david lynch thursday!

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Putting a dirty towel over your head doesn't make it near dark.

Region 1 U.S. releases>>
- Beau Geste (1939) (dir. William Wellman)
- The Beloved Rogue (1926) (starring John Barrymore)
- Coco Chanel (starring Shirely MacLaine)
- Grave of the Fireflies (1988 anime on the firebombing of Kobe, Japan)
- Knowing (what a dumb title)
- Le Jupon Rouge (talky Holocaust survivor flick with GLBTQI-appeal)
- Mr. Rock N’ Roll: The Alan Freed Story
- Near Dark (reissue) ('87's super-fantastic southern-fried vamp flick featuring Aliens cast members Jeanette Goldstein, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton; Hurt Locker helmer Kathryn Bigelow's first flick)
- One Missed Call 3 (wait - there was a second one?)
- Sherlock Holmes (1922)
- The Tempest (1928)
- Unborn (hotties versus demons, with Gary Oldman and Carla Guigino)

Multi-region and other foreign releases>>
- Bronson (PAL UK region 2) (Brit prison bio-pic getting lots of fanboy buzz)
- Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts (PAL UK region 2)
- GP506 (Japan region 2) (supernatural box-office hit taking place in the South Korean-North Korean DMZ)
- Kung-Fu Girl (HK all region) (1973) (stars former Shaw Brothers' actress Chang Pei Pei, Corey Yuen and Jackie Chan)
- Lola Montes (PAL UK region 2) (Max Ophuls' wonderful bio-flick gets a DVD remaster; stars Peter Ustinov and Martine Carol)
- Meatball Machine (PAL UK region 2) (super-gory Japanese cyberpunk)
- Shadows in the Palace (Korea region 3) (period-piece-murder-mystery)
- The Show Must Go On (Japan region 2) (highly-praised Japanese gangster melodrama)
- Three Monkeys (PAL UK region 2) (the best film of the year, thus far)

Region 1 Blu-Ray releases>>
- Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets
- Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire
- Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix
- Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
- Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone

Field guide to Invertebrates in Film: The Horrors of Spider Island

Horrors of Spider Island (1960)
Critter: The dreaded tropical five-fingered monkey spider and its mutant creation, Gary
Size: About Chihuahua-sized, man-sized
Modus Operandi: One bite from this critter will either kill you or turn you into a hairy faced, toothy thing that likes to run around shirtless
How the Menace Emerges: Our crew of dancing gals encounters this undescribed spider species after they are stranded on deserted island
End Goal: Hard to say, neither critter seems to eat

Hmmmm. Let’s see, what if a plane wrecked in the middle of the ocean with 8 buxom dancing girls and you were the only guy? You might enjoy the strip-joint sax soundtrack, but watch out, you’re on an island with an oddly buck-toothed spider sporting monkey paws, and soon you’ll become a were-spider-monkey more interested in strangling than making out. That’s the German sexploitation wonder that is The Horrors of Spider Island (a.k.a. A Corpse Hangs in the Web or It’s Hot in Paradise). Here, the sexploitation comes first, catfights, cattiness and skinny-dipping all trump horror, critters and critter attacks. When we finally get some monster action, there’s only about 10 minutes of film left. Once we discover that the barely mutated spider-monkey-were-man is afraid of flares, and barely remembers his lost human self, poof: we’ve reached the sorriest of all endings.
When I viewed Mesa of Lost Women, I had to add a drop my rating scale a notch (to zero) to hold such a wretched film. Still, with its leering dwarves, it had more charm than this piece of schlock. Even for a cheap sexploitation film, The Horrors of Spider Island sets a new low. Granted, the version I’ve seen had been burned from a video transfer, trimmed to remove the nudie bits and terribly dubbed, but I still doubt that a crisp, restored version of this would help one whit.
Nit-picking Science: Science? What science?

