Meat Grinder is one of those movies where the main character, a woman who murders people and feeds them to her restaurant customers, is so psychotic and morbid that, at first, I didn’t think I was going to be able to sympathize with any of the characters. But that’s not the case at all. In fact, by the end of the movie I really pitied her. She’s had a rough life, and it’s easy to see how circumstances led her to such a disturbed psychological state.

This is a slow-paced, beautifully shot horror movie. Thai director Tiwa Maytaisong turns grotesque imagery into art with vivid colors constrasted against a gritty, grimy background. The result is a Hotel-esque movie, but instead of the nihilistic celebration of violence common in American films, we get a sympathetic look at a woman whose gruesome tendencies have been shaped by an unfortunate life. A sort of horrific drama, if you can imagine it. That being said, there’s enough blood, dismemberment, and meat grinding to satisfy the most jaded horror fan.

At the time of this writing, there is no retail version of Meat Grinder available with English subtitles. The DVD I have was subtitled by a fan from the original Thai DVD. The picture looks great - very sharp, colorful, and clean.

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Peter Greenaway’s artistic and painterly approach to filmmaking is polarizing. Most of us get our first exposure to Greenaway through one of his feature films (typically one from the 1980s) and we pretty much know right away whether we like him or not.

His early films manage to be both entertaining and tedious, with Greenaway’s admittedly self-conscious style in full effect. Here we see his experiments with superimposed text, a fascination with paintings and other forms of art, and the way in which he combines documentary-style imagery with quirky, often ludicrous narrative.

Included on this DVD are the beautifully preserved films:

A Walk Through H - (40min) - In this film, the longest on the DVD, the narrator takes us on a journey through the fictional town of “H” by presenting several painted maps he has collected over the years. The maps have been organized and displayed by his friend, Tulse Luper, and the narrator delivers many personal stories about how he obtained the map, what its relevance is, and what eventually happened to it. The paintings were actually painted by Peter Greenaway and make for an interesting film.

H Is For House - (9min) - An exploration of the alphabet and how it brings together unrelated words in its fairly simple organizational structure.

Windows - (3min) - Shots of windows with narration about the number of people who died after falling out of windows “last year.”

Intervals - (6min) - Lessons in Italian are delivered over black and white shots of Italy.

Dear Phone - (17min) - Humorous tales of telephone obsession are told over shots of various English telephone boxes. Interesting both for its visuals and its narrative.

Water Wrackets - (11min) - A difficult-to-understand study of some type of water creatures is discussed over poorly lit and boring close-ups of stagnant lakes.

The DVD also includes two incredible galleries of Greenaway paintings, as well as a 15 minute introduction in which Greenaway discusses these films and his early experiments. The best way to watch this disc is to go to the “Special Features” and select the option to view each film’s introduction, followed by each individual film.

On a side note, I once drove several hours to see Greenaway present a screening of The Pillow Book which, at the time, he didn’t think would be picked up for distribution in the United States. I missed the earlier, snobby showing at the American Film Institute and instead caught a much later (and I imagine much more enjoyable) screening at a local theater that night.

Somehow this movie manages to be a complete rip-off of Jaws, while capturing none of the excitement that made Jaws such a great film. All the stock characters are here: a handsome guy who wants to prevent the deaths of swimmers, windsurfers, and teenagers, an egotistical guy in a suit who refuses to close the beach, and a fisherman doing his best Robert Shaw imitation. There is very little plot other than the shark attacking various people in short, surprisingly gore-free scenes.

The Last Shark is so clearly a redux of Jaws that, in some countries, it was billed as a Jaws sequel. In the United States, Universal successfully had it pulled from theaters.

After an incredibly cheesy opening, the music is pretty good - typical of 1980s Italian horror and action films with heavy synthesizers and tension-building bass lines. Not John Williams, but reminiscent of the work of Claudio Simonetti and other great Italian composers.

On the copy I have, the letterboxed picture is a little bit jittery, which can be annoying, but the image is not muddy. It has non-removable, non-English subtitles, but they’re white and easy to ignore.

Also known as: Great White, The Last Jaws

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Clocking in at a brief 13 minutes, this short film would later be developed into the masterpiece of the same name, launching Wes Anderson and the Owens brothers into super-stardom. Here, more than ever, their talent is on display as the dialogue and delivery shine through the grainy, black and white, hand-held image.

Watching this film, it seems as if the feature script was already written, then pared down to its basics for the short. It shares much of its dialogue with the feature, and two years later, many of the scenes would be refilmed almost identically - with a modest, but much larger budget.

A great treat for fans.

UPDATE: Industrial Symphony No. 1 is now available in the United States and other countries as part of the David Lynch Lime Green DVD Set. I no longer trade this title.

This collaboration between David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, an avant garde stage performance, takes all of Lynch’s signature elements and presents them in a surreal show filled with symbolism, the haunting voice of Julee Cruise, and the unforgettable music of Badalamenti.

Industrial Symphony No. 1 contains a large number of references to Lynch’s other work. It begins with two lovers breaking up over the phone (Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage in roles almost identical to those they played in Wild At Heart), then abruptly switches to a stage performance that symbolizes the thoughts inside the head of the heartbroken girl. Julee Cruise, seen briefly in Twin Peaks, is the focus of the performance as she flies about the stage and lip syncs songs from the two albums she created with Lynch and Badalamenti. Michael J. Anderson, the little man from Twin Peaks, plays an integral part, as do Lynch’s ubiquitous power lines and unsettling imagery. Badalamenti himself makes an appearance on stage and plays a clarinet.

