Poltergeist: Special Edition: Now here’s a special edition that isn’t, and a lack of extras that it is much harder to excuse. Without question one of the finest American horror films ever made, the Tobe Hooper-directed, Spielberg-penned and produced yarn about a typical suburban family terrorized by unruly spirits who abduct their daughter deserves better – a commentary with stars Craig T. Nelson and Jo Beth Williams, maybe, one or two of the production featurettes that ARE out there (you can check YouTube!)? Hell, I’d even excuse a feature on the much-ballyhooed “Poltergeist Curse” surrounding all the actors who subsequently died. All we get on this purported special edition is a mini-doc on poltergeist phenomenon that has nothing to do with the film. Abysmal… still, it’s my second favorite movie of all time, so I can’t not recommend it. At least there’s a restored anamorphic transfer.
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Caligula: Three-Disc Imperial Edition

I’m beginning to feel as though I’m too often feasting on my own words with regard to double-dipping; a number of my picks over the past several months have been re-releases of stuff that’s already out in non-vanilla editions with decent extras. Sometimes, though, when the circumstances are right you just can’t deny the value in an upgrade, and this week’s triple-disc reissue of Caligula is a prime example.
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Cujo: 25th Anniversary Edition

What works on paper doesn’t always necessarily work on screen – it’s a time-proven fact that movie adaptations of successful novels often gauge correctly, and just as often spectacularly fail to grasp. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, tweaks the timeline of Tolkien’s books perfectly to sustain the drama that is necessary to make Peter Jackson’s films work; similarly, most of the successful adaptations of Stephen King rely on anything from minor (Carrie) to significant (The Shining) changes for a winning film experience. This week, Cujo is released in a special edition DVD and… well, it swings both ways with this one.
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Death Proof: It’s frustrating to recommend anything when you know how much greater it could have been. For the time being, however, we might as well give up on the notion of seeing Grindhouse reach DVD properly, with both features and all the trailers intact – after all, Tarantino’s been promising us ‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’ for ages now, so he’d better deliver that first. Instead, we get Tarantino’s neo-slasher opus this week and Rodriguez’s zombie splatterfest Planet Terror in a month or so. Of course, this version of Death Proof is QT’s longer unrated cut, with the “missing reel” reinstated (but that was such a good joke!) and other additional material.
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Return of the Living Dead: Collector’s Edition

It takes a very special film to impinge upon a classic canon of a genre and wind up as beloved as Return of the Living Dead. In 1985, just as George Romero was concluding his initial zombie trilogy with Day of the Dead, any old upstart that not only sends up the series but trods upon some of its core mythology might have been outright disdained by horror fans everywhere. But Dan O’Bannon’s lovingly gory parody is damned fun, and sick to boot, and this week it gets a brand-new special edition that improves on the previous release.
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