Jack’s Back — For The First Time, At Any Rate — In “The Ripper”

When director Christopher Lewis ventured behind the camera again in 1985 to make his second feature,  hot on the heels of the previous year’s Blood Cult, he had a pretty tough act to follow. After all, “sophomore slumps” are a notoriously common fact of life in fields of human endeavor, and —

Oh, wait a minute. What the hell am I talking about here? Blood Cult sucked. And I say that as a guy who really does appreciate its place in history, given that it was the first-ever shot-on-video, direct- to-VHS horror movie ever made, and I generally love ’80s SOV/DTV  stuff — still, much as I really am thankful that Blood Cult opened the floodgates for what was, by and large, a fairly fun sub-genre, the fact is that it’s an almost preposterously lousy flick in and of itself.

But hey, it did turn a tidy profit for Lewis and his business partners, so less 12 months later, they did exactly what (probably) you and (certainly) I would have done in their situation — hustled up 75 grand and gave the whole thing another go . And this time, they even had a bankable horror icon on board with them.

Notice I said “icon” there, not “star,” because, let’s face it, much as I absolutely love Tom Savini, it’s always gonna be his work behind the camera that he’s most renowned for, rather than his work in front  of it. Which isn’t to say that he’s a “bad” actor by any stretch of the imagination, just that he’s — how can I put this kindly? — rather limited. Still, in 1985 he was getting restless in his role as top horror special effects guy in the world, wanted to give the thespian life a go, and Lewis, canny businessman that he was (and probably still is), figured that just even having the Savini name attached to his project would guarantee, at the very least, a modest return on his (admittedly minimal) investment.

I guess it all worked out as far as that goes, since the finished result of their collaboration, The Ripper, did indeed turn a tidy little profit. So that’s at least one thing they can hang their hats on, at any rate. Beyond that, though, well —

Our “story” here, such as it is, revolves around one rather asshole-ish college professor, played by Tom Schreier, who happens upon an ancient ring that was apparently once worn by Jack The Ripper himself. Whenever he puts it on, he turns into Tom Savini and kills somebody — usually a young woman, and usually via throat-slitting. Then when he takes the ring off, he can’t remember what the hell happened, and reads about his crimes in the paper the next morning. Now, you or I, we might simply stop wearing the ring,  just to be on the safe side and all — but he keeps putting the damn thing for reasons that, I guess, are known only to him. Maybe blacking out and reading about grisly crimes on the front pages the following morning is just his idea of a good time, or maybe he really is just too damn thick to put two and two together — I dunno. What I do know is, that’s about all the “plot” recap that’s necessary to sufficiently clue you in as to what’s going on here.

Incidentally, if all of this sounds somewhat similar to Rowdy (Road House) Herrington’s 1988 film Jack’s Back, starring James Spader, maybe it is a little bit, albeit with a couple of key differences : if I remember correctly (and it’s been awhile, so I can’t rightfully claim that I do) in Jack’s Back, Spader’s character was a  then-modern-day serial killer inspired by Jolly Jack’s crimes, rather than his outright reincarnation ; and, more importantly, Jack’s Back was actually a halfway decent little movie, while The Ripper,  frankly, is anything but.

Shit — who are we kidding? I’m being too generous. Fact of the matter is, The Ripper is downright painful to watch. The acting is uniformly deplorable, the soundtrack “music” is among the most grating in cinematic (or videomatic, or whatever) history, the production values are shit (in particular the laughable “flashback” sequences where Lewis and Co. try, without success, to recreate Victorian London on the streets on Tulsa, Oklahoma), and, perhaps most surprisingly, the makeup effects are beyond lousy. Seriously — I know Savini was otherwise occupied on this production, but you’d think that when he saw what the crew were trying to pass off as blood and gore here, he’d have at least stepped in and offered a few pointers. Apparently — and obviously — he didn’t.

Anyway, all these years later, The Ripper is, if you absolutely must ignore me, available on DVD from VCI, the company Lewis founded with the cash he netted from even-less-than-half-assed “efforts” such as this. It’s presented full frame with mono sound, neither of which is anything to write home about, and includes both a dry “making-of” featurette on the flick’s production and an even drier feature-length commentary where Lewis drones on at length about how much “work” went into this production. I can’t imagine much of it being of any interest to anyone other than die-hard Ripper fans — assuming such an animal even exists in the wild — but I did get a kick out of checking out this movie’s comments section on the IMDB where the author of its screenplay, one Bill Groves, states that, if Lewis loved the script even half as much as he claims he did on the commentary, “then how come he treated it like one of The Ripper’s victims?” Ouch. Gotta love that.

But wait, there’s more! If you’re in the mood for even more self-abuse (and not the fun kind) than watching this provides on its own, VCI has also released it as part of something called “The Ripper Blood Pack,” a three-DVD set that features not only The Ripper, but Blood Cult and its if -anything-even-worse sequel, Revenge, as well. If you’re tired of pushing saltwater-soaked safety pins through your nipples, attaching untreated heated copper wire to your scrotum or labia, stapling your eyelids open for days on end, or clamping your toes between shards of steaming dry ice, then might I humbly suggest trying to watch all three of these movies, consecutively, in one sitting — that, my friends, is some real pain.

Grindhouse Classics : “Friday Foster”

So, I gotta ask — how come Arthur Marks’ 1975 Pam Grier starring vehicle Friday Foster doesn’t get a little bit more respect?

Okay, I’ll grant you — it’s not Coffy or anything, but Grier plays a feisty, intelligent, liberated woman who’s just as comfortable using her brains as her body to crack the case she’s working; she thinks on her feet (and yeah, okay, sometimes on her back); she mixes it up with the likes of Carl Weathers, Ted Lange (who plays pretty much the best movie pimp ever here), Godfrey Cambridge,  Thalmus Rasulala, Scatman Crothers, Yaphet Kotto and none other than Eartha Kitt herself; and if all that ain’t enough for ya, she gets naked a lot.

And yet — -despite all this, and despite a typically solid, workmanlike job from Marks (who also gave us Bucktown and Detroit 9000, among others), it seems this film is considered one of Pam’s weaker efforts, down there with the likes of Sheba, Baby.

This, dear friends, troubles me deeply.

Well, okay — not deeply. In fact, it’s probably not even fair to say that it “troubles” me at all. Maybe “perplexed” is a better word.  Shall we go with that?

