DVD Spin Doctor

Coppola celebrates 'Bram Stoker's Dracula'

#2 in the DVD blog's "7 Days of Halloween" series.
The so-so reputation of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" can be blamed, in part, on the film's noble goal of performing cinematic magic tricks from the days when motion pictures -- and Dracula himself -- were new.

For the first 45 minutes or so, Francis Ford Coppola's horror film felt like a camp, stagey homage to the B-movies of Hammer Studios. The leaden acting of Keanu Reeves and the underwhelming presence of Winona Ryder didn't help (even though they were the hot young stars of 1992).

But as the film darkened, Coppola's brew of sex, gore and the supernatural proved transformative, as did the ying-yang acting of Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman. But what was that vaguely cheesy old-time vibe? Did the fX computers crash?

After release, the production's secrets were detailed for laserdisc owners in an ambitious Voyager box set with several documentaries and commentary from director Coppola. On DVD, there were several releases, including a Superbit, but the back story went untold until last month.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's double-disc rerelease of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" finally gives the production a thorough autopsy in the DVD format. Coppola turns up for a video introduction and then a new feature-length commentary. He admits he hadn't seen the movie since "those days," and seems quite pleased. Coppola calls it "a treasure box of strange effects ... some worked beautifully and some not at all."

The new documentaries illuminate the production using footage from rehearsals and the all on-set filming, as well as interviews from 1992 and now.

"In-Camera: The Naive Visual Effects of Dracula" explores the curious images that were done with techniques from a time when the camera -- not the computer -- incubated the special effects.

"The Blood Is Life" is a new half-hour making-of docu that leans heavily on footage from 1992. We're on the sidelines as Oldman and Coppola clash over what seems to be a simple scene. A costumes/sets short looks at the contributions of designer Eiko Ishioka, who essentially gave the film its look and feel. She saw Dracula as a "man of a thousand faces." "Method and Madness" reveals the visual larceny from noted gothic and surrealistic works of art.

There are 12 deleted/extended scenes, including a thrilling but over-the-top opening sequence with Oldman and some boring voice-overs from Ryder.

Coppola's new shape-shifting Dracula (Oldman) actually was born of a literal adaptation of the novel that the director loved as a youth. The director also leaned on the silent "Nosferatu," John Carradine's Draculas, and the films of Jean Cocteau and Abel Gance. "It is in the great imagery tradition of surrealism," he says. The real-life tale of Romanian hero Vlad the Impaler provided the "Romeo and Juliet"-like suicide angle, in which Ryder appears to be Dracula's reincarnated lover.

The (1.85:1) images are suitably handsome, free of wear and reasonably grain-free except for some night sequences. The darkness and softness come with the territory. There is also a Blu-ray version that reportedly isn't much of a step up from this standard DVD.

"Dracula's" dynamic 5.1 audio soundstage possesses any room it visits. This is a fine, creepy piece of mixing, about as good as it gets in horror films. Listen carefully as we enter the insane asylum to check in with Tom Waits: the walls breathe, water drips, the rats scurry, the lunatics wail. Let's get out of here.

The "7 Days of Halloween" review series: "The Tripper," "Witchfinder General," "The Damned Thing," "Murder Party" and "Hostel" the director's cut in Blu-ray.

New DVDs: 'Twin Peaks,' a swarm of Spider-Man

Pick of the week: Twin Peaks
Dog of the week: The Princess Diana Collection

For the hip and the severly caffeinated, Paramount's gorgeous, highly anticipated "Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition" tops the week's DVD release list.

For everyone else, the big news is the arrival of several DVD and Blu-ray releases keyed the debut of "Spider-Man 3."

The "Twin Peaks" set looks and sounds great, especially for an older TV series. The episodes were remastered from the original negatives, and the audio was reimagined for 5.1, all under the supervision of David Lynch, the show's director/co-creator.

Lynch stars in a half-hour stylized film in which he revisits the project with actors Kyle MacLaughlin and Mädchen Amick. "The Laura Palmer mystery was never meant to be solved," he tells the actors over giant cups of coffee.

