These Amazing Umbrella Blu Ray Releases Blew My Mind

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:04]Hi and welcome to Terry Talks Movies and welcome to another haul from Umbrella Entertainment. Umbrella Entertainment sent me four collector's edition box sets this month. All actionoriented, all of them real bangers. I've watched of the um well, let me see. Three and one, four, five. Of the half dozen movies I've sent, I've watched four of them.

[00:00:25]I've watched four of the six movies and the two that I haven't watched are in one box set. So, I watched one out of that box set and I watched the other three box sets movies. They're all actionoriented. They're all really bangers and there isn't one of them I didn't enjoy out of the four that I've watched so far. So, I'll get start with the one that brought to the public's attention. Parkour jumping around brutalist architecture in an athletic way. And it's a movie called District B13, otherwise known as District 13. And we also have the sequel District B13 Ultimatum, which came out in 2009. The original came out 2004. The story is from the first movie. It's 2010, so it's like 6 years in the future from when the movie is made. And Paris has a problem with crime and with people who are not white. So they build a wall around district B13 and it becomes a ghetto.

[00:01:26]It's heavily policed. There's a lot of crime there. Crime gangs basically run the place. And one of the crime gang leaders is a guy called Letto played by David Bell. And David Bell is one of the people who invented parkour along with people like Sebastian Farn. They started the sport out. Incredibly athletic guy, very charismatic as well. and he his letterto is trying to keep the high-rise building he lives in fairly clean. He doesn't want drugs in there. He doesn't want things to be as nasty as they are in other parts of the district. Letter steals 20 kg of heroin from Taha, one of the other gang leaders who runs a big drug operation. He's militarized to hell back. He is a tough guy. and Letto gets the 20 kilos of heroin, pours it into a bathtub and runs it down the sink. This does not end well. Taha kidnaps Leto's sister, and Leto ends up being in jail after some rafifi between the two gangs.

[00:02:29]Things go wrong. 8 months later, Taha gets hold of a nuclear weapon of a very specific sort that the French government was trying to smuggle into. It's a very clean bomb. It only destroys within a certain limited area, but it totally obliterates anything in that area. And the secret government plan is for that bomb to go off there and clean the district out for them. Not everybody in the government's on board with this.

[00:02:53]There's a secret cartel within the government that wants to put a very small nuke into the district and clear it out, solve the government's problems for it. along with a very athletic cop called Tomaso. Letto is recruited out of jail to go in there and steal the bomb back before it goes off within 24 hours.

[00:03:15]So, you got a ticking clock. You got two guys that are very good at parkour. You got him going up against a lot of criminal gangs that are armed to the teeth. And that's the story of the movie. There is so much to love about this film. was written by Pierre Morurell and he recruited David Bell to help him with the action scenes. They actually went to locations not filmed in Paris but actually filmed in Romania where there's a lot of Soviet era brutalist architecture around a lot of high-rise buildings, a lot of high-rise apartment buildings. And they mapped out the action sequences based on what they found at these locations. And it is a banger. It is incredibly well acted.

[00:03:57]It's incredibly powerful. There's gun scenes. There's parkour scenes. There's fight scenes of all kinds. Meanwhile, they're trying to stop this bomb from going off. It does feel a little bit like The Raid, the IO's movie. It feels a lot like John Wick and it would have been one of the precursors for John Wick. I love the fact that Umbrella have put this one out. The films are beautifully restored. The action sequences are fantastic. The extras are good and um I had a great time re-watching this one. We have all the usual inclusions. I will show I'll show you all the extras for both movies and you can freeze frame on that because I'm not going to just recite them to you.

[00:04:37]There is the card, the mandatory removable card with all the extras on it. Now, there's a 48 page book of behind the scenes material and essays by Jennifer Reer and Leon Marvel. Custom illustrated rigid case by Rivey Creative. Custom illustration slip case by Rivaly Creative. And I will first show you the hard case. There's one side of it. Beautifully dynamic artwork. And I love that umbrella uh commissioning art for these releases. There's the back. There's the edge, which of course are held upside down.

[00:05:17]Then we have the slipcase artwork, which is good. and the back slipcase artwork.

[00:05:22]We do get art cards just showing the artistry of these parkour performers.

[00:05:30]There's David Bell.

[00:05:34]There's the gang.

[00:05:37]There's one of the ladies of the gangs.

[00:05:44]There's one of the henchmen called K2.

[00:05:46]Really big guy with a gun. David Bell again, Leto with Taha, the gang leader.

[00:05:57]And there's Leto and Tomaso, the cop.

