Years:  1982, 1983, 1986, 1987, 1992
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Ted Danson, Shelley Long, Woody Harrelson, Rhea Perlman, George Wendt, John Ratzenberger, Kirstie Alley, Kelsey Grammer, Bebe Neuwirth, Nicholas Colasanto
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

                So, there’s a facebook poll to choose the episodes of Cheers that are the “Fan Favorites”.  And fans vote, and the eight top episodes are put onto a DVD called Fan Favorites, out March 6^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Eight episodes of Cheers (well, nine if you count the two-part episode about Woody and Kelly’s wedding).  And there is only ONE episode with Rebecca Howe. 

                I guess fans really liked Shelley Long as Diane, much more than Kirstie Alley as Rebecca.  I get that, I much preferred Diane too.  What’s funny here though, is that while there is just one episode with Rebecca in it, there are TWO that centre around Frasier’s relationship with Lilith.  The one where she and Frasier get together after a TV appearance together, and the one where they move in with each other and invite Sam and Diane over for dinner.  Then there’s the pilot episode, the Thanksgiving episode at Carla’s house, the one where Sam fixes Diane up on a date with a murderer, and the one where Harry the con man helps Coach get back some money that was scammed from him.

                It’s all great, of course, because Cheers is great.  But TWO episodes about Lilith, who was a tertiary character at best, and only one featuring Rebecca, who was on the show for more than half its run?  Take that, Kirstie Alley!  Facebook doesn’t like YOU at all!

Years:  1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989
Genre:  Horror, Slasher, Garbage
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kevin Bacon, Betsy Palmer, Cory Feldman, Crispin Glover, Kane Hodder
Eye candy:  All kinds of dumb young naked (mostly horny) chicks with knives in them
Directors:  Sean S. Cunningham, Steve Miner, Danny Steinmann, Tom McLoughlin, John Carl Buechler, Rob Hedden
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     On October 4th, the horror box sets start appearing, beginning with the Friday the 13th Limited Edition Gift Set from Paramount Home Entertainment.  This 8-disc box contains the first eight Friday movies (as some purists would have it – the REAL 8 Friday movies).  If you want the ninth and tenth also (Freddy Vs. Jason and the bonkers slasher-in-space opus Jason X), they are available together on a bargain double feature DVD from Alliance Films the same day.

     The first eight movies are, of course, Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th Part II, Friday the 13th Part III (in 3-D – the box set comes with the glasses), Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.  For individual reviews, click the above links.

     The thing is, all of these movies are genuinely terrible.  The Friday series has been one of the most consistently awful film series in history, and has become famous…why I don’t really know.  Maybe just volume.  But the fact remains that it HAS become famous, a weird cult thing for people with bad taste and those with a keenly developed sense of irony.  And for those people this box set is just about perfect.

     It comes with a mask – just in time for Hallowe’en!  The mask is decently made, but way too small for the average adult.  And of course the average Friday the 13th geek IS an adult.  In my house, the only person who could fit into the mask was my 11-year-old stepson, who is too young to watch Friday the 13th movies anyway.

     That being said, what makes this box set work is the geeky minutiae in the booklet.  Each movie has stats – number of kills (21 in Jason Takes Manhattan!) and weapons used.  How many sex scenes and stalled cars in Jason Lives?  Which is the one movie where a character other than Jason exhibits supernatural powers (telekenisis!)? 

     THIS is the sort of thing Friday buffs love.  I think most of the recognize the awfulness of the films, so they must care more about body count and spear-gun-vs.-hatchet than they do about really enjoying the films.  And that’s exactly what this box set does.  It caters to the audience for the movies, and I think that audience will be thrilled.

Year:  1982
Genre:  Comedy, Action
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Nick Nolte, Eddie Murphy, Annette O’Toole, Frank McRae, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Sonny Landham
Director:  Walter Hill
Run time:  96 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     48 Hours comes to Blu-Ray today, which has given me an opportunity to take another look at this old 80s classic.  I couldn’t remember it well – it has, after all, been likely 20 years since I last saw it.  I wondered if it just seemed like a classic because it was surrounded by all kinds of crap in the early 80s, and shone brighter as a result.  Or, was Eddie Murphy actually funny at one time?