puts you there where things are hollow: anvil! the story of anvil and jcvd

Even if he has no intention whatsoever to explore or exploit it, Anvil! The Story of Anvil director and band fanboy Sacha Gervasi still can't avoid capturing on film the very real and very strange tension between reality and stage life that exists for original bandmates Steve "Lips" Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner: we get Kudlow and Reiner are best buddies - always were and always will be - and we get that the pair and their bandmates seem to be genuine, decent people who're dearly loved by their families, friends, and their few remaining devoted hometown fans. We get that the pair are still talented musicians, effervescent onstage even after twenty-plus years. And we get that even talent and effervescense means little to the corporate-dominated music culture, one that nevertheless acknowledges Kudlow and Reiner's hard work and Anvil's legacy. In this respect, Gervasi's love letter to his heavy-metal youth (he worked as a roadie for the group in the mid-1980s) and to his music idols is an unqualified success: we get all these things, and we're rooting for Lips and Reiner the moment we see Anvil's frontman whip out a fat, flesh-colored vibrator in archival concert footage to the final, wistful scenes of his flick.

What we don't get, and what we should, is more about that tension. I went in thinking they were one-hit wonders, but the revelation that Anvil has been hard at work making albums since the early 80s - thirteen of them - is glossed over with an aside that they had bad management, bad label representation, and that's why they never made it big. Really? That's all it was? Lips and Reiner repeatedly state throughout the film that they accept that what's past is past, that they're happy with the impact they've had among current metal acts, or some variation of this; yet, the pair continue to scrape and claw for success, and it's clear that it's not just any kind of success they want, but the sort of fame and money their metal brethren enjoy. I know a lot of people have been throwing around This is Spinal Tap (1984) as well as (the wantonly voyeuristic and cruel) American Movie (1999) comparisons, but I think a more apt film to hold up alongside Anvil! The Story of Anvil for contrast would be The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years (1988). In so many ways, Steve Kudlow and Robb Reiner appear to be grounded in lives among loving people the way the bands and musicians (the ones which survived success, anyway) featured in the latter film probably never will, and maybe, just maybe, some of that has to do with their lack of "success" (at what point do you think somebody like, say, Bret Michaels stopped being a real person? The first million? The second? Five?). While it's hard to blame them, and hard not to root for them, Lips and Robbo are still starstruck after all these years, and it looks like Gervasi cares too much to lift the curtain on the contradictions permeating their heavy metal fantasies.


The economy of fame is the theme for Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD, an A-grade arty action vehicle for C-grade action star Jean-Claude Van Damme. The Muscles From Brussels is essentially playing a variation of himself, here - broke, divorced (again and again), his weathered face a document testifying to the years of excess and addiction since he broke as a high kicking hero back in the late 1980s. Mabrouk and his screenwriter Frederic Benduis designed JCVD almost as a gauntlet of embarassment and low blows for Van Damme to act his way through; remarkably, the film's titular subject accedes in practically every way, pulling off a charismatic, nuanced and unselfconscious performance. Indeed, from the exhausting opening master shot the forty-plus actor huffs and puffs his way through to the surreal, rambling, tear-laden apology for a life of indulgence and family neglect midway into the film to the smack on the head with he gives himself in the movie's last shot, you might be inclined to say that Van Damme saw JCVD as penance. He's often so good in JCVD you hope and wonder if you're seeing a real person up there on the screen, but if not, it's definitely a real actor.

david lynch thursday!

happy birthday, atrain!

get yr release on

As you can see here, Rosie doesn't quite know what the right thing may be, or how she might go about doing that right thing.


