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Criterion's new Blu-ray release regards Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla as a major landmark of postwar atomic anxiety. Ten years ago the original Japanese Gojira drew a flurry of journalistic interest on its belated American theatrical release in America. Audiences were impressed by its overt references to Hiroshima and the utter destruction of Tokyo. A fine DVD from 2006 double-billed Gojira (the original Japanese title) with its highly successful American version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Criterion's Blu-ray gives us new HD transfers of both versions, along with commentaries and interview extras that address questions that have bothered film fans for fifty years. Why would the only country ever to suffer nuclear attacks produce such a masochistic fantasy about their national trauma?

This original Japanese-language Gojira balances its spectacular monster rampage against human issues and post-atomic moral questions. Japanese sailors are irradiated and their ship sunk by an unknown flash of light and heat that continues to destroy other vessels. Searching for the cause, scientist Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) travels to a tiny fishing island, and is confronted by a colossal water dragon. It soon comes ashore to march through Tokyo, leaving a broad wake of utter destruction. Conventional weapons prove useless, which puts the mysterious, secretive Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) in a bind: he's invented a new device he calls an "Oxygen Destroyer" but refuses to use it against the monster. He feels morally compromised: if the device's existence is revealed, governments will rush to exploit it as another weapon of mass destruction. Serizawa's fiancée Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kôchi) begs the scientist to reconsider.

The scenes of Godzilla crushing Tokyo underfoot thrilled American youngsters of the 1950s. Toho would later expand and tame the franchise, adding new monsters and adapting the formula to create a series of increasingly juvenile epics. But every schoolchild of the late '50s knew that Godzilla was a symbolic substitute for The Bomb, and was curious why the Japanese would make such a movie. According to the esteemed Japanese critic Tadao Sato, the vision of Tokyo once again reduced to ashes allowed Japanese audiences to deal with the communal guilt still felt over the war. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka did not copy the theme of Ray Harryhausen's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a popular movie about a dinosaur revived by a bomb test. Godzilla is not a dinosaur but a new force of nature, a dragon that breathes Atomic fire.

Godzilla was made soon after the end of the American Army's occupation of Japan. Rather than address the wartime nuclear bombings, events still spoken of in hushed tones, producer Tanaka seized upon the topical Lucky Dragon 5 incident, in which a Japanese tuna boat defied warnings to stay clear of the Bikini Atoll, unaware that the U.S. was testing its new Hydrogen bomb. As critic David Kalat points out in his Criterion commentary, Gojira restages the event, substituting the radioactive monster for the nuclear blast. The horror-beast rising from the Pacific to threaten Tokyo is an enormous political statement: for much of the world, America will forever be seen as an Atomic aggressor.

Seen in this rejuvenated presentation, Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects look better than ever. Considering the limited technical means available in 1954, the resourceful Toho technicians found clever ways to combine their rubber Man-in-suit-a-saur with live action and impressive miniatures. Hand-rotoscoped mattes are employed to composite the beast into several shots. Stop-motion animation sees use in a couple of shots as well. What's most impressive is the depth of focus maintained on the miniatures, even with the camera rolling at four-times speed.

The "towering titan of terror" is unlike the giant monsters in American movies. Godzilla is not a dinosaur or giant animal, but a cultural fantasy. He rises from the sea not to eat or spawn, but for the express purpose of annihilating Tokyo. Godzilla is a post-modern version of a traditional Yokai demon, writ large. And that billowing, notably non-reptilian hide? He's meant to look like a walking atomic mushroom cloud!

Ishiro Honda's sober and respectful direction makes its anti-nuke statement without resorting to moralizing speeches. The specter of the bombings is always present, even if no spokesperson steps forward to deliver an overt author's message. Godzilla involves us in its human drama, even if the characters are orchestrated along familiar lines. The scientist has a beautiful daughter (Momoko Kochi, with her endearing, Gene Tierney-like overbite) who must choose between an eager young salvage operator and her fiancé, a morbidly-obsessed scientist who does bad things to goldfish in his Rotwang-like mad lab. All that is missing from the American formula is a representative of the military.