     It turns out – a bit of both.  Eddie Murphy WAS funny at one time.  And before he became the “after” picture for the don’t-get-electrocuted PSA, Nick Nolte was the toughest, most grizzled, ideal hardass cop in the movie business.  Both were at the top of their game here, 20 years before Nolte’s infamous mugshot and 25 years before Murphy’s even more infamous Norbit.

     It may only be in the light of the hundreds of thousands of buddy-cop movies since 1982 that 48 Hours feels dated and tired.  Yeah, they’re partners who hate each other, but they will of course gradually grow a modicum of respect toward each other over the course of the film.  I’ve seen it a hundred thousand times before.  And it always gets old.  Even in the older films that originated the genre.

     48 Hours works on a few levels – the action and the chase of the cop-killers takes precedence over the comedy.  The comedy, and Eddie Murphy, are secondary to the plot and the action.  And that really, really works.  Murphy’s scene in the redneck bar is as funny and great today as it was then, and the cool cars and action scenes still work.  It isn’t solely a product of the 80s the way so many of its contemporaries are.

     That being said, the necessity of upgrading to Blu-Ray if you already own this film is unclear to me.  It looks great, but this was a gritty and dark movie to begin with, and your existing DVD will do fine.  However, if you don’t already own 48 Hours, now’s a good time to revisit a fine film.

“I quit drugs for a dollar thirty-five?  What was I thinking?” 

Years:  1981, 1982
Genre:  TV series, comedy, sitcom
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Christopher Lloyd, Andy Kaufman, Jeff Conaway
Eye candy:  Marilu Henner, Carol Kane
Creators:  James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels, Ed Weinberger, David Davis
Run time:  9 hours 41 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Previous reviews:  TV sets: Forever Funny

     Taxi probably had the best cast of any sitcom ever, and was certainly one of the greatest of all half-hour television comedies.  Willing to take chances, willing to break molds and taboos and talk about all kinds of stuff no one talked about until Seinfeld came along, it remains as funny and relevant today as it was in the late 70s and early 80s.  Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Danny DeVito, Marilu Henner, Andy Kaufman and Christopher Lloyd all moved on to other things, and so ended one of the best.  But at its peak (and Season Four, out October 6th from Paramount Home Entertainment was definitely part of its peak) Taxi was as good as any season of Cheers or Frasier, and better than 99% of the sitcoms that followed.

     The first episode of the season sees Christopher Lloyd worried that Alex (Judd Hirsch) is going to die.  He’s had a dream, you see, and he believes that he is psychic.  This is a pretty standard sitcom episode, in that everything Lloyd predicted is going to come true, up to the moment where Hirsch is supposed to die.  What sets Taxi apart is that within this standard, tried-and-true sitcom framework, they manage to make brief innocuous references to drug abuse and other nefarious things, and there is a subplot involving Andy Kaufman not speaking to Tony Danza which borders on the offensive. 

     It was always the cast that made this show stand out, the actors who took the standard material and elevated it to the level of classic television.  They were in fine form in Season Four, and it’s well worth picking up.

“The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low.  The danger is extreme.  Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador.  I almost could, except for the children.  The poor, bruised victims of this insanity.  Who would care for them?”

Year:  1982
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jean Donovan
Directors:  Ana Carrigan, Bernard Stone
Run time:  56 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     I wanted a lot more from Roses In December.  The story of Jean Donovan is a compelling one, a nice one, and a heartbreaking tragedy.  Interviews with her family and friends are interesting and sweet.  Memories of Donovan are always good ones, and it certainly seems like she was a wonderful person.  But I wanted to understand a little more about her death, and a little less about her.  Or, at least, more about her death.  You see, Donovan was an American lay missionary who was murdered, along with three nuns, by a military death squad in El Salvador in 1980.  The American government, in bed with the regime in El Salvador, paid lip service to finding her murderers, and even charged her family money for helping to facilitate the return of her body to America.

     This is, to me, the most interesting part of the story.  Why were the American government officials so reluctant to do anything about the tragedy?  Why did they help the El Salvador government basically cover up the crime?  What about the three American nuns who were executed with her?  Who were they?  Why were the hit-squads in the country targeting religious figures?  What was behind the civil war that started the whole thing?  Who were the bad guys in El Salvador, and what was their  role (likely or confirmed) in the rape and murder of these four women?

