D.K. Holm's DVD Talk DVD Reviews

X2: X-Men United

Thu, 01 May 2003 17:00:45 UTC

Recommended

[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers]

X2 Marks the Spot

X2 is bigger, better, and more emotional than its predecessor, X-Men.

That is, if you liked X-Men.

Released in 2000, X-Men was quite a hit despite what the skeptics thought. It made $157 million dollars, was released twice on DVD, and heralded the rebirth of Marvel comic books as a vital source for popular movies, followed by Spider-Man and Daredevil, the soon to be released Hunk, and now X2.

And like its sequel, X-Men was a reasonably accurate account of the source comics. Though the films blend X-Men myths from all eras of the comic book's history, this seems to be acceptable to purists because within that largo the writers have respected the integrity of the comic's story arcs...Read the entire review

Chopper Chicks in Zombietown

Mon, 21 Apr 2003 07:53:49 UTC

Recommended

An Interview with Dan Hoskins on CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIETOWN

It has a joke title that is an accurate summary of the story. It's a blend of about seven genres, most prominently the zombie film and the motorcycle movie, all the way back to The Wild Ones. And it is surprisingly effective despite a small budget, with a great cast of then newcomers (Billy Bob Thornton among them) and old hands (like Don Calfa). It has a sardonic wit that borders on but pulls back from grossness.

It's Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, and now it's out on DVD, from Troma, with several extras and an audio commentary track by writer and director Dan Hoskins.

Chopper Chicks in Zombietown is the amusing tale o...Read the entire review

Unhinged

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 20:15:55 UTC

Rent It

The Movie:

A minor, very minor footnote in the slasher genre, Unhinged finds renewed life, so to speak, via DVD release from IndieDVD.

It offers a simple, derivative tale. Three college girls head off for a rock festival (though that fact is hardly made clear). During their chatty trip, they drive off the road for some reason and when they wake up find they are guests in a creepy house (Portland, Oregon's tourist attraction the Pittock Mansion). The household is overseen by an angry woman in a wheelchair and her daughter Marion (J. E. Penner). When the three (only three) girls start vanishing, there is a small sum of suspects to confound the viewer: the wheelchair bound matriarch, a mustachioed gardener, and?that's it. Slowly the girls are picked off one by one, and in the film's final scene, the remaining girl confronts evil, learning the ghast...Read the entire review

The Story of O

Tue, 31 Dec 2002 01:35:42 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:
A beautiful nude brunette, leather cuffs around her wrists, is secured in an elaborately furnished chamber, her arms suspended over her head and arching her torso and straining her upper arms. Another woman, with blonde hair, is setting to her with a thin flexible bamboo cane. The fury on the blonde's face and the writhing and screaming of the brunette indicate the severity of the blows and snaps on the pale flesh of the "victim's" body.

If the idea of this scenario doesn't turn you on, then you will have no interest in The Story of O.

O's story began as a novel published in France in 1954. Histoire d'O (technically Story of O) eventually came out from Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, which had also birthed the debut of The Ginger Man and Lolita. Credited to the pseudonymous Pauline Réage, the book tel...Read the entire review

Scarlet Diva

Sun, 29 Dec 2002 11:49:47 UTC

Highly Recommended

The Movie:

Scarlet Diva begins with a video introduction by director, writer, and star Asia Argento (daughter of giallo specialist Dario Argento), in which she says that the film "saved my life." Well, after a statement like that, the viewer is going to be very interested in what follows.

But Scarlet Diva is going to defy expectations.

Like most people, I first heard about Scarlet Diva in a sidebar to a profile of Asia (pronounced "AH-zhe-ah") published to coincide with the release of xXx. The sidebar made the film sound hot, showing Argento leaning over a hog-tied blonde as if to indicate that the sexually rapacious character she plays has a submissive lesbian love slave on the side.

Scarlet Diva was released in May 2000, and went on to win an award at a New York City film festival. But much has ...Read the entire review

Spetters

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 00:58:29 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

Paul Verhoeven is clearly one of modern cinema's most controversial directors. A kind of high class Renny Harlin, or a Dutch version of Oliver Stone, Verhoeven likes to mix politics and violence, and has a knack for picking projects that are apt to outrage whole segments of the populace. Long before his lesbo action film Basic Instinct and the widely ridiculed Showgirls (for which many viewers, including this one, have a secret affection), Verhoeven was in trouble for, among other things, Spetters, his tale of life among Holland's motorcycle set, which was protested by various special interest groups in his homeland. The fallout from this film, and his later The Fourth Man, encouraged his eventual decision to vacate Holland for Hollywood, where he started off making RoboCop.

