This week’s home entertainment releases include The Girl on the Train, which features a great performance by Emily Blunt, Ouija: Origin of Evil, one of the best horror films of the year, the second season of SyFy’s 12 Monkeys, the last hilarious gasp of the UK’s brilliant geek comedy The IT Crowd, plus a wonderful French/Danish animated film (Long Way North) that you have probably never heard of, but should definitely try to watch.
Theatrical Movies
It’s rare that a sequel turns out to be a better film than the original, and it’s even rarer that a “prequel” turns out to best the film that meta-spawned it, but that is the case with the horror film
Ouija: Origin of Evil (Universal, “PG-13,” 198 min., $29.98, BD $34.98), which was written and directed by Mike Flanagan and turns out to be one of the best horror films of a very good year for the genre (2016).
Ouija: Origin of Evil is basically a “possession” film about a family of fake spiritualists who add a Ouija board to their repertoire of tricks only to have it backfire when a spirit uses the device to menace the family’s youngest. With a strong rating of 82% positive on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes,
Origin of Evil is arguably the best film based on a Hasbro property, and certainly the best effort yet from Hasbro Studios.
This week’s most successful release at the box office is
The Girl on the Train (Universal, “R,” 224 min., $29.98, BD $34.98, 4KBD $44.98), which earned $75.4 million in North America last fall. Emily Blunt is great as a blackout drunk in this adaptation of the Paula Hawkins novel, but the overall narrative here is not as strong as it was in 2015’s
Gone Girl, the film that
The Girl on the Train is often compared with, and be forewarned that the emphasis here is more on character than suspense.
The suburban spy comedy Keeping Up With the Joneses (Fox, “PG-13,” 105 min., $29.98, BD $34.98, 4K BD $39.99) wastes a wonderful cast that includes Zack Galifianakis, Isla Fisher, Jon Hamm, and Gail Godot (Wonder Woman) with a weak script, but there are some laughs here (and some solid performances).
In many ways the most interesting release of the week is the French/Danish animated film
Long Way North (Shout Factory, “PG,” 81 min., $16.97, BD $22.97), the adventurous saga of young Russian woman, who rejects her parents plans for an arranged marriage, and heads off into the artic to find her missing grandfather, who disappeared on a polar expedition. This delightful little film, with the original title
Tout En Haut du Monde, earned an excellent 98% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and is “must see” viewing for animation fans.
TV on DVD
This week’s top offering is
12 Monkeys: Season 2 (Universal, 558 min., $44.98, BD $49.98), which collects the 13 episodes of the latest season of the SyFy series that is based on Terry Gilliam’s 1995 time-traveling science fiction film (which in turn is based on Chris Marker’s 1962 short
La Jetee).
Also of great interest is the one-off special that ended the brilliant UK workplace comedy
The IT Crowd.
The IT Crowd: The Internet Is Coming (MPI, 50 min., $19.98) is a double-length episode that concluded the series (and aired in the UK in 2013) that stars Chris O’Dowd, Richard Ayoade, and Katherine Parkinson. This character-driven saga of basement-dwelling IT workers is one of the funniest TV series of the past decade—there was supposed to be fifth season, but all we got is this 50-minute double-size, tear-stained last episode.
Other contemporary series due on Tuesday include the TBS distaff detective series Rizzoli & Isles: The Complete 7th & Final Season (Warner Bros., 572 min., $29.98), and the BBC detective series Shetland: Series 3 (BBC, 480 min., $39.98), which includes all six episodes of the picturesquely-set crime series that aired in the UK in 2016.
The long animated offering this week is Lego Nexo Knights: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros., $19.98), which features adventures in the high tech kingdom of Knighton caused by a rogue jester, who stole the talking Book of Monsters.
Vintage TV shows debuting on Tuesday include the romance-drenched 1980s sitcom The Love Boat: Season 3, Part 1 (Paramount, 786 min., $29.98), and Part 2 (Paramount, 614 min., $29.98); the last season of the gritty cop drama NYPD Blue: The Complete 12th Season (Shout Factory, 860 min., $34.93); and the 1990s miniseries Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (Mill Creek, 362 min., $14.98)
Anime
This week’s offerings consist of releases from two long-running and venerable manga-based anime series, Naruto Shippuden Uncut Set 29 (Warner Bros., 325 min., $39.99), which includes episodes 362-374 of the ninja anime based on the manga by Masashi Kissimoto; and Fairy Tail Collection 6 (Funimation, 600 min., DVD/BD Combo $54.98), which contains episodes 121 to 142 of popular anime based on the manga by Hiro Mashima (note the episodes of Fairy Tail have been released here before, but are now available at a lower per-episode cost).