The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray of Godzilla improves substantially on all earlier video versions. The blizzards of dust specks that marred earlier releases have been all but eliminated. Many scenes still carry fine scratches, but all the major damage has been repaired.

Criterion disc producer Curtis Tsui is responsible for some of the label's best fantasy discs, including Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face. His extras for Godzilla are on the same level as those for any other great work of world cinema.

First up is the 1956 American re-cut, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the version most commonly shown in other international markets. Director Terry Morse skillfully shoehorned additional scenes with Raymond Burr into the narrative. Burr's fly-on-the-wall reporter narrates the movie, aided by a newly imposed flashback structure. Rather than a pastiche, the American version is well written and cleverly assembled. This transfer is from pre-print film materials and looks far better than earlier videos. It includes the original Trans-World logo and closing credit crawl, albeit from a 16mm source. Author David Kalat provides an impassioned pair of commentaries for both feature versions. He explains what the original Godzilla represented to Japanese audiences, and examines the strange cultural re-mix of the American version.

Critic Tadao Sato explains some of the political context of the time in Japan, and offers his personal analysis of Japan's monster-who-became-a-friend. Other interviews give us input from the beloved composer Akira Ifukube, actors Akira Takarada and Haruo Nakajima, the man who played Godzilla inside the rubber suit. Two effects technicians also comment, but an effects-oriented featurette has only a few examples to offer. Much better is a piece about the terrible fate of the sailors of the Lucky Dragon 5. With last year's near nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, Godzilla's anti-nuke stance is more relevant than ever.

Trailers for both movies are included. The soundtrack for the King of the Monsters trailer throws an uninterrupted tirade of hyperbole at the audience, that must have left schoolboys in 1956 with their mouths hanging open:

Jean Rollin returned to the cradle of le fantastique with Fascination (1979) after an interval spent churning out pornography under the aliases Michel Gentil and Robert Xavier. The legitimization of hardcore porn worldwide by mid-decade had made redundant the erotisme of his earlier Pop Art horror films, from the comic book-inspired crazy quilt of The Rape of the Vampire in 1968 to the oneiric, epitaphic Lips of Blood in 1975. In 1978, Rollin signed on to direct The Grapes of Death, a bloody zombie movie (of sorts) with Gothic blandishments, set in French wine country. The production found the filmmaker working well outside of his comfort zone, incorporating graphic gore and an overall more naturalistic approach than that with which he had begun his feature filmmaking career a decade earlier; The Grapes of Death was at the time Rollin's most conventional production, tricked out with professional special effects and the beneficiary of a full budget.

In follow-up, Fascination had begun as a proposed sex film until Rollin suggested to his co-producer that they make instead a horror film combining violence and elements of fantasy. Assuring the money men that he would assume the burden of any budgetary overruns, Rollin was given the green light to write his own script. Limiting his locations for the most part to a single setting (as he had in his first films), Rollin spun the tale of Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire), a brash young thief on the run from accomplices he has betrayed who takes refuge inside a seemingly deserted chateau in the French countryside. Killing time until nightfall, Marc encounters the residence's sole occupants: the lady-in-waiting (French porn star Brigitte Lahaie in her first straight role), and companion (Franca Mai) of an absent noblewoman. Armed with a revolver, Marc seems to have the upper hand until his hostages reveal themselves as all too up for the play of power and he begins to suspect that he is the one being held against his will.

