Because there’s a little metal in all of us.

The TransFormers, as scored by Manowar! Notice how the visuals match the lyrics. This is a tightly-edited fan flick. Bravo!

Weird Al Show, Pee-Wee Herman Show, Faith No More, Vince McMahon, The Big Buy

Portions of this review originally appeared in INsite magazine, October, 2006.

The Weird Al Show was gaudy, obnoxious, and nerdier than the Drafthouse on anime night. It was obviously a kids’ show, which was okay, because it was far funnier than its Saturday morning time slot deserved. It was 1997, about six years since tabloid TV “news” had demolished Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Someone needed to fill the void. For one season, “Weird Al” Yankovic would deliver a fairly worthy successor. Sure, it had lame guest stars like Drew Carey and Hanson, but it was still better than anything your kids have been subjected to since. The new three-disc DVD comes with commentaries and some behind the scenes stuff. Fire up the accordion, fix some Twinkie wiener sandwiches, put on a Hawaiian shirt and do a rubber man dance. Perhaps Al-TV won’t be too far behind.

Speaking of Paul Ruebens, you can’t go wrong with his Playhouse prototype, The Pee-Wee Herman Show. This is the HBO special from 1981, several years before the silver screen, the weekly series, or all those jokes about Abraham Lincoln. He wasn’t quite the guy from Nice Dreams anymore, but this was no kids’ show, either. Shoe mirrors, fake dog doo, a Shaft reference, Kaptain Karl getting blitzed, Jambi’s joke about his new hands: it’s all risqué, perhaps even more so today than when it was new. (If that last thought makes you shudder, we should hang out.) There are no extras, but the show itself is brilliant, and the price tag is low. Plus, you get guest stars like Phil Hartman, John Paragon, a barely recognizable Tito Larriva, and the incomparable Lynne Stewart.

Mike Patton must have seen The Pee-Wee Herman Show, as it contains a classic children’s educational film about minding your manners, lest you become a “Mr. Bungle.” Patton would reach a larger audience with Faith No More, who has a double-feature DVD out now. Live at the Brixton Academy, London was on VHS and CD during the band’s Real Thing heyday, and features a fantastic concert with songs from the era. Patton flops like a fish during “Epic,” breaks wind into the microphone and swears it was real, and even belts out a couple of tunes originally sung by Faith No More’s first frontman, Chuck Moseley. Who Cares a Lot? The Greatest Videos covers the band’s entire career, and made me wonder why these guys had to break up. I mean, we lose an innovative, imaginative, songwriting machine like Faith No More, but the Chili Peppers get to release the same album every few years?

I haven’t watched McMahon, but I know it exists, because I’ve seen it in stores. I even held it in my hands, but I put it down before the curse could affect me.

Let’s face it: I’m a big dork for wrestling. You know those anime guys I made fun of in the first paragraph? They have nothing on wrestling fans when it comes to utter silliness. Some of us have limits, though. Mine is McMahon. He runs the whole show, some old robber baron’s version of action storytelling, where the racial and gender stereotypes are worse than anything that upset Pauline Kael. And he gets away with creating really bad television (and now, really bad movies, thanks to Lion’s Gate and Fox), because he’s the last one left. (TNA? Please. I’d love to see those guys succeed, but I’m not staying up until eleven on a Thursday night – or whenever they’re on this week – in the hopes that Impact will at least be slightly better than Raw or WWECW.)

So, no, I won’t be paying money to watch the old fart pretend he can wrestle. I also won’t be buying any autobiographical DVD’s from Steve Jobs or Rupert Murdoch. I love wrestling, but there’s better, more entertaining stuff out there.

The Big Buy: Tom DeLay’s Stolen Congress is for fans of an entirely different variety of wrestling. Our state’s favorite disgraced congressman finally gets his own movie, and it’s an eye-opener. This is the guy who said, in 1994, that having no federal government at all would suit him just fine. Over the course of a decade, DeLay did all he could to make this happen. The movie comes from Disinfo, the same bunch who brought you Outfoxed. Check it out, especially for the killer jazz score.

Giuseppe Andrews, Shane Douglas

Portions of this review originally appeared in INsite magazine, June, 2006.

  Whether they know it or not, filmmaker Giuseppe Andrews and hardcore wrestling icon Shane Douglas play to the same audience. They’re part of an underground gestalt, an amorphous blob of culty weirdness that somehow finds its way into your shopping bag every few weeks, along with the latest issue of Rue Morgue and those cheap, public domain sci-fi box sets. When you get home from your favorite pre-fab, monolithic, income-snorting big box store, you may find yourself wondering what you just spent half your check on. It’s okay. If you bought Giuseppe’s Trailer Town, Touch Me in the Morning, or Period Piece, or either of Douglas’s (heretofore referred to as the Franchise) Hardcore Homecoming shows, you can rest assured you’ve gone beyond the range of the average home theater consumer.

