Opening this week for a limited run before its DVD release on Lionsgate is the brilliant brutal French shocker Frontiere(s). Trust me, you've never seen anything like it. In the film a bunch of kids escaping the riots in Paris head deep into the country and come to stay at a remote inn which they soon find out is filled with a charming Nazi cannibal family. While the movie is ruthlessly violent it's pretty terrific too... beautifully directed by Xavier Gens, who went on to direct Hitman. You really should try to catch this in theaters because when I saw it the audience went ape-shit.....

Opening this week is Surfwise, the provocative documentary about the unorthodox family life of Dr. Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, who packed up his wife Juliette and their nine children in a 24-foot. camper in the 1960s, traveled and all surfed daily on the beaches of California, Hawaii, Mexico -- home schooling their kids and flaunting convention. This surfing dynasty (eight brothers and one sister) became legendary, but this wild child existence made it hard for the siblings to make their way in the real world. Documentary filmmaker Doug Pray illustrates the positive points of Doc’s strict health-conscious philosophy but shows the downside also. Still, the final family reunion in Hawaii is almost cosmic.

Picked up the DVD of an offbeat horror movie from 1974, Devil Times Five. A van overturns on the highway and the survivors are five psychotic children who trudge through the snow and make it to a remote lodge where they are taken in and proceed to bump off everyone in clever gory ways. Sorrell Booke -- who was Boss Hogg in TV's Dukes Of Hazzard -- is one of the unlucky adults, and little Leif Garrett (who went on to be a teen idol and adult mess) plays one of the murderous moppets. These deranged delinquents make for a fun creepy film....

Out this week in a new special edition DVD is Serial Mom, John Waters' sardonically funny tale of a suburban mom (the brilliant Kathleen Turner) who kills people that get on her nerves. Here's the fabulous scene wherein Turner harasses Mink Stole on the phone -- "Is this the cocksucker residence?" -- which makes me crazy. The new disc has documentaries: Serial Mom: Surreal Moments and The King Of Gore about Herschell Gordon Lewis and I'm on both of them, which was fun to do.

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the new book about the legendary Perry Mason star, Hiding In Plain Sight: The Secret Life Of Raymond Burr by Michael Seth Starr. I mean, I knew Burr was gay, but I know very little about his personal life. And I always loved him on screen. With that booming bass voice he was so commanding as a “heavy” or villain in Rear Window, Desperate and Pitfall with Lizabeth Scott. He gave a great turn as the prosecutor in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun, and was just splendid as the beloved attorney Perry Mason on the well-loved mystery series that ran on CBS for nine seasons and then returned for scores of two hour Perry Mason TV movies.

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There's something infinitely cool about Iron Man, the new Paramount action adventure based on a Marvel comic. Robustly directed by Jon Favreau with a wonderful performance by Robert Downey Jr. in the lead, it's a superhero movie with a "swinger's" soul. Downey Jr. plays the brilliant billionaire Tony Stark, who designs sophisticated weapons for the U.S. Army. He is abducted in Afghanistan and kept in a cave and forced to design rockets for a crazed warlord.

Instead, he fashions an invincible suit of armor to escape in which he modifies back at home into a super-charged flying body suit. Jeff Bridges (in full bald Daddy Warbucks mode) plays the weapons manufacturing executive who flips out when Tony Stark comes back from his capture (a changed man) and decides to stop making weapons of mass destruction only to have them fall into the hands of terrorists. Gwyneth Paltrow gives a lovely turn as Stark's devoted assistant Pepper, and the always great Terrence Howard plays Stark's military buddy. When the Iron Man cartoon was first conceived in the early 1960s the villains were the Viet Cong. This Afghan update is a surprisingly prescient and almost cartoonishly heroic in the end results. It's a bit of a relief after sitting through Standard Operating Procedure. Robert Downey Jr. has the nice ability of seemingly throwing away his lines in such an offhand manner but making them count somehow. And the whole film is a whole lot of fun -- the action scenes bring up fond memories of Robocop and The Iron Giant. And the witty hipster sheen makes it all go down nicely.

More grieving over the father of LSD -- Albert Hoffman, who died at age 102. But what I'll especially miss are those fabulous campy movies made about tripping. From serious efforts like The Trip to Psych-Out, The Hallucination Generation, Riot on Sunset Strip, The Hooked Generation, Free Grass, Wild in the Streets, The Big Cube, where Lana Turner was dosed, and of course, Jeff Lieberman's classic Blue Sunshine, in which LSD that you took 10 years ago causes you to lose your hair and become homicidal. Now that's what I call a good trip!

