Regular Columns

Severed hand films. Gotta love 'em. Not because they're necessarily good, as such. The ones that have been (the various versions of The Hands of Orlac, or The Beast with Five Fingers) have been, ultimately, psychological thrillers. There have been honest-to-god crawling hands, of course, in wonders such as Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn, but Bruce Campbell's misbehaving limb was a supporting character, rather than the central menace. But I return to my initial statement. Even if the film isn't that good (or good at all), you have to love it for the crawling hand.

Let’s consider today’s exercise a companion piece to my colleague’s excellent Dare to Play the Game column. That’s by way of saying to that I’m going to risk slightly poaching on his turf by considering a tangentially game-related topic.

I’m probably not going too far out on a limb to assume that just about anyone with access to an Xbox 360 or a sufficiently powerful PC played Bioshock at some point in the last year. Among its many qualities, Bioshock is one of the best-written games to have come down the pike, and one of its not-inconsiderable delights is the dialogue it engages with the ideas of Ayn Rand. Specifically, it is her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged that provides most of the game’s philosophical fodder. Anyone with the time to slog through the book’s utterly lunatic thousand-plus pages will surely find their appreciation of the game increased (and this is one of those rare cases where the writing, characterization and ideas of a game are consistently better than the work of literature it is bouncing off). And the book is so insane that is has an absolutely compulsive, Biggest Train Wreck Ever appeal. But let’s pretend you don’t have that much of your life to give up to an experience that can best be described as the philosophical equivalent of high camp. There is a more time-efficient alternative.

Time to praise another journeyman performer, another unsung hero of the heterodox film scene. Today: Robert A. Silverman. He’s been kicking around the scene for ages, popping up in everything from Prom Night to Waterworld to Jason X. But his most memorable work consists of the sterling character turns he has done for David Cronenberg.

So last week, I looked at Universal’s latest collection of their vintage SF movies, a set unfortunately limited to a Best Buy exclusive. We have another one of those today: the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive. It, too, can be tracked down pretty easily through the Amazon marketplace.

A while back, I nattered on about The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection, a Best Buy exclusive from Universal of films long overdue for DVD release. That collection ranged from the top-flight classic (The Incredible Shrinking Man) to the mid-level classic (Tarantula, the official Second Best Big Bug Movie after Them!) to the unsung gem (The Monolith Monsters) to the middling programmers (The Mole People and Monster on the Campus). Today, Volume 2. It’s another Best Buy exclusive, but can still be found quite easily being resold on Amazon.