Welcome to Mandatory and ComingSoon’s weekly Binge & Buy, a digital HD, Blu-ray, and DVD column for the week of May 14! Here, you’ll find detailed write-ups of different titles released this week, including a number of new releases like Happy Death Day 2U, reissues, combo packs, and TV seasons, none of which you can live without in 2019. Click each highlighted title to purchase through Amazon!
Horrorgram: ‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Star Jessica Rothe Brings Life To Instagram
Photo: Universal Pictures
New Movies on Blu-ray/DVD
Happy Death Day 2U
She thought she solved her murder by reliving her death, but Tree Gelbman becomes caught in a deadlier time loop when a new killer targets her friends
Fighting With My Family
Former wrestler Ricky and his wife Julia make a living performing with their children Saraya and Zak. When brother and sister get the chance to audition for WWE, they learn that becoming a WWE Superstar demands more than they ever imagined possible.
Cold Pursuit
A snowplow driver seeks revenge against the drug dealers he thinks killed his son.
Never Grow Old
After a vicious outlaw (John Cusack) takes over a peaceful frontier town, an undertaker (Emile Hirsch) must choose between profits and survival in this gritty Western.
Valentine: The Dark Avenger
Batavia City is a metropolitan jewel, but one increasingly tarnished in the face of rising crime. Amidst the chaotic onslaught of robbery and violence, Srimaya, a waitress at a café, dreams of a glamorous life as an actress. A chance meeting with a film director and his assistant leads to a life-changing series of events for Srimaya, as they take her on a thrilling adventure that finds the waitress-turned-actress transforming into the person Batavia City needs and deserves most: the consummate kick-ass superhero!
Masked Mutilator
In 1994, a production team in Eastern Pennsylvania brought together a group of local pro wrestlers and young actors to make a horror-action film. A quarter of a century later, the movie was finally finished: After accidentally killing an opponent in the ring, a professional wrestler takes a job at a group home for youth offenders. But when a psychopath wearing a wrestling mask begins butchering the teenage residents, their rehabilitation will become a no-holds-barred battle for survival.
Life Like
In this futuristic thriller, Sophie (Addison Timlin) and James (Drew Van Acker) purchase a lifelike robot to cook and clean at their sprawling new home. At first, android Henry is quiet and hard-working, but as his artificial-intelligence programming kicks in, he starts to anticipate the couple’s needs and desires, ones they themselves cannot fully understand.
American Exit
Based on an incredible true story, this searing crime-thriller stars Dane Cook as Charlie, a desperate father who steals a million-dollar painting from Anton (Udo Kier), a shady art dealer.
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Photo: Insight Editions
Book Club
The Art and Making of Aladdin
Filled with striking imagery and fascinating behind-the-scenes details, this book examines the creation of Disney’s latest addition to their lineup of live-action adaptations of classic animated favorites. This deluxe book features an in-depth look at never-before-seen concept art, unit photography, and other gorgeous visual details.
The Art and Making of The Handmaid’s Tale
The groundbreaking show produced by MGM Television and based on Margaret Atwood’s best-selling novel has drawn rave reviews and attention worldwide. Now, this comprehensive book details the process of bringing the story to the small screen with forty-five exclusive cast and crew interviews, backstage and set photography, concept art, costume design, and more.
Blood on Black Wax
A defining horror soundtrack volume that spotlights iconic franchises such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Jaws, The Exorcist, and George A. Romero’s Dead films, highlighting both the music and the amazing, often rare artwork that graces the record sleeves. It also tells the stories behind the soundtrack, from the mouths of the musicians who made them, including John Carpenter, Fabio Frizzi, Christopher Young, Harry Manfredini, Charles Bernstein, Pino Donaggio, John Harrison, and more.
Photo: The Criterion Collection
Criterion Corner
The Heiress
When shy, emotionally fragile Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland, in a heartbreaking, Oscar-winning turn), the daughter of a wealthy New York doctor, begins to receive calls from the handsome spendthrift Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), she becomes possessed by the promise of romance. Are his smoldering professions of love sincere, as she believes they are? Or is Catherine’s calculating father (Ralph Richardson) correct in judging Morris a venal fortune seeker?