     We get lots of pictures and video of the corpses, which certainly adds to the heartbreaking nature of the story.  But we get about two minutes spent on the American government’s refusal to help.  We have no real context for the civil war, and we don’t really learn what it was about the religious people that made them targets for these military death squads.  We just get a nice biography, about a nice woman, who happened to be involved in a politically motivated murder in Central America in late 1980.  The synopsis on the back of the DVD box says that the film is a “powerful indictment of U.S. foreign policy in Central America”, but so little time is spent on it that it comes across as a pretty weak indictment in the end.

     As a one-hour biography, Roses In December works just fine.  And Jean Donovan has a devastating and powerful story.  I just wish it was fleshed out a lot more, and that her murder was put into more context.  To learn about that event, click here.  To learn about Jean Donovan, watch Roses In December.  The film is part of the Human Rights Watch DVD box set, released July 21st by First Run Features.

     To read (and hear) the review of Friday the 13th, Part 3, click here.  It is one of the better Friday The 13th movies, in that it only sucks a lot and isn’t utterly intolerable.  It’s just a little bit neat because of the 3-D aspect.  It’s a little more neat in 3-D on Blu-Ray.  Not that it’s good now.  Far from it.  But the 3-D is just a tiny bit better on Blu-Ray, and the scares are just a tiny bit scarier with better 3-D.  That’s about it.  I truly noticed the effectiveness of the slightly scarier moments when my girlfriend nearly leapt off the couch and shrieked when Jason Voorhees aimed the spear gun at the screen and fired.  The harpoon appears to leap out of the screen and into the living room, and it took a while for her to catch her breath.  And I laughed and laughed.

     No amount of added extras, special effects or high-definition will make Friday the 13th Part 3 good.  It’s just a little bit better in Blu-Ray, out June 16th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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      Thankfully, on Paramount Home Entertainment’s Forever Funny TV Set, there is no Walker Texas Ranger to ruin the mood.  Instead, this is just a solid collection of the premiere episodes or pilots of some of the most classic comedies ever to grace the television sets of North America.  I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Brady Bunch, The Odd Couple, Frasier, Cheers, and Taxi are all represented here.  Now, Paramount also distributes The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Happy Days and several other classic comedies which might have made a little more sense than Frasier, in terms of old-school classics, but I love Frasier.  So I won’t complain.  Much.  Here are the premieres, in chronological order:

     I Love Lucy (1951): 

     “Happy Anniversary, Ethel.”

     The very first episode of I Love Lucy sees Fred and Ethel fighting over what to do on their anniversary.  Fred (and of course Ricky) wants to go to the fights, while Ethel (and of course Lucy) wants to go to a nightclub.  Soon, the old cranky couple have decided to go sepearately, and Lucy stirs the pot by trying to find dates for her and Ethel.  Of course, this makes Ricky and Fred decide to find dates for themselves, which end up being Lucy and Ethel in disguise and…well, you can guess the rest, I’m sure.  We all know I Love Lucy, we all know it’s hilarious, and one of the best comedies ever.

     The Honeymooners (1955): 

     “You wanna go to the moon?  You wanna go to the moon?”

     Although Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) is constantly threatening his wife Alice with phyiscal violence, he has, to my knowledge, never actually struck her.  At least, not on screen.  But The Honeymooners must at least present Ralph as a potential domestic abuser and a ticking time bomb of rage.  As he and Ed Norton (Art Carney) split the cost of a TV set, and then fight over what programs to watch, I got the sense that Gleason was, at any moment, capable of snapping and commiting a brutal murder.  And I found that hilarious.

     The Brady Bunch (1969): 

     “Dad’s gonna take the girls’ side on everything from now on.”

     I wasn’t aware that when The Brady Bunch began, Marsha wasn’t yet old enough to be smoking hot.  But she was still a little girl in 1969, when the show began with a wedding.  The man, you see, has a bunch of boys.  The boys have a dog.  The woman, obviously, has a bunch of girls.  And the girls have a cat.  Because men like boys and women like girls and boys like dogs and girls like cats.  And they are all going to live together after this big ol’ wedding, and hilarity will ensue!  In the meantime, the little kids say all kinds of cute and smarmy things, paving the way for the 80s and the Olsen twins saying “dude” on Full House.  Thanks a lot, Brady Bunch.

