Finding that they are getting a lot requests from abroad but are unable to investigate them because of family commitments, Grant and Jason from Ghost Hunters decide to form an international investigation team led by Robb Demarest from the Florida branch. Their first case is in England and the 800-year-old Chillingham Castle, reputed to be the most haunted castle in the country. To be fair, at night with no lights on, the place does have a foreboding vibe.

Not surprisingly, most of the cases take place in the United Kingdom so that there is no issue with a foreign language but they do go to Italy and check out a haunted monastery with a reported demonic presence, Transylvania, Slovakia (gothic compound), Germany (a headless ghost), and Germany where they team up with Destination Truth’s Josh Gates to investigate Frankenstein’s castle.

Each episode is broken up into two separate cases. The investigators are given the backstory to the place, eyewitness accounts of paranormal activity, a tour of the site, and then the investigation begins. The team’s goal is to prove or disprove the presence of paranormal activity. The team waits until night and breaks up into couples and explores the site. The investigators are equipped with an array of scientific equipment including thermal imaging and an electronic voice phenomenon device that picks up noises not detectable by the human ear. Each episode mixes footage of the investigation with soundbite interviews with the team members conducted after the fact. After the investigation, they review the evidence and then present their findings to the client.

What is refreshing about Ghost Hunters International is that it takes the Ghost Hunters template on the road all over the world. The investigators are skeptical and are looking to debunk things that were thought to be unexplainable. They attempt to capture potential evidence of the paranormal but unfortunately most of what they find consists of the odd disembodied voice or footage of a strange shadow. The investigators do often experience something first hand but it are rarely recorded and therein lies the rub. Still, if you are even remotely interested in the unexplained, the show is entertaining to watch but unfortunately the personalities of the team aren’t as distinctive as the ones on the original Ghost Hunters. On Ghost Hunters International, the exotic locations are the real star of the show.

Special Features:

There is over an hour’s worth of deleted/extended scenes for every episode. We get more backstories to the various haunted locations and naturally we see more of the investigations themselves.

I saw him live in Cardiff on the Dangerous Tour in 1992. I saw the opening night of the History Tour in Prague in 1997, and two of the Wembley dates the following summer. I also had tickets for the opening night of the This Is It concert last year. Not just tickets either, Thriller VIP hospitality tickets – costing over a grand for the pair.

I opted for the printed holographic ticket instead of a refund, I have the Michael Jackson Opus book and yes, I used to subscribe to ‘King’ magazine.

It’s safe to say I’m something of a fan.

Therefore the chance to review Michael Jackson’s This Is It on DVD is something not to be missed.

When I heard the news last summer that Michael was rushed to hospital I sat, like many people across the world, transfixed by the news channels while checking websites for updates. Twitter fell down with the clamour for news and Facebook was alive with rumours and hearsay – sadly most of it turned out to be true. The tragedy every fan had feared had finally happened, at the worst time possible.

Many believed that Michael wasn’t in good physical or mental shape and that the concerts wouldn’t have gone ahead regardless. The video footage that was compiled to form last year’s theatrical release of This Is It proved otherwise.

Michael was in fine shape and the concerts were ready to go. This would have been the pinnacle of his career in terms of liver performances, and thankfully it was recorded so that we do get the chance to enjoy it in some form, even if it is incomplete.

This Is It has an eerie quality all of its own. The empty stadium, the casual nature of the presentation, the fact that the production was never performed; it all makes for awkward viewing. Putting that aside however and you have a truly spectacular concert showing that Michael was still at the top of his game, both vocally and artistically.

Highlights of the show include the specially shot video footage for the introduction of Thriller and the tear inducing final performance of Billie Jean, which earns Michael one last ovation from the watching dance troop, many of whom would have grown up watching him dance.

The film starts off in a tearful manner, but doesn’t dwell on what happened. The film is about Michael as a performer and about the concert that he worked so hard to put on. It’s a celebration of life and talent, rather than a lament at the loss of it.

Watching this in the cinema I was caught between two contrasting emotions. I was delighted that I got the chance to watch it, to enjoy it and was singing along at certain points as though I was at the concert in person. I was also devastated that the concert itself would never be seen live, as it was intended.

Special Features

In the weeks following Michael’s death I tried to avoid the television as much as possible as I knew every TV channel would try to capitalise on the event by hashing together old footage from various videos and putting out ‘tribute’ programmes. I’d seen all of this footage before and didn’t want to see the same sequences over and over, in what was basically just an attempt to gain ratings from fair-weather fans.

The special features on The Is It however contain more than 2 hours of unseen footage, and as someone who has edited together behind the scenes footage from Michael’s Stranger in Moscow video for a screening at the 40th Birthday Bash in London in 1998, I know my ‘unseen’ footage from my ‘often seen’ footage.

