Mill Creek Entertainment Announces It September 2015 DVD And Blu-ray Release Calendar

Movies galore, plus some history about the U.S. Calvary and the presidents on Mount Rushmore are what Mill Creek Entertainment has planned for DVD and Blu-ray during the month of September.

Kicking off the proceedings on Sept. 1 is the double-disc, seven-part study on the four presidents that were carved into the face of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota by Gutzon and Lincoln Borglum between 1927 and 1941.   

Titled Monument Men: The Road to Rushmore, the seven parts include one each for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, plus three additional segments that are titled  “The Making of Mount Rushmore,” “Mount Rushmore National Memorial” and “Crazy Horse Memorial.”    

Over four hours of material have been assembled here and Mill Creek Entertainment will be releasing it to retail with an SRP of just $14.98.

Also on the history front on Sept. 1 is the five-hour, five part series titled U.S. Cavalry: History of America's Mounted Forces.  

The five segments are broken down as follows: “Origins to America's First Wars,” “Indians, Custer and the West,” “The Rough Riders and a New Horse” “Patton and World War II” and “The Modern Cavalry.”   

The SRP for U.S. Cavalry: History of America's Mounted Forces is also just $14.98 (and that’s before discounts offered at retail).

Rounding out this Sept. 1 trio of new-to-DVD product offerings is director Brooks Benjamin’s family-fun tale (tail), Bandit and the Saints of Dogwood, which is the latest production from Engine 15 Media Group, who are known for their family-friendly canine and kid adventures  — their Designer Pups is also heading to the DVD market place from Mill Creek Entertainment on Aug. 4).

The Dogwood Shores Elementary School (filmed in and around the Rockwood and    With help from her best-buddy Dalton (Makinnon O'Brien), they’ve concocted a plan to “punk” Principal McDougal (Mike Stanley — Attack of the Morningside Monster, Within: Terror Resides ...), which is important to them in that no one in the history of the school has been able to put something over on him.

Kingston communities to the west of Knoxville, Tennessee) is home to Lenna (Katie McNamara) and her close-knit band of fifth grade misfits.

It’s a good plan, as fifth-grade plans go, but as luck would have it, they picked the very same night that a group of inept “treasure hunters” (with an ancient map in hand) plan to rip up the gym floor and unearth a cache of long-forgotten buried gold.  The kids barely escape their encounter with the thieves, but end up being blamed for the destruction that they caused to school property.

Their fate: summer school at the Passive Valley Educational Center!!!

With the help of Bandit, an Australian Shepherd, Lenna and Dalton — along with their cohorts Benji (Skylar Feichtner) and Huggy (Connor Oringderff) — decide that after a few days at Passive Valley that a better plan of action would be to escape and bring the real villains to justice.   Their first plan didn’t go so well, maybe they’ll have better luck with this one!!!

Bandit and the Saints of Dogwood is great family fun (and doggie fun too) and the SRP is just $14.98.

Shifting to Sept. 15, Mill Creek Entertainment has ten new DVD SKUs on the calendar and a pair of new Blu-ray film offerings.

The selections breakdown into three groups — four new additions to the company’s popular “Anniversary Edition” line of retrospective film releases, four ten-film, three-disc DVD selections and a pair of six-film collections spread over two DVD discs.

So let’s tackle them in that order.   The new “Anniversary Edition” releases are: 25th Anniversary Edition: Postcards from the Edge (directed by Mike Nichols and based on Carrie Fisher’s tell-all book … starring Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep), 25th Anniversary Edition: Spaced Invaders (which will be available as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings — director Patrick Read Johnson’s inspired tale of Martians landing on the very day that Orson Welles did his famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast), 60th Anniversary Edition: Creature with the Atom Brain (director Edward L. Cahn teams with the legendary Curt Siodmak for this summer of 1955 sci-fi gem starring Richard Denning and Angela Stevens) and 80th Anniversary Edition: Crime and Punishment (director Josef von Sternberg’s 1935 film adaptation of the Dostoevsky novel and starring Peter Lorre with Marian Marsh and Edward Arnold).

The SRP for each of the “Anniversary Edition” film releases on DVD is just $9.98, with 25th Anniversary Edition: Spaced Invaders on Blu-ray coming in at $14.98.

As mentioned, there are four three-disc, ten-film collections (priced at $14.98 each) slated for delivery to fans and collectors (and the curious) on Sept. 15.

Attack of the Killer B's features a nifty collection of sci-fi films from mainly the 1950s and 60s that were produced, often quite inventively, on a shoestring budget.   Classics one and all — we begin in chronological theatrical release order with filmmaker Dan Milner’s Christmas of 1955 box office hit, The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (Kent Taylor and Cathy Downs star).

