Samuel L. Jackson attempts to survive against hundreds of deadly snakes when they're released on a commercial airplane.
The Fifth Element In the year 2257 a planet-sized sphere of supreme evil is approaching the earth at relentless speed threatening to exterminate every living organism unless four ancient stones representing the elements of earth wind fire and water are united with the mysterious 'Fifth Element'... The Abyss: In this thrilling underwater action-adventure from writer-director James Cameron a civilian oil-rig crew is recruited to conduct a search-and-rescue effort when a nuclear submarine mysteriously sinks. One diver (Ed Harris) soon finds himself on a spectacular odyssey over 25 000 feet below the ocean's surface where he confronts a mysterious force that has the power to change the world or destroy it. Aliens: Sigourney Weaver returns as Ripley the only survivor from mankind's first encounter with the monstrous Alien. Her account of the Alien and the fate of her crew are received with skepticism until the mysterious disappearance of colonists on LV-426 lead her to join a team of high-tech colonial marines sent in to investigate...
This is the story of Fanny Price, who emerges from this comedic maze of manners having discovered the rightness of of true love.
In the first season of The X Files, creator Chris Carter was uncertain of the series' future, so each of the episodes is a self-contained suspense story; they do not delve deep into the ongoing X Files mythology or turn to self-parody and humour as do episodes in later seasons. Yet, these episodes display the elements for which the show would become famous: the cinematic production values and top-notch special effects, the stark lighting of the Vancouver sets, the atmospheric halo of Mark Snow's score, and the clever plots dealing with subjects ranging from the occult, religion, and monsters to urban legends, conspiracy theories and science fiction. Most importantly, Season 1 introduces FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox "Spooky" Mulder (David Duchovny), two of the most attractive government officials around. Scully is the serious-minded medical scientist assigned to join Mulder on the X Files, a division of the FBI dealing with the paranormal. Mulder is the intuitive thinker with a dry wit, a passionate believer in the existence of paranormal phenomena and one of the few characters on television smart enough to figure out who the bad guy is before the audience does. Their muddled relationship, a deep friendship laced with sexual tension, provides the human heart in a world where the bizarre and horrible lurk in everyday society. The materials on the bonus disc provide some interesting trivia and background, but it is the 24 episodes themselves that make this seven-disc boxed set a true find. Those unfamiliar with The X Files often view all the fuss with the same scepticism with which Scully first regards her new partner's ideas. But just as she comes to realise the uncanny accuracy of Mulder's outlandish theories, newcomers to The X Files who sample a few episodes in this boxed set will likely find themselves riveted to their television late into the night. And undoubtedly, the shadows and creaking noises in the house that evening will seem more menacing than usual. --Eugene Wei, Amazon.com
In the first season of The X Files, creator Chris Carter was uncertain of the series' future, so each of the episodes is a self-contained suspense story; they do not delve deep into the ongoing X Files mythology or turn to self-parody and humour as do episodes in later seasons. Yet, these episodes display the elements for which the show would become famous: the cinematic production values and top-notch special effects, the stark lighting of the Vancouver sets, the atmospheric halo of Mark Snow's score, and the clever plots dealing with subjects ranging from the occult, religion, and monsters to urban legends, conspiracy theories and science fiction. Most importantly, Season 1 introduces FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox "Spooky" Mulder (David Duchovny), two of the most attractive government officials around. Scully is the serious-minded medical scientist assigned to join Mulder on the X Files, a division of the FBI dealing with the paranormal. Mulder is the intuitive thinker with a dry wit, a passionate believer in the existence of paranormal phenomena and one of the few characters on television smart enough to figure out who the bad guy is before the audience does. Their muddled relationship, a deep friendship laced with sexual tension, provides the human heart in a world where the bizarre and horrible lurk in everyday society. The materials on the bonus disc provide some interesting trivia and background, but it is the 24 episodes themselves that make this seven-disc boxed set a true find. Those unfamiliar with The X Files often view all the fuss with the same scepticism with which Scully first regards her new partner's ideas. But just as she comes to realise the uncanny accuracy of Mulder's outlandish theories, newcomers to The X Files who sample a few episodes in this boxed set will likely find themselves riveted to their television late into the night. And undoubtedly, the shadows and creaking noises in the house that evening will seem more menacing than usual. --Eugene Wei