Photo: Shout! Factory
Reissues
Princess Mononoke Collector’s Edition
This limited-edition set comes housed in an elegant hard slipcase and includes a new 40-page book with stunning art and essays. Featured in a deluxe disc portfolio is a Blu-ray of the film paired with hours of special features, and the film’s soundtrack made available on CD for the first time in North America. Inflicted with a deadly curse, the young warrior Ashitaka heads west in search of a cure. There, he stumbles into a bitter conflict between Lady Eboshi, the proud people of Iron Town, and the enigmatic Princess Mononoke, a young girl raised by wolves, who will stop at nothing to prevent the humans from destroying her home and the forest spirits and animal gods who live there.
The Big Clock
Overworked true crime magazine editor George Stroud (Ray Milland) has been planning a vacation for months. However, when his boss, the tyrannical media tycoon Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), insists he skips his holiday, Stroud resigns in disgust before embarking on an impromptu drunken night out with his boss’s mistress, Pauline York (Rita Johnson). When Janoth kills Pauline in a fit of rage, Stroud finds himself to have been the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Sex Madness Revealed
Playfully exploring the outer reaches of cult film fandom, this is both an ingenious twist on the audio commentary and a satire of the wisecrack track (featuring the voice of MST3K regular Patton Oswalt). Using as its foundation a low-budget sex hygiene picture from 1938, we listen in as Jimmy Morris (Oswalt), of the popular “Film Dick” podcast, hosts an irreverent conversation with the filmmaker’s grandson, the eerily emotionless Chester Holloway (Rob Zabrecky) while the film streams behind them.
The Landlord
Legendary filmmaker Hal Ashby makes his directing debut with this acclaimed social satire starring Beau Bridges as a wealthy young man who leaves his family’s estate in Long Island to pursue love and happiness in a Brooklyn ghetto.
Rhinoceros
Gene Wilder and Zero Mostrel push their shared genius for physical slapstick, manic wit, and sly satire to a level of fearless absurdity that virtually no other comedy team would dare approach. Director Tom O’Horgan transforms Eugene Ionesco’s Theater of the Absurd curio Rhinoceros into a fluid, character-rich screen comedy.
A Delicate Balance
Katharine Hepburn and Academy Award-winner Paul Scofield lead a cast of stage and screen luminaries in this acclaimed adaptation of the heart-wrenching drama by Edward Albee and directed by Tony Richardson.
Boogie Boy
After being released from prison, Jesse Page (Mark Dacascos) backs up his old friend Larry (Jaimz Woolvett) on a drug deal gone sour. With the drug dealers hot on his trail, Jesse has three days to reach Detroit where a new, clean, legitimate life awaits him.
Mortuary
A family moves to a small town in California, where they plan on starting a new life while running a long-abandoned funeral home. The locals fear the place, which is suspected to be on haunted ground.
Moses the Lawgiver (DVD)
Moses, a man of wisdom and strength raised his staff and crushed an empire. This is his story The story of the Exodus or flight of the Hebrews from Egypt to escape persecution is told in a perspective which highlights Moses’ efforts to persuade first the stubborn Pharoah Merneptah, who was his adopted cousin, to release the Hebrew slaves he was using to build his empire.
Photo: Saban Films
New on Digital HD
The Professor (in theaters and VOD May 17)
A college professor lives his life with reckless abandon after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. (The film premiered exclusively on DirecTV Cinema on April 18
A Violent Separation (in theaters and VOD May 17)
Two brothers struggle with a terrible truth behind a tragedy that aims to tear three generations of a family apart.
Photo: Starz
TV on Blu-ray and DVD
Power: The Complete Fifth Season (DVD)
In Season 5 James “Ghost” St. Patrick in a dangerous alliance with his former brother-in-arms Tommy Egan and mortal enemy Kanan. Ghost is blind to new enemies and must remain vigilant toward those wanting to take him down.
