GeekWeek's Extremely Last Minute Holiday Home Video Buying Guide
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Dec 22 2010, 10:12 AM
It’s Christmas Week 2010. You’ve been too busy playing BLACK OPS for the last six weeks straight to remember that you need to buy presents. Short of making macaroni-and-paper-plate sculptures, what do get for the discerning Geek on your Wish List? Here are the Twelve Days Of Geekmas— Home Video Edition.
1.) MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: VOLUME XIX
Shout! Factory reclaimed the rights to distribute Mystery Science Theater 3000 from Rhino a few years back, and the folks at Shout! have done a bang-up job with not just getting these four-disc box-set out in time, something Rhino was terrible about, but with the value-added extras that cater to the show’s fans. Volume XIX, which contains bad-movie chestnuts like Robot Monster and Bride Of The Monster, along with rarely-seen goofs like Devil Doll (which looks, according to Crow T. Robot, like “Alfalfa E. Neuman”) and the Italian monster mash Devil Fish, delivers the goods. We not only get a lengthy documentary about Ed Wood and the making of Bride Of The Monster (complete with interviews with Ed Wood’s associates and wrestler George “The Animal” Steele, who played Tor Johnson in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood), but interviews with Devil Doll producer Richard Gordon and a retrospective on the surreal ineptitude of Robot Monster— as well as a figurine of beloved MST3K character Gypsy! And save your Xmas gift cash for Volume XX, out in March (an all-Joel Hodgson set that includes the hilarious Master Ninja series) and this summer’s Volume XXI, which is rumored to consist of the show’s entire run of Gamera movies.
2.) RIFFTRAX
In the same vein, ex-MST3K creators/performers Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy have been plying their wisenheimer trade through Rifftrax (www.rifftrax.com), which allows you to download individual commentary tracks for movies both new and old, including everything from the Star Wars films up through the Twilight series and cult oddities such as The Room. You download the track as an mp3 file and sync it up with the movie and you can instantaneously rake Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson over the coals. There are dozens of downloadable public-domain shorts — available on the site for $1-2 a pop — which range in topics from “Are All People The Same?” to the seasonal “Christmas Dream,” which features a bizarre stop-motion animated doll that runs amuck on Christmas Eve. Shorts compilations are available for sale on DVD for $9.99 each, as are a number of feature-length riffs including Plan 9 From Outer Space and the jaw-dropping 1934 mad-scientist movie Maniac! Best of all is the jaw-dropping Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny, a 1972 mishmash of holiday film, fairy-tale story and cheapjack movie-making that will scar you for life. It’s $9.99, with only video-on-demand and download-to-burn options available now, but you can purchase gift certificates. Trust me, everyone you know needs to see a seedy Santa Claus stuck in the saddest Florida amusement park ever helped out by a guy in a creepy, oversized bunny suit.
3.) THE CRITERION COLLECTION
While it’s still an injustice that there’s not a Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny Criterion collection Blu-Ray disc available, the good folks at Criterion — the banner name in quality home-video presentation for over twenty-five years for, as they say, “important classic and contemporary films” — have upped the Geek Ante in 2010 with such titles as Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, Charles Laughton’s terrifying Night Of The Hunter and the giant America Lost And Found: The BBS Story box set, which includes Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show and The Monkees’ Head (on DVD and Blu-Ray). Titles new to Blu-Ray include David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Sanjuro and Seven Samurai. You can’t go wrong with a Criterion title (though don’t give Granny a copy of Salo: The 120 Days Of Sodom).
4.) SCOTT PILGRIM VERSUS THE WORLD Blu-Ray
While a box office disappointment, Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic book became a cult sensation overnight— recent midnight screenings have sold out well in advance and Universal’s decision to release the film to home video just three months after the film’s theatrical release has turned out to be a boon, with the film selling incredibly well. The Blu-Ray version is loaded to the gills with extras, including a packed commentary track, detailed behind-the-scenes featurettes and a vast number of funny outtakes, bloopers and deleted scenes. Of all the recent theatrical releases on Blu-Ray, Scott Piligrim (and #9 below) is the one to beat.