Here's the deal -- Paramount has made a deal with Legend Films films for a series of fun DVDs like The Deadly Bees, Student Bodies, The Possession of Joel Delaney, etc., but they won't be in stores until June 3rd. You can buy them directly from Legend and I just had to have The Skull right this minute and that's just what I did. Based on a Robert Bloch short story The Skull of the Marquis De Sade this superior 1965 chiller directed by legendary cinematographer Freddie Francis stars Peter Cushing as a man who buys occult memorabilia who is given the chance to buy the skull of the Marquis De Sade...but it comes with a heavy price. The evil skull floats in the air and commands him to kill people. Christopher Lee stars as another dabbler in the black arts who originally owned the nefarious skull. The print quality on the DVD is excellent -- retaining the widescreen imagery. It's just thrilling to have it in my hot little hands. Now I wonder if I can hold out until June for the rest of them. Oh hell -- maybe I'll just order Mandingo today....

Coming this week to DVD is The Living End Gregg Araki’s great 1992 film about a film critic (Craig Gilmore) who finds out he’s HIV positive who takes to the road with a unstable hunky gun-toting drifter (Mike Dytri). This self-proclaimed “irresponsible film” bristles with sexy vitality and rage. It's still effective, still sexy and Araki has remastered the soundtrack to rocking effect.

Here's a pretty great new trailer for the remake of the Larry Cohen classic It's Alive!, this time starring Bijou Phillips. I usually get disgusted by the endless remakes, but this trailer surprisingly rocked....

Here's a fabulous "Scopitone" classic with Brook Benton singing about Mother Nature and Father Time with frugging go-go girls, geese, a fake cow and old father time with a scythe... It doesn't get any more sublime than this...

MY WINNIPEG
Crackpot visionary Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World) is leaving his beloved hometown of Winnipeg and decides to look back on his past and the town’s quirky, snowy, sleepwalking ways. He even hires actors to recreate family scenarios. The fabulous Ann Savage (Detour) plays his fearsome mother in these loony recreations. Some of his recollections are priceless -- a fire that caused horses to stampede and freeze to death in the river so that people came to pose next to the horse heads grotesquely jutting out of the ice. It’s poetically poignant as is bizarrely funny. This “remembrances of frigid past” is divinely deranged.

REDBELT
David Mamet’s supremely satisfying new film stars Chiwetel Ejifor as Mike Terry who teaches jiu-jitsu self-defense in a modest studio in West L.A. His business is bleeding money but he refuses to return to the ring to fight professionally because of his philosophy about fighting which he imparts to his loyal students. When he rescues a movie star (Tim Allen) during a bar fight, the actor takes a shine to Terry and he believes his life is about to change for the better. But this is Hollywood and deception and cons and sleazy fight promoters (Ricky Jay) force Terry to return to the ring to regain his honor. What’s fascinating about Mamet’s film is that it works as a martial arts action movie as well as an old John Garfield boxing movie where a character’s character is the plot of the movie. Fortunately an actor as dynamic and brilliant and Ejifor gives the movie a moral center that the audience identifies and passionately roots for.

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I’ve mellowed about the Tribeca Film Festival since it’s well meaning inception (by Robert de Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff) in 2001. You could say I’ve learned to stop worrying and come to look forward to it in many ways. Last year I found myself trying to cram as many movies as possible and this year it surprises me how many good titles are included. Here’s my rundown so far, and I still look forward to seeing the documentary about Squeeze Box…

BAGHEAD
The Unknown Comic meets Jason in this sardonically inspired deranged gem of a movie by the Duplass Brothers (The Puffy Chair). After attending an underground film festival, best buds Chad (Steve Zissis) and Matt (Ross Partridge) decide to take their girls Michelle (Greta Gerwig) and Catherine (Elise Muller) up to a remote cabin for the weekend to write a movie script. Chad is really into Michelle who is eyeing Matt, and Catherine is not amused. Michelle has a bad dream about a guy wearing a paper bag on his head in the woods and they start writing a horror movie -- that is until a guy with a paper bag on his head shows up. Remember when you were kids and you and your friends tried to scare each other until suddenly you actually freaked yourself out? Well, this is that movie. Call it “slackerscare” cinema. While the film could have headed into many different directions the outcome is vibrantly satisfying and had me smiling to myself contentedly all the way home.

BERLIN
“In Berlin, by the wall, she was five feet ten inches tall. It was very nice. It was paradise...” begins Lou Reed’s 1973 rock opera Berlin. I loved that album to death when it came out -- it was about speed freaks, suicide, taking children away from an unfit mother, and looking back at really bad love affairs... every thing rock operas should be about. But it bombed at the time. Here director Julian Schnabel covers Lou Reed’s staging of it at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2006, with a top-notch orchestra, children’s choir and guest singers like Sharon Jones and Antony, who sings an unearthly beautiful version of “Candy Says.” Schnabel’s artful photographic interjections really don’t elevate this beyond just a concert film, but I still insist it’s a great record.

