Blue Man Pix Set to Nix Nazi Flix?

In the absence of any great (by conventional wisdom) films, this year's crop of Oscar nominees represents a far more interesting group of films that we can remember. Expanding the Best Picture nominee list to 10 all but guarantees that, but was anyone expecting District 9 to get a nod? A win is about as likely as an impromptu snow storm localized to the winner's podium, but it's nice to see that not everyone feels the need to ghettoize the horror/sci-fi genre. We're certainly rooting for District 9 over Avatar, which justly deserves every imaginable technical award in addition to a special honorary prize for Cameron for sheer innovation. But as a film, we felt Avatar was ungainly sized at almost 3hrs with occasionally poor pacing and some cringe-worthy dialog. Anyone coming out of that film pretending to be unimpressed should be barred from all professional or amateur film criticism, but the mammoth technical achievement isn't big enough for the weaknesses to totally hide behind – a win in either the Picture or Director categories would be a self-serving Hollywood joke.

The brothers Coen are probably as surprised to see A Serious Man on the list as we are, as it was clearly seen as a deeply personal project for the pair, reflecting as it does on a slice of Jewish life in 1960's suburban Minnesota. A Serious Man isn't an easy film to like (though we really, really did) and this has the faint whiff of a courtesy nomination (or "Mission"). Our major complaint – where is the Supporting nod for Fred Melamed's gloriously despicable Sy Ableman?!?

Haven't seen Precious, Up in the Air or An Education yet, but we've heard great things and look forward to both, though there isn't a power on earth that can get us to The Blind Side and we're frankly astonished to see it here.

Pixar's Up has a dead solid lock on the Best Animated Feature category and that's just where it belongs, as mixing animated films in with the best picture crowd seems to do a disservice to both. Up is a very good film that has moments of greatness, but it's not Pixar's best.

The Hurt Locker left us shaken and stunned; its director Kathryn Bigelow most mature, assured work and easily the best film about modern warfare since Black Hawk Down. Like that film, it wisely eschews politics and large-scale questions about our presence in Middle Eastern conflict and concentrates on characters etchings of the soldiers serving the country. The bomb defusing sequences are raw-nerve tense without any of the typical Hollywood action histrionics that accompany most studio-made war films (the explosions here, though smaller in scale than ones we might see in Transformers, have a ferocious verisimilitude that leaves you breathless). And though Renner is likely to lose out to Jeff Bridges, we were thrilled to see his name turn up on the nominee list. Watch his face in the cereal aisle of a supermarket – wordless, perfect screen acting.

Quentin's Inglorious Basterds really surprised us last fall; we had already gone on record as a Death Proof hater, carelessly spending all the good will that Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror had stored up in the first half of Grindhouse – and we weren't the only one to think that Quentin had lost the plot. But Basterds was a real return to form; beautifully operatic in structure with a fabulously carefree attitude towards historical accuracy and period music (by the time David Bowie appears on the soundtrack, you're either on the train or waiting back at the station) and the product of a filmmaker who still gets jazzed making movies. Waltz seems to be the one universally agreed upon lock in the Supporting Actor category and we will be properly thrilled to see him win.

Major Category Nominee List:

Best Picture
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglorious Basterds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

Best Director
James Cameron, 'Avatar'
Kathryn Bigelow, 'The Hurt Locker'
Quentin Tarantino, 'Inglourious Basterds'
Lee Daniels, 'Precious'
Jason Reitman, 'Up in the Air'

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges, 'Crazy Heart'
George Clooney, 'Up in the Air'
Colin Firth, 'A Single Man'
Morgan Freeman, 'Invictus'
Jeremy Renner, 'The Hurt Locker'

Best Actress
Sandra Bullock, 'The Blind Side'
Helen Mirren, 'The Last Station'
Carey Mulligan, 'An Education'
Gabourey Sidibe, 'Precious'
Meryl Streep, 'Julie and Julia'

