La Strada: Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) by Justin Remer The Movie: After the international splash made by I Vitelloni in 1953, Federico Fellini came back with a film seemingly designed to burnish his worldwide reputation without smoothing over his rough edges. That film, La Strada (The Road), is arguably his first masterpiece. The achievement is helped in no small part by the uniquely tragicomic lead performance by Fellini's then-wife Giulietta Masina.Masina plays Gelsomina, a slow-witted girl who is sold by her poor mother to traveling sideshow strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) as an assistant. Zampanò had previously taken on Gelsomina's older sister as his assistant, but she died -- a portentous set-up for Gelsomina's journey ...Read the entire review »

Dead Pit (Blu-ray) by Ian Jane The Movie:1989's Dead Pit directed by Brett Leonard, takes place in and around the \'State Institute For The Mentally Insane\' where one Doctor Ramzi (Danny Gochnauer) uses the unwitting inmates at his disposable as guinea pigs to further his work in the field of lobotomies! When the experiments inevitably don\'t go so well, he tosses their corpses into a giant put in the bowels of the hospital where they are to gotten rid of, permanently. When Doctor Swan (Jeremy Slate) finds out what his co-worker has been up to when no one has been watching him, he shoots him dead.A few years later and an insanely voluptuous Jane Doe (Cheryl Lawson) takes up residence in the institute. As she gets used to her surroundings, she starts to have recurring dreams of good old Doctor Ramzi. Insisting that she\'s had her memories erased by someone under duress, it\'s clear that her presence in...Read the entire review »