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Cult DVDs

The Straight Story

Sales Rank:4490
List Price: $19.99
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MPAA Rating: G (General Audience)

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Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Sissy Spacek
Jane Galloway Heitz
Joseph A. Carpenter
Donald Wiegert
Richard Farnsworth

Throughout The Straight Story, 73-year-old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) gazes calmly at the night sky, as if the stars were reflections of his own memories. Alvin's eyesight is bad and his daughter (Sissy Spacek) is slightly retarded and unable to drive, so he's traveling from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin on a riding John Deere lawn mower. It's slow going, so there's plenty of time to stop for the night and ponder the cosmos. Alvin's journeying to visit his ailing brother; they haven't spoken in years, and it's time to make peace. Along the way, he befriends a variety of nice folks, and you have to ask yourself... Is this really a David Lynch movie?

It's a miracle that this G-rated Disney film was made by a director whose work is often described as twisted and bizarre. But Lynch is too complex an artist to be labeled, and he brings charm, grace, and kindness to his fact-based telling of The Straight Story--not to mention a serenity rarely found in movies anymore. It's a film of moments--funny, odd, quietly spiritual--and this simple tale of a man, a lawnmower, and rural hospitality becomes a genuine Lynchian odyssey, unlike any film you've seen but as welcoming as a cup of lemon tea with honey. Best of all, it's a fitting tribute to the career of veteran stuntman-actor Farnsworth who, at age 79, plays Alvin Straight to sheer perfection, his face a subtle roadmap to a broad spectrum of emotional destinations. --Jeff Shannon

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Hairspray

Sales Rank:6041
List Price: $14.98
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MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Anamorphic
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Sonny Bono
Ruth Brown
Josh Charles
Divine
Jason Downs

John Waters made his bid for PG respectability with this enjoyably trashy comedy about the racial integration of a teen dance show on Baltimore television in the early '60s. Waters, as always, makes a virtue of junk culture and the powerful emotional forces it can represent as kids vie to get on the show. Meanwhile, a parade of former stars (Pia Zadora, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono) and pseudostars (Divine, Ricki Lake) cross the screen, playing freakish characters absorbed by thoughts of fame. (Waters himself turns up as a weirdo psychiatrist.) This transitional film for Waters is rough going at times and not as interesting or funny as his later features Cry-Baby and Serial Mom, but it's worth a look. --Tom Keogh

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House

Sales Rank:6238
List Price: $14.98
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Color
DVD-Video
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

William Katt
George Wendt
Richard Moll
Kay Lenz
Mary Stavin

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Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 2

Sales Rank:5518
List Price: $19.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Animated
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
Dubbed
DVD-Video
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

John Di Maggio
Kevin Michael Richardson
Cree Summer
Tatyana Yassukovich
Wanja Gerick

Volume 2 of the stylish animated series Star Wars: Clone Wars picks up where volume 1 left off, with General Grievous threatening a group of Jedi. The war between the Republic and the Separatists continues to rage, and due to desperate need, Anakin Skywalker is bestowed the title of Jedi Knight, though he must undergo one final rite of passage by traveling to the frozen planet of Nelvan. The action is at its fiercest when the Separatists launch an overwhelming assault on Coruscant, and Masters Windu and Yoda get to show their stuff to defend the city. However, it's just a diversion from the main goal: Grievious's attempt to kidnap Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. In the series' most dramatic moment, Shaak Ti and other Jedi try to fend off the droid's attack. Clone Wars Volume 2 aired on the Cartoon Network in March 2005, and it's a bit more substantial than volume 1, taking place in five 12-minute chapters (nos. 21-25) rather than 3-minute chapters. And while volume 1 was mostly flat-out action, the developments in volume 2 lead directly to the opening of Episode III, Revenge of the Sith. And you even get small tidbits such as C-3PO (again voiced by Anthony Daniels) unveiling his new gold look, Padme sporting a cinnamon-bun hairdo, and the reason why General Grievous has difficulty breathing. Let casual fans content themselves with the feature films; Clone Wars remains essential viewing for the Star Wars aficionado. (Rated Y7 for cartoon action and violence) --David Horiuchi

DVD features
In both a commentary track and a featurette, Genndy Tartakovsky and his creative team discuss the making of Clone Wars and how it ties into Episode III, Revenge of the Sith. If you're not a fan of the Lego Star Wars, you might become one after you watch the amusing "Revenge of the Brick" trailer. There's also the same Xbox demo of Battlefront II that was on the Sith DVD, and the Dolby 5.1 sound is an improvement over volume 1's 2.0 Surround. --David Horiuchi

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Two Moon Junction

Sales Rank:10556
List Price: $9.95
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Full Screen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Sherilyn Fenn
Richard Tyson
Louise Fletcher
Burl Ives
Kristy McNichol

This camp spectacle stars Sherilyn Fenn (Boxing Helena) as an upper-crust Southern belle who abandons the posh life for sex on the road with a carny worker. Naturally, the older folk (Burl Ives, Louise Fletcher) take exception. Typically silly, soft-porn stuff from director Zalman King (Wild Orchid), this erotic joke of a movie is good for putting one's busy brain on hold for awhile. Colorful support from Kristy McNichol as a cowgirl, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and the late Hervé Villechaiz (Fantasy Island). --Tom Keogh