The highlight of the special features has to be the unfinished rehearsals, where you see footage from rehearsals that wasn’t included in the film. The stand-out section here is the rehearsal footage for Dirty Diana, where a huge bed had been created for Michael to perform on with a pole dancer. The bed included poles at each corner, and a roof structure, where we see the talented pole dancer swinging around and performing while the bed itself is encapsulated in fire.

This would have been one of Michael’s raunchiest stage routines.

Another interesting aspect of the special features concerns the search for his dancers, where a talent show similar to ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ is held, featuring dancers from all over the world flying in to win one of the 11 places on the crew. This would have made a great series in its own right, and features some very talented dancers.

There hasn’t been a DVD (or video) release of Michael’s that has given this much insight into his creative process as he was such a private man. This release gives you that tinge of sadness that the concerts never happened, but the feelings of joy experienced when watching it far outweigh any negatives.

This, as Michael said himself, is it.

Al Reinert’s documentary For All Mankind (1989) chronicles these missions in a unique way: it is essentially a mash-up of all of them, from liftoff to splashdown. No astronaut is identified by name yet we hear them talking about their experiences on the soundtrack. No one mission is identified from another and this strangely gives the film an epic quality, enhanced considerably by Brian Eno’s low key and oddly ominous electronic score.

With the exception of Kennedy’s famous speech, all of the footage in For All Mankind is taken from NASA’s archives and this gives the film the feel of being made from an insider’s perspective. This isn’t some omniscient dramatization like Apollo 13 (1995) but more like a fly-on-the-wall feel, like we are tagging along for the ride with these astronauts. In this day and age of DVDs, the various astronauts talking about their experiences over footage of the missions has the sensation of an audio commentary only not done by some scholar or filmmaker but by the men who were actually there.

Watching the footage of one of those huge rockets taking off is still an impressive spectacle to behold. The footage of the Earth as seen from outer space is breathtaking and really puts things into perspective. Even more impressive is footage of a spacewalk over the Earth as an astronaut describes the experience. No matter how many times one sees Neil Armstrong take the first step on the surface of the Moon it is still a stirring moment.

After For All Mankind, Reinert went to write Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and contribute two screenplays for HBO’s ambitious 12-part miniseries From the Earth to the Moon (1998) but they don’t quite capture the immediacy of his documentary.

Special Features:

This is a re-issue of a previous release by the Criterion Collection but features a brand new transfer of the film, which looks fantastic. All of the previous extra material has been carried over.

There is an audio commentary by filmmaker Al Reinert and astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to set foot on the Moon. Reinert provides some insight into how the film came together. He went through thousands of hours of footage and managed to put together an 80-minute film. Cernan shares some of his experiences about what it was like to be an astronaut at that time.

New to this edition is “An Accidental Gift: The Making of For All Mankind,” a 30-minute retrospective documentary. Reinert always wanted to see this outer space/Moon footage on the big screen and this was the impetus for the film. He got his start as a journalist covering NASA in the early 1980s. Through his contacts he got access to their film archives and found footage that had never been shown. This is an excellent look at how For All Mankind came together.

Also new is “On Camera,” a compilation of on-camera interviews Reinert conducted with 15 of the Apollo astronauts. In the film itself only the audio is used and it is nice to put a face to the voice.

“Painting from the Moon” is an updating of an extra on the original edition. After retiring from NASA, astronaut Alan Bean became a painter and this is a gallery of his work with commentary.

“NASA Audio Highlights” is a collection of 21 soundbites from the first ten years of the American space program. Some of the most famous words have spoken during this time, including Neil Armstrong’s immortal words.

Finally, there is “3, 2, 1 . . . Blast Off!” a collection of launch footage of various rockets taking off for outer space.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008) is a documentary that re-opens the case and examines the subsequent investigation, interviewing the lawyers representing the case and the victim herself. It also examines the media firestorm that surrounded Polanski and the case. The doc spends time introducing all the major players involved in the case – the attorneys and the judge – and then proceeds to take a look at how it all played out with tons of archival footage.

Wanted and Desired paints a fascinating, complex portrait of Polanski – the controversial filmmaker and the devastation left in the wake of his wife’s murder. It also helps set the stage for the court case, which unfolded in a very unconventional fashion and in a way that neither attorney could have predicted. Judge Rittenband, who presided over the case, was easily manipulated and liked to be surrounded by celebrities. He comes across as somewhat incompetent and out of his depth.

While Wanted and Desired does create some empathy for Polanski and provides possible motivation for his actions, it also demonstrates that, at times, he was his own worst enemy. This doc is a fascinating look not just at Polanski, but the byzantine machinations of the U.S. legal system and how justice is rarely blind. It doesn’t excuse what Polanski did but puts it into historical context and shows how the judge’s personal views impacted the case, changing the filmmaker’s life forever.

