Special arrival in today, folks, as the crew out at Fox sent over a screener copy of In Time for us to cover for you, and if you thought this one was a mindbender in theaters, then you may rest assured it will be every inch the same kind of mindbender when you get it home.

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Okay, folks, the Christmas season is over, and the disappointment of a cold dark winter is neck deep upon us, at least as long as we’re in the northern hemisphere. But I’ve got a little something here that ought to put some spark in those long cold nights. The folks out at Dreamworks sent over a copy of Real Steel for us to review, and if you ever thought that Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots was just for pansies, well, brace yourself for a whole lot of robot fighting joy.

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Okay, this had to be the one, didn’t it? I mean, come on–two consecutive good reviews in a row? For Tyler Perry titles? Surely this is the one! This is the one where, if it were a used car, the wheels fly off and the undercarriage starts throwing sparks and the radio starts screaming insults at me. It’s Meet The Browns Season Three, and the folks at Lions Gate sent out a copy for me to review. Time to see if the Broken Clock Principle swings both ways!

Once again, Meet The Browns takes us back out to Brown Meadows and the various Browns–and not so Browns–that have come to make up the highly unconventional Brown family. And there’s plenty of change going on at the Brown house, in pretty much every sense of the term. A lot of things are going on out there; people are leaving, some new ones are arriving, and the ones who stick around are somewhat different than they were.

And indeed, this is the series where things start going wrong. See, Tyler Perry makes the horrendous mistake of making Meet The Browns a bit more like House of Payne. In a surprisingly large number of instances, events that are clearly not at all funny are thrown in–someone gets assaulted, the Browns’ quasi-adopted daughter (who will later become adopted) is on birth control and likely sleeping around, and then there’s the worst of the lot where the younger Browns actually threaten their quasi-adopted daughter with a RETURN TO FOSTER CARE if she doesn’t improve her attitude.  They threaten to, essentially, THROW THEIR OWN KID AWAY if she doesn’t do as she’s told. That’s not funny. That’s disturbing.

But then, then Meet The Browns manages to recover by going back to its true strength, the thoroughly irrepressible antics of David Mann, surprisingly top-notch comic actor. Mann throws himself into his comedy, throwing up both the comedy of dialogue (the man commits more Spoonerisms than possibly even Spooner himself) and some great physical comedy on the side. The man is excellent, and he’s backed up by some surprisingly good writing.

And after a few false starts, you’ll find much of the rest of Meet The Browns surprisingly palatable. A little too much Tyler Perry drama gets into this for my tastes, but there’s still plenty of fine Meet The Browns comedy. I’m hopeful that future seasons of Meet The Browns will understand what works and what doesn’t, but this one is starting to show some cracks.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Meet The Browns Season Three a seven out of ten–a little too much Tyler Perry drama gets infused in this one, but a good chunk of the earlier-season laughs still manages to slip through and provide a good time.

Admittedly, while we see a whole lot of television box sets out here, one thing we don’t see is box sets for cop shows from the eighties. Especially cop shows from the eighties with a little edge of humor. And that’s just what we’re going to get today with Sledge Hammer! The Complete Series, a copy of which Image Entertainment sent out for us to review.

Sledge Hammer! The Complete Series follows the cop by the same name, Sledge Hammer. And while Sledge’s way of life might have been appropriate for 1950–very law and order, a little misogynistic, quit smoking, drink your milk, that kind of thing–he’s also got some significant mental problems. He talks to his gun. He also sleeps with it. And showers with it. He has a rocket launcher in the trunk of his car. There’s a bumper sticker on the back of his car that reads “I Heart Violence”. And this guy is going to be set loose on the criminals of his city, with his newfound partner–a tough, smart lady with a surprisingly vicious spin kick who takes to Hammer right away–to protect the citizenry from the criminal element.

Heaven help the criminal element.

If you haven’t already seen this–which was a surprisingly popular show back in the eighties when it was on (about the only reason it went under was because it was up against big names like Miami Vice and Dallas)–then you’ll need to picture Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun / Police Squad, and make him a barely-restrained homicidal lunatic. Now you have a good idea of what we’re looking at here, and you can already imagine the possibilities. We have the Dirty Harry Excelsior model, the Smart And Tough Lady Cop, and of course, the Bellowing Captain. All the major archetypes are in place, and ratcheted clear up to eleven. The results are surprisingly fun and jammed full of laughs.