Spetters contrasts the li...Read the entire review

Intervista

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 09:09:57 UTC

Rent It

The Movie:

Intervista is meant to be some kind of celebration of Italy's Cinecita but comes across as a typically chaotic and redundant late film by Federico Fellini.

The "plot" of this plotless film is that Fellini has returned to Cinecita to make a film based on Kafka's America, and is interviewed by a Japanese television crew. While filming, a younger version of Fellini wanders the lot and encounters various filmmakers. Later, Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, late of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, reunite to reminisce. Many of the "cast" members are actually members of Fellini's actual crew of casting directors and gaffers. Fellini and Mastroianni appear only briefly in the film.

You really have to like Fellini to like this film, and apparently Martin Scorsese does, as he participated in the revived presentation of...Read the entire review

The Best Arbuckle Keaton Collection

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 08:36:55 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

Buster Keaton is the real star of this collection of films directed by and staring silent comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Seeing them is like watching Woody Allen's Bananas for that brief flash of Sylvester Stallone. However, Keaton played a more significant role in Arbuckle's shorts. They rant into each other on the streets of Manhattan one day and Arbuckle invited Keaton, who was between stage appearances, down to his set, thus changing the course of Keaton's life (later films were shot in Hollywood).

Image Entertainment gathers 12 of the 15 films they made together in The Best Arbuckle/Keaton Collection. The discs are a good addition to anyone's Keaton collection, but the films themselves leave something to be desired, and certain packaging decisions will irritate connoisseurs. Also, one has to have an appetite for physica...Read the entire review

Fingers

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 07:17:32 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

James Toback is one of the "crazy" directors. Like Abel Ferrara or Oliver Stone, the subject matter of his films is going to be unpredictable, the film's inner workings are often going to test sense, and you are going to hear wild stories from the set. I don't know, maybe all directors are nuts, maybe they have to be to do the job, but only a select few though few have achieved the depths of Tony Kaye.

Toback was a Harvard graduate, a best friend of Jim Brown (about whom he wrote a book), and a number of other things before he turned to writing screenplays. His first The Gambler seemed to "make" him, and he ended up shooting his original screenplay, Fingers in 1978 for the perfume company Brut, which wanted to go into the film biz.

Fingers recounts a few days in the life of James or Jimmy Angellelli (Harvey Keitel...Read the entire review

Green Dragon

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:09:57 UTC

Rent It

The Movie:

Green Dragon suffers from its best intentions. Director and writer Timothy Linh Bui, in this quasi-autobiographical story, wants to chronicle an actual event in United States and Vietnamese history—the housing of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon in camps in the States before dispersal throughout the nation—but his hesitation against deviating from the reality of the situation has left him with a story denuded of drama.

The narrative blends a handful of stories in a unity of time and place. The time is 1975 and the place is a Marine run tent city where broken families come to regroup and fan out. The main character is Tai (Don Duong), a calm, philosophical man who is made an assistant to the camp commander, Gunnery Sergeant Jim Lance (Patrick Swayze). Tai develops feelings for Thuy Hoa (Hiep Thi...Read the entire review

The Producers

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 23:47:10 UTC

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Movie:

The Producers is one of the funniest American comedies ever made.

The film appears as number 11 on the AFI list of all time best comedies, but it is arguably funnier than most of its predecessors, including M*A*S*H, The Graduate, and another Mel Brooks film on the list, Blazing Saddles. Surely it is as funny as most Billy Wilder comedies, or most Chaplin and Keaton shorts, or Groundhog Day. The film has the unusual honor of being one of the few American comedies transferred to the American stage as a musical. Only a handful of Billy Wilder comedies share this honor. And Brooks won an Oscar for best original screenplay, again unusual for a comedy.

Long before the Farrelly Brothers, even before the Zucker brothers, Mel Brooks was the first to introduce gross vulgarity into the movies. It's hard to tell...Read the entire review

The Company of Wolves

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 21:35:12 UTC

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Movie:

The Company of Wolves is one of the oddest yet most interesting films in the werewolf genre. A blend of fairy tale with Howling-American Werewolf-style make-up achievements, it's really a chick flick, but if Anne Rice had picked this genre as her next subject.

