With Shout! Factory’s upcoming compilation of The Secret Policeman’s Balls (street: Jan. 27)—a series of benefit shows put together by Amnesty official Peter Luff and Monty Python’s John Cleese and staged in England to raise funds for Amnesty International—I get a great opportunity to look back and listen to a bunch of great music offered by a varied array of talents. These kind of compilations are fantastic time capsules—sorta like the Saturday Night Live seasonal releases, which offer some great music in between the classic comedy bits. What’s most noteworthy when looking at the five Balls as a complete series is the focus that&rsquo...Read More

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As the star and producer of the current thriller Traitor (Anchor Bay, available now), Don Cheadle has plenty of stories to tell about the making of film. He’s been on a slew of talk shows and done a zillion interviews for print outlets and film websites (including this one), talking about how he and his partners got the script out of turnaround at Disney, how they made it with such a relatively low budget ($25 million) and how the “confines” of that low budget still managed to get them around the world (it was shot in five different countries). Cheadle’s will also admit, though, that he didn’t much enjoy talking about the film on the commentary track.

&...Read More

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It’s nice to see that Wes Craven’s way-disturbing 1972 thriller Last House on the Left is getting a Stateside special edition from the good people over at MGM/Fox (available on Feb. 24). There have been several special edition packages of this film overseas, but never on these shores, so all of us hovering in Seventies “Video Nasty Land” are pretty psyched. The advance word is that the set is gonna be pretty expansive and include such supplements as an actors’ commentary, a trio of featurettes including one on the real-life crime upon which the film is based, outtakes, a deleted scene and Craven’s annotated shooting scripts.

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The frontman of heavy metal outfit Twisted Sister for some 30 years now (well, that’s counting the decade or so from 1987 to ’97 when they were broken up), Dee Snider remains one of the most high-energy, rowdy, rockin’ and enthusiastic singers in the business. I spoke on the phone with Snider just a couple of hours ago about the new Twisted Sister twin-disc CD and DVD release, Twister Sister: Live at The Astoria (Demolition Records, available now) and he was all-to-psyched to tell me about the gig, which was taped in London one hot summer evening back in 2004.

“It turned out to be a real special night and it’s fortunate that we preserved it,” Snider eagerly told me. “It wasn’t part of ...Read More

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I’m a big fan of all those mind-bending, brain-draining sci-fi flicks of the early Eighties. You know the ones I mean: The kind where the protagonist taps into the furthest recesses of his mind or something like that, unleashing quantifiable mental energy that’s beyond the understanding of mortal men—and that has the power to destroy us all! I’m talking about movies like Dreamscape (1984), Videodrome (1983), Altered States (1980), Looker (1981) and, most notably (at least for this piece) Brainstorm (1983). The  film will be released on DVD on Feb. 3 as part of the studio’s ...Read More

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From where I’m sitting, Joan Allen looks like she’s having a helluva lot of fun in the Death Race, director Paul W.S. Anderson’s quasi-remake of Roger Corman’s 1975 cult favorite. The film stars Jason “The Transporter” Statham as a wrongfully imprisoned former racecar driver who’s pressured into participating in a race where machine gun hood ornaments and fatal crashes win the day. This “Death Race” is sponsored by Ms. Allen the warden of the prison island where the race is held, and what’s more surprising than the fact that our

I had to tell Jeff Dunham about my planned headline for our brief telephone interview—I mean, it is sorta wacky to interview a ventriloquist over the phone and have him perform some of his stock characters without the pressure of making it look like he’s not mouthing the voice—and he indeed got a kick out of it.

“I guess you were wondering if I would phone it in,” Dunham laughed over the phone. “What’s even worse is when you do a radio spot! When you’re sitting there with the DJs, you’ve gotta bring the dummy and you just don’t know how it’s working over the air. Before I had any notoriety, my poor publicist would try to convince me that it was all still funny.”

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Another holiday season means another release of a complete season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live (as announcer Don Pardo referred to it in the early years before the powers that be dropped the NBC and way before the show was simply to by the call letters SNL). Saturday Night Live: The Complete Fourth Season will be released by Universal on Dec. 9.

The fourth season kicks off with an appearance by then-New York Mayor Ed Koch, who offers a “certificate of merit” to an insulted John Belushi (he wanted a key to...Read More

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Filmmaker Olivier Assayas always has time to talk about Irma Vep, his 1996 film about a French moviemaker (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who embarks on a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 silent serial Les Vampires (which concerns a cabal of Parisian cat thieves). For his leading lady in the epic, he chooses Hong Kong action heroine Maggie Cheung, a distinctly non-French presence, whom he feels can bring a natural depth to the action-flavored production. Zeitgeist is re-issuing Irma Vep as a special edition DVD on December 9.

“There are movies that have their own lives, and...Read More

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For a director known for making some of the most otherworldly movies in the business, Guillermo del Toro is hoping that the extras packed in the Blu-ray release of Hellboy II: The Golden Army debunks many of the myths behind filmmaking.

"It's a way for a lot of young people that have no money or access to a film school to learn the craft of storytelling in films," del Toro told a group of about 200 attendees at the film's DVD-release party in Hollywood last week. "It's like carpentry without the head injuries."

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Okay, there’s no such game or movie out there with this name (not to my knowledge, at least), but I can tell you that actor/filmmaker Saul Rubinek wasn’t playing around when he set out in 2005 to make the independent film Cruel But Necessary, which was just released on DVD by Somerville House/Koch.

“It’s very satisfying to see that the movie is now very real,” director Rubinek told me at a recent screening of the film at New York’s Tribeca Film Center. “All in, the whole movie came in at under $70,000—it was just a matter of all of us putting our forces together for what was a very personal project.”

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Airing on the Sundance Channel in the U.S., Live from Abbey Road is, well, just that: a collection of live musical performances recorded at the famed London studios, the very same facility that has hosted such musical greats as the London Symphony Orchestra, Pink Floyd, U2 and, of course, The Beatles.

Produced by Michael Gleason, the show was issued on DVD or Blu-ray this week—or, rather, highlights from the show as there certainly were a lot to choose from. Included in this Best of Season 1 collection (on the ...Read More

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