minutes of the movie without ever figuring out what the plot is about. It hits BD on September 29th as part of Alliance Entertainment's Retro VHS collection, and the packaging format is fitting for a film of this kind. It is wrapped in a faux-distressed slipcase with the look of a sun-faded rental cassette from a mom-and-pop video shop in 1989. The disc inside is bare bones; you drop it in, and you get a bare-minimum menu screen, and the movie starts. There are no retrospective interviews, no director commentary, no archival behind-the-scenes coverage. Just eighty-three minutes of Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger yelling at each other in late-1950s Texas while running away ...

Taylor Sheridan's recent output has been the work of a man with a factory cranked to full capacity. Some of the products that have come off the assembly line have been a bit stale, but Landman is the one show where the machine has hit the perfect RPMs. Mean, funny, and a little bit messy, it's right in the wheelhouse of high budget daddy TV that knows exactly what it is. While season one was getting us to know the volatile grease-stained world of West Texas oil, season two sees everything involved in it coming to the realization that the ground could be swallowed at any second. Billy Bob Thornton remains the heart of the production as Tommy Norris, who is the type of guy who only comes to life with the kind of weary, ash-dusted charisma that makes you think he's been up for 72 hours straight sipping lukewarm diner coffee and negotiating with cartels, environmental lawyers, and corporate idiots who wouldn't know a drill bit from a hole in the wall. Watching Thornton mane...

Every decade or so, Hollywood decides the time is right to reinvent the absurd vehicle comedy. We've had runaway buses and subways and now we have Stop! That! Train!, a movie which takes an absurd premise so ludicrous a five year old could make up on the spot while eating sugary cereal and stretches it to a full ninety-eight minutes! Directed by Adam Shankman is the precise type of mid-budget studio comedy that used to dominate multiplexes on a random Friday in April. It does not attempt to rewrite the rules of high cinema, but rather to toss a wacked out mix of recognizable comic actors and fabulous drag performers onto a train going too fast and see who sweats off their makeup first before the end credits roll. The premise is as hilariously straightforward as you'd expect. We follow a disgraced former transit authority engineer who happens to be riding a commuter train on the exact day which a bizarre computer glitch or disgruntled villain sabotage renders the breaking system...

There was a period in the early 1980s when college campuses in movies were lawless microcosms; before every square inch of a university was watched over by omnipresent surveillance or bogged down by hyper-connected modern anxiety, you could run around a quad at two in the morning playing elaborate live-action assassination games with dart guns without instantly getting swatted. TAG: The Assassination Game (1982) encapsulates that period, it is not a pretentious cinematic statement and it is certainly not an transformative work, rather it is a slightly goofy, surprisingly tense budget thriller about kids taking a silly game too seriously until one of them snaps and starts using real bullets. The movie was directed by Nick Castle who most horror fans know best as the physical presence behind Michael Myers in John Carpenter's original Halloween, but you can see he learned a lot while working on set and understands how to use shadows, how to frame a hallway to look threatening and how ...

If you spent any reasonable amount of time lurking in the horror aisles of mom-and-pop video stores back in the VHS era, you definitely know the original cover art for Graduation Day. It had that wild, arresting close-up of a terrified woman's face with an axe shattering right through glass, anchored by that bold red title text. It was pure slasher gold, the exact kind of sleeve art that practically begged a bored teenager on a Friday night to shell out three bucks. The actual movie, as is often the case with early 80s regional schlock, doesn't quite match the insane intensity implied on the box, but it's got a weird, chaotic charm that makes it hard to completely dismiss. Released in 1981, right in the thick of the post-Halloween gold rush, Graduation Day tries to do a few different things at once and mostly stumbles through all of them. The setup is straightforward enough: a high school track star named Laura suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack right after winning a 100-...

If you grew up hanging out in video rental stores in the mid-90s, chances are the box art for the original 1991 The Guyver movie caught your eye. It had Mark Hamill on the cover, a slick alien suit, and promised a crazy live-action anime adaptation. Then you took it home and realized Hamill turned into a giant cockroach monster, the tone was goofy camp, and the fighting felt completely muted. It was a letdown, plain and simple. But three years later, director Steve Wang came back to direct the sequel, Guyver: Dark Hero , on a shoestring budget without Hollywood execs breathing down his neck. He ended up making one of the most unapologetically cool creature-feature action movies of the entire decade. Now we finally have the film making its Blu-ray debut with a brand new master transferred from the best surviving film elements. It is a physical media release that cult movie nerds have been waiting years to get their hands on. It strips away the PG-13 silliness of the first movie and goe...