5.) DARK STAR SE
The first (and last collaborative) film from USC buddies John (Halloween) Carpenter and Dan (Alien, Return Of The Living Dead) O’Bannon — you might have heard of them — has finally been released in a “Hyper-Space” edition which contains everything you might want to know about this super-low-budget sci-fi comedy, which started as a graduate film project and blossomed to a standalone feature film. Carpener has long disowned the movie — his only contribution to the extras is a phone interview where it’s clear he’s still bitter about USC claiming ownership over the film — but a nearly 90-minute documentary on the piece goes into great detail about every possible facet on the making and impact of the film and a new anamorphic widescreen transfer of the 16mm print looks as good as it ever will. It’s too bad that Dan O’Bannon, who died just over a year ago, wasn’t able to directly participate in this edition, but archival interviews make sure his anarchic spirit lives on.
6.) ALIEN ANTHOLOGY Blu-Ray
Speaking of Dan O’Bannon, the Alien screenwriter's presence is felt all over Fox’s amazing ALIEN ANTHOLGY box-set. While some might gripe that they’ve bought the damn thing three times over (1999’s ALIEN LEGACY and 2003’s ALIEN QUADRILOGY), the transfers are so crisp and detailed and the supplements so exhaustive on this new six-disc Blu-Ray set that it’s hard to complain too much. Disc producer and longtime Ridley Scott associate Charles De Lauzirika has pulled together literally everything that’s appeared on any Alien related home-video release, going all the way back to material that first turned up on the original Alien laserdisc box set in 1996. A documentary that Lauzirika filmed about the travails of making the troubled Alien3 which was edited on the QUADRILOGY — to the point that Lauzirika replaced his name with that of “Fred Garvin,” the character Dan Aykroyd played in the “Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute” sketch on Saturday Night Live — has been fully restored as well. James Cameron personally supervised the transfer for Aliens and managed to remove some of the rough grain from the image without compromising fine detail; it’s never looked as good. For the Alien fanatic on your list, you can’t go wrong with this; there’s even a gift set — available only through this link — where you can buy the discs hidden inside a scale replica of an Alien egg.
7.) APOCALYPSE NOW Blu-Ray
Francis Ford Coppola's landmark film is sharper, louder and more gorgeous and haunting than ever. Both versions feature the 1979 theatrical and 2001 Redux editions, both framed properly— previous editions supervised by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro matted the film so that the top and bottom were opened up and the sides cut off — and the resolution of Blu-Ray brings out detail you never thought possible. The three disc “Full Disclosure Edition,” while sacrificing the amazing Bob Peak theatrical poster artwork of the cheaper version, is the one to get, containing the late George Hickenlooper’s amazing documentary, Hearts Of Darkness. If you thought that the Alien3 documentary was warts-‘n’-all, this piece reveals the shoot of Apocalypse Now to be every bit as chaotic as the film itsef. Essential.
8.) ROGER CORMAN’S CULT CLASSICS
When Shout! Factory announced that they had acquired the rights to the Roger Corman/ New World catalog — the video rights to his American-International Pictures films are still owned by MGM — expectations ran high. But Shout! Factory has gone the distance by mining the Corman vaults for cult classics like Death Race 2000, Piranha, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Hight School, enjoyably trashy genre titles such as Galaxy Of Terror, Forbidden World and the entire Slumber Party Massacre series, and hidden gems like The Woman Wore Red and the jaw-dropping Starcrash. Some of these titles had been previously released in cruddy full-frame transfers, but these Shout! Factory editions look and sound better than they likely ever have and are packed-to-the-gills with extras or put on “double bills” with menus that replicate an old-school movie-going experience, complete with trailers and lobby popcorn ads. When companies like Image dump genre favorites like Time Bandits onto Blu-Ray with lousy transfers and next to no extras, it’s heartening to see Shout! Factory go to the mat to give fans what they want and more. Next year, look for a triple-bill of the Corman-directed Not Of This Earth, War Of The Satellites and Attack Of The Crab Monsters and the much-anticipated Battle Beyond The Stars. Bravo, Shout!
9.) INCEPTION Blu-Ray
You’ve seen the movie, read the essays on it, engaged in highfalutin’ conversation about it over coffee, and gotten into a fistfight with someone about it when they claimed that it was “not as cool as The Matrix.” Now watch it and slip around the various layers of dreams in crisp hi-def along with a thunderous lossless DTS-MA audio track and the ability to watch the film in “Extraction Mode,” where writer-director Christopher Nolan and his cast and crew pops in on the film to explain both the behind-the-scenes nuts-and-bolts and the philosophy behind certain sequences.
