If you want to see why Elizabeth Taylor is more than just an icon, more than just a sex symbol, do yourself a favor and watch Mike Nichol's directorial debut, an adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are fantastic; the movie is exquisitely written, directed, and acted, and while it's not an easy film to watch emotionally, you will come out of it understanding why Taylor is remembered the way she is, even after being out of films for nearly twenty years.
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Oh, speaking of Charlton Heston (my go-to guy for 70s paranoia films), Soylent Green is coming to Blu-Ray. If we're going to stamp this particular post in time, I thought you might want to know. That concludes his "Science Fiction Hero Trilogy" (Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, Soylent Green) on High Definition, so go ahead and pick those up. No seriously, I'm not actually being sarcastic there. The Planet of the Apes series are all worth seeing, the first one all the more so; silly ending aside, The Omega Man does a better job of portraying the loneliness of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend than The Last Man on Earth or, well, I Am Legend; Soylent Green doesn't quite have the budget to back up its scope, and it's the least surprising twist this side of Psycho*, but the film is still compelling.
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While I understand Patton Oswalt's argument that the over-availability of films is slowly destroying "geek" culture and removing what seemed to special about being a cinephile, I have to say that the rise of Blu-Ray and the movement on the part of DVD manufacturers to stay alive have only increased the availability of films I never knew existed, and that's a treat.
For example, the concept of having a "Blaxploitation Night" for Summer Fest may well have been a pipe dream were it not for the discovery of Blackenstein on DVD, which then led me to Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, a film that fortuitously was scheduled for release this month. That led me to Abby, the Blaxploitation Exorcist, and then gave me cause to expand my search beyond the 1970s to include Tales from the Hood and Bones. I realize this seems to have less to do with the previous paragraph than it ought to, but the sudden presence of a "35th Anniversary Edition" of Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde is attributable to the growing market for smaller titles, in part because most of the "mainstream" audience is moving to high definition.
It also explains how and why films like Santa Sangre, The Dorm that Dripped Blood, WUSA, Boss, and Teenage Mother are suddenly appearing after years of wallowing in obscurity. Meanwhile, cable channels increasingly have been picking up movies that still haven't made their way to home video. Turner Classic Movies, who launched TCM Underground in 2006 and continued the series unofficially until some time this year, still shows a Friday night double feature of exploitation, cult, or obscure horror films.
Last week, their double feature included Ghoulies and a horror film from 1981 called The Boogens. I had no idea The Boogens even existed, it's not on DVD, and as best I can tell there are no plans to release it. Is the film any good or not? I don't know, but I'll certainly check out the film after recording The Boogens, which seems to be about killer turtle creatures. For someone like me, who loves the thrill of discovery, this period is a blessing.
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Finally, when I went to check out TCM Underground's page, I found that it no longer existed, but the "error" image almost made its absence worthwhile:
* Imagine, for a second, what it must have been like to not have the "shower scene" in the collective subconscious of moviegoers, and to have entered Psycho thinking that Marion Crane was the character we were supposed to follow throughout the film. And then the "shower scene" happens.
