Alien Anthology

Well it's taken some doing but I've finally finished watching the Alien Anthology box set, the Alien series has always been a favorite of mine and as soon as I heard the movies were going to receive a Blu-ray release I just knew I'd be buying these movies yet again, as it turned out I wound up buying the Blu-rays twice.

As I have done before whenever there has been some sort of limited edition Alien release that has been the version I bought and that was what I did this time as well, I got the box set home and my wife actually said that it seemed like a shame to open it, Fiona never says things like that so I was straight online to see if I could get the regular box set cheap anywhere and it wasn't long before another Alien Anthology was winging it's way to my house.

The movies themselves all look and sound fantastic, thankfully 20th Century Fox did the right thing with these movies and didn't attempt to remove all the film grain with excessive noise reduction, there have been some well publicised failures at doing this that have left characters in various films looking like they were made of wax in some scenes, perhaps since the directors of the Alien movies ( well three of them anyway ) are pretty big names in Hollywood it was though best not to get on their bad side.

The sheer volume of special features that accompany the movies is impressive, in the past the Alien Legacy and later the Alien Quadrilogy box sets set the standard by which other DVD box sets were compared for some time to follow and that would seem to be the case again, it is worth noting that the special features are only presented in standard definition but there are a lot of them and also neither of the Alien vs Predator movies are included in this set.

If you are a fan of the Alien series then the Alien Anthology is thus far the definitive Alien collection and in my opinion well worth the upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray.


 

Robocop: The Animated Series

I finally after all these years picked up a DVD with six episodes of Robocop: The Animated series on it, I'm not sure what I was expecting but actually it wasn't too bad for a children's cartoon, some of the animation looks a bit primitive by today's standards but there was some fun to be had, I wouldn't mind seeing the rest of the series one day.

From what I hear there was another Robocop animated series called Robocop: Alpha Commando and that should be avoided at all costs.

The Omen

I've been watching all The Omen films over the last few days, the original film is a classic, the rest of them not so much, thankfully the original series stopped after the fourth film which was intended to be the first in a series of TV movies but thanks to poor ratings ( and to all of you who didn't watch it THANK YOU ! ) it never got any further than the first TV movie.


 

The Omen ( 2006 )

I'm a big fan of Richard Donner's The Omen, it's one of the very few occult thrillers of that type that I don't find extremely silly and I can remember being more than a little annoyed when the remake was announced years ago.

Time passed and the film was completed and released and from what I heard it was terrible, four years after it's release I've finally seen the remake and it was nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be, it was uninspired and workman like completely lacking any of the subtlety of the original movie but it's not terrible as such.

Any viewer would be far better served seeking out the original version of The Omen and if they must see this movie try and catch it on TV, it's not worth spending money to see it but I guess it will pass a bit of time, as remakes go it could have been much worse.

Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda

Over the last couple of days I've watched the first eight episodes of the first season of Andromeda, it was a show I was interested in seeing but other than the first two episodes which were released on VHS to rent I'd never seen any of the show, like many TV series over the years those opening episodes were nothing special but I assumed it must get better as the series went on.

The only things I'd really heard about Andromeda was how bad it was and honestly I think that is undeserved, this so far at least has been a fun show, true it doesn't look like it will become a classic science fiction series like Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Farscape ( although it has often reminded me of the first season of Farscape ) but I have been enjoying watching a space opera that is fun for a change rather than grim and depressing.

I think Paramount really dropped the ball by not purchasing this idea and developing it as a Star Trek series instead of Voyager, that could have done a lot to relieve the franchise fatigue that Star Trek suffered in it's last few years on television and lets be honest change a few names and you have a series set in the Star Trek universe, I don't know if that was Gene Roddenberry's intention but the idea of the crew of the last Federation starship trying to restore the Federation would've worked for me.

The Abandoned

I won this movie as part of a bulk lot of DVDs on eBay but because of it's publisher who usually releases poor quality extremely low budget movies I just hadn't bothered watching it and as it turns out that was a mistake.

This was obviously a fairly low budget movie but it's producers make the most of what they had and they also made excellent use of sound.

