This Tuesday brings one of the most critically and commercially successful movie franchises of all time to Blu-ray: Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures. At once a loving homage to the pulp adventures of the 1930's and 1940's and a full-throated embodiment of those features, the Indiana Jones series showcases Spielberg at his most formally playful; he uses his prodigious gifts as a director to craft what are, essentially, peerless rollercoaster rides. The first three films rank among the all-time greats; the fourth film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, is...less impressive. Still, taken together the four features represent a key moment in the evolution of screen blockbusters.
Paramount Home Media has orchestrated a grand HD rollout for the titles, which Martin Liebman calls, "filmmaking brilliance...the series represents all there is to love about the movies, evident in every frame, each crack of that whip, and all of Indy's smirks that light up the screen like no character ever has before...The Indiana Jones films represent cinema magic, high adventure, escapist entertainment, balanced humor, dramatic intrigue, and emotional depth all at once and, together, perhaps better than any single film or collective film series."
Another highly anticipated title is Lionsgate Home Entertainment's The Cabin in the Woods. This breathlessly ambitious horror-comedy was the first picture released this year to spring from the mind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon (the other being The Avengers), and it shares that seminal television program's gift for using and exploiting genre clichés. The setup is pure Evil Dead - during a vacation in the titular cabin, five twenty-somethings find themselves fighting for their lives against supernatural monsters - but the actual development is anything but familiar (though Buffy fans might recognize some similarities to that show's fourth season). Whedon and director/co-writer Drew Goddard take a perverse glee in confounding viewer expectations, culminating in a deliriously inventive third act that...but I've already said too much.
Jeffrey Kauffman nicely sums up Cabin in the Woods with his Blu-ray review, writing that while "Whedon can be a little too "precious" for his own good at times (witness Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog), but here, working with longtime collaborator Drew Goddard, he manages a near perfect tightrope act balanced between horror and comedy. The film really doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it too much, but the good news is, the gore and guffaws come with such regularity that any lapses in logic end up not really mattering all that much."
Finally, we end the week with the cult horror favorite Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The third Halloween thriller will always be infamous among horror geeks as the Halloween entry that tried to get rid of screen psycho Michael Myers; franchise architect John Carpenter envisioned the series as telling a different Halloween-themed story in every film, and Season of the Witch found Michael Myers M.I.A., replaced by a villainous corporate conspiracy intent on using its Halloween merchandise for bloody, nefarious purposes. As one might expect, audiences didn't exactly appeciate the change - when Halloween 4 came around, it carried the reassuring brand The Return of Michael Myers. The irony is, Halloween III: Season of the Witch works more often that it doesn't. It's a creepy, stylish little chiller that proves itself far more ambitious than Michael Myers' typical stalk-and-slash adventures.
Scream Factory's new Blu-ray gives viewers a perfect opportunity to rediscover this unfairly maligned Halloween movie, one that Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review describes as "wrongly decried, [though] rightfully left out of the upper-echelons of its genre. Ignore the name and enjoy a decent little time waster with a few good ideas and a fair implementation thereof...Yet all told this is a fun little Chiller that offers up a smattering of gore, a decent story, and an unforgettable hallmark jingle."