Film: DVD Reviews

A gory, creepy television prophecy, with extras

'Videodrome'
($39.95, Criterion)
(movie)
(DVD features and extras)

Televisions do all manner of unsettling things in the gruesomely prophetic "Videodrome," David Cronenberg's 1983 sci-fi/horror classic starring an almost boyish James Woods. TV screens swell and stretch like balloons; their frames sprout veins and undulate with breath; blood and viscera spray from the screen.

In Criterion's handsome presentation of the unrated version, Cronenberg's low-budget shocker appears prescient on so many levels: the ominous addictiveness of reality TV, the continuous convergence of man and machine, notions of virtual reality, satellite and cable sources feeding an overstimulated society.

Woods' sleazy network president seeks the most extreme programming in a grab for ratings, and he finds it in "Videodrome," a mysterious reality show of snufflike sadism. The more he watches, the more he has horrific hallucinations, and the lines between what's real and what's in his infected head vanish. This makes for some fuzzy narrative leaps, and at times we're as flummoxed as Woods.

In this abstract nightmare of technology paranoia -- where human reliance on machine leads to the physiological fusion of the two, with all the flesh-splitting gore that implies -- Cronenberg explores his ongoing fascination with "re-inventing the human body," crystallized in the film's incantatory "New Flesh."

The two-disc set comes fully loaded, including two audio commentaries and a pair of shorts casting a deserved light on special effects master Rick Baker, whose pre-digital latex prosthetics give the movie its most memorable, controversial and slurpiest moments.

'Chris Rock: Never Scared'
($19.96, Warner Home Video)
(show)
(DVD features and extras)

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when comedian Chris Rock went from promising, but hardly groundbreaking comedian and underutilized "Saturday Night Live" cast member to arguably the best stand-up comic working today.

But Rock's new DVD of this year's HBO special, "Never Scared," offers one big clue with the inclusion of a much earlier half-hour special, 1993's "Big (expletive) Jokes." In the young, more heavily goatee'd Rock, we can see the stirrings of the staccato rhythms and furious, hilarious outrage that would inform some of his best work, including the seminal stand-up performances "Bring the Pain" and "Bigger and Blacker."

Rock starts out playfully, teasing the audience with mild "the red brick wall at The Improv"-caliber material before veering into his often searing takes on race, relationships, celebrity and sex.

The audience then couldn't have known that Rock would become the polished, more cerebral and infinitely funnier Chris Rock of "Never Scared." He's as funny as in his past few comedy tours, even as he admits that as a 39-year-old married man with a kid, he's bored out of his mind and that nobody's truly happy: "If you're married, you want to kill your spouse. If you're single, you want to kill yourself," he barks.

Though his movie career has been spotty of late, Rock rarely misses his target on the comedy stage, whether he's returning to the Jackson well ("What kind of black man shows up to court 20 minutes late?") or riffing anew on the responsibilities of fatherhood ("If you have a daughter, you have one job: Keep her off the (stripper) pole."). Not only is he never scared -- we're lucky that he's never at a loss for words.
-- Omar L. Gallaga

'Columbo: The Complete First Season'
($59.98, Universal)
(show)
No stars (DVD features and extras)

"Excuse me, sir, but I'm trying to understand -- if you left at 3:30 a.m. on Friday and drove 2 hours to Santa Barbara, how did you get a ticket in Beverly Hills at 5 a.m.?" Even in print, the voice is unmistakable. The "Sorry to disturb you" small talk and distracting pleasantries followed by the final, fatal stinger -- seemingly tossed in as an afterthought -- "Oh. There's just one more thing ..." It's what's known in the trade as a "gotcha."

The voice belongs to Lt. Columbo (no first name given after 34 years), L.A.'s most relentless murder detective. Dressed in a rumpled raincoat incongruous with the South California sunshine, and as disheveled as a walking morning after, Columbo would proceed to flatter, interrogate and pester his quarry until he harried them into submission.

"Columbo" was originally part of NBC's 1971 "Mystery of the Week" trilogy, a series of rotating 90-minute dramas that also included "McCloud" and "McMillan and Wife." Series star Peter Falk literally had the role of his lifetime.

From its inception, "Columbo" took a singular approach to the mystery genre. For starters, the viewer always knew exactly who committed the murder and how; the entire first half-hour of each episode was devoted to showing us the crime. Then Lt. Columbo would arrive in his dilapidated 1960 Peugeot, smoking a half-chewed stogie, and begin to harass the culprit with an unending battery of seemingly innocuous questions, setting him up for the inevitable coup de grace.

This box set contains the entire first season on 5 discs, including "Murder By the Book," directed by a very young Steven Spielberg, along with the two TV movies that launched the series.

In the end, of course, Columbo solves every mystery. Except one: Who killed the DVD bonus extras? There's not a single one included in this otherwise fine set; no audio commentary, no outakes, no deleted scenes, nada. Zip. Somebody call Lt. Columbo.
-- Steve Uhler