So here’s the rundown — Grier  plays an intrepid ex-model-turned-freelance photographer named, of course, Friday Foster, who gets more than she bargained for when, one night while trying to secretly catch a few snapshots of a guy named Blake Tarr (Rasulala), the “richest black man in America,” she actually witnesses his attempted assassination! Needless to say she’s soon thrown into a web of intrigue that sees her team up with grizzled P.I. Kotto, attempt to avoid being wiped out herself by hitman Weathers, try to coax the truth out of gay suspect Cambridge, match wits with dirty (in more ways than one) preacher Crothers, fight off the employment advances of — uhhmmm — “procurer” Lange, put up with the deliciously catty egotism of fashion designer Kitt, and eventually blow the lid off a scheme to kill basically every important black person in the country! Throw in none other than Jim Backus, better knows as Mr. Howell from Gilligan’s Island, as a racist politician, and again, I must ask — what’s not to love?

Okay, Pam doesn’t mix it up lady-street-fighter-style with anyone here, relying more on her wits, brains, and undeniable charm rather than her fists, but there’s still plenty of action on offer , and Marks moves things along at nice, snappy pace. There ain’t a dull moment to be had and the whole thing’s pure fun from start to finish. Yet folks seem to think this was the beginning of the end for Pam. I’d ask why one more time at this point, but I really hate repeating myself (too much), and anyway, I have no desire to bore you good folks.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that this is a movie with, believe it or not, a certain amount of historical significance, since it’s based on Jim Lawrence and Jorge Longeron’s  newspaper comic strip of the same name — the first syndicated strip to feature an African American lead character. Take that, Boondocks! For whatever reason, the strip’s largely forgotten these days, but I’ve included a brief sample below just to give you a little taste of what it was like.

Friday Foster is available as a bare-bones, extras-free DVD from MGM/UA as part of their Soul Cinema collection (nicely-remastered widescreen picture, good enough mono sound) and is definitely worth another look if you haven’t seen it in some time — or worth a first look if you’ve never seen it at all. I feel quite confident you’ll walk away as — what was the word  we settled on again? — oh yeah, perplexed as I am as to why this isn’t a better-regarded example of blaxploitation cinema, since it’s got more or less everything you could possibly want and then some.

What’s not to love? You tell me. I honestly can’t figure it out for the life of me.

Grindhouse Classics : “Death By Invitation”

I’ll be the first to admit — the side-swiped version of the poster for writer/director Ken Friedman’s 1971 east coast regional obscurity Death By Invitation that I’ve reproduced above absolutely sucks. You, the reader, certainly deserve better — you deserve a competently-cropped image that shows you the poster in all its —well, less than glory. There’s just one problem : there don’t seem to be any decent pics of it to be found anywhere on the entire internet!

Which, normally, is  a pretty good sign. It means we’re onto something not too many people know about. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that until a few weeks ago, when Vinegar Syndrome issued this flick on DVD paired with Savage Water (which we’ve already reviewed on these virtual “pages”) as part of their “Drive-In Collection” series, there may very well have been no stills or promotional art materials available for this film online at all — and quite possibly no reviews of it, either.

Of course, all that’s changed now, since discerning cult film aficionados are all over this release like flies on shit  — and for good reason. Vinegar Syndrome, as we’ve already come to expect from this aggressive upstart label,  has done a great job here : the widescreen transfer, while understandably grainy at times, looks pretty awesome for the most part, the mono sound is by and large clear and distortion-free, and as with the more —ahem! — “well-known” lead feature on this disc, we’re treated to a fantastic commentary track from the good folks behind everyone’s favorite transatlantic horror podcast, The Hysteria Continues.

So, yeah, the DVD is great. But what about the movie itself?

I gotta say, all told, that  it’s really not a bad little ancestral-revenge number, even if it’s by and large a wholly unremarkable one —and  weird as it probably sounds at first,that unremarkability (did I just make up a word there?) is actually part of its charm. We start things off  in with hunt-era Salem, where some of those burnings we’ve  all heard so much about are going down, and we quickly leap forward to then-present-day Staten Island, where a mysterious, rather quietly sultry —even, dare I say,  Lynn Lowry-ish — semi-quasi-pseudo-post-debutante named Lise (magnificently brought to life with cool, nonchalant, faux-disinterested, slow-burn menace by Shelby Leverington) is planning on having some people over to her semi-quasi-pseudo-Victorian home. More specifically, she’s planning on having the descendants of the folks who torched her ancestors  over.

Not that they know it, of course — and truth be told, we’re never even sure how she knows it, but I guess that’s neither here nor there. I’ll just make a safe guess that it all came to her in her dreams and leave it at that. The main point is, of course, that they’re all gonna die.

The pacing and atmospherics here are actually highly reminiscent of Wisconsin ultra-low-budget auteur Bill Rebane’s The Demons Of Ludlow, although these proceedings are admittedly a bit bloodier. Essentially Friedman is telling a character-driven story here with some nicely appealing period trappings and some adequately-realized blood n’ guts, but by and large this film is more concerned with lulling you into its world than it is with lowering the boom on you. Personally,  I found myself rather taken in with its dark, if cheap, languidness, and the almost lackadaisical way in which it all unfolds, but if you’re more of the short-attention-span type, it’s probably fair to say you may find it all just a bit uninvolving, if not a downright snoozer.

Still, when was the last time you saw a horror film that wasn’t afraid to take its time? I kinda miss that, myself, what with  the annoying prevalence of the throw-you-in-at-the-deep-end-and-trust-you-to-figure-it-out-as-it-goes-along “aesthetic” that we’ve grown accustomed to these days. I got the distinct feeling throughout Death By Invitation that this was a movie that was comfortable in its own skin, and you could either meet it at its level or take a fucking hike. Granted, that’s most likely simply due to the fact that Friedman couldn’t afford to make a more “in your face” effort, but nevertheless — I found myself digging the vibe he laid down here.

And hey, lest we all forget — slowness needn’t necessarily equal dullness. Yeah, this is a  flick that isn’t afraid to stop and smell the roses (speaking, of course, strictly metaphorically) on its way to getting where it’s going, but the strength of Leverington’s performance alone is enough to keep you interested — even when the story, from time to time, isn’t. That’s at least worthy of some praise, isn’t it? Even if it’s only of the guarded variety.

So what the hell, right? You’re not in any hurry. Whatever plans you have can wait 80-some minutes. Siddown. Relax. Take a load off. Spend some time with Death By Invitation. It’s in the same mood you are. It has things to do, people to kill — but it wants to make sure you to enjoy the journey every bit as much as the destination.