Best Supporting Actor

Matt Damon, 'Invictus'
Woody Harrelson, 'The Messenger'
Christopher Plummer, 'The Last Station'
Stanley Tucci, 'The Lovely Bones'
Christoph Waltz, 'Inglourious Basterds'

Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz, 'Nine'
Vera Farmiga, 'Up in the Air'
Maggie Gyllenhaal, 'Crazy Heart'
Anna Kendrick, 'Up in the Air'
Mo'nique, 'Precious'

Best Animated Feature Film
'Coraline'
'Fantastic Mr. Fox'
'The Princess and the Frog'
The Secret of Kells'
'Up'

Best Original Screenplay
'The Hurt Locker'
'Inglourious Basterds'
'The Messenger'
'A Serious Man'
'Up'

Best Adapted Screenplay
'District 9'
''An Education'
'In the Loop'
'Precious'
'Up in the Air'

When I See a Blog that Hasn’t Been Updated in Over 2 Months, I Just Go …

No excuses – we've been remiss. Nearly 2 months without a post has given us plenty of time to concentrate on life's more important pursuits. That one of those pursuits happened to be watching the new Image Blu-Ray of Billy Jack surprises us as much as you. Anyway, for your patience you are now well and justly rewarded with a 2K word fun run through the film. Ready?

Billy Jack

As much a product of its age as a Haight-Ashbury time capsule buried in 1969, Billy Jack is a sequel of a sort to Tom Laughlin's 1969 biker picture The Born Losers, both of which he directed under the pseudonym T C Frank. Losers was straight-ahead exploitation and featured the first appearance of the ass kicking, ex-Green Beret half breed, Billy Jack (Laughlin, looking like Robert Blake's handsome older brother) protecting a small town from a biker gang, who were tough and ruthless in addition to rough and toothless. Laughlin next directed a pair of babysitter sexploitation films and a tepid horror picture, The Touch of Satan, under yet another pseudonym, Don Henderson, before crafting another Billy Jack adventure, this time the scope of the battle would widen to current hot-button social issues with the hero battling both a corrupt land baron and the racist town that he rules with an iron fist to protect the Native Americans on a nearby reservation and the students and staff at a 'progressive' school.

Sitting through the film from beginning to end for the first time in our adult life was an interesting experience. Of course we remembered the Freedom School, the hippie enclave threatened by a small minded racist town whose evil is embodied in Stuart Posner (Invaders from Mars' Bert Freed) whose family fortune seems to rest on killing wild stallions and selling the meat for dog food. We had forgotten how utterly loathsome Posner's son, Bernard (David Roya) was, though – presented sympathetically at first, as we see him refuse to take part in the horse slaughter (mercifully halted by Billy's arrival) and then goaded by his domineering father into all manner of foulness, including rape (both statutory and otherwise) and murder. We remembered that the town sheriff had a daughter, pregnant after running away to San Francisco and being "passed around" from one filthy hippie to another, who goes to live at the school under the protection of Billy and the school's founder, Jean Roberts (Laughlin's wife and frequent co-star Delores Taylor) even if we were disappointed to find the evil sheriff played by one of our heroes, Kenneth Tobey, who spent the 1950s saving the world from The Thing, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and The Vampire, to name but a few. It was genuinely depressing to see him smacking his pregnant teen daughter around, and we cheered his Norma Rae moment when he stood up and screamed at the hippies.

What we didn't remember were the long periods where Billy Jack disappears from the picture entirely, leaving us in the ill graces of the inhabitants of the Freedom School, many of which are played by the actual members of the SF-based improv group, The Committee, including an utterly filthy looking Howard Hesseman. Hesseman and friends are sure that they could bring the locals around and prevent them from passing an ordinance restricting the kids from the town with a display of authentic street theater. Now, for those lucky few out there who can't imagine the sheer moral terror of this so-called 'street theater', let me, as the kids say, spell it out for you. Imagine the worst standup artist that you've ever seen; now make him into the most hideously trite invocation of a 60s radical that you can think of. Add enough members to create a troupe and imagine them doing freeform political skits that will take 'the man' down a peg or two with biting parody steeped in social commentary. Finally, add the realization that they're really making fun of you; they look at you for a moment, size you up for the kill and then begin their impression by ruffling a pretend Wall Street Journal, puff on a pretend pipe and talking like Thurston Howell III. Just think of how much you'd want to punch the little creep right in the Jesus beard – now imagine being stuck in their company for a half dozen endless scenes in the middle of the karate action revenge pic you've just settled down with.