In fact a woman did write The Company of Wolves. A British highbrow fantasist, the late Angela Carter wrote the source story and co-wrote the screenplay with director Neil Jordan. A proponent of what she called the Sadeian Woman, Carter is a cult figure among horror readers, especially after the release of this film in 1984, which finally enjoys DVD release via Hen's Tooth (if the IMDBPro is any guide, this is its first DVD release in region 1, and there has been no laser disc).

The Company of Wolves is probably something of a puzzle if ...Read the entire review

The Mechanic

Sat, 16 Nov 2002 20:05:15 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

There's a great cult film inside The Mechanic but it needed a great director to get out. Unfortunately, what it got was Michael Winner. Usually he is a mundane movie helmer with no distinguishing visual characteristics except a penchant for kinky sex. Action star Charles Bronson had formed some kind of Satanic pack with the British Winner in the '70s and The Mechanic, their second film, remains one of the more interesting of their collaborations. After this, they did Death Wish, and everything went to hell.

Bronson is Arthur Bishop, hitman for a vague Point Blank-style "commission" of anonymous gangsters. He's one of those sophisticated killers who works alone and works slowly, studying pix of his victim and the victim's environment as drinks wine from a snifter and listens to classical music.

Bishop has a ...Read the entire review

Marquis de Sade's Justine

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 12:02:39 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

Of all the film maudit directors—Herschell Gordon Lewis, Fred Olen Ray, Ed Wood among them—none is more maudit than Jesse Franco. A Spanish director now in his feisty 70s, Franco has made an estimated 140 films under an orgy of pseudonyms. He has one of the most complex and confusing filmographies in cinema history. Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog, for whom Franco is something of a hero, has been mining the gravel quarry of Franco's career for years, culminating in the indispensable 1992 book Obsession: The Films of Jesse Franco (Selbstverlag Frank Trebbin, 255 pages, ISBN 3 929234 05 X), but at least one reader has the distinct feeling that, thorough as the book is, the story still isn't fully told.

The relatively new DVD distributor Blue Underground has made a cunning choice from Franco's oeuvre in selecting ...Read the entire review

Rumpole of the Bailey

Thu, 07 Nov 2002 05:00:56 UTC

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Movie:

Horace Rumpole is the best series detective character since Sherlock Holmes.

In fact, I would argue that the stories featuring Horace Rumpole, barrister in the courts of the Old Bailey, are better than those featuring Holmes, if for no other reason than that Rumpole-creator John Mortimer truly likes his hero and the numerous recurrent subsidiary characters surrounding him much more than the contentious Doyle liked Holmes and his villains. Doyle seemed to view Holmes as an interfering irritant as he sped the globe looking for validation of his views on the afterlife. Mortimer, in the course of 11 original books (the most recent, Rumpole Rests His Case, came out in November 2002) and some 60 short stories (and one novel) featuring the irascible barrister, has made Rumpole's world internally consistent and filled it with a host of endear...Read the entire review

The Big Picture

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 10:55:41 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

The premise of The Big Picture is simple and was somewhat famous at the time, back in the days of "high concept," though the film's sleek idea sort of got lost in the resulting picture. An aspiring filmmaker named Nick Chapman (Kevin Bacon), who has just made a music video for a neophyte group, doesn't answer his phone for a day and suddenly his inaccessibility makes him hot, with lunching execs claiming they have seen his earlier films, of which there are none. The interest in him builds, and his fey, blow-dried agent (Martin Short) goes nuts trying to find him. At the end of the day, the formerly hubristic and now humbled Chapman is in a position to make the film he has always dreamed of.

One of the problems with The Big Picture is that film that Chapman wants to make. His dream project appears to be a dull tale with awful di...Read the entire review

True Romance Unrated Director's Cut

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 10:21:45 UTC

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Movie:

The most famous scene in True Romance occurs about half-way through. You know the one I mean. It's the scene in which gangster Vincenzo Coccotti (Christopher Walken) is questioning security guard Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper), father of a man Coccotti is looking for. The man, a youth really, is Clarence (Christian Slater), an Elvis-worshiping, kung-fu-movie viewing comic book store clerk, and he has run off with some money and drugs and his new wife, Alabama (Patricia Arquette). In order not to have to reveal under torture what he knows about his son's destination, Clifford contrives to so anger the gangster that Coccotti kills him prematurely.