            It would be unfair to compare these two to their mainstream counterparts (say, Kevin Smith and Vince McMahon). Sure, they’re all vying for that coveted 18-34 year old male demographic, but something seems more genuine about Giuseppe and the Franchise. Maybe it’s the homebrew, barely-digital video quality of their respective productions. Or, it could be that anything seems more genuine than Jersey Girl and Monday Night Raw. (Speaking of apples and oranges…)

            Regular readers of this column have probably figured out by now that I lean more towards the small press variety of home entertainment. Given the choice between the tenth re-release of Highlander 2 or a weird little movie from some folks I’ve never heard of, I’ll likely save Christopher Lambert for another evening. (Wait. Virginia Madsen’s in Highlander 2. Choices, choices, choices.) When you grow up around tape recorders and video cameras, you tend to appreciate entertainment that’s a little closer to home. It may be more exciting than that chop-up snippet tapes you made in high school, but it’s hardly overproduced. That’s cult. That’s fun. I’ll take a micro-budget rip-off over a big-budget remake any day.

            Both of these guys are low-budget, but neither of them are rip-offs. Giuseppe’s style owes a bit to John Waters, Dolemite, and, frankly, the VCR, but he’s his own creation. His movies, for the uninitiated, are adult comedies, shot mostly on hand-held video, featuring gin-you-whine, California trailer park residents as actors. There’s always a story, sometimes several, but the narrative rightly takes a back seat to the jokes. And there are lots of jokes, all of them dirty, some of them genius. Idiots who complain about adult content in sitcoms and reality shows have no clue what lies beyond American Idol.  If That 70’s Show seems risque to you, just keep writing those FCC letters. Stay away from these movies.  You won’t like them, and you’ll hate the people who do.

            Giuseppe’s detractors will tell you all of his films are basically the same. Anyone who’s seen at least two of them knows this isn’t true. His short Dribble (featured on Best of TromaDance Volume 3), has people reading monologues in nearly every scene. Trailer Town has subtitles. Touch Me in the Morning is in black and white. Period Piece is an anthology. These seem like minor deviations at first, but they genuinely change the pace and feel of each movie. In each case, what would be just another silly, sicko comedy becomes more visceral.  And if you meet me, I will make you watch all of them.

            The Franchise made history in the wrestling world, when ECW was just starting out. Big-time wrestling fans know the story: when ECW was just another subsidiary of the old NWA (that’s the National Wrestling Alliance, which has no affiliation with MC Ren), the Franchise won the NWA title, then threw it down and declared ECW the real deal. It was the closest thing to the Protestant Reformation professional wrestling had ever seen. (And, I swear, it was frickin’ real!) Eastern Championship Wrestling became “Extreme” Championship Wrestling, a new era began, wrestlers started walking out to Pantera songs; you know the drill.

Then, ECW closed up, was bought out by WWE, and, naturally, someone got mad at someone else. The result is, basically, two ECW’s. (Just don’t tell McMahon.) You have the WWE version, set to resurface this summer with ECW One Night Stand and a regular TV series. Hardcore Homecoming, needless to say, is more like the original ECW product. It’s cheap, it’s lewd, and it’s bloody. There is no storyline. If you like wrestling action, you could do worse (say, Monday Night Raw).

The product is in its infancy, and you can bet the bigger promotions have taken notice. That may be one of the reasons why the Dudley Boyz (Team 3-D, if you prefer) don’t appear on this release. ECW was the pinnacle of independent wrestling in the 90’s. They were the company that “almost made it.” Hardcore Homecoming (and its sequel event, November Reign) may not be the most professional product, but it does recapture that spirit.

Andrews and the Franchise both play to the same audience, even if it is just me and my crazy friends. I’m waiting for the analogies: “Tyree is to Terry Funk what Walt Dongo is to the Sandman.”

Yes. There is someone in this world named Walt Dongo. You must not fear.

Parts of the Family, Tales from the Crapper

Parts of this review originally appeared in INsite magazine, March, 2006.