In case you think we're exaggerating, take the 'town square' scene that begins at almost exactly the 1hr mark in the film. This particular bit of hysteria finds Hesseman & Co staging a mugging at a park bench; I won't even begin to go into the bit, but it suffices to say that even the town sheriff gets involved (the nice one, not the racist, child abusing one) and this non-starter goes on for 5 full minutes of screen time! That might not sound like a lot to you citizens reading this now, but 5 minutes passing on film is an eternity (imagine counting "one Mississippi" 300 times) and it became instantly clear why AIP and Fox both jumped ship at various times during the film's production history. That 5 minute sequence is much longer than the film's famous fight scene in which Billy squares off against nearly a dozen agitated rednecks and is far from the only scene of its kind in the picture (you can discover the hilariousness of the Cheech & Chong-inspired 'driving in a car while smoking week' sketch on your own). These scenes strike an indelible chord when paired with the discovery of the body of a brutally murdered Indian boy, or the protracted rape of Jean Roberts while tied nude to the ground.

Scenes constantly butt up against each other that have no business being in the same film, and yet this crazy gumbo manages to come together into a reasonably cohesive picture. It speaks volumes about the show that it's still good enough to overcome these moments that would easily derail a lesser picture. Director Laughlin has a good eye for composition and chooses his angles extremely well; many individual sequences are quite powerful, including the mustang round up that plays over the opening credits (to the strains of "One Tin Soldier") and is good at working us up into a lather while we anticipate the arrival of Billy Jack to set things right. Early in the film, Billy strolls into the town's ice cream shop (obviously a lightning rod for trouble) just after Bernard has finished pouring flower on the heads of the cute little Indian children in an effort to whiten them up and make them eligible for service. Billy stews a bit, rubbing his forehead in a theatrically exasperated gesture and begins talking about how Jean keeps admonishing him to keep his temper in check, all the while moving to within ass kicking range. He then talks at length about each of the defiled children and how long they'll have to carry the memory of this horrific event and no matter how hard he tries to keep his cool, it just makes him go BERSERK!!! The sequences inside the parlor and its continuation a few minutes later in the town square, amazingly, constitute the films only real fight sequence.

Cleverly planted anticipation led us here, and the promise of more kept us tuned in – but all that ever comes is a single, lethal neck chop that triggers the film's final act. We'd really, really like to see more, as the scene is brutally kinetic and superbly choreographed by the great Hapkido master Han Bong-soo, who also stood in for Laughlin for some of the more complicated moves ("I'm going to put my right foot right in your ear, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it"). Incidentally, dropping Han's name in martial arts circles will illicit well-deserved head nodding as the man could literally take you apart and reassemble you before you even knew the fight had started, but also had a sense of humor, owing to his memorable appearance as Dr. Klahn in the "Fistful of Yen" segment in the Kentucky Fried Movie ("Take him to Detroit!"). This action bait 'n switch continued through the film's sequels, 1974's The Trial of Billy Jack and 1977's Billy Jack Goes to Washington, with the hectoring political content increasing and ass kicking decreasing at a geometric rate. And if Billy Jack seems somewhat bloated with hippies and Indian welcoming ceremonies at 114min, Trial feels absolutely soul shattering at 170min (we've never actually made it through Trail in a single sittings, and feel that the even stranger Billy Jack Goes to Washington is an easier pill to swallow at 155min and featuring old pros E G Marshall and Pat O'Brien in supporting roles).

