FILM FRENZY

Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (Photo: Warner Archive)

By Matt Brunson

(View From The Couch is a weekly column that reviews what’s new on Blu-ray, 4K, and DVD. Ratings are on a four-star scale.)

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT (1942). It’s Bogie vs. the Nazis! Shot before, but released just five weeks after, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the comedic All Through the Night is propaganda at its pulpiest, with Humphrey Bogart given a gangster-like role but made the hero rather than the heavy. He’s “Gloves” Donahue, a notable NYC gambler who loves nothing more than the cheesecake made by the kindly baker Mr. Miller (Ludwig Stossel). When Mr. Miller is found murdered, Gloves gathers his team (a wonderful assortment played by the likes of William Demarest, Jackie Gleason, and Phil Silvers) and sets out to solve the mystery. What he finds is a nest of fifth columnists operating in the Big Apple — Ebbing (Conrad Veidt) the leader, Madame (Judith Anderson) his invaluable aide, and Pepi (Peter Lorre) the enforcer. The dialogue is so lively and the good guys so amusing (the Nazis, of course, are humorless bastards) that the climactic all-out battle actually feels protracted since it’s the firearms and fisticuffs that then take top billing. Nevertheless, there are many fine sequences: the opening scene, with Gloves’ gang playing with toy soldiers; the auction; and Gloves and his right-hand man Sunshine (Demarest) infiltrating a Nazi meeting and employing doublespeak to confuse the assembled.

Blu-ray extras consist of audio commentary by director Vincent Sherman and Bogart biographer Eric Lax; a featurette on character actors; a vintage 1942 newsreel; the 1942 live-action short So You Want to Give Up Smoking; the 1942 cartoon Lights Fantastic; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

THE BORROWERS (1997) / THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY (2012). While Mary Norton’s classic novel The Borrowers has been brought to television on several occasions, there have been only two theatrical versions. Both are newly arrived on Blu-ray, one for the first time and the other for the fourth.

The Blu newcomer is The Borrowers, which adds its own embellishments to the source material while also liberally borrowing its style from Home Alone. The Lenders — Mom (Doon Mackichan), Dad (Aden Gillett), and inventive son Pete (Bradley Pierce) — unknowingly share their home with the Clock family, tiny people who call themselves “borrowers” as they appropriate household items they can use for their own surroundings (e.g. used stamps as wall paintings, a tape measure as an elevator, a Reach dental floss container as a backpack). When slimy lawyer Ocious C. Potter (John Goodman) illegally but successfully steals the house from the Lenders so he can tear it down and build condos, it’s up to Pete and the Clocks — Mom (Celia Imrie), Dad (Jim Broadbent), daughter Arrietty (Flora Newbigin), and son Peagreen (Tom Felton, unrecognizable as the boy who would be playing Draco Malfoy a mere four years later) — to stop him. The Borrowers is perfectly pleasant and features outstanding art direction, but the slapstick and vulgarity grow tiresome. Besides, 1997 also saw the release of Mouse Hunt, which followed a similar template but was more amusing and featured far more interesting characters.

The Secret World of Arrietty, meanwhile, hails from Japan’s Studio Ghibli, the only toon factory comparable to Pixar. It’s understandable that the original Japanese voices were overlaid with English ones for many international markets, but considering this initial dubbing already had taken place for the picture’s UK release — and with noteworthy actors like Olivia Colman, Saoirse Ronan, Tom Holland, and Mark Strong, to boot — did stateside distributor Disney really need to replace those British voices with American ones? Were they afraid Yank audiences might be too dumb to decipher the King’s English? Whatever the daft reason, it’s a good bet this film would still work even in Pig Latin, given the usual warmth and attention to detail invested in all Ghibli efforts. The story revolves around the title character (Bridgit Mendler) and her parents (Amy Poehler and Will Arnett), inches-tall people who live in their own makeshift home underneath a real house. Warned to avoid human contact at all costs, Arrietty nevertheless strikes up a tentative friendship with a sickly boy (David Henrie), a bond that inadvertently draws the attention of a cruel housekeeper (Carol Burnett). Leisurely related and lovingly crafted, The Secret World of Arrietty is an oasis of calm in the normally hyperactive world of toon entertainment.

As with Nadine and Micki & Maude (both reviewed below), this release comes with a VHS retro-style slipcover; there are no extras. Extras on The Secret World of Arrietty include interviews with director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and scripter (and Studio Ghibli co-founder) Hayao Miyazaki; feature-length storyboards; and trailers.

