Any day I get a press release from WWE’s film division (yes, WWE has a film division, AMERICA!) is a good day, and it sounds like my prayers for a 12 Rounds sequel have finally been answered! Remember 12 Rounds? It starred John Cena in what was basically a cross between Die Hard 3 and Saw meets every action movie ever? Believe it or not, it was actually the top-selling DVD in the country for a brief period a few years back. And now, the 12 Rounds franchise continues, with Randy Orton! Who’s also a wrestling guy!

To the press release!

12 ROUNDS 2: RELOADED

Arriving Just in Time for Father’s Day, The Action-Packed Sequel Comes to Digital HD™ May 21 and Blu-ray and DVD June 4

JUST IN TIME FOR FATHER’S DAY! Hey, Dad, what do you want? An easy chair? A foot massager? Some reading glasses? F*CK THAT, THIS AIN’T YOUR GRANDMA’S FATHER’S DAY! You’re getting a DVD about a wrestler solving crimes! It’ll go great with the subscription to the New Yorker I bought you last year! OOOOOOH WAH-AH AH-AH! (*drops People’s Elbow on cat*)

LOS ANGELES, CA (April 29, 2013) – A twisted genius and a good man are going head-to-head in the ultimate game of cat and mouse! Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and WWE Studios unveil a brand new chapter in its thrilling action franchise with 12 ROUNDS 2: RELOADED. The second installment, starring WWE Superstar Randy Orton, debuts on Digital HD on May 21 and on Blu-ray and DVD on June 4 – just in time for Father’s Day.

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Do you want to see Steven Seagal do a Southern accent and slit a guy’s throat with a karate chop? Of course you do. All you need to know about this trailer is that it’s called Maximum Conviction, and it stars Steven Seagal and Stone Cold Steve Austin. It hits DVD and Blu-Ray March 18th, and it looks like it was made for about 18 dollars. It opens with Steven Seagal doing a syrupy southern drawl, and if you’ve never heard Steven Seagal’s dialect work before, you’re in for a treat. Russian, Italian, Asian, Latino, American Indian – Steven Seagal can play virtually any race unconvincingly. This time around, it seems they spun the Steven Seagal wheel of jobs and it landed, as it so often does, on “ex-special forces.” Judging by the shemagh scarf thing he wears when training fat, racist Arizonans in tactical paintball, Steven Seagal pretends to be an ex-special forces op on a daily basis, so he should have no problem doing it in a movie (he also claims to have worked with the CIA, incidentally).

Meanwhile, Steve Austin plays a “weapons expert,” and together, they have to fight their way through a “black-site” prison full of high-value detainees when some bad guys take it over and lock them inside. They’re going to need all their wits if they’re going to make it out alive, and all of their punching and kicking. We also get:

• Karate chops to the throat

• Boxed ears

• Ripped-out Adam’s Apples

• Kicks to da groin (danga da danga dang...)

• A move at the 1:10 mark where I think Seagal just gets tired of punching and crushes the guy by taking a rest on top of him with his bloated body.

Pay special attention to the 48-second mark where Seagal actually slits a guy’s throat with a karate chop. GO GO GADGET KNIFE HANDS! It’s funny, I was under the impression that high-value detainees would be mostly bombmakers and terrorist masterminds, you know, guys that plan attacks and stuff. But it turns out, they’re mostly Russian gangsters and big black guys. But Steven Seagal was in the CIA, so I guess he would know this stuff. You learn something new every day.

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A Christmas Story came out in 1983 and it’s everyone’s favorite Christmas movie, probably because they show it on TV non-stop every Christmas, and it’s hard not to love a movie you’ve seen every year since you were six, usually while being showered with presents. Popular as it is, it’s hard to believe that it’s been 30 years and Hollywood still hasn’t found a way to milk cash-money from it like my uncle thinks you can do with Jews. That is… UNTIL NOW!