Warner Home Video, amid a general celebration of the work of Quentin Tarantino, has released a two disc, unrated director's cut of True Romance (replacing one from 1997). The important...Read the entire review

The Long Goodbye

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 09:47:21 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

"He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn't. That was the last I saw of him. I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them."

That's how Raymond Chandler ends his last significant Philip Marlowe novel, The Long Goodbye. It's a moment of defeat. Marlowe has been confronted by the manipulative genius behind the mystery that Marlowe has been pursuing through this, Chandler's longest novel. Marlowe is confronted quietly in his office by Terry Lennox, who up until this moment has been presumed ...Read the entire review

Ossessione

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 03:25:11 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:
Italian directors start out like Rossellini and end up as Visconti. Even Rossellini and Visconti did. Both began in the so-called neo-realist mode and ended up doing lavish historical dramas. In this, they also reflect the lineage of Italian directors to follow. Pasolini, who was also gay, learned a great deal from both ends of Visconti's career, and in turn his disciple, Bernardo Bertolucci, whose films are definitely bi, has also followed suit.

But what is it to say that someone began as a neo-realist? What was, and where was, the "old" realism that Italian films of the war and post-war year's are the "neo" versions of? The plays of Ibsen, perhaps, dating back to the 1800s?

It's perplexing, because there was never really much of a "realist" movement in cinema to begin with. Also, neo-realism is as hard to define as film noir. U...Read the entire review

La Terra Trema

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 03:22:54 UTC

Recommended

Reservoir Dogs: SE

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 03:23:48 UTC

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Movie:

Reservoir Dogs is about interpretation.

The interpretive arts are employed at every single significant point in the narrative, and during most of the "insignificant" ones, too.

The movie begins with a guy explaining the meaning of a song (Madonna's "Like a Virgin"). It ends with a guy realizing that he had failed to interpret reality correctly.

But interpretation as the modus vivendi in the film is established in the opening scene. Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), the organizer of the heist, is obsessed with an old telephone book he found in a coat pocket, going over the names again and again, trying to remember the people, to the irritation of Mr. White. Also there is the anti-tipper (Steve Buscemi's Mr. Pink) who needs to (futilely) explain that his refusal to tip is based on his analysis of a waiter's performance....Read the entire review

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Thu, 03 Oct 2002 19:23:22 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

This is the MGM DVD version of the not-so-long awaited Orion film that Criterion had in its catalog (number 55) until the rights to it lapsed, along with all the other films Criterion had from Orion.

Now that it is here again the film comes across like another one of those quasi-arty American financed films with an all European cast. The film Lightness most resembles is The English Patient, though less commercially successfully— Lightness only made about $10 million compared with the Oscar winning Patient's multimillions. Both films are based on international bestsellers, both films are tales of love set against a backdrop of political turmoil, both films are edited by Walter Murch, and both films star Juiette Binoche.

In The Conversations (Knopf, 339 pages, $35, ISBN 0 375 41386 3), the recent in...Read the entire review

Tabu

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 01:02:34 UTC

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Movie:

There is a lot that could be said about Tabu: A Story of the South Seas. It is one of the last great silent films, made well after the advent of sound, in 1931. It is the product of a weird collaboration between quasi-documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty and German expressionist F. W. Murnau (pronounced "MORE-now"). It is an iconic, fairy tale level story of thwarted love (Bora-Bora youngsters Matahi and Reri, lovers and naifs, who run into conflict with both the edicts of their small culture as uttered by elder Hitu, and the corruptions of white society, a trajectory that ends in a form of exhilarating tragedy), yet has timeless profound resonance. The film won an Oscar for best cinematography, and Murnau died in a controversial car wreck just days before the film's premiere. In fact, it would take a book to say all that can be said about ...Read the entire review

The Sheltering Sky

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 23:57:53 UTC

Rent It

The Movie:

Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the great film directors, but when he stumbles, boy he really falls.

He can do beautiful work as in The Conformist, then later do a confused, embarrassing film like Little Buddha. From work to work, Freudian mish mash alternates with political extremism. Last Tango in Paris is probably the template here. Beautiful passages of heartfelt emotional self-revelation are followed by scenes of abysmal narrative crap; great actors are asked to stretch their talents, but sometimes into embarrassing contortions.