International Weirdness : “Celia”

 

Once in awhile, a film comes along that completely confounds whatever expectations you had of it going in — and once in awhile you have to go pretty far afield to find said film. Both things are undoubtedly true of writer/director Ann Turner’s 1989 effort Celia, a genuinely surrealistic depiction of a young girl’s struggle to come to grips with the world as it really is (or really was, at any rate, this story taking place in 1950s  Australia)  by superimposing her vivid, often inexplicable interior mental landscape upon it.

Turner’s flick unfolds at a languid,dreamlike pace, and is often thoroughly confusing in terms of its use of symbolism — but then, why wouldn’t it be? The way nine-year-old kids interpret events around them, and their refusal or inability to clearly demarcate the “real” from the “unreal,” is a state of mind us reality-burdened adults should probably be envious of rather than perplexed by, given that those things which make life — whether real or imagined — interesting often don’t make a tremendous amount of “sense,” anyway.

The point here being that even though a lot of things in this movie don’t “work” in the traditional sense, it definitely feels right, on the whole,  at the very least, and that’s a pretty remarkable accomplishment in and of itself when presenting material this challenging and unorthodox.

 

Still, if you’re one of those people that absolutely must have some sort of plot recap in order to judge whether or not you want to even watch, let alone purchase, a movie, here are the particulars : Nine-year-old (as, I believe, we already mentioned) Celia Carmichael (Rebecca Smart, in a terrific performance) lives with her dad, Ray (Nicholas Eadie) and “mum,” as they say Down Under, Pat (Mary-Anne Fahey) in a typically conservative and uptight semi-rural Victoria community that she definitely feels stifled by even if she can’t quite express why or how yet at her tender age. She has a habit of conflating her waking world with her dream world (an often nightmarish one at that , peppered with Goblin-esque creatures, creeping, skeletal hands, and masked children) in order to compensate for the lack of stimulation her environs provide on their own, but hey — there’s hope. Some interesting new neighbors, the Tanner family, have moved in next door. Mr. Tanner works alongside Celia’s old man as an electrical engineer for the government, and the three Tanner kids are fun playmates for our impetuous young heroine, but wouldn’t ya know it? Problems soon arise.

The Tanners, you see, are communists, and to complicate matters even further, Celia’s dear old dad has the hots for Mrs. Tanner (Victoria Longley) and isn’t averse to trying to blackmail her into accepting his “affections” by threatening to expose her and her husband’s political leaning to their government employers. Mrs. Tanner (her name’s Alice, by the way) refuses to play along, woman of principal that she is, and even goes so far as to drop less-than-subtle hints to Mrs. Carmichael in regards to her husband’s proclivities (not that she’s an idiot by any means herself, but she generally follows the old “see no evil, hear no evil” axiom until a situation becomes so obvious that she absolutely can’t ignore it — hence, suffering in silence is pretty much her fallback position in life), but by then it’s too late — Mr. Tanner’s out of a job and Celia’s only “real” friends in the world are forced to move out of town.

Oh, and in the midst of all this psychodrama, one of Australia’s infamous rabbit plagues is decimating the countryside. People are killing off the pesky little thumpers in droves, but Celia loves rabbits, and even keeps one as a pet.

 

If all of this sounds like it really shouldn’t mesh together terribly well — especially when you throw in all the vivid and hallucinatory dream sequences — rest assured, it doesn’t. But then, our youthful perceptions of the world itself don’t always “mesh together” very well, do they? And that’s where the quiet genius of Turner’s sensitive script and capable, sympathetic direction lies — she weaves a thoroughly inexplicable web and leaves you, as a viewer, feeling glad that it doesn’t make sense and somewhat saddened at those moments when it does. She captures the inherent scariness and confusion of childhood, but never lets us forget that the banality of the adult world is where the real, often quiet, terror lies.

I’ll tell you what makes absolutely no sense, though — the way this film was marketed to foreign (in this case “foreign” meaning non-Australian) territories : it was affixed with the subtitle Child Of Terror and pawned off on unsuspecting audiences as either a horror movie or, at  the very least, an “Oz-ploitation” picture. Quite clearly it’s neither, and by 1989 there was at least something of a market for independent international cinema, but for whatever reason this movie’s distributors declined to go down that route and instead what few people did manage to see this (mostly on home video) outside its native country were no doubt thoroughly perplexed when they didn’t end up getting the standard “evil kid” flick they were expecting. Don;t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against “evil kid” flicks personally (no shock there, I’m sure),  but a psychologically and thematically complex work such as this deserved a more honest, and frankly respectful,  international ad campaign.

 

As a result of this self-inflicted confusion, Celia is a film that’s had a tough time finding much of an audience over the years, even though by all rights it should have “cult favorite” written all over it (yeah, the “cult” would be a small one, but whatever). Fortunately, Scorpion Releasing has recently seen fit to try to rectify that situation a bit by finally giving it a proper Region 1 DVD release — even if their decision to retain the Child Of Terror tag-line, and include it as part of their “Katarina’s Nightmare Theater” series, hosted by former WWE “diva” (and, if I’m not mistaken, Aussie herself) Katarina Leigh Watters, largely ensures that, once again, it’s mainly horror and exploitation fans (you know, like you and me) who are going to end up giving this frankly un-classifiable little gem a look. I choose to look at the bright side, though — some sort of a larger audience for a work this singular and interesting is better than none at all, and most of the people I know who are fans of genre, obscure, and “cult” cinema are bright folks who will be pleasantly surprised by what they find here — even if it’s nothing like what they were expecting. And hey — at least Scorpion’s done a pretty decent job on the technical front : the widescreen transfer looks sensational, the two-channel mono sound does the job just fine, and as far as extras go, apart from the usual trailers for other titles in the same line and Watters’ semi-informative (but also, let’s be honest, semi-annoying) intro and outro bits, there’s a vintage “making of” featurette and an audio-only interview with Turner that’s quite a compelling little listen.

 

All that being said, it’s still an open question as to how many readers of this blog are going to be as intrigued and captivated by Celia as I was, given that you really do have to be on, as they say, a ” certain wavelength” to really dig it, but I think most of you good people would do well to give it a gamble,  provided the brief summation I’ve scribbled (okay, typed) out makes it sound like the kind of thing that would be up your alley. It’s quite unlike anything else currently occupying space on your DVD shelf, that’s a guarantee,  and while it may be one of those films that’s easier to appreciate than it actually is to like, there’s  a pretty fair chance you’ll end up doing both.

You Can Keep The Rest, I’ll Take “The Nest”

What is it with Roger Corman and fishing villages, anyway? I swear to God he just loves to fuck with these places in his productions. Okay, yeah, for Humanoids From The Deep the setting made sense, given that it was a flick about horny killer sea creatures and all that, but for a movie about giant bloodthirsty mutant cockroaches — I dunno, wouldn’t New York or someplace have made more sense?

