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Cult DVDs

Doctor Who - The Dalek Invasion of Earth

Sales Rank:13562
List Price: $29.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

William Hartnell
William Russell
Jacqueline Hill
Carole Ann Ford

The second story of season 2, Dalek Invasion of Earth sees William Hartnell's Doctor in a six-part adventure pitted against his greatest nemesis, the Daleks. The Doctor, Susan (Carol Ann Ford), Ian (William Russell), and Barbara (Jacqueline Hill) arrive in the London of 2164, where the Nazi-like Daleks have turned the remnants of the human race into salve workers or "Robomen," who unfortunately foreshadow Monty Python's hilarious "Gumbies." The Daleks' plan involves a vast mine in Bedfordshire and the final destruction of the human race, while pitted against them is a World War II-style resistance movement led by Dortmun (Alan Judd) and David Campbell (Peter Fraser). One of the most famous of all Doctor Who stories, Dalek Invasion of Earth features such iconic moments as a dalek emerging from the Thames, and a remarkable flight across London showing daleks crossing Westminster Bridge and patrolling Trafalgar Square and the Albert Memorial. Terry Nation's story is almost insanely ambitious for the budget, and while sets and effects are primitive the location work is highly evocative. Lavishly remade for theaters as Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966), the plot here is more detailed and mercifully free of comic relief, and delivers a surprisingly sensitive ending to mark Carol Ann Ford's departure from the series. --Gary S. Dalkin

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Doctor Who - The Leisure Hive (Episode 110)

Sales Rank:9976
List Price: $19.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
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Widescreen
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Tom Baker
Lalla Ward

Particularly significant in terms of Doctor Who's history, The Leisure Hive marked an end to Who's descent into vaudeville, and heralded the entrance of new hotshot series producer John Nathan-Turner. The opening long, slow pan across a wintry beach, on which an autumnal Doctor sits slumped, immediately declares the show's serious intentions. The narrative itself is an erudite discussion on fascism and racism taking in regeneration, megalomania, cloning, and a series of Agatha Christie-esque murders. It's the style, rather than the story, however, that's most prominent in The Leisure Hive: along with his new sober ambitious approach, Nathan-Turner brought a new theme tune, a new logo, a striking red costume, and a new title sequence--one that, tellingly, moved away from the enclosed time tunnel to show the vastness of space opening up. Productions values are also high: the Quantel effects are impressive even now, and the performances are quite stunning, particularly Baker's as the prematurely aged, infirm Doctor.

By dispensing with the clowning and with what he termed "Douglas Adams's undergrad humor," Nathan-Turner reinvigorated a show that was becoming stale. The diegetic rebirth brought about by the Regeneration Drive at the show's denouement is an apposite motif that was emblematic of the rebirth of the show itself--The Leisure Hive truly represented a new beginning for Who. --Paul Eisinger

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Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

Sales Rank:8536
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MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Pernilla August
Kenny Baker
Brian Blessed
Anthony Daniels
Oliver Ford Davies

This is the 2-disc widescreen edition of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

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Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht

Sales Rank:21944
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MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Anamorphic
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NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Klaus Kinski
Isabelle Adjani
Bruno Ganz
Roland Topor
Walter Ladengast

Werner Herzog's remake of F.W. Murnau's original vampire classic is at once a generous tribute to the great German director and a distinctly unique vision by one of cinema's most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Though Murnau's Nosferatu was actually an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Herzog based his film largely on Murnau's conceptions--at times directly quoting Murnau's images--but manages to slip in a few references to Tod Browning's famous version (at one point the vampire comments on the howling wolves: "Listen, the children of the night make their music."). Longtime Herzog star Klaus Kinski is both hideous and melancholy as Nosferatu (renamed Count Dracula in the English language version). As in Murnau's film, he's a veritable gargoyle with his bald pate and sunken eyes, and his talon-like fingernails and two snaggly fangs give him a distinctly feral quality. But Kinski's haunting eyes also communicate a gloomy loneliness--the curse of his undead immortality--and his yearning for Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) becomes a melancholy desire for love. Bruno Ganz's sincere but foolish Jonathan is doomed to the vampire's will and his wife, Lucy, a holy innocent whose deathly pallor and nocturnal visions link her with the ghoulish Nosferatu, becomes the only hope against the monster's plague-like curse. Herzog's dreamy, delicate images and languid pacing create a stunningly beautiful film of otherworldly mood, a faithful reinterpretation that by the conclusion has been shaped into a quintessentially Herzog vision. --Sean Axmaker

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King of New York (Special Edition)

Sales Rank:9608
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MPAA Rating: X (Mature Audiences Only)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
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Full Screen
Special Edition
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Christopher Walken
David Caruso
Laurence Fishburne
Victor Argo
Wesley Snipes

This low-budget crime thriller has the feel of a major blockbuster and owes its roots to the hard-edged crime movies of the 1930s. Christopher Walken stars as a drug kingpin who is released from prison and vows to use his position and influence--and criminal enterprise--for charitable means. But a core group of New York cops are all over him and his gang, determined to go to war, whatever the cost, to bring him down. Eventually his empire--headquartered at, of all places, Donald Trump's Plaza Hotel--crumbles under the weight of double-crossing and a body count of open warfare with the cops. This is one of the most stylish films of the last decade, with a strong supporting cast (including Lawrence Fishburne, Wesley Snipes, and David Caruso) and some truly enthralling set pieces, including a stunning car chase and gunfight across a rain-soaked Queensboro Bridge. The film's tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top style offsets its nihilism; and its riveting visuals will have audiences hooked from beginning to end. --Robert Lane

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Escape From L.A.