The key extra is a feature-length documentary, "Secrets From Another Place." It starts off promisingly, with a modernistic film title sequence led by the tag "CBS DVD Presents ..." (just like a movie; cool idea). From there, it's a long haul, for fans only. Lynch doesn't participate, but co-creator Mark Frost does. Along with everyone else who had anything to do with the innovative early 1990s series. Some of them seem to need a cup of joe -- or even better, some editing.

The docu has a great story to tell and it's fun to revisit the national "Twin Peaks" obsession, but the film feels as interminable as, say, a bad "Peaks" episode from season 2. For completists willing to spend $100 on the box (suggested retail), the parade of ancedotes might be welcome.

I'll be reviewing "Spider-man 3" and its offshoots separately. Meanwhile, here's the deal on the "Spider-man" DVD releases.

New and notable:
The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard (Acorn Media)
Barbara Stanwyck: The Signature Collection (Warner)
CSI: Miami: The Fifth Season (Paramount)
Day Watch (Fox)
Jackie Chan's The Myth (Sony)
Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume Five
Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection Volume Five (Warner)
Miami Ink Season One (Genius Products)
My So-Called Life (Shout!)
Mystery Science Theater 3000, Vol. 12 (Rhino)
Patti Smith Under Review
Neil Young Under Review (MVD Entertainment)
Scrubs: Sixth Season (Disney)
Spider-Man 3: Single- and double-disc DVDs; trilogy collection; Blu-ray versions. (Sony)
Talk to Me (Universal)
Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition (Paramount)
The Wendell Baker Story (ThinkFilm)

Complete list of today's releases on my pal Harley's site, onvideo.org

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'Murder Party' on DVD: Low budget, big fun

#3 in the DVD blog's "7 Days of Halloween" series.

" 'Murder Party' is 'The Breakfast Club' with chainsaws and hard drugs," says director Jeremy Saulnier. He could throw in "After Hours" as well, another tale of confusion and weirdness in the New York night.

The indie horror pic comes from the filmmaking collective the Lab of Madness, a bunch of childhood friends who grew up making odd little camcorder movies. The shorts "usually involved some sort of blood spray," one member recalls. Their greatest VHS-tape hit was "Asskickers," or maybe "MacBeth."

Their film festival success with the 2004 short "Crabwalk" didn't translate to mainstream backing. That didn't stop the mad lads.

"Fuck you, Hollywood, we're going to make our own films," was the motto.

"Murder Party," written and directed by Saulnier, is an act of lunacy, one of those low-budget films like "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" in which the audience feels held hostage -- and any kind of perverse plot twist seems possible. It's a funny, mean and gory movie in which pretty much everyone dies badly.

Our hero Chris (Chris Sharp) is a parking-ticket officer who goes home each night to his unimpressed cat and TV. One Halloween, the nerd finds on the sidewalk an invitation to a "murder party." Uncharacteristically, he shows up, in a knight's costume made out of spare cardboard. He's even baked pumpkin bread.

Chris' hosts turn out to be group of low-rent, bad-karma artists hanging out in a junky warehouse. Anyone stupid enough to show up for a murder party deserves to die, they figure. They're also in Halloween costumes, dressed to kill.

The deadbeats tie Chris to a chair while debating ways to kill him as a work of performance art. Drugs and weapons come into play. A patronizing art patron joins the party, bearing truth serum and crank. Truth or dare ... or homicide.

Viewers won't confuse "Murder Party" with a studio film, but for a cheap-o production it looks pretty good. The acting is appropriately over the top. A digital effects artist and a makeup man sell the plentiful gore.

The Magnolia Home Entertainment DVD includes a commentary from Saulnier and pals. Non-obsessives should skip it and viddie the making-of docu about the collective's curious history -- and what it took to get this piece of indie insanity into theaters and homes.

'Hostel' director's cut Blu-ray: sick and smart

#4 in the DVD blog's "Seven Days of Halloween" series.

There's a new, even creepier ending attached to "Hostel" in the director's cut DVD and Blu-ray. Torture me if you must -- I'm not telling. Let's just say it elicits several interpretations, one of which is about as evil as it gets.