This isn't to say that Billy Jack is bereft of interesting performances; Laughlin is surprisingly believable in the central role (if we drop Robert Blake's name again we fear it will break, but there's some of that same intensity that made Blake a believable bad ass) and Freed and Tobey are old school pros, incapable of a bad performance. One actor for whom this film should have been a breakout is David Roya as the twisted young Bernard Posner. Bernard shows a hint of humanity early on by refusing to slaughter the stallions, but is soon browbeaten by his father into becoming an absolutely sadistic villain, all while maintaining a cool detachment that's, well…cool. Roya is a magnetic presence in the Ryan O'Neal / Sam Bottoms mold and should have been a much bigger deal in a decade that allowed such men to flourish, but bad blood between himself and Laughlin (Roya insists that he was supposed to receive billing on the film's poster, only to have his name wind up literally at the bottom of the credit crawl, leading to a lawsuit that Roya lost and a subsequent unofficial blacklisting). There's a recent interview with Roya here that makes for an interesting read and provides a different look at Laughlin than we've had elsewhere.

Interestingly, Billy Jack's one unassailable claim to fame comes in the manner of its release. After its initial release was bungled by Warner Bros Laughlin negotiated a deal with the studio wherein he would take the film around the country, territory by territory, and rent out the individual theaters (actually letting the theater keep 100% of concession sales) which were then up to him to fill – and Laughlin's clever ad campaign did just that, earning the $800,000 indie in the neighborhood of $50 million, making Billy Jack one of the most profitable films of all time. The Trial of Billy Jack went this release route one better; instead of regional advertising and releasing, Laughlin arranged to have the film released on well over a thousand screens at once backed by television ads on the national network news. The gambit paid off once again, raking in big capitalist bucks for the wildly overlong film. Billy Jack Goes to Washington, however, did not ever receive a general release and only had scattered screenings before its eventual release on home video in the 1990s. The Laughlins will be happy to give you their own set of reasons as to why the film was shelved, most of which have to do with Washington politicos getting wind of the plot and sabotaging the release rather than have their own thinly veiled dirty laundry aired in a feature film. We suspect that few would have the patience to sit through Laughlin's merciless stretching of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in order to shoehorn the unstable Billy Jack into congress (though Laughlin tried to head this particular issue off at the pass by bringing in Frank Capra Jr. as producer).

Surprisingly, Image's new Blu-Ray edition actually looks pretty terrific, giving the nearly 40 year old film its best video transfer by a long shot. The 1080p picture displays far richer color than we would have thought possible, along with strong detail and without any egregious digital manipulation. We're guessing that Laughlin gets a lot of the credit for this, as the film elements are likely under his care rather than rotting in a studio vault and getting passed around whenever a division is sold off. The two commentary tracks (recorded for previous DVD editions in 2000 and 2005) feature Laughlin and Taylor and neither seems different enough from the other to warrant the inclusion of both. There's also a very strange documentary on the film's unique production and distribution history that opts for an unusual cut & paste montage style (along with self-serving narration in very poor-quality audio) and a sampling of TV ads from the period. Laughlin's two adult children appear to be responsible for much of the restoration and HD mastering and deserve to be lauded for an excellent job (with the exception of the unusual menu screen, utilizing funhouse-mirror images from the film backed by odd music cues ripped from a Nic Roeg dream sequence).

