Terribly Happy, which opened last Friday, is a grungy, deliciously demonic Danish film-noir about a Copenhagen cop named Robert Hanson (Jakob Cedergren) who is transferred to a shit hole of a small town where he becomes entangled with a wily, battered wife. Director Henrik Ruben Genz sets all the sleazy machinery into motion as Robert gets nightmarishly sucked down the rabbit hole into murder and mayhem. There's a nice, lurid and bleak Jim Thompson sensibility to the film and the lead has a scruffy, anti-hero handsomeness.
  

Out on DVD is the bizarre Goodbye Gemini (Scorpion Releasing). Set in swinging London in the '70s, precocious twins Jacki (Judy Geeson) and Julien (Martin Potter) arrive at their father's flat and get rid of the meddling housekeeper by craftily placing their toy teddy bear on the stair landing. She takes a header and is carted off in an ambulance. They are then left to their own demented devices and head to a pub full of decadent swingers and a drag queen disrobing on the bar. There they meet a dissolute couple who unwisely attach themselves to the troubled twosome. The twins are weirdly incestuous and afterJulien is tricked into having a threesome with drag queens in a seedy hotel room the plot unravels into madness and murder. Jacki wanders aimlessly on the streets with a bloody sheet only to be rescued by a slumming politician (Michael Redgrave). Directed by Alan Gibson (The Satanic Rites Of Dracula) and with gorgeous cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (2001: A Space Odyssey/Cabaret) this was also known as Twinsanity on VHS. The DVD unleashes its true beauty and enjoyably nutty oddness.  

Out on DVD is one of my top ten favorite movies of last year: The House Of The Devil. This deliciously demonic tale by the talented director Ti West (Trigger Man), set in the 1980s, is about a pretty college girl named Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) who unwisely accepts a "babysitting" job at a spooky house in the country harboring many satanic secrets. She should have seen it coming based on the two weirdos who hire her, the skull-faced and looming Tom Noonan and the sardonically menacing Mary Woranov. West subverts the horror genre film playfully by insidiously setting up the mood and letting it eerily and slowly play out before slamming home with a fiendish finale. Tracking shots of Samantha wandering through this weird house with strange noises coming from behind closed doors keeps you marvelously unnerved and unsettled. For a promo they sent out the movie on VHS in the old big box format which made me crazy because the movie is such a perfect time machine back to those satanic drive-in favorites. The DVD has commentary with the director and star as well as behind the scenes footage and deleted scenes...

Out this week on DVD is The Evelyn Waugh Collection, featuring two exceptional British TV versions of novels by the acerbic author Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) and his caustic looks at different factions of British society. In A Handful Of Dust, Waugh's gaze is turned on the lifestyles of the upper class, where a bored wife (Kristen Scott Thomas) takes up with a handsome but impoverished man (Rupert Graves) to spice up her life, leaving her husband (James Wilby) and young son back at their rambling estate. But tragedy intercedes. With Alec Guiness, Stephen Frye and Judi Dench. Scoop is about a young journalist and naturalist William Boot (Michael Maloney) who is mistakenly sent by his newspaper, the "Daily Beast," to cover an impending civil war in the obscure (fictional) African republic of Ishmaelia. A particularly sardonic look at politics and the press, based on Waugh's offbeat experiences as a war correspondent. 

Out now on DVD is the rollicking road movie Zombieland. I was hesitant about seeing this movie -- the field is littered with apocalyptic zombie comedies -- but this film, directed by Ruben Fleischer, is a pleasant surprise. A plague has consumed the earth and Jesse Eisenberg plays a nerdy student traversing the highway battling hungr,y hungry reanimated corpses when he collides with ultimate zombie-basher redneck Woody Harrelson. Two wiley gals (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin) get the better of them along the way. There is a major star who shows up later that makes this all worthwhile but let no one ruin the surprise. It's zombilicious...