Still, sending a film crew out to New York or some other major metropolis known for its large and aggressive roach population would cost money, I suppose, and money is something our guy Roger would rather make than spend, so when it came time to roll the cameras for the film under our metaphorical microscope today, 1988′s The Nest, he packed up all the folks and equipment he’d need to do the job from his Venice, California lumberyard-turned-studio/offices, sent them upstate under the watchful eye of firs-time director (and co-screenwriter of The Howling, along with John Sayles) Terence H. Winkless, and told ‘em all to come back with something he could do one of his typical late-’80s “yeah, we’ll release it to a few theaters right here in the neighborhood but home video is where most of the action for this one is gonna be found” numbers on.

To his credit, Winkless put together a pretty solid cast for this one — Franc Luz stars as local sheriff Richard Tarbell, who’s in charge of putting the mutant roach infestation plaguing his sleepy seaside community down ; Lisa Langlois plays Elizabeth Johnson, his former (and perhaps future) love interest , who comes back to town at the worst possible time;  Robert Lansing turns up as her possibly-corrupt father, who just so happens to be the mayor; Terri Treas is tasked with the role of Dr. Morgan Hubbard, a mad scientist working for the dastardly (or at least amoral) INTEC corporation who has overseen the creation of these flesh-eating monstrosities herself; and Stephen Davies is on hand as poor, hapless Homer, the hard-working local pest exterminator who discovers the problem first but who, of course, no one else listens to until it’s far too late.

The real stars here, though, are the special effects guys (and possibly gals) — especially once the roaches take on the ability to mimic the characteristics of whatever they eat (via means of some DNA transference process that’s never suitably explained but doesn’t really matter, anyway). The final 30-or-so-minutes of The Nest are an absolute make-up and prosthetics tour de force, and a case study in why “real” effects work — even of the low-budget variety — will always trump CGI (not that they had much of that back in ’88, but whatever). The human/roach hybrid creatures are absolutely, gruesomely spectacular — even if they never actually mount any nubile young bra-and-panty-clad women as shown in the poster (although there is a decent amount of nudity and near-nudity on hand here, so you can relax on that score).

So yeah — the creature effects are definitely the “cake” as far as things go here, but there’s some pretty decent “icing,” too,  in the form of some — believe it or not — genuinely involving character drama, nicely-shot exteriors and interiors that give the proceedings a real sense of place, and even a pleasingly fair amount of actual suspense thrown in for good measure. All in all, this is a much better film not only than you’d think going in, but probably than we’ve got any right to expect given the people, and the budget, behind it.

The Nest is available from Shout! Factory’s horror-centric Scream Factory imprint as  a Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack that is, curiously enough, not labeled as part of their “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” line for whatever reason. Both discs feature a crisp and clean anamorphic widescreen picture with mono sound (with the Blu-Ray in this case both looking and sounding considerably better) and a feature-length commentary track from director Winkless. There are no other extras to speak of, which is kind of a bummer, but doesn’t detract too terribly much from a movie that any fan of the kind of shit we usually talk about around these parts will be proud to have on their shelves. Sit back with a  full can of Raid handy and enjoy.

Grindhouse Classics : “Massage Parlor Murders”

 

One thing’s for sure — they don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

And that’s too bad, really, because if there’s one thing the shot-in-1973, released-in-1974 exploitation oddity Massage Parlor Murders (originally released with six minutes of additional footage featuring an at-first-reluctant, later-even-more-reluctant —uhhmmm — “client” choosing to high-tail it out of a New York “health club” once his fetching young — again with the uhhmmm — “masseuse” displays her — third and final, I promise, uhhmmm — “wares” under the title Massage Parlor Hookers) is, it’s fun. The kind of dirty, seedy, oughtta-make-you-feel-guilty-but-oddly-doesn’t fun that just plain can’t be had at the movies today.

Fortunately for us, there’s Vinegar Syndrome, a newish cult label that made quite a splash a few months back with their Lost Films Of Herschell Gordon Lewis DVD box set and has followed it up with their so-far-downright-awesome “Drive-In Collection” series and this, their first (at least to my knowledge) DVD/Blu-Ray combo release. And what a release it is! But more on that later, first the particulars of the film itself —

 

A killer with, we’re later to learn, a very warped sense of morality apparently has an axe to grind (or a face to bash in, or a switchblade to unsheathe, or a — you get the idea) with the “working girls” at a Times Square massage parlor called, appealingly enough, the Venus Paradise. Rather than quit en masse as the dead bodies begin piling up, though, as you’d think they would (but which would probably result in an already-slim 80-minute feature being whittled down to a half-hour production at best), the ladies keep plying their profession (it is, after all, the world’s oldest), and why not? They’re under the tough-as-nails protection of two gritty New York vice cops, in the form of  ultra-low-rung exploitation vets John Moser and George Spencer, the latter of whom is finding himself with some trouble on the domestic front due to his overly-enthusiastic full-scale immersion, at least psychologically (or should that be psycho-sexually?) into the grimy, anything-goes-for-a-price underworld he’s, lucky guy, getting paid to poke his nose (at the very least) in. Their investigation starts when a good-time gal named Rosie (Chris Jordan, in an early and decidedly even-farther-down-the-barrel role than those she’d later become known best for) meets a gruesome and untimely demise, proceeds through a few predictable twists and turns (Rosie’s roommate, Gwen, played by Sandra Peabody — who’s best known for her starring turn as doomed-as-all-hell Mari in Last House On The Left, where she worked under the name Sandra Cassell — falls for Moser ; there’s a low-rent imitation of the famous car chase scene from The French Connection, things like that) as well as some decidedly unpredictable ones (like the cops questioning none other than Brother Theodore himself!), and finally ends pretty much like you’d expect it to, with plenty of vintage, Plato’s Retreat-era 42nd Street footage thrown in for good measure.

What sets this film apart from many of its counterparts, though, is its grimy authenticity. Only Andy Milligan came close to matching the street-level (or maybe that should be gutter-level) grittiness and desperation that directors Alex Stevens and Chester Fox capture here, and he always filtered it through a lens warped (enjoyably, at times unbelievably, warped — but warped nonetheless) by his own obsessions and — okay, one more uhhmmm — “sensibilities.” This is the straight dope, as it was, and the sleaze unrepentantly oozes from every frame. Hell, even much-later Law & Order  stalwart George Dzundza plays a guy named “Mr. Creepy” here (and he also served as a co-producer!).

