Lockout hits the big screens this weekend. Written and directed by Luc Besson, who obviously loved Escape From New York, since this is pretty much the same story except it takes place in an orbital prison. This one looks like good mindless fun from the guy who brought us things like The Fifth Element and Angel-A.
The Darkest Hour has five teens in Moscow when alien invaders take over the Earth, and they spend the movie trying to survive. It is not a bad little film, but I think they made a mistake when they opened it in theaters on Christmas day, as it was not exactly holiday fare.
A rather amusing family oriented TV miniseries this time is The Witches of Oz, where best selling author Dorothy Gale discovers the stories she has been writing are based on suppressed childhood memories, and Oz is real.
The other TV choices are all older programs now available for the first time, starting with Night Gallery: Season Three. Joining Rod Serling in Season 3 were Vincent Price, Mickey Rooney, Sally Fields, Sandra Dee, Bill Bixby, and Leonard Nimoy, amongst others. Logan’s Run: The Complete Series ran on TV for the 1977/1978 season and also comes out this week.
Finally, Dark Shadows: Fan Favorites pulls all the way back to the 1960s for its episodes. Dark Shadows ran for five years, but as a soap opera it ran every weekday during that time, so it had over a thousand episodes. Besides being the first TV series to focus on the emotional needs of Vampires, Werewolves, and Witches, it was also one of the few shows of its time to include time travel and alternate universes as regular plot devices in its ongoing story arc. Every one of those details is represented in this small collection.
In western animation, Marvel Knight’s Astonishing X-Men: Dangerous becomes available this week, the second release in the series.
The new release in Anime is Naruto Shippuden: DVD box set 10, which I am not going to bother to describe, on the theory that if you liked the series enough to watch the previous 9 box sets you probably already know the story thus far.
The other anime releases this week are consolidations or Blue Ray or just plain re-releases. Oh! Edo Rocket – Complete Series is a consolidation, previously available in a box set per season, now with both seasons in a single box. Infinite Stratos is a re-release, except it also includes the OVA Infinite Stratos Encore, a short sequel, together for the first time.
Just when I thought the silliness had reached its limit, the new Pirates: Band of Misfits trailer comes out, and the whole Titanic thingy gets run through the wringer. There is a reason I am a big fan of the humor these folks bring to bear on all their projects.
I did have an entry with a trailer for the Hotel Transylvania animated comedy coming out later in the year, but they turned out not to have the rights to show it, and it got yanked. So instead, here is a different trailer for Lockout, the new Luc Besson movie coming out next weekend.
The movie Iron Sky opens today in Finland and Norway, and tomorrow in Germany and Austria. The US release dates have apparently not yet been determined, I am sorry to say. The plot is that the German rocket program was more advanced than anyone knew at the end of WWII, and the Nazi’s populated the dark side of the moon before they were defeated. 70 years later they return to conquer Earth, with no clue what kind of technical changes civilization has evolved through while they were gone. Boy, are they in for a surprise.
New Total Recall trailer is out! Strangely enough, I was actually considering going to a horror comedy this weekend; Detention is finally going into wide release, or at least wider than the film festival circuit it has been on for the past year. Or maybe not; some schedules have it for this week, and some for next, and next week I will definitely be at Lockout. The other main choice for this week is Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, a documentary about Comic Con. For me, documentaries rarely require the big screen to tell their story, so I may wait on the DVD for that one. But I am hoping some theater is running the trailer for the new Total Recall movie, because it looks like another great Philip K. Dick roller coaster ride of a film!