Monsters

Jaws 2

The tourist island of Amity is once again threatened by a giant killer white shark when it attacks a group of teenagers.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: PG
Release Date: 23-MAY-2006
Media Type: DVD

Ushering in the age of the inferior sequel, Jaws 2 was essentially a license to print money. Indeed, the film did very well despite blatantly replicating the plot of Steven Spielberg's original, though to lesser effect. Roy Scheider returns as Martin Brody, sheriff of the small island town of Amity. Just as the beachside resort is rebounding from the previous movie's shark attacks, another great white is snacking on divers and water-skiers. Naturally, the town fathers don't want to confront reality and choose to proceed with a lucrative sailing regatta, resulting in a grisly loss of life. Besides the fact that director Jeannot Szwarc takes an impersonal, workaday approach to the film, Jaws 2 manages to be both stylistically flat and openly cynical about its commercial intentions. Of chief interest here is Scheider's performance, which wisely reflects the emotional fallout from Brody's last trauma in his obsessive behavior here. --Tom Keogh

Jaws 3

An American Werewolf in London

Remember back in the early 1980s when special-effects makeup artists were tripping over themselves to create the next big effect? The Howling boasted a fantastic werewolf transformation scene courtesy of makeup wizard Rob Bottin. Then along came Bottin's mentor, Rick Baker, with his own spectacular effects in this popular horror comedy directed by John Landis. An American Werewolf in London is more of a makeup showcase than a truly satisfying movie, but the film is effectively moody when David Naughton discovers that a wolf attack has turned him into a bloodthirsty lycanthrope. Jenny Agutter plays his love interest (watch out, he bites!), and who can forget Griffin Dunne as Naughton's best friend, an undead corpse who progressively rots away as the plot unfolds? All things considered, it's easy to see why An American Werewolf in London became a modern horror favorite. --Jeff Shannon

Gremlins

Gremlins is a whee of a film (if you don't mind the occasional gross-out) from producer Steven Spielberg, writer Chris Columbus, and director Joe Dante. Zach Galligan is the young man whose inventor father (Hoyt Axton) gives him an odd Christmas present: a tiny, furry creature that comes with a set of rules: don't get him wet, don't feed him after midnight, and keep him away from direct sunlight. But Galligan breaks the first rule and the damp little critter pops out a dozen little offspring. Then the offspring break the second rule and, overnight, turn from cute furry guys to malevolent scaly guys with world domination on their mind. The only way to stop them: rule three. But it's an anxious (and extremely funny) battle to make it to daylight--and the bad gremlins find ways to multiply over and over. Great special effects and a gruesome sense of humor make this a wild (if occasionally dark and scary) ride. --Marshall Fine

A man buys a Mogwai as a Christmas present for his son. The young boy is told to keep the pet away from water, out of the light and never to feed it after midnight. Inadvertently, the creature is dampened and almost instantly, produces half a dozen furry replicas of itself --which continue to multiply and turn the small town upside-down.

Jaws - The Revenge

Alien (The Director's Cut)

A landmark of science fiction and horror, Alien arrived in 1979 between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back as a stylishly malevolent alternative to George Lucas's space fantasy. Partially inspired by 1958's It! The Terror from Beyond Space, this instant classic set a tone of its own, offering richly detailed sets, ominous atmosphere, relentless suspense, and a flawless ensemble cast as the crew of the space freighter Nostromo, who fall prey to a vicious creature (designed by Swiss artist H.R. Giger) that had gestated inside one of the ill-fated crew members. In a star-making role, Sigourney Weaver excels as sole survivor Ripley, becoming the screen's most popular heroine in a lucrative movie franchise. To measure the film's success, one need only recall the many images that have been burned into our collective psyche, including the "facehugger," the "chestburster," and Ripley's climactic encounter with the full-grown monster. Impeccably directed by Ridley Scott, Alien is one of the cinema's most unforgettable nightmares. --Jeff Shannon

The terror begins when the crew of a spaceship investigates a transmission from a desolate planet, and discovers a life form that is perfectly evolved to annihilate mankind. One by one, each crew member is slain until only Ripley is left, leading to an explosive conclusion that sets the stage for its stunning sequel, "Aliens."

Creepshow

Inspired by the controversial E.C. Comics of the 1950s--which also provided the title and inspiration for the popular Tales from the Crypt TV series--director George Romero and screenwriter Stephen King serve up five delightfully frightful stories. Utilizing comic-book panels, animated segues, and exaggerated lighting and camera angles, Romero and cinematographer Michael Gornick come very close to replicating a horror comic in film format. The results mix fine acting with the morbid sense of humor and irony that made the E.C. books so popular in their heyday. Actors such as Leslie Nielsen, Hal Holbrook, Ted Danson, Adrienne Barbeau, Ed Harris, E.G. Marshall, and even King appear in the stories, which include tales of a sinister father's day celebration, a mysterious meteor, seaweed-draped zombies, a monster in a crate, and a cockroach-phobic millionaire. Fiendishly fun fare from one of horror's most famous directors. --Bryan Reesman

Two macabre masters - writer Stephen King and director George A. Romero - conjure up five shocking yarns, each a virtuoso exercise in the ghouls-and-gags style of classic '50s horror comics. A murdered man emerges from the grave for Father's Day cake. A meteor's ooze makes everything ... grow. A professor selects his wife as a snack for a crated creature. A scheming husband plants two lovers up to their necks in terror. A malevolent millionaire with an insect phobia becomes the prey of a cockroach army. Add the spirited performances of a fine cast (Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, E.G. Marshall and King himself) and the ghoulish makeup wizardry of Tom Savini. Let the Creepshow begin.

