The Corner Penthouse

Tremors: A Cold Day In Hell, which comes out this Tuesday, May 1st, is the sixth film in a series that has spanned nearly 30 years! It all started back in 1990 with the original Tremors, starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, and Michael Gross (not to be confused with Ghostbusters producer Michael C. Gross). Handymen Valentine McKee (Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Ward), along with gun enthusiast Burt Gummer (Gross) and the rest of the inhabitants of the small isolated desert town of Perfection, Nevada, fought off the underground sandworms known as Graboids. When Earl found himself in Mexico outgunned against the Graboids, and the new bipedal Shriekers in Tremors II: Aftershocks (1996), he enlisted the help of his old friend Burt. Burt came back to Perfection to fight the good fight with the remaining residents (including several returning secondary cast members) against the Graboids, the Shriekers, and the new aerial Ass-Blasters in Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001). After closing out the trilogy, Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004) saw the series placed in the Old West of 1889 (100 years before the first film), as the citizens of that small town battled Graboids for the first time. Thanks to the efforts of Burt's ancestor, Hiram Gummer (also played by Gross), the town of Rejection was rechristened Perfection. The franchise rebooted itself, in a manner of speaking, with Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015). Burt and his new sidekick/cameraman/son Travis Welker (Jamie Kennedy) are called in to rid South Africa of those nasty Graboids, Shriekers, and Ass-Blasters. The new movie, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018), continues where Bloodlines left off. If that's not a good recap for you, here's Burt to give you his version.

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It all started back in 1968 with George A. Romero's original Night of the Living Dead (just released by the Criterion Collection). While it didn't create the "zombie", it did create the genre as we know it. There would be no "The Walking Dead" were it not for Night of the Living Dead. Mr. Romero followed up his masterpiece with two more films to create the original Dead trilogy: Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). In the 2000s, he would release a new Dead trilogy: Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). All three films of the original trilogy have been remade, more so for the original film because it fell into the public domain (due to the lack of a copyright notice), and thus it was "free" to all who wanted to rip it off. Dawn of the Dead received a popular theatrical remake in 2004, written by James Gunn and directed by Zack Snyder. Day of the Dead has now been remade twice; first in 2008 as a film starring Ving Rhames and Mena Suvari, and now as Day of the Dead: Bloodline starring Sophie Skelton and Johnathon Schaech.

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The Hellraiser franchise has been one of the longest-running in the horror genre. To date there are 10 films in the series: Hellraiser (1987), Hellbound (1988), Hell on Earth (1992), Bloodline (1996), Inferno (2000), Hellseeker (2002), Hellworld (2005), Deader (2005), Revelations (2011), and the latest entry - Hellraiser: Judgment. I have seen every one of these films (save for maybe Revelations), and what's unique about this series is that most of the films after the first two have been standalone films that have had little to nothing to do with the ones that came before or after it. That's not a surprise since most of them are based on scripts that did not start off as Hellraiser projects. That doesn't change with Judgment, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad film.

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Class of 1999 arrives on Blu-ray as the 14th entry in Lionsgate's Vestron Video Collector's Series, "a line of classic genre films newly remastered and with a wealth of supplementary features." I have reviewed several other titles in the series.

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Gothic arrives on Blu-ray as the 13th entry in Lionsgate's Vestron Video Collector's Series, "a line of classic genre films newly remastered and with a wealth of supplementary features." I have reviewed several other titles in the series.

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