If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a hooker, and thought that Pretty Woman was a ridiculous farce, you’ll do quite a bit better with X. The folks out at IFC sent over a copy of X for us to review, and though, in the beginning, it’ll start a little weird and rocky, the main plot will get going soon enough.

X follows a couple of hookers–one a cynical veteran and the other a relative newcomer–who find themselves working a profitable threesome together one night when their john is abruptly shot in a business deal gone wrong. The rest of the night will be a downright disaster for these two women, and you’ll be there right along side them.

First off, folks, keep the kids way, way far away from this one unless you like the thought of having a whole lot of explaining to do. The first five minutes will be largely comprised of a bizarre sex performance to an audience of a roomful of well-heeled middle aged ladies. The poster alone shows you what’s going on here.

X isn’t the normal kind of thing we’ve seen from the IFC of late–this is no horror flick, in no uncertain terms–it’s a thriller with a few good elements of crime drama mixed in there. Though the content is deeply adult in nature, it’s still well worth the watch if for no other reason than it’s very deep and well put together. Gritty is this film’s second nature, and it’s going to put on the best gritty show it can. A movie so hard boiled it makes Easter eggs look like omelettes by comparison, X brings drama and thrills to the proceedings in a thoroughly believable–and thoroughly authentic–fashion. It’s believable, and that’s the best part about the whole thing. Can I say it’s absolutely authentic? No, I’ve never been a hooker. But I can believe this is what it would look like. I can believe this because X is a stark, but sharp, little thriller that will do a nice job of keeping your attention quite thoroughly riveted, and that’s quite good enough by me. It should be good enough for you too.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this gritty package of authentic thriller with just a pinch of crime drama thrown in an eight out of ten–this one is going to be terrific for anyone who likes your standard British crime drama, as well as most anyone else with a taste for action and thriller.

You ever been to a family reunion? They can be fun, but they can also be downright nerve wracking. And the family reunion we’ll get in The Inheritance, a copy of which the folks out at Image Entertainment sent for us to review, will be just plain old deadly.

The Inheritance follows a group of five cousins, out to have a family reunion. But this family reunion follows tragedy–the cousins are out to secure their legacy as well, a family fortune that goes back centuries. Their uncle Melvin welcomes them, but warns them that they must respect the family traditions. But what that means takes on a new and sinister life as the cousins vanish, one by one. Soon they learn the truth behind not only those “family traditions” uncle Melvin mentioned, but also the truth behind their entire family, as well as the inheritance they all so deeply prize.

The Inheritance isn’t exactly long on the comprehensible, but that’s almost okay given how they’ve set this up. The lack of much in the way of a coherent plotline plays into its hands nicely as we find that we’re just as confused as the flock of cousins who finds themselves neck deep in a horror they are as ill-prepared for as they are understanding of.  Something weird is going on, it’s probably going to kill them, and we’re not a hundred percent sure just why it’s going on.

The only real downside to this approach, though, is that they’re not going to do a whole lot to clear up the confusion, even up to the very end.  The Inheritance is somewhat puzzling in this sense, even though they’re reasonably straightforward about it, and the ending leaves a few more questions than it actually answers.

But still, taken as a whole, The Inheritance really isn’t half bad, and will do a decent job of putting on a worthwhile, scary show. Sure, if you look at it really close it’ll all kind of fall apart into some strange metaphysical mush, but if you leave it be and just accept what’s going on, well, it’ll still fall apart, especially at the end, but by then you’ll be reasonably satisfied anyway.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Inheritance a six out of ten. This decent effort didn’t succeed on every front, but managed to keep things interesting for the most part. There’s a difference between good and good enough, and The Inheritance shows that off plainly.

Seems like a lot of movies are kicking off with disclaimers lately. This time we get “This film contains scenes with very large, very loud 3-D creatures, which may not be suitable for younger viewers. Parental discretion is advised.” We’re talking today about Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia, which the folks out at Image Entertainment sent out for me to review.

Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia is about exactly that: dinosaurs. We’ll follow their history, their evolution, and their eventual extinction as best regular people can piece it together. And of course, we’ll be doing it in mind-blowing 3D.