The titular “massage parlor murders” themselves aren’t terribly well-realized, of course, but that’s part of the charm. This is the lowest of the lowest of the lowest of the lowest of the low . Is there any better way to spend your free time?

 

Now, about that Vinegar Syndrome Blu-Ray/DVD combo. I’ve taken a look at both discs, and frankly the Blu-Ray only looks marginally better. Which isn’t meant as a knock, rather it’s high praise for how fucking great the DVD looks. Taken from a remastered high-def transfer, the picture on both is damn near flawless barring the occasional warped frame, and the same can essentially be said for the two-channel mono sound — absolutely pristine, apart from the occasional near-complete audio dropout. Honestly, friends, to have something this obscure — it’s never been released on home video before in any format, even VHS — look and sound this good is flat-out miraculous. As far as extras go, there’s an option to view this in either the Massage Parlor Murders or Massage Parlor Hookers cut, the theatrical trailer is included, there’s a largely uneventful outtake reel, and the package is rounded off with a radio spot for the film from back in the day. The real treat, though, are the exhaustively-researched, meticulously-detailed liner notes provided by Temple Of Schlock’s Chris Poggiali, which clearly establish him as the guy on the planet who knows the most about this particular film. They’re a joy to read and really enhance one’s understandings of the proceedings to an unbelievable degree. Bravo, Mr. Poggiali, bravo. As a fellow B-movie critic/amateur historian, I’m in awe (and, truth be told, green with envy).

 

Try this — next time you’re at your local live peep show booth (assuming there are any left in your town), after you’ve blown your last handful of tokens on the the girl on the other side of the window (you know, the one who tries to keep the veins on her arms covered up and talks about needing extra cash to pay for her kid’s medicine), screw up all your courage and reach into that trash can in the corner. Plunge your hand in there good and deep (you might want to wear rubber gloves). Reach under all those discarded Trojan wrappers and those used (you know what for) kleenex. Go down beyond the crusted, dried-out, half-empty vaseline tubes and those safety razor blades caked and flaking with the blood of the girl who slit her wrists in there a few weeks back. Reach for the bottom. The very bottom. I guarantee you’ll find a copy of Massage Parlor Murders waiting there for you. Take it home. Clean the the lube, the cum, and the slime of who knows (hell, who even wants to know) origin off the case. Pop it into your Blu-Ray  —or DVD — player, sit back, and enjoy. Congratulations, you lucky, twisted,  hopelessly sick bastard.  Underneath all the hurriedly,  desperately tossed-out remains of  humanity’s most basic — and least talked-about — urges, you’ve found celluloid gold.

 

Animation Sidebar : “Batman : Under The Red Hood”

 

If you’ve not been keeping up with DC comics on a month-to-month basis lately — and I can’t say I’d blame anyone for that given the hopelessly derivative, editorially-fucked-with-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life state of most of their output — you may not be aware that Robin recently died. Again.

I know, I know — it’s getting to be old hat by now, isn’t it? At least the Batman of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight had the decency to put his cowl in mothballs for awhile after getting one of his teen sidekicks killed, but in the DC universe proper, he just seems to keep on going no matter how often he reverses the typical “worms are food for robins” course of nature. To make matters even more grim/depressing/tasteless, the latest Robin to be violently ushered out the side door was Bruce Wayne’s own son, Damian, and he was killed by his mother, Talia al Ghul. Couldn’t they have all just gone on Jerry Springer and tried to work out their differences in at least a somewhat less deadly or embarrassing fashion?

Obviously, as is usually the case in comics these days, this latest Robin death is, blatantly and on its surface, little more than a crass ploy to generate extra sales for the army of Bat-books cluttering up the racks — but believe it or not, in that regard it still has a long way to go to match the brazen commercial pandering and expiloitive, “we’ll kill any character for a buck” crudeness of the first  Robin death, back in 1988.  Ya see, that was the time,  as you may have heard (if you weren’t following along yourself), when DC decided to bump him off based on the results of a fucking telephone survey.

You only think I’m kidding, but I’m not — The Joker rigged a an bomb at a warehouse with Robin bound and gagged inside, the building went “boom!,’ and readers were instructed to call one of two 1-800 numbers (at a cost of 75 cents a pop) to register their “Live or die” choice, then come back next month and find out which option won out (this morbid trope was wonderfully spoofed by Rick Veitch in his seminal deconstruction of the entire “teen sidekick” phenomenon, Brat Pack).

Without lingering too long on the disturbing implications of a bound-and-gagged teenage boy in tights being abused by a man with a face full of makeup (all this is a Code-approved book, no less), let’s just consider what it says about a comic book publisher that they’re willing to kill kids in their stories to bump up sales, and what it says about comic book fans that more of us voted to see Robin get bumped off than have Batman save the day. I’d say the message is clear : publishers are cynical, manipulative, and utterly without conscience, and readers are sadistic bastards. No wonder mainstream comics are in what basically amounts to a two-decade-old death spiral.

 

Still, if you know DC and Marvel, you know that no death lasts forever, and it was only going to be a matter of time before Jason Todd (who was, in actuality, the second Robin, the first being Dick Grayson, who miraculously-in-retrospect survived the job and went on to be a proper superhero in his own right, operating under the handle of Nightwing) somehow turned up again — the only surprise is that it took almost 20 years for his “resurrection” to happen.

For the better part of 2005, and a pretty good chunk of 2006, several of the monthly Bat-titles were consumed with a seemingly endless storyline by writer (and former contest on MTV’s The Real World) Judd Winick, and illustrated by a bevy of artists (most notably Doug Mahnke, co-creator of Dark Horse’s The Mask) that detailed the apparent return of a one-time super-criminal named The Red Hood (who was actually, in his former incarnations, a collection of several different hoodlums, one of whom was none other than The Joker himself back when he was, relatively speaking, “more human” — but that’s another story for another time), who was keeping himself busy by screwing up the operations of a Gotham City crime boss known as The Black Mack (so called because, well — he wears a black mask).

This wasn’t a bad story, even if it dragged on for waaaaaay too long, but it was hardly an all-time classic, either. Most of the investigations into Red Hood’s “secret identity” undertaken by Batman and Nightwing (who plays a big part in the proceedings) were go-nowhere run-arounds and it was fairly evident fairly early on that this latest Red Hood was, in fact, Jason Todd.  The only question was — how the hell did he survive? The answer was pretty uninspired — Ra’s al Ghul utilized one of the infamous “Lazarus Pits” that give him immortality (or close enough to it) to resurrect the freshly-dead youngster, and Jason ends up going on to form his own sorta-super-team called, blandly enough, The Outlaws. Which, I guess means that the second Robin is now a zombie. At least technically speaking, But whatever.

