Clash of the Titans was one of my favorite movies as a kid. When the remake came out, I avoided it for the longest time. With Arrow’s new box set release, I finally watched it. Was it worth the wait?

Clash of the Titans (2010): When they started making this movie, producer Adam Schroeder and writers John Glenn and Travis Wright wanted to drop the “cheesy chessboard manipulation of characters” by the gods. Or, you know, the whole story of Perseus that this is based on and the story that Beverly Cross wrote for the 1981 movie this is also based on. As they dropped out and other creatives joined, the phrase “darker and more realistic” kept getting used and that’s where this ended up.

Director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk) was a big fan of the original film — his ending of the Hulk movie is inspired by it — and also took in elements of the Saint Seiya anime for this remake. There’s even a fun moment where Bubo the owl shows up to remind you of the first movie.

When the gods battle the Titans who made them, Hades (Ralph Fiennes) turned the tide with his monster the Kraken. As the gods split up the world, Zeus (Liam Neeson) screwed over Hades and gave him the underworld while he took the Earth and Poseidon the sky. Zeus also made humans, who disappoint him as they no longer worship him. Maybe it’s because he keeps messing with them, like how King Acrisius (Jason Flemyng) tried to take over Mount Olympus, which led to Zeus cucking him and knocking up the royal wife Danae (Tine Stapelfeldt) before throwing a lighting bolt and turning the king into the demonic Calibos — which isn’t in any myth — and then — run-on sentence much? — the king throws his wife and baby into the ocean. An immortal cursed by the gods named Io (Gemma Arterton) saves the child and has fisherman Spyro (Pete Postlethwaite) and his wife Marmara (Elizabeth McGovern) raise Perseus (Sam Worthington) as their own.

As he grows to be a man, King Kepheus (Vincent Regan) and Queen Cassiopeia (Polly Walker) rule the country he lives in, Argos. They go to war with the gods, which cause the Furies to sink his parent’s boat. Only he survives and is brought to the royal throne room. There, he meets Princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), who thinks her parents are morons for doing this. Well, they are, because Hades soon shows up, gets insulted when Cassiopeia says her daughter is as beautiful as the gods. He ages the queen until she dies and says that he will unleash the Kraken in ten days unless Andromeda is killed. Hades also says, “Oh by the way, Perseus is Zeus’ son.”

Perseus agrees to save Andromeda by defeating the Kraken. His plan is meet the Stygian witches (Ross Mullan, Robin Berry and Graham Hughes) who will tell him how to win and the answer is to get the head of the Medusa (Natalia Vodianova). Working with the royal guard, led by Draco (Mads Mikkelsen), Perseus battles giant scorpions and his father Calibos. Zeus also gives him a god sword that he refuses to lose until Calibos kills Io, so as he strikes his father, it transforms him back to reason. He asks his son not to become a god while Io, as she dies, begs him to save Argos.

While asked, Ray Harryhausen had no involvement in this as he felt his films had didn’t need to be remade. And yes, the ending is overly CGI, but it’s thrilling watching Perseus ride Pegasus and battle the gigantic Kraken (actually Leterrier in a green screen suit) to save Andromeda. All of my cynicism went away at the close of this, as I was happy with the action and how fast this moved.

But what of the sequel?

Wrath of the Gods (2012): Ten years after the first movie, humans have stopped praying to the gods, so the Titans have escaped and Zeus (Liam Neeson) is in trouble. Can he call on his son Perseus (Sam Worthington) to save the gods that he despises?

Despite being saved at the end of the first movie, Io has died — never mind that she’s Perseus’ great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in actual mythology — and Perseus is raising their son Heleus (John Bell). Also, he should be the son of Perseus and Andromeda, but we’re already not following any of the source material. Perseus is now a fisherman when Zeus visits him, telling him that the prison that holds Kronos is failing. Our hero turns him down and soon, Zeus is attached by his son Ares (Edgar Ramirez) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes), who also murder Poseidon (Danny Huston). They make a deal with Kronos for power if they free him.

After fighting a Chimera that has attacked his hometown, Perseus looks for his father but only finds the dying Poseidon, who tells him that his son Agenor (Toby Kebbell), who can lead him to Hephaestus (Bill Nighy) and the prison of the Titans. Along with Andromeda (Rosamund Pike), Perseus goes on a quest that sees him battling a minotaur, cyclops and demons. How can he defeat Ares and the creator of the gods? By combining Zeus’s thunderbolt, Hades’ pitchfork and Poseidon’s trident into the Spear of Trium.