Bruno - Blu-Ray Review

After re-watching Bruno this past weekend, the same problem began cropping up that had occurred after seeing it theatrically – I was calling it Borat. Not just because they were both based on characters created by Sacha Baron Cohen for Da Ali G Show (they were) and not just because their formats are closely related (they are) but because the memory of the sublimely hysterical Borat looms so large over poor Bruno that it feels like an also-ran before the Universal logo is even off the screen. Interestingly, Cohen’s third character from that show – Ali G himself – had his own feature long before even Borat back in 2002; a misbegotten, unfunny flop called Ali G Indahouse that should have clued Cohen to the fact that traditional narrative storytelling was a mistake for these improvisational characters. It was easy for Borat to follow a film that most people outside the UK had never even heard of, but the decision to launch Bruno’s eponymous feature film behind one of the most surprisingly successful comedies of the decade was a poor one, as borne out by the tepid box office receipts (things got so desperate in Cohen’s native UK that the film was voluntarily edited after its release to secure a more audience-friendly 15 certificate from the BBFC). Universal, hoping that Bruno – debuting on Blu-Ray and DVD on the 17th – will make up some lost financial ground on home video, have packed the film with nearly an hour of deleted and extended scenes with a very interesting feature that appears to be exclusive to the BD release. But the question remains, is there enough bigotry and hatred in Middle America for both Bruno and Borat?

The structure of the film is astonishingly similar to that of Bruno’s Kazakhstani cousin; flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista, having suffered the indignity of a breakup with boyfriend Diesel and the loss of his show, Funkyzeit, treks to America to regain his lost stardom. With adoring assistant Lutz in tow, Bruno travels to the ground zero of meaningless fame – Hollywood – where he interviews a remarkably nonplused Paula Abdul while sitting (literally) on the backs of immigrant laborers, attends a focus group for a celebrity interview show that’s about 5% interview and 40% flailing penis, and getting instructed on hooking up with only the most fashionable charities. Bruno also goes international, attempting to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians (focusing on the terror group, Hummus) before returning to the states – including Washington, D.C., where he attempts to make a celebrity sex tape with Presidential candidate Ron Paul, and finally Texas, where, in the realization that his homosexuality might be what’s holding him back, reinvents himself as the straightest wrestler alive, ‘Straight Dave’.

Right out front, we need to mention that Bruno contains a solid number of hysterical gags; an overnight hunting trip with a stereotypically “Texas” quartet is brilliantly funny (“That is such a Samantha thing to say”) but an early scene where Bruno visits a psychic to get in touch with the spirit of ex-lover and Milli Vanilli frontman Rob Pilatus may possibly have been the hardest that we’ve ever laughed inside a theater. But the nagging concern that many had with this film holds true for us as well; on Cohen’s television show, the Bruno segment was typically the least funny of the three, mostly because spoofing the vapidity of the fashion industry is as soft as targets come. Like the feature, the TV show had its share of funny moments (like his interview of a bunch of frat boys on a beach during spring break who were clueless to Funkyzeit’s gay overtones until the very end) but the mock interview format had already been better covered by Ali G and Borat, and Bruno just felt the tiniest bit stale bringing up the rear (pun unplanned but enjoyed). After the enormous success of Borat, it just feels like Cohen is retreading the same tire, here, and one gets the feeling that even he knows that this will be the last time he’s going to get away with enough material to craft a feature (during the commentary track, Cohen and director Larry Charles mention just how many times Cohen was recognized and a skit had to be abandoned).

It’s also worth noting that Borat’s innocence in regard to the world around him was actually kind of sweet (even while he throws cash at two cockroaches he believes to be the transmogrification of the sweet Jewish couple who own the bed & breakfast he’s staying in) and helped negate the baseline of cruelty that this sort of humor plays off of. As due-paying members of the intelligentsia, we love to mock people that are dumber, poorer, and smellier than ourselves; laughing at a bunch of narrow minded hicks wearing confederate caps and shirts confirming that their anus is used for defecation only makes us feel wonderful – mostly. One could say that we reached a minor breaking point with ambush-based humor while watching Bruno, and began to feel for the mockees rather than simply laughing with the mocker. When Bruno and Lutz are bound together in an array of dildos and sexual appliances and dumped on a city bus in a mid-sized southern town, we actually caught ourselves hoping that one of these people might pick them up and toss them right off into the middle of the street. Our other issue might have more to do with necessity than intent; after Borat, there are simply too many people who will recognize Cohen, leading to far more bits that had been prepared and scripted in advance (what was our reaction to Bruno and Lutz’s fight and breakup outside of a police station supposed to be?) and Bruno simply isn’t as likeable as Borat. Is sounds silly to pit fictional characters against each other in this way, but it might well explain the low box office receipts.