Eli Roth's first film, "Cabin Fever," attracted some heavy-duty fans, including director Quentin Taratino (executive producer of "Hostel") and Takashi Miike (whose brutal movie "Audition" was a major influence). Both men show up in the extras on "Hostel: Director's Cut"to hail Roth as the new king of horror.

Tarantino gives his ultimate compliment: "Hostel" is "extreme entertainment."

Miike says with a grin: "There is no room for me to work in America because Eli Roth is already there." Roth showed his respect by having Miike do a cameo in "Hostel," playing himself as a customer of the torture operation (a killer in-joke).

"Hostel" succeeds so wildly because it is an intelligent film whose elements feel real -- and may be. Roth tells how he saw a mysterious web site supposedly from Thailand in which wanna-be killers could pay for a local victim to torture and slay. The film loses a lot once its secrets are known, but it still works for repeat viewings because so many clever hints and clues exist in the long Hitcockian setup.

Video and audio on the Blu-ray version are quite respectable, not remarkable. The image has occasional speckling (small dancing white spots) and there is a low-grade visual flatness, even in the early daylight scenes in Amsterdam. (This true of the standard DVDs; the flatness could be true to the movie.)

The Blu-ray's Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless audio has its creepy surround moments, as when the hero first enters the killing house, but the mix is surprisingly front-centered for a horror pic. The sound is warm and strong; the extras have a couple of good segments on the soundtrack and its glass harmonica.

Roth talks about how the 1995 film reflects the recent period in which Katrina, 9/11, Iraq and the growing hostility toward Americans turned paranoia into a national pastime. He also discusses the movie's structure, in which the first act shows how men pay money and do whatever they want to the whores of Amsterdam who wait helpless in confining rooms; in the later acts, the men become the paid-for naked flesh awaiting their fates in cells. The film "is about exploitation," he says. He notes that few reviewers picked up on the theme.

The four commentaries were ported over from the initial DVD release. Check out the first one, with Roth and Tarantino. Also repeating is the hourlong documentary "Hostel Dissected." The new "Hostel Dismembered" runs about half that and gets the job done for casual fans.

There are some good deleted scenes, some slight and couple that seem like they should have stayed in the picture. In one, the Dutch torturer breaks out a 17th century tool for locating the mark of the devil. Yuck. Another extends the unnerving talk in the taxi cab between hero Jay Hernandez and beautiful bait Barbara Nedeljakova.

Fans who want to know more about Roth and his work should not miss the audio extra in which Roth is interviewed on Elvis Mitchell's "The Treatment." The director talks with glee about the first screening requiring two ambulance calls, and plenty of clean-up for the viewers' vomit. Of most U.S. horror films, he notes: "Everybody is making horror movies with a safety governor on."

Everybody who succeeds with a horror film also is making sequels. "Hostel: Part II" also debuted in an unrated cut and is available on Blu-ray.

Tomorrow: More fun with men tied to chairs in the wild and funny "Murder Party."

So far in the "7 Days of Halloween" series: "The Tripper," and "Witchfinder General" and "The Damned Thing."

'The Damned Thing': full-force Hooper

#5 in the "Seven Days of Halloween" series.
Ambrose Bierce was a cool guy from the early 1900s best known for writing "The Devil's Dictionary" and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Tobe Hooper is a cool guy from Texas best known for directing the horror genre giant "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."

Bierce was a darker Mark Twain, a great wit who wrote in many genres. His short stories about ghosts and war could get better rough for the times. In "The Damned Thing," he described an invisible and malevolent force of nature, capable of rendering a man mad, and then ripping him to shreds.

Hooper took on the Bierce tale for Showtime's anthology series "Masters of Horror," in which famed genre directors do hourlong films. The result is a nerve-pounding ram of a featurette that's among the best in the series. The Hooper episode aired last season and was released on DVD as "Masters of Horror: The Damned Thing."

Control freaks should watch their step here. Ultimately this is a monster movie, but it feels more like a hellbent ghost story (Hooper directed "Poltergeist.") The fear card is the utter helplessness of humans when faced with a madness-inducing entity, one that strikes with the force of an earthquake -- an evil that can't be shot or captured or even confronted.