U.S. Region 1 releases>>
- Do the Right Thing (20th Anniversary release)
- The Education of Charlie Banks (directed by Fred Durst--whaaaaaaaaaa?!?)
- Kaidan (a 2007 reinterpretation of classic Japanese horror)
- King of Kings (1961) (imdb says "The Life of Christ" - need you say anything else?)
- The Legend of Big Foot/Snowbeast! (there's-monsters-in-them-hills schlock from the mid 70s)
- Lookin’ to Get Out (Hal Ashby, Jon "He Bit Me!" Voight, and Baby Jolie)
- Monster X Strikes Back (starring Takeshi Kitano - ahh, it is Guilala! Run!)
- Oliver Twist (1922)
- Pedro (on Pedro Zamora, the Poz Real World Cast member from the mid 90s)
- Rip! A Remix Manifesto (a doc about remixin'; could be interestin...)
- Split Sides: Merce Cunningham Dance Company
- They Call Me Bruce? (25th Anniversary Edition) (hey, that goofy Korean looks like Bruce Lee!)
- Tokyo! (directed by Bong Joon-Ho, Michel Gondry, Leos Carax)
- 12 Rounds (starring another WCW wrestler)


Multi-region and other foreign releases>>
- Che, 1 & 2 (dir. Steven Soderbergh) (Region 2 PAL UK)
- The House by the Cemetery (there's a house, it's by the cemetery, it's 1981, it's Lucio Fulci) (Region 2 PAL UK)
- Macabre (dir. Lamberto Bava) (Region 2 PAL UK)
- Modern Boy (an action/drama set in Korea's colonial period) (DVD Region 3)
- Push (a sort of unofficial adaptation of Marvel's "Exiles?") (Region 2 PAL UK)
- The Scam ("where sleek black suits hide white-collar crime", via Korea) (DVD Region 3)
- Sleepless (directed by Dario Argento, but since it's from 2001 it may not be worth the bother) (Region 2 PAL UK)
- Surveillance (David Lynch's daughter directs Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond in a weird and ultraviolent thriller) (Region 2 PAL UK)


Region 1 Blu-Ray releases>>
- Do the Right Thing (20th Anniversary release)
- Tokyo! (directed by Bong Joon-Ho, Michel Gondry, Leos Carax) – movie

happy birthday, amber!

(it gets especially buggy about the four and a half minute mark...)

Field Guide to Invertebrates in Film: Feast of the Praying Mantis

Feast of the Praying Mantis (2003)
Critter: Mantoidia sapiens var. plantii
Size: About 5 feet 8 inches tall
Modus Operandi: Woos victims with a bouquet of flowers, then sexes them to death
How the Menace Emerges: A mystery. Apparently this species is only found in the south (in Belgium I presume), but exists throughout time as illustrated by the lamest epilogue scene I’ve ever seen.
End Goal: Sex and death

The Feast of the Praying Mantis is a different kind of terrible bug film than I’m used to. Rather than settling comfortably into being a slow, Euro-art film or a cheeky B-movie, it attempts to straddle the line of both, achieving nothing by its compromise. The film is about Sylvia (Get it? She’s a nature girl because her name means “of the forest”! Yawn!) an immortal, critter who seems to be a hybrid between a humanoid, a vine and a praying mantis. She can talk to Doberman pincers and plants, likes to have tarantulas walk on her and is an excellent gardener. Oh, and she’s also really into S & M. The plot is carried out through the barbiturate-induced voiceover of her bewitched, cello-playing boyfriend who is willing to anything to actually sleep with her. In the first line of the film, we learn that he is dead, while near the end, he tells us that he’s in oblivion. Who knew that they could record droll voiceovers from oblivion? Add to the mix a bit of bad and pointless CGI (a dove bursting into flames and a swarm of green dots that please Sylvia for no apparent reason), superfluous melodrama from subsidiary characters and tedious sex scenes, and you have a big waste of time.

Nit-picking Science: There’s no science in Feast of the Praying Mantis for me to pick apart, so instead, I’ll just talk a bit about Fabre. The film opens with a quote from Jean Henri Fabre’s incredible 1921 work Fabre’s Book of Insects. Fabre was an observant naturalist and an excellent writer, and his Book of Insects is a wonderfully written look at some of the most intriguing critters he studied. While the language is too anthropomorphic to pass for science in today’s standards and much of his observations have been disproved, it is a delightful read nonetheless. Talking of the praying mantis, Fabre said “The Mantis, I fear, has no heart. She eats her husband, and deserts her children.” Now that’s the film I wanted to see.

david lynch thursday!

get yr release on

Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir - coolest trailer of 2008?


