It’s hard to underestimate the importance of Kentucky Fried Movie in my own pop culture consciousness. I love this movie. I first saw it the night I graduated from high school, and that was just perfect timing – here was a flick which was as twisted and crude and as filled with non-sequitur jokes as I was. KFM also marks the first movie to chronicle the collaboration between Jim Abrams and David and Jerry Zucker. All of them have gone on to greater things – including the TV cop show spoof Police Squad and its Naked Gun spinoffs on the big screen – but their bizarre take on everything from TV commercials to the martial arts movie craze is quite evident here. (more…)

MGM rushed a DVD of The Princess Bride out a few years ago, with barely any supplemental features. Ignore that DVD, and focus on the outstanding special edition. You get two commentaries, one from Reiner and one from Goldman. It’s wonderful to see the respect Goldman is accorded by Reiner and the rest of the cast and crew – this was a special book to them, and they knew it was a special book and script to the author, and everyone treats it as such. (more…)

Don’t cry foul, but this is a Region 2-only release only for the forseeable future. The complex web of copyright and broadcast run rights issues surrounding the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie gets particularly tangled in the U.S., with Universal Studios holding the key, that this title may never see the light of day on DVD on American shores. Damn shame it is, too, because this is one of the best ones yet. Thank goodness for multi-region DVD players! (more…)

It’s been a long time coming, and here it is at least: Babylon 5 on a shiny round thing. Both sides of the aforementioned shiny round thing, no less.

After months – nay, years – of speculation, wishing, dreaming, petitioning, and plenty of fan bitching – Babylon 5 has arrived on DVD in this budget-priced, two-movie set containing the 1998 revisionist edition of the pilot movie, The Gathering (originally aired in a vastly different form in 1993 and re-edited later for a 1998 TNT airing), and the sweeping 1998 prequel TV movie In The Beginning. (more…)