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Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 1

Sales Rank:4894
List Price: $19.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Animated
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
Dubbed
DVD-Video
Extra tracks
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Genndy Tartakovsky
Tippy Bushkin

Actor(s):

John Di Maggio
Kevin Michael Richardson
Cree Summer
Tatyana Yassukovich
Wanja Gerick

Make no mistake, Clone Wars is honest-to-goodness authentic Star Wars. The animated series takes place between Episode II, Attack of the Clones and Episode III, Revenge of the Sith. If the feature films covers the beginning and end of the war, Clone Wars depicts the actual battles and events that made heroes into legends. Don't expect too much character development, as the episodes tend to be driven more by flat-out action than by dialogue (which can be a good thing, considering some Star Wars dialogue). We see such familiar faces as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and Mace Windu in combat, and we meet the elite ARC (Advanced Recon Commandos) clone troopers plus new Jedi--the amphibious Kit Fisto and two women, Luminara Unduli and Barriss Offee. We also see a little more development of Anakin--showing off the best pilot skills in the army, defying Obi-Wan, and engaging in a deadly duel with Sith apprentice Asajj Ventress. But just when it's clear that the Separatist droid armies are no match for a Jedi, the tide begins to turn with the introduction of the menacing General Grievous, who plays a crucial part in Episode III. The cast mostly consists of veteran voice actors, but Anthony Daniels does appear as C-3PO.

Clone Wars was created by Genndy Tartakovsky, whose resume includes such stylish series as Samurai Jack, Dexter's Laboratory, and The Powerpuff Girls, and the program won a 2004 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming One Hour or More). These 20 episodes, which played on the Cartoon Network (and were originally designated seasons 1 and 2), can be viewed as a seamless 69-minute whole or as individual chapters. DVD features include two commentary tracks, a making-of featurette, video game and Episode III trailers, and an Xbox playable demo of the stealth game Republic Commando. If you're a fan who can't wait for Episode III, Clone Wars is essential viewing. --David Horiuchi

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Kentucky Fried Movie

Sales Rank:5560
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Jim Abrahams
Anna Crawford
Barry Dennen
Rick Gates
Marcy Goldman

Twenty years before the Farrelly Brothers turned raunch into acceptable film comedy, the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker exploited it first. The college threesome made it big with Airplane! in 1980, but this 1977 cinematic version of their live theater show is ground zero for their talents. Like The Groove Tube, Kentucky Fried Movie is a mishmash of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies with no central theme--except their crudeness and laugh-out-loud humor. Highlights include a commercial for "Scot Free," a board game based on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, "The Wonderful World of Sex," in which a couple goes through foreplay with a self- help narrator instructing them step by step, and a 20-minute spoof of Bruce Lee films entitled "A Fistful of Yen." Brazen to a fault, the movie will reach for any punch line, no matter how crude (and those who flocked to the film's initial release looking for R-rated sex will remember the final sketch and the infamous trailer for "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.") Directed by then-unknown John Landis on a shoestring budget, the film has aged. But crassness, when it's this funny, is forever. --Doug Thomas

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Doctor Who - The Beginning Collection

Sales Rank:3828
List Price: $44.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Box set
Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

William Hartnell
William Russell
Jacqueline Hill
Carole Ann Ford

The "unearthly" strains of Ron Grainer's soon-to-be-famous title music announced the arrival of Doctor Who to British TV screens on Saturday, November 23, 1963. It must have been quite a baffling experience for first-time viewers: the swirling abstract graphics, the weird electronic sound effects courtesy of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, the very oddity of the show's title. This really was groundbreaking TV. "I think you'll find there's a very simple explanation for all of this", says schoolteacher Ian Chesterton (William Russell) condescendingly, shortly before being taken on board the TARDIS and transported to an alien planet. For audiences, too, this was something entirely unfamiliar, yet obviously appealing: Doctor Who ran for almost 30 years and remains one of the BBC's most popular shows. His later incarnations were all eccentric in their different ways, but William Hartnell's original Doctor is an irascible and distinctively alien character, not at all happy having to put up with ignorant 20th-century humans. The "Unearthly Child" of the title is his granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford), temporarily attending school on Earth. She is conspicuously different from her classmates and attracts the attention of two of her teachers who resolve to find out why. After an encounter with her mysterious grandfather they are whisked away on an adventure to a different time and place where angry cavemen are trying in vain to learn the secret of fire. Thus the show's trademarks are established from the outset: the Doctor and his more or less reluctant human companions, the mechanical unreliability of the TARDIS, the cliffhanger ending of each episode. It was a formula that rarely changed but that allowed apparently limitless variation, the only constraint being the BBC's budget. In later years the show tried vainly to compete with blockbuster special effects movies; but its original low-key incarnation relied more on inventive scenarios and good writing--qualities that are just as important now as then. --Mark Walker