The Abandoned isn't the typical Hollywood gore fest that most modern horror movies seem to have become, while I'm not entirely sure what was happening all of the time ( which invites a re watch ) I think I have a pretty good handle on the basic scenario.

How nice it is to see a horror movie that with an actual story that will cause the viewer to think about what he / she has seen.

The Killer

Once again I just don't get what the fuss is all about when it comes to a lot of the collaborations between John Woo and Chow Yun Fat.

The storyline for this movie was fine but the execution was terrible, I'm still not sure if some of those action sequences were supposed to be funny but for me this just isn't a good film, I believe it's pretty well regarded but I just don't get it.

To 3D or Not 3D

I have a 3D Plasma TV, I bought it because it was a nice TV not because it was 3D, I have one 3D title on Blu-ray Coraline which they apparently screwed up when it come to encoding the 3D content ( well that's what the reviews say ) so I've only ever watched the 2D version as a result I haven't had the opportunity to properly try out a movie in 3D although Panasonic are supposed to be sending me Avatar in 3D on Blu-ray which should be interesting viewing.

I also own a PS3 and I've now picked up a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops which has support for 3D so I thought I'd give it a try and it works well enough but really it adds nothing to the game play, yes there is a marginally greater sense of depth to the picture but that was about it, it certainly wasn't worth putting up with the stupid 3D glasses to play the game so by the time I'd gotten to the end of the first section of the game I'd turned off 3D and continued playing as normal.

Apparently this year there is going to be a big push into 3D gaming but it seems that just like 3D in movies it's set to become an annoying gimmick, personally I'd prefer to see software developers make good games instead of 3D games or at least come up with a way to make 3D an innovative part of the game play.

For what it's worth even without the 3D Call of Duty: Black Ops seems like it is going to be a fun game.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie

I hated this movie when I first saw it, yes it had a big budget and looked spectacular but it was so diluted and Americanised ( sorry but it's true ) I was devastated, it could've / should've been great.

I was told recently that gets better with a second viewing - it doesn't !, after 5 minutes I was getting angry and after 10 minutes I wanted to hurt things.

One to avoid of if you must watch it turn the volume down and just look at the pretty images.

V Returns

Well I've just finished watching the season 2 premiere of V and there was some interesting things going on, we get a look at the Visitors true form, an insight into their plans for Earth, the suggestion that Erica's son might be an alien hybrid ( I'm thinking this is a red herring ) but it was the last minute or so of this episode that was truly cool with Jane Badler as Diana.

I've read online that this episode was a ratings disappointment so it looks like this show may not survive past it's second season, I hope that's not the case but I fear the producers won't be able to maintain the momentum that was established in this episode anyway.

V  is a show with a lot of potential, hopefully it will at least live up to some of it.

The Exorcist ( The Version I'd Never Seen )

Last night I finally watched The Exorcist ( The Version You've Never Seen ), I've never been a huge fan of the Exorcist films, I find most of those type of occult thrillers to be pretty silly but I did always intend to watch the re cut version of the movie.

Well it was better than I remembered but honestly it still wasn't what I'd call a great movie and now I've finally seen the infamous spider walk scene and I'm not sure what all the fuss was about.

I don't know if I'll bother re-watching the rest of the Exorcist movies, I enjoyed the prequel Dominion a lot and this was OK, from what I remember Exorcist 2 was pretty stupid but Exorcist 3 was decent, I really don't remember much about Renny Harlin's alternate prequel which I guess says a lot in itself.

The Exorcist ( The Version You've Never Seen ) wasn't a bad movie I guess but it's also not a movie I could recommend either.


 

To watch pile is actually shrinking ( slightly )

Well I've been more of a couch potato than usual - it must be something to do with the new TV, I 've recently watched R-Point which was a fun little supernatural mystery from Korea, Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend, Invasion which was the latest version of Invasion of the Body snatchers and far better than I was expecting even if they wimped out on the ending and the mini-series based on Stephen King's novel The Stand.

They were all pretty decent but sadly I still find a documentary about Bruce Lee far more interesting than most of his movies and this one wasn't what could be called in depth or particularly revealing merely ok.