Kino Lorber announced its
August Blu-ray and DVD release package this past week and there is something
for everyone to enjoy … the company’s dance card is full with shipments planned
for all four street-date Tuesdays during the month.
Heading to DVD on Aug. 13
is writer/director William Dickerson’s claustrophobic survival thriller, Detour,
starring Neil Hopkins (Skyline, Lost, etc.) as a hotshot
advertising executive who finds himself buried and in a fight for his life …
and the clock is ticking.
Don’t let the nature of
his entrapment fool you in to thinking that this is a riff on director Rodrigo
Cortés’ 2010 film, Buried. It’s not.
On the way to some big
meeting, Jackson (Hopkins) ends up in buried inside his car as the result of a
mudslide. That’s the only thing that
connects the two films, being buried underground.
Detour has more in common with filmmaker Adam Green’s
2010 film, Frozen — that is the one where a trio of skiers are trapped on
a ski lift and have to figure out a way out of their sure-to-die predicament. It is the same thing here … Jackson has only
so much air and then the inside of his car becomes a tomb.
One-man survival films
are tough, either the character talks to himself, or the character thinks to
himself … or some other creative way has to be found to give dialog to the
proceedings.
Back in 1953, director
Roy Ward Baker pulled it off with Robert Ryan’s character in Inferno
— he was stuck out in the desert with a broken leg and left to die. He simply “thought” to himself (his thoughts
in voiceover) and to break up the monotony of that device Baker cut back and
forth to Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan as they saw their perfect plan for
murder slowly unravel.
Two years earlier, in
filmmaker Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, he got around the
problem of dialog for Richard Benedict — the poor sap trapped in a mining
accident — by introducing the Kirk Douglas character as a cynical reporter hot
for the story of the doomed man. The
great irony in Wilder’s survival tale is that Douglas is as trapped as Benedict.
So the survival motif is
a long-standing film vehicle. You either
do it right, or it is not worth watching.
For the first 25 or 30 minutes of Detour there is that nagging little
thought that Dickerson hasn’t figured how he is going to pull it off. The problem is that he mixes film techniques
early on and it doesn’t quite work. Just
plant the “all-seeing” camera and don’t worry about all of the cinéma vérité nonsense with the cell
phone.
Once he gets past the
gimmicks, Detour really takes off.
During the last 30 minutes of the film you have bought into the action
and are pulling for Jackson, even though he is a bit of an asshole, to find a
solution to his problem and escape his would-be grave before the air runs
out.
Also on the release
calendar from Kino Lorber on Aug. 20 are three remastered Blu-ray and DVD SKUs
showcasing the filmmaking talents of the late Jess Franco. All three are presented in their original
French-language (with English subtitles) or as English-dubbed viewing options …
and all three films include newly-prepared commentary by film scholar Tim
Lucas.
Getting the royal treatment
for DVD and Blu-ray are: Nightmares Come at Night, A
Virgin Among the Living Dead (two different cuts of the film) and The
Awful Dr. Orlof (includes the featurette titled “The Horror of Orlof”).
For concert fans, Aug. 6
will mark the DVD street date for a restored version of The Cream Farewell Concert
(83 minutes in length). Filmed at the
Royal Albert Hall in London on Nov. 26, 1968, the truncated version featured
only six songs, but this full-length presentation expands the concert out to
the full ten-song set.
Included in the mix are “Sunshine
of Your Love,” “White Room,” “Sitting on Top of the World” and Steppin’ Out.”
Filling out the August release slate are two foreign
language imports — Unit 7 (Spanish – Aug. 27) and I Killed My Mother
(French – Aug. 13) — plus documentary filmmaker Mark Hall’s look at the issues
surrounding the worldwide love affair with the Japanese delicacy, sushi … Sushi: The Global Catch (the Aug. 6 street date yields an ARR of 368
days).
To download this week's
complete edition of the DVD and Blu-ray Release Report: DVD & Blu-ray Release Report
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