DVD Features:
Interactive Menus
Scene Access
Theatrical Trailer

Dawn of the Dead (Widescreen Unrated Director's Cut)

Are you ready to get down with the sickness? Movie logic dictates that you shouldn't remake a classic, but Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead defies that logic and comes up a winner. You could argue that George A. Romero's 1978 original was sacred ground for horror buffs, but it was a low-budget classic, and Snyder's action-packed upgrade benefits from the same manic pacing that energized Romero's continuing zombie saga. Romero's indictment of mega-mall commercialism is lost (it's arguably outmoded anyway), so Snyder and screenwriter James Gunn compensate with the same setting--in this case, a Milwaukee shopping mall under siege by cannibalistic zombies in the wake of a devastating viral outbreak--a well-chosen cast (led by Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, and Mekhi Phifer), some outrageously morbid humor, and a no-frills plot that keeps tension high and blood splattering by the bucketful. Horror buffs will catch plenty of tributes to Romero's film (including cameos by three of its cast members, including gore-makeup wizard Tom Savini), and shocking images are abundant enough to qualify this Dawn as an excellent zombie-flick double-feature with 28 Days Later, its de facto British counterpart. --Jeff Shannon

Nightbreed

Troubled twentysomething Craig Sheffer is haunted by violent dreams of serial killings and nocturnal invitations by misshapen creatures who live in a misty, mysterious land called Midia. Adapted and directed by Clive Barker (Hellraiser) from his novel Cabal, this tribute to the magical creatures of the night plays like a Jungian reinterpretation of classic myths with a modern twist. Nightbreed are the dead reborn as monsters of legend, fantasies, and nightmares who form their own outcast society in an underground city beneath an Alberta graveyard. Visionary horror director David Cronenberg steps in front of the camera to play Sheffer's unscrupulous psychiatrist, an eerie, unsettling character whose dark side is hidden under a soft-spoken manner and an eerily calm and controlled voice.

Barker has a rather unsubtle approach to this fantastical Holocaust metaphor: every human is a victim, a hick, or a bloodthirsty monster, and the climactic witch-hunt is all gore and spectacle. By contrast the bestial society of outcasts has a kind of natural, innocent savagery that turns protective when the tribe is threatened. Cool-looking beings of bright colors, latex masks, and outrageous bodysuits, they band together like some extreme mutant superhero team with anger-management issues. Barker could use more attention to details (what happened to the so-called mystic properties of his shape-shifting monster heroes when the guns were drawn?), but there's an undeniable charge to his modern take on myth and magic. --Sean Axmaker

Set in the canadian wilderness, a search is on for a serial killer and an ancient tribe of monsters called the night-breed.

Blood & Chocolate

As a young girl living in the remote mountains of Colorado Vivian (Bruckner) watched helplessly as her family was murdered by a pack of angry men for the secret they carried in their blood. Vivian survived the attack by running into the woods and changing into a wolf. Ten years later Vivian is living a relatively safe and normal life in Bucharest Romania. Vivian spends her days working in a chocolate shop and nights trawling the city s underground clubs fending off the reckless antics of her cousin Rafe and his gang of delinquents he refers to as "The Five."Vivian s life begins to unravel when she has a chance encounter with Aiden (Dancy) an artist researching Bucharest ancient art and relics for his next graphic novel. Aiden pursues Vivian until she relents and begins to see him but she can t bring herself to tell him the truth - and lives in fear of showing him who she really is. Even though Vivian has sworn never to kill she is as much an animal as she is human and her love for Aiden threatens to cast him to the very wolves who saved her life and who are waiting for their chance to hunt him as prey.Run Time: 98 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: HORROR Rating: PG - 13 UPC: 043396189560 Manufacturer No: 18956

When graphic novelist Aiden (Hugh Dancy) travels to Bucharest to research the loup garou legend, he nearly gets devoured in the latest female werewolf film, Blood and Chocolate. In the tradition of Werewolf Woman and Ginger Snaps, Blood and Chocolate stars Vivian Gandillon (Agnes Bruckner), a girl who's forced to face her lupine tendencies in order to discover how capable of loving Aiden she really is. Based on a book by Annette Curtis Clause, the film chronicles the lives of the remaining loup garou who are an extended Romanian family waiting for their pack leader, Gabriel, to select his new mate. His desire for Vivian means trouble when her wish to be with Aiden results in her revealing too much about the clan's secretive lifestyle. In this film, werewolves look fully human until their eyes glow with colored contact lenses while they fly through the air to then land as full-fledged wolves. Gone are the days, apparently, of films showing the transformation in all its hairy, explosive detail. A lack of scenes describing the werewolf metamorphosis make this film more a love story than a monster tale, though two forest gatherings in which the loup garou hunt human sacrifices offer some grizzly satisfaction. Unlike the aforementioned femme werewolf films, Blood and Chocolate features a girl fighting her urge to kill in a bid to unite humans with her brethren, making this movie the most peaceful in its genre. With a tame wolf as protagonist, the potential nightmare is really just a pleasant dream to unite the two disparate worlds. The question is: Do we want that to happen? --Trinie Dalton