10.) THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS Blu-Ray
The biggest news in film restoration in recent years was the discovery of an entire missing reel of footage from Fritz Lang’s ground-breaking 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The film, recently restored in 2001, has had the new footage — much of it damaged but restored as well as humanly possible by a team led by Thomas Bakels — reinstated, producing a richer and more satisfying film. There are still scenes missing, but this is the longest and — save for the new material — the best-looking the film has ever been. The new Blu-Ray edition from Kino International is the perfect gift for serious film aficionados and those who think science fiction began with Star Wars.
11.) TV ON DVD
It’s been a banner year for TV on DVD, with Shout! Factory putting out complete box sets of The Larry Sanders Show and Leave It To Beaver, Image releasing The Twilight Zone on Blu-Ray and Time-Life giving us every single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman ever made. But the single best TV show on DVD right now is Look Around You, a British short-subject program that is so spot-on as a parody that it’s easy to miss the joke. A bone-dry take-off on the kind of dull instructional science programs that filled British and Canadian (those of us who grew up getting certain TV channels from Winsdor will attest to this) TV in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. Created by Robert Popper and comedian Peter (Shaun Of The Dead) Serafinowicz, the series is made up of ten-minute vignettes each dealing with a particular subject, ranging from “Maths” to “Calcium.” Here, nonsense experiments are performed increasingly bizarre theorems are put forward, all performed with a very straight face. Look for bit parts by the likes of director Edgar (Scott Pilgrim Versus The World) Wright and his Spaced/Shawn Of The Dead/Hot Fuzz actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Only Season One of Look Around You is available right now in the U.S.— hurry up BBC Video with Season Two!
12.) WARNER ARCHIVES
While it’s a little disappointing that a number of titles are only seeing release via new DVD-on-demand efforts launched by Warner (through their Warner Archives program), Universal, Sony and, in early 2011, MGM/Fox, it’s clear that this is the only way we’re ever going to see legitimate releases of hundreds of obscure or less-popular films. Warner Archives launched in May 2009 and has put out dozens of hard-to-find titles— many musicals, comedies from the ‘30’s and ‘40’s and a number of film noir B-movies. Genre titles are in the catch-up phase, but it’s good to finally be able to get an anamorphic widescreen copy of the Japanese sci-fi monster cheese classic The Green Slime, the gritty and underrated Robert Duvall-Joe Don Baker crime thriller The Outfit, the hard-to-find New Wave concert Urgh! A Music War and the have-to-see-it-to-believe-it psychedelic outer space epic The Wild Wild Planet.
It’s Christmas Week 2010. You’ve been too busy playing BLACK OPS for the last six weeks straight to remember that you need to buy presents. Short of making macaroni-and-paper-plate sculptures, what do get for the discerning Geek on your Wish List? Here are the Twelve Days Of Geekmas— Home Video Edition.
1.) MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000: VOLUME XIX
Shout! Factory reclaimed the rights to distribute Mystery Science Theater 3000 from Rhino a few years back, and the folks at Shout! have done a bang-up job with not just getting these four-disc box-set out in time, something Rhino was terrible about, but with the value-added extras that cater to the show’s fans. Volume XIX, which contains bad-movie chestnuts like Robot Monster and Bride Of The Monster, along with rarely-seen goofs like Devil Doll (which looks, according to Crow T. Robot, like “Alfalfa E. Neuman”) and the Italian monster mash Devil Fish, delivers the goods. We not only get a lengthy documentary about Ed Wood and the making of Bride Of The Monster (complete with interviews with Ed Wood’s associates and wrestler George “The Animal” Steele, who played Tor Johnson in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood), but interviews with Devil Doll producer Richard Gordon and a retrospective on the surreal ineptitude of Robot Monster— as well as a figurine of beloved MST3K character Gypsy! And save your Xmas gift cash for Volume XX, out in March (an all-Joel Hodgson set that includes the hilarious Master Ninja series) and this summer’s Volume XXI, which is rumored to consist of the show’s entire run of Gamera movies.
2.) RIFFTRAX
In the same vein, ex-MST3K creators/performers Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy have been plying their wisenheimer trade through Rifftrax (www.rifftrax.com), which allows you to download individual commentary tracks for movies both new and old, including everything from the Star Wars films up through the Twilight series and cult oddities such as The Room. You download the track as an mp3 file and sync it up with the movie and you can instantaneously rake Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson over the coals. There are dozens of downloadable public-domain shorts — available on the site for $1-2 a pop — which range in topics from “Are All People The Same?” to the seasonal “Christmas Dream,” which features a bizarre stop-motion animated doll that runs amuck on Christmas Eve. Shorts compilations are available for sale on DVD for $9.99 each, as are a number of feature-length riffs including Plan 9 From Outer Space and the jaw-dropping 1934 mad-scientist movie Maniac! Best of all is the jaw-dropping Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny, a 1972 mishmash of holiday film, fairy-tale story and cheapjack movie-making that will scar you for life. It’s $9.99, with only video-on-demand and download-to-burn options available now, but you can purchase gift certificates. Trust me, everyone you know needs to see a seedy Santa Claus stuck in the saddest Florida amusement park ever helped out by a guy in a creepy, oversized bunny suit.