Universal’s Blu-Ray release of Bruno will be making fans of Cohen very happy this week, as it marks one of the few times that Cohen discusses his work out-of-character. He and Charles appear in a PIP window discussing the film and, at certain points, literally pause the film to discuss one aspect or another (we assume that this is the feature that’s exclusive to BD). Both men are quite funny and have great stories about the shoot (like the fact that only time that Cohen was so afraid for his life that he broke camera was while being chased by orthodox Jews) and the frankly disappointing number of people who were already in on the gags. There’s also at least an hour of deleted/extended scenes, including footage of a few of the other would-be sex tape participants (again, some very big Washington names turn up here) some disturbing footage of Bruno at a gun show, and the not-nearly-as-infamous LaToya Jackson sequence that was removed when Michael died (like Paula, she happily sits on the Mexican gardener’s back and takes waaaaay too long to be freaked out by Bruno’s questions (maybe better to get someone less well acquainted with crazy next time). It’s hard to judge the 1080p image; due to the nature of the shoot, many different cameras with different resolution levels were apparently used, but this perfectly matches the look that we saw in theaters earlier this year. We did love the menu layout, featuring German-ish phrasing for each menu option, but working off the familiar Universal BD functionality.

Edward Woodward

Another sad passing to report. This morning, the superbly talented Edward Woodward, who spent a long career comfortably straddling the fence between character actor and leading man, died in a British hospital at the age of 79. Most of my fellow Americans remember him from The Equalizer (talk about an actor absolutely making a show) but to us he will forever be the doomed Sergeant Howie in 1973’s The Wicker Man.

On paper, Howie must have read like a near unlikeable stiff – an almost unbearably pious and humorless Christian who travels to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle in search of a missing girl – and it must have been a concern for director Robin Hardy and writer Anthony Shaffer that no one would care what happens to this jerk one way or another. But Woodward, with his tough, unforgiving countenance and soft heart breathed humanity into the role, making his ultimate fate all the more tragic. In fact, it isn’t an exaggeration to say that the conclusion of the film represents one of modern horror’s most truly disturbing sequences, and Woodward’s cries of “Oh, God – Oh, Jesus Christ!” will echo in memory long after the film has ended.

Another fine remembrance would be to revisit the fine Breaker Morant, Bruce Beresford’s absorbing courtroom drama about two Australian officers being court-martialed for the murder of prisoners during the Second Boer War. The film arrived on US shores in 1980 as part of a wave of extraordinary Australian films of the late 70s and early 80s that included Mad Max and Gallipoli and announced the extraordinary careers of directors like Beresford, George Miller, and Peter Weir. Morant is an actor’s showcase all the way, making international stars of Woodward and Bryan Brown, who arguably give career-best performances. Woodward would always excel at the tough-as-nails military type, but never let you forget that they were real, three dimensional men. Morant probably led to his acceptability for CBS as the lead in The Equalizer, and throughout 4 seasons of thug-busting his way through mediocre scripts, there was never even the slightest hint that he considered the material to be beneath him. For a more satisfying dose of Woodward in a weekly series, check out the little seen (at least in the US)series, Callan, an espionage drama set during the height of the cold war; he’s disarmingly young, but looks at the world around him with the same weary suspicion and droll humor that Woodward brought to nearly everything he did.

Though it wasn’t his final appearance, we’ll regard his appearance in Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz as Woodward’s true career capper. It’s a film lover’s delight to watch him along with contemporaries like Jim Broadbent, Billie Whitelaw and Paul Freeman having a grand time as members of the Sandford Neighbourhood Watch Alliance, keeping the city safe from absolutely everyone.

