New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Welcome to How to Spend $20, BOP's look at the latest DVDs to hit stores nationwide. This week: A Connecticut family gets spooked, Americans land on the moon (in Blu-ray!) and Michael Ian Black does television.

Pick of the Week

For people who can start watching Virginia Madsen movies again now that The Number 23 has officially disappeared from public consciousness: The Haunting in Connecticut

There were boatloads of horror features released earlier in the year. Among the list of surprise hits is The Haunting in Connecticut, the Virginia Madsen-starrer that picked up $23 million in its opening frame (debuting only behind Monsters vs. Aliens) and $55.3 million domestically. The movie is supposedly based on true events. But knowing Hollywood, who knows for certain what parts of the flick actually have an ounce of truth in them. According to reports, there have always been inconsistencies amongst the family members in recounting what they may have seen. So the "facts" have that going for them as well.

Regardless, the movie follows one family's encounter with supernatural forces when they move to a Victorian home in upstate Connecticut. There, they learn that the home had once been a funeral parlor, and the owner's son provided a gateway for spiritual entities to cross over to our world.

Yeah, it sounds based on a true story to me too.

Because of its success, a sequel is in the works, titled The Haunting in Georgia. Like other movie franchises that play the same game but with fresh faces – I'm looking at you, Final Destination – The Haunting in Georgia will feature a similar story, but with new characters and setting.

Disc includes: Two Dead Boys: The Making of The Haunting in Connecticut featurette, The Fear is Real: Reinvestigating the Haunting – Parts 1 and 2 featurette, Anatomy of a Haunting featurette, Memento Mori: The History of Postmortem Photography featurette, audio commentaries, deleted scenes, trailer





For people who can't be Neil Armstrong: For All Mankind (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar in 1990, For All Mankind pieces together archived footage from six space missions that were previously unseen by the public. (NASA had hastily kept the information private for 20 years, then released it once the space race was decidedly cleared off the social relevancy scale). The footage – about 80 minutes in total – is arranged in a way to depict a single moon mission, even though much of it is arranged out of order. So no fault on the editor here. It's the way the director wanted it.

Available today is that same docu paired up with some new featurettes in sparkling Blu-ray.

Disc includes: Audio commentary, An Accidental Gift: The Making of For All Mankind featurette, interviews, Bean's Artwork featurette, audio highlights, astronaut IDs, a booklet of essays by film critic Terrence Rafferty and Reinert

Continued:       1       2