The Sheltering Sky is one of the lesser works. I know it is suppose to be art, but really, com eon. Two unpleasant people in an unforgiving landscape amid people they don't understand, and we are suppose to find them interesting. The Sheltering Sky was filmed in Algeria, ...Read the entire review

The Salton Sea

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 23:18:08 UTC

Highly Recommended

The Movie:

The Salton Sea received a lot of pre-lease hype and enthusiasm, then came out for a week before vanishing into the video stores. In that regard, the film followed the same pattern as The Way of the Gun, another very good, very flawed examination of a violent underground that speaks to a minority of film fans.

When the detailed history of neo-noir, or post-noir or film soleil or film blanc or whatever you want to call it, is finally written, The Salton Sea, like The Way of the Gun, will loom large in that history. Visually stylish, dependably, even iconically, acted, narratively clever, with great, quotable dialogue, both films are premiere examples of their genre and are rather amazing artefacts to come out of contemporary studios.

But that is as much as I want to say about Th...Read the entire review

Crossroads

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 21:39:58 UTC

Highly Recommended

The Movie:
Crossroads was photographed by a friend of mine but I am not biased. This movie looks great. Eric Edwards is one of the best cinematographers in the business (Copland, Kids, To Die For), and the viewer should expect no less than stellar work from him. Director Tamra Davis agrees. At one point in her introduction to deleted scenes she lavishly praises a shot of Britney Spears, seen in a car's rear view mirror. It is a great shot.

One of the things I've learned about cinematographers from seeing Edwards's movies is that they have "themes" just like directorial "auteurs." Robert Richardson loves direct overhead highly contrasting lighting, like a single bulb over a door frame (see Bringing Out the Dead for the most examples). Edwards seems to be attracted to scripts in which important matters are decided on...Read the entire review

Texasville

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 02:02:04 UTC

Highly Recommended

The Movie:

Texasville is not just a sequel to The Last Picture Show, the film that put director Peter Bogdanovich on the cinematic map in 1971. The newer film also represents a sea-change in Bogdanovich's approach to content and style, hinted at in They All Laughed. In fact, Texasville finds director Peter Bogdanovich in a Renoirian mood, after previously embracing the aesthetics of Hitchcock and Ford.

But Texasville wouldn't even exist if Larry McMurtry, who wrote the novel on which The Last Picture Show is based, hadn't himself wrote a sequel. As a novelist McMurtry is addicted to sequels, and Bogdanovich, who has done a few himself over the years, picked up the cudgel. It would be easy to suspect that he was returning to the material that made his career at a time when he seemed to be in trouble, but narrati...Read the entire review

The Sopranos - The Complete Third Season

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 23:51:31 UTC

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Movie:

Let's start with the credit sequence.

It's a relatively simple set of images. Yet it speaks volumes about the world of the show that the credits preface.

It's the world of Tony Soprano, and as A3's "Woke up This Morning" plays in the background we are with Tony in his SUV as he comes out of the Holland Tunnel and into New Jersey. The words "Woke up this morning" coincide with a "coming into the light," emerging from out of the tunnel with its fuzzy view of white tiles and ceiling lights into the industrial sprawl of the Garden State.

Tony is driving. The first bit of him we see is his cigar. He appears to be in the kind of mood that we often see him in during a season—irked about something. As he drives, Tony passes the Statue of Liberty. The Twin Towers appear in his read view mirror (will that image be retained in the fourt...Read the entire review

Don't Look Now

Sun, 08 Sep 2002 13:36:57 UTC

DVD Talk Collector Series

The Movie:

Don't Look Now is great art and great entertainment.

You don't often get both in one package.

On the one hand, Don't Look Now is a complex of recurrent images, ideas, and themes, all intermingled superbly yet seamlessly and rendered with variations. There's the theme of looking (seeing, blindness, avoidance of seeing, "psychic" reading, as well as the idea of "watching over" someone, both poorly or successfully). Then there's the theme of red (a child's red coat and a another person's equally red coat, the red of ink, of blood, and mosaic tiles). There is the theme of scary decay (Venice in disrepair, empty hotels closing for winter, strange and dangerous alleys, a serial killer on the loose). And there is the theme of communication (letters, 'phone calls, psychic communication, not hearing what someone says to yo...Read the entire review

Stakeout

Sat, 07 Sep 2002 10:53:54 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

Usually when someone tells you that a particular movie is a "guilty pleasure," what they really mean is that they like a girl in it. So if I tell you that, for me, Stakeout is a guilty pleasure, you will know immediately that what I really mean is that I have a crush on Madeleine Stowe.

