Laserblast: August 4 Horror, Fantasy & Sci-Fi DVD & Blu-ray Releases

Race to Witch Mountain, Mutant Chronicles, Big Trouble in Little China, Stargate Atlantis: Fans Choice, Ulysses

Since brevity is the soul of wit, we will overlook this week’s numerous direct-to-video releases and ultra obscure cult items in favor of focusing on a handful of higher profile titles. For fans of science fiction and/or Dwayne Johnson, the big news is the release of RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, which arrives in three versions: a single-disc DVD, a two-disc DVD “extended edition”(with digital copy); and a Blu-ray/DVD combo (with digital copy). Drew Fitzpatrick reviews the latter here, telling us that the 2.40×1 image is very pleasing, although there is a slight loss of detail in some of the darker scenes. Extras on the Blu-Ray disc include deleted and extended scenes and a featurette examining the references to the original ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, plus a gag reel.
The other new title hitting the trifecta this week is MUTANT CHRONICLES, arriving on home video in three versions: single-disc DVD, two-disc “collector’s edition,” and Blu-ray. The film made its debut on Video on Demand back in April while simultaneously receiving a very limited platform release in a few theatres around the country. With some nice CGI to expand the film’s look beyond it’s budget, and with Thomas Jane, Ron Perlman, Sean Pertwee, and John Malkovich in the cast, MUTANT CHRONICLES is a step above most movies of this calibre, but the screenplay is weak. The BD-Live enabled Blu-ray disc contains several bonus features: a feature-length documentary; six deleted scenes; green screen and storyboard comparisons; interviews with the cast and crew; concept art; visual effects; a theatrical trailer; BD previews; a short promotional film with commentary by the director, and (god help us) a a look at hte making of the short promotional film.
John Carpenter’s BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA was a bit of a disappointment back when it came out in 1986 – it was a failed attempt to recreate the amazing sense of wonder evinced in the Hong Kong Fant-Asia films (e.g. ZU, WARRIORS OF THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN) – but it seems to have developed a cult following. Kurt Russell (doing a John Wayne impersonation) is the hero, James Hong is the evil sorcerer David Lo Pan; and Kim Cattrall and Kate Burton are the leading ladies. Previously released on DVD, the film now comes out on Blu-ray with improved picture quality; 5.1 stereo soundtracks in English, Spanish, and French; Dolby Digital in English and French; and an “extended cut” in addition to the theatrical. Bonus features are mostly ported over from the old special edition DVD: audio commentary; deleted scenes; a behind-the-scenes documentary; an extended ending; an interview with special effects supervisor Richard Edlund; a John Carpenter music video; a stills gallery; and trailers and TV spots.
Coming out this week is a new DVD of the previously released ULYSSES, the 1954 adaptation of Homer’s poem, starring Kirk Douglas. Produced by Carlo Ponti and Dino DeLaurentiis, and directed by Mario Camerini (with an uncredited assist from Mario Bava), this sounds like just another sword-and-sandal gladiator movie, but it is actually a fairly high-class production that strives to do justice to the source material. Unfortunately, Lionsgate’s new disc has no bonus features, and advance word warned that the picture and audio quality reveal that the film negative is badly in need of restoration.
Also out this week is a Blu-ray disc entitled STARGATE ATLANTIS: FANS’ CHOICE, which consists of extended versions of two episodes selected by the fans: the pilot episode “Rising” and the Season 5 episode “Enemy at the Gate.”