When Sylvester Stallone first pitched up in Oklahoma as Dwight "The General" Manfredi back in season one, there was a novelty to the whole setup. You had an aging mobster straight out of New York trying to figure out how weed dispensaries work while extorting local business owners who looked like they'd never seen a leather jacket in their lives. It was goofy, slightly ridiculous, but fun. By season two, Taylor Sheridan’s TV assembly line was grinding away, pushing the crime network bigger and bringing in more rival factions. Now that season three is available to own now on Blu-ray, the main question is simple: does Dwight’s middle-America mafia empire still have any gas left in the tank? The short answer is yes, mostly because Stallone refuses to let this show drag. At 80 years old, the guy still commands every room he walks into. He knows exactly what kind of performance he's delivering here. It isn't subtle, it isn't groundbreaking drama, but it's wildl...

The folks at Troma have spent fifty years slinging some of the dirtiest, grossest, and most unhinged cinema in North America. You generally know what you’re getting when Lloyd Kaufman attaches his name to something: cheap prosthetic guts, aggressive camp, and a complete refusal to take anything seriously. Every now and then, though, a Troma release pops up that actually cares about its characters amidst the buckets of fake blood. Sweet Meats , directed by and starring Ricky Glore, is one of those rare surprises. It’s a low-budget, country-music horror comedy that essentially takes the core premise of Sweeney Todd or Motel Hell and drags it through a greasy roadside diner in Kentucky. Troma just dropped the physical release on Blu-ray, and while the movie itself runs a little long at a hundred minutes, the package as a whole is a surprisingly charming love letter to DIY filmmaking. The setup is delightfully straightforward. Bobby Sweet (Ricky Glore) is a delusional, wannabe country si...

Look, we all know what Star Trek is at this point. It is baked so deeply into pop culture that even people who have never watched a single full episode can quote "Beam me up, Scotty" or do the Vulcan nerve pinch. But going back and actually watching 1960s Star Trek from start to finish on Blu-ray is a weirdly grounding experience. It is easy to forget that before it became a multi-billion-dollar franchise with dozens of spin-offs and endless corporate branding, it was just a broke television show trying to survive on NBC while getting shuffled around bad time slots. The entire original series is now available to own on Blu-ray, and honestly, holding the whole thing in one hand feels kind of strange given how huge the legacy is. The physical packaging itself is surprisingly clean and simple. They did not bloat it with unnecessary plastic or bulky, awkward digibooks that end up getting crushed on your shelf. It is a sleek set that stores all three seasons neatly without taking ...

Paramount dumped André Øvredal’s Passenger into theaters back in May with almost zero marketing pushing it, mostly because they were banking on bigger summer tentpoles to carry the box office. That usually means a studio knows they have a stink bomb on their hands, but Passenger isn't a bad movie at all. It’s actually a mean, incredibly lean 94-minute ghost story that knows exactly what it wants to do and doesn't waste time trying to be anything else. If you missed its brief theatrical run, this disc is easily the best way to catch up on one of the most underappreciated horror flicks of the year. The setup is pretty simple. Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and Maddie (Lou Llobell) are a young couple six weeks into their grand "van life" adventure. They traded in their cramped New York lives to live out of a customized camper van, driving across the country and posting about it. But right from the opening stretch, you can tell the romanticized illusion of road life is already we...

If you spent any significant portion of your youth wandering the aisles of a blocky local video store on a Friday night, you know the exact vibe of Past Midnight . You’re looking at the box art: Rutger Hauer looking brooding and mysterious, Natasha Richardson looking concerned yet determined, and a trashy neon title tag promising nineties erotic-thriller thrills. Alliance Entertainment’s decision to drop this obscure 1991 thriller into their retro VHS line is a stroke of pure nostalgia marketing, and to be honest, it works. The physical release itself comes in one of those slipcovers designed to look like an old-school worn cassette case, complete with fake distress marks along the spine and a fake rental sticker on the back. Inside, it’s a standard Blu-ray disc, but make no mistake: this is as bare-bones as it gets. You get the movie, a main menu that looks like a static image captured off a CRT television, and zero special features. No commentary tracks, no retrospective interviews, ...