Disc Reviews

What do you get when you take one over-actor, one under-actor, a mythical creature, and place them in the Norwegian woods? The answer is Thale, the worst thing to come out of Norway since the Viking raids. This is quite possibly the most boring film I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen Rubber and Southland Tales). Leo and Elvis clean up crime scenes for a living. One day, while cleaning up a scene where a man’s body has been scavenged by animals, they find a hidden doorway to a secret room. In that room, they find a naked girl in a tub hooked up to life support machines and tubes à la The Matrix. Unsure of what to do or how to help her, they soon find out she’s not what she seems, and that different groups want her.

My first problem with this film was the audio. This is one time where I would have preferred subtitles. (There were no subtitles to be had.) The English dubbing over the Norwegian dialogue was worse than a Godzilla flick. Admittedly, I don’t know a thing about dubbing audio, but it’s like the people responsible didn’t even try to match the voices to the actors’ lips. There were times when the audio came on a good half second after the actor stopped speaking. Compounding the bad dubbing was the similarity in the voices for Leo and Elvis, so sometimes the only way to tell who was talking was by the tone of the voice. (Elvis is usually freaked out, while Leo almost always speaks in a stoner’s monotone, but more on that later.) It gets really confusing when Leo and Elvis find the deceased man’s audio tapes, and they start talking over them while the camera is focused on the tape player.

Things needed to survive a zombie apocalypse: a secure location to hole up in, water (lots of water), canned goods, a hatchet, and a high-powered rifle (preferably with a scope). Luckily for Jim, the main character of State of Emergency, all these things just happen to fall into his lap. Produced by the Clay Brothers (Haven’t heard of them? That’s okay, neither have I.), State of Emergency is their second feature film, and though it ultimately shows promise, it could have been better with a few tweaks.

State of Emergency dives right into the story, dropping the audience right into the middle of the crisis. As the film opens, four people barricade themselves in a room; one man braces himself against the door as something tries to force its way inside, then the other man enters the frame. Armed with a rifle, he takes up a defensive position and gives the nod to his partner to move away from the door and let the threat in. Wordlessly and without argument, the man bracing the door steps away and moves behind his rifle-wielding friend. Suspense builds as the two await the door opening, and then boom….the audience is transported three days earlier without discovering what’s behind the door.

"This series presents information based, in part, in theory and conjecture. The producers’ purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will examine."

Everybody loves a mystery. I'm not talking about a murder mystery found in a book or movie. I'm talking about the mysteries of life. We're surrounded by them. Do aliens exist? Have they visited us now or in our ancient past? Can plants communicate? Are some sharks immortal? Is there life after death? How about before birth? Is there really a Fountain of Youth? Do our pets have ESP? There are as many questions as there are stars in the sky. If you're rather fond of these questions, and who isn't? (Oops, that was another question.) In Search Of... is just the vintage television show for you. Thanks to the folks at Visual Entertainment you just got your chance. So ask away.

You need to imagine you are back in 1969. Many of you will have no idea what a different world it was back then. So many things did not exist, like computers and the internet and cable television. So much is available now that people could only fantasize about then. Now any unsupervised 10-year-old can see just about anything they want. It's hard to imagine how big a difference that is. Hiding Playboy magazines under the mattress was about as bad as it got back then. There was a huge unfulfilled demand for adult entertainment when adults couldn't find much that excited or titillated them. But there was a change coming slowly without calling too much attention to itself. Radley Metzger saw an opportunity to create a kind of art film that would let him break new ground.

The film The Lickerish Quartet was one of a number of films Metzger created as a film distributor and director. The films look quaint now. They were filmed beautifully with excellent production values. For instance, The Lickerish Quartet makes superb use of an actual castle (Balsorano in Italy's Abruzzi Mountains) by the gorgeous seaside and countryside. It attempts to use Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author as an inspiration for its existential musings. Metzger's forays are pretentious, but they did break ground in upscale eroticism. Both Andy Warhol and NY Times film critic Vincent Canby gave it high praise.