Musing about home video again: The Alien Anthology BD set.

As a semi-early adopter of the Blu-ray Disc format, I have noticed two distinct patterns in terms of which releases I will line up to buy next. On the one hand, I will buy a lot of discs where I have heard good things about the film therein (or seen it as a rental) and am willing to take a punt. Examples of that include Crank: High Voltage or Machete. On the other hand, there are films I saw repeatedly as a boy and, since coming to fully grok the benefits of progressive video and lossless audio, have been dying of curiosity to learn how they scrubbed up on the new format. Aliens and the series it is part of (to one extent or another) is an example of that.

Why I will not watch DVD anymore (aka in praise of BD)

I have written about or referenced a lot of different films in entries prior. That is a given. As I have also written previously, I grew up in a household that was one of the first to have a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) in the house.

Making a film that is shit, on purpose

Every serious fan of films that are so fukking terrible that they are entertaining by accident, at some point in their life, asks themselves whether it is possible to make a film that is so terrible it is awesome on purpose. Films that have come out of production so terrible that they are often more entertaining than most “good” films by accident are legion. Often, it is merely a matter of things going horribly wrong, or people in key positions failing at their job. But hysterically terrible films that were made that way on purpose are so rare, so difficult to find, that it is even a matter of debate as to whether they really exist. The only example I can think of is a Roger Corman production of Fantastic Four that was shot in 1994 and not intended to be commercially released. The only reason it even exists is because certain people held the rights to make such a film and wanted to retain them, which in turn necessitated making an actual film. The total budget of that piece was a mere one and a half million dollars, which in 1994 terms is not even enough to hire enough people to make a two minute superhero film trailer. (For those who doubt this, Terminator 2 was released commercially the previous year, with the kind of special effects that would be required to photo-realistically render Mr. Fantastic’s signature abilities. Even if you leave out Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s average salary around the time, that equates to around seventy to eighty million dollars.)