The Big Boss Limited Edition . An instant box office sensation upon its original release in Hong Kong in 1971, The Big Boss is the film that catapulted former child actor and Hollywood TV sidekick Bruce Lee to cinematic superstardom.Cheng Chao-on (Lee) moves to Thailand to work at a factory alongside his uncle and cousins. However, a ruthless crime boss (Han Ying-chieh, Come Drink with Me) and his gang are using the factory to smuggle dope, and whoever stumbles upon this unfortunate secret promptly meets a grisly end. When some of Cheng’s friends and cousins disappear, he is forced to set aside the vow of pacifism he made to his mother and unleash his fists of fury in order to bring those responsible to bloody justice...Directed by Lo Wei, The Big Boss forever changed the landscape of Hong Kong action cinema, signalling kung fu’s dominance over the genre for years to come. Lee’s big breakthrough now looks more glorious than ever in a 4K restoration with hours of insightful bonus features, including the restored 110 Mandarin Cut of the film that first stunned audiences in Hong Kong back in 1971.LIMITED EDITION 4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY CONTENTS. • Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Walter Chaw. • Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella. DISC 1: THE BIG BOSS. • 4K (2160p) Ultra HD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) of the 99-minute 1983 version of The Big Boss, restored by Arrow Films from the original negative. • Original restored Mandarin, English and Cantonese mono audio. • Two English mono options, the standard mix and a Japanese mix with alternate score. • English subtitles, plus optional subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing for the English dubs. • Two feature commentaries, one by David Desser and one by Brandon Bentley. • Two alternate versions with lossless mono audio: the English Export Cut, featuring a rare alternate English dub track (some scenes in Mandarin); and the 100-min US Theatrical Cut. • Return to Thailand, a documentary produced and presented by Matt Routledge exploring the original filming locations. • Recently uncovered deleted and extended scenes, with optional commentary by Bentley. • The Not-Quite-Biggest Boss, a video essay by Bentley investigating the scenes still lost, such as the ‘saw-in-the-head’ scene. • Archive interviews with co-star Lau Wing and stuntman Tung Wai. • Bruce Lee Vs. Peter Thomas, a short video essay about the music for the English version. • Alternate credits sequences. • Trailer gallery, including a ‘Before The Big Boss’ reel and the trailer for lost sequel The Big Boss Part II. • Image gallery. DISC 2: THE BIG BOSS – THE MANDARIN CUT. • 4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) of the 110-min Mandarin Cut of The Big Boss, restored by Arrow Films. • Original lossless mono audio. • English subtitles for the Mandarin Cut. • Axis of English, a video essay by Will Offutt profiling the English dubbing actors for The Big Boss, Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon. • Unrestored raw scan of the Mandarin Cut (1080p only)
Inspector Gadget 2 sees the unlikely detective with higher-tech gadgets and more special effects. French Stewart (from TV's Third Rock from the Sun) replaces Matthew Broderick as the bumbling detective in a plot that revolves around the glitch-ridden Gadget being replaced by a completely robotised female. Parent Trap's Elaine Hendrix does what little she can with the one-dimensional role of "G2". Still, Gadget falls for his rival and the pair team up with his smart-as-a-whip niece Penny and her brainy beagle for a showdown with Claw. Where Broderick struggled to humanise the caricature of an inept detective in the 1999 original, Stewart doesn't even try. Instead he plays Gadget as a cartoon with endless over-the-top theatrics. The enhanced special effects may placate young viewers, but without the comedy of the original, that's small comfort. --Kimberly Heinrichs
Further investigations with garrulous detective Frost (David Jason)... Includes: Line Of Fire Benefit Of The Doubt and Mistaken Identity.