A word about that before we carry on into the movie itself–everything about this movie screams. More specifically, it screams both “big” and “loud”. This was originally geared toward IMAX presentations, but it’s been scaled down, just a bit, for our consumption. Naturally, this means that things will be very loud, and things will go flying at your monitor, sometimes screeching at you.

When we went diving into Panthalassa, I jumped just a bit. It was definitely a surprise, and worth watching.

But despite the big nature of what we’re watching here, there will be more than a few problems. Frankly, Donald Sutherland is hit or miss as a narrator–sometimes he’s downright compelling, and sometimes he sounds like he’s just so sick and tired of reading this script that he just wants someone to cut his check so he can get out of there. And backup narrator Dr. Rodolfo Coria  occasionally manages to sound like a man reading a script at gunpoint.

As for the graphics themselves, which are substantial portions of the movie (after all, they’re not going to get actual dinosaurs to play this) are no Jurassic Park, and Jurassic Park was around about fifteen, twenty years ago. It’s a dark sign that a big 3D movie actually features less believable dinosauria than a twenty year old adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel could pull off.

Oh, and one more thing–this has a total run time of forty minutes. It’s a little bit short, in all honesty, and though it’s certainly taking full advantage of 3D capability, it’s not putting up a whole lot in general.

If you’ve got kids who are dinosaur enthusiasts, you might do well here, especially if you have the proper home theater system to handle the 3D and the incredible soundtrack. Otherwise, you’ll likely want to skip this one.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia a five out of ten. It’s good, and for a variety of reasons, but there are entirely too many conditions to meet for many people to actually be able to enjoy this. You need the right components and the right audience in order to get the most out of it, and movies that come with strings attached just can’t get that much of a recommendation. Still though, if you’ve got the hardware, or something near it, it will make a decent rental.

Hey Mad Men fans! Have we got a doozy for you today! The folks out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of Mad Men Season Four for us to review, and you bet that’s just what we’re going to do.

Who is Don Draper? That’s the question that leads off season four, and it’s going to follow along those lines for most of the season. Don’s dealing with a nasty divorce at home, and a whole lot of competition out at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. In fact, things aren’t looking very good at all. But with Don’s personal life buckling, and showing through several missteps in his work life, he’s going to have to pull it all together and get it all back on track. And even in the midst of a field of disaster, it gives us all hope to know that the answer to the lead-in question is, simply: “He’s Don Draper, that’s who Don Draper is.”

It’s hard to watch a man truly in the  midst of disaster try his best to overcome it. Even a force of nature like Don Draper would be hard pressed to deal with the sheer amount of nightmare that’s been flooding his way, and season four will throw it at him hard and fast. For anyone hoping for an improvement over the misogyny, however, you won’t be getting much in the way of that, which is a shame, but not so much the point. This is an office environment in the late fifties / early sixties, and is at least coming close to authentic. Not that I lived through the fifties and sixties, mind you, but there’s secondary research that does the job, and that’s good enough for a series about a fifties-era ad agency.

And yes, just in case you’re wondering, there will still be crateloads of booze involved in this, with it frequently involved in set pieces, and it regularly figuring into the plot as well. The DVD set even includes three recipes for drinks, including a Manhattan, a Tom Collins, and an Old Fashioned. Plus, you’ll get a variety of featurettes serving as supplement to what’s going on here, making the fourth season box set a shockingly complete value.

But aside from that, the fourth season is clearly the most exciting yet, and well worth watching assuming you haven’t already seen it during its original AMC run.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Mad Men Season Four an eight out of ten for putting out a very good quality show that seems to only get better as time goes on. The added value of the extra features is merely icing on the cake.

When a DVD series kicks off its presentation with “Much of what you are about to see and here is graphic in nature, and may be disturbing to sensitive viewers”, you know you’re in for something that won’t leave you watching the clock. That’s just what we’ll get with The Third Reich, a copy of which the folks out at the History Channel sent out our way to review.

