Page 24 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • July 30, 2014 DVD releases (continued from Restaurant page) combo pack include featurettes on the location filming and interior and exterior design of the ark. “The Ong Bak Trilogy” (Magnolia) is a compilation of the three tales comprising the story of Thai warrior Tien (Tony Jaa), a religious young man who swears an oath of peace. In “Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior,” a gangster steals the head of Ong-Bak, the deity of Tien’s village, and Tien heads for Bangkok to get it back. Action abounds, with Jaa performing his own incredible stunts. The second film is a prequel set hundreds of years in the past, showcasing ever more mesmerizing action stunts from Jaa. Seven elaborately choreographed set pieces deliver some terrific martial arts action. “Ong-Bak 3” is the most brutal of the films. Tien is captured and almost beaten to death before he is saved and brought back to his village. There, he is taught meditation and how to deal with his karma, but soon his arch rival, a fierce supernatural warrior named “Demon Crow,” returns to challenge Tien for a final duel. Jaa will remind viewers of Bruce Lee. His moves are sleek, panther-like, and clean, and he is smoothly elegant even in the fast-paced action sequences. Taken together, the three Ong-Bak movies have an epic feel. “Five Dances” (Wolfe Video) stars Broadway dancer Ryan Steele as Chip, a naive young dancer from Kansas who joins a small New York modern dance troupe and spends his days in a SoHo rehearsal studio. The movie meanders along, with Chip eventually falling in love with fellow dancer Theo (Reed Luplau), the ho-hum coming- of-age moment. The “five dances” of the title are brief sequences, each involving a different combination of danc- ers, all taking place in the same rehearsal studio. The music is dark and brooding and the choreography by Jonah Bokaer is intriguing initially, but eventually becomes repetitive. Steele is a superb dancer. The others pale in comparison and have sketchily written roles that relegate them to the background. With such exquisite dancing, it is a pity that writer/director Alan Brown did not provide a more solid script. I thought of “The Turning Point,” a film that exploited the backstabbing and jealousies of professional ballet in a riveting story with terrific acting (Shirley MacLaine, Anne Bancroft). “Five Dances” never approaches that level, but it does offer some expert dancing combined with melo- drama. “Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon” (Lionsgate) features a battle between man and beast. Dr. Travis Preston (Scott Adkins) is a crypto-zoologist, a scientist who tracks down animals thought to be extinct. He and his team travel to a remote region of China where the locals believe a primeval monster roams free and a merciless trophy hunter (Dolph Lundgren) has already set up camp. A race against time fol- lows for Travis and his team to capture the creature alive. The conflict here is the same as that in “The Thing from Another World” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Characters disagree about how to treat a real threat to human life: Scientists want to preserve and study it, while the non-scientists want to destroy it. The acting is sub-par and so is the script. Special features on the DVD release include interviews with Adkins and Lundgren and a making-of featurette.