[00:06:02]And of course, we have discs as well.

[00:06:05]We have the reversible cover there with and without the censorship Brady.

[00:06:14]This one says strong violence, drug use, and coarse language. So, it's basically a good party. Haven't watched the second movie yet. There's seven movies I've got here because I've got the second movie on this one as well. There's the Blu-ray of the first movie. There's the Blu-ray of the second movie. And as always with Umbrella Collector's Editions, we get a double-sided poster.

[00:06:34]Got that one, which I like, but I think I like that one better.

[00:06:43]You had a great time with this. Just watching the athleticism and the um the way they manipulate the physics of gravity to do parkour is just mindblowingly good. The music's all very kind of industrial metal kind of music.

[00:07:01]I'm not an expert on this stuff, but the films are just as dynamic as you can get without using computerenerated effects.

[00:07:12]Yes, the John Wick movies do that. They use computerenerated effects, but these ones don't. And we also have District 13, Run, Rebel, Repeat.

[00:07:24]The 48 page booklet, More Mayhem, Civ Play by Jennifer Reader.

[00:07:30]So we get that as an essay. There's one of the fight scenes. Just using locations and using what they find in locations really gives a a reality to these films that they wouldn't have otherwise. Suburban Jungles times 2 by Leon Marvel.

[00:07:45]Another essay.

[00:07:48]Great stuff. If you like the John Wick movies, you're going to definitely like the District 13, otherwise known as District B13 films. They are as fullon as it gets. And there's some really interesting use of speed ramping in the at the start of the first movie to show you the locations, give you the sense of the district, the buildings in the district, and how people live within those buildings.

[00:08:16]It's done very well. It would have been done better now because I would have had a lot more stabilized gimbals. The speed ramping would have been easier to do.

[00:08:23]filming things at 240 frames a second, then slowing them down would have been a lot simpler than it was in 2004. But given the technology of the time available, it does pretty bloody good.

[00:08:35]Second movie I got is a French thriller.

[00:08:37]We'll stick with the French ones for this little bit of it. It's a 2006 French thriller uh directed by Giam Kane starring Francois Kuz and it's called Tell No One. And this has a killer setup literally. In the movie, France Clus plays a guy called Alexandre who's a pediatrician. He's very much in love with his wife. She's in love with him.

[00:09:02]They were childhood sweethearts. And they go out to a lake where they spend their childhoods together and have a little asignation together. And then his wife is kidnapped and killed by a serial killer who is caught and jailed. 8 years later, things start happening again.

[00:09:19]First off, on the site where his wife was found, two men are found buried in the ground who were buried a number of years before around the time his wife died. And one of them has his wife's safety deposit box key in his pocket and some photos of her being beaten taken before she died. Alexandra then gets an email with a link in it and the link is to one of those world webcams where there are webcams around the world and they show different sites in different cities and he clinks the link right at the time requested and his wife is in front of the webcam alive 8 years after she died. She's been buried. He's dealing with the aftermath of that, but he sees her alive now because these two men have been found with her safety deposit box key in their pocket. The case of his wife's death is reopened by the police and he is a very strong suspect and evidence builds up that he actually killed her. And so he goes on the run.

[00:10:28]He calls in some favors from a gang leader he helped as a pediatrician a number of years before. and he goes on a run in Paris while trying to find out first off who's trying to set him up for the murders and secondly whether his wife is indeed alive or not.

[00:10:45]This is an incredible thriller and all of the pieces fit together perfectly.

[00:10:50]There's no plot holes that I can see in this movie. It's shot wonderfully well.

[00:10:55]It's almost a meditation on grief and on the secrets the rich people have. And there is a secret that a rich person has which is integral to the plot. Crazily good thriller. The action sequences are are terrific. Not to the level of District B13, but they're very much in a different film. Uh France Clusette is fantastic playing Alexandra.

[00:11:21]We have Kristen Scott Thomas playing his sister-in-law. Just an amazingly good film and it keeps you guessing right until the end. Can't recommend this highly enough. There is a standard edition as well. So if you want to have a really good film to watch, you can't go past this. Let's do the card first.

[00:11:40]There um the custom illustration rig the custom illustration rigid cases by Tony Stellar. There are the extras and there's a really good essay about the footage not used in the film that was shot for the film which tells more of the story but takes away from the um flow of the movie had it been included in the original film. So there it is there. I try to freeze on that again. We get a 48 page booklet. We get the posters as well and we get the art cards. Here are the art cards. There is France Glozette.

[00:12:20]There he is there with Christen Scott Thomas as his sister-in-law in the background.