Bryan Singer's follow-up to his post-modern caper-thriller The Usual Suspects trades in the flamboyant narrative flourish of that film for a moody meditation on the allure of evil. Based on the Stephen King novella (featured in the collection Different Seasons), Apt Pupil follows the disturbing downward spiral of a bright young schoolboy, Todd (Brad Renfro), who discovers a wanted Nazi war criminal is living in his town and then blackmails him into telling stories ("everything they're afraid to show us in school") of the horrors of the Holocaust. The old man, Dussander (a terrifying performance by Ian McKellen), comes alive while telling his tales and is soon reliving his past glories in a SS Halloween ordered byTodd. It's not long before Dussander's homicidal streak is unleashed and he is pulling Todd along with him. Although set against a backdrop of Holocaust history, the issues raised in the stories are ignored in favour of shocks and suspense and the film ultimately sacrifices the opportunity to be a fascinating psychological thriller about the seductive power of evil for a trip into Stephen King territory. Despite such limitations, Singer delivers a stylish and sometimes unsettling horror picture, which is largely due to McKellen's chilling portrait of a slumbering sadist awakened. --Sean Axmaker
Tom Hardy (Bruce Willis) is a fifth generation Pittsburgh cop. Formerly a homicide detective he publicly challenged the police department including several of his family members about the identity of the serial killer who took his father's life. Convinced that a newly active serial killer is the same gunman who murdered his father - despite the fact that another man is already behind bars for that crime - Hardy is working out of his jurisdiction to catch the killer. The maverick
Is it time, after the anonymous disaster of Mission to Mars, to give Brian De Palma's famously doomed film of Tom Wolfe's bulky novel Bonfire of the Vanities another chance? The uproarious ins and outs of the film's troubled production have become well-known via Julie Salamon's account of its making, The Devil's Candy, and fans of that might want to flick between page and screen to see just when Melanie Griffith caused untold continuity problems by having her breasts inflated. Techno buffs will surely appreciate the pointless but somehow wonderful trickery of an extended tracking shot at the outset that exists only to last a few seconds longer than the one in Orson Welles Touch of Evil (1958). Tom Hanks was rather better cast than was generally allowed, as "master of the universe" Sherman McCoy, who comes a cropper after a hit-and-run accident, since his nice-guy act shows intriguing cracks. And even Bruce Willis does his best on a hiding to nothing as the drunken writer. It is funny in parts, agonising in others, and misses Wolfe's tone--but somehow its failures might make it as symptomatic of the long-gone excesses of the early 90s as the novel was of the 80s. --Kim Newman
Exceptionally well-directed by John McTiernan, Die Hard made Bruce Willis a star back in 1988 and established a new template for action stories. Here the bad guys, led by the velvet-voiced Alan Rickman, assume control of a Los Angeles high-rise with Willis's visiting New York cop inside. The attraction of the film has as much to do with the sight of a barefoot mortal running around the guts of a modern office tower as it has with the plentiful fight sequences and the bond the hero establishes with an LA beat cop. Bonnie Bedelia plays Willis's wife, Hart Bochner is good as a brash hostage who tries negotiating his way to freedom, Alexander Godunov makes for a believable killer with lethal feet and William Atherton is slimy as a busybody reporter. Director Renny Harlin took the reins for the 1990 sequel, Die Harder, which places Willis's New York City cop in harm's way again with a gaggle of terrorists. This time, Willis awaits his wife's arrival at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC when he gets wind of a plot to blow up the facility. Noisy, overbearing and forgettable, the film has none of the purity of its predecessor's simple story; and it makes a huge miscalculation in allowing a terrible tragedy to occur rather than stretch out the tension. Where Die Hard set new precedents in action movies, Die Hard 2 is just an anything-goes spectacle --Tom Keogh The second sequel, Die Hard with a Vengeance brings Detective John McClane to New York City to face a better villain than in Die Hard 2. Jeremy Irons is the brother of Alan Rickman's Germanic terrorist-thief from the original film. But this bad guy has his sights set higher: on the Federal Reserve's cache of gold. As a distraction, he sets McClane running fool's errands all over New York--and eventually, McClane attracts an unintentional partner, a Harlem dry cleaner (Samuel L Jackson) with a chip on his shoulder. Some great action sequences can't obscure the rather large plot holes in the film's final 45 minutes. --Marshall Fine
That'll Be The Day: Abandoned by his father at an early age Jim MacLaine seems to have inherited the old man's restlessness. Despite his apparent intelligence Jim decides not to take the exams that would pave his way to university; he begins to think that the life of a pop musician might be the thing for him... Stardust: Jim is now enjoying the nomadic gigs and groupies' life of The Stray Cats. When he achieves all his wildest dreams of international stardom the sweet taste of success begins to turn sour...