Yes indeed, laughs. I spent a lot of time laughing at Sledge Hammer; not only the jokes, either, but the sheer wild over the top antics in the plotlines (one episode features a reporter who goes on a ridealong with Sledge, and ends up with two broken arms which spend the rest of the episode in a pair of casts) that got, and kept, my attention.I spent a lot of time laughing at Sledge Hammer, and it’s not every day I get to laugh uproariously at television. This is one of those grand times.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives Sledge Hammer! The Complete Series a full ten out of ten. It’s a riot, and a sweet shot of history to boot. If you missed this one back in the eighties, then prepare to get a massive shot of comic cop glee to make your day.

Something big for you today, folks, as the crew out at Anchor Bay sent over a copy of Our Idiot Brother for us to review. And this one’s going to be a lot stranger–yet also a lot more engaging–than you might think.

Our Idiot Brother follows a family of four, three sisters whose lives may look pretty good but have some interesting issues scattered throughout and a brother who’s got possibly just a bit too much trust in humanity. While the sisters have industriously built their lives, their brother went into organic farming. And his organic farm covers a whole lot more than impressive strawberries and the best rhubarb in town, as he discovers when he gets locked up. His girlfriend–yes, he has a girlfriend–has thrown him off the farm, and with nowhere left to go, he turns to his sisters. But their brothers’ uncompromising honesty and faith in humanity–even in the strangest parts–will shake up their world beyond all their expectations.

It’s hard to call a movie heartwarming without it sounding like some giant sad cliche, but Our Idiot Brother does an excellent job of doing just that. See, this one focuses on what happens when a big part of your life is suddenly changed, and that changes the whole picture. And that’s how it works for the whole family: Ned loses the farm, his only real stability, and the family gains the biggest destabilizing influence of all, a man who has virtually no stability. This ends up changing everything, and the process of changing manages to make them all substantially better. You’d think that would be a big cliche, and I suppose it is on some level, but there are plenty of laughs thrown in for added variety and substance. Paul Rudd dancing to Willie Nelson’s Midnight Rider is inherently wild, and it gets better from there as their brother’s unusual philosophy interacts on all their lives.

Plain and simple, Our Idiot Brother is surprisingly fun to watch, especially for a movie that’s basically about people’s lives changing. This is going to be a shot of drama that will go down very smooth, thanks to the laughs mixed in.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Our Idiot Brother a very sharp eight out of ten. It’s hard to find drama that doesn’t choke you under the weight of its own self-importance, and Our Idiot Brother takes a path that you’re certainly going enjoy.

Thanks to the folks out at the History Channel, who sent over a copy of Swamp People Season Two for us to review, and if you liked the first one, then the second one is going to blow your ever-loving mind. And if you didn’t like the first one, well, you may want to take a chance on this one, because it’s substantially more than the first season. More what, you wonder? Well, stick around…it’s worth it.

Swamp People goes back out to alligator hunting season out in Louisiana, with a whole bunch of faces old and new to lead off the hunt for big alligator. And this season is going to bring us more giant alligators–with nicknames like Dozer and Tree Breaker for starters–but also some bigger problems too. Family struggles, injuries, and even theft will come into play

Swamp People Season Two introduces us to Terral Evans, a “gator wrangler” who goes after only live gators, partially with the sanction of local authorities, the father and son team of Jay Paul and R.J, and the Guist brothers, a pair of local swamp dwellers who don’t do much gator hunting, but rather perform a variety of hunting missions on any of a host of local species. Terral’s live hunting skills are a very interesting departure from the normal hunt and shoot action of the rest of the hunters. The brothers Guist, meanwhile, are almost comic relief, but still do some impressive things with their hunt. For instance, the Guist family’s alligator gar hunting skills–a large fish–require three levels of hunting to be done: first, they hunt worms. They then use these as bait to hunt fish, which in turn they use once again as bait to catch the alligator gar.