Sales Rank:8641
List Price: $9.98
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

AC-3
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Color
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Letterboxed
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NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Kurt Russell
Steve Buscemi
Stacy Keach
A.J. Langer
Georges Corraface

Kurt Russell reprises his role as Snake Plissken, of the near-future thriller Escape from New York, in this reworking of that film's basic premise. Instead of New York being a maximum-security prison, this time it's L.A., which through the agency of earthquakes has become an island of the damned. This penal colony is where the film's future rulers, something very like the Moral Majority, send those deemed guilty of "moral crimes." But something has gone wrong in this new moral order, because the President's daughter has absconded to L.A. with a detonation device, and Snake is commandeered to retrieve it. The film's dark dystopia, with its satrical elements taking aim at our dwindling freedoms, and the eclipsing of democracy by narrow interests, are more the subject this time. As a result the action suffers, and the plot devices are sometimes weak and predictable. But just below the surface there is a coiled Snake ready to strike. Steve Buscemi's performance as a weasely hawker of L.A. tour maps is a standout, and the presence of Peter Fonda and Pam Grier adds to the fun. In fact, just the sight of Fonda surfing down the flooded corridor of Sunset Boulevard is reason enough to check this movie out. --Jim Gay

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Doctor Who - Planet of Evil (Episode 81)

Sales Rank:10194
List Price: $24.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Original recording remastered
Subtitled
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Tom Baker
Elisabeth Sladen
Ian Marter
David Maloney

When a distress call draws the Doctor and Sarah Jane to a scientific outpost at the end of the Universe, the Doctor suspects dark planetary forces are behind a series of sinister deaths.

DVD Features:
Audio Commentary
DVD ROM Features
Production Notes

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Straw Dogs

Sales Rank:6443
List Price: $14.98
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MPAA Rating: Unrated

Format:

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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Dustin Hoffman
Susan George
Peter Vaughan
T.P. McKenna
Del Henney

One of Sam Peckinpah's most controversial efforts, this film came out at a critical moment in the early 1970s, released in the same month as both Dirty Harry and A Clockwork Orange, causing a furor over film violence. Based on a little-known British novel, the film casts Dustin Hoffman as a bookish American mathematician on sabbatical in rural England, in the town where his young bride (Susan George) grew up. He finds himself forced to defend his home against an assault by local toughs, and discovers a frighteningly feral and vicious side to himself. Though Straw Dogs has a reputation for graphic violence, it actually looks tame by contemporary standards. Instead, the violence is psychological, and the suspense and shocks are induced by the editing--you're more terrified by what you think you see than by what you are actually shown. --Marshall Fine

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Cross of Iron (Widescreen Special Edition)

Sales Rank:17144
List Price: $29.95
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Special Edition
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

James Coburn
Maximilian Schell
James Mason
David Warner
Klaus Löwitsch

Sam Peckinpah weighs in on World War II--and from the German point of view. The result is as bleak, if not quite as bloody, as one expects, in part because the 1977 film was cut to ribbons by nervous studio executives. The assorted excerpts that remain don't constitute an exhilarating or even an especially thrilling battle epic. The war is grinding to a close, and veterans like James Coburn's Steiner are grimly aware that it's a lost cause. The battlefield is a death trap of sucking mud and barbed wire, and the German generals (viz., the martinet played by James Mason) seem to pose a bigger threat to the life and limbs of Steiner's men than the inexorable enemy. Not even Peckinpah's famous sensuous exuberance when shooting violence is much in evidence; the picture is a depressive, claustrophobically overcast experience. The bloody high (or low) point isn't a shooting; it's a wince-inducing de-penis-tration during oral sex. For a fun time with the men in (Nazi) uniform, try Das Boot instead. --David Chute

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Bad Lieutenant

Sales Rank:16389
List Price: $9.98
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
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Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Harvey Keitel
Victor Argo
Paul Calderon
Leonard L. Thomas
Robin Burrows

Proving that he may be the most fearless actor of his or any other generation, Harvey Keitel gives an amazing, no-holds-barred performance in director Abel Ferrara's uncompromising 1992 film about a New York cop on the edge of self-annihilation. The film's title is meant to be taken literally: Keitel's character has no redeeming values whatsoever, save for his desperate need for redemption. Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide is correct in calling this an "over-the-top Catholic guilt movie," but it's been made with such conviction that Ferrara and Keitel transcend the sheer unpleasantness of the material to give it a kind of tragic divinity. Here's a character so vile and corrupted that he consumes or re-sells the drugs he confiscates, but when he's assigned to investigate the brutal rape of a nun who refuses to press charges, he feels that this is his opportunity to redeem his rotten soul. Deservedly rated NC-17 due to its rough content and a frontal nude scene that even Keitel's most loyal fans could do without, this film tends to divide viewers into love-it-or-hate-it categories, but few could deny its raw power and the deeply anguished humanity that Keitel brings to his role. Whatever your reaction may be, few would deny this is an unforgettable film. --Jeff Shannon

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