There are some fun moments, but this sequel, directed by Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning), feels like effects and monsters thrown at you instead of the story of the first, which was a step down from its classic inspiration. This did much worse at the box office, which led to the third movie, Revenge of the Gods, being cancelled.

The Arrow Video When Titans Ruled the Earth set is available in both 4K UHD and blu ray. Extras include an illustrated collector’s book containing new writing by author and critic Guy Adams and film scholar Josh Nelson, a double-sided fold-out posters for each film featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Joe Wilson, six postcard sized artcards and reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Joe Wilson.

Clash of the Titans has an interview with producer Basil Iwanyk, an alternate ending, deleted scenes, a trailer, an image gallery and several features. Wrath of the Titans also has an interview with Iwanyk, deleted scenes, a trailer, an image gallery and several features.

You can get the 4K UHD and blu ray sets from MVD.

François Gaillard and Christophe Robin referred to this movie as “glam gore.” Perhaps you’ve seen some of their other giallo-influenced movies like Blackaria and All Murder, All Guts, All Fun. As you can also tell by the titles of these three movies, they like Danzig a lot.

A woman gets the feeling that she will be killed and faints at an art show before her assistant drives her home just in time for a woman in black with an axe lives up to her nightmare and kills her. There’s also a priceless painting of a witch who was burned at the stake hidden on the estate and another killer with a spiked gloved from Blood and Black Lace or Death Walks at Midnight murders the first killer just in time for five friends to pay a visit. While the killer hides, they wait for the host — who is now dead — to come back. They decide to have a seance, which awakens an ancient evil and we’re off to a movie that is pretty much every late 60s to early 80s Italian horror and giallo movie all thrown together as well as the rose thorn beating scene from School of the Holy Beast just in case there wasn’t enough.

This is more a remix of the filmmakers showing you every horror movie they love, along with lots of nudity and practical FX. There are a lot of people hating on this online and saying that it’s mindless, but, well, of course it is. It’s like someone passing you a mixtape of some bands they like and some of their music on the other side, so when you hear their garage band, you know where they got the riffs and inspiration, but you have to admit that you appreciate how hard they go. I mean, it ends with a witch setting a priest on fire after an hour plus of bloody murders set to synth and if you don’t enjoy that, what hope can there be?

Directed by Guillem Morales, who wrote the story with Oriol Paulo and produced by Guillermo Del Toro, Julia’s Eyes isn’t an Italian movie made in the 60s or 70s, yet it has the giallo in its heart.

This starts with a blind woman named Sara (Belén Rueda) being haunted by an unseen presence. She decides that she has to hang herself to escape her life, but changes her mind at the last minute. As she prepares to get down, someone kicks the chair out from under her. As this happens, her twin siser Julie (also Belén Rueda) senses her death.

Sara and Julia both have the same degenerative eye disease, as Julia is slowly losing her sight. She tells her unbelieving husband Isaac (Lluís Homar) that her sister, whose eye surgery didn’t save her vision, couldn’t have killed herself.

As a giallo heroine, Julia must investigate the case herself. She meets her sister’s neighbor Soledad (Julia Gutiérrez Caba), a blind woman who tells her that everyone will leave her, including her husband, as her son Angel (Pablo Derqui) did to her. She also tells her that her sister had a boyfriend, which leads her to a hotel where a janitor named Créspulo (Joan Dalmau) tells her that men in the shadows are watching her and are tired of being ignored.

Things get worse. Isaac disappears and Créspulo is killed. When the police take Julia, whose eyesight is nearly lost, home they discover Isaac has also hung himself, leaving behind a suicide note stating that he had been in an affair with Sara. As surgeons work to repair her eyesight, Julia now must move into her dead sister’s apartment and attempt to keep her eyes bandaged for two weeks, which is how long the donor eyes will take to adjust to her body. She will have an assistant, Ivan (Dani Codina) to take care of her and ensure that she doesn’t remove her bandages.

Days before she gets to see again, someone breaks in and drugs her. She barely fights him off and learns from a neighbor’s daughter that that man was Ivan. She also says that he was the one who ruined Sara’s operation, kidnapped Isaac and forced him to write the note before killing him and has an entire room filled with photos of Julia and her sister. She tears off the bandages to find that the room that she is in is definitely filled with those photos and the young girl is dead.

