On DVD: July 14, 2009

Reviews of The Haunting in Connecticut, Mad Men: Season Two, The State: The Complete Series

The Haunting in Connecticut
Lionsgate
$30
2-Disc: $35
Blu-ray: $40

Plot: A family moves into a seemingly ordinary home in suburban Connecticut but quickly discovers it has a haunted history.

Opinion: A bootleg version of The Amityville Horror, The Haunting in Connecticut has a few effective gotcha moments, but much of the movie is tedious to the extreme.  The problems start with Peter Cornwell’s heavy-handed direction, which stifles any scares with overbearing music cues and choppily edited shots of bloodied bodies.  The actors don’t fare much better; Virginia Madsen’s zombie-like performance reminds us that its been almost two decades since Candyman and respected character actor Elias Koteas spends much of the movie looking ashamed to be a part of this fixer-upper.  The original Amityville flick is no classic, but compared to The Haunting in Connecticut, it’s like the Citizen Kane of horror movies.

Bonus Features: Two commentary tracks, a making-of featurette and a 45-minute documentary about the real haunting that inspired the film.

Verdict: Skip It

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Mad Men: Season Two
Lionsgate
$50
Blu-ray: $50

Plot: The continuing adventures of Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the main man at Madison Avenue’s struggling ad agency Sterling Cooper.

Opinion: The best show on television only got better during its sophomore year, which found Don going through a literal identity crisis, his wife Betty contemplating having an extramarital affair of her own and his former secretary Peggy continuing to climb Sterling Cooper’s male-dominated corporate ladder all the while straining to keep the real reason for her months-long absence a secret.  And then there are all the other storylines that are just too juicy to give away.  Much like The Wire, watching a season of Mad Men is akin to reading a great novel, one that grows richer each time you revisit it.

Bonus Features: Cast and crew commentary tracks on all 13 episodes; a two-part documentary about the changing role of women in American society in the early ’60s, a featurette about that era’s style and a series of interactive video clips that touch on the decade’s major historical and cultural events.

Verdict: Buy It

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The State: The Complete Series
MTV
$80

Plot: MTV’s short-lived sketch comedy series lands on DVD at last, with all its early-’90s pop culture references still intact.

Opinion: Back in 1993, when MTV was actually a pop-culture force instead of a pop-culture punchline, the network attempted to muscle in on Saturday Night Live’s territory by launching their own sketch-comedy series starring a young crew of comedians fresh out of NYU.  Instead of SNL though, the minds behind The State were more clearly influenced by the non-sequiter, anything-goes approach favored by cult shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Kids in the Hall.  Consequently, the series never really found a sizeable audience and faded away three years later.  But in the years since it went off the air, The State has acquired a rabid fanbase and several of its alumni–most notably David Wain, Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter–have gone on to bigger things.  Watching the show more than a decade after its demise, it’s surprising how much of it holds up, certainly more so than a lot of the SNL episodes from that period.  Just be prepared for some serious ’90s flashbacks if you decide to pick this set up.

Bonus Features: Vintage interviews from the ’90s, almost two hours worth of unaired sketches and outtakes, the original pilot episode and recently recorded commentary tracks featuring a rotating crew of the ensemble cast.

Verdict: Buy It

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Also on DVD:

If Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney decided to turn the Ocean’s movies into a weekly TV-show, it might look a little bit like TNT’s caper series, Leverage: Season One (TNT, $40).  Timothy Hutton stars as the leader a gang of tech-savvy outsiders who do the Robin Hood thing of conning the rich to give to the poor. While the show has some cool twists up its sleeve, the predictable and overly familiar characters aren’t anywhere near as much fun to hang with as Clooney’s crew.  The Color of Magic (Geinus, $15) adapts the first two books in Terry Pratchett’s popular Discworld series of humorous fantasy novels.  Sean Astin—no stranger to the genre—Christopher Lee and Brian Cox are among the stars.  Last year’s underrated horror flick Quarantine was inspired by a Spanish film [Rec] (Sony, $25), which is now out on DVD for anyone interested in a side-by-side comparison.  Ryan Reynolds just won the Power Ring to play Green Lantern, which means he’ll definitely never be tempted into making another Van Wilder film.  But Paramount isn’t about to abandon the franchise just yet; the direct-to-DVD prequel Van Wilder: Freshman Year (Paramount, $30) follows the character’s shenanigans as a frosh.  Finally, the made-for-cable movie Grey Gardens (HBO, $27) casts Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the famously weird Kennedy relatives living in a dilapidated summer-house on Long Island.