It’s Dawn of the Dead meets High Noon in the bloody, action-packed film The Dead and the Damned, on DVD wherever they are sold.

We have our winner for this scary movie giveaway with a Western twist. Ron O. is our winner, and he says, “The mere mention of the Dead and the Damned has gotten me into the Halloween spirit! It would be spooktacular to win and enjoy! Thanks!”

You are welcome Ron and we hope you get scared watching this movie and make sure you don’t watch it alone.

Hot on the trail of a renegade Apache warrior, gun-slinging bounty hunter Mortimer passes through an 1849 California gold rush town, where local miners direct him into the mountains to track his prey.

Following a ferocious battle, Mortimer triumphantly returns to town with his Indian captive in shackles … only to find themselves surrounded by a ravenous horde of the undead. Now the two enemies must band together if they are to escape the horrors of The Dead and the Damned!

The movie sounds like the perfect feature to be watching during the Halloween season. I just hope it is not too scary.

I’m beginning to really enjoy British television. In fact, I’m probably enjoying it a lot more than I should. But they’ve had some really good stuff of late, and the folks out at Acorn Media sent over what I’d hoped would be another entrant in the sweet British television lineup, Wired. Thankfully, despite a few hiccups, it would prove to be just that.

Wired follows a single mother who’s just managed a promotion at her bank in London, and then discovering that her “high net worth” position connects her to a whole lot of unexpected nastiness, like “crime syndicate” kind of nastiness. Now she’ll be up to her next with a group of killers who are looking for an in at a bank to help them move several million pounds sterling. And our single mother is looking pretty likely in this position indeed. But given that she could use a bit of extra cash herself, she’s not exactly against this plan…but it may well kill her by the end.

The British do drama exceedingly well. And the thing about that incredible dramatic skill is that it not only translates well to regular dramas with romantic comedy edges and the like, but also to full-on crime dramas, as anyone who’s seen Layer Cake, Snatch, or even Crank, sort of, can attest to. Wired is a surprisingly taut little crime thriller that’s not exactly going to have a lot of scary moments, but will do a fine job in the crime department. You’ll need to clear a good chunk of time for this one, though–fair warning–the run time on this one is 134 minutes, or about two and a quarter hours. But it’s two and a quarter exciting hours to this one’s credit–some more so than others–but still.

There are several good twists in there that make it well worth watching. It may actually surprise you to see how well this comes off, but one thing is quite clear–this is some impressive stuff. It’s hard to tell just what will happen next, and that’s one practical definition of “suspense”, something Wired does wonderfully. In fact, by the end, it will actually be tough to tell who’s really a good guy here, and who’s a complete jerk.

The Screenhead Ten Scale give Wired an eight out of ten–you’ve got to be interested in the subject matter (which has both business and criminal interests going on) to get anywhere with it, but once you prove your interest, you’ll do just fine here.

The Heart Specialist has hit the streets and is now available wherever DVDs are sold. I happen to have an extra copy of the DVD for a giveaway.

Smooth-talking lothario* Ray Howard (Brian J. White), a young Harvard Medical School graduate, arrives for his internship at a hospital in South Florida to pursue his ex-girlfriend Valerie (Grammy Award®-winner Mya) who can’t forgive his womanizing ways.

When his supervisor, Dr. Sidney Zachary (Wood Harris), discovers that Ray has put the moves on his own girlfriend, nurse Donna (Zoe Saldana), the two conspire with the rest of the hospital staff, patients, and friends to teach Ray a lesson—not just about medicine, but also about true love.

The Heart Specialist features stellar supporting performances from Marla Gibbs, Leon Robinson, Method Man, Thomas ‘Nephew Tommy’ Miles, Jasmine Guy, Scott Paulin, Kenneth Choi, Terrence J and comic legend Ed Asner.

*a man who obsessively seduces and deceives women

To enter the giveaway, post your name and we will pick the winner October 20, 2011.

Something special for you today, folks–you’re not going to be able to get hands on this one until Tuesday, so settle in with us so we can fill you in. We’ve got a movie called The Sylvian Experiments today, and the folks out at Lions Gate sent a copy over for us to review for you. And while this won’t be the best movie we’ve seen in a while, it’s going to represent something much more important, and still provide a worthwhile show in the process.

The Sylvian Experiments follows a neuron scientist and her husband who, while in the basement of an old hospital, find a 16 mm film print. And when they go to see what’s on it, they discover that someone was staging experiments into the Sylvian fissure of the human brain in a bid to access something called the “forbidden territory”, a realm between life and death. And now, the neuron scientist has decided to take up the gauntlet dropped with this 16 mm film print and begin her own exploratory surgery. Her guinea pigs of choice? Her own daughters.

