DVDIALOG

July 3, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Sitting down and to record commentaries, featurette interviews and episode introductions for the 24-installment first season of the legendary private eye detective TV series Mannix (just released on DVD by CBS/Paramount), star Mike Connors thought he was going to have “a good time”—he just didn’t know how good until he started to sink into the project.

“It was fun to work on it, very fun,” Connors—that’s right, Joe Mannix, himself--told me in a recent phone interview. “But then I sat down to do a commentary with [former Mannix co-star] Joe Campanella, and it ...Read More

July 1, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Here’s the second part of my recent talk with filmmaker Ulli Lommel!

VB: The Boogeyman’s release in 1980 was the beginning of a very prolific Hollywood output.
LOMMEL: I was very busy, yes. Then we did Brainwaves (1983) with Tony Curtis, and The Devonsville Terror (1983) with Donald Pleasence, and one movie after the other. The last few years, we’ve been doing all these Lionsgate movies. I think I must have done more than a dozen in three years.

VB: And you launched your own production company a couple of years back, Hollywood House of Ho...Read More

June 26, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Filmmaker Ulli Lommel has been making movies for nearly 40 years, first in his native Germany, then for a brief time in New York and, for the past three decades, in Hollywood. I recently spoke with the affable, L.A.-based Lommel about his latest wave of Lionsgate-distributed, low-budget movies about serial killers, and his fascinating career, which has included collaborations with Rainer Fassbinder, Andy Warhol, Richard Hell and The Voidoids and The Living Theater.

VB: You live in L.A. now, but I know you’ve spent some serous time in New York.

ULLI LOMMEL: Oh, yes, yes. When I first came to America in the late Seventies, I was there for a few years.

June 24, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

In the words of its writer/director, Sex and Death 101 (available July 1 from Anchor Bay) is “a comedy and a thriller and a psychological examination; it has a one-sentence storyline, but it’s the sentence that keeps on giving.”

The writer/director is Daniel Waters, whose dry wit and caustic dialogue launched his career when he penned 1988’s Heathers. He subsequently scripted such not-nearly-as-fun film as Hudson Hawk (1991), Batman Returns (1992) and Demolition Man (1993), not to mention his first directorial effort, 2001’s Happy Campers. With Sex an...Read More

June 23, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

The first time I ever heard the word “irreverent” (and was informed what it meant) was in reference to George Carlin, the great stand-up comedian and actor whose legendary “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” was embraced by everyone I ever met in summer camp while growing up in suburban New Jersey in the Seventies. Carlin died of heart failure yesterday at the age of 71.

My father was the one who described Carlin to me as irreverent—you see, he was familiar with (and quite enjoyed) Carlin's comedy of the late Fifties and Sixties. That was a time when Carlin was garbed in a traditional jacket and tie, appeared at the country’s upper-crust nightclubs and delivered relatively conventional...Read More