Tusk and DVD releases

Last week was a phenomenal week for DVD releases. Season 2 of Hannibal. The first season of From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series. Season 2 of The Equalizer (with the late, great, Edward Woodward from the original Wicker Man). You should all imbibe. But one of the movies I bought right away was the Ford Brothers' The Dead 2. It's the sequel to the original Dead filmed in Africa, and these fledgling filmmakers went through the ringer to make their own zombie movie a few years back. Among other things, filming equipment being confiscated and then extorted by customs officials. The lead actor getting sick from malaria. Damn.

The Dead 2 is also a great horror flick from the Brothers Ford, and all those involved obviously worked very hard. I enjoyed it, but the story is a little linear and too Resident Evil for my liking this time around. Character finds a building, kills zombies, finds a mode of transportation. Wash, rinse, repeat. Good, but my final verdict is optional.

Then a friend told me about Kevin Smith's Tusk. "I feel I have a hard time recommending this movie to people," he told me. "But I need to. The more I dwelled on it, the more I found that I really enjoyed it."

And after seeing it, I feel very much the same way. The less I say about Tusk, the better. But I will say at the film's conclusion I was cosmically stupefied. Tusk has a lot of character dialogue, backstory, and academia through detective work. Tusk is "The Call of Cthulhu" of the horror movie world. A well-known actor makes an appearance as a police detective in what I call "The Inspector Legrasse Segment".

Tusk really isn't that graphic, just disturbing. Yep, it involves a poor sap that gets turned into a walrus through surgery by a backwoods psycho (Michael Parks, who is just as creepy as he was in Red State). But that's all I'm going to say.

In conclusion...

Hannibal Season 2: not optional.
From Dusk Till Dawn Season 1: not optional.
The Equalizer Season 2: not optional.
The Dead 2: optional.
Tusk: I just don't know, man. I just really don't know.