Alien Anthology is coming to Blu-Ray soon. Hell yeah!

One of my favourite film series in the entire world is coming to Blu-Ray pretty soon. Details are pretty hazy for the moment, but here’s what you may or may not expect from the packing/artwork:

Also there is a pretty cool looking limited “egg” edition that encases the entire set:

Keep in mind that these images are for the Polish editions so our release in North America may look entirely different. I don’t know if I’d personally shell out the cash for the fancy casing but it would definitely look a lot better in your living room than that crazy alien head bust, that holds all the discs in its skull, which was released for the 25th anniversary:

Damn!

So there are a lot of rumors floating around about Sigourney Weaver recording brand new commentaries and a whole bunch of awesome new special features being included but for now there are no official specifications. Fingers crossed that this set will be as satisfying as the 2003 DVD releases that were loaded with more features than you could shake a stick at. I’ll be eagerly awaiting this release, for sure.

In the mean time, here is the teaser trailer for the Alien Anthology Blu-Rays:

Blu-ray cover art sucks.

What happened to the good old days of movie posters? When the advertisements themselves were works of art, had some effort put into them, and promised that a certain movie would be epic and awesome?

The digital age with DVD kicked in and suddenly the cover art started looking very awful. Giant heads floating around. Terrible photo-shopping. Perfectly good movie poster art started getting replaced with really crappily edited cover art.

It’s not getting any better with Blu-ray. I have no idea what’s going in some of the designers’ minds. Some are either terribly minimalist or have so much ridiculous, nonsensical photo-shopped shit flying around the small area of cover space that just looking upon it induces headaches and/or vomiting.

Take a look at a few examples of cover art for upcoming Blu-ray releases and you’ll see what I mean:

You can tell that they’re putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into the cover art. Which begs the question, why not just use the original poster art? They recycle all the special features most of the time, so why not that? We’re paying big bucks for titles that we probably already have on VHS and DVD, and God knows what other formats, so we should at least have some aesthetically pleasing art to look at in our collection, not some lazily photo-shopped garbage that was probably done by some visual design student for free instead of a professional artist.

My movie collection

Howdy folks. I just thought I’d share some photos of my DVD collection.

This bunch is on a shelf. I have tried my damnedest to arrange them by colour.

These DVDs get the honor of being placed on the crappily-assembled DVD Stand I bought from The Beat Goes On.

Horror in the drawer (part 1)

Horror in the drawer part 2! This time it’s B comedies, concerts, double/quadruple features, and SNL best-ofs. Plus the Evil Dead Books of the Dead.

Box sets here! Everything from James Bond to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comedy hits.

Finally, the TV DVDs. I loves me some 30 Rock and HIMYM.

But wait! There’s more! I still have VHS tapes.

VHS tapes were a way of viewing movies before DVDs were invented. They cannot be played on a DVD player, but instead a machine called a VCR.

Some of the old favourites! I have updated these to DVD.

Most of these I have not updated to DVD. From Dusk Till Dawn, Men In Black, Twister, Godzilla, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The French Connection…I have never seen ’em on DVD!

And check out the box-sets. They’re huge!

The Stanley Kubrick set is bigger than my damn head, yo!

Before I finally got a DVD player, I collected “clamshell” VHS sets…they were pretty cool. Often digitally mastered, often with some special features added before or after the movie…and in some cases, even liner notes on the reverse side of the cover sleeve.

Notes on Evil Dead 2, by Bruce “don’t call me Ash” Campbell

Notes on Dawn of the Dead’s 20th Anniversary VHS release by director George A. Romero.

I still enjoy watching VHS tapes from time to time…especially if it’s a cheesy horror flick like Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 or Return of the Killer Tomatoes. And why on earth would I want to watch Blair Witch on any other format?

Ah, my very first VCR. Don’t get too jealous of this baby, I don’t think it works anymore. Note the VHS tape of E.T. and its odd colouring. Back in the 80’s, going green meant something entirely different.

As fun of a trip down memory lane with VHS is, I still like to look forward to the future of home entertainment.

This is my Blu-ray collection so far. I’m sure that by the time I get a respectable collection, the format will be obsolete!