Season Two, the 1994-95 run, of The X Files was the one where creator Chris Carter, having had a surprise hit when he expected a one-season wonder, started trying to make sense of all the storylines he had thrown into the pile in the first year. Moreover, he had to cope with Gillian Anderson's maternity leave by having Scully get abducted by aliens (back then, a pretty fresh device) for a few episodes and come back strangely altered. The season also inaugurated the tradition of opening ("Little Green Men") and closing ("Anasazi") with the show's worst episodes, both pot-boiling attempts to keep the alien infiltration/government conspiracy balls up in the air while seeming to offer narrative forward-thrusts or revelations. But it's also a show noticeably surer of itself than Season One, with its stars reading from the same page in terms of their characters' relationship and attitudes to the wondrous. Scully's no-longer-workable scepticism finally starts to erode in the face of Mulder's increasingly cracked belief. There are fewer marking-time leftover-monster-of-the-week shows--although we do get a human fluke ("The Host"), vampires ("3"), an invisible rapist ("Excelsius Dei") voodoo ("Fresh Bones")--and the flying-saucer stories at last seem to be going somewhere. The powerful two-episode run ("Duane Barry", "Ascension") features Steve Railsback as Mulder's possible future, an FBI agent burned out after a UFO abduction who has become a hostage-taking terrorist, which climaxes with Scully's disappearance into the light. The standout episode is also a stand-alone--"Humbug"--the first and still most successful of the show's self-parodies (written by Darin Morgan, who had played the Flukeman in "The Host"), in which the agents investigate a murder in a circus freakshow, allowing the actors to make fun of the mannerisms they have earnestly built up in a run of solemn, even somnolent, explorations of the murk. Other worthy efforts: "Aubrey", about genetic memory; "Irresistible", a rare (and creepy) straight psycho-chiller with little paranormal content; and "The Calusari", a good ghost/mystery. Rising deputy characters include Nicholas Lea as the perfidious Krycek and Brian Thompson as the shapeshifting alien bounty hunters. Notable guest stars: Charles Martin Smith, C.C.H. Pounder, Leland Orser, Terry O'Quinn, Bruce Weitz, Daniel Benzali, John Savage, Vincent Schiavelli, Tony Shalhoub. --Kim Newman
Will Smith stars in this sci-fi action thriller suggested by the classic short story collection by Isaac Asimov, and brought to the big screen by visionary director Alex Proyas ("The Crow").
Fist Of Fury: In what many enthusiasts consider to be 'the ultimate martial arts movie' Bruce plays the fictional character of Chen Jun a student of legendary real-life martial artist Fok Yun Gap. In an epic tale of national rivalries Lee is a true force of nature as he battles against Japanese Imperialist forces determined to subjugate his people. In the most electrifying performances of his career Bruce Lee demonstrates complete mastery of his art in scene after scene of the most realistic and brutal unarmed combat ever filmed! Legend Of The Red Dragon: When his wife and entire village are brutally murdered by evil Manchu soldiers the master warrior Kwun (Jet Li) sets out on a mission of vengeance with the only survivor of the massacre - his son Ting. For seven years the two journey across ancient China on their quest for revenge always staying one step ahead of the deadly army. But Kwun is forced to face the past when they come across a wealthy benefactor with five young Shaolin masters in his charge who unbeknownst to Kwun have the detailed map to a priceless treasure trove tattooed on their backs. It is not long before Manchu officials find out about the maps and deadly soldiers came after the masters. Now in an ancient battle that will pit Kwun against one of the very soldiers who helped to kill his family he and Ting will unite with the young masters of Shaolin for a fight to the death. Get ready for an ancient martial arts battle with the world's most masterful warriors! Who Am I?: Left for dead after a brutal CIA double-cross a lone commando (Chan) must struggle to regain his memory and expose an international espionage ring before they can unleash a powerful and lethal new energy source. With the aid of two beautiful sidekicks Jackie fights his way across continents and faces armed assassins and sinister plots at every turn. For blistering action and adrenaline-pumping excitement nobody does it better than Jackie.
After starring in the now-legendary Dollars trilogy of spaghetti Westerns for Italian director Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood became a box-office star and imported the style of those classic shoot-em-ups for this 1967 Western directed by Ted Post, with whom Eastwood had worked during their days on the television series Rawhide. Eastwood plays an innocent rancher who is mistaken for a cattle rustler and sentenced to hang by an angry mob. When he is saved from the noose by a passing lawman, he embarks on a renegade campaign of vengeance against the men who attempted to lynch him. Hang 'Em High offers a number of memorable moments and stylistic flourishes, and features a superb supporting cast of Western veterans, including Ben Johnson, Ed Begley, Pat Hingle, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, LQ Jones, and the "Skipper" himself, Alan Hale Jr Made just three years before Dirty Harry, the film marked a turning point for Eastwood, who would soon move into a prolific period of contemporary thrillers. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com
Classic martial arts action. Chen Chen (Bruce Lee) returns to Shanghai for the funeral of his martial arts mentor, who died in suspicious circumstances. Whilst he is mourning his old friend, members of a rival school arrive and taunt Chen and his friends, who do not react at first. Chen later visits the rival school and humiliates them by beating every single one of them, but this causes bloody repercussions and begins to uncover the real reasons behind the mentor's death.
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