DVD & BLU RAY REVIEWS
Reviews by JAIME PINA
Ignore Heroes TSOL
MVD Visual
Hailing from Long Beach, California, TSOL was one of the most galvanizing bands on the punk scene that exploded after the Hollywood scene had run out of steam. They were part of a “top 3” along with The Adolescents and Social Distortion in the same way the Brit top 3 consisted of The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned. Much like how The Damned differed from the other two, TSOL had a unique and always changing look and sound. They mirrored The Damned in how they were eager to keep moving forward musically and felt no need to keep playing in the same style on each new record. And there were stories about the band. Jack wearing a dress onstage, Ron wearing Captain Sensible’s okapi suit from The Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette album cover, the violence, the pranks. And with the front line all being over 6 foot tall, you know these guys were the real deal.
Singer Jack Grisham directed the film and it looks great. It starts with a pensive Grisham in what appears to be a backstage area and then he emerges on to what looks like an old vaudeville theatre stage looking like some kind of veteran Catskills comedian. When it cuts to his supposed audience it is made up of authority figures like the police, nuns and teachers. I didn’t quite know what to think of this and since it is Jack Grisham, after all, I figured it was a sly comment from Jack on former punk singers like Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins doing “spoken word” shows that are more like comedy monologues. Jack completely disagrees with this. “A rib on Jello and Henry? Because I was on a stage?”
It’s one of the things that sets this film apart from other band documentaries. The other surviving band members, guitarist Ron Emory, bassist Mike Roche and keyboardist Greg Kuehn all give their comments in the conventional way, with their instruments in hand. Another thing that sets it apart from other band documentaries is the fact that there are few music clips by
the band and what we do get is brief. “The movie is about us, the people,” says Grisham. “The music was secondary.”
And as the story unfolds you realize it is true. This is not a film about music. It is a film about these 4 and then 5 crazy juvenile delinquents who started a band because if they hadn’t who knows where they may have ended up. While at first it seems that Jack and drummer Todd Barnes may have been the worst of the lot, Kuehn spills the beans that even while working on the band’s mature fourth release he was “all in” when it came to the stuff that bad boys do. It is a film about five angry yet innocent young men who wanted to experience every bit of fun this world had to offer and music just happened to be the catalyst that brought them together. It’s a film about the ups and downs of friendship.
The film is long as it clocks in at over 2 hours. But it’s a big story with lots of twists and turns. While focusing on the original line-up they do cover the “hair band” years briefly and as of right now their story isn’t over yet. “I wanted to make something unlike other documentaries,” Grisham states and he has succeeded.
Stooge O-Rama The Men Behind The Mayhem – And Even More Mayhem!
MVD Visual
More so than many of their contemporaries, The Three Stooges popularity seems to keep growing. Their current Saturday night slot on the MeTV network is exposing them to new fans and in many cases at least three generations of Stooge-O-Holics are sitting in front of the family television laughing at the antics of the Amalgamated Morons.
This three-disc Blu-ray set is a must for serious Stooges fans but for those just discovering them this makes a great look at their history and the rest is for the vault. Disc one contains an extended cut of Stooges: The Men Behind The Mayhem originally broadcast on the A&E network and then released on A&E Home Video plus some extras. Disc two features miscellaneous film items like crazy outtakes of Moe and Shemp in their younger days cutting up at a packed poolside, home movies from various eras of Stoogedom, a TV segment focusing on a picnic with the Curly-Joe era Stooges and their families, a rare Shemp short film, a TV pilot with a roundtable of comics telling stories with Moe in one of the segments and more. Disc three is a collection of miscellaneous short items including two great commercials for Dickies clothing with Curly-Joe, Moe and Larry, trailers for the Columbia feature films, a couple of commercials from local television advertising Stooges broadcasts and more. Stooges completists will appreciate the digital archiving of some of these incredibly rare pieces of film. The quality is not always the best in a few cases but fans will be grateful for the preservation. Moe, Larry, Shemp, Curly, Joe Besser and Curly-Joe DeRita are all here and so is Ted Healy in this fun, informative and collectable set.