The Daleks (sometimes called "The Dead Planet") is the second-ever Doctor Who serial. First broadcast between December 1963 and February 1964, the seven-episode story ensured the program's success by introducing the Doctor's most iconic enemies. Five hundred years after a nuclear war has devastated the planet Skaro, the Doctor (William Hartnell), Barbara, Ian, and Susan materialize in a petrified forest where the pacifist, and decidedly camp, Thals face starvation. Our heroes visit a nearby city, the home of the last remaining Daleks, terrifyingly cold-blooded mutants encased in armed, pepper-pot-like shells, and become involved in a desperate battle for survival. Given a nightmarish atmosphere by Tristram Cary's surreal electronic score, The Daleks proved the template for many a future Doctor Who adventure. Hartnell's Doctor is a surprisingly self-serving hero and the ambitious storytelling, which reflects the Cold War fears of the time, belies a tiny budget. The remastered picture sometimes looks digitized, but this story, remade for the cinema as Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and starring Peter Cushing, is still both an effective, if at times unintentionally hilarious, entertainment and an essential piece of television history. A superior sequel, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, was screened in late 1964. --Gary S Dalkin

One of the rarest of the early Doctor Who series, with William Hartnell as the crusty old Doctor, Edge of Destruction is entirely based in the TARDIS, which has stopped somewhere between worlds and times. The Doctor blames Ian and Barbara, the two teachers who came aboard in search for answers about his granddaughter, Susan, assuming they have committed sabotage in an attempt to return to their own time. They, in turn, in spite of recent shared escapes from Cavemen and Daleks, have no particular reason to trust his sanity. Something is causing one after another of them to act with violent irrationality, and the clock is ticking towards their destruction... This is a claustrophobic two-episode plot in which the series examines closely some of its more beloved assumptions. --Roz Kaveney

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Heavy Metal (Collector's Edition)

Sales Rank:4804
List Price: $27.95
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

AC-3
Anamorphic
Animated
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
DVD-Video
Special Edition
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Richard Romanus
John Candy
Joe Flaherty
Rodger Bumpass
Jackie Burroughs

As long as there is a need for adolescent male sexual fantasy, there will be an audience for Heavy Metal. Released in 1981 and based on stories from the graphic magazine of the same name (possibly the greatest publication to simultaneously provoke imagination and masturbation), the film has since become the most popular single title in Columbia/TriStar's entire film library. That's an amazing fact considering just how silly and senseless the movie really is--an aimless, juvenile amalgam of disjointed stories and clashing visual styles, employing hundreds of animators from around the world with a near-total absence of creative cohesion. It remains, for better and worse, a midnight-movie favorite for the stoner crowd--a movie best enjoyed by randy adolescents or near-adults in an altered state of consciousness.

With a framing story about a glowing green orb claiming to be the embodiment of all evil, the film shuttles through eight episodic tales of sci-fi adventure, each fueled by some of the most wretched rock music to emerge from the 1980s. The most consistent trademark is an abundance of blood-splattering violence and wet-dream sex, the latter involving a succession of huge-breasted babes who shed their clothes at the drop of a G-string. It's all quite fun in its rampantly brainless desire to fuel the young male libido, and for all its incoherence Heavy Metal remains impressive for the ambitious artistry of its individual segments. Courtesy of producer Ivan Reitman (who'd just scored a hit with Stripes), voice talents include several Canadian veterans of Second City comedy, including John Candy, Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy, and Joe Flaherty. --Jeff Shannon

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The Hunger

Sales Rank:5424
List Price: $19.98
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Catherine Deneuve
David Bowie
Susan Sarandon
Cliff De Young
Beth Ehlers

Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie are rich, beautiful, and oh-so chic as denizens of the night. Dressed in sleek outfits and stylish sunglasses, they haunt rock & roll clubs on the prowl for young blood, whom they bring home to their impossibly luxurious mansion for a late-night snack. Being a vampire never looked more sexy, but there's a price: Bowie starts to age so fast he wrinkles up in the waiting room of a doctor's (Susan Sarandon) office. The agelessly elegant Deneuve, evoking Delphine Seyrig's Countess Bathory from Daughters of Darkness, is perfectly cast as a millenniums-old bloodsucker who seeks a new mate in Sarandon and seduces her in a sunlight-bathed afternoon of smooth, silky sex. Tony Scott's (Ridley's brother) directorial debut, adapted from the Whitley Strieber novel, revises the vampire myth with Egyptian inflections and removes all references to garlic and crosses and wooden stakes--these bloodsuckers can even walk around in the daylight--but the ties between blood and sex are as strong as ever. Scott's background as an award-winning commercial director is evident in every richly textured frame and his densely interwoven editing, but the moody atmosphere comes at the expense of dramatic urgency. At times the film is so languid it becomes mired in its hazy, impeccably designed visual style. In its own way, The Hunger is the perfect vampire film for the '80s, all poise and attitude and surface beauty. Sarandon talks candidly about the film in the documentary The Celluloid Closet. --Sean Axmaker

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