The Damned Thing stalks a town in Texas oil country, where the son of one of its victims is sheriff. He obsesses over the night his father went insane, shotgunned his mother and was gutted by the force that possessed him. The sherrif spends his life waiting for the Damned Thing's return. It doesn't disappoint him.

Many "Masters" pieces work with the traditional horror elements of gore, sex and collegiate humor. Hooper plays this one straight, doing what he does best -- scaring the crap out of people.

Screenwriter Richard Christian Matheson does the commentary; he also worked on Hooper's "Dance of the Dead," one of the great sick "Masters" (from 2005). There's a featurette on building the monster and a decent making-of showing Hooper at work.

Anchor Bay recently unleashed the first season of "Masters of Horror" in a crypt box set that's a steal right now. Next up from season 2 is Norio Tsuruta's "Dream Cruise." I also recommend "The Black Cat" and "The Washingtonians."

Also in the DVD blog's Halloween series: "Hostel" in a director's cut Blu-ray, the political ax-swinger "The Tripper" and the indie English classic "Witchfinder General."

More gore: In this killer year for horror movies on disc, your minion the DVD blog kept track of all the releases. Check out this unholy trio of posts: Halloween I, Halloween 2 and Halloween: The Final Chapter.

'Witchfinder General' swings onto DVD

#6 In the blog's "Seven Days of Halloween" series.

Vincent Price wasn't welcome on the set of the British horror film in which he was starring.

Michael Reeves, the young director of "Witchfinder General," wanted nothing to do with the king of generic horror movies. He'd demanded Donald Pleasence, but had been overruled.

Reeves initially refused to even speak with Price on the set, the new DVD's documentary says. The frigid treatment kept the actor on edge throughout shooting. Reeves made the old pro go through endless takes, until the cold-stare anger came through on film. The result is one of Price's finest performances. It was his 75th movie.

You might recall the film as "The Conqueror Worm," the title AIP used in the U.S. in an attempt to tie it in with its successful Edgar Allen Poe franchise. But "Witchfinder" had nothing to do with Poe or worms, at least not the ones found in the soil.

The more or less true story concerns mass-murderer Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed witch hunter of eastern England during the mid-1600s. His infamy was built on torture, bogus confessions and his patented witch test, in which the accused would thrown into a river. If they sank, they were absolved -- but dead by drowning. If they rose to the surface to breathe, that was proof of witchcraft and it was off to the gallows.

Reeves' camera feels hand-held jerky in the scenes where the terrified victims are prepared for hanging. Combined with quick-cut editing, the scenes offer a truly unnerving sense of what it might be like to dragged away by an insane mob and finished off by professional killers.

"Witchfinder General" didn't cost much but often feels like a bigger-budget film. The movie was quite capably cast and costumed. The locations (some of the actual sites) are gorgeous, photographed with an artist's touch. The production values seem more BBC than Hammer, reminiscent to me of Ridley Scott's "The Duelists."

Paul Ferris' lush but haunting soundtrack, replaced on earlier videos by a Moog synthesizer, returns to complete the film's restoration. The DVD looks quite good and the audio comes across strong and clear.

"Witchfinder" had the marketing tag "The Year's Most Violent Film." Maybe so. The 1968 release came when "violence was making its move" on mainstream movies," one of the film historians says in the extras. "Night of the Living Dead" had just been unleashed and "The Wild Bunch" would ride in the next year.

"Witchfinder" wasn't a typical horror film. Its terrors came from the depiction of physical and psychological torture -- frenzied confusion and despair -- not from the supernatural. The stabbings and shootings are realistic for the era, aside from the candy-apple red blood. All in all, a rough bit of time travel for the squeamish.

The movie debuted on DVD as a "Midnight Movies" title and as part of the "Vincent Price: MGM Scream Legends Collection."

The DVD extras include an ancedote-rich commentary starring leading man Ian Ogilvy, a pal of director Reeves who went on to a long film and TV career. The talented Reeves, sadly, was a drug guy who didn't make it out of the Sixties. He directed three movies. (The biography docu "Blood Beast," about Reeves, appeared on a Region 2 version of the film, but not here.) The look-back documentary on "Witchfinder" is unusually good, fueled by the story of Reeves and Price. A must-see for new fans and old.