Taking its title from the name of a French magazine, Fascination is a bit of a farmer's daughter story and recalls a number of earlier tales in which a cagey male finds himself at odds in a house full of designing women, from Réné Clement's Joy House (1964) to Don Siegel's The Beguiled (1971), with a hint of D. H. Lawrence's The Fox thrown in for good measure. Alliances are liquid within the walls of this chateau, with Eva (Lahaie) and Elizabeth (Mai) at first giggling and cooing over their new acquisition until Eva condescends to a sexual encounter with the stranger; Elizabeth's jealousy grows, stemming from unexpected feelings for Marc rather than Eva. When Elizabeth and Marc couple off at last, Eva turns in a fit of pique to his accomplices, who lie in wait outside the chateau. With the offer of their former partner's gold and her own body, Eva lures the criminals to a stable, dispatching every one of them with a scythe, and returning to the chateau with considerably more than a taste for blood. Though his cast is small and his setting contained, Rollin keeps the proceedings buoyant by never tipping his hand toward where the narrative is pointed. With Marc a standard issue cad whose comeuppance is as good as guaranteed (the film has the predetermined feel of one of EC Comics' "Jolting Tales of Tension"), it is Eva and Elizabeth who truly fascinate. (Rollin often twinned his female characters by dint of similar names - in Shiver of the Vampires, he filled the frame with Isle, Isolde and Isabelle and talk of the worship of Isis.) Possessed of an uneven acting ability but an undeniable screen presence, Brigitte Lahaie (whom Philip Kauffman would cast as Uma Thurman's doppelgänger in Henry and June a few years later) impresses from the outset with her uninhibited ferality. Lahaie's bit with the scythe (as she pads about nude under a cloak, no less) was immortalized in the posters and promotional art but it is the more demure Franca Mai who emerges as the precious find of Fascination. Introduced sipping ox blood as a remedy for anemia, Elizabeth evinces a quality of evil-in-innocence that lends to the fade-out a frisson on par with that of the "Wurdulak" episode of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura, 1963).

Fascination first found its way to American home video consumers in 1996 via an authorized VHS dupe courtesy of Video Search of Miami (which included specific introductions by Rollin himself). Digital rights for the films were acquired after the advent of DVD by the American arm of the United Kingdom's Redemption Films - Redemption USA - who released this and several other titles through Image Entertainment. The Redemption/Image disc, sourced from positive film materials, reflected a quantum leap forward in times of resolution and color even though degradation of the materials was evident in scratches, stains and splices. Redemption's new deal with Kino Lorber marks another step up in quality for Fascination (and several other titles included in an initial retrospective rollout of Rollin's work), remastered as it has been in high definition from the 35mm negative. Though painted from a considerably more muted palette than Rollin's previous films, Fascination looks impressive and magisterial on this new DVD, which is framed at 1.66:1 (a more generous aspect ratio than the 1999 disc) and anamorphically-enhanced. Extras include two extended sex scenes (which, though hardly graphic, upped the soft core quotient) featuring Brigitte Lahaie, an original theatrical trailer, and a 24-minute episode of the 1999 British TV series Eurotika!, which offers an entertaining and informative thumbnail primer on Rollin's career. A 20-page booklet contains mini reviews of the first Redemption-Kino Lorber Rollin releases and a career overview by noted film critic Tim Lucas.

For more information about Fascination, visit Kino Lorber. To order Fascination, go to TCM Shopping.

by Richard Harland Smith

An unexpected real-life demonstration of the "banality of evil," 1974's Swastika remains one of the most unsettling documentaries about Adolf Hitler. Rather than focusing on graphic atrocities or the infamous German leader's philosophies, it compiles over an hour and a half of rare archival film including obscure home movie footage (much of it in color) to present a dispassionate, shockingly ordinary portrait of the most reviled man in world history. The film caused a firestorm of controversy even before its release with Eva Braun's sister, Gretl, fighting to prevent its release and claiming ownership of some of the footage. Its screenings at festivals provoked violent reactions including vandalism in France, condemnation from writer James Baldwin over a snippet of Jesse Owens in the feature, and outcries over its "pro-Nazi" stance including its omnipresent poster art featuring the titular symbol.

After 1945, it took quite a while for cinema to come to grips with the aftermath of the Nazi regime. Across the board, politicians and educators presented the participants as nightmarish aberrations of humanity, demonic boogeymen now relegated to the distant past. Filmmakers took a somewhat more complicated view, whether it be in dramatized productions like Judgment at Nuremberg or epic-length documentaries like The Sorrow and the Pity. However, it was always clear that the filmmakers were absolutely damning Hitler and his followers in no uncertain terms.

