On DVD: June 16, 2009

Reviews of Madea Goes To Jail, Friday the 13th and Dough Boys

Madea Goes to Jail
Lionsgate
$30

Plot: An ambitious assistant D.A. (Derek Luke) puts his career and personal relationships on the line when he attempts to help a childhood friend (Keisha Knight Pulliam) who has morphed into a crack-addicted prostitute.  Oh, and Madea (Tyler Perry) goes to jail.

Opinion: Tyler Perry has never been shy about the fact that his films are designed to impart serious life lessons, most of which are derived from his staunch Christian beliefs.  It’s not uncommon for the narratives of his movies to come to a dead stop so that a character can deliver a lengthy monologue that doubles as a dose of church-going testimony.  For better or worse, there’s not a trace of irony to be found in this or any other Perry production, which is exactly what his fans love and his critics love to hate.  Personally, it would be easier for me to let Perry off the hook for his excesses if he were a better filmmaker.  It’s a shame that, six movies into his big-screen directorial career, he still hasn’t mastered such basic skills as shot composition and match cutting.  Surprisingly, that hasn’t stopped bigger and bigger names from appearing in his movies.  Madea Goes to Jail features one of his best ensembles yet, with Luke, Vanessa Ferlito and recent Oscar nominee Viola Davis doing good work in underwritten roles.  (He also scores some big-name cameos, including Dr. Phil, Judge Mathis, Tom Joyner and the women of The View.)  Perry’s gigantic fanbase turned out en masse to support his latest filmed morality play, but don’t expect Madea Goes to Jail to bring any new converts to the Church of Tyler Perry.

Bonus Features: Five behind-the-scenes featurettes covering various aspects of the movie’s production.

Verdict: Rent It

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Friday the 13th
Warner Bros.
$29
Blu-ray: $36

Plot: Jason Voorhees slices and dices a new generation of nubile teenagers that unwisely decide to spend a weekend in the vicinity of his hunting grounds at Camp Crystal Lake.

Opinion: Did Friday the 13th really need to be remade?  Probably not, but this 21st century update isn’t the disaster you might expect.  It helps that most of the previous Friday the 13th installments were pretty awful, so director Marcus Nispel didn’t have to work that hard to improve on films like, say, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.  At the end of the day, this new Friday the 13th doesn’t deviate from the formula that made the franchise a hit: a little T&A, a little pot and a whole lot of bloodshed.  The only real difference is budget; where the early Friday the 13th flicks were produced for spare change, Nispel was given almost $20 million to play with.  And while that’s not Benjamin Button money, $20 million does buy you an awful lot of fake blood and gruesome prosthetics.  The best compliment I can pay Nispel’s Friday the 13th is that it provides exactly what you expect from a Friday the 13th picture.  And for the movie’s target audience, that’s enough of a recommendation.

Bonus Features: The standard version comes with a making-of featurette and deleted scenes, while the Blu-ray version makes room for a trivia track, a retrospective documentary about the original Friday and a behind-the-scenes look at how the film’s best kills were created.

Verdict: Rent It

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Dough Boys
BET
$23

Plot: Four young hustlers run afoul of a big-time gangster and their survival instincts cause them to turn on each other.

Opinion: Someone should have told screenwriter Preston Whitmore II and director Nicholas Harvell that hood movies are so 1990.  Filled with amateurish performances, sloppy direction and clunky dialogue, Dough Boys resembles the first draft of an unpublished urban crime novel.  This isn’t Menace II Society—it’s a menace II moviegoers.

Bonus Features: None.

Verdict: Skip It

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Parker Lewis Can’t Lose: The Complete First Season
Shout! Factory
$50

Plot: A tech-savvy teenager navigates the ins-and-outs of high school—i.e. girls, bullies and overly zealous principals—with the help of his two best buddies.

Opinion: The year was 1990.  Moviegoers flocked to Ghost and Home Alone, Bell Biv DeVoe ruled the pop charts and hypercolor was a big fashion trend.  It was also the year that an unassuming teen comedy called Parker Lewis Can’t Lose debuted on the fledgling FOX network, whose biggest hits at the time were Married…With Children and The Simpsons.  Owing a great deal to the John Hughes teen classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (in fact, a TV spin-off of Ferris Bueller premiered on NBC the same year, but only ran for 13 episodes), Parker Lewis is dated somewhat by the ’90s fashions and music cues, but the fast pace and clever camerawork makes for fun viewing almost two decades later.  It also serves as a welcome counterpoint to the teen soap operas that dominate prime time these days.

Bonus Features: Nostalgic audio commentaries from the show’s cast and crew and a retrospective documentary about the origins of the series.

Verdict: Buy It

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Also on DVD

Paramount used the theatrical release of the new Friday the 13th to put out deluxe DVD versions of the first three installments in the franchise and now they’re piggybacking on the film’s arrival on disc to release three more.  Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (Paramount, $17 each) cover the death and rebirth of Jason Voorhees, who was killed off in the fourth installment only to rise again one movie later.  Extras include deleted scenes and retrospective featurettes.  The Transformers: The Complete First Season 25th Anniversary Edition (Shout! Factory, $30) collects restored versions of all the episodes from the classic ’80s animated series freshman year along with a new featurette and a printable script.  Appearing on Blu-ray this week are the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Sony, $39) as well as the first two seasons of ABC’s awesome adventure serial Lost (Disney, $70 each), which comes with new features including The Official Lost Connections, a visual guide to the show’s many connections between its large cast of characters.  The Mel Brooks Star Wars spoof Spaceballs (MGM, $30) and the seminal sci-fi comedy Ghostbusters (Sony, $29) also make their Blu-debut.  Finally, fans of cult cinema will be curious to check out Little Red Riding Hood and Other Stories (Malaprop, $13), which collects three short films by David Kaplan, each of which is based on a classic fairy tale.  A teenage Christina Ricci appears in the titular film and Kaplan talks about each movie on a commentary track included on the disc.