The Borrowers: ★★½

The Secret World of Arrietty: ★★★

EVIL DEAD BURN (2026). Americans can stand pretty much anything in their moviegoing diet — extreme violence, gruesome gore effects, sexual assaults, endless streams of profanity, Josh Gad — but if there’s one thing they will not tolerate, it’s the dog dying. Guess what? In Evil Dead Burn, the dog dies, [Spoiler, Trigger or both?] getting repeatedly stabbed in the face with a fork. To be fair, pretty much every living being dies in Evil Dead Burn, a horror flick that looks like an Evil Dead entry about as much as, say, the Kansas City Chiefs look like a baseball team — that is to say, not much at all. In this one, a widow (Souheila Yacoub) has to contend with the disparate and mostly unpleasant members of her late husband’s (George Pullar) family after he’s taken from her in a car accident. To be more specific, he was taken by a Deadite (the franchise’s demonic entities), who proceeds to turn him into one of the evil dead as well. From there, the Deadites hopscotch from one family member to the next, taking care not to overlook the girlfriend (Luciane Buchanan) of the wimpy son (Hunter Doohan). The problem with the newer EDs — 2013’s Evil Dead, 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, and now this — is that they’re far too serious and far too joyless to deserve to carry the Evil Dead brand name, a series that was initially as known for its quirky sense of humor and its gonzo shooting style as for its outlandish gore sequences (see From Screen To Stream below). The humor in these more recent outings is far too muted, the technical achievements are too slick, and the gore tries to be unsettling rather than outlandish. This entry also attempts to tackle heavy issues, with the theme of family dysfunction better handled than the issue of domestic abuse.

Blu-ray extras consist of a making-of featurette; a scene breakdown; and a look at the visual effects.

Movie: ★★

EXIT 8 (2026). Surpassing Werewolves Within as the best video game adaptation to date (keep in mind I have yet to see Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot), this adaptation of the Japanese game The Exit 8 is a trippy endeavor that’s both visually striking and thematically involving. The protagonist is The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), a commuter who finds that the subway station has somehow been transformed into an immersive game in which victory can only be achieved by finding and passing through Exit 8. He must constantly be on the lookout for anomalies, since if he misses anything that’s different while moving forward (e.g. flickering lights, eyes shifting on a poster, blood dripping from a sign), he will be sent back to the beginning — conversely, if there are no anomalies, he will be able to successfully move toward the next exit. Initially, the only other person in sight is The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who dispassionately strides in a perpetual loop, but The Lost Man is eventually joined by The Boy (Naru Asanuma), a mute and perceptive tyke. By design, the movie is initially repetitive as The Lost Man continuously examines the same primary corridor looking for anything out of the ordinary, but it expands and deepens as it progresses, with the opening (non-game) scenes proving to be integral to the piece as a whole. By including this material, the film shifts from being merely an engaging brain tease to mulling over such issues as setting goals, accepting responsibility, pondering parenthood, and making sacrifices.

Blu-ray extras consist of a making-of featurette; a Q&A with writer-director Genki Kawamura; and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

NADINE (1987). Writer-director Robert Benton’s first movie after his astonishing Places in the Heart (which 42 years later remains my pick for the Best Film of 1984) is entertainment at its most featherweight and disposable, and it would be completely forgettable were it not for a bright performance from Kim Basinger. She stars as Nadine, a hairdresser seeking a divorce from her husband Vernon (Jeff Bridges) in 1954 Austin, Texas. It’s never convincingly explained why they would want a divorce — he doesn’t abuse her, she doesn’t cheat on him, and neither has a drinking problem, but, boy, do they lightly bicker a lot! Nadine inadvertently gets mixed up in the murder of sleazy photographer Raymond Escobar (Jerry Stiller), who was in possession of a land development map sought by local businessman Buford Pope (Rip Torn) — said map ends up in her hands, allowing Vernon a look-see and an opportunity to concoct a get-rich scheme. Unfortunately for the couple, they’re being pursued not only by Pope and his goons but also by the police, who tag them as the photographer’s killers. Nadine has the type of plotline that would have been right at home on many of the decade’s enjoyable but hardly complicated TV shows — series such as Hart to Hart and The Fall Guy — while the characters could just as easily have been found on any given sitcom. That’s not meant as a knock as much as it’s meant as a suggestion to temper expectations. Bridges is his usual likable self, even if it feels like he’s coasting, while Basinger delivers a bright and winning performance — as in the same year’s Blind Date and the following year’s My Stepmother Is an Alien, she proves to be by far the best thing in a mediocre comedy.

