Criterion gives the special edition treatment to "Kiss Me Deadly" (Criterion), Robert Aldrich's atomic age reworking of Mickey Spillane. Some have called it the greatest film noir of all time; it is certainly the most apocalyptic and one of the most brutal, and it delivers a pulp punch while it savagely satirizes the entire hardboiled mythos. Reviewed on Videodrone here. The feature debut of Todd Haynes gets a new DVD edition in "Poison: 20th Anniversary Edition" (Zeitgeist). Reviewed on Videodrone here.

 

The rediscovery this week comes via "Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas: Eclipse Series 27" (Criterion/Eclipse).​ While the world was awed by the wave of neo-realism breaking out of Italian borders after the devastation of World War II, local audiences were flocking to the overheated melodramas directed by Raffaello Matarazzo and starring Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson as eternally star-crossed lovers, forever separated by scheming villains, moral hypocrites, lies, misunderstandings, emotional hurricanes and wicked plot twists designed to pour on the suffering.

 

While these are not unearthed masterpieces, they do indeed offer surprises to audiences steeped in the conventions of romantic melodrama. They build from the more conventional soap opera of jealousy, revenge and sacrifice of "Chains" (1949), the first collaboration between the director and stars, to the increasingly amplified complications, outsized suffering and elevated gestures of martyrdom in the subsequent films. The torment of "Tormento" (1950), which takes a page from "Stella Dallas" and twists it into an act of vicious vengeance, is largely engineered by a severe stepmother whose cruelty makes the wicked stepmothers of Disney look like misguided caregivers. And  "Nobody's Children" (1952) and its sequel "The White Angel" (1955) drives the twists with less malevolence and more devastating consequences, the lies and manipulations of controlling family members snowballing into blackmail, crushing loss and terrible tragedy that borders on murder. Matarazzo withholds the reward of a happy ending until the last seconds (and in one case withholds it completely, at least until the sequel) while he loads the film with Catholic imagery and the trials of a modern day Job. They make Hollywood's grand melodramas look timid by comparison.

 

The films in the four disc set are mastered from prints that suffer various states of damage: worn and damaged footage and unsteady footage, probably due to shrinking and splices. No supplements beyond some brief essays by Michael Koresky.

 

Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson star in the 1975 "The Romantic Englishwoman" (Kino), directed by Joseph Losey from a screenplay co-written by Tom Stoppard. "As a director Joseph Losey wasn’t known for his scintillating sense of humor and light touch," begins Dave Kehr in his rich review of the film's DVD/Blu-ray debut in the New York Times, which spotlights "the rather more witty and playful" quality of the film. "Uncharacteristic as it may be, “The Romantic Englishwoman” remains one of Losey’s most accomplished and engaging films." Also new from Kino is "Priest of Love" (Kino), a 1981 biographical drama starring Ian McKellan as D.H. Lawrence and co-starring Janet Suzman and Ava Gardner. The latter features a documentary on the film, interviews and deleted scenes. 

 

Criterion gives the special edition treatment to "Kiss Me Deadly" (Criterion), Robert Aldrich's atomic age reworking of Mickey Spillane. Some have called it the greatest film noir of all time; it is certainly the most apocalyptic and one of the most brutal, and it delivers a pulp punch while it savagely satirizes the entire hardboiled mythos. And the Blu-ray is gorgeous, which is weird to use in the context of this tawdry film shot on large part in the bowels of the old Bunker Hill neighborhood, but there you go. Reviewed on Videodrone here.

 

"Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society" (Anchor Bay)

"Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex: Laughing Man" (Anchor Bay)

"Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex: Individual Eleven" (Anchor Bay)

The serialized spin-off of the landmark anime feature "Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex" is actually a prequel, following the adventures of the covert cyber-S.W.A.T. team known as Section 9 that specializes in tech-crime and robotics gone wrong in a near future society where technology is not only a deadly tool for human criminals, but is evolving in its own right. Though not quite as dark as its inspiration, the series offers solid cyberpunk stories animated with style and designed and executed with a detail rarely seen outside of theatrical features.

