Don Movie Reviews

"I Don't Know Jack" is the title of a documentary about actor Jack Nance. Chris Leavens and company have produced a memorial to a very interesting actor and a guy who would have needed several lives to fulfill his potential. This film sent me off on a Google search to find out more about his theatrical work (which set him up for possible starring roles in "The Graduate"-- I can imagine Jack saying, "Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?"-- and "In Cold Blood").

It's hard to tell where to start; the film proper tells us about Nance's career, but the mini-feature (featuring Kimmy Robertson) about Jack's death is like something out of Twin Peaks, as is the section about how much of "I Don't Know Jack"'s footage was kidnapped and held for ransom! It's a strange world...

David Lynch, Dennis Hopper, Charlotte Stewart, Jack's brothers, Catherine Coulson and many of Jack's friends and co-workers supply the interviews, and it's a funny thing that they all feel compelled to imitate Nance's voice (Wayne Grace does the best job). Jack is obviously a guy who got under people's skin in a good way!

There are a few technical glitches-- the menu controls are sluggish, the film starts so abruptly that it looks like a mistake, and the image quality isn't always up to snuff (understandable considering the variety of video sources). But I especially liked the photo section and its cowboy-song soundtrack.

Fans of Jack Nance will laugh and cry; the DVD features interviews with friends, family and loved ones. They all agree that there was something special about him, and after having seen this film I wish I'd known Jack.

Jack Nance, the iconic figure of Eraserhead and the emotionally fragile sheriff of Twin Peaks, worked often with David Lynch and made many loyal friends in Hollywood. This documentary interviews friends and family members, and shows excerpts from well-known and lesser known works in which he acted. Interviewees include Lynch, Dennis Hopper, Nance's ex-wife and the homicide detective who worked on his case (on the accompanying featurette). One gets the impression that Jack was quite a bright man who was thoughtful and eccentric, and who attracted admiration and friendship despite his alcoholism. After an odd career, Jack was beat up outside a donut shop and received injuries that resulted in his death.

This is the first feature from director Chris Leavens, and he does a nice job. Editing is good though the movie starts very abruptly -- I thought there was a problem with the disk at first. Lighting and sound between interviews is uneven but the content is fascinating, and a vivid portrait of Nance is developed. The dvd interface is clunky. There is an accompanying web site.

Extras are just as interesting as the feature. There is a lovely photo montage set to music, crew credits, trailers, and a 21-minute featurette about questions revolving around Jack's death called 'Unsolved Homicide'. The production notes relate a strange story about how the tapes of the feature were kidnapped and held for ransom by an actress friend of Nance's.

One gets the feeling that Jack would be pleased by the continuing bizarreness of it all.

a good movie, a must see.
LA BELLA MAFIA,
sINCERLY,
tHE dON cARTAGIA =)

Anthony Quinn stars as a mob boss whose mistress gets killed and starts a bloody mob war.This is a classic must see mob movie!!

On this part of the Perfect Cell Saga, Tien, the 3-eyed dude, tries to stop Cell from becoming complete by using his Tri-beam attack, but it drained most of his life force. So Goku went down to the battlefield to rescue his friend until he sensed Piccolo's life force, but it was faint though. They narrowly escapes back to Kami's place when Vegeta and Trunks come out of the hyperbolic Time Chamber. Anxious to try out his new powers, Vegeta raced to the location Cell was at and Trunks wasn't to far behind. With Vegeta surpassing a super saiyan, it looks like Cell can forget about becoming complete. Can Vegeta finally accomplished what no one else was able to do? Watch more of the Saga and Find OUT!!

if you love dbz, then this video is just another part of this great series... i enjoyed the android saga as one of my personal favorites of all the sagas, and all the cell sagas are just a continuim of that... so if youre looking to complete your series for the cell sagas, then this is a must have...