U.S. and Region 1 releases>>
- Cherry Blossoms (directed by Doris Dorrie)
- Jem Cohen: An Evening’s Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin (artsy rendering of the decline of the American Century)
- Dillinger (1973) (directed by Hollywood right-winger John Millius, starring Warren Oats, Cloris Leachman, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ben Johnson)
- Last Year at Marienbad (Criterion Collection directed by Alain Resnais)
- My Dinner With Andre (Criterion Collection directed by Louis Malle)
- Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, a former Israeli soldier, and his animated mediation on memory, guilt, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon)

Multi-region and other foreign releases>>
-Franklyn (Brit sci-fi with Ryan Phillipe and Eva Green) (PAL Region 2)
- Hardware (1990) (special edition of Richard Stanley's punky cult hit) (PAL Region 2)
- Occupation (story of three British soldiers' experiences, and their aftermath, in Iraq) (PAL Region 2)
- Open City (Korean crime opera) (Region 3)
- Handphone (Korean thriller set around a lost telephone and a loan shark) (Region 3)

Blu-Ray releases>>
- American Gangster (directed by Ridley Scott)
- Casino (Scorsese's last great film before 2006's The Departed)
- Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg's sophomore outing with Viggo Mortensen)
- Last Year at Marienbad (Criterion Collection directed by Alain Resnais)
- The Pink Panther (1964)
- Waltz With Bashir

Field Guide to Invertebrates in Film: Kingdom of the Spiders

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)
Critter: Once again, our fine, photogenic friends from the Theraphosidae family
Size: 4-5 inches in diameter
Modus Operandi: Swarms of deadly tarantulas overwhelm a victim with multiple venomous bites
How the Menace Emerges: Through the overuse of pesticides, humanity has eliminated the majority of the spiders’ typical food supply. Desperate to survive, the spiders evolve social behavior and venom 5 times stronger than their pre-pesticide days, enabling them to take down cows, puppies and people.
End Goal: Dinner

Kingdom of the Spiders is yet another entry into the 1970s eco-horror, critter attacks subgenre. No more, no less. It’s a bit slow, but there’s a spider panic riot at the end that’s worth sticking around for. The laughable William Shatner delivers an uncharacteristically understated performance as Dr. Rack Hansen, veterinarian to the farming folk of sleepy Verde Valley, AZ. When blood samples from a dead calf are sent off to Flagstaff, Dr. Denise Ashley, a sharp and strangely glamorous entomologist with big-city sensibilities and a knack for rebuking the patronizing flirtations of local yokel Hansen, enters the scene. Unfortunately, she soon crumbles under Hansen’s freakishly redneck come-ons and before long, I kid you not, she is fetching his beer. The venerable Woody Strode (Once Upon a Time in the West, The Professionals, Sergeant Rutledge) makes an excellent, sympathetic appearance that is cut far too short. Another unlikely appearance is on the soundtrack. Country/rockabilly icon Dorsey Burnette was somehow convinced to record the soundtrack, contributing four fine songs to this mess of a film.

At least the makers of Kingdom of the Spiders spent their meager budget well. According to IMDB, $50,000 went to spiders alone. That may explain how the final scene became a zoom out on a somewhat lame drawing, rather than something that could have conveyed the creepiness that they were after. It’s just too bad that a number of these fine furry actors and actresses were obviously squashed in the filming.

