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“Mean Guns” on MVD Rewind Collection Blu-ray! Purchase Here!

A Crime syndicate mid-level enforcer named Vincent Moon invites professional hired killers and syndicate affiliates to a new, urban-centric prison constructed by the organization the day before grand opening. The reason for this elaborate invitation is simple: all those invited have betrayed the syndicate in one way or another and are brought into the locked down prison to battle royale to the death. The rules of the competition clarify no one will leave the premises, unless being gunned down by a rooftop sniper is acceptable to them, and three contestants must survive the game to claim the prize, the prize being a three-way split of ten million in cash. As guns, ammunition, and melee weapons are dumped onto the battle grounds, a scramble ensues, and factions are made with 6-hour clock to kill nearly everyone in sight to live and be rich or to be slaughtered by Vincent Moon. However, there’s no honor amongst thieves and thugs and the rules bend in a rigged high-stakes game of kill-or-be-killed.

The late director Albert Pyun was an ambitious, fast-paced, and prolific director who dominated the late 1980s through much of the 1990s with eclectic, science-fiction action. The “Cyborg” and “Nemesis” writer-director severed the line between reality and the alternate that brought science fiction to a more grounded realism, such as we see in the aforementioned films, mostly because Pyun was always short on funds and short on time to deliver a final, finished feature. With his 1997 actioner “Mean Guns,” Pyun severed into another layer on the existential plane and took hold of different kind of alternative reality, one that is plagued by an all-powerful crime syndicate that has its insidious hands in everything, even in the personal and professional lives and secrets of its own employees and hired contracts. Andrew Witham wrote the script that was produced by longtime Pyun collaborating producers Tom Karnowski (“The Sword and the Sorcerer,” “Cyborg”) and Gary Schmoeller (“Hong Kong 97,” “Omega Doom”), together the trio founded Filmwerks which became the production company under “Mean Guns.”

Pre-“Law & Order: SVU,” which would define his career in the film and television industry, rapper Ice-T worked himself in from behind a mic to in front of a camera mostly beginning in the 1990s with “New Jack City,” an urban gangster film that matched his on stage musical presence and starred opposite Wesley Snipes (“Blade”), Chris Rock (“Jigsaw”), and Mario Van Peebles (“Jaws: The Revenge”). Ice-T found cult status in more pulpy thrillers with exploitation “Surviving the Game” as a homeless man hunted down by a group of rich sport hunters and playing a post-apocalypse beast in the graphic novel adapted “Tank Girl,” but his gangster persona had stuck with him, leaving him the legendary rapper seemingly encircled in the same kind of urban gangster films. This is the case with “Mean Guns” as he portrays a philosophical, upper-level syndicate criminal Vincent Moon spearheading a game of wetwork for the unscrupulous wetworkers associated with his organization. Not the most prolifically dialogued or screen timed role, Ice-T does what he can to bring Vincent Moon into the fold of much more colorful characters. “Highlander’s” Christopher Lambert receives co-top of the bill as a psychotic assassin looking to atone for a careless sin. Lambert is wonderfully unhinged while calculating as he integrates his “Highlander” sword skills and maniacal grin into his character of Lou, who through flashbacks had accidently killed a child on one of his hits and retrieves his biological daughter for an abusive stepfather to start life anew. More pragmatic is Lou’s rival Marcus, stoically portrayed by Albert Pyun regular Michael Hasley (“Dollman,” “Nemesis 2”). Together, Lou and Marcus must team up, along with the coldhearted D. (Kimberly Warren, “Blast”) and syndicate accountant turned informant Cam (Deborah Van Valkenbugh, “The Warriors’), to survive against the fray of likeminded killers. “Mean Guns” cast fills out with Tina Cote (“Nemesis 2”), Thom Mathews (“Return of the Living Dead”), Yuji Okumoto (“Robot Wars’), Jerry Rector (“Vampire’s Kiss”), James Wellington (“The Evil Inside Me”), and introducing Hunter Doughty.

Like many of Albert Pyun’s caffeinated action films, “Mean Guns” is the epitome of vehemently slick dipped in a 90’s glaze of an alternative, unchecked free-for-all of bad hairdos, trench coats, and guns. Lots of guns in a pre-computer-generated muzzle flash with real recoil and really bad, but good, one-liners. What’s more surprising about this Pyun is that, unlike his previously mentioned films, “Mean Guns” is virtually bloodless albeit the shoot’em up melee violently lays waste to nearly 100 bad guys. Pyun integrated a liberal use of blood squibs in his other guns-blazing and contentious conflicts, but “Mean Guns” takes a step back to a less severe tile like “Unkind Guns” with a comically coated film pulled straight out of a cheesy graphic novel. For example, a combatant, thinking they just scored the briefcase full of millions, finds their head aflame and their face covered in black powder loony toon style after the opened briefcase explodes offscreen. These moments provide a reality check to the already outlandish, yet highly entertaining, every man for himself game of death made willingly subjectable by its limited principals and Pyun style action.

