Gordon, Stuart

From Beyond (Unrated Director's Cut)

Studio: Tcfhe/mgm Release Date: 09/11/2007 Run time: 85 minutes Rating: R

Stuck

When brandi accidentally hits a homeless man she chooses not to get him medical attention - instead she leaves him clinging to life in her garage. But her psyche soon unravels when they become pitted in a bloody .. Even outrageous battle for survival. Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 10/14/2008 Starring: Mena Suvari Russell Hornsby Run time: 85 minutes Rating: R

Stuck, a cunning and energetic thriller, takes its premise from the real-life incident of a woman who hit a homeless man, then drove home and parked the car in the garage--with the man wedged halfway through her windshield. The genius of Stuck is that it not only squeezes every possible drop of gruesomeness out of this event, it also portrays everyone involved as a fully-rounded human being. Brandi (Mena Suvari, American Beauty), the driver, is a nurse at a retirement home who genuinely cares about her patients and is struggling for a promotion; for Tom (Stephen Rea, The Crying Game), being hit by a car is only the latest in a long line of misfortunes and indignities. But this is no earnest tragedy--instead, when the movie seems about to become a grim psychological portrait of denial and trauma, it shifts into high gear as a brutally funny black comedy. Director Stuart Gordon, best know for the over-the-top horror of Re-Animator, keeps most of Stuck slyly underplayed, to superb effect. The simple but effectively constructed script zips along, zigging and zagging within a very tightly framed situation. Suvari, Rea, and the rest of the cast (including excellent newcomers Russell Hornsby and Rukiya Bernard) commit to every emotional twist, turning from suspense to satire with adroit skill. This movie was made on a modest budget but has more thrills, laughs, and genuine tingles up and down the spine than all the special effects money can buy. A gem of tight, effective filmmaking. --Bret Fetzer

Re-Animator

Studio: Starz/sphe Release Date: 03/20/2007 Rating: Nr

Stuart Gordon's adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West: Re-Animator puts a Night of the Living Dead spin on the classic Frankenstein story. Jeffrey Combs furrows his brow and bugs his eyes as the preternaturally intense Herbert West, a maverick medical student whose gory, gooey experiments cause bloody corpses and body parts to jerk to life. Bruce Abbot is the studious roommate drawn into his extracurricular experiments, which soon involve the dean's daughter (the frequently naked Barbara Crampton) and the college's cadaverous, calculating star professor (David Gale), who literally loses his head over a battle for West's discovery. In this world, that's only a minor setback. Charged with sick gallows humor and a ghoulish gallery of undead beasties, Re-Animator, like Evil Dead II, is one of the most inspired and inventive--and funniest--horror films of the 1980s. Combs, Abbot, and Gale reunite for the almost-as-entertaining sequel Bride of Re-Animator. --Sean Axmaker

Robot Jox

Studio: Tcfhe/mgm Release Date: 06/05/2007 Run time: 85 minutes Rating: Pg

Dolls

They're cute they're cuddly...and they kill! From horror director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) and screenwriter Ed Naha (Troll) comes this "fiendish nightmare" (The Hollywood Reporter) that combines the pint-sized playmates of childhood with bone-chilling fun resulting in "a bloody bonbon you chew with relish" (Los Angeles Times)!A precocious girl her nasty parents two punk-rock losers and a weak-kneed salesman inadvertently become the guests of two ghoulish senior citizens in their dark haunted mansion. The old couple make and collect dolls that when not sitting still like good little mannequins creep around in the night offing the guests one by one! You may laugh at first but if they turn on you you'll regret it...for the rest of your short life!System Requirements:Running Time: 78 Min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: HORROR Rating: R UPC: 027616926616 Manufacturer No: 1008651

Edmond

William H. Macy, a longtime collaborator of David Mamet, takes on one of Mamet's biggest, ugliest creations in the title role of Edmond. Edmond drops out of his ordinary life after a chance encounter with a fortune-teller, and cruises through a New York inferno that leads to murder. It also leads to a great deal of the clipped, counter-punching dialogue that Mamet is famous for, although at times the film plays like a monologue interrupted by peripheral blips on Edmond's skewed radar. Mamet's subject is the frenzied reaction of the modern male to the narrowing of his domain, a crisis that drives Edmond to the familiar touchstones of bar, peep show, and whorehouse, none of which provide the solace he thinks they should. The 2005 film is based on Mamet's 1982 play, and somehow the picture might have had more pop if it had been filmed closer to that time, when panicked masculinity was a fresher subject. And the text is a kind of dark, horrific fable that probably worked better in the stylized realm of the stage than on film. Stuart Gordon directs with a blunt forward motion that foregrounds the most unsavory aspects of the material (fans of his Re-Animator should note the presence of Jeffrey Combs as a snotty hotel clerk). Except for Macy, cast members come and go in the episodic flow, some of them (Joe Mantegna and Rebecca Pidgeon) identified with Mamet's work. Julia Stiles plays the unfortunate waitress who falls into Edmond's path, and Bai Ling, Denise Richards, and Mena Suvari are women of the night who want to charge Edmond too much money. But it's Macy's show, and he mercilessly gets inside Edmond's bad self: a monster of entitlement and self-delusion, given to epiphanies that lead nowhere except his own ego. --Robert Horton