Not that I believe in "guilty pleasures." I happen to like movies, so I don't have to feel "guilty" over the "pleasure" that they give me. I like all kinds of movies, from Thunder Road to really bad Julie Strain action films, all without the least trace of guilt.

To refer to a class of films as "guilty pleasures" is to suggest a cinematic caste system, as if there were a few movies officially designated as morally preferable to most others. In reality, the guilty pleasure is often a film that is more complex, and more alive to the way tha...Read the entire review

Birthday Girl

Mon, 02 Sep 2002 10:02:26 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

There have been so many efforts to establish Nicole Kidman as a sexy starlette—as a femme fatale—of late that you kind of forget that she has resisted that sort of treatment her whole career. But unlike another British Empire actress, Julia Ormond, whom the studios plucked out of live theater and groomed for stardom thanks to her Julia Roberts smile coupled with a larger chest size, Kidman has successfully resisted that Promotional-Industrial Complex pigeon-holing. She has continually selected odd, counter-intuitive projects, such as The Others, movies that went on to validate her instincts by becoming dynamite at the box-office. And in any case she began life as a teen tomboy star in Australia, with her first American exposure coming in Dead Calm as the tough dedicated wife of a Naval surgeon, a Ripley with a flare gun and...Read the entire review

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - The Crawling Hand

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 06:49:05 UTC

Highly Recommended

The Movie:

"Is there an abridged version of this movie?" Tom Servo asks of The Crawling Hand when the cheap sci-fi film proceeds to get boring again. Crow replies, "If so, burn it." Servo retorts, "Don't burn your abridges behind you." It's a typical excruciatingly bad pun from the team, and it's funny in context. But, guess what. There is an abridged version. They're watching it.

It's no secret that Mystery Science Theater 3000 abridges the already short, cheap drive-in fodder it victimizes. Otherwise, how could comedy, television commercials, and the film itself all fit into the two-hour format. One of the pluses of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on disc is that there's room for the original film on the other side, if anyone can take such a film seriously after the gang is done with it. It also lets amateurs try to mim...Read the entire review

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - The Hellcats

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 02:23:09 UTC

Highly Recommended

The Movie:

I first watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the early '90s when I was home from work with the flu. At that stage of its broadcast career it appeared on the Comedy Channel about four times a day, so I got a crash course in the show. I then instantly called all my friends and told them about the hilarious satire show that I had just discovered, little knowing that the cognoscenti were already deeply versed in the show's lingo, tricks, procedures, and history. I did make some converts, but among older viewers as out of it as I was.

But it wasn't as if I had never heard of the program. I had frequently flipped past it, and though the screen looked cute with the silhouettes on the bottom of the screen, but I had a reaction that I have found in many others since then: Why not just show the bad movie, who needs the commentary track? I sa...Read the entire review

The Fog

Sun, 25 Aug 2002 06:25:40 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:
John Carpenter followed up his surprise success on Halloween with this modest horror film in 1980.

It's not the worst Carpenter film ever made, but it isn't one of his highest achievements. It begins with a Poe quote, "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" which frankly doesn't seem to have anything to do with the subsequent film. But it is a Poe quote and links the film with the Corman Poes of the '60s, and with Carpenter's own affection for horror writers like Poe and Lovecraft.

It's Antonio Bay, California, and it's the weekend of a 100th anniversary celebration of the town's founding. It's also the 100th anniversary of a time when the citizens of the city, all crooks, misled gold-bearing ships to the rocky shore where Antonionians robbed and killed the hapless seafarers. One of the ships was the Elizabeth D...Read the entire review

The Men Who Killed Kennedy

Sun, 25 Aug 2002 01:25:18 UTC

Recommended

The Movie:

A Nightmare on Elm Street

A friend of mine just returned from a business trip that eventually took him to the southwest. Circumstances took him to Dallas, and he found himself driving through the city one day when he suddenly realized that the land just on the other side of a railway trestle he was driving toward was Dealey Plaza. He pulled on the steering wheel and parked. Being as much a JFK assassination buff as I am, he had to see the place in person.

Phillip got out of the car and walked around. His first reaction was, "How small this place is!" Dealey Plaza turned out to be about an acre's worth of territory. Talking with a vendor selling his own self-published Kennedy assassination book from a booth in the Plaza, he learned that his reaction to the tinyness of Dealey Plaza is in fact the most common reaction to the siz...Read the entire review