Blu-ray review roundup: Breakdown, The Brotherhood of Satan, Strike Commando 1 + 2

Breakdown, one of the best action thrillers of the ’90s, finally gets a well-deserved new Blu-ray release courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Directed by Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3), Breakdown stars Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan as Jeff and Amy, an East Coast couple driving from Boston to San Diego in their new Jeep Cherokee. Following a near accident with a pick-up truck on the road and a tense encounter with the driver at a gas station, the couple’s jeep suddenly gives out. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, Amy accepts an offer from a passing driver offering her a lift to go phone for help. After restlessly waiting for her return, Jeff realizes Amy isn’t coming back and sets off on a dangerous and thrilling journey to find her.

An exciting mashup of Duel and The Vanishing, Breakdown is a near-perfect mix of tightrope suspense and intense action. Centered by the endlessly charismatic Kurt Russell and with some truly chilling villains including the great M. C. Gainey (Con Air), Breakdown is a thoroughly enjoyable popcorn thriller that delivers on all fronts, while also hitting on the cultural divides in American life that have only become more pronounced in the years since its release.

This Blu-ray edition features a revealing new 4K transfer along with a handful of new extras including video interviews with director Jonathan Mostow, star Kathleen Quinlan, and producer Martha De Laurentiis. The most fascinating addition is a completely different alternate opening for the film that Mostow rightly fought against including, featuring a needlessly involved backstory for Jeff as a war photographer returning from a jumbled overseas mission.

It’s great to have one of the most underrated action films of the ’90s finally available in a spiffy new Blu-ray edition; you’ll get a lot of mileage out of this one. Order Breakdown here.

In an opening very similar to Breakdown, The Brotherhood of Satan also begins with a road trip. The recently widowed Ben (Charles Bateman), his girlfriend Nicky (Ahna Capri), and Ben’s daughter K.T. (Geri Reischl) are traveling across the South when they witness a terrible accident. They head to the nearest small town in search of help from the local Sheriff (L.Q. Jones), but they are quickly confronted by an angry mob of villagers who want the new interlopers out of their town.

The villagers have a right to be on edge; many of the local children have gone missing, and a number of violent deaths have occurred in the small town. The new arrivals are quickly swept into the drama of the small town, which we soon learn is the launching pad for a group of Satanists who are using the town’s children to keep themselves immortal by any means necessary.

This little-seen 1971 release is a surreal and strange gem that stands out due to the intense performance by Strother Martin (Cool Hand Luke) as the head Satanist. It takes elements from Rosemary’s Baby and expands the notion of everyday Satanists in our midst out of the New York City brownstone and into a small secluded town, creating a very different sort of unnerving tension.

This new release from the always dependable Arrow Video features new interviews with two of the children from the film (Jonathan Erickson Eisley and Alyson Moore) reflecting on their experiences making the movie, Satanic Panic: How the 1970s Conjured the Brotherhood of Satan, a fascinating visual essay that places the film in context with the surge of Satanic films and books during the era, and an incredibly comprehensive commentary by writers Kim Newman and Sean Hogan that doubles as a history and film lesson in one. (The first pressing aloes includes a nice thick booklet with essays by Johnny Mains and Brad Stevens).

While The Brotherhood of Satan is an interesting genre piece with some welcome stylistic flourishes, the extras on this disc make this an indispensable pick-up for horror fans looking for a deep dive into the era’s paranoia-fulled Satanic Panic. Order The Brotherhood of Satan here.

Strike Commando 1 + 2

Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei was notorious for releasing cheapo exploitation films liberally “inspired” by blockbuster American films of the time. After witnessing the massive popularity of the Rambo films, Mattei unleashed Strike Commando in 1987, a takeoff of the Rambo films with a fraction of the budget (and talent). The film stars Reb Brown as Sgt. Mike Ransom, a testosterone-fuelled soldier working as one of the elite Strike Commandos in Vietnam. After a raid on a Vietnamese base goes awry, Ransom is determined to exact revenge for the loss of a fellow soldier, which ensnares him in a world of meddling Russians, the Vietcong, and shady U.S. officers.

To be clear, the plot is nonsensical and barely matters; you come to Strike Commando for the action, and boy, does it deliver. Like an unhinged Coppolla making Apocalypse Now (both films were shot in the Philippines), Mattei unleashes an ungodly amount of pyrotechnics here, destroying what feels like entire bamboo villages complete with death-defying stuntmen leaping out of every conceivable window or opening just before the next fireball hits.

The laughably audacious battle sequences are offset by some very strange directorial choices including long takes of men intensely staring at each other (for dramatic effect?) and a hilarious exchange between Ransom and a dying boy about Disneyland that has to be seen to be believed.

This disc from Severin features an astonishing 2K scan of the film from the original negative, along with some worthwhile extras including an open discussion with co-director Claduio Fragasso on the making of the film, and an interview with the film’s screenwriter Rossella Drudi. The disc features the theatrical cut of the film (imagine seeing this madness in the theater!) along with an extended cut featuring extended scenes.

Mattei went back to the well a year later for a sequel that is somehow even more bizarre than the first film. When they couldn’t secure Reb Brown’s return, they enlisted Brent Huff to take on the role of Mike Ransom. Perhaps in an effort to try to even out the scales, Mattei was able to coerce legendary actor Richard Harris (The Guns of Navarone) to head down to the Philippines and join the mayhem. Not content to simply rip-off Rambo any longer, Strike Commando 2 features a number of sequences that are essentially beat-by-beat recreations of Raiders of the Lost Ark, including the famous bar fight and the truck chase sequence.

Strike Commando 2 has a very different tone than the original film but is still way more fun than you might think. The acting is terrible and you’ll want to go back in time and berate Richard Harris’ agent for ever letting him get on that plane, but the endless action sequences and generally over-the-top insanity of the film is hard to beat.

This release from Severin also features both the theatrical and extended cuts of the film, an interview with Brent Huff (who fondly looks back on his time making the movie), and another interview with Claduio Fragasso, who seems perfectly content to reveal all the chaos surrounding the film’s production so many years later.

The Strike Commando films are so hilarious and entertaining that you immediately want to share them with as many people as possible. The budgets may be considerably lower than their American counterparts and they can barely stitch together one original idea over the course of two whole films, but Mattei’s chutzpah and sheer determination to copy the big boys imbues the films with an unbridled energy that’s hard to beat. Order Strike Commando here and Strike Commando 2 here.