 

The show ran for two series and both were released on DVD in multiple volumes of individual episodes. The Blu-ray editions edit multi-episode stories into complete features. It works quite well, in fact, removing some of the narrative hiccups and streamlining the stories, but I do wish that the discs would identity the episodes that make up each feature-length story. Because we really do want to see these things in order. Each disc also features a substantial collection of in-depth behind-the-scenes featurettes, all in Japanese with English subtitles.

 

Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are clones in search of self in "The Island" (Paramount),  Michael Bay’s science fiction thriller turned property damage spectacle. Raised in an isolated, antiseptic compound in the wake of a nuclear holocaust (or so they are told), an entire society is raised on strict diets and indoctrination, trained to be simple and compliant and unquestioning. McGregor is the lone voice questions his existence and yearn for something more than the regimented life and he escapes into the crazy urban world with fellow naïf Johansson, with a small army of mercenaries (led by Djimon Hounsou) on their trail. The similarities to Robert Fiveson’s "Clonus," an almost forgotten film from the late seventies, are startling, and not to Bay’s credit. If anything, the ideas here are dumbed down in direct proportion to the increase in budget and the scale. The final act, however, is pure Michael Bay: a half-baked plan that stretches credulity and maximizes onscreen destruction. Features commentary by director Michael Bay and a couple of featurettes.

 

Jackie Chan's 2003 "The Medallion" (Image), directed by Gordon Chan, is a Hong Kong produced action comedy that attempts to fuse elements of his classic, slapstick-laced Hong Kong films with the big budget slickness of his Hollywood hits. New York Times critic Dave Kehr called it a “moderately successful attempt to bring Mr. Chan's two careers together” but critics generally agree that it is minor Jackie nonsense. Features commentary by co-executive producer Bill Borden and editor Don Brochu

 

Also debuting on Blu-ray: Joseph Losey's "The Romantic Englishwoman" (Kino) and "Priest of Love" (Kino) with Ian McKellan as D.H. Lawrence. The New Release Rack includes all the new films hitting Blu-ray as well.

 

"Poison: 20th Anniversary Edition" (Zeitgeist) celebrate the directorial debut of Todd Haynes. An audacious, disturbing film that explores taboo subjects in alternately poetic and grotesque imagery, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and Haynes went on to direct "Far From Heaven," "I'm Not There" and the acclaimed "Mildred Pierce" mini-series. But when the film, which presents an explicit gay love affair in one section, first came out, its fame was as a cause célèbre. The conservative American Family Association launched a media attack on the film when it was revealed that it was in part funded by a grant from the NEA and conservative politicians joined the fray. The ensuing controversy gave the low budget, highly uncommercial 16mm production a far wider audience than it otherwise would have drawn. Hayne’s own provocative and fiercely independent vision justified the attention.

 

Haynes directs the triumvirate of tales in three disparate but vivid styles. "Horror" utilizes distorted lenses and stark B&W stock to create an alienated take on 1950s monster movies in the story of a sex researcher who becomes a deformed, disease ridden monster after he distills and, accidentally, ingests the essence of the human sex drive. In "Hero" Haynes takes to the flat TV news documentary style to tell, through a series of mock interviews, the story of a seven year old boy who escaped his abusive father with a Grimm Fairy Tale twist. The final and most substantial sequence, “Homo” (adapted from the works of Jean Genet, most notably “Thief's Journal”) alternates between a deceptively idyllic Eden-like vision of childhood and a dark, claustrophobic prison to explore the sado-masochistic romance between two thieves in terms both beautiful and brutal.

 

The film has been digitally remastered from the original elements for the new release. Along with the archival commentary with Todd Haynes, producer Christine Vachon and editor James Lyons (recorded for the 1999 DVD release), the new DVD features an audience Q&A with Haynes, Vachon and executive producer James Schamus from the anniversary screening of the film at Sundance 2011, the short film "Last Address" by Ira Sachs and galleries of poster concepts by Haynes and Polaroids taken on the set by Kelly Reichardt (who was on the crew). An accompanying booklet reprints production notes and J. Hoberman's original Village Voice review along with brief original essays. Comes in a paperboard digipak.