3.) THE CRITERION COLLECTION
While it’s still an injustice that there’s not a Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny Criterion collection Blu-Ray disc available, the good folks at Criterion — the banner name in quality home-video presentation for over twenty-five years for, as they say, “important classic and contemporary films” — have upped the Geek Ante in 2010 with such titles as Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, Charles Laughton’s terrifying Night Of The Hunter and the giant America Lost And Found: The BBS Story box set, which includes Easy Rider, The Last Picture Show and The Monkees’ Head (on DVD and Blu-Ray). Titles new to Blu-Ray include David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Sanjuro and Seven Samurai. You can’t go wrong with a Criterion title (though don’t give Granny a copy of Salo: The 120 Days Of Sodom).
4.) SCOTT PILGRIM VERSUS THE WORLD Blu-Ray
While a box office disappointment, Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic book became a cult sensation overnight— recent midnight screenings have sold out well in advance and Universal’s decision to release the film to home video just three months after the film’s theatrical release has turned out to be a boon, with the film selling incredibly well. The Blu-Ray version is loaded to the gills with extras, including a packed commentary track, detailed behind-the-scenes featurettes and a vast number of funny outtakes, bloopers and deleted scenes. Of all the recent theatrical releases on Blu-Ray, Scott Piligrim (and #9 below) is the one to beat.
5.) DARK STAR SE
The first (and last collaborative) film from USC buddies John (Halloween) Carpenter and Dan (Alien, Return Of The Living Dead) O’Bannon — you might have heard of them — has finally been released in a “Hyper-Space” edition which contains everything you might want to know about this super-low-budget sci-fi comedy, which started as a graduate film project and blossomed to a standalone feature film. Carpener has long disowned the movie — his only contribution to the extras is a phone interview where it’s clear he’s still bitter about USC claiming ownership over the film — but a nearly 90-minute documentary on the piece goes into great detail about every possible facet on the making and impact of the film and a new anamorphic widescreen transfer of the 16mm print looks as good as it ever will. It’s too bad that Dan O’Bannon, who died just over a year ago, wasn’t able to directly participate in this edition, but archival interviews make sure his anarchic spirit lives on.
6.) ALIEN ANTHOLOGY Blu-Ray
Speaking of Dan O’Bannon, the Alien screenwriter's presence is felt all over Fox’s amazing ALIEN ANTHOLGY box-set. While some might gripe that they’ve bought the damn thing three times over (1999’s ALIEN LEGACY and 2003’s ALIEN QUADRILOGY), the transfers are so crisp and detailed and the supplements so exhaustive on this new six-disc Blu-Ray set that it’s hard to complain too much. Disc producer and longtime Ridley Scott associate Charles De Lauzirika has pulled together literally everything that’s appeared on any Alien related home-video release, going all the way back to material that first turned up on the original Alien laserdisc box set in 1996. A documentary that Lauzirika filmed about the travails of making the troubled Alien3 which was edited on the QUADRILOGY — to the point that Lauzirika replaced his name with that of “Fred Garvin,” the character Dan Aykroyd played in the “Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute” sketch on Saturday Night Live — has been fully restored as well. James Cameron personally supervised the transfer for Aliens and managed to remove some of the rough grain from the image without compromising fine detail; it’s never looked as good. For the Alien fanatic on your list, you can’t go wrong with this; there’s even a gift set — available only through this link — where you can buy the discs hidden inside a scale replica of an Alien egg.
7.) APOCALYPSE NOW Blu-Ray
Francis Ford Coppola's landmark film is sharper, louder and more gorgeous and haunting than ever. Both versions feature the 1979 theatrical and 2001 Redux editions, both framed properly— previous editions supervised by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro matted the film so that the top and bottom were opened up and the sides cut off — and the resolution of Blu-Ray brings out detail you never thought possible. The three disc “Full Disclosure Edition,” while sacrificing the amazing Bob Peak theatrical poster artwork of the cheaper version, is the one to get, containing the late George Hickenlooper’s amazing documentary, Hearts Of Darkness. If you thought that the Alien3 documentary was warts-‘n’-all, this piece reveals the shoot of Apocalypse Now to be every bit as chaotic as the film itsef. Essential.
8.) ROGER CORMAN’S CULT CLASSICS
When Shout! Factory announced that they had acquired the rights to the Roger Corman/ New World catalog — the video rights to his American-International Pictures films are still owned by MGM — expectations ran high. But Shout! Factory has gone the distance by mining the Corman vaults for cult classics like Death Race 2000, Piranha, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Hight School, enjoyably trashy genre titles such as Galaxy Of Terror, Forbidden World and the entire Slumber Party Massacre series, and hidden gems like The Woman Wore Red and the jaw-dropping Starcrash. Some of these titles had been previously released in cruddy full-frame transfers, but these Shout! Factory editions look and sound better than they likely ever have and are packed-to-the-gills with extras or put on “double bills” with menus that replicate an old-school movie-going experience, complete with trailers and lobby popcorn ads. When companies like Image dump genre favorites like Time Bandits onto Blu-Ray with lousy transfers and next to no extras, it’s heartening to see Shout! Factory go to the mat to give fans what they want and more. Next year, look for a triple-bill of the Corman-directed Not Of This Earth, War Of The Satellites and Attack Of The Crab Monsters and the much-anticipated Battle Beyond The Stars. Bravo, Shout!
9.) INCEPTION Blu-Ray
You’ve seen the movie, read the essays on it, engaged in highfalutin’ conversation about it over coffee, and gotten into a fistfight with someone about it when they claimed that it was “not as cool as The Matrix.” Now watch it and slip around the various layers of dreams in crisp hi-def along with a thunderous lossless DTS-MA audio track and the ability to watch the film in “Extraction Mode,” where writer-director Christopher Nolan and his cast and crew pops in on the film to explain both the behind-the-scenes nuts-and-bolts and the philosophy behind certain sequences.
10.) THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS Blu-Ray
The biggest news in film restoration in recent years was the discovery of an entire missing reel of footage from Fritz Lang’s ground-breaking 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The film, recently restored in 2001, has had the new footage — much of it damaged but restored as well as humanly possible by a team led by Thomas Bakels — reinstated, producing a richer and more satisfying film. There are still scenes missing, but this is the longest and — save for the new material — the best-looking the film has ever been. The new Blu-Ray edition from Kino International is the perfect gift for serious film aficionados and those who think science fiction began with Star Wars.
11.) TV ON DVD
It’s been a banner year for TV on DVD, with Shout! Factory putting out complete box sets of The Larry Sanders Show and Leave It To Beaver, Image releasing The Twilight Zone on Blu-Ray and Time-Life giving us every single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman ever made. But the single best TV show on DVD right now is Look Around You, a British short-subject program that is so spot-on as a parody that it’s easy to miss the joke. A bone-dry take-off on the kind of dull instructional science programs that filled British and Canadian (those of us who grew up getting certain TV channels from Winsdor will attest to this) TV in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. Created by Robert Popper and comedian Peter (Shaun Of The Dead) Serafinowicz, the series is made up of ten-minute vignettes each dealing with a particular subject, ranging from “Maths” to “Calcium.” Here, nonsense experiments are performed increasingly bizarre theorems are put forward, all performed with a very straight face. Look for bit parts by the likes of director Edgar (Scott Pilgrim Versus The World) Wright and his Spaced/Shawn Of The Dead/Hot Fuzz actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Only Season One of Look Around You is available right now in the U.S.— hurry up BBC Video with Season Two!
12.) WARNER ARCHIVES
While it’s a little disappointing that a number of titles are only seeing release via new DVD-on-demand efforts launched by Warner (through their Warner Archives program), Universal, Sony and, in early 2011, MGM/Fox, it’s clear that this is the only way we’re ever going to see legitimate releases of hundreds of obscure or less-popular films. Warner Archives launched in May 2009 and has put out dozens of hard-to-find titles— many musicals, comedies from the ‘30’s and ‘40’s and a number of film noir B-movies. Genre titles are in the catch-up phase, but it’s good to finally be able to get an anamorphic widescreen copy of the Japanese sci-fi monster cheese classic The Green Slime, the gritty and underrated Robert Duvall-Joe Don Baker crime thriller The Outfit, the hard-to-find New Wave concert Urgh! A Music War and the have-to-see-it-to-believe-it psychedelic outer space epic The Wild Wild Planet.
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