November 02, 2003
November 2, 2003

Happy November from Los Angeles, where Halloween rainstorms and cold weather are allowing a lot of firefighters to get some sleep. Now the reviews can start rolling out ... besides the ones below, I hope to have a couple of the terrific new Humphrey Bogart pictures covered by street date.

Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films is something I never expected to see, a docu on the making of those gore movies about car crashes shown to us high school kids back when the authorities sought to scare us into 'appropriate behaviors.' Bret Wood's docu is mostly on the mark, and a second disc oozes with three complete films - including the notorious Signal 30 - and clips from a dozen more. Yikes!

MGM pulls out the stops for a lavish Special Edition of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a film Savant grudgingly admits is some kind of a children's classic, even though it drives him up the wall.

Fox's A Christmas Wish really irks Savant. It's a remarketed, retitled, colorized bit of subterfuge. Hidden behind the glitzy packaging and extras that proclaim it a rediscovered Christmas classic, is a minor but underachieving Jimmy Durante movie from 1949 called The Great Rupert, with its title altered and its credits reshuffled to favor a passel of new 'producers'. "Hi Kids! Let's learn about the word, SCAM!"

Beautifully transferred is Paramount's Dragonslayer, the handsome return of giant stop-motion monsters to the screen courtesy of ILM's animator Phil Tippett. Fans of Lord of the Rings will enjoy this fairly serious tale of old magic being replaced by new religions, and a rigged lottery to provide virgin sacrifices to the horrible Verminthrax Pejorative (great name!).

Thanks again for all the letters, which is the most fun of running this column. I think I'm going to have to spring for a real AV audio system, after THE INDIANA JONES COLLECTION proved to be another of those discs where the center channel doesn't play on my 65" Mitsubishi rear projection set. There were others before, but the only one I really remember was GREASE, and my initial review foolishly blamed the disc! I think I have it all hooked up correctly, and can't determine if the problem is my player or the TV ... Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

Posted by DVD Savant at November 02, 2003 10:08 AM