The Third Reich comes in a two disc package, taking up about three hours total. And in it, you’ll get two sides on those discs: The Rise, and then, The Fall. It will follow the German people, using their own film footage, as they found themselves in the midst of a horror partly of their own creation, asking questions that seldom get asked, like how and why a society would hand over power to a man like Adolf Hitler. And when you discover these answers–and while you discover them too–you will find they’re significantly more disturbing…and plausible…than you ever thought.

This is not the normal dose of History Channel–you won’t see a whole lot of one lone man screeching in German to crowds of adulating followers. What you will see is a lot of things you probably haven’t seen before. Some of what you’ll see is actually illegal to show in Germany, which is even more compelling.

And compelling really is the best way to describe these proceedings–downright frightful things will happen right in front of you. The whole thing looks like a train wreck that you can’t stop staring at, a train wreck you’ve seen before yet you know there’s no way to stop. And yet, viewed in this light, suddenly the whole Nazi regime makes a kind of dark, horrible sense. Looking at starving people living in the midst of horror makes it understandable–though not condonable–that they would turn to the direction they did.

You will see things here that are not only new, but alarming. You will see bodies in the streets, desperate people, small children surrounded by horror and all around it the darkly-tinged, comparative mania of people actually living a normal life, complete with dance contests and scenes from carnivals. They even have a term for it: howling with the wolves.

It’s dark, it’s terrifying, it’s scarier than most horror movies you’ll see in recent memory, and it’s all true. This is the power and the terror that is The Third Reich, and the History Channel has really knocked it out of the park with this one.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Third Reich a ten out of ten for being probably the most unique, and most disturbing, presentation the History Channel has put on to date.

You’ve got to hand it to Wan and Whannell–the two guys who managed to turn a short film about a guy who kills people to show them how valuable their lives are into an actual film career–they do know how to make a movie that scares you. The problem, of course, is that they don’t make a good scary movie. There’s an important distinction, and one that comes up very nicely in Insidious, opening in theaters today.

Insidious follows a young family who’s just moved into a new home when, following a short fall off a ladder, their young son turns up comatose. Baffled, the family exhausts most every medical explanation imaginable…until they discover that what’s truly wrong with their boy has nothing at all to do with medicine, but rather with a mysterious realm jam-packed with rotting ghouls and a guy who looks almost exactly like Darth Maul from the Star Wars prequels. Anyway, all these assorted ghouls and vague copyright hassles are eying the little comatose boy like people in the desert eye a bottle of water, and are thus all out to get hold of the boy so they can get another go-round on this big spinning planet of love, to borrow from the Brian Setzer song. Will they manage to save their little boy–and themselves–from the horrors arrayed around them?

If you’ve seen Dead Silence, Wan and Whannell’s earlier–and frankly, better–effort, you’ll have a good idea of what you’ll be seeing here, lots and lots of madly grinning horrors that do manage to at least put the frighteners into you by virtue of their sheer manic joviality. You get the feeling that you don’t at all like what’s got them grinning, and that’s what they’re after.

The problem here, is that while there will be plenty of good old fashioned jump scares and things popping up and screaming super loud (seriously, I could hear speakers rattling in some points), the plot is spectacularly thin. Look at it closely and all of a sudden it dissolves into a cloud of “Really?” and “You expect us to believe…?” But if you stick close to the surface, don’t kick the tires really hard, and just let it go about its business you’ll find a reasonably competent thriller that has all the great taste–not to mention long-term satisfaction–of a big bag of cotton candy. It’s the movie equivalent of cotton candy with speakers, and extra loud ones at that.

Still though, for those who like a movie with plenty of jump scares and lots of big uglies popping out from around corners waving their arms and shrieking “booga booga”, well, Insidious will serve you well. Very well, in fact. It’s terrifying.

Just don’t look for it to be scary more than ten minutes after you leave the theater.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Insidious a seven out of ten. It’s short on long term satisfaction, but if you like a movie that makes you jump and possibly scream a little in a crowded theater, well, you’ve got all you need right here.

I have to admit, when I first got hands on Dark Fields from Entertainment One, who sent out a copy for me to review, I was skeptical. It reminded me of a movie I’d seen years prior, called Slash, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s seeing a movie that I’ve already seen. But thankfully, my early opinion was quickly turned around, and I got a look at what Dark Fields really was.

