This Week in Blu-ray / DVD Releases: Batman v. Superman, Orphan Black

By John Law

July 19th 2016, 2:28am

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

This Week: Batman v. Superman gets even longer, Orphan Black keeps messing with your head, and Elvis goes to Washington..

► Things are getting truly bizarre when a movie that made as much money as BATMAN v. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE underperforms, but here we are. After a massive opening week, it dropped an incredible 81% at the box office its second Friday as some of the, er, ‘extreme’ reactions took hold. There hasn’t been a bigger love it or hate it movie this year, and while the Ultimate Edition’s extra 30 minutes put some character issues into better focus, it just prolonged an already bloated movie. Director Zach Snyder gets a lot right here – Ben Affleck’s Batman, the moral question of unchecked power – but at the midway point it starts feeling like a table setter for the Justice League movie instead of its own thing, never more obvious than with the utterly pointless inclusion of Wonder Woman (Gia Gadot) who picks NOW to resurface instead of, oh, that whole Zod thing that threatened the world in ‘Man of Steel.’ Still, this big-ass blu-ray has loads of good stuff, including the ‘Gods and Men: A Meeting of Giants’ featurette and a look at the future of DC’s films.

► Tatiana Maslany defends her title as Hardest Working Woman on TV with Season 4 of ORPHAN BLACK, getting another Emmy nomination in the process. It’s time for her to win, though – she’s never less than amazing on this show, even as the plot tends to meander and get too bogged down in its own clone mythology. Seriously, this show feels like work sometimes. Season 4 harkens back to the show’s first season and got its best reviews yet. Extras include a look at the show’s effects and three of this season’s new clones.

► Just before Christmas in 1970, Elvis Presley – presumably high as shit – showed up at the White House requesting a meeting with President Nixon. The reason, as seen in ELVIS & NIXON? He wanted to be sworn in as an undercover agent in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Apparently, Elvis was fuzzy on the definition of ‘undercover.’ The resulting pic of them shaking hands is still the most requested photo in the National Archives. Kevin Spacey plays the prez (he has some experience) while Michael Shannon is Elvis.

► By my count, this is the sixth edition of THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD on DVD/Blu-ray. If you haven’t got it by now, Shout! Factory tempts you with four commentaries (two of them brand new), new features on the effects and iconic soundtrack, a revisit to the sets 30 years later, and about a dozen extras pulled from previous releases, including the ‘80s horror doc ‘The Decade of Darkness.’ New 2K scan means Linnea Quigley has never looked better.

► Right before he went on a box office tear in the early ‘80s, Sylvester Stallone made one of his best ever movies with 1981’s NIGHTHAWKS. Originally written to be ‘French Connection III’ until Gene Hackman passed, it has Stallone as a New York detective matching wits with a European urban terrorist (Rutger Hauer) who has brought his campaign to the U.S. Billy Dee Williams is his partner while Lindsay Wagner plays Stallone’s wife and eventual target. Hopefully this Shout! Factory release restores the film’s original soundtrack, which brilliantly used the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’ and Keith Emerson’s cover of ‘I’m a Man’ during a key nightclub scene.

► Lost in the crowd of series finales this year, PERSON OF INTEREST went out kicking ass. The fifth and final season has The Machine and its anti-terrorist tech team on the ropes against a rival AI called Samaritan that wants to launch a catastrophic virus on the world. Not every character survives the tense final episode. The COMPLETE SERIES is also being released today if you want to binge one of the better action/sci-fi efforts on network TV recently.

► The CW’s THE 1OO began with a group of juvenile offenders (about a hundred or so) evicted from their space station to see if Earth is habitable again 97 years after a nuclear apocalypse. There they find remnants of humans, some not so friendly, who’ve managed to survive. Season 3 finds them up against the artificial intelligence which caused the devastation. If that’s not enough, all the world’s nuclear reactors are in disrepair and threatening to poison the planet again.

► Don Cheadle co-wrote, co-produced, directs and stars in the Miles Davis bio flick MILES AHEAD, revisiting the point in the late ’70 when the jazz legend attempted to revive his career after five years of drug addiction. Ewan McGregor is the Rolling Stone writer who forces his way into his life and helps him try to recover a lost tape of his newest work.

Also out this week: