Not a lot on the TV front this week, although you can’t go wrong with more Chuck Norris. The slim pickings include Coach S3; He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Vol 1 and Walker Texas Ranger S4.
Also only a few items on the movie front, but at least some good stuff.
Kino’s German Expressionism Collection includes a refurbished edition of the utterly essential The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (I wonder if the damage line at the top of the frame is gone, now; that would require another, superior print source, though). Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting to see the original silent The Hands of Orlac ever since I did that ‘killer hand’ edition of Video Cheese back in 2001, and reviewed the 1961 remake. (I also reviewed Mad Love with Peter Lorre there, another version of the same novel.) Warning Shadows I’ve seen and don’t remember much about, other than its story involves a mysterious storyteller who uses shadows to illustrate tales to aristocrats that mirror their lives just a tad too closely, and I’ve never seen Secrets of a Soul.
Obviously a thing like this is an acquired taste, but Kino’s been fantastic with genre silents lately, along with their amped up new editions of Cat and the Canary and Nosferatu. These are also sold separately, but unless you’re only buying one, the set give you four movies for basically what two would cost you.
As always, Amazon link included for convenience sake. Check DVDpricesearch.com for best price.
Black Water is an Australian Blair Witch meets killer croc movie (or, more aptly, Open Water with a crocodile) that at least some people liked, although it’s not a thrill a minute sort of movie apparently. Again like Open Water. A zillion killer croc/gator movies have come out in the last ten years, with a very recent batch emanating from Asia, and they’ve nearly uniformly sucked. The usually dependable Dread Central only gave it two stars out of five, but the review included an extended section on how such movies were politically incorrect from an environmentalist viewpoint. I don’t know, it’s a monster movie, it doesn’t need to try to teach us anything. Isn’t that where Primeval went awry?
Still, when the hell is Rogue coming out? Dammit!
I usually don’t list cheapie box sets, because the presentations are often awful, and even when they’re not, you usually end up with at best watchable non-letterboxed versions sans the original language tracks. However, if not up to the standards we nerds in our ’30s and ’40s now expect (thank you Media Blasters and Classic Media), there is something to be said for a really cheap set that gives you the Americanized versions that, no matter how inferior, are in fact the versions that made us fall in love with these movies.
On that basis, I’ll plug the Monsters Unleashed set, which for under ten bucks (often a lot less) gives 10 giant monster movies, including a batch of old Gamera flicks (Gamera vs. Monster X, Gamera vs. Gaos, Destroy all Planets, War of the Monsters, and the original Gamera the Invincible.), as well as such familiar titles as Yongary, Monster from the Deep, Warning from Space, The Giant Gila Monster, and Monster from a Prehistoric Planet.
Maybe even kids expect digital perfection these days, but hey, what have you got to lose? Sixty or seventy cents a movie? And again, surely tykes would prefer the American language versions. Sure, man of these are available in often eye-poppingly good editions; at ten to twenty bucks a pop. If nothing else, this sort of thing would make a great stocking stuffer.
That said, it would be nice if there was a website that reviewed some of these public domain sets (although there are too many to make it feasible to do all of them, or even most), so you knew whether you were going to get ‘C’ presentations or unwatchable ‘Z’ ones.
Spooky Funny Halloween is a parody of a Halloween show run by an old school Horror Host. The idea is good; depends as ever on the execution, though.