Hat tip to Chris Morris for recommending this frightfully (and surprisingly) good film.

Also in the DVD blog's Halloween series: "Hostel" in a director's cut Blu-ray, "The Damned Thing" from Tobe Hooper and the political ax-swinger "The Tripper."

More gore: In this killer year for horror movies on disc, your minion the DVD blog kept track of all the releases. Check out this unholy trio of posts: Halloween I, Halloween 2 and Halloween: The Final Chapter.

'The Tripper' DVD: Gore and Reagan

The calendar commands. I must obey. No escape from "Seven Days of Halloween," this DVD blog's weeklong guide to the most spellbinding horror movies unleashed this fall.

#7. "The Tripper" -- Even back in the Sixties, when every other kid had long hair and a zest for recreational mind expansion, nobody much liked real hippies. You know, the chanting, glassy-eyed, guru-loving dharma bums from another dimension. Bummmer.

In the Eighties, pretty much everyone liked Ronald Reagan to some extent. His policies may have been vile at times, but we got to blame the evil geniuses who worked for him. Ronnie had that befuddled grandfather thing going along with a two-term supply of Teflon. The prez took a bullet for us and cracked jokes while at death's door. Heh-heh-heh.

Reagan vs. hippies. Death match. Yeah.

Put these icons from two decades together and you have "The Tripper," David Arquette's hilarious old-style slasher pic about an ax-wielding Gipper returning to most righteously harvest our current crop of hippies. Arquette's liberal politics are right there to the end, but it's all just good old mean-spirited fun.

Arquette's wife, brother and pals such as Lukas Haas, Jason Mewes and Balthazar Getty populate the woods. Our screamin' hot hippie chick is Jaime King. Lots of entrails and boobs move the exploitation meter to 9.5.

The story begins when a sleazeball promoter (Paul Reubens) brings his American Free Love Festival to redwoods country. The civic boosters are thrilled with the revenue. The cops are cool and bemused, especially our hero Sheriff Buzz (Thomas Jane).

As the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll get under way, a naked hippie finds himself ensnared and filleted. Another guy loses his head. Prime suspect: a local whose life was destroyed by dumb-ass treehuggers back in the day. But then there are those black jellybeans at the murder sites ...

"Ronnie?" a longhair asks just before the ax falls.

Arquette's directorial debut unites the twitchy twosome of horror and comedy, which few films ever got right. Look to it as a great party film for the big night. Just put the flower children to bed early.

The Fox Home Entertainment DVD's images are pop-art colorful and there's a playful 5.1 sound mix. Two hours of decent but routine extras and a commentary with Arquette and pals.

Also in the DVD blog's Halloween series: The English indie classic "Witchfinder General" with Vincent Price, "The Damned Thing" from Tobe Hooper and "Hostel" in a director's cut Blu-ray.

More gore: In this killer year for horror movies on disc, your minion the DVD blog kept track of all the releases. Check out this unholy trio of posts: Halloween I, Halloween 2 and Halloween: The Final Chapter.

New DVDs: Stanley Kubrick in high def

Pick of the week: Stanley Kubrick: Directors Series DVDs
Dog of the week: Mr. Brooks

The long-awaited widescreen Stanley Kubrick rereleases are on the shelves. So far, I've seen the uncensored HD DVD version of the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman sex movie "Eyes Wide Shut," which is handsome but not a stunner.

The "Eyes" upgrade to high def pays off with a more elegant and less visually fatiguing presentation than found on previous DVDs.

An A-B comparison of the "Eyes" HD DVD and the older version (played upconverted and standard) revealed deeper blacks and more pronounced shifts in the film's thematic color scheme. For example, on the HD DVD the first act plays out in an amber-reddish haze that was clearly present but not nearly as persistent on the last DVD release (of six years ago). The movie also has been released on Blu-ray.

Both versions exhibit significant grain and softness to be expected with the naturalistic lighting Kubrick used in most of the extended indoor settings. In the second act, as Tom Cruise begins his midnight creep on the Manhattan streets, the HD DVD quality becomes obvious -- the film gets better looking as it goes along. (Look at the two photos on this DVD review post to see the color shift from amber to blue.)

