outings: the British-made TARZAN’S GREATEST ADVEN- TURE and TARZAN THE MAG- NIFICENT). Excitement comes in small doses, but this is fairy en- joyable jungle hokum, and it’s re- freshing to see the “white ape” collaborating with his native neigh- bors for once. Scatman Crothers (billed here as Sherman Crothers) guest stars as a village elder and loyal friend to the Tarzan family. Platinum spreads the five
films across two discs—three on one, two on the other—without any regard for chronological or- dering. The individually shrink- wrapped keepcases come housed in a reasonably sturdy slip case. Transfers, none of which will win any awards and probably hail from previously existing video sources, vary in quality, with REVENGE achieving the best film-like look and GODDESS suffering the worst from blurring during scenes with rapid move- ment. Though its presentation can’t compare to a Kino on Video restoration, the 1918 film is at least viewable without too many
distractions, and I like the musi- cal accompaniment—a repetitive program of classical overtures and upbeat band tunes—be- cause the vintage recording has a kind of innocence evocative of the “penny arcade” era in which the film was made.
HORROR
2002, Elite Entertainment, DD-5.1/MA/16:9/LB/+, $19.99, 75m 51s, DVD-1 By Richard Harland Smith
Unless one lives in morbid
fear of goats, Dante Tomaselli’s hell-’n-damnation spooker HOR- ROR makes for a long hour and fifteen. Within the first minute of the New Jersey auteur’s sopho- more effort, a docile representa- tive of the horned genus Capra hircus presides over the abduc- tion of a teenage girl by the frontman for a devil cult and re- turns periodically throughout the film, checking on the proceed- ings like a waiter refilling water glasses at a Chinese restaurant. However the beast in question
may have stood for all things Satanic in Medieval times (and continued to be depicted as such by artists from Bruegel the Elder and Francisco de Goya to H.R. Giger), the sight of a bearded he- goat is for contemporary viewers less evocative of the Underworld than of a roadside petting zoo. It’s this damned literal mindedness that makes Tomaselli’s vision of Big Evil so flatly fundamentalist, like a Jack Chick comic without the subtext of leering schadenfreude that made those graphic reli- gious tracts (in which the well- meaning but godless were sucked straight to Hell) such a compelling guilty pleasure. In the director’s commentary
accompanying this DVD from Elite Entertainment, Tomaselli speaks at length of the inspira- tions and touchstones for HOR- ROR, originally titled DEATH’S DOOR and concerned with the fate of a van-load of ironically- named escapees from a drug rehabilitation center who fall into the grasp of a messianic Satanist who may or may not be The
Satan gets The Amazing Kreskin’s goat in Dante Tomaselli’s DTV spooker, HORROR.
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