 

Catch up with "Louie: The Complete First Season" (Fox), Louis C.K.'s quasi-autobiographic​​al sitcom about a recently divorced comedian with two young daughters and an awkward reintroduction to the dating scene, on DVD and Blu-ray before the new season begins. In an age where cable keeps trying to push the envelope of acceptable material, "Louie" tosses it out there and then confronts it head on: racism, homophobia, politics, sex, all of it, done smartly and with a sense of humor. Reviewed on Videodrone here.

 

"Medium: The Seventh and Final Season" (Paramount) wraps one of the most underrated shows on TV, a family drama wrapped in a supernatural mystery. Allison Dubois (Patricia Arquette) and her family have been through a lot in the six seasons leading up to this—some of it a result of a sometimes unwelcome gift for second sight, most of it just the travails of a middle class family dealing with work, marriage, growing children and the anxieties keeping it all together in a rough economy—and the show's strength has always been its balance of crime drama and family drama. That her daughters have received her gift—which can be an assault on the senses and the emotions—only complicates growing up. The final season is an abbreviated 13-episode run but it brings the show back to the family and friends and the spiritual shadows hanging over them, much of it around her husband (Jake Weber). The four-disc set (in a standard case with hinged trays) also has featurettes, character profiles and a retrospective of the show.

 

There are a lot of cop shows on TV and just as many colorful squadroom casts, but "The Closer: The Complete Sixth Season" (Warner) brings back the most well-oiled detective squad on TV, something that fans of the show have watched come together under the tenacious and talented Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) over the seasons. Which makes their brand of professionalism and camaraderie all the more impressive because it feels earned, forged under the pressure of job. Meanwhile, this season observes the equilibrium of the department go off-balance when Johnson is encouraged (by Mary McDonnell's Internal Affairs officer) to apply for Police Chief, putting her in direct competition with her boss (and former lover) J.K. Simmons. 15 episodes on three discs in a standard case with hinged trays, plus a "Script to Screen" featurette following the making of the third episode of the season, an interview with Sedgwick, deleted scenes and a gag reel. Season seven begins in July in TNT.

 

"Rocko's Modern Life: Season One" (Shout! Factory), being the oddball animated adventures of an Australian wallaby and his friends, debuted on Nickelodeon in 1993. It was one of the channel's first original animation programming hits and became a favorite of kids and adults over its first four seasons. The 13 episodes of the first season debuts this week on DVD from Shout! Factory, a company dedicated to all manner of small screen nostalgia. Two discs, no supplements.

 

BritTV:

"Wired" (Acorn) is a new three-part thriller set in the modern world of international banking and organized crime, starring Jodie Whittaker as newly-promoted bank officer targeted by criminals to engineer a banking scam and Toby Stephens as an undercover cop with ambiguous loyalties. There's an interview with the stars at the Telegraph here.

 

A little more vintage is "Under the Hammer" (Acorn), a 1994 mystery series created by John Mortimer ("Rumpole of the Bailey") and set in the world of auction houses and antiquities. Richard Wilson stars. Seven episodes on two discs. And "Miss Marple: The Pale Horse" (Acorn), the latest entry in the British mystery series with Julia McKenzie, hits DVD a few weeks before its stateside debut on "Masterpiece Mystery!" and the disc features an earlier TV adaptation of the book from 1997.

 

TV Movies and Mini-Series (Vintage models):

Joan Collins was TV's favorite high-society schemer and seductress in the eighties, as these two mini-series/multi-pa​rt movies attest. In the 1986 "Monte Carlo" (Olive), adapted from the World War II espionage romance by Stephen Sheppard, she's a cabaret celebrity by day and a double agent for British Intelligence by night (or maybe it's the other way around, and in 1988's "Sins" (Olive), from the Judith Gould novel, she a fashion mogul surrounded by backstabbing rivals. Chris Nashawaty has fun with the trash-with-class TV shows at Entertainment Weekly here.

Also new this week is "Queenie" (Olive), starring Kirk Douglas, Sarah Miles, Joel Grey and Mia Sara as a fictionalized version of real-life star Merle Oberon, and the notorious 1974 "Movie of the Week" "Born Innocent" (Hen's Tooth) with Linda Blair, which gets its due in this week's "Cult Watch" here.