What makes Industrial Symphony No. 1 interesting to fans of Lynch’s other work, however, may not be the music or the presence of Lynch affiliates, but how it predicts the “psychogenic fugue” style of narrative that he would fully explore seven years later in Lost Highway - a style that he has continued to develop and perfect. Lynch’s recent work tries to replicate that lucid dreaming moment when one is aware of being in the dreamstate. To fully enjoy films like Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire you have to sit back and imagine you’re enjoying a good dream - one in which logic, continuity, and linear storytelling are unnecessary. Looking at it this way, Industrial Symphony No. 1 is closer to Inland Empire than it is to Wild At Heart, which was made at roughly the same time as this performance. It moves through moments of calm, moments of nightmare, and moments of uncertainty like a bad dream. Or a really good one.

The source for this DVD is the Japanese laserdisc. There are no subtitles (all dialogue and lyrics are in English) and the picture quality is very good. It runs just under an hour.

UPDATE: Hardware is now available in the United States on 2-disc DVD and Blu-Ray. I no longer trade this title.

Richard Stanley’s first feature film is one of those movies that could only have been made in the late 1980s - a visually artistic, post-apocalyptic/science fiction/horror film that has more in common with the films of Ken Russell than it does with The Terminator. Many of us lucky enough to see Hardware during its limited theatrical run became life-long fans of the man who, in 18 years, has really only directed two full-length features.

Long before the debacle of Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, Stanley’s film about a robot killing several less-than-likeable humans explored the concept of our own unusual creations becoming a threat to our existence. At the time of its release, I remember reading an interview with Stanley in which he claimed to be filming a documentary in the desert when he received word of Hardware’s funding. He had been carrying a wounded friend on his back for a day or so.

Hardware has much of the late 80s/early 90s post-apocalypse style: a washed out orange/red tint to the image, the implication of a Big Brother-type government, a population of nuclear-mutated homeless people, and a pessimistic attitude that everything is not going to be okay. It’s slow and it mostly takes place in a single room. It’s a movie that just wouldn’t work in the 21st century.

The beauty of Hardware lies in the presentation. With a minimal budget, Stanley created an artistic film with loads of surrealism and memorable imagery that manages to be intelligent and absorbing without being pretentious. A dose of gory violence (which initially earned the film an X rating) keeps things from getting to self-conscious. This is, after all, a movie about a killer robot.

There was a time when Hardware was slated for a Region 1 release. Time stretched on and on until eventually it was clear that it wasn’t going to happen. Fortunately, it was released in limited numbers in one or two other regions. In an age of High Definition, the intentionally washed-out look of the image takes a few minutes to adjust to, but then it starts to add to the movie’s dreamlike feel. A great score, a slight bit of philosophy, and a few quirky characters round out the experience.

This Warner Brothers-licensed oddity of Twin Peaks fanaticism, released only on laserdisc in Japan, presents the Twin Peaks soundtrack album accompanied by professional-quality, shot-on-video images of various Twin Peaks locations. Japanese captions and subtitles play throughout, along with the occasional English title card.

For those familiar with Angelo Badalamenti’s incredible score to Twin Peaks, the presentation of the images perfectly suits each track. “Laura Palmer’s Theme” plays over shots of an abandoned railroad car “graveyard.” “The Bookhouse Boys” takes you on a tour of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office. You’ll also get a glimpse of the RR Diner and its famous pies, among several other famous film spots.

Though it may test your attention span towards the end, this is an interesting piece of documentation for fans. In fact, the best way to watch it may be the imagine that the events of Twin Peaks actually happened and that you are watching a documentary film about the murder of Laura Palmer. The broken-down reality of the locations, in contrast with the romanticized beauty of the show, certainly make it feel this way.

The source for my DVD is the original laserdisc and the video quality is excellent. I wish the Japanese titles could be removed, but after a while I stopped being bothered by them. The scenery changes with each song, making what could have been the world’s most boring home video a moderately interesting look at the people and places of a real life Twin Peaks.

Logan’s Run is one of the classics of 70s science fiction - a combination utopian/dystopian portrait of a future society in which everyone lives inside a shopping mall, travels easily from location to location via public transportation, enjoys liberated free love, and voluntarily dies at the age of 30 as part of a government-run population control. Although the original novel produced two sequels (written to take advantage of the movie’s popularity), the movie never saw a sequel - but it did produce a quality, but short-lived series of the same name.

Logan’s Run: The TV Series follows the logical continuation of the movie if Logan and Jessica had continued running rather than return to Dome City to overthrown the system. They quickly pick up a companion, an android named Rem, and the three go about encountering various unusual groups of survivors who live in the wasteland outside the city - all the while followed closely by the sandman Francis.

Like other science fiction series of the 1970s, Logan’s Run is very episodic - every story begins and end within the time frame of the episode. Their conflict with Francis runs throughout the series’ 14 episodes, but it’s usually just a background plotline or a reason to increase the danger of an episode. The stories usually strive for the psychological and sociological exploration that was done so well on Star Trek , but they fail to reach such heights.

The series is surprisingly entertaining, however, and fans of the movie and 70s sci-fi should enjoy it. Though some episodes lag during the second act, they usually pay off in the end. Gadgets, hovercrafts, and other low budget futuristic devices abound, the interactions between the characters are sometimes intentionally humorous, and flimsy temporary sets provide a sterile future without dust.

I picked up this set at a comic convention - a great place to get cruddy-looking DVDs - and was surprised to find that the video quality of this set is extremely high. I can’t imagine that an official DVD release (which doesn’t exist) would look any better. The image is sharp and the compression is done really well, especially considering that each single-layer disc contains more than 3 hours.