[00:12:29]Here's the director Giam Ka filming the movie. And Kane actually has a role in the film playing probably the most evil person in the movie. It's not a large role, but he's there.

[00:12:44]There is Alexandra and the gang leader who helps him.

[00:12:49]Here's some more filming of the movie.

[00:12:52]And there's Alexandra on the run again.

[00:12:55]I was so impressed with this film. It just worked for me. The plot and the mystery held together. There's a wonderful grace note at the end of the film. It just lands incredibly well.

[00:13:08]Here's the booklet. Tell no one behind the scenes essays and art.

[00:13:12]I like the artwork on this, too. With telling no one, the French are always up to something. This is an essay by Maria Lewis.

[00:13:25]Mystery of love on Guam Kane's Tell No One by Isaac Philber. Another essay.

[00:13:34]There's a slip case with some really good artwork in it. Eight years ago, Alex's wife was murdered. today she emailed him.

[00:13:42]That's a really nice hook for a film, too, by the way. Inside we get different artwork on the cover. It's a reversible again. Same as there as on the other side. And there's the disc itself.

[00:13:55]And we get the reversible poster with that artwork on one side, which is pretty bloody good, and that one on the other side, which is pretty bloody good as well.

[00:14:08]I'm really impressed with this film. It wasn't I had no expectations. I knew nothing about it apart from that little tag on the back of the disc, but it hooked me and it held me and I really appreciated that. Just a terrific thriller and you got to check it out. It um would have slipped under the radar for a lot of angophone markets. It wouldn't have been on your major English language streaming services or anything like that as far as I can ascertain, but totally worth it. Worth checking out, worth having a copy of. There are thrillers along slightly similar lines which are done in English language markets, but they're not done as well as this one. And have a look at that artwork on the hard case as well.

[00:14:56]Terrific stuff. This one's highly recommended by me. Then we go over to Hong Kong in 2002 for a strangely feminist but also male gazy action film, Naked Weapon.

[00:15:12]Built to kill, fighting to live.

[00:15:17]There is the Is that the right way around? Yeah, it is. There's the edge.

[00:15:22]This one is a story of basically assassins.

[00:15:27]There are two young women who are kidnapped as young teenagers by a woman called Madame M. She kidnaps 40 girls from around the world and trains them for six or eight years on an island to be assassins. She trains them in fighting. She trains them in how to endure suffering. She trains them in weapons and makeup and how to look sexy and how to uh tell which one's what.

[00:15:55]basically to be able to be infiltrated into the world of people that and of course the people are mostly men who have been targeted for assassination. We see the training process for these girls and two of them played by Maggie Q and Anna uh kind of the final girls of the training process. They're sent out to be assassins. They're going to be assassins for 5 years for Madame M and then they're free. Meanwhile, a CIA officer played by Daniel Woo is on the trail of Madame M's assassins, and he finds one of them, Charlotte, played by Maggie Q, and they kind of sort of fall in love.

[00:16:37]This one's full of Hong Kong wirework action kung fu stuff. It's got an incredible meat cute, which also has some really weird product placement because the meat cute takes place in a refrigerator van full of Magnum ice creams. Action sequences are great.

[00:16:55]There are some very brutal scenes in the movie as well. It doesn't hold back from the brutality. It's got a little bit of the feel of La Fem Nikita, but on a larger scale. It's got some great locations in the Philippines and Hong Kong, and it's kind of like a gender flip John Wick with a male gays involved. There is a really great video essay on this one, by the way, by Alexander Helen Nicholas, which you've got to check out as well. This one did get a physical release at the time. I think it was on both DVD and VHS because it was at that time when VHS was flipping over to DVD. The rigid case artworks by Melbs. So, we've got that on the rigid case and that and also the um soft the slip cover artwork is by Melbs.

[00:17:39]Here are all the special features of which there are a lot, but I'd especially suggest that you check out Alexander Helen Nicholas's video essay on this one. Here's your slip case.

[00:17:53]Inside we got the disc. I'll show you the um I'll show you the booklet and the art cards in a moment. There's the original artwork as I remember it from when it first came out.

[00:18:05]There's the back of it. It says medium level violence adult themes. I'd say there's a little bit more to it than that, but that's what it is. Reversible slip cover. Of course, as always, we also get the reversible poster with Melbour's artwork on it. That one on one side, that one on the other.

[00:18:30]Now to the eye cards. There is the mother of Charlotte, one of the assassins who was kidnapped as a child.

[00:18:37]There are the assassins training.