Finally, Bad Biology is out on DVD! Frank (Basket Case) Henenlotter's triumphantly returns to cult cinema with a wildly transgressive tale of two people with mutant genitalia who find love. Jennifer (Charlee Danielson) has orgasms that usually end in her partner's death (and a mutant birth). Batz (Anthony Sneed) has a penis with a mind of its own. Can these two lost souls find love? With a wild, riotous script by Henenlotter and R. A "The Rugged Man" Thorburn, things gets pretty jaw dropping and fabulous. And special effects wiz Gabe Bartalos really does some creatively sick work here. Henenlotter's other films that touch upon body politics -- Frankenhooker and the divinely deranged Brain Damage -- pale in comparison. It doesn't get any more twisted or better than this.

Out this week on DVD is Pie In The Sky: Series 2, another batch of 10 delicious British mysteries with the marvelous Richard Griffiths (The History Boys) as Henry Crabbe, a somewhat retired policeman, running a restaurant and also forced to solve cases for his Chief Constable Fisher (Malcolm Sinclair). The nice mix between the foodie stuff and the clever crimes really works thanks the Griffiths' big personality and the charm of his wife Margaret (wonderfully played by Maggie Steed), an accountant with no interest in cooking. This go around, Henry investigates a peeping tom, a diner who is found dead in the restroom only to have the body vanish minutes later, a troubled druggie daughter of a fellow officer, a series of home robberies while people are out dining, and there's a hilarious episode where a food critic raves about Henry's restaurant and the frenzy that follows. Lots of fun.

Out now on DVD exclusively through Amazon is the camp classic Kitten With A Whip starring Ann-Margret. This 1964 trash masterpiece directed by Douglas Heyes has Ann as Jody Drew, an escaped jazz-talking juvenile delinquent who breaks into the house of a married politician (John Forsythe). She  makes his life a living hell by blackmailing him, throwing wild parties in his house with her bad boy friends (Peter Brown, Skip Ward) and even forcing him to drive them all to Tijuana. In this ultimate bad girl movie, Ann is so frenetically trashy and fabulously rotten that she burns a hole through the screen.



 

Pandorum, a fun sci-fi chiller that you probably missed in theaters, is out on DVD this week. The talented Ben Foster (3:10 To Yuma, The Messenger) stars as an astronaut who wakes from a long hyper-sleep aboard the spacecraft Elysium, which is traveling like a giant ark through a distant solar system in order to relocate on a new planet. But he awakes disoriented. The power system seems damaged. The only other person he encounters is another officer (Dennis Quaid) and they soon find that while they slept a horde of cannibalistic creatures have been roaming the spacecraft snacking on the sleepers. Directed by Christian Alvart (who made an interesting serial-killer film called Antibodies), the movie is Event Horizon meet The Descent -- but hell, I liked both those movies so I had a great time. It gets way too convoluted for it's own good, but Foster is such an intense presence it helps wash it down.

 

Out now on DVD is Kingdom Of The Spiders, a superior, above average, 1977 creep-fest from director John Bud Cardos about a pesticide that causes tarantulas to overtake a small town in Arizona. With William Shatner (who's actually not half bad) and some amazingly unnerving scenes of arachnid attacks, this is one of those movies that I love to spring on people who just assume it's going to be junky. Shout Factory has done a great job with the DVD transfer, which features new interviews with Shatner and the spider wrangler Jim Brockett, plus audio commentary from the director. If I could rate this movie, I'd give it eight legs up.

Out now on DVD is the second season of Damages, truly one of the best shows on television today. This is a suspenseful, complex and mesmerizing look at an unscrupulous cutthroat lawyer Patty Hewes (a brilliant Glenn Close) and the female attorney in her firm Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), who's secretly joined up with the feds to bring Patty down. The show sublimely skitters back and forth in time like great Hong Kong movies in the 1970s. This season featured a host of fascinating characters: William Hurt plays a man from Patty's past accused of killing his wife; Marcia Gay Harden is stupendous as a sensual, ball busting attorney; and the terrific Timothy Olyphant plays a mysterious stranger Ellen meets in grief counseling who has many secrets of his own. The way these threads all converge at the end this time around takes your breath away and makes one eager for the next round between Ellen and Patty. Re-watching these shows is a real treat to see how seamlessly everything fits together and to watch such incredible ensemble acting.  

Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is dragged back begrudgingly in the exciting two-day, four-hour premier of "Day 8," the new season of 24 that starts on Jan. 17th on FOX. And it's set in Manhattan! Jack is out of CTU and planning on traveling to LA with his daughter and his grandchild when an informant, bleeding, stumbles into his apartment and apprises him of a plot to assassinate a foreign leader (Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor) just as he is about to sign a nuclear disarmament treaty with the US President (the fabulous Cherry Jones) at the UN. So Jack is off and running, and before long shooting and dodging missiles. Freddie Prinze Jr. is a great fit as a CTU agent as is Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff as his data analysist girlfriend with a dark secret in her past. The first four hours are thrilling as usual and  will inevitably hold me hostage for another 20 hours of New Jack City. 

Opening today is the blood-spattered action flick, Daybreakers. And it doesn't suck. Except for the hemoglobin. It's set in a future nation ruled by vampires who are quickly running out of blood. Ethan Hawke plays an undead researcher hunting for a blood substitute, who uncovers a renegade pack (including a crossbow-weilding Willem Dafoe) who may have actually found a cure for vampirism. Sam Neill plays a particularly loathsome leader who is happy to stay undead and intends to resist the underground at all costs. Written and directed by Australia's Spierig Brothers (whose 2003 zombie rethink Undead didn't quite cut it for me), the film is stylish and sleekly action-packed enough to be actually enjoyable. Dafoe is wryly funny, and if a flick like this can allow Hawke to tread the boards at Lincoln Center in productions such as The Coast Of Utopia, that's fine with me...

Out on DVD now is Best of the B's, Collection 1: Hot Bikes, Cool Cars & Bad Babes. Producer/director Roger Corman is celebrated in this box set offering up seven drive-in films (he produced) about hard-driving, hard-living teens. The quality of the movies range from fair to piss-poor but several have never been on DVD before and their lousy quality ads to the exploitation feeling. Included in the set are Bury Me An Angel (1971), which has the best ad campaign: "A Howling Hellcat Humping A Hot Steel Hog On A Roaring Rampage Of Revenge." It stars Dixie Peabody as a tall blonde with a sawed-off shotgun out to avenge her brother. Naked Angels (1969) is another rarity starring Michael Greene, who leads his gang to Nevada to get even with a rival biker gang. The Fast And The Furious (1954) stars John Ireland and Dorothy Malone in a road race into Mexico. The T Bird Gang (1959), starring Ed Nelson, is about a teen syndicate, and also had a great tagline: "Fast cars, fast girls and nowhere to go!" The Winner (1967), also known as Pit Stop, is directed by the wonderful Jack Hill (Spider Baby) and is about stock car racers. Angels Hard As They Come (1971) was written by Jonathan Demme. The Wild Ride (1960) features a young Jack Nicholson as a punk who runs down motorcycle cops and is involved in plenty of high speed chases. So start you motors rolling!

Out now on DVD directly from the Warner Archive is the bizarre 1950 film The Next Voice You Hear. It was made during producer Dore Schary's reign at MGM and it's a cockamamie message movie about God coming over the radio around the world every night at 8:30. James Whitmore plays "Joe Smith, American" and is the typical dad, working in an aircraft plant, with a wife (the future Mrs. Reagan) Nancy Davis, who is expecting their second child, and their young son Johnny (Gary Gray) who even has a paper route. God's nightly broadcasts (which conveniently are not heard) throws the family for a loop at first. They are fearful, upset and lash out at each other but finally unite through faith and love. Yikes. This was directed by William A Wellman (who did The Ox-Bow Incident, Roxie Hart and Blood Alley starring John Wayne). It's hard to remember a movie as weird and so scarily '50s as this one. But I find it a riot.

Out on DVD now is The Moon In The Gutter. Director Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1983 follow- up to his smash hit Diva was this wildly stylized movie based on a novel by David Goodis set around a seedy dock teaming with drunks, deviants, hookers, and wall-size posters for champagne saying: "Try Another Life." Gerard Depardieu plays a dock worker haunted by his sister's suicide (after being raped), who nightly revisits the alley where her body was discovered searching for clues to the man who violated her. He meets and falls for a beautiful wealthy girl (Natassia Kinski) who returns to the neighborhood searching for her dissolute brother. This movie was dismissed by critics and audiences at the time as pretentious, but it has an intoxicating, mad quality that is riveting, and I profess a guilty love for it. According to the director, the original running time was four hours and it was a much better film (but all the footage was later destroyed by the studio). Nonetheless, it's a fascinating, beautiful mess.