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Race to Witch Mountain – Blu-ray Review

Looking back on Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s World of Wrestling Entertainment career is to marvel at one of the more successful vocational makeovers in modern film. While attempting to foist the remarkably charisma-free John Cena on a trusting world, the wrestling overlords would do well to realize that Johnson actually possesses something special, and that there is no greased slide from the ring to movie stardom. Though we were unfamiliar with his meteoric rise through the WWE ranks – first as Rocky Maivia, then later, simply as The Rock – we definitely noticed his easy charm in the entertaining 2003 action comedy THE RUNDOWN, wherein he routinely out-shone co-star Seann William Scott. Smaller but showier roles followed in less lustrous fare like the GET SHORTY sequel BE COOL and last summer’s GET SMART, but even in non-starters like an ill-advised WALKING TALL remake and the merely bewildering SOUTHLAND TALES, Johnson demonstrated an uncanny ability not to go down with a sinking ship. The success of 2007’s THE GAME PLAN (a fable of paternal responsibility with a professional sports background so well worn that one could easily imagine Wallace Beery in the lead) encouraged Johnson and his agents and managers to set a clear career path for the star into family-friendly entertainment, as evidenced by the in-production TOOTH FAIRY (a warmed-over project that had earlier been earmarked for California’s current governor) and even a JOHNNY QUEST reboot featuring Johnson as Race Bannon. But it was last year’s healthy grossing RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN that offered definitive proof of the star’s appeal to children and his ability to open a movie as a leading man – even if he shares the screen with alien kids and talking animals, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Escape to Witch Mountain and Return to Witch Mountain (reviewed on DVD here) were two of Disney’s bright spots in an otherwise difficult decade. Beginning very inauspiciously with 1970’s The Boatnicks and ending with the budget-busting The Black Hole in 1979, Disney looked to still be stuck making stilted slapstick like The Apple Dumpling Gang (just as unfunny in 1975 as it is now). Escape to Witch Mountain and Return from Witch Mountain, released, respectively, in 1975 and 1978, broke this trend by offering an exciting children’s adventure tale featuring superb veteran casts and the really wonderful Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards (who return in small roles in Race) as twins who possess unusual powers (including telepathy and telekinesis) but have no memory of their parents or home life prior to the orphanage. The revelation of their true nature will catch by surprise only those who routinely run into telekinetic children, but the kids’s alien nature was  smartly downplayed by Disney, giving Escape to Witch Mountain a mysterious edge. Though not released on DVD until this year to coincide with Race, both the original film and its sequel remain favorites thanks to their distinctly non-juvenile approach and unusually up-market production values (including an uncommonly large amount of location work for a Disney effort of the time.) The inevitable announcement that a remake was in the works gave many fans the willies, but we found Race to Witch Mountain to be firmly in the ‘not bad at all’ category with a winning lead performance from Dwayne Johnson.
As is the fashion now, all suspense about the past of the children is thrown out the window as the US military monitors the crash of their ship in the Nevada desert. In an eco-friendly plot twist, the children, Sara and Seth (played by AnnaSophia Robb and Alexander Ludwig, both significantly older than their ’70s counterparts) have come to Earth to search for a science experiment left on the Earth years ago by their parents to study the decline of our environment. Their home world, it turns out, is dying, and the data gathered in the experiment will allow them to regenerate their environment, but if they can’t get the proof back in time their government will begin a military colonization of our planet. The kids seek help from ex-con and former mob driver turned cabbie Jack Bruno (Johnson) to drive them from Vegas to the spot where the experiment has been hidden, and a disgraced astrophysicist in Vegas to speak at a UFO convention (the always great to see Carla Gugino) is along for the ride, too. Complicating things are an alien assassin sent by the military on the children’s home planet to insure that they don’t make it back, along with the ubiquitous cabal of government agents (led by the great Ciaran Hinds) who are out to imprison the kids and their ship in their secret base hidden in – you guessed it – Witch Mountain.
Though the original certainly featured some suspenseful chase sequences (particularly for children), it seemed to be fueled by a sense of wonder and discovery, with the children’s past only parceled out piecemeal via hazy flashbacks. With the mystery of the children’s past no longer a factor, Race to Witch Mountain plays out more like an amusement park ride than a quest. The worst offender in this regard is the addition of the alien assassin, a thinly veiled Predator rip-off that feels like it was added merely to give the film a running action beat. And even though we were pleased to find Hinds – playing the role deadly straight – as the government baddie, the use of black-suited government goon squads hunting down E.T.s feels more than trite at this point.
This might sound like we’re being over-critical of the film, and we don’t mean to be. Director Danny Fickman set up a very believable UFO convention as a humorous backdrop for the Vegas scenes (Coast to Coast AM listeners will find many familiar faces – or, er, voices – in the crowd, including John Lear and author Whitley Strieber), and he is able to balance the demands of the genre while poking gentle fun as well.