Obviously, spoiler warning from here on out.

Ivan is really Angel, who killed and replaced the assistant. He believes that only blind women can love him, as they depend on him for their care. Soledad appears and shows that she is not blind, so Angel goes all Lucio Fulci and attacks her eyes with a needle. The police arrive just in time for Julia to find him in the dark, at which point he slices his own throat.

Julia’s vision lasts just long enough to come to the morgue, where they have been keeping her husband’s body, and say goodbye. The eyes that were donated to her were his, and now as teh result of Angel, no longer work.

Remade in 2022 as the Hindi movie Blurr, Julia’s Eyes has enough of the past while looking — well, you know what I mean — bravely to the now and beyond. It’s a thrilling movie and one that I hope more people watch.

You can watch Julia’s Eyes on Tubi.

David Slade, director of Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night, stepped into the chair to direct the third Twilight movie, which was going to be a blockbuster just by the force of its fans. One major change would be that the film’s main enemy vampire Victoria would be played by Bryce Dallas Howard.

Victoria starts the movie by attacking a young man named Riley Biers (Xavier Samuel) as part of her goal of making an army of newborn vampires to get her revenge on Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) for killing her true love. sa for Edward and Bella (Kristen Stewart), they’re still going back and forth over turning her and getting married. As for her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), he forcibly kisses Bella as he’s in love with her.

Anyways…

Alice (Ashley Greene) has a psychic flashforward of the newborn army attacking the Cullens, which calls for a truce between the vampires and Lycans. Bella also learns that mated vampire pairs experience stronger love than normal humans — again, if you think this entire story doesn’t have major BDSM themes, I’ll let you whip me — so she agrees to marry Edward. She’s also fallen in love with Jacob but it’s not a love as strong as the one she has with Edward.

In the battle with the vicious baby — well, newborn — vampires, Victoria is finally killed by Edward and Riley is killed by Seth. Then, the Volturi arrive and find the Cullens guarding a newborn vampire by the name of Bree Tanner (Jodelle Ferland). Despite the fact that she surrendered, Jane (Dakota Fanning) tells Felix (Daniel Cudmore) to kill her. She also remarks that Bella is still human, but Bella informs her that she plans to get married, have sex and then become a vampire.

Her dad is really going to be the last to know.

This installment of Twilight only serves to set us up for the wild lunacy of the final two movies. Get ready.

As part of THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K, Twilight: Eclipse has extras, like two commentary tracks (Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart on one, Stephenie Meyer and Wyck Godfrey the alternate), a part of the six-part making-of doc, extended scenes, cast interviews, music videos for Muse’s “Neutron Star Collision” and Metric’s “Eclipse (All Yours)” and so much more. Get this set exclusively from Best Buy.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on December 21, 2017.

December 5, 1492. Former bishop Niklas and his gang have gotten away with too much. The villagers have had it up to here with their antics, like looting and killing, so they kill them off. Yet for every year after that coincides with a full moon, they return as ghosts with murderous intent.

The film then inverts all the holiday traditions of the Netherlands: Sinterklass is not a jolly fat man, he’s a killer with a sharp staff that he won’t hesitate to use. His elves, the Zwarte Pieten, don’t have faces blackened from the soot of chimneys, but instead they have been burned alive.

The last time the real Sinterklass came back was in 1968 and hundreds of people were killed, including the family of Goert, who is now a policeman. That traumatic event has been covered up by the authorities and the Catholic Church, who want Saint Nick to remain pure.

With another full moon coming, Goert tries to ban all Sinterklaas events and increasing police manpower, but he’s laughed off and sent on leave. But of course, Sinterklass arrives and brings horror with him.

Directed by Dick Maas (The Lift, Amsterdamned), the film looks gorgeous, with a crushed black color palette and really intriguing angles. If a gore movie can be lush, then by all means, this is it. The scene where Sinterklass reveals himself to the children in the hospital, as well as a chase across the rooftops with Sinterklass on a horse, are just plain gorgeous. As we watch the evil saint fall through floor after floor of a building, then onto a police car, then stalk the hero, it really gets across just how frightening the villain is.

