Soylent Green is…well, I won’t spoil what Soylent Green is made of for the few people who haven’t seen the movie or had it spoiled for them already. Which may be a lot of people, come to think of it. The movie is over 50 years old after all and doesn’t have quite the cultural cache it once had. I didn’t see it until I was in college in the 1990s, and it had definitely been spoiled for me.
Buy Soylent GreenWhat Soylent Green is made of doesn’t really matter all that much. It is shocking and thematically important, but the film is so much more than that one discovery. It is one of my favorite dystopian thrillers, and it’s got an amazing performance from Edward G. Robinson (that would prove to be his last).
Arrow Video is bringing us a new 4K UHD disc of Soylent Green loaded with commentaries, interviews, and featurettes. I unabashedly love this film and am thrilled to see this coming out in UHD.
Also coming out this week that looks interesting:
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair: Quentin Tarantino originally intended Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 to be a single film. But it was too long and too costly, and the Weinsteins made him turn it into two films. Now he’s put them back together and added in a new animated sequence. It had a limited run in theaters (I really wanted to go, but it is nearly 4 1/2 hours long, and that is far too much time in a cinema at one time). But now it is getting a home-video release, and I am totally down for that.
In the Mouth of Madness: Arrow Video does their excellent thing with this pretty terrific horror film from John Carpenter. Sam Neill plays an insurance investigator sent to find a missing horror writer and discovers a strange, small town full of unexpected horror.
The Devil Wears Prada 2: Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway are back in this sequel, which reverses the roles. Hathaway’s Andy Sachs is no longer the assistant to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of a major magazine. Set some 20 years after the events of the first film, Priestly is struggling to keep her magazine afloat, and Sachs now runs a luxury group with lucrative advertising dollars that could keep the magazine from going bust. Hilarity, presumably, ensues.
Bride of Re-Animator: This sequel to the cult classic doesn’t make a lot of narrative sense, but it is a whole lot of blood-soaked fun. I reviewed the Arrow Video Blu-ray of this film back in 2016. Ignite Films is giving it a 4K UHD upgrade and loading it with three discs worth of extras.
Mortal Kombat II: Sequel to a movie based on a video game where crazy dudes fight each other to the death.
Pressure: Andrew Scott stars as a meteorologist tasked with forecasting what the weather will be like on D-Day. Brendan Fraser plays Eisenhower.
Stranger Things: The Complete Series: It is amazing to me how a series that started so good and was such a huge cultural hit, just kind of fizzled out in the end. The time between the first season and the last one was so long that I think collectively we were just ready for it to be over. The final season isn’t even that bad, but it felt like absolutely no one was asking for it. I certainly wasn’t. But if it is still your thing, this is a fine package. It comes with every season, loads of extras like interviews and bloopers, and it comes with a big booklet full of pictures and essays.
The Outfit: Robert Duvall plays a small-time crook who takes on the mob after they kill his brother. Arrow Video has the release.