The cameos by Eisenmann and Richards are enjoyable, and they even get a moment of screentime together. Their presence definitely lends the show an air of legitimacy, even if it reminds older audiences of the shortcomings of Race to Witch Mountain‘s young actors. These shortcomings lay the weight of the film on Johnson’s shoulders, where it’s ably carried. Johnson gets better and better with each film, and his work here (along with the underused-as-usual Gugino) raises the film well above the level of typical kids fare.
Disney is releasing the film for a limited time in a 3-disc Blu-Ray edition that contains at least one version of the film that will play for everyone whose home video system has moved beyond cave wall pictographs. The feature is presented on a Blu-Ray, a standard DVD, and a digital copy for download via iTunes.
The 2.40×1 Blu-Ray image is very pleasing; although the detail does reveal some budgetary shortcomings in the visual EFX department, we found the low-tech approach to the Sci-Fi elements quite pleasing (especially the design of the UFO itself, which could have been right from an episode of In Search Of). There was a slight loss of detail in some of the darker scenes, but this could have been a fault of the original photography rather than a video transfer issue.
The throaty DTS track also gets a workout, and if you miss any dialog there are about 75 subtitle options.
Extras on the Blu-Ray include a lengthy section of deleted and extended scenes running a little more than 20min, featuring helpful comments from director Fickman as to why the scenes were removed. Our favorite extra – “Which Mountain?” – goes over all the hidden (and not so hidden) references to the original film; some, like the use of a familiar Winnebago, we caught, while others we missed, like the fact that Jack Bruno’s cab number is 1975, the year that the original was released. There’s also a brief gag reel that’s about par for the course as far as these things go.
The standard-def DVD also contains an irritating extra, selling the virtues of Blu-Ray, featuring a pair of charmless, tossy-haired jerks that apparently star on one of Disney’s TV shows.
Recommended.
Race to Witch Mountain‘s will be available on DVD and Blu-ray on August 4, 2009.
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Escape to Witch Mountain/Return from Witch Mountain – DVD Review

Amazing transfers of two ’70s Disney films that eschew the usual studio factory look in favor of a refreshingly mature style.

When Disney ventured into the live-action field of motion pictures, they typically fell into 2 reasonably distinct categories: there was, of course, pure children’s fare like Flubber and The Apple Dumpling Gang that the little ones would love but made most parents cringe, and there were the productions that existed on another level – films whose elements would strongly appeal to the young ones, but took on more adult themes as well. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea could hardly be called a ‘children’s film’, and how many kids were given nightmares by Patrick McGoohan’s scarecrow mask in Dr. Syn? Those films sported high production values, expert casts, and they dealt with, in the words of the MPAA, “adult themes”. The line between those films and the more madcap variety was rarely blurred successfully – how many children begged to see One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing because of the Disney name and fun-sounding title only to be bored senseless by the leaden plot dealing with Chinese spies and stolen microfilm?
Director John Hough must have seemed a strange choice to helm a Disney film in 1975; his previous work included a decidedly adult Hammer film, Twins of Evil, an effective haunted house thriller, The Haunting of Hell House, and the car chase dust-up Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, but his experience would give Escape to Witch Mountain a refreshingly adult feel missing from most of the studio’s output. Of course, everyone over 35 knows the secret behind the telekinetic and telepathic abilities of orphaned siblings Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and Tia (Kim Richards), and even in ’75 we knew not to trust Donald Pleasence before he falsifies adoption papers in order to bring them to boss Ray Milland’s massive California hacienda so that he can manipulate their powers to his own, presumably evil, ends. We instantly loved Eddie Albert (who, like Pleasence, didn’t noticeably age from the late ’50s through the early ’80s) from the moment he appeared with his Winnebago. Sure he was a gruff widower, and nearly threw the kids out after they snuck into his camper, but he certainly isn’t going to kick them out on an empty stomach now, was he? And we don’t feel like we’re giving anything away by saying that the conclusion involves a UFO, particularly since an image from the scene is included on the box art!