     The Odd Couple (1970): 

     “They think I’m a hypochondriac?  That makes me sick.”

     The people who made the Odd Couple TV show must believe that everyone tuning in already knows the whole concept, either from the movie or the Neil Simon stage play.  And they’re probably right.  I think we all know the idea.  Felix is neat and anal.  Oscar is slovenly and rough.  And they have troubles…the premiere episode of this classic comedy introduces the weekly poker game, the Pigeon sisters who live upstairs, and the angrily tolerant dynamic between Jack Klugman and Tony Randall.

     Taxi (1978): 

     “I’m playing the horse.”
     “Which end?”

Years:  1978
Genre:  TV series, comedy, sitcom
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Christopher Lloyd, Andy Kaufman, Jeff Conaway
Eye candy:  Marilu Henner
Creators:  James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels, Ed Weinberger, David Davis
Run time:  30 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The first episode of Taxi is a surprisingly sweet one, as Judd Hirsch runs off to attempt to re-connect with his daughter whom he hasn’t seen in fifteen years.  And of course, Tony Danza is a stupid guy and a terrible boxer, Danny DeVito is a tiny little loudmouth jerk, Andy Kaufman is just learning to speak English and acting creepy, Jeff Conway is an actor who gets no roles and isn’t very good, and Marilu Henner is the smoking hot woman who just started working as a taxi driver.  And they’re in New York.  And that’s the show.

     Cheers (1982):

     “A drunk?  A drunk?  Why, Sam was the greatest drunk there ever was!”

     The first episode of Cheers introduces Cliff and his stupid and questionable facts, Norm and his apathy toward his wife, Carla and her scathing wit, Sam and his womanizing, Coach and his idiocy, and Diane.  Mostly, the episode is all about Diane, who has come into the bar for the first time on her way to the airport with her soon-to be husband.  He is an intellectual, of course, and he will ditch her in the bar to go back to his ex-wife.  Of course.  So Diane sits there and annoys everyone in the bar for hours with her snobby holier-than-thou attitude, and eventually ends up with a job there.  And so began Cheers.

     Frasier (1993): 

     “My wife had left me, which was very painful.  Then she came back, which was excruciating.”

     The debut episode of Frasier opens with Frasier Crane on his radio program, explaining succinctly and in a neat little package why he left Boston and Cheers and moved back to Seattle for his own spinoff show.  Quickly, we meet neurotic Niles and space cadet Daphne and of course Frasier’s dad Martin, who moves in with his son in the first episode.  And the dog Eddie, who stares at Frasier.  And Martin’s chair, which drives Frasier nuts.  We don’t get to see Maris, but we know she’s a cold ice queen.  And Roz is sardonic and mean, but has a heart of gold.  Yep.

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     Paramount Home Entertainment released a magnificent Blu-Ray box set on May 12th, featuring the first six Star Trek movies in stunning high-definition, with an extra disc featuring an interview that will, I’m sure, thrill nerds the world over.  It’s a 70-minute piece called The Captain’s Chair, where five huge stars have been brought together to reminisce about Star Trek – Whoopi Goldberg, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes talk, for 70 minutes, about Star Trek.  I found this to be terribly boring.  But I am not (even though I just watched SIX Blu-Ray movies), a Trekkie.  Or, Trekker.  Whatever.  I suspect that those who are Trekkies(ers) would love this exclusive content.

     There are extensive special features, including commentaries and interviews and behind the scenes stuff and nerd stuff on every single disc.  However, it’s the movies that everyone cares about, so I will review them one at a time.  Here goes:

Star Trek The Motion Picture (****4/10): 

“It’s life, Captain.  But not life as we know it.” 