For every person who has a warm fuzzy memory of playing catch with Dad, there is the ying-yang expereince of those abused by fathers living vicariously through their sons' little league experiences. Such is the essence of "Fear Strikes Out".
I first saw this movie on late night TV about 20 years ago. It scared the bejeezus out of me. Carl Malden gave a truly frightening performance. However, he was matched scene-for-scene by Anthony Perkins. I remember one early scene in the movie where young Jimmy Piersall is playing catch, rather poorly, with his father. Carl starts yelling. I was getting a pain in the pit of my stomach. Young Jimmy goes behind a shed, I think, to fish out the passed ball he just missed. Tony Perkins stops, his face contorted in angst. This scene stayed with me much like the Flying Monkees in the "Wizard of Oz" or the head-turning scene in "The Exorcist".

Every little league dad should be forced to this film at the start of every season!

If you're looking for a baseball film solely dedicated to the playing of the sport by the central figure of this film, pass it up. But if you are looking for an intimate, psychologically complex portrait of a famous sports personality as a human being and not a mythic figure, you happened upon the right film. The film is not about how Piersall's talent for baseball was discovered or how his technique broke ground in the field, but rather it is a universal exposition of the steps through which a father's desire for his son to succeed where he failed turn into a desire to live vicariously through the child's glory and the damaging emotional repercussions that it has on the child, as well as the steps back to a normal life. Anthony Perkins turns in what is truly a brilliant performance. The pain he registers has rarely if ever been equalled by another actor alive or dead, and he is almost unbearably poignant in every scene without ever pandering to cheap bathos or melodramatic fits of tears. The pain we see is genuine and haunting, something that radiates from his eyes and his voice and his presence, not from "technique". His expressive face conveys the anguish of a deeply tortured psyche, vacillating from the shy charm he exudes in courting Norma Moore, to the eruption of his lifelong pain heaped upon him by his tyrannical father when he tearfully tells him of how his efforts to help him only hurt him, and to the moments when he cracks up, when either splitting the wood of a door in anger with his fists, or swinging a bat violently after hitting a homerun asking "Was I good enough?". It is one of the greatest performances ever recorded on film, from an actor renowned only for his role in a certain Hitchcock film I'm sure you are all familiar with. Karl Malden transcends the potentially one-dimensionality of his role as the tyrannical father, making it clear that Father Piersall did what he did not only out of a hope that he could achieve the glory he never got in baseball through his son, but that he did it out of love as much as anything else. The rest of the cast is quite fine as well. The details of a delicate psyche under stress is of the utmost importance in this film, as opposed to the details of how Piersall became a great ball player, and that is why it so remarkable. You shouldn't miss this

This movie was done very well, Michael Boatman, Lori Petty, Ice Cube all acted the way they should for there parts. But then you have mean Michael Ironside, who wants to put everyone through hell in the sheriff's department. I thought that Elliott Gould was the only wimp in this movie, he's the one who did not act real well in this film. But timely look at racism and corruption in the sheriff's department as seen through the eyes of African American rookie J.J. Johnson (Boatman). He realizes his own department is framing a black man (Ice Cube) for a murder he did not commit. Lori Petty who becomes Johnson's only ally on the force. "THIS IS A MUST SEE FILM"

This movie was pretty good. I started watchin this movie with my friends and they said it was a LA CONFIDENTIAL ripoff. I think that it wasn't and i think it was awesome.

The picture and sound transfer on this DVD is very good (that's always good news whenever old, rarely seen films are released on home video). Roan Group is a DVD maker you can count on. "The Kennel Murder Case" is a bright, tight, and fluidly-directed whodunit. "Nancy Drew, Reporter" is a juvenile but enjoyable teen mystery-comedy. The movies are on separate sides on the disc. No captioning nor supplements are included.

The Roan Group can always be counted on to bring the best quality DVDs on public domain titles.
THE KENNEL MURDER CASE is sharp and clear with great contrast! The mystery is quite intricate and absorbing, I bought this for the next title but ended up thoroughly enjoying this mystery. You will want to see it again and again to find all of the clues.
NANCY DREW REPORTER is also sharp and clear, but there are a few scratches in the print used (not bad). Still it is an excellent presenation. The story is a bit juvinile, but then that is what Nancy Drew was aimed at.
It is a strange pairing of mysteries.