The Dolby True audio (stereo) sounds fuller in musical passages and is notably less shrill with the dialogue.

The Kubrick titles are available in a box set, as separate two-disc titles and in HD DVD and Blu-ray. (Read the DVD blog's breakdown of the new Stanley Kubrick releases. And the "2001: A Space Odyssey" DVD review.)

The set, "Stanley Kubrick: Warner Home Video Directors Series," contains "2001: A Space Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange," "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Shining" and "Full Metal Jacket." The splendid 2 1/2-hour Kubrick documentary "A Life in Pictures" (from 2001) rounds out the 10-disc set.

This is the third time around on DVD for most of these Kubrick movies (previously 1999 and 2001). The other two series inspired endless debate over use of full frame and mono sound on some titles. The 2001 collection saw the final three movies in full frame, according to the director's wishes. This box set comes with the participation of the Kubrick estate, which apparently has overruled the late director to some extent. It's a victory for Kubrick fans, most would agree.

"Eyes" apparently comes uncensored (no blurring in the orgy rooms). The disc says viewers can pick between versions, but the disc just played the pure European version. Either way, it's no big deal -- in the end, this is a movie about sex that isn't all that sexy.

Also this week (abrupt MPAA rating shift!):

Disney's "Meet the Robinsons" isn't nearly as bad as its reviews indicated. (The New York Times called it "one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label.") Parents will find the 3-D animated movie pleasant enough -- but far from a cross-generational pleaser like "The Incredibles." I liked the hero, a kid inventor operating somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum. The Blu-ray of "Robinsons" is what you'd expect from cutting-edge computer ani rolled out in high definition: reference quality. Beware the usual barage of Disney promo materials before the film, sigh.

This DVD blog's players are cued up for "Days of Heaven," the gorgeous 1978 Terrence Malick film with Richard Gere; the unrated high-def versions of the terrific horror series "Hostel"; and the 1973 Malcolm McDowell-Lindsay Anderson lark "O Lucky Man!"

New and notable:
The Adventures of Aquaman (Warner)
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (Paramount)
Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq (HBO Video)
American Gangster: First Season (Paramount)
Breathless (The Criterion Collection)
Burt Lancaster: The Signature Collection (Warner)
The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (Genius Products)
The Company (Sony)
Days of Heaven (The Criterion Collection)
Dog Bite Dog (Dragon Dynasty)
Home of the Brave (MGM)
Hostel unrated (Sony)
Hostel II unrated (Sony)
The L-Word: The Fourth Season (Paramount)
MacGyver: The Complete Series (Paramount)
The Mario Bava Collection, Vol. 2
Meet the Robinsons (Disney)
Mind of Mencia: Season 3 (Paramount)
O Lucky Man! (Warner)
Route 66: Season One (Infinity Entertainment)
The Sopranos: Season 6, Part II (HBO Video)
Stanley Kubrick Collection (Warner)
The Tripper (Fox)
Under the Volcano (The Criterion Collection)

Complete list of today's releases on my pal Harley's site, onvideo.org

Salvage job: 'Treasures III' revives old pics

The third of the National Film Preservation Foundation's "Treasure" boxes goes by the textbook title of "Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934." Sounds like homework.

But viewers don't have to be academics to dig into these old movies -- the four-disc set is another of the preservationists' fascinating time capsules of early U.S. films, released by Image Entertainment.

(Detour here to read the full DVD review.)

There are 48 films, newly restored and all making their home video debuts. They're accompanied by audio commentaries and detailed on-screen text that's pretty much mandatory to decoding some of the films.

The set ends about the time the Hays Office began its policing of U.S. movie content. The topics are surprisingly rough-hewn: abortion, child labor, anarchy, alcoholism, atheism, police corruption and so on.

Some of the films are worthwhile just as entertainments; others earn their keep as windows back to old weird America. Most are short silent movies and newsreels but there are feature films.

Take, for example, Cecil B. De Mille's "The Godless Girl" (pictured). The big-budget 1929 film, the director's last silent, was one of the first rebellious-teenager dramas. A good start to the genre. It tells of an atheists club operating in a high school. Its leader, an charismic girl, enrages religious classmates, who attack the godless ones' meeting. The ensuing tragic riot spreads over four floors of a warehouse, caught from every angle -- over, under, sideways, down -- by a camera set in a free-standing elevator. Those who think of the director solely as ringmaster of color-drenched spectacle should check out these stark black-and-white action scenes.