A Christmas Story 2: Christmas Harder (note: probably not the real title) brings directly to DVD all the Christmasy stuff you remember, this time under the veteran direction of Brian Levant, of Snow Dogs and Jingle All the Way fame. Snow Dogs! This is going to be great! Plus, Daniel Stern plays the dad! SHUT UP AND NARRATE MY IDEALIZED CHILDHOOD, STERN!

The original, traditional, one-hundred-percent, red-blooded, two-fisted, All-American Christmas continues five years later, with Ralphie (Braeden Lemasters), Randy (Valin Shinyei), Mom (Stacey Travis), and the Old Man (Daniel Stern). This time, Ralphie has his eyes fixed on a car. But trouble is sure to follow.

That first line is the same as the tagline from the original, in case you was ponderin’. Though I still don’t know how “two-fisted” is a selling point. Is John Woo directing? Is there a strict no-amputee policy? What does that even mean? Meanwhile, the 16-year-old main character still wears the exact same clothes, hair, and glasses as he did when he was 10 because people who weren’t brutally molested do that, and it isn’t creepy at all.

Everyone loves a man-child! But this won’t be a simple rehash of the original, oh no no no no no no no. This one also has a number of cutting-edge humor jokes, such as man spills liquid on a lady’s blouse and offends her by awkwardly trying to clean it off her breast, and man runs from bigger man in comically-fast motion while Yackety Sax plays. And WAIT A SECOND, DID THEY JUST BUY DAD ANOTHER LADY’S LEG LAMP?!! OOOOH HAAAIL NOO YOU DI’IN’T! DOES MOM BURN THE GOOSE AGAIN!? WILL THEY HAVE TO GO OUT FOR CHINESE…. AGAIN? I NEED TO KNOW! FA RA RA RA RA RAH! Phew, you know what? This might be too outrageous.

I’m including a clip from Jingle All the Way just because:

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Sometimes people send me DVDs to review, and I have to call for back-up. In this case, Chodin. Just a reminder that the views laid forth here are his, not mine. I don’t know how a person can complain about “watching some greasy overweight man lick a popped zit off of a dirty toilet seat.” That sounds brilliant. -Vince

Hello Filmdrunkards, Filmdrunkettes, and homely derelicts alike, Chodin here. Now  under normal circumstances, anytime that I’m asked to sit through a campy straight-to-DVD video release, I gladly comply. The ability to outlast some of cinema’s worst is a trait that I’m actually quite proud of; I even list that s**t on my job applications. And yet, through all the conditioning and countless team showers, my stamina was still no match for my latest homework assignment: to write a review for The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol. Usually an oddly enjoyable experience, the difficulty level of my latest review was nothing short of trying to pull every damn tooth from the mouth of a crocodile, while another croc mouthed my balls. This flick is just not enjoyable.

Written, directed, and starring Aramis Sartorio, (the former porn lead from Pee-Wee’s XXX Adventure: A Porn Parody) The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol plays out like some kind of experimental goth project that your film school teacher forgot to turn off. Offensively long and lacking of any coherent structure, T.G.D.T.P. doesn’t even offer its viewers the due diligence of becoming an enjoyably bad movie, -instead it decides to walk an invented razor’s edge between campy industry satire and aspiring comedy gore porn. This isn’t the flick you play in the background of a house party and giggle when guests try to get stoned in front of it. This is the video that you turn on right before The Ring girl crawls out of a Magnavox and rips down your SAW IV posters.

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I know Morton already covered this in his Mid-Week Guide to DVD and Streaming, but I wanted to make sure everyone saw it. New, from the director of Ghost Dog: A Detective Tail and the producer of Metal Man (guess what that’s a rip-off of!) comes THE AMAZING BULK, new on DVD this week. (I enjoy that they seem to have thought calling it “The Incredible Bulk” might get them sued).

DID YOU KNOW: You can shoot an entire sci-fi action film using only a garage, a green screen, and basic knowledge of animation? It’s true!

The future is now, friends.

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