Even watching the film in its native language, I was easily able to define the storytelling and stayed interested throughout. It was interesting to learn of another Christmas myth and then see the more malevolent side of it.

In the opening of this film, Edgar and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) stopping a vampire Senator from killing a Congressman. That said, Alan is forced to drink vampire blood, which makes him a half-vampire. Then, we move forward five years and learn that Edgar is down on his luck and trying to sell all his comics to the store where Zoe (Casey B. Dolan) works.

He’s been turning down vampire fighting, even the stack of money that Gwen Lieber (Tanit Phoenix) offers to find her missing brother Peter and learn about the drug called The Thirst that a vampire known as DJ X is using to make thralls. Allan’s life might be worse, as he drinks animals and then turns them into taxidermy. And as for Sam? Well, he did become a vampire and Edgar had to kill him.

Why do some sequels just make things so bad for heroes that you love?

I do like that Congressman Blake (Matthew Dylan Roberts), who the brothers saved, has gone nuts and stolen all sorts of weapons from Area 51 to battle vampires. It’s that kind of madness — as well as rave vampires — that I want from direct to video sequels, as well as the hint at the end that vampires exist in this world.

Directed by Dario Piana, who made Too Beautiful to Die WAIT WHAT? No one told me this was directed by an 80s giallo dude! Oh man, now I love this even more. This was written by Evan Charnov and Hans Rodionoff, who also made Deep Blue Sea 2 and The Skulls II.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the page on December 24, 2017.

After two well-received web entries, 2003’s Rare Exports Inc. and 2005’s Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions, writer and director Jalmari Helander created this ode to the darker side of Santa Claus.

A British company called Subzero is doing arctic deep drilling when it discovers that a burial mound contains something hidden. Two boys, Juuso and Pietari listen in, then argue the existence of Santa before Pietari goes home to read how Santa is really a horned being who whips bad kids and boils them alive.

The day before Christmas Eve, Pietari’s dad, Rauno, digs a trap to protect his reindeer herd from wolves, who have been driven mad by the explosions and digging. They discover hundreds of dead reindeer, all gnawed to death, but both Pietari and his father are unsure if the wolves are really to blame.

Rauno blames his misfortune on the Subzero company and heads out for retribution. However, he finds no one there, just a deep pit into what looks like Hell. Then, they learn that potatoes, heaters and even a hairdryer have gone missing. Even worse, Jusso jas disappeared, a fact that Pietari discovers has happened to kids all over the village.

Another villager, Piiparinen, finds an old man who is near death, who goes from deceased to able to attack to strong enough to break metal bars. They dress the old man as Santa and inform Subzero’s American boss, Riley. He informs them that they only have an elf and must not behave rudely. One swear word later and the lights, Riley and his pilot have all been killed.

Everyone runs to Hangar 24, where they discover a horned beast trapped in a block of ice being warmed by the stolen heaters. They also see sacks of kidnapped children before they are attacked by the elves.

What follows is a daring rescue and escape, with Santa being blown up real good and Raulo ending up working with Subzero to send the elves to American malls, where they will be seasonal Santas.

Rare Exports could have been a silly parody of a film, but it is shot with dark charm and plenty of verve. It’s a really unique piece of cinema that surprised me at several turns.

Produced by Jimmy Miller of Mosaic Media Group, a native of Castle Shannon, PA and the brother of comedian Dennis Miller, She’s Out of My League was shot all over the city, mostly at the airport as lead character Kirk Kettner (Jay Baruchel) is a TSA agent. It also has scenes filmed at The Warhol, on Mount Washington and in Pluma’s in Irwin, PNC Park, Market Square and the now closed Century III Mall.

Kirk is lost without Marnie (Lindsay Sloane), his unfaithful ex-girlfriend, and is barely making it through life. He’s also the only TSA agent that doesn’t creep out party planner Molly McCleish (Alice Eve) when she goes through his security check-point. She leaves her phone, he finds it and that’s how they meet cute.

Everyone is against the relationship, as Kirk’s friend Wendell (T.J. Miller) states that she’s a ten and he’s a five, while her friend Patty (Krysten Ritter) thinks that she’s afraid of getting her heart broken again so she’s picked a safe man. The relationship seems doomed and the typical teen sex comedy hijinks nearly derail things, but of course it all works out.

As for that restaurant that Kirk and Molly eat at in Market Square, it’s a fake set.