Review: 'Frankenhooker' Blu-ray

What is there to say about Frankenhooker that Bill "If you see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker" Murray hasn't already said? Needing to explain to someone why they should see a movie about a grieving mad-scientist who uses the body parts of prostitutes to rebuild his fiancée recently deceased due to a routine lawnmower accident doesn't seem like something a grown man should be doing, even if Patty Mullen comes right to the precipice of genius in her face-contorting performance as the title creature. Will this kind of thing fly amongst those with 2026 sensibilities and sensitivities? What am I, a psychiatrist? All I know is that, much as it is with Bush-era terrorists, you're either with Frankenhooker or against Frankenhooker. If you fall into the latter camp, you probably do enjoy your bong hits.

Review: 'I'm a Believer My Life of Monkees, Music, and Madness Updated'

Micky Dolenz could have easily gone off on some massive ego trip. He was the lead singer of the biggest hits by the biggest band of the mid-sixties. His face was mugging on TV every week for two years. He befriended The Beatles, toured the world, got screamed at a lot (although not as much as Davy), and did some very odd things to a Moog synthesizer. Yet, Micky seems to have somehow come through Monkeemania with his humbleness in check and his sanity mostly intact. 

Review: 'Pretty in Pink: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack'

Pretty in Pink is not my favorite John Hughes movie. Andie is too mopey, and we don't really want to see her end up with major appliance Blane; we want her to end up with Duckie, even though Duckie is kind of a creep. He's friends with Andre Dice Clay, for chrissakes! It's the one John Hughes movie in which the adults are much more likable than the kids. Harry Dean Stanton and Annie Potts really save Pretty in Pink.

Review: 'The Bad Seed' Blu-ray

In 1954, William March published a book about a child who kills not because she's an invading alien, like the kids in The Midwich Cuckoos, or because she's the antichrist, like the kid in The Omen, but because she's entitled, covetous, and completely immoral, like Donald Trump. Because of its all-too-human monster, The Bad Seed was a genuinely scary novel, and with its tight storytelling and clearly defined characters, it was ripe for adaptation into an equally chilling movie.

 The problem was it was a little too ripe. Producer/director Mervyn LeRoy should have sat on The Bad Seed until Hollywood was ready to make a picture about children killing children without pulling punches. Instead, Warner Bros. rushed it into theaters in 1956, forcing LeRoy to defang March's tale with camp eight years before Susan Sontag even got a chance to define the term.

Review: 'The Star Trek Archive: 100 Objects and Stories from the Final Frontier'

Star Trek has been granted longevity that few franchises could ever dream of because it was smart, well-written, had a specific point of view, and was full of memorable, lovable characters. But, like all enduring sci-fi works, it was also full of stuff. Just as Star Wars had its lightsabers and landspeeders, Star Trek had its phasers, tricorders, Enterprises, tribbles, and pointy ears. 

Review: 'Forbidden Planet' Limited Edition Blu-ray

There have been many, many Shakespeare adaptations, but one of the most creative picked up the relatively obscure Tempest and plopped it down on some distant planet in the future. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that screenwriter Cyril Hume or director Fred Wilcox ever copped to the origins of Forbidden Planet, but come on! You have a mad genius daddy and fetching daughter living in isolation only to have a crew of travelers invade their paradise and turn their relationship upside down. Daughter wants to make off with one the ship's captain. Daddy wants to rain down holy hell by commanding the elements. Sure Shakespeare probably never considered an interstellar angle, nor did he conceive of a zany animated Id Monster or Anne Francis in a series of miniskirts short enough to get his play banned in Spain, but the parallels are undeniable.

Review: 'Looney Tunes Collector's Vault-Volume 3'

Looney Tunes shorts have been repackaged and repackaged on DVD and Blu-ray, and it can be a real task trying to make sense of the various golden collections, platinum collections, showcase collections, spotlight collections,  collector's choice collections, and on and on. There's a lot of overlap, although many of these sets will also draw in fans of animated wise-assery because they offer some unique cartoons. 