It’s reasonable to assume that this will not end well. In fact, what caught me most by surprise on this one was the trailers before the movie began–a whole slew of old, like five or ten years old, Japanese horror flicks. It proved later just why all these old trailers were running; as it turns out, The Sylvian Experiments is a rare treat indeed, the resurgence of a line that I had thought long since dead: the Lions Gate J-horror importing system. For background’s sake, after The Grudge (the remake of the Japanese film Ju-On) hit theaters, there was a bit of a surge in Japanese horror. People wanted to see what else these guys could bring out, and so we got stuff like Infection, Isola, Premonition, St. John’s Wort, and a host of other titles under various banners going direct to video in the United States but having survived Japanese theaters.

As I discovered after watching several of these, there are really only two kinds of Japanese horror film: the bombastic, thundering nightmare with loads of kills and action, and the chatty, slow sludgefest. Most Japanese horror fits into one of these two, and this one falls into the chatty and slow pile, though admittedly, it does do a reasonably good job of building suspense. Thankfully, unlike many slow and chatty Japanese horror titles, it also has some moments in which that tension gets released. Not the best releases, of course–they’re very subtle in the normal Japanese style–but they’re still releases of tension all the same.

Still though, as someone who deeply missed the crap shoot that was Japanese horror importing, I was glad to see The Sylvian Experiments, and more than ready to give them a try. The end result could have been better, but it was still relatively welcome nonetheless.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Sylvian Experiments a seven out of ten–it’s not the best movie you’ll see, but if you’re a fan of subtlety in your horror, it’s definitely worth a rental if nothing else.

Screenhead is holding an online giveaway for Legend of Millennium Dragon. Anyone, who enters the giveaway, has a chance to be picked as the winner of the DVD/Blu-ray combo pack of the film.

The movie is about a spectacular journey of an unwilling young hero thrust into a mysterious past full of monsters, dragons and strange hidden powers. Through a series of out of this world battles and adventures, Jun, a shy middle school boy, is transformed into a hero destined to battle evil and ensure harmony and tranquility in the world.

To enter the giveaway, post your name and we will pick the winner October 18, 2011.

The song in the trailer is Miho Fukuhara’s “Starlight.”

When a new television series announces that it’s “from the team behind Arrested Development”, I get skeptical. After all, Arrested Development was easily one of my favorite shows, and anything trying to capitalize on that is a low blow. But then, when you get a former actor from Arrested Development, Will Arnett, otherwise known as Gob Bluth, to play the lead, well, now I don’t know whether to be amazed or skeptical. But that was what I was going to find out with Running Wilde: Season One, a copy of which the folks at Lions Gate sent out for review. And thankfully, my skepticism was wholly unwarranted, because this is some terrifically funny stuff.

Running Wilde follows Steve Wilde, self-centered rich dullard, who’s decided to try and recover his childhood sweetheart’s affection. Trouble is, said childhood sweetheart is a dirt-poor econaut out to save the world who’s sufficiently econaut to name her daughter Puddle. Oh, and did I mention old Steve’s family made their fortune in oil? That’s going to be quite the comic mismatch, or so the series hopes.

The thing about Running Wilde is that it only lasted thirteen episodes, and on Fox, the network that was dumb enough to shut down Arrested Development in the first place. And frankly, Running Wilde will be every inch as hilarious as Arrested Development, largely because of the Arrested Development alums involved here. It’s not just Will Arnett, but also David Cross (the former never-nude Dr. Tobias Funke) shows up. The sheer amount of great comedy here, in the grandest Arrested Development tradition, is enough to get anybody interested. Frankly, I laughed on a variety of occasions, and when a DVD makes me laugh, I know it’s going to be a big deal indeed.

It’s a shame it didn’t last longer, and I can only hope that this will one day get the Futurama treatment and be brought back elsewhere. It’s probably the closest thing you’re going to get to new episodes of Arrested Development. There are more than enough wild situations here that revolve around Steve’s relative naivete and his massive ego despite same to make most anyone laugh. David Cross and Will Arnett’s interactions are also terrific fun.

The Screenhead Ten Scale can hardly believe it’s doing this, but for the second time this week, Running Wilde gets a full ten out of ten. It’s simply too funny to pass up.

It’s a dark sign when a movie’s heroine is unsympathetic, and that’s just what we’re going to get with Vlog. But the dark sign will prove overwhelmed by some truly impressive twists and turns. Plus, Vlog is so new you won’t even be able to find it in video stores until next Tuesday, so brace yourselves, because this is going to be interesting. The folks out at Anchor Bay sent a copy over for us ahead of release, and the end result is going to be interesting to say the least.

Vlog follows Brooke Marks, video blogger–or vlogger, if you prefer–who’s got a pretty nasty stalker problem. See, Brooke’s made a lot of enemies with her vlog–she sort of got into this “queen of mean” vibe and never let it go. And as a result, someone significantly worse that Brooke decided he was going to go on a rampage, targeting five people who showed up on her various vlogs. But there’s more going on here than you might initially think.