Dark Fields takes us out to the little town of Perseverance, a largely farming community that’s seen better days. Not to mention wetter days–Perseverance is in the middle of a drought. So they turn where farming communities in horror movies have traditionally turned in drought–not to prayer, or cloud seeding, but to human sacrifice.  And when this starts a series of horrors for the residents of Perseverance, ending in a mysterious affliction for one of their residents, they’re going to have to do something even they didn’t think they’d have to do, and for people willing to kill people for rain, you know it’s got to be pretty bad.

Dark Fields is, not to put too fine a point on it, deliciously creepy stuff. It’s a whole lot more ominous than you might expect, largely owing to the fact that, most of the time, there’s a thunderstorm going on somewhere in the background. There’s nothing more creepy than a thunderstorm, I say; the great punch that is nature running amok in the background, when at any time a bolt of pure electricity might slice down from on high and incinerate anything it happens to touch. And then follow it up with a scream of primal triumph in a rumble of thunder.

It does suffer a bit under the weight of its own ambition; Dark Fields weighs in at right around two hours, and it really didn’t need that much runtime. There’s a lot of superfluous extra stuff that easily could have been dropped off here, as well as plenty of bits that I wonder why they even made it in in the first place.

That’s the worst of it, frankly–it’s deliciously creepy in its opening minutes, but it spends so much time on pointless superfluities that it ends up killing the very buzz that it helped to create. It wears out its own welcome after a while, and frankly, that’s a shame. That’s a profoundly deep shame. Because this was some great stuff when it got started; I only wish it could have held on and been good all the way to the end.

Speaking of which, the ending will kind of boil off into this strange block of nonsense–if you look at it too closely, like I did, you’ll break down and start screaming at your television about how preposterous the whole thing is.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Dark Fields a six out of ten. It started out great, but just couldn’t hold on to that initial creepy long enough to finish the job. And that’s a shame, too, because this was some pretty good stuff. At least, halfway good stuff.

Take one part Rambo, one part Deliverance, and one part Hostel, and what do you get? Wait–don’t answer. Because I haven’t told you the weirdest part: the mixing bowl in which we blend our disparate ingredients is no less than the IFC, who sent out this baffling amalgam they’re calling Shadow for me to review.

Shadow follows David, a young Iraq War veteran who’s out biking in Europe following his successful return from duty. He’s having a nice time of it, cruising the trails, meeting attractive French girls, and so on. At least until a run-in at a bar with a couple of hunters makes him a couple of bad enemies. They tail David in a bid to get some revenge, and in the process, find themselves squarely in the clutches of an emaciated lunatic who embarks on a series of bizarre, clinical tortures on his newfound victims. Will David get out alive, with or without the hunters in tow?

There’s an old saying, and The Incredibles did it first–”when everybody’s super, no one is”–and that, oddly, actually applies here. We’ve got a combat veteran going up against a pair of gun-toting wackadoos who all find themselves in the clutches of a pure-on nightmare. This should all be quite awesome, but it ends up playing against itself, almost, and yielding a good first half, but a significantly slower second half that has a tendency to devolve into torture porn, complete with occasional toad licking sessions.

I never thought I’d be accusing the IFC, of all places, of putting out torture porn, but that’s a fair assessment of what we’re looking at here. I will, however, give them plenty of due credit for using that weak space as a great setup for a last half hour full of twists, betrayals and surprises, and call it a vast improvement.

There will even be a reasonably satisfying twist ending here, in the general hallmark of the IFC.  So yes, Shadow has its rough patches, but it will still do a very solid job in the end. If it weren’t for about the ten minutes or so in the middle of all this, it might have been even better.

Still though, I can allow for a misstep or two from otherwise top-notch IFC, and it just serves to remind us that no one wins them all, not even great companies like this.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Shadow a six out of ten. It’s a good idea, and it’s executed mostly well, but not without a few problems that get in the way of enjoying it. Still, it’s mostly a good time, and should make a worthwhile rental, if nothing else.

