Regular Columns

The serial is an extinct form of movie-going experience. Right up to the fifties, your movie ticket got you not only the main feature, a B-feature, cartoons, a newsreel and other shorts, but an episode of a serial. Usually running 12 or 15 chapters, the serial would unspool in 15-20-minute units, each ending in a cliffhanger (often quite literally so, with the hero or heroine plunging off a cliff in a runaway car, for instance). George Lucas pays tribute to the serials in his Star Wars films, which begin with ...he traditional recapitulating crawl and chapter titles.

Many, many serials are available on DVD, and since most of these titles are in the public domain, you’ll find multiple editions of the same title, with print and transfer quality varying wildly. The rule of thumb here, is, as with everything else, that you get what you pay for, so don’t expect a miraculous viewing experience if you only dropped a couple of dollars on your disc. Major-label re-issues are your best bet. The Adventures of Captain Marvel, for instance, released by Republic Pictures, is a pretty solid package.

Well, it’s that festive time of the year, and what could be more appropriate than the remake of Black Christmas hitting the theatres on December 25? Now, I haven’t seen this film, of course, but the advance word is not encouraging. Head on over to www.dreadcentral.com and you’ll see that it seems that directors Glen Morgan and James Wong know how to do comedic horror (Final Destination), but have no idea how to play things straight. Sounds like we have another fine mess on our hands. But the remake has ...ad a good result in the re-release on DVD of the 1974 original. While the new version has lost some of the features of the previous release, it is now in 5.1. Whatever the home video version one watches, however, this is a terrific film, and perfectly perverse counter-programming.

Director Bob Clark has had an extremely eclectic career. Anyone who manages to have both Porky’s and the Sherlock-Holmes-versus-Jack-the-Ripper effort Murder by Decree on their resume isn’t in any danger of being stuck in a rut. But he also must be one of the few directors to have made not one but TWO significant Christmas movies: Black Christmas and A Christmas Story. Different enough for ya?

Old fogey time. When I first encountered Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K, don’t you know), it was an authentically viral phenomenon. This would have been circa 1993. It was still on the Comedy Network, a station that very few of us in the Great White North had access to. But the closing credits ordered, “Keep Circulating Those Tapes,” and people did. Often, this meant viewing the episodes in multi-duped EP versions so muzzy the dialogue was barely audible, but enough was discernible to know that we were w...tching sheer genius.

A few years later, things become easier. Rhino started releasing episodes on VHS. Renting became a possibility, as did outright purchase, as the prices were eminently reasonable. Flash forward to today. More and more episodes are being released to DVD. At first, there was a mere trickle (two episodes per case), but now multi-volume box sets are the order of the day. So too, unfortunately, is a concomitant increase in price. MST3K is a wonderful show, but not all the episodes are equally funny. Joel, Mike and the ‘bots had some pretty grim movies to work with, and not all of them turned out to be gold mines of humour. But the best episodes have a tendency to reduce one to lethal paroxysms of laughter, and these are well worth the effort to track down.

I’ve danced around the subject a few times already, but I haven’t directly dealt with Edward D. Wood Jr. in this column yet. Frankly, to do so seems rather superfluous. If you’re reading these words, you are in all likelihood intimately familiar with the great man’s work. So I’m not going to do any kind of survey or intro here. Instead, this is something of a plea.

Cult film fans have long been used to having to view their faves under conditions that are often less than ideal. Ten or fifteen years ago, befo...e the full onslaught of the DVD, and when most people didn’t own laser disc players, awful bootleg VHS was often the only alternative. Fortunately, this was never the case with Wood. There were plenty of legit releases of his work, especially those that had fallen into the public domain.