Getting ready to kill for this new Blu-ray of Albert Pyun’s “Mean Guns.” The MVDVisual release, a part of their MVD Rewind Collection, is presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, AVC encoded onto a 1080p, high-definition BD50. Pyun and director of photography George Mooradian, who collaborated on many of Pyun’s films, such as “Cyborg” and “Nemesis” as well as standalone projects with “Bats” and “K-911,” utilized a spherical lens with steep drop-offs around the edges of the frame, almost looks like everything around the left and right sides should be falling. IMDB states anamorphic lens but judging from the complete focus of the background and the severe oval-like nature of the frame, I’m leaning toward a spherical lens. For vast landscapes where length is nearly limitless, a spherical lens would be ideal to unify depth and main focus but since confined to a prison interior, compact hallways are squeezed in beyond a reasonable limit and often side-stance characters are warped in frame. Details are generally fine with the hi-def pixel count that translates skin tones naturally pleasing with a few moments of corrective coloring aside from the occasional red hot temperature flashbacks that bath everything in color-varied reversal exposure. The transfer isn’t perfect either with a couple of noticeable damage blips on the 35mm print. The uncompressed English LPCM 2.0 stereo is a mambo-ladened, bullet-whizzing, melee-skirmishing, and depth-exacting design that’s well balanced and layered. Dialogue remains free of audible blights and courses prominent throughout. Optional English and French subtitles are available. Special features, including an Albert Pyun introduction that’s encoded into the Play Film as well as the bonus content and to which had to be shot well before his death judging by the appearance of his rather healthy person in the video, includes an audio commentary by the director, a new interview with producer Gary Schmoeller, a new interview with executive producer Paul Rosenblum, and a new interview with composter Anthony Riparetti.. The original theatrical trailer is also included. I’m always elated to see the MVD’s throwback package design and the 59th Rewind Collection release continues the theme with a cardboard slipcover in mock disrepair with a corner edged torn and exposing the corner of a VHS tape cassette. Not to forget to mention the designed rental stickers to heighten the effect. Underneath the slipcase is a clear Blu-ray Amaray case with reversible cover art, each side promoted with a scaled down poster art bordered and backgrounded with a similar coloring shade. Inside, the disc is smartly pressed with a VHS-façade while the insert side has a mini-folded poster of the primary cover art. The region free release comes rated R and has a runtime of 104 minutes, which when watching the feature one can see perhaps some cuts were made for timing. Perhaps, Pyun had a longer version and had to edit and cut down for time.

Last Rites: A romping mayhem, “Mean Guns” is ballistically ceaseless and entertaining, if not also the touchstone of 90’s cheesy action, and is presented well here with in the latest, and greatest, MVD Visual Rewind Collection Blu-ray.

“Mean Guns” on MVD Rewind Collection Blu-ray! Purchase Here!

In 1933, the heart of prohibition-era regulation, a corrupt Southampton, New Jersey police department shakedown the illegal alcohol distilleries and bootleggers, forcing establishments to cough up payment for police protection. Chesterfields, the hip new brass club in the sleepy town, falls into the sights of enforcement officers, an alcoholic with post-war issues, Jack Malone and his partner Sam, who want the club owner, a ruthless black bandleader named Chester, to pay for his establishment’s booze sales and bootlegging, but Chester, and his conspicuously strange henchmen, are more than just bootlegging booze runners. The nightclub is a front for a vampire den that’s draining, bottling, and shipping the blood of Southampton residents and master vampire, Chester, operates the business with his human associate, Victor Renfield. An invasion of bloodsucking gangsters seep into the affairs of not only Jack Malone’s baffled police department, but also into the resident brothel that homes Jack’s longtime beloved lover, Rosie. Only Jack, the deranged town priest, and Willie, a boy caught in the middle, stand in between the corrupt, yet still innocent, souls of Southampton and the terrorizing dark forces that scratch at the town’s door.