There are five from 1959 — the Baby Boomers were in their early teens and hot for movies of this sort and filmmakers scrambled to deliver them in droves.  From the summer of that year we have writer/director Tom Graeff’s ultra-low budget, but very entertaining, Teenagers from Outer Space, plus writer/director Ray Kellogg’s drive-in double bill of The Giant Gila Monster (a little cheezy) and The Killer Shrews (very effective thriller).   

The Halloween season of that year saw the Roger Corman-produced delight, Attack of the Giant Leeches, starring Yvette Vickers and Ken Clark and the Roger Corman-directed classic, The Wasp Woman, starring Susan Cabot (Sorority Girl, Machine Gun Kelly, etc.) as the youth-seeking businesswoman who overdoses on an experimental drug with stinging results!

Rounding out this collection are: The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962), Eegah! (1962, with Richard Kiel as the run-amok caveman), Night Fright (1967, starring John Agar) and Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973).

The ten-film, three-disc set titled Directors Collection, features ten different films from ten different film directors.   These are: John Ford directing Judge Priest (1934, starring Will Rogers); Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941, Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck); Orson Welles’ 1946 film noir, The Stranger (Welles co-stars with Loretta Young and Edward G. Robinson); John Huston assembles an all-star cast that includes Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley and Gina Lollobrigida for the 1953 caper comedy, Beat the Devil; Francis Ford Coppola teamed with producer Roger Corman for the 1963 release of Dementia 13, and Corman also produced Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 reworking of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (which borrowed footage from an earlier Russian sci-film), Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (starring Mamie Van Doren).

Rounding out this collection are: Richard Donner’s 1971 romantic comedy, Lola, teaming Charles Bronson with Susan George; Paul Verhoeven’s Katie’s Passion (aka: Katie Tippel) and filmmaker Stephen Frears’ 1983 MOW, Saigon: Year of the Cat, starring Judi Dench and Frederic Forrest.

Next up is First Features Collection, which showcases the early talents of ten acclaimed movie stars.   On the female front we have: Marilyn Monroe is featured in writer/director Arthur Pierson’s 1951 release of Home Town Story; Bette Davis is teamed with Pat O’Brien in 1932 film release of Hell’s House; Ava Gardner stars with George Raft in 1946 film noir, Whistle Stop, and Michelle Pfeiffer is teamed with Lindsay Wagner, Jameson Parker and Dabney Coleman in soapish 1981 MOW, Callie & Son.

Leading men featured in the First Features Collection are: Bing Crosby shines briefly (singing “When the Folks High Up Do the Mean Low-Down”) in the 1930 film release of Reaching for the Moon, which teamed Douglas Fairbanks with Bebe Daniels; Clark Gable stars opposite William Boyd (aka: Hopalong Cassidy) and Helen Twelvetrees in the 1931 Western, The Painted Desert (a rare early filmed-on-location “talkie” production); Tommy Lee Jones stars in the 1975 Canadian film release of Eliza's Horoscope (filming actually took place in 1970); Dennis Quaid is featured in the 1978 college-themed comedy, The Seniors;  Keanu Reeves co-stars with Olivia d'Abo in 1986 direct-to-video release of Dream to Believe (aka: Flying) and Jeff “The Dude” Bridges is on view in actor-turned-director Burgess Meredith 1970 production of The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go (but not released theatrically until 1973 — after Bridges was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in The Last Picture Show).

The final ten-film collection, Man with a Plan Collection, is all-action and features such High Risk — which counts among its cast members James Brolin, Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Quinn, Bruce Davison, James Coburn, Cleavon Little and Lindsay Wagner — director Ralph Nelson’s hard-to-find 1976 sci-fi thriller teaming Rock Hudson with Barbara Carrera, Embryo, and director Lewis Allen’s 1954 assassin drama, Suddenly, starring Frank Sinatra and Sterling Hayden.

enjoyments as director Stewart Raffill’s all-star film release of

The two six-film collections are both actor-inspired.  The first, Boris Karloff Collection, packs together The Black Room (1935, with Marian Marsh), The Man They Could Not Hang (1939, Karloff is brought back from the dead!), The Man With Nine Lives (1940), Before I Hang (1940, with Evelyn Keyes and Bruce Bennett), The Devil Commands (1941) and the 1942 comedy, The Boogie Man Will Get You (co-stars Peter Lorre).

It’s Western action with the DVD release of Randolph Scott Round-Up.   The six films included here are: A Lawless Street, The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station.

And last, but not least, is the stand-alone Blu-ray release on Sept. 15 of director Christopher Guest’s 1989 romantic comedy, The Big Picture, starring Kevin Bacon as a wunderkind filmmaker.