Here's a real treat for Lugosi fans--an in-depth, fascinating, and utterly entertaining hour featuring lots of previously-unseen material. The clips from his early silent films are beautifully restored, and left this reviewer with a strong urge to see the complete films. There's an impressive array of interviews with former co-stars and friends, and some surprisingly clear interviews with the star himself (some of these also appear on Roan's excellent "White Zombie" disc).

I was also impressed by the sometimes hallucinatory editing style--often a rapid succession of film clips set to spooky music--that made the documentary every bit as entertaining as watching one of Bela's movies.

If I have one minor gripe, it's that a large amount of "deleted scenes" could have been editing back into the feature. Most of them are expanded interviews and clips from particular films. I'm sure the decision was made to cut these extra scenes for reasons of pacing or time. But a true Lugosi fan would not only NOT mind the extra padding, he (or she) would most likely appreciate it. It's a minor point, because of course you can access all these extra scenes from the main menu.

Order this one, you won't be disappointed.

Gary D. Rhodes textured portrait of a film icon is quite good. Besides an in-depth look at his Hollywood rise and fall, yuo can view Bela Lugosi's oldest existing film, a brief fragment of Hungary's "Struggle for Life(1918). You see scenes from "Dance of the Volcano(German/1920)" and a good, restored sequence from perhaps his earliest American film role in "Midnight Girl(1925)", an otherwise slow and tedious movie. A wonderfully restored interview from 1932(at his home) and several other special features(including a first-time interview with his last and fifth wife(shortly before her cancer-caused death) are real bonuses. It's a two-disc marathon, and even features previously unknown radio broadcasts(five), including a dark diatribe against facism in 1944 that belies his left-wing, pro-communist leanings. For the Lugosi fan, this cannot be missed.

Although the first 2 episodes were a little slow, the next 2 made up for that! Seeing Kongo battle with Refang was worth the price of admittion. This is a movie any Monkey Magic fan should own. This truly is a GREAT anime and I hope we see more of it soon.

The title says it all, this is one of the greatest DVD's of Monkey Magic you could get. Everything about it is top-rate! Plus forget Titen A.E., this is real 2D/3D animation. Get it. I'm sure you won't be sorry.

A scathing satire of Hollywood and its egos. Some great performances and lots of fun cameos. I was intrigued by the title because it sounded like a z-grade science fiction movie. But it turned out to be a really funny mock documentary about the making of a really bad z-grade science fiction movie - but nobody involved realizes it's really bad. Terrific dialogue throughout. Hail Gropo!

In this satiric comedy that offers a jaundiced look at the film industry, Leslie Miller (Ashley Hill) and David Johnson (King Wilder) are a producer/director team who've been working along the lowest rungs of the low-budget film industry for longer than they care to recall. Hoping to move up in the world, Leslie and David decide to start pitching a glossier project around town, and they score a deal with a major studio to make a mid-budget science fiction-thriller. However, Leslie and David soon find themselves butting heads with the head of the studio, and when the financing is pulled from their project, they find themselves trying to finish it on a budget even they find impossible. Jason Priestley, Neve Campbell, and Dean Devlin all make cameo appearances as themselves.

I watched this movie this afternoon, & loved it. Its titlewas "Twist of Fate," & thinking it was the annoyingSteve Martin movie, I almost flipped the channel. I'm glad I didn't!

The star of the movie, actress Maedchen Amick, was honestly what kept me watching. However, the villain in the movie looked to me like a mixture of Bill Maher & David Caruso. Apparently, it was filmed in British Columbia. Overall, I'd say the movie was pretty decent...

How to get a murderer behind bars even though he has already been acquitted? This is a great movie about the triumph of justice in the case of two murderers who are going to jail for each other's crimes. This movie will keep you at the edge of your seats, for you won't know until the very end how it's all going to end up.