There are no Blu-ray extras.

Movie: ★★

OUT OF THE PAST (1947). One of the quintessential film noirs, Out of the Past casts Robert Mitchum as Jeff Markham, a private eye hired by mobster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to track down his moll Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who he claims shot him and absconded with $40,000. Jeff locates Kathie in Acapulco, but rather than inform Whit, he falls for her and plots to run away with her. Needless to say, things don’t quite work out as desired. Flashbacks relate this section of the story, with the plot moving forward once Jeff reluctantly agrees to work for Whit again — Kathie is still in the picture, as are murders, double-crosses, and enough cigarettes to keep an entire army battalion happy. This adaptation of Daniel Mainwaring’s novel Build My Gallows High was placed in the capable hands of director Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who had employed light and shadow to staggering effect in the 1942 horror classic Cat People. That made them a natural fit for a noir, and Out of the Past is a textbook example of the form, with a perfect anti-hero in Mitchum’s doomed detective, one of cinema’s all-time great femme fatales in Greer’s duplicitous doll, dialogue with edges as sharp as razor blades (a personal fave: “He couldn’t find a prayer in the Bible”), and plenty of nocturnal, smoke-choked mise-en-scènes ready-made for genre deconstruction. Even the daytime isn’t safe from danger, as evidenced by a marvelously staged death-by-fishhook sequence. Strong support is provided by Paul Valentine as Whit’s enforcer and Rhonda Fleming as a secondary femme fatale, this one with the catchy name Meta Carson.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition consist of audio commentary by film noir historian James Ursini; an introduction by Turner Classic Movies Noir Alley host Eddie Muller; and a handful of audio-only radio show appearances by Mitchum and Douglas.

Movie: ★★★★

TORRID ZONE (1940). James Cagney and Pat O’Brien were a popular screen team, co-starring in eight pictures in a six-year span (both also appeared in 1981’s Ragtime but shared no scenes). Their final collaboration was this fast-paced romp that also reunited the pair with their Angels With Dirty Faces leading lady Ann Sheridan. Cagney (sporting a scrawny mustache that does him no favors) is Nick Butler, who has just quit as the foreman at a Central American banana plantation owned by the cranky Steve Case (O’Brien). In addition to trying to get Nick to work for him again, Steve also has taken it upon himself to oversee the removal of nightclub singer Lee Donley (Sheridan) from the area, since he finds her a needless distraction to the men under his thumb (plus, she cheats at cards). Nick agrees to come back to the plantation, where he finds Lee hiding from the authorities; naturally, they engage in a, well, torrid love-hate relationship. Cagney is rightly regarded as one of the all-time greats, and, while a fine actor, it’s easy to see why the comparatively vanilla O’Brien hasn’t enjoyed similar enduring success. More of a puzzle is the long-term fate of Sheridan, a Warner Bros. star promoted by the studio as “the oomph girl” and paired with just about every major WB player save Edward G. Robinson (including Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, John Garfield, and even Ronald Reagan). Sheridan was effective in dramas, but films like Torrid Zone proved that she was equally noteworthy as a comedienne. She deserves more recognition.

Blu-ray extras include a vintage newsreel; the Oscar-nominated 1940 classic A Wild Hare, featuring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in what’s considered (given their enduring designs) the first real Bugs ‘n’ Elmer cartoon; and the 1940 short Pony Express Days, starring future Superman George Reeves.

Movie: ★★★

FILM CLIPS

MICKI & MAUDE (1984). TV reporter Rob Salinger (Dudley Moore) is married to workaholic lawyer Micki (Ann Reinking), who’s simply too busy to have the child he so desires. He ends up falling for cellist Maude Gillory (Amy Irving) — after she gets pregnant, he decides to divorce Micki and marry Maude, only to learn that Micki has also become pregnant. So what’s a poor fellow to do? Become a bigamist, of course! A dubious premise is handled as delicately as possible by writer Jonathan Reynolds, or at least until the awful copout ending. Luckily, Blake Edwards is in the director’s chair, so the farcical elements mostly work. Reinking, best known as a Broadway actress and Tony Award-winning choreographer (for 1996’s Chicago revival), only appeared in four movies, and that’s a shame — she delivers a phenomenal monologue in this picture that shows she could have been a star in this medium as well.