It’s an impressive new season for Swamp People, with a whole lot more going on than you may have seen coming. This season has much more depth than you might think, and that’s saying something for a show like Swamp People, which could have easily fallen to the same problem as Billy The Exterminator did, falling into rapid banality under a constant flood of more-of-the-same. But all the unexpected extras give Swamp People Season Two an extra shot of spice that can’t help but be welcome.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Swamp People Season Two an eight out of ten–it’s plenty of good old fashioned swamping fun with lots of extra twists, and is a worthwhile followup to the first season, which was already looking pretty nice. It remains to be seen just how long they can keep this up, but for now, just sit back and enjoy.

The folks out at Entertainment One sent out a copy of Born of Earth, and this one looked on the surface like it had all the makings of a good monster movie. Nifty cast, not only featuring a Baldwin (Daniel, but still) but also one of my personal favorites in Brad Dourif, as well as some decent looking monster effects. But would this whole be greater than the sum of its parts…or less?

Born of Earth revolves around Danny Kessler, a man that’s been having a rough time of things lately. His wife was recently murdered, and his children recently abducted. That’s rough enough for anybody, but when Danny discovers that, just to make things even worse, there’s a race of horrible monsters living right around the area, he’s going to not only have to find out the truth behind these horrors and put paid to them before they can run amok on a killing spree of their own over large chunks of the planet.

Implausible? You bet! But then, some of the best monster movies are exactly that, at least in the early going. The down side here is that, not only is it implausible, it’s also kind of dull. See, Born of Earth has a run time of about eighty four minutes. We see the monsters only a couple times in the first five minutes, and then, not again for better than the first half. When you’ve only got about an hour and twenty minutes on your movie, you need to hit things hard and fast. Thankfully, the ending does somewhat make up for this with loads of monsters running around and lunching up the assorted residents, many of whom actually deserve to get gnawed on for one reason or another, which makes this something of a strange one.

It’s always kind of a weird sign when you have to ask, are the horrible twisted flesh-eating forces of justice or murderous monsters? Equally thankfully, the doubts won’t last long. They rapidly reassert themselves as horrors, and this is for the best. Born of Earth does quickly pick up its pacing toward the end, and though the ending isn’t the best, the end does at least take care of most of the loose ends. It’s really rather underwhelming, and looks more like the kind of thing you’d get out of a SyFy Channel Saturday night special than something you might more notably expect in video store shelves or theatrical releasing.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Born of Earth a somewhat nonplussed five out of ten. A good rental, but really, not much more than that.

Today, folks, we’ve got something special for you, as the folks at The Asylum sent over a copy of Dragon Crusaders for us. This by itself wouldn’t be so special, until you consider one important fact: I can’t tell what movie they’re ripping off. Thus, it looks like we’ve got something interesting here–original Asylum fare.

Dragon Crusaders takes us out on the open sea, as a group of Knights Templar find themselves up against a band of pirates. Naturally, Knights Templar don’t much care for pirates, and descend upon them with all the fury you’d expect. But when the knights in turn are cursed to take on horrible forms, they find they must take on something much, much worse than they expected in order to break the curse, and by extension, save humanity from a fate only slightly worse than being burned alive–being burned alive and eaten by enormous lizards.

Original Asylum fare doesn’t happen very often these days, with the bulk of their work dedicated to titles that sound vaguely familiar, because, not surprisingly, they are. But sometimes they get something original out, and that’s where the bulk of their best movies comes from. Sure, they have the occasional clunker–who doesn’t?–but give The Asylum some original content, the stuff that hearkens back to their best times when they were just getting started and putting out some really impressive stuff, and they can really show you a good time.

See, Dragon Crusaders is almost disturbingly ambitious. They’re going to have dragons and gargoyles and even zombies–though they call them revenants–in here. Though admittedly, the narrative is a little light on the cohesiveness, it’s not exactly doing a terrible job of getting the point across. And what it lacks in decent narrative structure it will amply make up for with a lot of action. Plenty of swordfights and the like will race across this like no tomorrow.