Review: 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home-The Making of the Film'

The Wrath of Khan may be the best Star Trek film, but The Voyage Home is easily the most lovable. It's the cinematic equivalent of "The Trouble with Tribbles": fun, breezy, a bit silly, and more focused on the dynamics between the crew than matters of galactic gravity. 

I do wish there was a bit more of the Enterprise's crew in John and Maria Jose Tenuto's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home-The Making of the Film, but this is still a pretty wonderful book that really conveys the film's warm, joyous spirit. The writers provide a clear idea of Leonard Nimoy's sensitive directing techniques, the challenges and triumphs of bringing the film's humpback whales to life, and the key members of the film's crew, most notably Kirk Thatcher, the wunderkind who not only served as associate producer, but also played the punk who gets memorably silenced by Spock and wrote and sang the punk song that so displeases our favorite vulcan.

Review: 'I Am the Night: The Ultimate Unauthorized History of Batman: The Animated Series'

Batman has gone through uncountable on-screen iterations (or, at least, two dozen), and each batfan has their favorite. Personally, I'm a campy Adam West fan. But even I will admit that the best realization of the caped crusader was Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski's. Batman: The Animated Series pleased fans to no end by capturing both the darkness and the fun of the comics, which is something that no other on-screen Bat-property has managed. It was beautifully animated, especially for an after-school cartoon from the nineties. The voice talent was top notch and the stories were often excellent. All the Batman movies or TV shows followed in the Animated Series' wake were merely sucking its fumes.

Review: 'The 7th Voyage of Sinbad' Blu-ray set

In 1958, Ray Harryhausen stretched himself beyond pictures menaced by a single big octopus or space monster for a greater challenge and a huge leap into pure fantasy. With The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a whole menagerie of stop-motion creatures were required, and the master outdid himself with the film's towering cyclops, horned dragon, two-headed Roc, four-armed cobra lady, and swashbuckling skeleton. Perhaps the work wasn't quite a refined as it would be five years later in Jason and the Argonauts, and one skeleton is no substitute for a whole regiment of them, but with his first stop-motion-showcase mythological swashbuckler, Harryhausen virtually created a new genre of film that he and he alone would continue to master with Jason, Sinbad's two returns in the seventies, and Clash of the Titans.  If 7th is a bit primitive compared to those later entries, it is no less charming. 

Review: 'Ferris Bueller... You're My Hero'

Imagine crazed Nick Cage as Ferris Bueller, popping his girlfriend Tandy, played by Meg Ryan, out of class so that the couple and their pal—the guy played by Emilio Estevez, not the girl played by Lara Flynn Boyle—can go to a depressing strip club. Ferris is also buddies with that druggie his sister—his twin sister, not his kid sister—meets at the cop station. 

Review: 'Iconic Objects of the 1980s'

Like, if I'm gonna read a book called Iconic Objects of the 1980s, I'm not doing it to learn a bunch of stuff like some poindexter. I'm doing it to get totally wigged out by a bodacious buttload of bitchin' eighties junk. I want every page to be a righteous barf-bag of Rubik's Cubes, shoulder pads, Yamaha synths, leg warmers, Casio watches, Swatches, Walkmen, Pac-men, and He-Men. 

Fer sure, there's all that stuff and more on the pages of Agata & Pierre Toromanoff's new book, but when that book is called Iconic Objects of the 1980s, I expect all the pics to be from the eighties! So, like, what's up with that He-Man action figure (don't call it a doll!) from 2002? Last time I checked, 2002 was not in the eighties. What about that bizarre Garbage Pail Kid sticker that looks nothing like a Garbage Pail Kid sticker... you know, the one I could only find on-line on a stock photo site, suggesting that it's probably some kind of bogus fan art or whatever. In fact, a lot of the images used in Iconic Objects of the 1980s are stock photos. That might account for why a shelf of VHS tapes includes Kill Bill, Resident Evil, and some Harry Potter movie. Those are some great movies from the eighties... Not!