Summer is Icumen in
Loudly sing cuckoo
Grows the seed and blows the mead
And springs the wood anew
Sing cuckoo
Ewe bleats harshly after lamb

Cows after calves make moo

Bullock stamps and deer champs
Now shrilly sing cuckoo
Cuckoo, cuckoo

Wild bird are you
Be never still cuckoo

DVD Review - Zorro, The Complete First & Second Seasons (Walt Disney Treasures)

Once again, Disney has dipped into its seemingly bottomless vault of television productions for another gem, the complete series run of Zorro, including all 78 half-hour episodes from both seasons, plus the 4 hour-long specials. It’s been difficult to see the series since its initial run, lasting from October 1957 through June 1959; shot in crisp black and white, the series suffered a grotesque colorization for reruns on the Disney channel in the early 90s (though some episodes were shown in their original versions to please us nitpicking purists). Disney had released small groups of shows in 3-4 episode spurts through the Disney Movie Club (which for us is a nice way of saying “out of print”) making this large scale release all the more tantalizing.

Upon the return of Don Diego de la Vega (Guy Williams) to the southern California (still under Spanish rule) estate of his father, Don Alejandro (George J Lewis) a wealthy and respected rancher, he learns that the region has fallen under the control of the villainous Capt. Enrique Sanchez Monasterio (Britt Lomond). Don Diego vows immediately to use his newly acquired swordsmanship and riding skills to resist Monasterio, but decides to do so behind a black cape and mask in order to protect his family. He christens himself ‘Zorro’ (Spanish for ‘The Fox’) and becomes a thorn in the side of the Captain and his men, particularly the oafish Sergeant Garcia (Henry Calvin). But when not protecting the innocent as Zorro, Don Diego adopts the personae of a foppish intellectual, incapable of even defending himself with a sword, while his faithful manservant, Bernardo (Gene Sheldon) pretends to be ‘deaf and dumb’ allowing him to eavesdrop with impunity. But Don Diego’s lifestyle of leisure deeply disturbs his father, Don Alejandro (George J Lewis) who whishes that is guitar-strumming son were more like the heroic Zorro.

New York City born Guy Williams worked as a fashion model before a string of bit parts in the 50s brought him to the attention of Walt Disney. Italian by birth, Williams slid easily into Zorro’s cowl, and the actor’s 6’3” frame and matinee-idol looks made him an instant sensation. Missing the original airing of these episodes (and though we enjoyed the Antonio Banderas retooling, Zorro-mania has heretofore been lost on us) we were startled by Williams’ effortlessly charming performance. The actor’s natural athleticism (he apparently did quite a bit of his own sword fighting) made a formidable match with his easygoing charm. But we also found ourselves falling for the comic buffoonery of Henry Calvin’s Sergeant Garcia (think of Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes in the Spanish army and you won’t be far off). In keeping with the Disney tradition of largely non-threatening villains, Garcia barely makes a move on-camera that isn’t accompanied by a muted trumpet refrain, but Calvin always made it work, and helped the show strike that elusive balance of comedy and drama that keeps it in the radar of both adults and children (we were incredibly relieved that the show was largely devoid of Apple Dumpling Gang-style hijinks.)

The first season is neatly divided into 3 separate 13 episode story arcs, making for an astonishing 39 total episodes (compare this to any modern network series, which typically top out at 26 episodes per season, or cable, at 13). Some episodes, like the first season’s Monasterio Sets a Trap and Zorro’s Ride Into Terror even flow together, cliffhanger-style. The above description accounts for the first storyline of the first season, but the core cast (minus Lomond’s Monasterio) remained through both seasons, with a rotating cast of villains against whom Zorro battled. The remaining two storylines of the first season involve a criminal conspiracy led by the mysterious Eagle (who was more of a presence once his identity was revealed and played thereafter by Charles Korvin). The second season played a bit looser with the story arcs, allowing for more flexible storyline lengths and even the occasional one-shot (Spark of Revenge, featuring an incredibly young Robert Vaughn) though our favorite features an extended guest appearance by Cesar Romero as Diego’s scheming uncle, Estavan. Sadly, the series came to an abrupt end after the second season due to an ownership dispute between Disney and the ABC network (which also extended to the Mickey Mouse Club). During that time, four hour-long episodes were produced (all of which are included in the new sets) Williams was paid full salary during the 2 years or legal rumblings that followed, but even after a courtroom victory, Walt decided that the Zorro fad had peaked, and did not bring the series back for a third season.