The question you’ll have to ask yourself, of course, is are you okay with a plot that only half makes sense but will pack in loads of clanging swords and people getting hit with pointy things in a thoroughly medieval fashion? Chances are most will be, and with good reason. Dragon Crusaders is reasonably fun and pretty exciting; flawed, to be sure, but still very exciting.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Dragon Crusaders, as a result, a flawed but still fun six out of ten. It’s certainly one of the more fun pieces I’ve seen The Asylum put out, especially recently, but it’s not without its problems. Though those problems are pretty substantial, it’s still hard to ignore the sheer amound of fun involved in this one.

When the folks out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of Meet The Browns Season Two, I have to admit, I was looking forward to it. This was by itself a strange new feeling for me: looking forward to watching anything Tyler Perry had to offer was a wholly new experience. But would I be disappointed? Would Perry’s oeuvre of heavy-handed pretentious crap come back to bite me by giving me a taste of the good life and then yanking it away like the tablecloth under a stack of crystal glassware?

Meet The Browns takes us back to Brown Meadows, where Leroy Brown, his doctor nephew and his nurse niece in law, are doing their best to keep up the newest retirement home in town. And while the home is packed with some of the strangest old folks you’ll ever hope to meet, the sheer amount of strangeness that the Browns and company will take on is going to mystify anyone who watches, including us.

There will be some substantial differences between the first season and the second. And I found this one didn’t have so many big laughs as the previous one, but it did still have a decent number of them. Admittedly, I was starting to get a bit concerned when the first fifteen minutes of an episode and no laughs, but thankfully, it didn’t take long for the laughs to kick back up.

It’s never a good idea to start a whole season off on a weak note, and that’s just what happens here. However, it recovers quickly, and gets us back to the laughs, which is not only where this series has proven amply that it can be, but where history has shown that it’s the best. It’s sad to say that the second season isn’t as good as the first, but it is comparable, and at the end of the day, that’s pretty good indeed. It’s still a delight, for the most part, even if it’s a bit less of a delight than it was previously.

And frankly, this never fails to amaze me. I am actively enjoying a Tyler Perry title. That’s weird. It has never happened to me before. But here it is, I’m laughing along happily with Meet The Browns. It’s the best thing I’ve seen Tyler Perry do, and frankly, I wish he’d do more like this. Instead of godawful low-budget plays and sanctimonious Serious Film, Tyler Perry needs to put more of his effort–in fact, all his efforts–into sheer pure blinding comedy. I’d happily watch more Tyler Perry if it were all as hilarious as Meet The Browns.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Meet the Browns Season Two a seven out of ten; it’s not quite as good as season one was, but season two will have plenty of good quality laughs in its own right.

Oh, the folks at the History Channel, always sending over new and exciting bits. And today they may well have topped themselves with the Vietnam in HD package, a copy of which they sent over for us to review.

Vietnam in HD is, pretty much, what the box says: the Vietnam War, in HD. It is, in fact, nearly indistinguishable from WWII In HD, which we just reviewed out here not too long ago. It’s made precisely the same way, with footage taken from home movies and the like and then updated in HD with a smattering of big names delivering narration. It’s about the same general concept, just a different time…but at the same time, there’s so much different between there and there, with different lines of thought, different priorities, and a different way of life.

The good part about this is that it’s going to be very, very inclusive. You’ll have some excellent stretches describing the buildup, and then a whole lot devoted to the war itself. Of course, some will say that the Navy and the Air Force are given short shrift here, but considering that this was primarily a jungle war, it’s pretty safe to say just why. There’s plenty here about Operation Rolling Thunder, though, so you’ve got a healthy chunk of the air war.

And indeed, there are plenty of big names involved in the narration here; names like Dean Cain, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Blair Underwood and James Marsden all make appearances as we get a deeply in-depth look at one of the most controversial military actions of the 20th century.

Basically, you’ll know pretty much going in just whether or not this will be any value for you or not. If you have any interest at all in the Vietnam War, or you enjoyed History’s earlier release of WWII In HD, then you should be in great company right here. This is prime candy for the war buff out there, and I’ll give fair odds that this is going to be showing up in some history classes in high schools, maybe even colleges, before it’s all said and done.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives Vietnam in HD a well-worthwhile eight out of ten. This may not be quite as extensive as the earlier WWII In HD, but it will more than definitely do the job. If you’re looking for a shot of incredibly in-depth war history, then you’ve got everything you need, and then some, right here.