One good, one not

This Blue Underground repackaging of their earlier NTSC 'two-fer' release offers one great movie and one not so great, but with the two at the same price as buying either one separately, it's worth picking them both up.

Grand Slam is a surprisingly enjoyable caper flick, and much more fun than any film with middle-aged men in tight black trousers and Klaus Kinski in a sailor suit has any right to be. I say surprisingly because anything that turns up on the Blue Underground label generally turns out to be a disappointment, but this globe-trotting diversion about a heist in Rio de Janeiro during the carnival looks great and is a much better piece of disposable entertainment than either the Rat Pack or Soderberg's Oceanic efforts. Ennio Morricone's main title is a particularly blatant ripoff of Burt Bacharach and the Tijuana Brass' Casino Royale with il maestro's own special flavoring, but only adds to the fun. Although the only extras are a photo gallery and trailer, the 2.35:1 transfer is for the most part very good, with excellent vivid color.

Revolver aka Blood in the Streets aka In the Name of Love is a disappointingly bland and overlong Sergio Sollima cop thriller with a miscast Oliver Reed complete with bad American accent (despite playing an Italian prison warden!) and Fabio Testi only marginally less wooden and ineffectual than usual caught up in a political assassination and kidnapping. Nothing out of the ordinary with some absurd plotting (a politician faced with death threats walking casually through the Place Vendome just so he can get killed, a ludicrous jailbreak from a prison with only rotten wood over the shower windows), the last reel is fairly good when the politics briefly kicks in and the movie refuses to go for the soft and easy ending, but it's outstayed its welcome by then.

A better extras package, with a featurette with Testi and Sollima plus trailer and stills gallery, although the 1.85:1 transfer is grainy in places.