Review: 'Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser'

Tigon Films-founder Tony Tenser didn't produce exploitation movies to satisfy a fetish, like Russ Meyer. He was simply a businessman, more like Roger Corman. So despite some of his dubious accomplishments, like opening a member's only movie theater/men's club and coining the term "sex kitten", Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser is only lurid when describing the plots of some of his movies. And along with bringing such smutty stuff as Naked—As Nature Intended and Not Now, Darling into being, he also produced some genuine genre classics, such as Repulsion, Witchfinder General, Frightmare, and The Blood on Satan's Claw. 

Review: 'David Lynch' Revised & Updated Edition

Break the code, solve the crime. One thing that draws a lot of viewers to the films of David Lynch is Lynch's refusal to express his intentions on the surface. In an age when every film's message must be explicitly stated for an audience with the attention span of a puppy, David Lynch's dogged refusal to ever play that dull game is especially thrilling. 

It also means that theories about what, say, that blue box in Mulholland Dr. means are more plentiful than donuts in Agent Cooper's mouth. Whether they be glib brain farts or endless exegeses, explanations of what Lynch really meant are everywhere. To the late filmmaker's credit, he rarely validated any, but also rarely outright said any were wrong either.

Review: 'A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Until History of Twin Peaks'

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Until History of Twin Peaks had already been on my radar for a bit when my wife told me she'd listened to Glen Weldon's podcast, and self-described Peaks superfan Weldon said he was surprised by how much he'd learned from Scott Meslow's book. 

Review: 'Futuristic'

A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic. 

Review: 'Rewinding the '80s'

When I think of the movies of the eighties, I tend to think of a really fun filmography, whether we're talking about horror, teen movies, sci-fi, or fantasy, the genre that tended to most bleed into all the others. Following a decade in which the defining cinematic style was bleakness, eighties cinema seems like a toy box of action, loud music, product tie-ins, and welcome silliness. 

Review: 'Rocky Horror by Mick Rock'

Mick Rock was a rock star photographer both in the sense that he photographed rock stars and that he was something of a rebel star himself. He gravitated toward the most visually electrifying artists of his time, including Queen, Bowie, Iggy, and T. Rex. So he was the perfect fit to serve as set photographer during the making of that most visual, rocking, and rebellious of seventies cult classic films, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

Review: 'David Lynch: His Work, His World'

Over the course of a lovely but tiring seventeen years of Psychobabbling I've scaled way back on writing anything but reviews here. So I allowed a big, awful milestone to pass without much more than changing the banner at the top of this page. I'm talking about the death of David Lynch, my favorite artist, one who was so versatile, open, and willing to tap into dreams and nightmares, so old-fashioned hardworking, that he has been nothing short of the biggest creative inspiration in my own life. 

I got my start as a writer when my article on the role of dream worlds in Lynch's work was published in the final issue of the Twin Peaks fanzine Wrapped in Plastic way back in 2005. Although I've since published a couple of books, and even got to work on one of them with one of my top music heroes, Dave Davies, the biggest thrill of my career was seeing my name on the cover of Wrapped in Plastic beneath those of Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, star Catherine Coulson, writer Bob Engels, editor Mary Sweeney, and David Lynch. 

Review: 'A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap'

This year marks the historic forty-first anniversary of This Is Spinal Tap, and as everyone knows, the forty-first anniversary is always the most special. So what are we getting from team Spinal Tap this milestone year? What aren't we getting is more like it![?] There will be a new Spinal Tap movie, a 4K Criterion reissue of an old Spinal Tap movie, a new Spinal Tap album, a reissue of an old Spinal Tap album, and a reissue of another old Spinal Tap album. That's a lot of Spinal Tap!