The Cassandra Crossing / The Domino Principle Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.0

The Cassandra Crossing / The Domino Principle Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 4, 2014

The seventies are often perceived to be a decade of unbridled creativity in film, an era when a new generation of filmmaker eschewed the now largely dormant studio controlled system of production to craft more personal stories, often in rather idiosyncratic ways. However, any objective parsing of the decade’s releases more than proves that old ways die hard, and behemoth retreads were still being foisted on the paying public with great regularity. Shout! Factory has been releasing some interesting double features on Blu-ray over the past couple of years, with sometimes tangential connections between the two films. Their latest offering, pairing 1976’s The Cassandra Crossing with 1977’s The Domino Principle, is another kind of “strange bedfellows” duo, joined mostly due to their release year proximity as well as by the perhaps unintended fact that each of them attempts to revisit genres that had already been mined more effectively in previous (better) films. The Cassandra Crossing is a big budget, “all star” disaster movie which came along at a time when the disaster genre was already showing signs of precipitous decline. The Domino Principle is a paranoid political thriller that attempts to examine an all knowing, all seeing shadowy group of operatives that enlists unwilling assassins, and so is a throwback to all sorts of films like The Manchurian Candidate, The Conversation and The Parallax View. Both of these films have certain commendable aspects, though neither ever rises to any considerable level of greatness.

For reviews of both films in this set, please see their individual listings:

The Cassandra Crossing Blu- ray review

The Domino Principle Blu-ray review

The Cassandra Crossing / The Domino Principle Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Video quality of each release is addressed in the individual listings linked above.

The Cassandra Crossing / The Domino Principle Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Audio quality of each release is addressed in the individual listings linked above.

The Cassandra Crossing / The Domino Principle Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Supplementary material of each release is addressed in the individual listings linked above.

The Cassandra Crossing / The Domino Principle Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This is another rather odd pairing from Timeless Media Group, but there may be just enough interest here for some fans to warrant checking this out. Neither film included on this set is anything approaching a lost masterpiece, but there are some glimmers of excitement here and there, and both films offer some big names both in front of and behind the camera.