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Lisa and the Devil, a review by Jimmy

                 
Title: Lisa and the Devil (1973)

Genre: artistic Horror
Director: Mario Bava (Black Sunday)           
Rating: Unrated
Length: 1h35
Video: Widescreen
Audio: English
Subtitles: No Subtitles

Stars:
Telly Savalas (KojakA Shot in the Dark)
Sylva Koscina (Sunday Lovers*)
Alessio Orano (The Most Beautiful Wife)
Alida Valli (The Third Man)   

Plot:
Telly Savalas and Elke Sommer star in this surreal tale that unfolds as both waking dream and elliptical nightmare, a lush and disturbing meditation on love, death, identity and the machinations of evil. Now recognized as Il Maestro's final masterpiece, LISA AND THE DEVIL has been fully restored and remastered from the original camera negatives recently discovered in a Rome lab vault.



* I can't understand why this is not already release on dvd.

(From The little known movie review depot on June 9th, 2008)

Linda Linda Linda, a review by Tom

Linda Linda Linda (2005/Japan) IMDb | Wikipedia Viz Pictures (United States) Director: Nobuhiro Yamashita Writing: Length: 115 min. Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85 Audio: Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround Subtitles: English

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Stars:
Doona Bae as Son
Aki Maeda as Kyoko Yamada
Yu Kashii as Kei Tachibana
Shiori Sekine as Nozomi Shiroko
Takayo Mimura as Rinko

Plot:
Only three days before their high school festival, guitarist Kei (Yuu Kashii), drummer Kyoko (Aki Maeda of 'Battle Royale'), and bassist Nozumi (Shiori Sekine) are forced to recruit a new lead vocalist for their band. They choose Korean exchange student Son (Doona Bae of 'Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance'), though her comprehension of Japanese is a bit rough!

It's a race against time as the group struggles to learn three tunes for the festival's rock concert--including a classic '80s punk-pop song by the Japanese group The Blue Hearts called "Linda Linda"...

Extras:

• Commentary
• Production Notes
• Scene Access
• Trailers

This is far from a cinematic masterpiece, but I enjoyed this movie. It has a realistic feel to it. It is about a bunch of girls who are participating in an high school event as a rock band. In the beginning they are much in need of practice but improve over the course of the movie with a lot of practice.
The most fun part is the Korean exchange student they asked to be the singer as they were short of a vocalist. I found the interaction of the Korean girl with the others somehow hilarious.
What I always find amazing is, that when I watch Japanese live-action movies set in high schools, how much the environment and school events matches those in animes. This is what makes animes so good, as they often portray stuff as it were live-action.

Also a lot of familiar faces from movies like Death Note, Battle Royale and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

Japanese trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFkk03xoHNI

Last 4 minutes of the movie (their performance at the school event):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQQUEicr6d8

Rating:

(From Two-Weeks Movie Marathon: Unwatched Movies on August 20th, 2008)

Pete's Pilots, a review by addicted2dvd

Kindred: The Embraced
Enter the dangerous and sexy world of the undead when vampires clash with mortals and each other in a modern-day San Francisco. Five clans of vampires are known as the KINDRED, and in their terrifying embrace, one becomes forever young...forever beautiful...forever doomed.

From the savagery in the premiere to the chilling climactic finale, the KINDRED draws you into a mysterious realm of Mafia wars, forbidden liaisons and inhuman hunger in a spellbinding saga of erotic danger and unworldly suspense!

The Original Saga
An affair with a vampire leads detective Frank Kohanek to the world of the undead ruled by the Prince of Vampires, Julian Luna.

My Thoughts:
This was a very short-lived series. Only lasting 8 episodes. It is a series I bought blind when I found it on sale cheap years ago (bought it in 2004). After buying it I checked the net to see what I can learn about it. It appears they canceled this show because the main star was tragically killed in.. if I remember right... a motorcycle accident after producing the 8 episodes. And instead of trying to write in a replacement somehow... they decided to just cancel the series.

This episode is good... I enjoyed it. Though the series has a slower pace then I am normally used to. I do like how they played with the vampire legend. In this as long as they feed they can seem to be human... have a heartbeat, go out in the sun for short periods of time and such.

My Rating:

(From Pete's Pilots on February 23rd, 2010)