There are no Blu-ray extras.

Movie: ★★½

THE SECRET AGENT (2025). Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship lasted 21 years (1964-1985) and led to the torture, disappearance, and/or murders of over 20,000 dissidents. This real-life atrocity was the focus of I’m Still Here, which landed on my 10 Best list for 2024 — history repeats itself with another Brazilian film tackling the same topic and making my 2025 list. Wagner Moura is wonderful as a former professor and wanted fugitive who hides in plain sight by assuming a fake alias and working in a government ID office. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho does an exemplary job of recreating the period, but he goes an extra mile by embellishing his dramatization with dashes of surrealism. And then he charges forward even further, adding modern-day sequences reminding us that we must always reclaim history from those deplorables who seek to alter or obfuscate it. This earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, International Feature Film, and Actor.

Blu-ray extras include a making-of piece and deleted scenes.

Movie: ★★★½

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

THE EVIL DEAD (1981) / EVIL DEAD II (1987) / ARMY OF DARKNESS (1993). The more recent entries in the Evil Dead franchise are merely pretenders to the throne, as it’s the original trilogy that still rules.

It was one of my favorite high school teachers who first told me about The Evil Dead back in 1983. Urging me to rent the bootleg cassette at our favorite video store in Nairobi, Kenya, he continued by stating, “It’s gory but it’s not scary. It’s so goofy and over-the-top that it’s impossible to take seriously. It’s just insane.” That declaration hardly prepared me for what I encountered. Few horror flicks have been as deliriously demented, as insanely radical, as alive, as this so-called “ultimate experience in grueling horror” (as it bills itself during the closing credits). A cult classic that jumpstarted the careers of director Sam Raimi, actor Bruce Campbell, and producer Robert Tapert, it arguably stands as the best splatter film ever made. Finished in 1981 but not seeing any sort of release until 1983, the film finds five Michigan college kids descending upon a cabin in the Tennessee woods, where they discover a Book of the Dead. Much demonic possession ensues, with bodily dismemberment the only real solution. This remains one of the most accomplished ultra-low-budget pictures I’ve ever seen, with the camerawork, the editing (Joel Coen is billed as “assistant film editor”), Joseph LoDuca’s score, and, of course, the gruesome visual and makeup effects all remarkably inventive and effective.

There are many who feel Evil Dead II (often subtitled Dead by Dawn) is superior to its predecessor, but I’m not in that camp. For all its merits, this follow-up completely strips away even the slightest hint of menace, coasts by on some of the wacked-out special effects, and features supporting characters even more lifeless (ouch) than those from the first film. After providing a shaky recap of what had previously taken place (because Raimi didn’t own the rights to the original, he had to reshoot that picture’s highlights), the movie catches up with lone survivor Ash as he’s still stranded in a remote cabin surrounded by demonic entities. Four other people join him, and it’s not long before the possessions and bodily dismemberments begin. Tackling this material less like a horror flick and more like a slapstick comedy, Raimi lets the talented Campbell go wild, and the actor’s infectious, rambunctious turn remains the movie’s high point.

Only a primitive screwhead would find zero entertainment value in Army of Darkness. Radically different from its predecessors, this entry builds on the ending of Part Deux and takes off in its own loony direction. Our hero Ash finds himself back in the Dark Ages (The Medieval Dead was suggested as the title, which would have been brilliant); there, he battles all manner of monsters, including a skeleton army and his own supernatural doppelganger, Bad Ash. With its glorious effects — not to mention a robust Bernard Herrmann-esque score by LoDuca — this film is first and foremost a tribute to Ray Harryhausen, although Raimi also finds room for shout-outs to William Shakespeare, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and especially The Three Stooges.

The Evil Dead: ★★★½

Evil Dead II: ★★★

Army of Darkness: ★★★

THE HUMAN STAIN (2003). With Robert Benton (Places in the Heart) as director, Nicholas Meyer (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution) as scripter, and a novel by Philip Roth as the source material, this was expected to be a major award contender, but underwhelming box office and mostly negative reviews took care of that. But it’s an affecting picture nevertheless, almost subdued in the manner in which it tackles its myriad issues of race, loss, identity, and the lengths to which one man will reinvent himself to succeed in America. Set during that period when the country was focused on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the movie traces the downward spiral of college professor Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) after an innocent classroom comment is misinterpreted as a racial slur in a time of rampant political correctness. Suddenly without a career or a family, Coleman passes the days alternating between dwelling on secrets buried in his past and engaging in a tentative relationship with a complex woman (Nicole Kidman) who paints herself as the ultimate in trailer park trash. Ed Harris’ intensity as Kidman’s crazed ex-husband is unsettling, and Gary Sinise makes Coleman pal Nathan Zuckerman a reassuring narrator. Yet it’s the two leads who dominate — many felt they were both miscast, but at the time Hopkins hadn’t been this interesting in years, while Kidman overcomes any presumed hurdles with an amazing portrayal.