Eschewing the usual condemning narration, Swastika instead compiles the footage into a compelling narrative showing Hitler in sequence through the years, intercutting footage of rallies and national events with tranquil scenes of him and Eva with their colleagues in the countryside. Seeing Hitler surrounded by puppies or discussing the potential dangers of cigarette smoking or boar hunting is a highly disorienting experience, and the film smartly avoids disrupting the proceedings with any sort of imposed creative viewpoint (apart from the surreal animated opening sequence, which features a swastika flying through space). The terse opening title card says it best: "If the human features of Hitler are lacking in the image of him that is passed on to posterity, if he is dehumanised and shown only as a devil, any future Hitler may not be recognized, simply because he is a human being."

One of the most unusual documentaries about the Nazi era, Swastika sports a surprising pedigree including co-producer Sir David Puttnam, a future Oscar winner for Chariots of Fire who had just started out with films like the sci-fi cult film The Final Programme and Jacques Demy's offbeat The Pied Piper. After this film he immediately moved on to a pair of far more outrageous films with elements of Nazi iconography, Ken Russell's Mahler and Lisztomania, before moving to more respectable territory with The Mission and Midnight Express. The film's other producer, American-born Sandy Liberson, worked with Puttnam on those same films through the Russell era and also had the 1970 classic Performance under his belt.

Swastika's director and co-writer, Philippe Mora, met both of the producers in 1973 when he moved to London from Melbourne, Australia, and they followed this up with a significantly tamer documentary about the Great Depression, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, in 1975. His career took a bizarre turn when he returned to Australia in the mid-'70s and helmed the violent western Mad Dog Morgan with Dennis Hopper, which led to a string of strange cult titles including The Return of Captain Invincible, The Beast Within, Communion, and the two most outrageous Howling sequels. In 1997 he returned to Nazi territory with the underrated Snide and Prejudice, which features asylum inmates taking on the roles of major Third Reich figures.

The final major player in the film is its co-writer, painter and exhibition director Lutz Becker, who had just directed a well-regarded documentary about Hitler's rise to power, The Double Headed Eagle: Hitler's Rise to Power 1918-1933 in 1973. He went on to work on a trio of later Hitler docs from 1977 to 1993: Hitler: A Career, Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth, and Good Morning, Mr. Hitler.

All four of these men participated in the DVD release of Swastika, which first appeared in and appears more or less in the same presentation for its American home video debut from Kino. The full frame transfer looks as good as possible considering the patchwork nature of the sources used to create the film in the first place; it's particularly shocking to see how clean and vivid the color footage looks, as it often feels like watching some bizarre alternate universe Hollywood production. Much of the raw film is now apparently locked away in the National Museum in Washington, so this film's importance in public perception of history through film can't possibly be overstated now.

Obviously a film like this requires some context to put it all in perspective, and the bonus features on the DVD are almost as valuable as the main program. After history professor Jonathan Petropoulos offers a two-minute introduction, the centerpiece here is a compelling half-hour discussion with Puttnam, Mora, Becker, and Liberson, which covers the aborted project which led to this one, the stormy international reception, and the insane true story of how some of the home movie footage was discovered. The 12-minute "Manipulation and Nazi Propaganga" offers an overview of the newsreels and documentaries shot in Germany during the period, after which Becker and Albert Speer are interview by Ludovic Kennedy for a 15-minute BBC Television interview in 1973. A quick two-minute look at Nazi color film features some highlights from various shoots which contributed to the feature (with voiceover from the discussion participants), while the nearly six-minute "Puncturing the Myth of Leni Riefenstahl" contains voiceover of Becker and Mora decrying her as "crooked" and "immoral" while demolishing the notorious female filmmaker's claims that she wasn't aware of the full horrific nature of the making of her films. They also explain why the then-unavailable Triumph of the Will wasn't integrated into Swastika, though from a current perspective, that's for the best as they now represent completely different, polar opposite cinematic perspectives of a chapter in human history that still refuses to fade away.

For more information about Swastika, visit Kino Lorber.

by Nathaniel Thompson

Cornel Wilde's grim, fatalistic end-of-the-world thriller No Blade of Grass is a forgotten dystopian classic of its time. Gritty and brutal, built on fears of ecological devastation through pollution and overcrowding (with hints of genetic manipulation gone bad), this 1970 eco-apocalypse thriller seems to have gotten lost in the overcrowded apocalypse now science fiction cinema of the era.