[00:18:40]There's Maggie Hugh as Charlotte.

[00:18:45]There are the girls at the last part of the train.

[00:18:51]The training process has a lot in common with Kenji Fukasaku's Battle Royale in some ways. It's got very much that kind of anybody could die vibe about it.

[00:19:04]Here's Maggie Q. And there are the female assassins again. We also have the booklet naked web and behind the scenes essays and art.

[00:19:15]There's a synopsis there.

[00:19:18]Breaking the China doll sexuality and body autonomy in naked weapon by Michelle Kisner. So there's a good essay there about the autonomy of the characters which is one of the important themes running through the film. Woo, Naked Weapons, and Chinese ghost stories, the cinema of Su Tongqing, who was the director of the film by David Michael Brown. So, there's an essay about the director's filmography and the themes involved. And there's posters and artwork there.

[00:19:48]Yeah, this one's very full on. It's at that um turn of the century thing when things were changing a lot in Hong Kong after the hand over to the Chinese government and the Hong Kong film industry took a dip and was looking for new ways to have financially successful films and this one was very much played to apart from anything else the Matrix and the Matrix audience there's a little bit of the DNA of the Matrix in this film in a very odd way. There's a really nice climactic battle between Charlotte and the big bad who only comes in in the last fifth of the film. He's not a part of the film up until then. Hong Kong action film post 1990 was it 1996 1998 when the Chinese took over Hong Kong again but it's post that very fullon as I said very male gazy but there are some moments of extreme brutality in this film as well. It's probably the one in this group box set that I like least, but I still like it. Then we get to a free film set. Shadow Wars: The Elusive Kini Fukasaku Collection. Cops and Thugs Cross the Rubicon Hakaro Proxy War.

[00:21:00]Three uh three Yakuza movies. They were filmed in the 1970s by Ki Fukasaku, who is the guy who made Battle Royale. Right at the end of his career, he peaked with Battle Royale. He'd been making movies for tolli since the 1960s.

[00:21:18]Then around 2000, he made battle royale and just blew everybody's mind. We have to talk about Yakuza movies in the 60s and 70s. In the 60s in particular, there was a lot of romanticization of the Yakuza and Yakaza movies. They were all made very stylish and slick and attractive. People like Sajun Suzuki with Tokyo Drifter and his other Yakaza films romanticized and made the Yakaza cool. In the 1970s, after having a career of about 15 years with Tolli, Kenji Fukaku took a different approach.

[00:21:54]He decided what he was going to do is fictionalize some things happened in real life with the Yakaza about 10 years before. taking the stories of real life turf wars between Yakaza clans, turf wars between the police and the Yakaza, police corruption, political corruption, all that kind of stuff by and the first one which is the one I watched, cops and thugs is set in a fictionalized West Japan city where there's a turf war between two clans and the cops who are kind of corrupt each in a different way.

[00:22:29]According to the Middle East, two turf wars, a new police chief comes in who's very cleanced and very moral. A corrupt cop has to deal with the different agendas. This one is incredible. It's got a terrific waka waka chika soundtrack from the 1970s and it's at my sweet spot. I like shower era Japan and having a movie made in the 70s but set in 1963 where all everybody's smoking cigarettes. There are nightclubs. The weird thing is too, which is kind of a very transgressive thing, women in the world of the Yakaza clans are currency.

[00:23:06]They are used to pay debts. They are used as bribes for people. And there are a lot of there's a lot of nudity in it.

[00:23:13]There's also a lot of violence in it and women are seen as currency in this world. It's an incredible film and it's not like any other Japanese gangster film I have seen before because it tries to stay very grounded and tries to stay realistic and doesn't try to make the world of the Yakaza attractive at all.

[00:23:32]It's a world of betrayal. It's a world where Yakaza clans when the police need to pin a crime on somebody, the clan will find one of their henchmen, pay him off, get him to do the 3 years or so for the crime, even if you had nothing to do with it. There's a lot of that kind of stuff that makes it very unattractive.

[00:23:51]The action scenes are fantastic. The character scenes are fantastic. All the acting feels heightened but realistic.

[00:23:58]Incredible film. I'll show you the extras when I've talked about the three movies. Cops and Thugs was the one I watched and it blew my tiny little brain. Inside, we don't get the reversible cover on this one. We get the disc. We get a scene from the movie. We do get a reversible poster, which is great cuz it's the original Japanese poster.

[00:24:22]This one is for this, which movie is it for? It's for one of the other two films. I can't read Japanese, but you got that as one of the posters. And you got this one from Cops and Thugs showing the corrupt cop who is at the center of this film.