Out now is the first season of Glee, Season 1 Volume 1, "Road To Sectionals" (Fox), one of the brightest, funniest, smartest, tuneful shows on TV. The sensational Matthew Morrison stars as harried teacher Will Schuester who assembles a ragtag team of misfits into a glee club at William McKinley High School. The ensemble of kids are terrific -- Lea Michele as a pushy but sweet diva, Cory Monteath as the hunky lovable jock, Mark Salling as the mohawk-sporting bad boy, Amber Riley as the powerhouse soul-singer, Chris Colter as the funny out gay, and the delightful Jayma Mays as the germaphobic mousy teacher Emma. But the standout is the divine Jane Lynch as the ball-busting cheerleading coach and Will's nemesis Sue Sylvelster. The show has heart, it's hilariuos and is a blast to re-watch. My personal favorite episode of this season is Acafelas, which shows off Matthew Morrison's many gifts and charms.  

As Christmas time approaches, I always reach for my weathered VHS copy of Elves (1989). Directed by Jeff Mandel, it stars Dan Haggerty (Grizzly Adams) as a chain-smoking recovering alcoholic who takes a job as a department-store Santa and does battle with a hideous monster elf who rises from the ground after teenage girls perform a witchy blood ritual in the woods. The little demon stalks a waitress, played by Julie Austin, who discovers that not only is her wheelchair-bound grandfather really her father, he's also an ex-Nazi who has bred this elf to mate with her and create a new master race. "Are we gonna be all right?" her little brother asks. "No, Billy, Grandpa is a Nazi." Deanne Lund (from TV's Land Of The Giants) plays her hateful mother, who drowns a cat in the toilet and is electrocuted in the tub when the elf flings a radio into the water. A crackhead store Santa gets stabbed in the crotch by the knife-brandishing gremlin. Haggerty consults a college professor about Nazis and is informed, "If you could ignore their brutality, you could call them just a bunch of crackpots." A neo-Nazi asks the crippled grandfather, "Now that hell is full, I wonder where you will go?" Trust me, this beats It's A Wonderful Life by a mile!

The Sherlock Holmes Collection, of which there are only five surviving episodes, is out on DVD this week. Peter Cushing, who stars as the deductive detective in this 1968 BBC production, had made a splash in the rousing Hammer version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, so they turned it into a series. Nigel Stock plays his trusted assistant Dr. Watson. And The Hound of the Baskervilles is retooled into a two part episode. Also included is the tricky A Study In Scarlet, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Sign Of Four and The Blue Carbuncle. The fact that these exist are fantastic, and Cushing is just great as the wily sleuth. 

Out now is a special edition DVD of Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's meta-war film. This glorious, violently entertaining pop fable that is my pick for the best film of this year. Considering the source -- Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 pulp action movie rip-off of The Dirty Dozen -- Tarantino's film is neither a send up of Italian exploitation nor a fan boy potpourri but almost a hallucinatory comic book of what war movies could be. Beginning with, "Once Upon A Time In Nazi-Occupied France," and set in five chapters, the film alternates between several story lines. One about a scalp-hungry commando team of Nazi killers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his dedicated crew (including a exuberantly witty turn by Hostel director Eli Roth).  The other is about Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) who escaped death as a young girl at the hands of notorious "Jew Hunter" Col. Hans Landa (the astonishing Christoph Waltz) to reinvent herself as the owner of a movie palace who plots to trap and kill Nazi bigwigs planning a premiere at her theater. There are also brilliant costar turns by Michael Fassbender as a David Niven-like British spy and former film critic, Til Schweiger, as a feared German cut-throat, and Diane Kruger as a Mata Hari-like movie star. The fiery action-packed pay-off at the end is wildly outrageous, cinematically dazzling and ludicrously satisfying. Spring for the two disc special edition because there are great extras: A roundtable discussion with Tarantino, Pitt and critic Elvis Mitchell, the making of "Nation's Pride," a great talk with Rod Taylor (The Time Machine) who plays Winston Churchill in the film, and lots of other fun things.