A man (Macy) becomes involved in a twisted game of sex lies and murder with 3 young women (Denise Richards Mena Suvari Julia Stiles). It s a first rate thriller from the legendary David Mamet.System Requirements:Run Time: 82 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/THRILLERS Rating: R UPC: 855280001700 Manufacturer No: FI0169DVD

Dagon

Based on a short story by hp lovecraft the undisputed master of macabre dagon tells the story of a fishing village tempted by greed who evolve into freakish half-human creatures and must sacrifice outsiders to an ancient monstrous god of the sea. Studio: Lions Gate Home Ent. Release Date: 08/16/2005 Starring: Ezra Godden Run time: 98 minutes Rating: R Director: Stuart Gordon

Space Truckers

The Year isi2196-John Canyon is a down-on-his-luck independent trucker trying to keep an honest living transporting loads across the solar system in his rocket powered rig. In a last ditch effort to stay in business rather than being forced into teaming up with the "Corporation" Canyon joins forces with Mike Pucci to pull off a dangerous transport - contents unknown. At over five times the going rate it's an offer they can't refuse. With the help from stowaway the trio set out on an adventure they will never forget.To make the scheduled deadline Canyon abandons the usual shipping lanes and heads for the scum cluster - a war zone of bandits black rocks and rogue asteroids - where they eventually are hi-jacked by the Regalia a pirate worship headed by Captain Mocanudo. It is here the secret of the mystery containers is revealed and the battle for the universe begins!System Requirements: Running Time 96 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: SCI-FI/FANTASY Rating: PG-13 UPC: 658149720527 Manufacturer No: 7205

Fortress

After losing their first baby John and Karen Brennick dare to have another. Caught trying to cross the border the ex-war hero and his pregnant wife are sentenced to a sadistic futuristic prison buried 33 stories beneath the earth. Computers control inmates' bodes and minds and newborn infants are being used to create a new breed of human robots. No one has ever gotten out alive. But not even the most overwhelming technology can extinguish one man's passionate love for his wife and child.System Requirements:Starring: Christopher Lambert Kurtwood Smith Loryn Locklin and Lincoln Kilpatrick Directed By: Stuart Gordon Running Time: 95 minutes Color Presented in "Standard" formatFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: SCI-FI/FANTASY Rating: R UPC: 012236116059 Manufacturer No: 11605

The story of Fortress takes place in drastically overpopulated America of the year 2017, where each woman is allowed only one pregnancy. John Brennick (Christopher Lambert) and his wife Karen (Loryn Locklin) flee to Mexico when she becomes pregnant after the death of their first child. They are captured by border police and sent to the Fortress, a subterranean high-security prison owned by the Men-Tel corporation and operated by "Zed-10," an omnipotent computer system, and a sadistic, genetically "enhanced" warden (Kurtwood Smith) who has nefarious plans involving Brennick's wife and unborn child. Along with his cellmates (including Jeffrey Combs, a favorite of director Stuart Gordon), Brennick plots a breakout, and Fortress shifts into auto-pilot action mode.

After making his reputation with such audacious horror films as From Beyond and Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon graduated to a bigger budget with Fortress, but his penchant for exploitation remains deliriously intact. While borrowing elements from a variety of better sci-fi movies, Fortress indulges every prison-flick cliché, but does it with such enjoyable B-movie vigor that it qualifies as a bona-fide guilty pleasure (indeed, it deserves to be ranked with James Cameron's original Terminator in terms of its budgetary ingenuity). Featuring such giddy (and gory) devices as "intestinators" (deadly obedience devices implanted in prisoners' bodies) and a torturous "Mind Wipe Chamber," this is really just a drive-in action movie with lofty ambitions, and the schlocky script hasn't a prayer of rising above the level of juvenile popcorn fodder. But there's no denying the energy and enthusiasm that Gordon brings to the film, which understandably became a global box-office hit and spawned a 1999 sequel starring Lambert and Pam Grier. --Jeff Shannon

Castle Freak

John Reilly (Jeffrey Combs) has come to Italy with wife and blind daughter in tow to arrange for the sale of his newly inherited castle. Unbeknownst to these folks, the duchess who willed the castle to Reilly kept her kid shackled in the dungeon, lambasting him regularly with a wicked cat-o'-nine-tails. Though the duchess is gone, the eponymous freak remains, now fully grown. As the family moves into the castle to await its sale, internal conflicts concerning Reilly's guilt over the blinding of the daughter, and the blame from his wife, further fracture their unstable family unit. Castle Freak escapes his shackles in search of food, and more importantly human warmth. The Freak just doesn't know how to express his need for love in a socially acceptable way, however, and seems destined for an unsavory end at the hands of the something-to-prove Reilly, who must find some way to route to vicious creature. But there's more than one way to skin a cat (though they only use one of those ways in this picture). Fitting addition to the oeuvre of splatter specialist Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator). --Jim Gay