Not much for us this week so up first is The Chelsea Detective Series 2. This is a 4 episode season, but each episode is around 90 minutes long so it’s really like an 8 episode show. I don’t actually remember if I’ve seen Series 1, but I didn’t feel too lost having not seen it. The female lead (on the box) is new to the show from what I can gather and the male lead (on the box) was probably married or going through troubles in Series 1 because he’s separated in Series 2. The first episode revolves around a murder at an art exhibit. The second episode involves the death of an elderly woman at a retirement home who had been injected with drugs. Episode three sees a therapist killed and the only witness is a patient watching over a video call. Episode 4 involves a young man running a fruit & vegetable delivery company who was killed and might not have been on the up and up. It has a cool, small town atmosphere, but is set in more of a city setting. The lead lives on a houseboat and the new detective is trying to find her way. It has an array of characters and each episode wraps up its storyline by episode’s end. I’d watch future episodes and if you liked the first series you’ll like Series 2.
Second we have Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman. There has been a ton of blind swordsman stories in Asian cinema for decades and this one is pretty solid. It won’t separate itself from the rest of the genre, but the action sequences are good with lots of violence and swordplay. The women are attractive and the costuming is top-notch. The setting and production design also work well. The lead actor carries the film with good physical abilities and you understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. He starts out as just a bounty hunter type delivering a body, but when a wedding is brutally attacked he steps up to right the wrongs. I watched a blind swordsman film about 2 years ago and barely remember it, but I think this one might last longer in my memory because the sword choreography is better than expected. If you like martial arts with heavy sword work in period dramas then check this one out.
Last we have a cool Steelbook release of Lords of Dogtown from Mill Creek Entertainment. I haven’t seen the film in probably 15 years so it was good catching up with it. Of course I remembered that Emile Hirsh and Heath Ledger were in it, but I didn’t remember John Magaro was the guy with the balance issue because of hearing problems. There are also a ton of cameos I probably didn’t recognize back in the day like Jeremy Renner, Joel McHale, Sofia Vergara and more. If you aren’t familiar with the movie it’s about the Z-Boys in Dogtown, the guys that paved the way for skateboarding in the early 1970s in Southern California. They were surfers who changed skateboarding to street surfing and skating empty pools and started what we consider skateboarding and X-Games type activities. Ledger owned the surf shop that made these kids a skateboarding team and brought that surfer lifestyle to skateboarding. I always thought it was a pretty underrated flick and find it funny that its director went on to do Twilight. If you like Steelbooks you’ll like this release. It’s an unrated extended edition and comes with tons of bonus features including commentary from the surviving original Z-Boys (Stacy Peralta did write the film after all). I dug it.
The Nerds Templar 