Adapted from the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher, it has vague resemblances to the nuclear holocaust thriller Panic in Year Zero in its basic premise of a man hardening to deal with the brutal new world order to save his family. But in place of nuclear war (the favored device of most apocalyptic films of the era) is ecological collapse: a virus poisons the world's grass and cereal crops and causes a dire food shortage. As panic spreads across the globe, John Custance (Nigel Davenport), a former military officer and an affluent husband and father in London, makes plans to take his family north to his brother's fortified compound, prepared for just such an emergency. But he puts off leaving until it is almost too late: mobs start looting, riots break out and London is put under martial law with roadblocks posted to prevent a flight from the city. To save his family, John becomes as hard and as ruthless as the looters, the rogue militias and the roving gangs preying upon the citizens fleeing the cities.

Cornel Wilde is not the most subtle of directors. Here he's a provocateur, favoring primal images to make his points. A montage of scenes of nuclear tests, overcrowding, and pollution poured into the waters, pumped into the skies and spread over crops in the form of pesticide opens the film as Wilde's narration sets the stage of environmental devastation. Early in the film, as John meets with his brother in a city pub, images of famine and starvation and long lines for food rations play on TV news while customers gorge on the lavish buffet spread out in the bar. Wilde hammers the point home in blunt terms until the irony and social commentary shifts from a statement decadence to the willful ignorance of a population that still believes it can hold out. Flashforwards hint at the horrors to come while flashbacks recall a time before such threats were even imaginable. It's a rather clumsy and unwieldy tactic as executed by Wilde, and it tends to confuse the narrative until the audience gets used to his style, but it's all part of his rabbit-punch assault on our sensibilities. Before the film is over, we'll be subjected to images of dead livestock sprawled over the landscape (the virus infecting the grass kills the animals who eat it, all part of the ecological cycle of devastation), dead and dying victims of marauders, savage murders and even a live, clinically explicit hospital childbirth intercut with a premature birth delivered in a barn. Even "the miracle of birth" is seen as a violent and bloody event. A brutal rape scene, cut from some prints, gives the uncut film a far more grim sensibility than edited versions; in this world, the cavalry does not arrive in the nick of time.

Once the family takes flight, Wilde adds another horror: the complete breakdown of society, not simply law but the social contract that holds society together. A motorcycle gang prowls the highways for stragglers and abducts John's wife, Ann (Jean Wallace, Wilde's real-life wife) and daughter, while other bands of survivors become road pirates, pillaging any group they can overwhelm for food and supplies. "What kind of people are you?" demands Ann after their cars and supplies are stolen by a bigger, better-armed group of otherwise salt-of-the-earth types. "Same kind of people you are," one of them replies, and he's right. Our heroes are not simply survivors defending themselves from the worst instincts of survivors driven by panic and fear. John becomes a militia leader in his own right, drafting a young tough with a brutal streak, Pirrie (Anthony May), as his number two, and shooting anyone who would threaten his family or prevent their passage, and pillaging from the weaker they come across.

Wilde makes no pretence of these people struggling with the moral questions at hand. They act, and then weigh the moral consequences after (when John buries a victim, the act of asking forgiveness is more like a confession). This is a primal expression of Wilde's sensibility of man as the human animal driven to survive and protect its own at all costs. That doesn't just mean blood or family in this new tribal existence. After predatory gangs prey on his tiny group, John and Pirrie build up their numbers and soon lead their own militia, a group that John refuses to abandon when faced with a tough decision.