Hybrid genre film “Bloodrunners” blends a spin of classic tale vampirism with early 20th-century gangsters that concocts a bad batch of cinematic bamboozlement. Filmed in West Chester and Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, director Dan Lantz, who helmed adult film star Alexis Texas in “Bloodlust Zombies,” does construct a marvelous speakeasy, prohibition-era world out of the greater Philadelphia region’s most popular and historical locations. From the period piece costuming to the acquisition of an antique 1921 Ford Model A car, Lantz’s ability to build a story around such facets on pocket-sized finances that help bring 80 years past back to the present can certainly compete with settings of many big-budgeted Hollywood productions. Being a previous recent resident of West Chester, the landscape was convincingly alien to this reviewer. Co-star Michael McFadden co-wrote the script with Lantz and, together, they input a girth of 1920s to 1930s terminology and slang into a script that can’t quite coherently string along a narrative that works under cut and dry filmmaking involving anemic mains characters.

Alongside McFadden, the “Law & Order: SVU,” or rather from one of my personal favorite films from 1994 entitled “Surviving the Game” co-starring Gary Busey and Rutger Hauer, star Ice-T takes on being a master, bootlegging vampire when he’s not busting heads of pedophiles on the streets of New York City. Ice-T maintains a hip hop persona that doesn’t translate well toward the 1930’s, but the legendary gangsta rapper has kept the hip hop schtick throughout this career and never in a hundred roles, eighty-seven credited roles to be exact, would I imagine Ice-T to break from a moneymaking image. Like his co-star, McFadden comforts himself in familiar roles that pigeonholes his career made up of authoritative figures such as cops or gangsters with examples including being a gangster in Fox’s hit television series, the Batman spinoff “Gotham” and also portraying the notorious real life gangster, Jimmy Hoffa, in the upcoming Tigre Hill film “American Zealot.” Then, there’s Philadelphia native Peter Patrikios. Patrikios’ phenomenal take on the iconic Renfield character is a break in the monotony highlight, reviving Renfield back to a sophisticated right hand man instead of a relapsing bumbling aid for his master’s whims of daylight chores and being more memorable than the “Bloodrunners'” main headliners. Airen DelaMater, Chris James Boylan, Julie Elk, Kerry McGann, Jack Hoffman, John Groody, and Dan McGlaughlin round up “Bloodrunners'” roster.

When attempting to examine “Bloondrunners'” vampiric special effects, only this descriptive phrase comes to the forefront of my mind: “Bloodrunners” pits vampire gangsters against crooked cops in a “Matrix” styled, slow-motion action-horror. While that sounds rather exciting, selling these particular creatures of the night didn’t enlighten a firm stance that the modern vampire is alive (well, technically undead) and well. Instead, the Dan Lantz and Michael McFadden story stays the routine course that fills the overstuffed and out of control vampire barrel that desperately requires genre damage control from the first moment a scofflaw vamp enters the scene. Vampire action films haven’t been popular since “Blade,” unless adapted to television as in the case of FX’s “The Strain,” and “Bloodrunners” doesn’t fit the bill, boozing in as a blasphemous contemporary day vampire film.

Paoli, PA based production company Impulse-FX delivers Dan Lantz’s latest schlock horror “Bloodrunners” with Speakeasy Films releasing the film out to the world and landing on retail shelves March 7th. The trailer held promise with vigorous action stamina, but, in the end, just turned out to be a well-edited trailer for an action-horror-thriller that needed a touch of stability in the story. Portions of the story are deemed absolutely unnecessary to motivate the characters or are place mats interjected to connect characters, such as Jack Malone’s encounter with a specific German vampire who just coincidently happens to be one of the henchmen in Ice-T’s vampire gang. The Speakeasy Films dual format 2-disc, Blu-ray and DVD combo, presents the film 1080p widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio in which the Blu-ray is on a AVC 26Mps disc. The image was a bit shaky under the compression, fizzing at times, more so during darker scenes, that outlined compression artifacts that remarked upon lighter shades of grey and black. The English Dolby Digital 5.1 track is fine through the 95 minute runtime. Jack Malone’s raspy gangster voice doesn’t become muddled and Ice-T’s epic hip hop swag comes through without even a hitch. The soundtracks fades in and out quite a bit over the LFE, during the “Matrix” slow-motion, that leaves much unbalanced when the soundtrack becomes warranted. Bonus features are nice, including a gag reel, deleted and extended scenes, filmmakers commentary, and an official trailer. In conclusion, “Bloodrunners” teeters on the edge of being a full bodied beverage that never really carbonates into a high-alcoholic contestant in being a good, modern day vampire thriller.