Video

Rip It Up, Issue 103, 1 February 1986, Page 8

Video

Roadshow heads the list of recent video releases, with big Arnie Schwarznegger as an android in The Terminator and Woody Allen as a bumbling theatre agent in his charming Broadway Danny Rose. Other releases include the horror movies The Haunted Palace (with Vincent Price, 1963) and The Filth Floor, and KGB: The Secret War.

- CBS/Fox offers Turk 182, starring Timothy Hutton of The Falcon and the Snowman fame. There'’s also the comedy Smorgasboard (starring Jerry Lee Lewis, Milton Berle and Sammy Davis Jnr), C.H.U.D. (cannibals in the sewers of New York!), the romantic Ladyhawke, The Baron and the Kid (starring. Johnny Cash as a pool player), The Burning Bed (Farrah Fawcett in a dramatic role as a battered wife), and the suspense-horror Scared To Death. Palace video releases include Blood Feast, the work of cult horror director Herschell G. Lewis, and Britt Ekland getting tacky in Erotic Images. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Bth Dimension (Roadshow) Wow, | wish | had written this one. A film hot on the trails to oblivion — just too wild and far gone daddy for words. Here's the plot: Buckaroo Banzai is a multi-media star, comic book hero, scientist and brain surgeon. He breaks through to the Bth dimension in his jet car (a customised Ford) and discovers aliens. There are good aliens and bad ones; the good ones (sort of good, but not too nice) are black and the bad ones are white and racist. The “good” aliens blackmail Buckaroo and his followers (The Hong Kong Cavaliers) to help them, by placing an atom bomb above the earth, and if he doesn’t stop them — bye bye World.

Now all the aliens are called John and came to Earth on Hallowelen 1938, the same day Orson Welles (well-known computer salesman) did his famous ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast. You see, Orson was telling the truth, but the aliens brainwashed everyone. Wonderful stuffl

The aliens set up the ‘Yoo Dine’ company as a front (YoYo Dine features in Thomas Pynchon’s book Crying Of Lot 49, which has nothing to do with the film, but shows that the scriptwriters did English Lit. at Yale.) and attempt to use Mr

The Last Metro(Palace Academy) Francois Truffaut died last year, leaving behind a body of work stunning and beautiful. From his early writhings in Cahiers du Cinema, dealing with “la politique des auteurs”, re-assessments of Hollywood directors like Ray, Fuller and Ford, and his first perfect films like Tirez sur le Pianiste and Jules et Jim. et , He leaves us with The Last Metro, which carries all the familiar touches of his other films, the fine handling of the dialectic between genre and auteur, the concentration on the micro rather than macropolitical system, and that particular French sense of reserve and stylistic modesty. In this film about the Nazi occupation of Paris, Truffaut tells a story about the love affair between 3 husband and wife, and the wife’s lover, set against the struggle of a theatre remaining open against censorship and discrimination against Jews. The theatre becomes a metaphor for Truffaut’s theme of resistance, be it against facism or dangerous desires. - Both Catherine Deneuve ( heroine of Bunuel’s Belle de Jour) and Gerard Depardieu give wonderful performances in a rich and important film. If you think Bolero is a. good example of French filmmaking, you're sadly mistaken. Watch Truffaut for his art and compassion and forget about that particular trans-continental soap

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