Movie: ★★★

JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (1996). The gang behind 1993’s wildly inventive The Nightmare Before Christmas — director Henry Selick and producers Tim Burton and Denise Di Novi — reunited three years later for another offbeat animated excursion, this one based on the book by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author Roald Dahl. After the death of his parents by a mysterious rampaging rhinoceros, young James (played in the live-action bookend scenes by Paul Terry), is sent to live with two heartless aunts (Miriam Margolyes and Joanna Lumley) who treat him abysmally. His encounter with a kindhearted stranger (Pete Postlethwaite) leads to a bizarre series of events which eventually find him burrowing into an enormous peach, at which point he’s magically transported into a fantastic adventure involving human-sized insects, a mechanical shark, and a voyage to that fabled land known as New York City. The forgettable tunes by Randy Newman slow the picture down (he did earn an Oscar nomination for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score), but otherwise, this is a visually stimulating treat that’s witty enough to even include a surprise cameo sure to please Nightmare Before Christmas aficionados. The voice cast includes Richard Dreyfuss as a Brooklyn-bred centipede and Simon Callow as an erudite grasshopper, yet Susan Sarandon fares best as a sultry spider who seems to be channeling Greta Garbo in Ninotchka.

Movie: ★★★

KISS ME DEADLY (1955). As brutal as any movie that came out of Hollywood during the 1950s, this exciting adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s novel, reimagined by scripter A.I. Bezzerides and director Robert Aldrich, drapes the film noir template with a nuclear age awning. Mike Hammer, played with a sadistic sneer by Ralph Meeker, is a far cry from Bogart’s ’40s gumshoes: Whereas Bogie’s heroes were smart, conversational, and charismatic, with a soft spot often buried under all that cynicism, this Hammer is a brutish lunkhead, letting his fists do all the talking and never fully comprehending the enormity of the situation at hand. He first gets involved when he picks up a frightened woman (Cloris Leachman in her first major film role) running barefoot along the highway; she’s soon murdered, and Hammer becomes curious after the authorities take special interest in her death and order him to forget the affair. Instead, he follows his own leads and gets tangled up in a labyrinthine plot that ultimately centers around the mysterious contents of a small box. So controversial in its day that Aldrich wrote a defense of the picture in the New York Herald-Tribune, this startling achievement proved to be a major influence on both French and American filmmakers — as one example, a direct line can be traced from this movie to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

Movie: ★★★½

MAX PAYNE (2008). The rain in Spain may fall mainly on the plain, but the pain in Payne falls squarely on the heads of unsuspecting viewers concussed by the bricks of incompetence that shower down in this ugly video-game adaptation. Imagine The Constant Gardener after a frontal lobotomy, and that’s basically Max Payne in a nutshell. This stars Mark Wahlberg as a New York cop who, years after the fact, is still solely obsessed with solving the murders of his wife and baby. It sounds like standard Death Wish fare; the picture even opens with Max luring three drug addicts into a subway restroom, then proceeding to inflict Payne — excuse me, pain — on them. But as in The Constant Gardener, a major pharmaceutical outfit figures into the proceedings, although it’s safe to say that Ralph Fiennes never had to contend with winged demons flying all over the cityscape. That’s not the case with Wahlberg, whose character also has to deal with invincible super-soldiers, a leggy druggie (Olga Kurylenko), and a career assassin (a miscast Mila Kunis) who’s about as menacing as a Scooby-Doo plush doll. Rather than a kick-ass action flick (presumably what fans of the video game would crave), this is a simplistic revenge yarn with various twists and turns that are all absurdly easy to predict (if the revelation of the piece’s final villain surprises you, you really need to add more mysteries to your moviegoing diet). Yet even when the film does get around to the shootouts and fights, they prove to be flagrantly opportunistic, rehashing both The Matrix and the John Woo oeuvre to diminishing returns.

Movie: ★