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The hilarious racy 1933 Mae West comedy She Done Him Wrong is finally on DVD, courtesy of Universal Home Entertainment, and it's about time. Based on West's stage hit Diamond Lil, according to TCM's Robert Osborne (in a great introduction to the movie), this had to be toned down to get past the censors, but it's still a howler. Mae plays a diamond-loving saloon singer, who, without her knowledge, is in with a pack of criminals. Cary Grant is the missionary that Mae salaciously asks to come up to her room "some time." But it's fast and furious. While Mae West practically saved Paramount Studios with this hit, the loose morals and double-entendres helped usher in a more stringent Production Code. "You bad girl!" Cary Grant says to Mae West who replies: "You'll find out!"

Saddened to hear of the death of Hazel Court, the beautiful, amply endowed, British scream queen. Her luminous presence graced some of my favorite horror films like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Premature Burial (1962), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Raven (1963). She died in Lake Tahoe, Cal. at age 82. The gorgeous star wrote a great autobiography called Hazel Court: Horror Queen, and will be missed by all of us who basked in her beauty on screen.

It's the kids vs. pissed off middle-aged women in Karaoke Terror, a bizarre, outrageous, apocalyptic Japanese dark comedy based on a twisted novel by Ryu Murakami (Audition). When a 20-year-old slacker follows a woman home one day and slits her throat for no apparent reason it starts a revenge war between her middle-aged girlfriends who meet to sing karaoke. The divorced women who call themselves "The Midoris" plan violent retaliation for the death of their friend. But this sends the boy's friends scrambling for weapons of their own. The whole thing escalates from knives to guns to heat-seeking missiles. Directed by Tetsuo Shinohara, this gets so insane I can't even begin to describe it. Lets just say it ends in a big bang.

Out now is a great DVD set: Perry Mason 50th Anniversary Edition. It's a marvelous tribute to the great TV attorney Perry Mason, based on the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, and played with brilliant authority by Raymond Burr. This four-disc set includes episodes culled from the show's nine successful seasons on CBS and are introduced by the still beautiful Barbara Hale, who played Mason’s devoted secretary Della Street. The ageless, lovely, Hale is just charming introducing episodes with such guest stars as Robert Redford, Bette Davis, James Coburn, etc.

The bonus disc features fabulous interviews with Raymond Burr by Charlie Rose and Person To Person’s Edward R. Murrow. And Barbara Hale is interviewed at length and her fond recollections of Raymond Burr (playing tricks on her during filming) are genuinely touching. They also include a rare TV spot for the American Cancer Society by William Tallman (who played the always losing prosecutor Hamilton Burger). Tallman was dying of lung cancer at the time he did the spot and his family gave permission to use this clip for the 50th anniversary. There’s also rare footage of the entire cast playing charades on the TV show Stump The Stars which is just hilarious. But the best is original screen tests (which haven’t been seen since 1956) made for the roles with Burr auditioning for both Mason and the Hamilton Burger parts.

I can't believe I'm holding in my hands the gorgeous DVD of The Delirious Fictions of William Klein. It's not out until May 20th but it's a must own! William Klein was a famed photographer who worked as a photographer for Vogue before he decided to become a filmmaker. Qui etes-vous Polly Maggoo? (Who Are You Polly Maggoo?) was his brilliant 1966 satire on the fashion industry starring his favorite model Dorothy McGowan as Polly Maggoo, followed around by a French TV crew. Future Dark Shadows star Grayson Hall plays the frosty fashion magazine publisher.

This opening scene of the movie where the models are screwed into these bizarre aluminum sheet dresses is hilarious. This three disc set includes Klein's Mr. Freedom (1969), a blistering satire on America about a Communist-hating super-hero, and The Model Couple (1977) about a couple involved in a controlled government experiment. The eye-popping black and white pop 1960s visuals of Who Are You Polly Maggoo? will make you crazy....

You have to check out this fabulous box set on DVD: Midsomer Murders (The Early Cases). It's a marvelous British mystery series based on the books by Caroline Graham with a charismatic John Nettles as Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby with his intolerant but trusty sidekick DS Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey). The two of them solve bizarre crimes in the seemingly charming English countryside. There’s nice macabre, kinky, twists and sparkling wit and charm as well. This is a great introduction to this terrific series and some terrific people show up as well -- Emily Mortimer, Imelda Staunton, even Orlando Bloom, who ends up stuck with a pitchfork! Trust me, stick this in and you’ll be so hooked.

Finally picked up the new DVD of The Nanny from Fox Home Entertainment. The terrific 1965 British thriller features a fabulous performance by Bette Davis as the nanny from hell. Directed by Seth Holt, Bette is dowdy and prim, and takes care of a disturbed little boy accused of drowning his sister. But there's more than meets the eye in this chiller. Think The Nanny Diaries, only with a killer twist....