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Extras in both DVD editions include audio commentaries; cast and crew interviews; featurettes on the visual effects; and photo galleries. Forbidden World also contains the barely seen original cut, known as Mutant. (Side note: Feel free to read Galaxy of Terror's accompanying tell-all booklet before watching the movie, since author Jovanka Vuckovic's erroneous crediting of a key character in the final scenes means that some surprise will still be maintained.)
Galaxy of Terror: **
Forbidden World: *1/2
Extras: ***
REPO MEN (2010). Not to be confused with 1984's dissimilar Repo Man but easily able to be mixed up with 2008's identically plotted Repo! The Genetic Opera, Repo Men mostly plays like an uninspired rip-off of Logan's Run plus Brazil plus Total Recall plus Monty Python's The Meaning of Life plus ... well, I could do this all day. Suffice it to say that there's little here to excite anyone except maybe the gorehounds. A futuristic saga with more blood than brains, this centers on Remy (Jude Law), whose career as a repo man for a company called The Union means that whenever someone falls behind on their payments for the mechanical organs keeping them healthy, it's his job to track the person down and forcibly remove the expensive piece of hardware by any means necessary (as expected, the client often doesn't survive the procedure). Like any good citizen of this country, Remy only cares about things that directly affect him, so it's only after he's injured and subsequently outfitted with a new heart he can't afford that he thinks, "Hey, maybe what I've been doing to people isn't so nice!" No kidding. Now equipped with a self-serving conscience, he finds himself on the run, chased by his partner and best friend (Forest Whitaker). Whitaker's inventive performance is an asset, but Repo Men, based on Eric Garcia's novel The Repossession Mambo, isn't able to take its potentially provocative storyline past the alternately silly, lazy and illogical scripting by Garrett Lerner and Garcia himself. To be sure, there are moments of inspiration (the child surgeon, for example), but for the most part, here's another piece of clunky sci-fi hardware that could use an overhaul.
The DVD contains both the theatrical version and an unrated cut. Extras include audio commentary by Garcia, Lerner and director Miguel Sapochnik; five deleted scenes; and a short look at the visual effects.
Movie: **
Extras: **
THE RUNAWAYS (2010). A look at the formation of the influential all-girl rock band from the latter half of the 1970s, The Runaways needs a lot more Joan Jett, a lot less Cherie Currie. Always entertaining but never as penetrating as one would hope, this tinkers with historical accuracy (but not to a distracting degree) to show how five teenage girls, including Jett (played by Twilight's Kristen Stewart) and Currie (former screen moppet Dakota Fanning, suddenly 16), came together in the sun-soaked California of 1975 to create a band that would remain together for only a few years yet forge a path that would lead the way for other female musicians over the ensuing decades. The material available for a radical screen biopic is eye-popping — here's a band that rubbed shoulders with the likes of The Ramones and The Sex Pistols, for God's sake — yet writer-director Floria Sigismondi keeps her focus small, preferring to present the story as a commonplace rise-and-fall odyssey. Even this approach would have worked had the spotlight been squarely on Jett, but instead it's Currie who receives the closest thing to a career trajectory. This makes sense considering that Sigismondi based her script on a book written by Currie (Neon Angel), but she should have chosen better source material: It's unfortunate (and probably a tad insulting) that instead of centering on the brainy woman who went on to become a trailblazer and rock icon in her own right, the picture chooses instead to follow the sexpot who fails rather than succeeds, predictably undone by the usual combo of drugs, exhaustion and incompatibility. The Runaways isn't bad — it's got spirit and spunk — but it fails to really punch across this vital period in rock history. Stewart and Fanning are both fine in their respective roles, although it's Revolutionary Road's Michael Shannon who, ahem, runs away with the film. As Kim Fowley, the oddball music maven who brings the band together, Shannon delivers a suitably prickly performance that doesn't shy away from exposing his sordidness or infuriating unpredictability. It's a captivating turn, and it best punches across the messy sense of anarchy that the rest of the picture desperately needs.