Escape’s popularity among kids is no mystery; what child hadn’t dreamed of levitating people and things at will? It’s the ultimate child-empowerment fantasy come to life! Escape was released a year before Carrie added a macabre twist to telekinetic ability (even though we’re left to wonder exactly how Milland was going to utilize the children’s powers), and it felt like something brand new. With the benefit of hindsight, a live-action Disney film that didn’t relentlessly pander to its audience seemed like a rare bird indeed. Both Escape and its sequel eschew the typical Disney factory look thanks to director Hough, who brings a refreshingly mature style to the proceedings.
Only during the major telekinetic effects sequences does the film fall into the traditional mold, with adults flailing their limbs and gesturing wildly; reacting to both flying props and post-production opticals like players in a Mack Sennett short. The special effects are pure Disney, meaning a combination of hastily assembled matte shots and the suspension of people and things from wires. The children’s ability to levitate never looks like anything more than a wire rig hoist-up; I’m not sure what sort of patience kids today will have for these silent era effects, but the quality of the production will likely win over all but the most video game-hardened pre-teen.
The world into which Return from Witch Mountain was released in1978 was a far different one than that of its predecessor. In the prevous year, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had reset the standard of acceptability for effects in science fiction films, an expensive lesson that took Disney several years of pricey missteps like The Black Hole to learn. Both young principals return – 3 years older and noticeably more mature. The pair had a bigger share of the film to carry the second time around –Richards plays most of her early scenes with younger actors, making her seem that much older – and they do so without the irritating Pollyanna quality that seeped into many young Disney performers (they’re also devoid of the constant adult guardian figure provided by Albert in the first film).
They’re once again supported by a terrific group of older actors, including Christopher Lee and Bette Davis as, respectively, a mad scientist and his impatient benefactor, whose experiment in mind control is interrupted by Tony when he saves the life of their unwilling guinea pig (played by the great Anthony James, whose memorably angular face has him enshrined in the henchman hall of fame). The film departs from the original in several ways; the tone of the Escape remains, though with more of a ‘young adult’ adventure edge, befitting the rapidly-nearing-teenage-years stars, but most importantly, Tony and Tia are split up early in the show and spend most of the running time apart, which actually deprives the film of their chemistry together (the two went on to play siblings again in the nifty TV shocker Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell in ’78 and also have cameos in the soon to be released Race to Witch Mountain).
The conclusion of the film, when a still mind-controlled Tony is forced to have a psychic showdown with his sister (with Lee in the background shouting “Kill her!” into the transmitter controlling Tony’s mind) might be upsetting to younger viewers, but Return has a snappier pace than the first film, and makes for a more entertaining time than the occasionally meandering original (though the Los Angeles exteriors are much less interesting than the northern California cool of the first film). Hough also made sure that the casting of the adult antagonists reached the same watermark as before; Lee and Davis appear to be having a ball as the baddies, and if they deemed the material beneath them, it never shows in the performances.
However good or bad Race to Witch Mountain turns out to be, we have it to thank for the amazingly bright and sharp transfers on the new DVDs. We’re certainly no expert on the restoration of films prior to a disc release, but either Disney spent a bundle sprucing these up or they have the cleanest vault elements in the business. Only the shots with dodgy matte work or optical effects have that “less than perfect look”.
Both discs feature scene-specific commentary tracks featuring director Hough and leads Richards and Eisenmann (the latter were thankfully recorded together and make for a very pleasant listen), a just-under 30-minute making-of documentary, a trivia track, a “Studio Album” featuring clips from all Disney features released in that given year, and one Disney cartoon (“Pluto’s Dream House” on Escape and “The Eyes Have It” on Return).
Escape features an extra interview segment with Hough, a clip compilation entitled Disney Sci-Fi, and a featurette on the special effects. Return features an extended interview segment with the now adult members of the “street gang” that helps Tia search for Tony, another clip compilation, “Disney Kids with Powers,” and our favorite extra, a rare interview with Lee for a Spanish television station (in Spanish – one of the many languages the actor speaks with near fluency – with subtitles), in which the actor is sporting the enormous mustache grown for his upcoming role as a Gypsy in The Passage.