 

SyFy has its Saturday night creature feature original movies down to a science. Bad science, mind you, but that is its charm, and the latest SyFy Original Movie to hit home video is an exemplar of its camp approach to monster mash moviemaking.

 

"Mega Python vs. Gatoroid" (Image) unites eighties pop stars (and co-producers) Tiffany and Debbie Gibson (veterans of the SyFy "Mega" monster movie brand) as a park ranger and an eco-activist (respectively) who put aside their differences to take on the digitally animated supersized mutants of the Everglades. Can you believe that Mary Lambert, former music video whiz and big screen horror director ("Pet Semetary"), actually tossed this thing off? Mickey Dolenz (of The Monkees) makes a tongue-in-cheek cameo as himself.

 

TV Guide's Watercooler columnist Damian Holbrook celebrates the "glorious buffet of cheesy brilliance" in his lovefest review: "how can you not love anything that embraces its full-scaly badness with such bite?" The disc includes a generic making-of featurette and a trailer. See the trailer at the end of the post.

 

Pam Grier made her first bid for B-movie stardom in the exploitation films for Roger Corman. "The Women in Cages Collection: The Big Bird Cage / The Big Doll House / Women in Cages" (Shout! Factory) is a trio of women in prison films, all of them featuring Grier, all of them knocked out in the Philippines. Grier takes her first lead in the Jack Hill-directed "The Big Doll House" (1971), a minor classic in the genre that established the new rules of the game: abusive guards, lots of showers, late night groping, and the payback prison break. It’s pure exploitation and bit mean spirited, but it was a smash hit and started Corman’s New World Pictures in the WIP exploitation biz. Hill’s superior semi-sequel "The Big Bird Cage" (1972) elevates Grier to top billing as a mercenary/revolution​ary in an unnamed South American country who (with partner Sig Haid) engineers a women’s prison break from the outside. Why? Because their rag tag soldiers are looking for revolutionary sisters to join their cause… and their beds. This is pure B exploitation powered with oddball humor—Grier and Haig’s first heist is a corker—and energetic action. The 1971 "Women in Cages," made between the two Hill pictures by veteran Filipino director Gerry (Gerardo) de Leon and featuring Grier as the sadistic head matron in a women’s penitentiary, fills out the triple feature.

 

The two-disc set features entertaining commentary by director Jack Hill (originally recorded for an earlier DVD release) on his two films. (My favorite tidbit: the location for the prison in "Bird Cage" was later used by Francis Coppola for Kurtz’s compound in "Apocalypse Now," where it looked much darker and more menacing.) New to the set is the 48-minute documentary "From Manila With Love," a detailed look at the making of "The Big Doll House" and "The Big Bird Cage," the films that reworked the WIP film as tawdry drive-in exploitation genre and launched Corman's New World Pictures.

 

HD Alert: Shout! Factory has announced a Blu-ray edition of this triple feature for August 23.

 

Made a year after "The Exorcist," the 1974 TV movie "Born Innocent" (Hen's Tooth)gave Linda Blair almost as much notoriety as the legendary horror film did. Playing a teenage runaway abandoned by her father to the juvenile justice system, she is not just chewed up by the system, she is systematically abused and degraded and the TV movie became infamous for a scene where she's raped with a broomstick. The scene, though not explicit, was so brutal and controversial that it was edited from subsequent showings. It's been restored to this edition. 

See the "Mega Python vs. Gatoroid" trailer after the jump

 

Perusing the New Release rack for the week finds a pair of mid-budget action pictures with a splash of romance. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt fight the power in "The Adjustment Bureau" (Universal) a high concept romantic fantasy with a team of supernatural secret agents with great hats and a dash of metaphysical science fiction (reviewed on Videodrone here), while Liam Neeson gets down and dirty when he wakes up from a coma to find his identity stolen and his ice-queen wife (January Jones) in on the theft in "Unknown" (Warner). Reviewed on Videodrone here.

 

Sleeper of the week is "Cedar Rapids" (Fox), a low-key comedy starring Ed Helms in fine form as the good-hearted small town naïf who learns the facts of life—without losing his essential idealism—in a "big city" insurance convention. Director Miguel Arteta ("Youth in Revolt") has an easy way with performers and a smooth hand with ensembles. He makes this oddball group of amiably geeky insurance salespeople (John C. Reilly, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Anne Heche) good company to be in, largely because has fun with them, rather than at their expense. Helms' Tim Lippe may not worldly but he has conviction, compassion and loyalty in abundance and those qualities are rare in the leading men of American comedies. More from MSN film critic Glenn Kenny here.