 

When Warner Premiere released its direct-to-video animated version of Batman : Under The Red Hood in 2010, it’s fair to say I wasn’t expecting much beyond a reasonably competent little run-around, but truth be told, truncating this tale down to a manageable 75 minutes actually makes it a much stronger and more effective story, and while any “surprise” as to who is, indeed, “under the red hood” is lost, it’s really no big deal since, as mentioned, it was never that “shocking” a “revelation” anyway. Perfect voice casting helps — Bruce Greenwood is one of the better actors to give Batman’s vocal cords a go, Jensen Ackles is flat-out superb as Red Hood/Jason Todd, John DiMaggio is a terrific Joker, Jason Isaccs is suitably dour as Ra’s al Ghul, Wade Williams is obviously having a blast as Black Mask, and Neil Patrick Harris is a more or less perfect choice to deliver Nightwing’s lines — but all in all it’s the smart work done by director Brandon Vietti and Winick, who adapts his own story for the (small) screen here, that turns a decent multi-part comics story into an excellent (and concise) animated adventure yarn.

Going in with suitably low expectations probably leaves me feeling more generous about the quality of the finished product here as well, I suppose, but honestly, this is pretty good stuff, and while the more grim aspects of the story aren’t glossed over, they’re not celebrated in agonizing detail, either, as is too often the case with many of Batman’s “darker” storylines of recent vintage.

 

As is the case with Batman : Year One, there are no less than three different home viewing options out there for the discerning viewer who wants to give Under The Red Hood a go : standard, single-disc DVD; single-disc Blu-Ray; and two-disc “special edition” DVD. All three feature extremely-well-done widescreen picture and 5.1 sound and come with a rather uninspiring Jonah Hex short (remember when it looked like he might be DC’s next “hot property”?) as well as some promo spots for other DC Universe titles, while the Blu-Ray and “special edition” DVD packages also include a behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of this story in both its print and animated versions and a selection of four cartoons from various iterations of the Batman animated TV series that have at least some bearing on the lead feature here.

At the end of the day, then,  Batman : Under The Red Hood is far from the out-and-out classic that either Year One or The Dark Knight Returns are, but it’s a solid-enough little piece of modern superhero storytelling that treads the fine line between being “heavy” and “too heavy for its own good” more or less successfully, and greatly benefits from having a lot of its fat cut for this abridged animated retelling. I got a kick out of it, and if you have any love for/interest in these characters, chances are that you will, too.

Animation Sidebar : “Batman : Year One”

 

What the hell, these reviews of titles in Warner Premiere’s “DC Universe” straight-to-video animation line seem to be getting a reasonably healthy response around these parts, so let’s plug away and do at least a couple more until I’m bored with the whole thing and feel like getting back to horror, exploitation, and all that other good stuff, shall we? And seeing as how our first entrants in this little sidebar series took a look at the two-part Dark Knight Returns, based on Frank Miller’s justifiably legendary take on the “omega” phase of Batman’s crime-fighting career,  it seems only right that we next turn our attentions to 2011′s animated adaptation of Batman : Year One, based on Miller and artist David Mazzuchelli’s take on the Caped Crusader’s “alpha” period.

Again, a little background for those not steeped in comic lore : hot on the heels of the success of The Dark Knight mini-series, Bat-books editor-at-the-time Denny O’Neil (a fairly accomplished author of numerous well-regarded Batman stories in his own right), approached said title’s creator, Frank Miller, with a proposal to essentially give him carte-blanche to retell the Gotham Guardian’s origin story as a way of “re-setting the table” on the regular monthly Batman series. Miller agreed, but only wanted to write it, bringing in as his artistic partner on the project one David Mazzuchelli, with whom he had collaborated on a recent run of stories for Marvel’s Daredevil book. Mazzuchelli bought a distinctly noir-ish and cinematic sensibility to the proceedings, and the end result , while admittedly a fairly basic, if extrapolated, take on events we already knew which sees Bruce Wayne return to Gotham to embark on his one-man war on crime, form an uneasy alliance with then-Lieutenant Jim Gordon (who seems to be one of the few honest cops in town), have his first series of encounters with a prostitute-turned-cat-burglar named Selina Kyle, and go after the beating heart of the city’s organized crime operation in the form of Carmine “The Roman” Falcone, is nonetheless a deeply resonant character-driven piece with a pleasing “pulp detective” artistic sensibility that feels both nostalgic and oddly contemporary at the same time. If the word timeless comes to mind from the brief run-down just provided, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark, as this brief-but-no-doubt historic four-issue Batman run, which has since been collected in near-innumerable paperback and hardcover iterations, feels as fresh and vital today as it did when first published way back in 1987.

 

The real genius of what Miller chose to do story-wise,though,  is that, despite the fact that we are granted numerous takes on the events depicted from the vantage points of both Batman and Catwoman, this is more or less Gordon’s tale, and we see get to see both the cesspool of corruption and vice that is Gotham City, as well as witness the dawn of a new age of weirdos in costumes, through his eyes. Miler’s version of Gordon is hardly a flawless hero — he’s stepping out on his pregnant wife with one of his colleagues on the force (who long-time Bat-fans will know becomes the second Mrs. Gordon at some unspecified future point), for instance, but by and large this is a decent guy trying to make sense of circumstances, and a city, that he can’t quite get his head around.

The powers that be in the suits at Warner and DC wisely decided to retain this Gordon-centric narrative structure when they adapted the story for home video release in 2011, and even more wisely opted to cast Bryan Cranston as Jimbo’s voice ‘artist,” so needless to say — expect some great things here. Yeah, okay, again it would have been nice (and frankly pretty gutsy) for directors Sam Liu and Lauren Montgomery to have their animators hue a bit more closely to Mazzuchelli’s visual style, but the finished product probably would have been considered somewhat inaccessible for, at least, a non-comics audience (although I gotta wonder how much a “non-comics audience” would even care about this thing in the first place), but at least most of the characters in this one look like real people rather than the non-green Hulks of (the otherwise generally excellent ) The Dark Knight Returns.

 

As far as the rest of the cast goes, Ben McKenzie positively nails it as Bruce Wayne/Batman, GreyDeLisle is pitch-perfect as the suffering-in-silence Barbara Gordon, Katee Sackhoff is suitably sultry as the object of Jim’s extra-curricular affections, Detective Sarah Essen, supposed “nerd culture” sex object Eliza Dushku inhabits Selina Kyle/Catwoman quite nicely, and it’s an out-and-out treat to hear the great Alex Rocco giving vocal “life” to Falcone. It’s Cranston’s show all the way, but these folks add plenty of spice to the stew.