[00:24:39]Love Japanese movie posters of a certain era. They're just the art design is very different in in Japanese movie posters.

[00:24:46]Before I show you the other two films, I will show you the art. By the way, the original case is by Colin Murdoch and The Richard Case has got really great mural kind of montage of the different themes in the film.

[00:25:02]Nicely done there. Here are all of the extras for the three films. Cops Versus Thugs, Cross Rubicon, and Hokaru Proxy Wall. There they are. There films Crossy Run.

[00:25:20]It says, "Once you cross the line, there's no going back. In a city where the line between law and crime is dissolved, one cop finds himself too deep to ever climb out." Inside we've got the disc and some artwork.

[00:25:32]And we've got the second of the two posters in this three movie box set.

[00:25:37]I do like that one.

[00:25:42]And you got that one as well.

[00:25:46]Japanese movie posters are just the best. We do have um archival behind the scenes essays and art in the 48 page booklet. Without honor and humanity, the gangster films of Kenji Fukasaku by David Michael Brown. So, we've got an essay about Kji Fukasaku's gangster films. And they do feel grounded.

[00:26:06]There's a kind of grittiness to them. I was kind of comparing this. This is like 1973 or 75 somewhere around then. Compare it to [ __ ] like Dirty Harry with the simplistic wish fulfillment right-wing Harry Callahan vigilante.

[00:26:22]It's a kitty movie compared to this stuff. This stuff has a complexity to it, a toughness to it that makes Dirty Harry seem like Officer Dibble in Copcat. Three films of Kenji Fukasaga by Mark Schill. No Honor Among Thieves, the gangster films of Kenji Fukasaka by Brandon Strusnik.

[00:26:44]So we got three essays in this one. And then we get the third film, Hakar Rico Proxy War.

[00:26:53]It says, "Every alliance is a trap.

[00:26:55]Every victory is borrowed. In Japan's frozen north, loyalty means nothing and survival is everything." So, this one's set in northern Japan up in Hokkaido by the look of it.

[00:27:09]We do get the art cards.

[00:27:16]Bit of action there. It's got to be the one for Hokurigu Proxy walk.

[00:27:29]Here's with the mafia guy and the corrupt cop from Cops versus Thugs.

[00:27:37]And there's the corrupt cop as well.

[00:27:40]Just really full on. And Kimchi Fukasaku, who started out doing action films with Sunonny Chiba for Tollway, really found his voice and his vision with these gangster films. They're totally different than any crime movies you'll see elsewhere. They're tougher.

[00:27:58]They're more grounded. All shot on location. And the locations are fantastically well chosen. And you do get the feel that it is the 1960s, particularly in cops versus thugs, because the cars are all 1960s cars. The people are dressed that way. It's just um a world that we don't know about and a world that most of us have never seen and will never see. I mean, I have seen Yakuza guys when we were traveling to Japan in 2019. We did hang around Kabuki Cho and every morning at the intersections of the little streets in Kabuki Cho there's one guy in a suit standing there watching everything that's going on and he's a Yakuza guy making sure that deliveries are made to the nightclubs that everything's going smoothly and each intersection had one of those guys in the morning just watching everything. Really wild to see that and for me it made these movies feel even more realistic. So, there we are. We've got all four of them there. A little bit crooked, but all four of them. Got all four of them there. Let's see if we can get a thumbnail out of this.

[00:29:08]Just all of them amazing films. Yeah, Naked Weapons probably the weakest for me, but the District 13 movies, the Tell No One, and the Gini Fukasaga stuff. All of it's worth your time and effort. It's just heightened action films at a level.

[00:29:24]At the times these films were made, there wasn't anything coming out of Hollywood or England that quite matched the imagination and dynamism and the plotting of these films. Really terrific stuff. And thank you again to Umbrella Entertainment for sending them over for me to review. Had a great time. My internet was down for about 15 hours yesterday and this morning. And so I had time to sit back and watch the films.

[00:29:49]And it was a good way to spend the time without the internet, believe me. So that's what I got for you this time around. Fantastic box sets. There are standard editions of everything but the KJI Fukasaku set. So you can get them and from shop umbrella ant.com.au and I'll post a link in the description as well. Next up we got science fiction Saturday and got some cool stuff for that. And then we have the live stream on Monday and the fortnightly live stream is going to be happening and it will be more than a little groovy. And I've got some things to say about a number of films. Some of which I like, some of which I do not. So until then, watch some good movies, watch some bad movies. Check this one out. You're going to like it. And I'll catch you next time.