Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES
II, III & IV • March 13, 2013 “The Falcon Mystery Movie Collection, Volume 2” (Warner Archive) contains six films featuring a character introduced in a 1940 magazine story as Gay Stanhope Falcon. R-K-O bought the screen rights, redrew the character as a refined, suave, English gentleman-detective with a weakness for beautiful women, and starred George Sanders in a series of four low-budget Falcon films before passing the role to his real-life brother Tom Conway, who stars in the half-dozen films -- made between 1944 and 1946 -- in this collection. A trademark gimmick of the Falcon series was to tack teaser epilogues onto the ends of films to keep interest in the series alive. Barbara Hale (Della Street of TV’s “Perry Mason”) stars in three of the films in the two-disc DVD collection. There are no extras. For fans of the walking dead, Kino Lorber has issued on Blu-ray two French films of the 1980s featuring Nazi zombies. “Oasis of the Zombies” is about a cache of German gold lost in the desert. That cache is sought by a group of students and protected by the walking dead. Director Jess Franco often undermines his grisly tale by stopping the action with long stretches of expositional dialogue. He incorporates a huge amount of stock footage and focuses on close-ups of the worm-eaten, shriveled undead, making this a sometimes gruesome, often talky exercise in horror exploitation movie making. “Zombie Lake” combines World War II, exploitation, the splatter film, and romantic melodrama. Written by Jess Franco, the film takes place in a French village where young women have been disappearing. The superstitious townsfolk blame the “Lake of Ghosts” because of its haunted past, and the mayor seems reluctant, or powerless, to take any action. Ultimately, a group of Resistance fighters confronts a troop of zombie Nazi soldiers, fresh from the grave, invading their town. Newly mastered in high definition from archival negatives, both films are in color, in French with English subtitles and English dubbed options, and contain original theatrical trailers.
DVD releases
(continued from Restaurant page) pictures usually favored a large city where monsters could wreak havoc on famous landmarks. In contrast to the lowbudget exploitation movies of the period that treated high school kids as juvenile delinquents, “The Blob” portrays young people as intelligent and active in solving the problem rather than simply standing, screaming, and waiting to be engulfed. Originally entitled “The Molten Meteor” and then “The Glob,” “The Blob” was shot in color and made outside Hollywood by an independent film distributor whose credits consisted mostly of religious and educational shorts. The title song was co-written by Burt Bacharach. Special features on the beautiful, digitally restored Bluray edition include two audio commentaries, a gallery of rare stills, posters, props (including the Blob), and a critical essay. “The Devil’s in the Details” (Image Entertainment) is about a deadly Mexican drug cartel and the lengths it will go to get what it wants. After serving a brutal tour of duty, veteran soldier Thomas Conrad (Joel Mathews) is looking forward to a peaceful life at home with his family. But a drug cartel’s ruthless enforcer has other plans for him. Thomas is kidnapped, tortured, and given an ultimatum: Help smuggle a fortune in drugs across the border or see his innocent wife and daughter killed. He must rely on former Navy SEAL Bruce Michaels (Ray Liotta) to bring an end to this nightmare. This is a routine action picture with far more gunfire and R-rated mayhem than characterization. The principal characters are strictly general-issue. Director Waymon Boone does have flair for explosions and non-stop action sequences, but after a few of these, they all run together. The only special feature is a behind-thescenes making-of featurette.