     It’s hard to believe that Star Trek lasted so long given the silliness of the original series and the poor quality of this first movie.  This is, really, a bad movie.  It’s all special effects, which are great in Blu-Ray, but totally pointless.  The movie goes on way too long, trying to cram one special effect on top of another for the entire two-hour-plus running time.  The movie opens with some special effects, then other special effects, then Spock talking to his Vulcan elders.  They are about to present him with a medallion, which symbolizes his attainment of Total Logic.  I thought right away – if he has truly attained Total Logic, banishing all emotion from his psyche, would he really need a medallion to symbolize that?  That isn’t terribly logical, is it?

     From there the movie gets sillier and sillier.  Kirk is an admiral now, and he is sour at his desk job.  This will continue over the course of several movies.  A mysterious cloud is approaching the Earth, and the crew of the Enterprise go inside to discover an entity that has achieved self-awareness and seeks its creator.  And there are more special effects.  Which seems to take all the charm out of the movie, and all the interesting features of the characters, and turns it all flat.  Considering this is a Star Trek movie and it’s in outer space and it involves Kirk and the Enterprise and so forth, Star Trek The Motion Picture is sadly devoid, utterly, of wonder and charm.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (*********9/10): 

“Who am I hiding from?”
“From yourself!” 

     Thank God the series continued, for this terrifically campy and silly film!  And make no mistake, this movie is CAMPY.  And SILLY.  It is a battle of two titanic overactors – who will suffer an aneurysm from overacting first?  Kirk or Khan?  Shatner or Ricardo Montalban?  Khan rages, shakes his fist, and quotes Moby Dick at Shatner.  Shatner emotes, sighs, screams and quotes A Tale Of Two Cities at Khan.  Shatner makes a dramatic entrance, bathed in blue light as his silhouette emerges in a doorway.  Montalban, not to be upstaged, emerges from a sandstorm and takes off the hood of his robe in a truly dramatic moment of revelation – It’s KHAN!

     It certainly helps to have seen the Khan episode of the original series, but it isn’t necessary.  That would explain fully why Khan is so obsessed with killing Kirk.  However, reading Moby Dick could prepare you for this as well.  Khan is basically Captain Ahab, so obsessed with his White Whale, Kirk, that he is willing to die in order to take down his nemesis.  Kirk and Spock are meanwhile living out A Tale Of Two Cities, quotes from the book and everything – “it is a far, far better thing that I do…”

     We learn that some scientists have managed to create life from nothing, in a project called Genesis.  We also learn that Kirk has a son.  Which appears to be forgotten rather quickly, but I’m sure it means something in a later movie.  What makes Wrath of Khan work the best of all the Star Trek pictures is that Ricardo Montalban is the only appropriate foil for William Shatner.  Only a massive overactor can truly be a nemesis to another massive overactor.  Given all the silliness, however, Wrath of Khan has a surprisingly moving conclusion as Khan brings destruction upon himself, Kirk embraces his son, Spock makes the ultimate sacrifice, and they all quote Moby Dick and A Tale of Two Cities.

Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (********8/10): 

“I have been, and always shall be, your friend.” 

     This movie, amazingly, is almost as good as Wrath Of Khan, although it is far less cheesy than its predecessor.  Gone is Ricardo Montalban, despite his attempt to stab at Kirk from Hell’s Heart, and so forth.  Instead, we get Christopher Lloyd in the role of nemesis, Bad Guy and all around irritant to the crew of the Enterprise.  He is a Klingon warlord who is after that Genesis thing that was introduced in Khan.  He too is a massive overactor, but his overacting is just one marble short of being Doc from Back To the Future, and that is just distracting.  And too silly for an otherwise serious movie.

     The central story, however, is not that of Kirk Versus the Klingon.  It is, of course, the Search For Spock.  Spock can’t die, you see, and he has somehow begun to regenerate on the planet to which his body was fired at the end of the second film.  When the Enterprise crew beam down to that planet to rescue him (and go through the weird Vulcan ritual where his mind is put back into his body and so forth), the planet is growing at a crazy rate, and Spock with it.  This has the terrifically convenient effect of making sure that at the end of the movie, Spock can once again be played by Leonard Nimoy!  (Who also directed.)