Each of Disney’s new Zorro sets feature an entire season spread across 6 discs, all kept in amazingly good order within a standard-size case (something Sony can’t seem to figure out how to do without resorting to disc stacking). The image is amazingly rich for a half-century old show, with the original black and white episodes looking wonderful – much better than most other shows of this era that we’ve seen recently and easily on par with Image’s Twilight Zone sets. Disney’s historical shows of the period were generally quite sumptuously produced, with lavish attention paid to period detail and production authenticity (see 1963’s Dr. Syn for our own favorite example). The first season set leads off with Leonard Maltin’s typically good-natured intro, and also features the exhaustive The Life and Legend of Zorro, a well-produced documentary on the production of the show, along with a Zorro-related clip from The Mickey Mouse Show (the second season set features the Behind the Mask documentary). In a striking – and pleasing – packaging change from previous Walt Disney Treasures collections, the outer boxes are black-lacquer in color, but feature the usual artwork and photo reproductions along with the ubiquitous Disney ‘certificate of authenticity’. And even though they never fit comfortably back into the outer tin once opened, we enjoyed the collector’s pins enclosed in each and will be wearing the crossed swords emblem fare more often than we should.

It’s impossible to say what children today might think of the Disney variant of Zorro, but we hope that the appeal of these wonderful sets isn’t limited to the adult collector. It would be interesting to get these shows into the hands of kids who haven’t yet developed an aversion to black and white programming, as it’s far more engaging than most current kids fare (including much of Disney’s own output) and, frankly, at least as smart as a good chunk of our present prime time programming.

A lovely image for Halloween Eve...

Thank you, Sir.

Been Cruising the Newsstands for Video Watchdog, Lately?

Greetings, readers. Those of you who’ve been following this blog from the beginning may remember our first post back on Sept 14th, 2007. Since William Friedkin’s Cruising was due for its digital premiere in the 18th, we thought it appropriate that the blog’s maiden voyage should be a brief chat about our long, curious history with the film.

From the days when it was first available on the CBS/Fox video label, we felt a strange kinship with this seemingly unwanted 1980 party favor, a film that its Oscar winning star pretends didn’t exist. We were fascinated by the picture’s view of the shadowy world of the meatpacking district’s gay leather bars painted on an unfashionably nihilistic canvas. Over the years, we realized that few (if any) people cared about the show, as routine investigations brought about precious little information on the film, almost as if it slipped into a black hole. Cruising was the subject of our first foray into long-form essay writing for a friend’s online magazine (though it’s still possible to search out the article, we beg you not to as we find to be just this side of unreadable now) and we were thrilled to find it quoted from in Warner Bros. press release for the film’s 2007 DVD release - apparently, more people care about the film than we thought!

So it’s fitting that the film should mark our doorway into the hallowed halls of Video Watchdog, long considered the Bible for serious writing on the cinema of fantasy and the fantastic. When its publisher, Tim Lucas, announced earlier this year that he would accept submission proposals for the first time, we immediately sent off our proposal for an all-new article on a film which we feel – with all humility – we know better than almost anyone else. The extraordinary news that the article was accepted has been eclipsed only by the arrival last night of our own copy of Video Watchdog #152, in which the DVD spotlight bears a familiar name.



As someone who has enjoyed the opportunity for writing on genre cinema for nearly a decade, VW is a height to which we dared not aspire. It’s the height of the form and we’re still having difficulty believing that we have been welcomed into the kennel. The magazine is not available online, and can only be had at better newsstands or from their website. Enjoy!