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Archive for the ‘Blog Post (short for weblog)’ Category

“Don’t you know who I am!? I wrote the essay for the UNDER SIEGE 4K from Arrow!”

Tuesday, January 6th, 2026

If you are the type of person who would buy UNDER SIEGE in its fancy new Arrow limited edition 4K or blu-ray I recommend checking out the essay in the booklet. It might be by somebody you know.

I went many years without ever achieving the status of “guy who writes liner notes for home video releases,” but now I have a few notches on my belt. The first was for a region B release of DOBERMANN, then I did NAVY SEALS for Vinegar Syndrome. UNDER SIEGE is the biggest movie I’ve done and also the first time I was the obvious choice. They said they found out about me while researching the movie. I hope they remember me if they do DARK TERRITORY!

I have two other ones coming up from other labels, but they’re not announced yet. One is an unknown no-budget movie I can’t wait to tell everybody about, and the other one I almost won’t believe until I see the disc with my own eyes, and then I’ll be carrying it around like Tom Cruise showing everybody his I.D. in EYES WIDE SHUT. Long after I’m in the ground my skeleton will still be bragging about it. But I have no more deadlines at the moment so I am focused on reviewing the good shit for you here. Happy 2026, despite everything!

I was on Vampire Videos

Monday, May 26th, 2025

When I was invited on the podcast Vampire Videos I had to come up with a vampire movie to discuss that hadn’t already been covered in 108 previous episodes. I didn’t want to watch AGAINST THE DARK again and someone had gotten to ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER right before me, but I remembered liking this post-apocalyptic priest vs. monster vampires movie called PRIEST. (You may have seen me mention this when I reviewed the director’s later movie DARK SKIES some weeks back.)

Here’s the episode. Enjoy!

VAMPIRE VIDEOS #109 – PRIEST (2011)

Comments

Tuesday, February 18th, 2025

Have you or a loved one experienced COMMENT BLOCKAGE? You could be entitled to not having that anymore. Sorry everybody, I’ve heard from several people that their comments have been blocked for days or weeks on end. One person fixed it by using a VPN and one by switching to mobile, but neither should be necessary. If you’re getting blocked, Chris asks if you could highlight the url in the browser and screenshot along with the error message to help us narrow down the problem. You can send that to me at outlawvern at hotmail dot com. Thanks for your patience.

Talking Rumble in the Bronx with ‘All ’90s Action, All the Time!’

Wednesday, January 29th, 2025

I swear I didn’t plan to be overexposed on podcasts this month, I just take them when I can get ’em and this is how it works out sometimes. When All ’90s Action, All the Time! invited me to come on this season I thought a great movie to talk about would be RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. Obviously it was one of Jackie Chan’s big breakthroughs in the west, even more obviously it is by far the most realistic depiction of New York and gangs ever put on film, including documentaries filmed in New York about actual gangs. It was an important movie to me and sums up some things about the personality of the decade.

KICK HERE TO LISTEN

I did Larry’s podcast!

Thursday, January 23rd, 2025

Longtime commenter Sternshein has a podcast called Reel Early where he talks to people about their history of movie love. I had a great time finally having a conversation with him, and we talked about video stores, working as a projectionist, writing reviews and other stuff. I talked about a few parts of my life I haven’t talked about before – sorry if it ruins my mystique. But check out the podcast, there are some good episodes with other people you’ve seen around here like Fred Topel and Mark Palermo. Thanks Larry, I had a great time!

 

 

Happy Sweet Potato Day

Thursday, November 28th, 2024

Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate. I can’t stop worrying about shit but I have much to be thankful for, including/especially all the great people here, the fact that anybody still reads my reviews, takes my recommendations, recommends things to me, and wants to hang out and talk about it with me and the community here you’ve all helped create. I hope you can have some good food today, maybe see family or friends, maybe avoid them if that’s better. I’ll keep striving and I hope you do too. Thanks everybody!

Man, I don’t know.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2024

I wish I had it in me to write something beautiful and optimistic and give everybody some solace. Should’ve prepared something in advance, I guess. Right now it feels like the bad guys won for the rest of my lifetime and it’s hard to even think or do anything. Evil, chaotic times ahead. I’ll be back on my movie review bullshit soon I hope but for now I need to regroup. Take care everybody.

Programming note

Thursday, September 5th, 2024

I’m going on a week long trip for family stuff, so I will not be posting any new reviews next week, and possibly the week after that (depending on how fast I get rolling again). So consider this my end of summer break and/or your break from me. But I promise after I get back I’ll catch up on new releases I miss like Jeremy Saulnier’s REBEL RIDGE and Hot Topic’s BEETLEJUICE2, and hopefully I’ll get in some time to enjoy the freedom of September, when I’m out of summer mode but not fully in Halloween mode and can just review whatever random things catch my interest for a bit. Have fun everybody, be respectful, no parties, I left some money on the table to get pizza and rent videos.

early review on Patreon: THE PRIMEVALS

Wednesday, May 29th, 2024

For those who currently do or want to start patronizing me on the ol’ Patreon, I have posted my review of THE PRIMEVALS, Full Moon’s Yeti vs. lizard men movie that was the passion project of their top stop motion animator David Allen, first pitched in the late ’60s, filmed in 1994, and thought dormant when he died without quite finishing it in 1999. Now it’s been miraculously unfrozen and coming to VOD soon.

If you’re not able to or don’t want to give me money, I get it and I plan to post this particular one for free here very soon. But I gotta self promote and remind you every once in a while that for less than it costs to buy a refrigerator magnet at the $1.01 Store you can get access to a bunch of exclusive posts and help me continue to work only part time at the day job and put most of my time and mental focus into providing you the good shit here at outlawvern.com. Thank you!

CLICK HERE TO MEET THE PRIMEVALS TODAY!

Vern’s Oscar Round-Up and 2023 Recap Thing

Thursday, March 7th, 2024

For some years now, some of you may remember, I’ve made it a point to watch all of the best picture nominees. This year, for the first time ever, I’d already seen all of them when the nominations were announced. Achievement unlocked, as they say in whatever they say that in.

Since I was ahead of the game there I thought maybe I could also review them all for the first time ever. I always don’t get around to a couple of them, and that’s what happened this year too. I did review AMERICAN FICTION and ANATOMY OF A FALL together, as well as BARBIE, MAESTRO, OPPENHEIMER, POOR THINGS and THE ZONE OF INTEREST. The ones I missed were THE HOLDOVERS, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and PAST LIVES, so I’ll say a little about them now. (read the rest of this shit…)