On the technical specs front, Batman : Year One is available on three different home video formats : single-disc DVD, single-disc Blu-Ray, and a double-disc DVD “special edition.” All three feature superb widescreen picture and a genuinely dynamic 5.1 sound mix, as well as a rather risque but otherwise generally uninteresting Catwoman short, and a smattering of promo stuff for other entrants in the “DCU” line. The Blu-Ray and two-disc DVD also feature a pretty sold little mini-documentary on the genesis  of, and influences on,  Batman : Year One in its original comic book form, and a couple of episodes of the Batman animated TV series that are at least tangentially related to the main course on offer here (again with the food metaphors, sorry — haven’t eaten lunch yet).

Final verdict, then : as with Miller’s Dark Knight, this is a seminal Bat-story that most definitely live up to all the hype, and its home video animated offspring is a faithful, exciting, well-constructed work that sticks to the character-driven narrative design of its printed-page progenitor for a highly-accessible translation that retains both the boldness and simplicity of Miller/Mazzuchelli while smoothing out its rough (but oh-so-lovely) edges just a bit.

Hell, just writing about it puts me in the mood to watch it again.

Animation Sidebar : “Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2″

Okay, this one’s probably going to be something of a “quickie” given that we’ve already covered all the relevant background info and what have you in our (alright, fair enough, my) review of the first film in this series — suffice to say that if you enjoyed Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 you’re absolutely gonna love part two (released in January of this year), because this is the one  where the shit really hits the fan.

Fresh out of a self-imposed 10-year retirement, and having already taken down both Two-Face and the leader of the vicious Mutant gang, a newly-reinvigorated Batman (Peter Weller), together with the latest version of teen sidekick Robin, an all-heart-but-no-training adolescent girl named Carrie Kelley (Ariel Winter),  find themselves tangling this time around not only with a crazier-than-ever Joker (fantastically voiced by Michael Emerson), but in the crosshairs of none other than Superman himself (Mark Valley), who has been dispatched by the highest powers imaginable to put a stop to his one-time friend’s self-decla vigilante war on crime in Gotham City.

Things start out on a fairly absurd note as The Joker is invited onto the Letterman-in-all-but-last-name “David Endochrine Show” (Endochrine himself being voiced by none other than Conan O’Brien), but quickly turn quite deadly when he kills the entire studio audience and has his final, and decidedly gruesome, confrontation with Batman at, appropriately enough, a carnival. All this is realized at a thoroughly fun, breakneck pace by director Jay Oliva, but for my money it’s when the inevitable Batman/Superman confrontation occurs that this story really kicks into another gear, as the story invites us to take a hard look at the philosophical and attitudinal discrepancies that have always made for an uneasy-at-best alliance between DC’s two “flagship” characters. When the thin strand of mutual (perhaps) aims between the two finally breaks, it makes for one of the more thought-provoking and multi-textured psychological analyses ever presented in a mainstream superhero comic (or, by extension, a mainstream direct-to-video superhero animated flick).

Fans of Frank Miller’s original work will be pleased to see that Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 doesn’t shy away from the book’s rather disturbing, even quasi-fascistic portrayal of the Caped Crusader, but likewise it isn’t afraid to ultimately portray him as a hero, either — a complex, deeply flawed hero, to be sure, but far from the heartless basket-case that so many subsequent writers have too easily pigeonholed him as. And in Miller’s world Superman is far from perfect, as well, so that’s a relief.

Don’t let all my talk of the subtexts inherent in this movie’s source material scare you off, though, because above all this is a piece of fun, kick-ass entertainment — just one that has the added bonus of being open to a deeper and more considered reading should you choose to give it one. On the surface, it’s one well-realized action sequence after another, and that can be a plenty good time in and of itself. Old friends (David Selby’s Commissioner Gordon) exit the scene while other old friends (Robin Atkin Downes’ Oliver Queen/Green Arrow) enter it, every old score is finally settled, and by the time the end credits roll a thoroughly satisfying, heartfelt, and respectful conclusion ends things on, believe it or not, a note of optimism that the sunny-out-of-nowhere wrap-up to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy could learn a lot from.

On the minus side, pretty much all of my criticisms from part one — the guys look like they’ve been gobbling ‘roids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; Miller’s idiosyncratic, free-form art style is replaced by a more typical “house” animation look; Selby’s take on Gordon just doesn’t ring true; the script adaptation can be a bit too hyper-condensed at times; etc. — all hold here, but that’s all small potatoes compared to the number of things Oliva and his cohorts get resoundingly, joyously right here. A genuine treat for long-time fans of the book while being immediately accessible to those unfamiliar with it, Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 is pretty much everything you could ever hope for in an animated superhero flick, and I guarantee it’s one you’ll enjoy again and again over the years should you go ahead and give it a purchase.

Speaking of which — I went the cheap route again and opted to pick this up on DVD rather than Blu-Ray, given that I can’t see what the hell difference there’s gonna be in image quality for an animated feature between the two formats, and while the widescreen picture and 5.1 sound are plenty great (at least to my mind) on DVD, it is, once again, free of extras apart from promotional preview material for other titles in the “DC Universe” animated line. The Blu-Ray disc, on the other hand, does have a smattering of pretty cool bonus features from what I understand, but not having seen them I can’t fairly critique, or even summarize, them here, so I guess that’s a wrap as far as the technical specs are concerned.

Still, whatever format you choose to go with, the point remains — get out  there and buy, or at the very least rent or steal (whoops, did I just say that? ) this thing now. Too few “legendary” comic stories live up to their status on either the printed page or the screen (if they make it that far), but this is one that does. If you’re unsure as to what all the fuss is about, you owe it to yourself to find out, and if you’re already familiar with the work, you’ll be pleased as punch to see it translated into a new format with so much care and respect.

Animation Sidebar : “Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1″

Quick, what was the best Batman flick of 2012?

If you’re like most, your answer to that is simple : “what are you talking about, dumbass? There was only one Batman flick in 2012, it was called The Dark Knight Rises, and even if you didn’t like it much, it wins ‘best’ of the year award by default!”

If you’re a hard-core comic geek, though, you know that’s just not true, because there was another Bat-movie that came out last year. It was an animated, straight-to-video feature called Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1, part of Warner Brothers Animation’s “DC Universe” line, and it was a hell of a lot better than The Dark Knight Rises.

Or should I say — it was a hell of a lot better than The Dark Knight Rises provided you’re part of the admittedly-much-smaller audience it was aimed at. Not that “newbies” to this won’t find it a pretty sold thrill-ride, as well, but we’ll get to all that in due course.