Junk Head
Synergetic/MVD
I had heard a little buzz about this flick but didn’t put much thought into it and took my time taking it off my desk and getting the disc into the player. After the first few minutes of the film I was completely in awe of the craftsmanship and the number of emotions it stirred up in me. As a kid when I saw my first Ray Harryhausen film I was a fan for life. Ray was the master of a technique called “stop motion animation”. It is the art of creating small, moveable figures, building a small set, photographing them with one frame of film and then meticulously moving the figure a fraction of an inch, then shooting another frame of film, moving the figure another fraction of an inch and so on. When you are done you roll the film and it gives the illusion that the figures are moving on their own and have some life and character to them. This was the technique used in the original King Kong and Harryhausen learned from the artists who made Kong.
This technique was used for ages in the film industry to create many creatures including dinosaurs and mythological icons but when computers came into the picture it was less time consuming to create these effects with pixels and the industry turned to producing these types of things digitally. The CGI revolution started off with questionable results, but as technology grew so did the artistry of CGI and stop-motion seemed all but dead.
Director Takehide Hori made a short version of this film almost singlehandedly. When he expanded the film to feature length he brought in a small crew but still did an astounding amount of work including design, building, lights, music and the voices. This personal touch is what’s at the heart of the best stop motion art. In the same way that Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen injected personalities into Kong, the orange Cyclops and many others, Hory really makes us care about the subjects of this film.
The disc looks and sounds fantastic. The lighting is sometimes so stark it gives certain scenes a documentary feel, like you are there. And then a hideous monster pops in and you are jarred back to pure film excitement. The only extra included on the Blu-ray is a “documentary”
consisting of footage from a screening in France and a lot of behind-the-scenes footage including comparisons of storyboard to film and live action references. It shows the sets and Hori creating the armatures and “skin” for the pieces that would become the characters. I use the term documentary loosely because there is no narration, a lot of blackouts and it seems like more of a record of the making of the film rather than telling the story of how it was made. And when I mentioned Hori supplying the “voices” it is because the characters communicate in a grunt-like language. There are subtitles included with the Blu-ray (not included with the DVD) but I watched the film without them and understood enough to be thoroughly engaged. It also added to the otherworldliness of the film in general and it’s a testament to Hori’s skills as a storyteller that the film works fine without them. A melancholy classic for fans of Sci-fi, stop motion animated films like Coraline and NBX, anime, Art Clokey’s Gumby adventures and cool stuff in general.
Invaluable: The True Story Of An Epic Artist
Synapse Films/MVD
Part of the appeal of The Evil Dead trilogy was the look of it. The Book Of The Dead and the drawings inside of it, some early poster art, the stop motion animation finale and the Evil Dead themselves. These were created by a fellow named Tom Sullivan who was an associate of Sam Raimi long before there was an “Evil Dead”.
Directed by Ryan Meade, this documentary centers on Sullivan but is also a fascinating look at what was like behind the scenes as Raimi started off making 8mm films in college and then started making his way toward Hollywood with his partners coming along. So this film works on many levels. It gives us a look at the personal life of the genius behind some spectacular film effects and art, we get a look at the genesis of Renaissance Pictures and it provides a look at the unforgettable special effects being created and implemented in the films. Another great aspect of the film is all the visits to locations in Tennessee and Michigan where scenes were filmed and effects created. There is a creepy visit to the cabin location of the first film where fans are warned profusely not to go as it is private property and trespassers will be shot. The film is a good watch and essential for the hardcore Evil Dead fans. While Raimi only appears in archival interviews Bruce Campbell is on hand with charisma to spare because he is Bruce Campbell. There are plenty of extras including a bonus documentary about Michigan filmmaker Josh Becker, a vintage Sullivan interview and much more.