DVD blog reviews home video news -- DVD Spin Doctor

Time to party with 'Wild Women of Wongo'

Labor Day over, the Dog Days a fond memory, our lunchbucket pals on the Film Crew straggled back to work, busting on the worst in "movie" making.

This time, it's a mud-wrestling death match with the all-awful "Wild Women of Wongo."

Let's make the plot description mercifully brief. Beautiful women live on a tropical unisex island -- the only males being scuzzy ape-like beings on the other coast. Hunks from the mists of the south float ashore, ready for fun. The ape-scuz take exception.

Awful movie humor works beautifully with, say, "Plan 9 From Outer Space." That Ed Wood classic is bad, but good for easy laughs. This time, the Film Crew -- you, know, the guys from "Mystery Science Theater 3000," minus wisecracking robots -- must find a way to make some toxic waste from the year 1958 sit up and sing. Good luck, men, we'll be cowering offshore. Send up a Wongo flare when it's over.

For braver souls, DVD Spin Doctor and our friends at Shout! Factory are giving away a few safety-sealed copies of "The Film Crew: Wild Women of Wongo."

Just sign up for this DVD blog's email feed. Earliest signups get the, uh, goods. No spam or ape-scuz monkey business -- just the day's DVD Spin Doctor editorial content. Same as the RSS. Be sure to activate the email when the confirmation notice comes. Days later, "Wild Women" will be at your door. Sorry, no returns accepted.

More Ingmar Bergman: 'De Duva' flies again

Ingmar Bergman's darker super-serious works inspired numerous parody tributes. Most of them by people of a certain age who sat through "The Seventh Seal" in college, wishing it were "Easy Rider."

Bergman liked a good laugh, they tell us. No telling what the master thought of the midnight movie short "De Duva."

Check out that camp classic and come back here for these other tasty Bergman goofs.

A star is born ... on YouTube

This is a bit afield, but I'd be delighted to buy these videos on DVD. Instead, they're free on YouTube.

Meet Ysabella Brave, karaoke singer. She's posted a swarm of videos on YouTube, mostly of her singing and dancing and flirting into a digital camera in her apartment. Let's go to the tape:

Wow. Yes, she appears to be for real, no bogus Lonelygirl. Her name is MaryAnne and she works for Yahoo. As a result of her vid postings, she now has a modest record deal with an e-label at Warner Music.

She's a sweetheart about communicating with her many YouTube fans and enjoys goofing on the unlikely fame she's accrued in the past year. (One day, she'll be up there with the Star Wars Kid.) My favorites of the 85 or so video performances she's posted are the standards. She doesn't nail the number every time -- sometimes when the phrasing is odd you wonder if she knows the tune all that well -- but it's always a good show. Too good to be true? Judge for yourself. Here are more of her greatest hits:

Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)
My Heart Belongs to Daddy
Let's Misbehave
Night and Day
Anything Goes
In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning
Mambo Italiano
Love Me Two Times(!)

Tooling down the 405

My son and I spent a good chunk of today on Southern California's infamous 405 freeway, an always reliable source of soul-searing stop-and-go traffic. We pondered the physics of traffic jams for a while. Nick wondered what it would be like if no one was driving in L.A. -- if the freeway was just empty at rush hour.

That stretch of road looked familiar. In fact, it took me back to the millennium, the first time I recall seeing office drones crowding around a computer screen to see a cool Net-only video. I still give it two fingers up.

The DVD blog theater presents "405":

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Martin Scorsese's jukebox from Heaven

After watching "The Departed" DVD over the weekend, came this random thought: Ever notice how the jukeboxes in Martin Scorsese's gangster movies all seem to play the same white-boy FM fare from the late Sixties and '70s? No matter how dingy the place, the barflies are in there digging the Stones, Eric Clapton, some cool song off an Allman Bros. album. You gotta love Scorsese for caring about the music every time out, but someone really needs to take the guy to a Snoop concert.

Here's the classic Cadillac-Clapton death scene from "Goodfellas" (graphic content).