Happy Thursday, everyone! It's still in the 90s (low 30s for our Celsius friends) here in Richmond but that's about to break with some thunderstorms today, which is nice. Meanwhile, the Sox continue their downhill slide and I'm slowly getting my office in more order. So let's take a look at this week's subject. I was kind of casting around for what I wanted to talk about this week and it struck me; I went through my shelves and picked out a bunch of my weakenesses at thrift stores: schlock DVDs that I may never watch! So here's five DVDs of ostensible schlock.
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Paul Walker's career outside of the Fast & Furious franchise is littered with this sort of thing (seriously, it's almost hilarious how many movies he did that look as cheap as hell and involve car races). I almost don't even need to watch this because I'm pretty sure I can predict what the hell happens. He's wrongly accused, has to get out of it, there's car chases, bad guys, Paul wins in the end and looks good doing it. This is exactly the kind of "I've never heard of this" schlock that I spend a buck on as a lark.
Vehicle 19 is on Prime with subscription and on Redbox and Pluto with ads. Weirdly, it's not on Tubi, the usual place for this sort of thing.
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Warner Archive is a weirdly fun service that Warner media runs where they don't distribute DVDs for a lot of their deeper catalog titles but they're happy to burn you a decent copy and send it to you. Almost always no special features, but hey it's a nice physical copy. Now this one, again, I'd never heard of and I assume it's in that weird period as Kurt Russell was transitioning from his Disney teen career and heading toward being the most badass John Carpenter leading man he would ever have. Going by the logo, I would guess this is part of the Egyptology craze of the '70s as the King Tut exhibition was touring the US. But going by the name, I really hope this is also part of the Erich von Däniken nonsense scam with his books about ancient aliens (which the more you read, the more obviously racist it becomes because goodness, obviously those people in this primitive countries certainly couldn't figure out how to move rocks). It's such a dumb '70s thing that thankfully has subsided a bit but is still there in parts of those white supremacist doofballs.
Hey, it's all on YouTube!
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Look, whatever else I might think of Quentin Tarantino (and let's be clear, his handling of the stunt work in Kill Bill and how Uma Thurman was in danger was terrible and he's rightly been dragged for it), it's worth noting that he's done a decent amount of work in promoting schlock that hasn't especially been available or widely seen. Case in point, Switchblade Sisters, a cult classic from 1975 about female high school gang members that for fans of exploitation films is apparently way up in the cult canon. I've obviously never seen this one, from Tarantino's short-lived Rolling Thunder DVD label (which amusingly, besides fun schlock, also included the stone-cold romance classic from Wong Kar-Wai, Chungking Express, which was pretty much out of print in the US outside of that DVD before Criterion released their big Wong Kar-Wai set last year).
Interestingly, I know this title much more as the name of film critic and screenwriter April Wolfe's excellent (and sadly no longer) podcast where she and guests looked at genre films from a female perspective. Switchblade Sisters is absolutely a podcast you should check out if the subject interests you at all (I particularly recommend #168 with Mallory O'Meara on Blow The Man Down, or #149 where Isabel Sandoval discusses Double Indemnity).
Switchblade Sisters is currently on AMC+ and Shudder as well as for rent/buy on the usual places.
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I love me a good double pack of schlock! Especially when it has working actors who are going to spend a lot of it just staring off screen at crude effects in a nonsensical plotline. Bonus points if there's at least one Oscar nominee in them and they've never been rated because why bother if it's just going straight to DVD? Even better if, like Supernova, it aired originally on the Hallmark channel for some reason.
That's some quality staring off screen. Supernova is streaming on Freevee (which is apparently the new, deeply stupid name for IMDbTV with ads). Final Days Of Planet Earth doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere.
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Well, that's enough schlock for one week, so let's close out with my recommendation. I've been doing this odd decades project, where I look at Letterboxd for the highest-rated film from 100, 90 and so on years ago and this week I got to 1982 and hoo doggy, Fitzcarraldo is as damn good as you may have heard. There's insanity and opera and actors who obviously want to murder Klaus Kinski and it's pretty damn great. Streaming on Kanopy and also a bunch of ad-supported channels like Roku, Freevee and Tubi (and hey, Shout! Factory) and absolutely worth your time.
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