The DVD offers little comic featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel. The Blu-ray adds bonus interviews with director Arteta and screenwriter Phil Johnson (originally made at cable promos) and members of the cast, plus a BD-Live exclusive featurette with Ed Helms at play and bonus digital copy.

 

Less essential is "The Eagle" (Universal), starring Channing Tatum as a stalwart Roman officer in 2nd Century Britain seeking the secret of the lost Ninth Legion and Jamie Bell as the British slave turned sword-and-sandal buddy-film partner. Based on a young adult novel and inspired by the real-life mystery of the Roman legion that marched into Northern England and disappeared without a trace, it's quite a confused picture, not sure whether the Romans are the good guys or the imperialist dogs, and the friendship between oppressor and slave is unconvincing.

"Given such juicy history and exotic terrain, this ought to be a compelling saga of warring cultures, unlikely friendship and a young man's costly quest for lost honor," agrees MSN film critic Kat Murphy. "But "The Eagle" fails to soar, thanks largely to Kevin Macdonald's unimaginative direction and Channing Tatum's charisma-challenged performance."

 

The DVD features both the theatrical version and an unrated cut of the film, plus director commentary, the featurette "The Eagle: Making of a Roman Epic," deleted scenes and an alternate ending. The Blu-ray adds the usual (and largely gratuitous) BD-Live interactive supplements and a bonus digital copy of the film.

 

For kids and families:

"Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules" (Fox), the second chapter in the saga, "plays out in some time-warp bubble, a boring mishmash of Sunday school sermonizing and '50s sitcom starring a blanded-up Beaver encumbered by parents seriously lacking in IQ points," in the words of MSN film critic Kat Murphy. And a late arrival from last week is another unnecessary sequel: "Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son" (Fox), the third comedy with Martin Lawrence doing the Tyler Perry Madea-thing as an undercover FBI agent. "Clowning around underneath that fat suit must be exhausting," observes Adam Markovitz in Entertainment Weekly. "Almost as much as watching it."

Arthouse and indie:

"happythankyoumoreple​​ase" (Anchor Bay), a comedy from "How I Met Your Mother" star Josh Radner, follows the trajectories of various twentysomethings (Malin Akerman, Kate Mara, Zoe Kazan and Radnor among them) looking for themselves in New York City, while "Elektra Luxx" (Sony) drops its ensemble comedy in the L.A. Porn industry, which writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez manages to populate with an impressive indie cast (Carla Gugino, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Timothy Olyphant, Adrianne Palicki, Emmanuelle Chriqui and Akerman again). "Ceremony" (Magnolia) stars Uma Thurman as the older woman object of Michael Angarano's desire.

 

On the drama side of the equation is "Harvest" (Monterey), with Robert Loggia as the aging patriarch facing his mortality as a family reunion, and "Bedways" (Strand), an erotic drama from Germany. "Bending All The Rules" (Lionsgate) is actually a 2002 romantic drama resurrected from oblivion to cash in on the fame of leading man Bradley Cooper.

 

And the rest:

The direct-to-DVD sequel "You Got Served: Beat the World" (Sony) takes the hip-hop franchise to the world championship dance-off in Detroit, plus there's the horror film "Playing House" (Maya) and the documentary "To Live and Ride in L.A." (Trafik), which profiles the fixed-gear bicycle culture.

 

For more on DVD this week, visit weekly DVD listings in MSN.

 

Liam Neeson gets down and dirty when he wakes up from a coma to find his identity stolen and his wife (January Jones) in on the theft in "Unknown" (Warner).

 

Though not any kind of sequel to "Taken," the English-language Euro-action film that managed to turn the dignified actor into the kind of action hero where experience and guile trump youth and arrogance, it promises a return to that territory, this time with Neeson as an American intellectual in Berlin for a biotech conference. By the time he pulls himself from a near-fatal detour into the river, he's either the victim of a conspiracy or he's really lost his mind. Diane Kruger is the German cab driver who reluctantly signs on to his tour through the Berlin underworld to find out the truth and Bruno Ganz and Frank Langella take small roles with big footprints.