     There are some solid scenes, and some solid camp as well.  Shatner, in mourning, basically puts on this cheesy and bizarre puppy-dog face.  He may as well be pouting and whining and licking his hands.  The Klingon Bird Of Prey spaceship looks amazing in HD.  Christopher Lloyd’s rat-dog-gremlin pet thing looks idiotic in HD.  There is a solid scene breaking Bones out of the brig as the crew goes renegade to bring Spock home.  And of course, the ship always takes off just as the planet explodes, and Kirk is beamed up just as the fire gets to him, and everything happens Just In The Nick Of Time.

     In Search For Spock, Kirk’s son dies.  Which is, apparently, why he was introduced in the second film.  It gives Shatner a chance to do some pretty funny emotional over-acting, but it appears to be forgotten rather quickly.  I mean, it was his son.  Not SPOCK!  And now everything is cool and they can take Spock back to Vulcan to get his mind right.  The costumes there are cool.  They look good in HD.  The next movie involves whales.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (******6/10): 

“A joke is a story with a humourous climax.”

     Explaining the plot of The Voyage Home could backfire.  This could easily be interpreted as a joke.  They need to go back in time to get humpback whales and bring them to the future so they can communicate with this probe which is somehow shutting down all electronic devices within a several thousand mile radius.  So they go to Sea World in 1989…seriously.  This is the plot of the movie.  Remember when Jaws went to Sea World in the third one?  Remember how cheesy and stupid that was?

     Amazingly though, The Voyage Home is not, really, that stupid.  It’s certainly silly.  After all, it’s the 80s, and there HAS to be a punk kid making too much noise on the bus who gets his comeuppance, and there has to be sleazy accountant types, and there has to be a hot blonde woman with big hair who cares deeply about animals…basically, Kirk and Spock and Bones and the rest of them appear to have been beamed back right into the middle of Crocodile Dundee.  Then there is a Culture Clash!  And hilarity ensues!  Leonard Nimoy directed this one too, and he deserves credit for not letting it become…well…Crocodile Dundee.  Well, not totally.

     The fun parts of this movie involve Spock, mostly, who is still not back to his old self.  He is now a total straight-arrow Vulcan, using only logic and unable to carry on a regular conversation with anyone.  Bones wants to fight with him and argue with him like old times, but every time he tries, he hits a brick wall.  There are some moments of real humour there.  Shatner is as understated as he can possibly be, most of the time, mostly because Spock is the star of the film this time around.  And, of course, they are all going to save the world.  With whales.

     “Captain!  There be whales here!”

     They get the whales, save the right two, of COURSE they manage to get to them just before a whaling vessel – whaling vessels being everwhere in the ocean – and we learn some good, helpful environmental lessons along the way.  There is a real ambitious desire to make an environmental point in this movie, and I appreciate that.  But the whales ARE pretty silly.  And then, just to hammer home the point that this is THE 80s, the final credits roll to a synth tune, over still photos from the movie we’ve just seen, like the end of some dreadful 80s TV show.  It’s like Star Trek by way of Magnum P.I.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (****4/10):

“All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.”

     It appears that by the time Star Trek V came around, Gene Roddenberry and his entourage had completely run out of ideas.  I mean, even the title – the Final Frontier?  Where have I heard that before?  Leonard Nimoy left the director’s chair for this one, and left William Shatner in charge.  What we get is a staggeringly strange mishmash of stupidity and idiocy, and not necessarily in that order.  We DO get to see Spock put that Vulcan neck knock-out thing on a horse.  Which is something neat.  A horse.

     The movie opens, as did Mission: Impossible II (both dreadful movies) with William Shatner free-climbing a rock face in Yosemite National Park.  This shows how Extreme he is.  You see, he is camping with Spock and Bones.  This goes on for a while.  The camping.  And the brotherly love and the joshing and the cameraderie and the campfire and so forth.  When they are finally called back to emergency duty, they are strangely awkward with each other, like they had a gay threesome in the woods and must never speak of it again.

     They are called back into action because Spock’s half-brother, a cult leaderish type guy, has escaped from somewhere and taken over the Enterprise.  So Kirk and Spock and Bones run around the ship, trying to evade the rest of their crewmates who are under the spell of the cult leader, until they finally cross a barrier that no one has crossed in history.  (Judging by their reaction to crossing this barrier, they are timidly going where no man has gone before.)  On the other side, they meet God, or some approximation of him who appears to be inspired by the Wizard of Oz, and Spock fires a laser gun from a Klingon ship, and everyone goes home happy.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (*******7/10):

“The Federation is no more than a homo-sapiens only club.”