For those of you who don’t already have at least a passing knowledge of comic- nerd legend and lore, here’s a brief (and very specific) history lesson : in the mid-1980s, the tired old super-hero archetype was getting a bit stale, and a small handful of creators figured the time was right to do something about it by injecting a bit more realism and psychological complexity into the proceedings. For a brief moment there, these “revisionist” super-hero works became all the rage, even garnering the medium as a whole the kind of semi-respectable “mainstream” press attention that the art form’s partisans had always longed for given that, hard is may seem to believe now, up until that point comics weren’t even considered “cool,” much less potential springboards for billion-dollar Hollywood special effects boondoggles — err, epics.

Truth be told, this new “darker,” “more mature” take on crimefighters in tights got pretty old pretty fast, but that’s neither here nor there. The simple fact is that two standout works emerged from this revisionist craze that have pretty much hung over the superhero comics medium like a Sword of Damocles ever since : Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, or, as it was more commonly referred to until a movie of the same title came along, simply The Dark Knight. Nearly three decades down the line, these works have been constantly imitated, but frankly still never equaled.

Watchmen and its various  cinematic adaptations, comic prequels, etc. is old hat by now for long-time or even casual readers of this blog, so we’ll just pass right over that and talk Dark Knight, shall we? Again with the history lesson for those not in the know : essentially, this is the story of an aging and bored Bruce Wayne, who decided to hang up the cowl when his teenage sidekick, Robin, was killed (an event that was later mimicked in the “proper” DC Universe itself a few years down the road — except for the retirement part — and has just taken place again in DC’s current “New 52″ line, continuing their less-than-proud track record of having no new ideas whatsoever since their much-hyped relaunch).  As you’d no doubt expect, Brucie-Boy has a tough time adjusting  to “civilian” life,  and  eventually a city-wide crime wave perpetrated by a street gang known as “The Mutants,” coupled with a plastic-surgically-altered Harvey “Two-Face” Dent reverting to his former outlaw ways, prompts Wayne to get his costume out of mothballs and take to the streets again. He vanquishes foes both old and new, picks up a new, female Robin in the form of teenager Carrie Kelley, finally settles his long-standing score with The Joker, and eventually comes to blows with the Man of Steel himself, who is sent to put Batman down by no less than then-President Ronald Reagan himself.

It’s all pretty heady, exciting stuff, and for those who were sick to death of comics being metaphorically ghetto-ized basically ever since their inception, it was a watershed moment. Here, we figured, was finally proof that our beloved medium wasn’t just stupid kids’ stuff. This was a story that was so damn good you could show it to anyone and they’d have to agree that comics had come a long way.

Little did we realize the far-reaching implications this book would have — in fact, it’s fair to say that Miller’s take on the Caped Crusader has informed everything that’s been done with him since. There certainly would have been no Tim Burton Batman film without it, and without Burton there would have been no Nolan reboot, etc., but concurrent with the ever-darker Dark Knight of the movies has been an increasingly more somber and humorless take on the character in the comics — a trend that still continues to this day. I generally enjoy the work of current “lead” Bat-writer Scott Snyder, for instance, but let’s face it — Batman’s such a far-gone, morose, obsessive head-case now that once in awhile it’s nice to watch a few reruns of the old Adam West series just to relieve the pressure from what’s now a quarter-century-old parade of grimness.

I’m not sure that’s the end result Miller necessarily had in mind for the character once his book was finished, but that’s what we’ve gotten, and because of that — because this was the point at which “the change” began — it’s sometimes easy to forget just how much fun this comic itself actually was. Sure, this is a a wracked-with-guilt, consumed-by-anger iteration of Batman we’re talking about here, but it’s also a story in which punks in multi-colored visors speak their own goofy lingo and The Joker gets invited onto a Letterman-esque late-night talk show.

Granted, he kills everyone in the audience, but still —

Fortunately, this new two-part animated feature (we’ll take a look at the second installment either later today or tomorrow, time permitting) is here to remind us, and it couldn’t have come at a better time, what with the unrelentingly bleak Nolan film series having just wrapped up and the tragedy in Aurora still weighing heavily on the public consciousness. It’s a good time, in short, to make the Batman property as a whole fun again, and sometimes you gotta look backwards to move forwards.

Yeah, okay — Batman as voiced by Peter Weller is pretty gruff and humorless, David Selby doesn’t strike me as the most effective vocal choice for Commissioner Gordon, all the male characters in the film are drawn like steroid-enhanced freaks, and Frank Miller’s distinctive, immediate, and sometimes very raw art style has been replaced with a more typically “clean” animated look, so the film has its flaws (perhaps the most notable of which is the fact that for long-time fans of the book the script  essentially comes off as  a Cliff Notes version of the story we know so well), but it’s still hard not to be taken in by director Jay Oliva’s fast-paced, dynamic take on things, Ariel Winter’s spot-on work as Carrie Kelley, and the genuine reverence for the material that more or less everyone who had a hand in this project seems to bring to the table. This was the “dream job” for a number of the principles involved on the DC side of things, and it shows.

I’m not sure how well the obviously-to-be-continued non-ending will play with a non-comics audience, this being a pretty literal interpretation of the first two parts of Miller’s four-issue series, centering on Batman’s conflicts with Two-Face and The Mutants, and it probably would have played out better to just do the whole thing  in one take, but comics fans are used to being fleeced at every turn by the “Big Two” publishers, so the decision to divvy it up into two parts is hardly surprising, and is more than made up for by the out-and-out coolness of seeing so many of the comic’s most iconic moments come to life on the screen (although am I the only one who’s a little bummed that we never get to hear Weller say “in my gut the creature writhes and snarls and tells me what I need? “) in a way that even folks who are not familiar with the story will find terrifically exciting and entertaining.

A lot of nerd-gasms were had when this project was first announced, and I’m pleased to say that it by and large delivers on all that we had been hoping for, while at the same time being a highly accessible work for newcomers to the material.  I wish the DVD had a few more extras than it does (essentially just promo spots for other “DC Universe” stuff), but the widescreen picture and 5.1 sound are both superb and anyway, I understand the Blu-Ray has more by way of bonus features for those interested. Personally, I can’t see shelling out an extra five or six bucks for an animated movie on Blu (and one barely over 70 minutes long at that), but maybe that’s just me.

I’ve watched Batman : The Dark Knight Returns at least a dozen times since it came out last September, and it leaves me smiling from ear to ear each time. Best Batman flick of 2012? That’s a no-brainer.