Special Features:

There is an audio commentary by director Marina Zenovich and editor Joe Bini. She says that it took five years to get the film made: two to get financing and three to actually do it. She also talks about the challenge of merging Polanski’s life and the court case. Zenovich points out that it was hard getting archival footage from the 1970s because much of it had been either taped over or lost. Bini talks a lot about the structure of the doc. – for example, where should they start the story? This quite a chatty track as Zenovich and Bini talk about how they put this film together.

Also included are five deleted scenes that feature the current L.A. District Attorney and his thoughts on Judge Rittenband. Prosecutor Roger Gunson returns to Rittenband’s old courtroom. He also shares some of his memories of the case.

There are “Extra Interviews” with various attorneys talking about the case then and now, including the possibility that Polanski may come back to the U.S. They also discuss the possibility that he might be pardoned.

“Friends and Colleagues Talk about Polanski” feature several childhood friends and people who have worked with Polanski on films in the past. They talk about his rough upbringing during World War II and his time spent in film school in Poland. They take us through various periods in his life. Naturally, Mia Farrow talks about making Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and speaks fondly of working with Polanski.

“Writers of Polanski” features three journalists talking about Polanski, the man and his career.

Finally, there is “Will He Ever Come Back?”, a question posed to various people in the doc. Not surprisingly they almost all say no for a variety of reasons.

These guys are pretty unbelievable, for instance the opening scene, is all the guys in huge shopping cart (regular viewers of the show will know that shopping cart antics are one of the boys’ faves – one of the first stunts they did for the first ever show). This enormous shopping cart is surrounded by explosions, big music, and introduces the boys one by one, finally throwing them all out, into a fruit stall! The idea behind this, Knoxville says on commentary 1, is to try to fool the audience into thinking they’ve sold out and gone all ‘Hollywood’, but he does admit that it didn’t really work, “people just thought it was funny!” No? Really!

Stunts included in this film are Rent-A-Car Derby, where they basically rent a car then smash it up and then begin the fun when they return it, the muscle stimulator, where electronic stimulator pads are attached to various body parts (I don’t think you need the details!), ass kicked by girl (Ryan Dunn getting exactly what it says on the tin!), getting Bam’s mom to swear, and the pièce de résistance, the Butt X-ray, where Ryan ‘short straw’ Dunn, shoves a toy car up his backside, and then proceeds to get it X-rayed by a rather eccentric Cuban doctor.

The film is basically a collection of scene or skits all pasted together into a movie, in fact it’s the TV show, just and 80 minute TV show rather than a 30 minute one. The stunts are slightly more extreme but the guys say the really wanted to push the boundaries. What’s clear is that they had a lot of fun making the film, and that really helps your own enjoyment of the film. Plus, Johnny Knoxville is like an oversized 7 year old, who nearly kills himself with laughter whilst watching other people’s skits and you just can’t help laughing along (not so with his skit where they test ‘less lethal ammunition’ – check out the bruise – ouch!).

This DVD is also a mini-treasure trove. It boasts a commentary by the director (Jeff Tremaine), cinematographer (Dimitri Elyashkevich) and Johnny Knoxville (sadly Spike Jonze is missing), and the second commentary is the Jackass cast group commentary. The first commentary is entertaining, with reflections on the filming, how badly people got hurt (Ryan breaking his arm on the opening credits) and how some things just didn’t work, and wondering why they cut some things out, that were actually really funny. The second commentary with the entire group is just what you’d think, a load of guys together, laughing pretty much all the way through, and making snide remarks at each other!

Other features of the DVD include 27 minutes of additional footage, some of which you have to wonder why was cut out, it so funny. These include ‘the failed ending’, which whilst grand in plan, wasn’t really funny in the end, and puddle surfing in the Pacific Northwest i.e. Seattle, which really is quite funny and should have been in the movie!

There’s also some outtakes, where the stunts didn’t work how they should have, or where people fluffed their lines, like Ehren Mcghehey having to say ‘Hi, I’m Ehren Mcghehey and this is the mouse trap’ about 27 times, and Steve-O and Pontius fluffing their lines.

The TV spots are something to be watched, using Bam’s parents to advertise the film, with Bam beating up his unexpectedly. The cast and crew bios are not very informative, but very Jackass in creation, and the photo and poster gallery, whilst nothing special is still worth a look.

Finally, there’s also a making of the movie (as made by MTV) which is almost insightful into how they went about putting the movie together, what difficulties they experienced and the transition from hand held, home video style footage, to huge cameras which hardly anyone knew how to use, and proper film!

I found this film hilarious, but I think you need have to some element of a sick and twisted sense of humour, and must enjoy watching people getting hurt. If that doesn’t appeal to you, then steer well clear of this you won’t enjoy it.