Nit-picking Science: Dr. Ashley, you stated that no members of the infraorder Mygalomorphae are remotely social, but oh how mistaken you are. Surely, you read Drachen’s 1967 paper describing the quasi-social behavior of the funnel-web tarantula Macrothele darcheni (Family: Hexathelidae). Or perhaps you’ve heard about the tarantula Hysterocrates gigas (Family: Theraphosidae) whose juveniles have been observed feeding cooperatively. Social behavior may be rare in spiders, and even rarer in Mygalomorphae, but it ain’t unheard of. And another thing, your comprehension of the long-term effects of DDT on arthropods is despicable, misleading and makes the rest of us look stupid. Individual spiders do not develop immunity to DDT, but populations of spiders may develop genetic DDT resistance over multiple generations. I suggest you consult an undergrad Biology textbook to discern the difference between Lamarck’s discredited theory of acquired characters and Darwin’s brilliant theory of natural selection before you mouth off again.

david lynch thursday!

get yr release on

The Shaw Brothers weave it so well in
their 1975 zombie-kung fu flick, Black Magic 2.

Region 1 U.S. releases>>
- Ashes and Diamonds (Essential Art House edition directed by Andrzej Wajda)
- Bergman Island (Criterion Collection directed by Marie Nyerod)
- Black Magic 2 (Shaw Brothers release)
- The Diary of Anne Frank (50th Anniversary edition)
- Essential Art House Vol. 3 (box set featuring Ashes and Diamonds, Forbidden Games, The Hidden Fortress, Last Holiday, Richard III, Variety Lights)
- Forbidden Games (Essential Art House edition directed by Rene Clement)
- Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
- Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning
- Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives
- Friday the 13th (2009)
- The Hidden Fortress (Essential Art House edition directed by Akira Kurosawa)
- Last Holiday (Essential Art House edition directed by Henry Cass)
- Madea Goes to Jail (Tyler Perry's multi-million dollar wurlizter plays on)
- Operation Valkyrie (Deutscheland version of the Tom Cruise/Brian Singer potboiler)
- Richard III (Essential Art House edition directed by Laurence Olivier)
- The Seventh Seal (Criterion Collection 2 DVD set directed by Ingmar Bergman)
- Thank You, Good Night (more alt-rock 90s nostalgia)
- Three Stooges Collection: Vol. 6
- Variety Lights (Essential Art House edition directed by Federico Fellini) – movie
- What’s Up Tiger Lily? (reissue) (dir. Woody Allen)


Multi-region and other foreign releases>>
- Anvil! The Story of Anvil (cheeky/touchy-feely doc on has been metal band Anvil) (PAL Region 2)
- Aria (Special Edition of the 1987 film featuring Liz Hurley, Bridge Fonda, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and a slew of art-house heroes like Derek Jarman, Godard, Altman, and Ken Russell) (PAL region 2)
- The Class (dir. Laurent Cantent) (PAL region 2)
- Exodus (HK-serial killer thriller) (all region)
- Insects Unlisted in the Encyclopedia (All region) (Japanese Burroughsian-sounding flick)
- The Italian Job (40th Anniversary Ed. and holy shit look at that cast: Michael Caine, Noel Coward, Benny Hill, Tony Beckley) (PAL region 2)
- Shinobi: Heart Under Blade (ninjas! duels! ninjaaaas!) (All region)
- Strange Circus (weirdo Japanese sex drama) (All region)


Blu-Ray releases>>
- The Diary of Anne Frank (50th Anniversary edition)
- Dr. Strangelove
- Friday the 13th Part 2
- Friday the 13th Part 3 (in 3D!)
- Friday the 13th (2009)
- Ghostbusters
- Into the Wild (dir. Sean Penn)
- Rockers
- The Seventh Seal (Criterion Collection 2 DVD set directed by Ingmar Bergman)
- Sling Blade (some people callit a slingblade)

Field Guide to Invertebrates in Film: Slugs, Muerte Viscosa

Slugs, Muerte Viscosa (1988)
Critter: Mutant members of the order Pulmonata
Size: Huge, for slugs- about 6 inches long, on average
Modus Operandi: Traveling in slimy packs, the slugs burrow into the victim and eat them
How the Menace Emerges: Sometime in the distant past in this sleepy town, and evil corporation dumped all of their toxic waste into the soil, mutating the native, harmless slugs into vicious killers.
End Goal: Dinner

“You ain’t got the authority to declare Happy Birthday, not in this town.”

