Happy Death Day [Blu-ray] [Standard]

Available for the first time on Blu-ray, Director Ted Kotcheff follows up his hit FIRST BLOOD with another powerful post-Vietnam story. Oscar winner Gene Hackman stars as Cal Rhodes, a former Marine Colonel who has been getting the run-around for ten years from the government concerning the disappearance of his son and his buddies - all Marines who enlisted years prior and served in Vietnam. Rhodes' son was last seen in Laos, where he was fighting in the war and captured as a POW. When word gets back to Rhodes that the men may still be alive and held in prison camps, but the government still has the men listed as missing in action, Rhodes decides to take matters into his own hands. Contacting an old friend, oil baron MacGregor (Robert Stack), Rhodes is granted financial backing to form his own incursion force. He assembles a crack team of men, puts them through an intensive period of training. And heads back with them into the Laotian jungles to search for the MIAs.

Another teen-flavored Shakespeare adaptation in a lineage that includes ROMEO + JULIET (1997), 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (1999), and O (2001), SHE'S THE MAN takes an even lighter approach to TWELFTH NIGHT than the bard himself, but throws a curve by mixing it's inherent gender-switch romance with a feel-good girl power sports element. Amanda Bynes (WHAT A GIRL WANTS) is Viola, a high schooler who just wants to play soccer, even though her mother (Julie Hagerty) is prepping her for a debutante ball. After the girls' soccer team is eliminated from her school just before the start of the school year, she finds that her brother, also a soccer player, is ditching the beginning of the semester to go to London with his band. Viola decides to go in his place-as a boy-and prove that she can make it on the team. However, she doesn't count on falling for hunky jock Duke (Channing Tatum, SUPERCROSS), whom she befriends and reluctantly attempts to aid in wooing beautiful and popular Olivia (Laura Ramsey). Though the credits list Shakespeare as it's inspiration, the script-by Ewan Leslie, Karen McCullah Lutz, and Kirsten Smith-owes more to the perennial cable TV classic JUST ONE OF THE GUYS (1985), in which a female student goes undercover at a rival high school as a boy for journalistic purposes. Here, Bynes, (a veteran of Nickelodeon's sketch comedy show ALL THAT) gamely jumps into the role with energy to spare and a broad comic style that works well with this bright, colorful film. The adult roles are handled deftly by Hagerty and Vinnie Jones (SNATCH), who lends authenticity as the soccer coach, and David Cross (ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT), who makes the most of his clueless headmaster role with the help of a cavalcade of ridiculous hats.

Two-time Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a researcher in the year 2019, when an unknown plague has transformed the world's population into vampires. As the human population nears extinction, vampires must capture and farm every remaining human, or find a blood substitute before time runs out. However, a covert group of vampires makes a remarkable discovery, one which has the power to save the human race.