This is something of a tough piece to write, folks. Last year you got a taste of the After Dark Horrorfest, and there have been fully three years’ worth before that. But now, the Horrorfest has…well…kind of dissolved. And what it’s been replaced with is a little dismaying. Will we still get the quality movies we’re used to? Or will change deprive us of sweet horror? Today we start out find out with Prowl, a copy of which the folks out at Lions Gate sent over for us to review.

Prowl follows Amber, a small town girl who, like a lot of small town girls, is tired of the small town life, and thus convinces her friends to pack it up and join her in the big city. When their car breaks down midway there, they’re only too happy to get a ride from a stranger in a semi. But when they discover what this trucker’s carrying–a cargo full of blood–their trip quickly turns even darker than they’d thought it would.

Considering that about half the slate of so-called “After Dark Originals” will wind up on the SyFy Channel before they hit video, you might be worried. In the case of Prowl, however, your worries are quite  unfounded.

It’s not the most original thing about the After Dark series–you might just as well choose to call Prowl The Midnight Meat Semi–but it’s still done in an interesting and engrossing fashion that does manage to keep you entertained. And that’s what the After Dark Horrorfest always did best, keep you entertained.

Even better, Prowl represents a comparative rarity, for both the After Dark series and movies in general–a good vampire movie. See, After Dark’s last vampire movie, The Hamiltons, was awful. But this one was definitely much better. It uses the “subhuman monster” vampire instead of the “preening master of the food chain” vampire, and I personally find that makes it a lot more accessible.

And yes, like the best After Dark titles, this one has a nice twist ending that you will really only see coming in retrospect. At least, that was my feeling on it.

Either way, though, if Prowl is representative of what we’ll be getting from this year’s After Dark supply, then I don’t care if it shows up on Lifetime, we’ll still be getting good quality stuff.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives a respectful eight out of ten to Prowl, the movie that defied the odds and made me believe again by virtue of its sheer potency and impressive action.

Speaking here as an artist–and no matter what anyone tells you, writing is an art (even if it is perhaps the most craftsman-like of the art forms, and certainly among the least romantic)–I actually had a lot of respect for what was going on in Step Off, a copy of which the folks out at Lions Gate sent over for me to review. Art is not easy, and it’s seldom kind. But for those willing to stick with it through the thin times, you’ll discover a whole new realm of possibility. And Step Off might be one of the most inspirational movies of its variety for an artist, even if the premise is tired.

Step Off follows Rippa, a collegiate music producer who’s been trying to break into the big time. He’s got lots of problems in front of him–a student loan demanding payment, his baby’s mother constantly demanding payment, industry backbiting, theft, and even some infighting on top of it. But Rippa’s got a lot of heart, and he’s going to struggle his way through in a bid to get to the top.

See what I mean? Horatio Alger is spinning in his grave to know people are still pulling chunks of his work and putting them in whole new settings, but that doesn’t make the proceedings that much less inspirational. Admittedly, we’ve seen this before. Not quite in this fashion, but we’ve seen this before. However, cliches are cliches for a reason: their sheer accuracy. And watching Rippa and his cohorts struggle through their various issues gives all the young artists out there a little extra punch into their own artistic endeavors.

A story in which the new guy shows up, tears up the metaphorical pea patch and then becomes king of the universe isn’t much of a story at all. But a story where a new guy fights his way through a horde of troubles and then makes it big after seeing the bottom of the barrel and tearing his way up through the side of the barrel is a much more satisfying experience.

And yes, despite the cliched nature of Step Off, we’ve got a reasonably inspirational and fairly satisfying experience here. That was more than I expected going in, to be honest, but this came out nicely. There will even be some funny bits, as Rippa leases out his studio to some rappers who look very much like American Idol rejects along with a couple who can’t rap unless they smoke some weed first, and of course, some of Rippa’s competitors as he fights his way to the top of the rap game are interesting enough–you’ll enjoy the Beat Priest and Enigma especially.

The Screenhead Ten Scale rewards a job well done and hands Step Off, a  moderately satisfying performance, a seven out of ten for doing a passable job with relatively mediocre source materials. That this even worked at all is something of a minor miracle.