     Kim Catrall joins the cast of Star Trek for a brief one-movie stint as a sharp-eyebrowed, pointy-eared character who looks like Spock.  This leads me to believe that she may be a Vulcan.  Spock is a Vulcan.  She looks like Spock.  She is a Vulcan.  That is logic, and Spock would be proud, I think.  By this point, the rest of the crew is pretty old.  Shatner and Nimoy are long in the tooth, James Doohan is large in the paunch, and Bones and Chekov and Sulu are pretty tired.  Good thing Catrall and Christian Slater are there to infuse the series with a little bit of youthful exuberance.  Not that they are any good.

     You know who is good though?  Christopher Plummer.  He is the best Star Trek villain since Khan, and like Mr. Montalban, his character has a tendancy to quote from great literature – in this case, Shakespeare.  Plummer plays General Chang, a Klingon general who plans to get rid of Kirk once and for all.  The setting is a series of Klingon-Federation peace talks, and Kirk represents the bigotry of the human beings against the Klingon race.  This is not just the one-sided view of Klingons.  Kirk is genuinely prejudiced against Klingons, because they killed his son.  (I know, I know, he barely seemed upset about it at the time, but his is a slow-burning anger.)

     Some Klingons are killed while in the care of the crew of the Enterprise, and of course Kirk is blamed.  Of course, he also didn’t do it.  But he gets arrested anyway, and sent to an underground labour camp in the Dilithium mines for Klingon prisoners.  While there, he has sex with some space-hottie who then shape-shifts into – an exact replica of Kirk!  In some kind of bizarre plot  to murder Kirk while he’s “trying to escape”.  This is the second-most remarkable Shatner-vs-Shatner scene since the finale of White Comanche back in 1967.

     In the end, the success of Star Trek VI rests mostly on the shoulders of Plummer, Nimoy and Catrall, who do most of the interesting things in the film.  Bones, Chekhov, Uhura and Scotty are all pretty obnoxious here.  As Shatner has toned down his overacting, the rest of the cast appears to be determined to compensate.  They are virtually insufferable.  But the movie works anyway, with it’s racial overtones, sci-fi atmosphere, courtroom drama, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome scene and prison escape.  This movie has everything!  And most of it works.  And so concludes the Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection, on Blu-Ray now.

     “Second star to the left.  And straight on ’til morning.”

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      Truly, I gave the Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection a better rating simply because I’m a completist.  I like the fact that there are a ton of extra special features on each disc, and the full series comes with an extra disc for Star Trek fanatics where William Shatner talks to Patrick Stewart for an hour and a half.  None of this is particularly useful to the non-fanatic, but it’s essential to a good Blu-Ray release.  And really, I like the three movies contained in the Trilogy.  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is deservedly a classic movie, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock is a decent follow-up, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home closes out the little trilogy nicely.

     But I liked Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country quite a lot.  In fact, I liked it better than Star Trek IV.  And I always like to have a complete collection.  That being said, Star Trek The Motion Picture was awful, and the William Shatner-directed Star Trex V: The Final Frontier was even worse.  So you’re not missing out on much if you go with the trilogy instead.  The special features on all three discs are the exact same that you get on those same three movies were you to get them in the full set.  Just know that there are options out there!

   Ingrid Bergman is known for a few key movies. For Whom The Bell Tolls, Notorious, and of course Casablanca. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a movie on Tuesday that should rank up there with Bergman’s finest work.

   A Woman Called Golda is a three and a half hour TV movie from 1982 that tells the story of Golda Meir, the first female prime minister of Israel. It traces her story from her childhood, which is dealt with briefly, to her young years working at a kibbutz in Israel with her husband, played by Leonard Nimoy. At this stage Meir is played by Judy Davis, but it’s when she gets older and is played by Bergman that the film really shines. It’s a TV movie, so at times it can be hokey, but in one of her final roles Ingrid Bergman is magnificent as the real-life Golda Meir. It’s worth it to see her cap of an astonishing film career with a performance of this caliber.

   A Woman Called Golda is on DVD for the first time on March 24th.