See an MSN Exclusive clip from the DVD/Blu-ray release below

"Director Jaume Collet-Serra classes up his act after the opportunistic pseudo-thrills of "House of Wax" and "Orphan" and applies his studio-approved technical proficiency to something a little more, erm, substantive, which at least yields some better-than-acceptab​le suspense/action set pieces," writes MSN film critic Glenn Kenny. "And January Jones, as the aforementioned trophy wife, looks fabulous."

 

Still, he warns audiences to approach with measured expectations. "Turn off your "I hope this plot twist is awesome" part of your brain and just enjoy big, gruff, increasingly Frankenstein-monster​-looking Neeson kicking the crap out of everyone who gets in his way, pausing only occasionally to register that existential anxiety that comes with literally not knowing who one is."

Andrew O'Hehir, over at Salon, is even more impressed, proclaiming it "a stylish and muscular thriller with some nifty twists and turns, a wicked sense of humor, several terrific performances and not one or even two but three of the best car chases in recent action-flick history."

 

The DVD features "Unknown: What Is Known?," a promo piece that barely qualifies as a featurette at under five minutes, and the Blu-ray adds another, just-as-brief micro-featurette, "Liam Neeson: Known Action Hero." There's also a Blu-ray+DVD Combo pack with a bonus digital copy of the film for portable media players.

 

Just for fun, check out Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's essay on what he hopes will become it's very own subgenre: the Liam Neeson Euro-Thriller.

 

"Kiss Me Deadly" (Criterion)

Robert Aldrich's 1955 film noir apocalypse "Kiss Me Deadly" is unlike any other noir ever made. From the opening scene, where Cloris Leachman (naked under a trenchcoat) runs barefoot down a coastal highway flagging down cars, to the Pandora's Box scream of destruction unleashed in the finale, it pushes the conventions past the breaking point.  

 

Ostensibly based on Mickey Spillane's hugely successful pulp novel, Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides turned the story inside, transforming it into a white-hot blast of tawdry pulp and film noir cynicism for the atomic age. Aldrich had just come off of "Vera Cruz," a mercenary western that looks forward to the cynical opportunism of the spaghetti westerns, and that tone carries over to "Kiss Me Deadly." Mike Hammer is turned into a blithely amoral opportunist, a corrupt private detective who specializes in divorce cases (a "bedroom dick," in the parlance) and stumbles into a conspiracy that he thinks he can parlay into a payoff, and Ralph Meeker plays him with a perpetual sneer of a smile and an arrogance that is rarely justified. This is a guy who pimps out it secretary/lover Velda (Maxine Cooper) between smooches and makes a play for almost every beauty who crosses his path.

 

"Kiss Me Deadly" delivers a pulp punch while it savagely satirizes the entire hardboiled mythos with its bare-knuckle brutality, flights of purple prose dialogue and the sheer he-man chauvinism of its dogged hero of scar tissue and street smarts, who isn't nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to it in "Pulp Fiction" (and, before that, so Alex Cox in "Repo Man"). Mickey Spillane hated it. I love it. Va-va-voom! Pow!

Criterion gives the film, previously available on an indifferent DVD from MGM, the special edition treatment on the beautifully remastered DVD and Blu-ray releases.

 

It features detailed, in-depth commentary by film noir historians Alain Silver and James Ursini, a video tribute by director Alex Cox, excerpts from documentaries on screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides and author Mickey Spillane, a video tour of the film's locations then and now, the altered ending that was seen for years before the 1998 restoration and a booklet with a new essay by J. Hoberman and an archival article written by Robert Aldrich for the New York Herald-Tribune, defending the film during the controversy over its violence. (You can read J. Hoberman's essay from the booklet at Criterion Current here.)

And if that's not enough reason, the inspired art direction, recalling not just a lurid "True Detective" cover but the entire pulp magazine through the pages of the booklet, is icing on the radioactive cake.

Gary Toozes gives his approval to the Blu-ray at DVD Beaver here.