"Redskin," another feature film from the last days of silents, captured its western settings in two-strip Technicolor (pictured, top). Locations included the Navaho stronghold near Arizona's Anasazi dwellings and the Pueblos' Acoma cliff city in New Mexico. The leads are played by white actors, as was customary, but much of the film is shot among Native Americans. The story keeps a brisk pace, with little sentiment to slow things down or negatively date the movie.

Many of the other early films were financed by institutions or businesses. Propaganda and other agenda-driven films were routinely played for the public as entertainment in cinemas or vaudeville halls.

The "Treasures III" book's introduction makes an interesting distinction about "lost" movies:

"The great majority of American films from this era are lost forever -- probably more than 90% -- but it's also true that many films that do survive have been lost from view. It's one mark of how inaccessible whole realms of filmmaking remain -- 30 years into the home-video era and a decade after the introduction of DVDs -- that none of the films in this set have ever been available on (home video)."

Read the full DVD review of "Social Issues in American Film: 1900-1934."

Previous titles in the "Treasures" series are Treasures From American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931.

'Prime Suspect,' 'Cracker' sign off

Why mourn two aging British cop shows?

In the case of "Prime Suspect," the episode "The Final Act" meant last call for Helen Mirren's greatest character, the police detective Jane Tennison. The series spread over 15 years, with 22 hours of superb TV assigned to seven telefilms.

"Prime Suspect" was arguably the toughest, most precise and best-acted cop series on any continent.

The telefilms were always specialty items in the States (airing on PBS' Mobil Masterpiece Theatre), so their availability on Region 1 DVDs is most welcome. HBO Home Video had rights previously, but Acorn Media has released "Prime Suspect 7: The Final Act." (Take this detour to the full DVD review.)

Unlike the slick but detailed police procedurals that rule the U.S. airwaves, "Prime Suspect" makes no overt concessions to show business -- or its audience. These stories are all rough rides, told with an aesthetic that feels more indie film than network TV.

"Final Act" tells of Tennison's pending retirement and raging alcoholism. Her final days on the force are filled with the case of a missing teen girl, presumed murdered. Across town, Tennison's father battles terminal cancer.

"Don't call me mum. I'm not the bloody queen," Mirren's Tennison says to a street cop, without apparent irony. The line is a touchstone of the series, but of course Mirren triumphed last awards season for her work as Elizabeth II in "The Queen."

"Prime Suspect's" track record of outstanding casting continues this time out with teenage Laura Greenwood (terrific as the dead girl's best friend) and Heshima Thompson (the prime suspect, a young ladies' man). Mirren herself signed off on casting and scripts.

The extent to which the series revolved around the actress is made clear in "Prime Suspect: Behind the Scenes," an robust ITV docu that served as plug for the current show and a epitaph for the series. It reunites many of the series' key contributors, including police detective and adviser Jackie Malton, whose real-world adventures parallel those of DLC Tennison.

"Cracker," another ITV telefilm series starring Robbie Coltrane, sees its bloated bleary-eyed hero return after seven years in Australia.

Wordsmith Jimmy McGovern, who did the first three telefilms returns for duty on "Cracker: A New Terror." The result is among the strongest of the "Cracker" narratives, even if its anti-Iraq war message feels heavy-handed.

The killer is known from the start -- a British street cop who served as a soldier in Northern Ireland. He takes to mudering visiting Americans in retaliation for their country's invasion of Iraq.

Fitz, distracted by his daughter's wedding and his usual temptations of booze, women and gambling, tries to keep his act (and marriage) together while burrowing into the murderer's brain.

Despite the "Final Episode" tag on the DVD, Coltrane does say in its "Behind the Scenes" featurette that he might be up for another ("if Jimmy's doing it").

"Prime Suspect" fans, alas, should entertain no such hopes.

Read this DVD blog's full review of "Prime Suspect 7: The Final Act" and "Cracker: A New Terror."