I’m a sucker for even the worst eco-horror flick (yes, I’m even fond of The Milipitas Monster). In Slugs, it’s true that the acting is terrible, the dialogue is awkwardly nonsensical and that much of the narrative is just ridiculous. Still, Slugs was a fantastically fun romp through amazing critter and gore effects, topped off with an excellent visual sense and decent cinematography (for a B-critter flick).

The effects are delightfully practical ones in Slugs, with plenty of competent prosthetics and titillating gore. When it counts, real slugs in all of their black, slimy glamour are introduced in large enough numbers to seem ominous. Of course, the scene that stole my heart is the stop motion one seen above. Those little un-sluglike teeth and tongue were just too perfect.

This was directed by the little mentioned J.P. Simon (Pod People, Cthulhu Mansion), whose anglicized name hides his Spanish origins. Apparently, he’s been a sort of Spanish B-movie king since the 80s, and Slugs impressed me enough to seek out more of his B-movie delights.
“Killah slugs, for christsakes! Whaddal it be next? Demented Crickets? Rampaging Mosquitas, Maybe?” Yes please, Mr. Simon.

Nit-picking Science: Another thing that softens me to Slugs is that someone did their homework. Yes, there are predatory slugs and yes, while snails are more commonly the carriers of the icky Schistosoma parasite, slugs can too. Aside from a bit of artistic license, (e.g. slug eggs are usually laid in clumps, not in singles) the science in Slugs is better than it should be.

do you really think she'll pull through? : the girlfriend experience

I know, I know, it's serious.

There's a scene towards the very end of Steven Soderbergh's latest, The Girlfriend Experience, where we watch a fey, Jewish jeweller nervously disrobe in the back office of his store, droning on about voting McCain and the chances for Israel's continued survival under a President Mac. Meanwhile, his companion, played by lissom porn actress Sasha Grey, strikes a tasteful pose in her tasteful off-white lingerie, a charitable look on her face. Eventually they embrace ("C'mere," whispers Grey, half-sexy, half-tender), but only their torsos and faces touch - not the lower part of their bodies - indeed, neither of them have even taken off their underwear. Holding Grey, the jeweller begins to breathe harder and harder, sighing and weeping, until he reaches orgasm, and she reaches up to stroke his hair.

The vulnerabilty Soderbergh showcases in this scene is what I'd really like to take away from the film: one that speaks directly and plainly to a notion the director manages to shape over the first half of The Girlfriend Experience only to dump for trite melodrama; that somewhere just beyond the shadow of desperation and grasping cast by significant but otherwise unspoken class divisions that loom over a big city like New York in late 2008 (and now), that there are sad and weird needs, sad and weird and basic needs people continue have, regardless of whether they're Wall Street douchebags, Saudi Princes, whiny screenwriters, hustling personal trainers, or call girls with a yen for something called "personology."

Casting Grey as the latter is Soderbergh doing his meta thing, through and through, so much so that it's hard not to see her reflecting on who she is outside of this brief stint in artsy stuff like this during a number of scenes with a probing and possibly infatuated journalist which are cross-cut with the rest of The Girlfriend Experience's goings on (ditto Soderbergh's process). She's a striking young woman, but when called on, can barely keep a scene together (though the same could be said for Scarlett Johannsen, frankly). That's not really the point though - she's a very young and somewhat notorious porn star doing a Steven Soderbergh flick about a very young high-class call girl with a vacuum in place of a personal life, so sign, meet signifier, etc., etc. Anyway, points for effort, I guess, and I have to imagine she knows the score here too, being a Herzog fan and all (at least that's what she says).