            Every studio does it: if you don’t give the bosses the movie they want, they’ll take your baby away and hack away at it, until it at least resembles something that can be sold.  Orson Welles was already selling wine in the sky before we saw his cut of A Touch of Evil.  Horror classics like James Whale’s Frankenstein were trimmed by local censor boards and even a few loony projectionists.  The Weinstein brothers’ efforts to trim every Miramax acquisition – whether the movies needed cutting or not – is the stuff of legend thanks to books like Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures.

            The rule, apparently, is if you put your heart and soul into a vision, some studio will turn it into easy money.  Unless, of course, that studio is Troma.  If you want your movie re-cut by Lloyd Kaufman and the gang, make sure it’s really awful the first time around.

            Parts of the Family and Tales From the Crapper are the two newest examples of Troma’s making something out of nothing.  The story behind both movies is the same: Troma fronted money to filmmakers they trusted, and were rewarded with something that was barely comprehensible.  The original Parts of the Family is directed by Leon Paul de Bruyn, who, ages ago, gave Troma a hit with Rabid Grannies.  The original Tales has a list of directors longer than a mop handle, including, of all people, B-movie starlet and not-quite-supermodel Julie Strain.

The stars seemed right, or as right as they can be in Tromaville.  Both movies featured all of the great Troma standbys, and a general disregard for authority.  So what went wrong?

I can’t tell you.  There is no original cut of Tales, and although the original Parts is included on the DVD, I can’t sit through it without feeling bad about myself.  There is a silver lining (or perhaps a mercury one; keep your fingers out of your mouth and you’ll do okay).  Unlike most studio cuts of lost classics, the Troma Team edits of these movies actually add value to them.  It’s as if Troma is showing the majors how to make something out of nothing, rather than the other way around.  They’re not perfect, and can be downright tedious at times, but they’re still better than the old Warner Brothers cut of Blade Runner.

For starters, the Sklar Brothers have returned.  Now the stars of ESPN Classic’s Cheap Seats, they were introduced to Troma fans years ago as wisecracking news anchors in Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger Part IV.  They reprise their roles here, and deliver the funniest moments of both movies.  Troma standbys like the morbidly obese Joe Fleishaker make appearances.  King Kaufman himself is misused in the original cut of Parts, but, of course, beefs up his role to the point where he’s commenting on his own product.  He is better as Tales From the Crapper’s Crap Keeper, a weird guy with a microphone, a camera, and a plastic garbage bag over his head.

So, why should you see these movies?  Unless you’re a film student or a major Troma nerd, you shouldn’t.  Even Sklar fans will be disappointed, as the brothers probably have less than ten minutes of screen time in both movies combined.

The Marx Brothers Collection and Silver Screen Collection

Portions of this review originally appeared in INsite magazine, March 2005.

            Comedy historians believe that Marx Brothers fans come in two sects.  Those who prefer the classic first five movies, featuring Groucho, Harpo, Chico and straight man Zeppo, want the brothers and only the brothers.  There shall be no kissing, and certainly no dancing.

            We’re the fundamentalists of Marx Brothers fans.  We bathe in the glory of The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup.  We know every routine, or are currently devoting a few hours every day to the task.  We’re East Coast Marx Brothers fans.

            The West Coast fans can talk the rest of us into watching A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, and the other films the brothers (sans Zeppo) made when they moved to MGM.  That’s because these movies are good, too.  They’re just not as good as the older ones.

            The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection features the first five movies and next to nothing in the way of extras.  The bonus disc has a few interviews, but they only total about twenty-five minutes altogether.  Universal could have taken a little more time with this one.  (They also censored some politically-incorrect Asian accents in the W. C. Fields box set, which won’t endear the company to classic comedy completists.)  I would have preferred a Criterion-style treatment, with lots of archival stuff, perhaps some notes, maybe a few words from comedians inspired by the Brothers.

Then there is The Marx Brothers Collection (pay attention now; it’s not that confusing), from Warner Brothers.  On the Night at the Opera and Day at the Races discs, there are commentaries (Leonard Maltin speaks – or rather reads out loud – on Night) and a few retrospective documentaries.  The above-mentioned inspirees include Dom DeLuise and regular Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert B. Weide.  The set also includes Room Service/At the Circus and Go West/The Big Store on two flipper discs (don’t lend them out; they’ll get scratched), and A Night in Casablanca.

Get these two box sets, and you will have almost all of the brothers’ cinematic output.  (Love Happy, their final picture, is owned by Fox.)  The Universal set is indispensable, and must be owned by any comedy fan.  The movies in the Warner set aren’t as good, but you can buy Night and Day separately, and avoid owning the entire box.  This is good for casual fans, those physically unable to carry two box sets at once, or people with less space.