See, the weird part is, I mean that. This movie has a run time of around seventy minutes. It’s going to be quick and very, very dirty. In, out, blam. And that means that not a single minute can be wasted. Thankfully, not a single minute is. It’s a little rough, so for those of you who don’t like the gore, you may want to stay away. There will be a lot of splatter going on here, but most of it is quite relevant to the plot. Plot-relevant splatter is about the same as plot-relevant nudity; not just some titillation, but a genuine component of story telling.

The last ten minutes will have about three or four different twists to them that should really catch you by surprise. And what’s really great about this movie is that you go in thinking its some kind of “message movie” like Megan Is Missing was. Great, somebody with a soapbox wants to tell the kids at home not to put up personal information online. But then what you’ve got turns out to be significantly more than that, and the surprise alone makes Vlog well worth the watching.

Granted, repeat viewings may not work out too well here, given that once you know the twist there’s not much more of a surprise to it, but still, that first watch should be pretty awesome in its own right.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Vlog a full ten out of ten for putting on a short sharp shocker of a production and doing a whole lot with very little.

This poster of Tom Cruise, returning as Ethan Hunt in Paramount Pictures’ Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, shoots me off the planet.

As the fourth installment of the hugely successful spy series, it is going to be big. So big, in fact, they had to shoot it in IMAX. Director Brad Bird (Finding Nemo, Incredibles) had Cruise hanging off the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world in Dubai. I am thinking the perspective on the poster is vertigo-inducing. Wow! I can’t wait until I see it projected seven-stories high in the IMAX Theater.

Ghost Protocol will open everywhere on December 21, 2011, but it will screen early on select IMAX screens on December 16.

The folks out at the History Channel sent over a chunk of American history that’s pretty much one of the biggest there is. It’s called Lee & Grant, and for Civil War buffs, there’s not going to be a whole lot bigger than that. But as it will turn out, these two titans of American military action will have a whole lot more going on than you might have expected.

Lee & Grant won’t be focusing so much on the Civil War as a whole, but rather on the two commanders of the Union and Confederate armies. Their early lives, their educations, their religious perspectives, and suchlike will be brought up, interspersed between each other. The differences between the two are surprisingly stark, and will be explored throughout the presentation.

They’re going to go into some truly incredible detail on this one, though you can pretty much expect that from most anything the History Channel brings out. It’s actually very surprising; as a regular reader of Harry Turtledove and a frequent student since the eighties, well, I think I’ve heard a lot about the Civil War, and there were plenty of things I never heard of here.

There are also a series of graphic sequences, displaying both maps and troop movements across said maps, showing you what was going on in the major battlefields of history. Plus, there’s even some truly top-notch narration by Jonathan Frakes, as well as a series of short commentaries by a variety of experts in the field.

Obviously, if you don’t have any interest in the Civil War, then most of this will be lost on you and you probably won’t have any interest in getting your hands on it any which way. But if you do have that interest, if you do follow the only civil war the United States has ever had (which is why the capital letters and the word “the” comes into play in conjunction with it so often), then you’re definitely going to enjoy this. As an educational tool, it will be impressive, and if high school history classes aren’t using this in some way then, frankly, I say they’re missing out. Still though, for most folks, Lee & Grant may not be sufficient enough to compel a watching.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Lee & Grant a seven out of ten–while it’s  a very niche product the History Channel has put on, and won’t be for everyone, those who do give this one a run will find a very orderly, very well put together piece of surprisingly watchable documentary-style television on DVD.

Trainees, start your engines! Preschoolers from coast-to-coast will get on the fast-track to fun and learning with “The Chugger Championship”! The newest “winner” in the “Chuggington” DVD series from Anchor Bay Entertainment, “The Chugger Championship” hits retail stores nationwide on October 11, 2011. Screenhead is giving one a way!

A colorful and contemporary CGI-animated TV series encourages early social readiness skills, “Chuggington” follows the amusing escapades of three young trainees, Wilson, Brewster and Koko, as they learn to “ride the rails” of life and become productive chuggers. The exciting train property for preschoolers airs daily on Disney Junior, Disney Channel’s programming block designed for kids ages 2-7 and their families.

In “The Chugger Championship,” the traintastic trio is ready to put their “wheels to the rails” for the biggest race in Chuggington! These six, action-packed adventures will have your kids cheering. Young fans join Wilson, Brewster and Koko as they prepare for a test, invent a new contest and pick up a fun hobby, while learning about the importance of accountability and responsibility. Along the way, the three friends – and viewers at home – discover that a true champion isn’t always the one who finishes first! Boy that is a tough one to learn.

“The Chugger Championship” is the newest addition to Anchor Bay Entertainment’s “Chuggington” DVD collection, which also includes “Chuggers to the Rescue,” “It’s Training Time” and “Let’s Ride the Rails.”

To enter the giveaway, post your name and I will pick the winner October 11, 2010.