In the end, The Girlfriend Experienceis exactly what it says on the tin - curious, a little more than a little ephemeral, an experimental film cooked up in Steven Soderbergh's secret lab hidden inside the second 'L' on the Hollywood sign. And as is often the case with experimental film, this is more involved with an idea (the color and the shape of shared humanity in a substantially unequal place like 21st New York) or series of linked ideas rather than characters, though Soderbergh would've delievered a better and much more effective film overall if he hewed closer to the consistent clinicism and detachment he exhibited in his '06 stuff, like Bubble or The Good German instead of letting the piece droop into a sketch of Holly Golightly done in Joe Buck's chintzy colors.

david lynch thursday!

get yr release on

A particularly orange-ish scene from John Woo's Red Cliff 2.


DVD releases for the week of 6/9/09...

U.S. and Region 1 releases>>

- Fired Up! (cheerleader humor-pron for you fans of ah, cheerleader humor-pron)
- Gran Torino (dir. Clint Eastwood; here's a long piece from "The Nation" on the Grimace That Launched a Thousand Westerns)
- The International (dir. Tom Tykwer, with Clive Owens and Naomi Watts; Aaron sez the shoot-out in the Guggenheim's alright but little else is worth watching)
- Ladies or Gentlemen
- Nelson Mandela: Son of Africa (re-release of the 1996 film)
- Were the World Mine (High School Musical by way of Q-Cinema)
- Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music (featuring Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, Canned Heat, and the editing skills of one Marty Scorsese; also, check out this NYT piece on recent 60s "youth cult" DVD re-releases)


Mult-region and other foreign releases>>

- The Dirty Harry Collection (PAL Region 2)
- Disciples of Shaolin Temple (HK all-region)
- Red Cliff 2 (John Woo follow up to his swords and stuff epic, starring Tony Leung) (Region 3)
- Viy (the very wild, very first horror film ever made in Russia) (PAL Region 2)

Blu-Ray releases>>

- Fatal Attraction (dir. Adrian Lyne, possibly Hollywood's most successful misogynist)
- Gran Torino
- The International
– Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music

Field Guide to Invertebrates: Parasite

Parasite (1982)
Critter: Unclassifed ecto-/endo-parasite of human hosts
Size: It starts small, but eventually gets about Chihuahua sized
Modus Operandi: This is a bit complicated, since the two specimens in the film behaved entirely differently- Specimen A: Burrows into gut, eats host from inside, eventually exploding from barely-living host’s gut, releasing millions of reproductive spores; Specimen B: Attaches to host’s exterior with 6 suction cups arranges in 2 rows of 3, drains all of victim’s blood and moves on to a new host.
How the Menace Emerges: The evil corporation that runs the world had them engineered by a parasitologist for nefarious purposes
End Goal: Kill, Kill, Kill!
It’s the 1980s and CGI has yet to be invented. Ahhh, practical effects, how I miss you so! The critter effects in Parasite were created by a super crew of Stan Winston (Aliens, Monster Squad, Jurassic Park), Jim Kagel (The Thing (1982), Running on Karma) and Lance Anderson (The Thing (1982), Pet Semetary) and it shows. In fact, the critters are the only parts of Parasite that are truly worthwhile. After all, Charles Band (better known as a producer of the Puppetmaster series and head of Full Moon Pictures), is not known for making fine films. Other than a crazy dream sequence and some fine critter moments, this movie is a run of the mill 80s post apocalyptic affair, with nonsensical gangs of thugs and expensive petrol. Parasite was originally shown in 3D, and some of the scenes tailored for this type of showing look a bit silly when they are flat. One such scene focuses in on a pipe jutting out of a dead thug’s stomach and seems to pay homage to one of my favorite scenes from 1979’s Tourist Trap, which I don’t mind at all. Since Band was the producer of Tourist Trap, I suppose we can’t call it “ripping off”. Just as a side note, this is one of Demi Moore’s first films, and her only real purpose here seems to be to look concerned and be slapped around.

Nit-picking Science: I don’t know what it is with you movie scientists and your love of auditory pest control. What the hell did taking a “fluid” sample and exposing it to various frequencies actually tell you?

david lynch thursday!