No Blade of Grass is an apocalyptic vision that Sam Peckinpah might have created, and it has more in common with Straw Dogs (which was released a year later, in 1971) than with most end-of-the-world movies before it. Unlike its American antecedents, which tended to jump right to the aftermath of the wasteland and the few stragglers left at the end of the world, Wilde focuses on the rioting, the anarchy, the regression to a tribal existence. How many American films before this showed the government instituting martial law and its heroes shooting policemen and soldiers to survive? It can't be coincidence that Wilde shot the film in England (as did Peckinpah with Straw Dogs), where films like The War Game, Fahrenheit 451 and Privilege (and later A Clockwork Orange) dared to portray social breakdown and governments transformed into repressive and authoritarian regimes, while in the U.S. even Riot on the Sunset Strip features no actual riot. No Blade of Grass is rougher and more blunt than any of those films, but his jagged, jabbing direction gives it a remarkable ferocity and savagery. Wilde goes for the visceral, delivering an ecological message writ large and an unforgiving portrait of humankind reverting to primitive form in the face of crisis. It makes the disclaimer at the end credits particularly evocative: "No living thing was harmed in the making of this motion picture."

The Warner Archive Collection DVD-R is a "Remastered Edition" release and presents the film in anamorphic widescreen in its complete, uncut form (with the rape and childbirth scenes and brief shots of nudity intact). The presentation is on the coarse side, likely due to the grain of the print; it looks appropriate to the film, which was largely shot on location, and it is clean and undamaged, with strong colors, and is complete and uncut. The initial release of the title, however, had swapped two of the reels and presented the film out of order. The Warner Archive quickly corrected the error and automatically sent corrected discs out to all who purchased the film from their website. Where a normal DVD recall would require the buyer to contact the company and fill out a replacement form, Warner took the onus off the customer and handled the replacement entirely from their end, making this the most efficient and painless replacement process ever in a DVD recall. Well done, Warner.

For more information about No Blade of Grass, visit Warner Video.

by Sean Axmaker

By the mid-1970s, producer/director Roger Corman had fully adapated to the needs of drive-in audiences who had moved on from his beloved monster movies of the prior two decades. Greater screen allowances for nudity and violence had opened the floodgates for his successful women-in-prison cycle beginning with The Big Bird Cage in 1972, and even earlier he had discovered the magical formula for women's lib era exploitation: crafting an entire feature around the random exploits of a group of single, young professional women, who all happen to look like models and take their tops off every ten minutes or so. The first of these arrived in 1970 with The Student Nurses, directed by Corman's most notable female director disciple, Stephanie Rothman. Four more official films in the series followed, but Corman also found ways to inject the template into other projects as well. As a result, all of these films helped make his New World Pictures one of the most productive and memorable independent studios of the decade.

Lethal Ladies 2, a two-disc DVD release from Shout Factory, features three unusual offshoots containing elements of both the women's prison and working girl scenarios above. It's certainly a different beast from the previous collection, which combined a trio of straight-up action films (TNT Jackson, its virtual remake Firecracker, and the perverse Too Hot to Handle). This time the first disc is devoted entirely to The Arena, a Roman female gladiator quasi-epic from 1974. Today it's perhaps most notable as the directorial debut of Steve Carver, a Brooklyn-born filmmaker and photographer who became the proficient action specialist behind Big Bad Mama, Capone, Drum, and two of the best Chuck Norris vehicles, Lone Wolf McQuade and An Eye for an Eye. This film is atypical in many respects, as it was his only title shot in scope and his only one set prior to the 20th century.

Shot in Rome with a mostly Italian cast and crew (including cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi, soon to become infamous horror director Joe D'Amato, and Carver's future Lone wolf composer, Francesco De Masi), this film was given the green light by Corman when he decided to hand chief producer duties over to Mark Damon, his one-time leading man in Fall of the House of Usher and now an aspiring producer in Europe. Around this time, Damon was still acting in European horror films like The Devil's Wedding Night (opposite one of The Arena's most beautiful co-stars, Rosalba Neri) and Hannah, Queen of the Vampires. However, he soon became a still-busy fulltime producer with credits including The Neverending Story, The Lost Boys, and Short Circuit.

After some contention in the casting process, Damon and Corman settled on the two leading ladies for the film who became its primary promotional gimmick: Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, the racially diverse duo who became a popular team in the previous year's Black Mama, White Mama. Though Corman forbade dating on the set, Damon and Markov hit it off and were married soon after. Meanwhile Grier, a veteran of Corman's big three prison films, went on to become a cult icon in films like Foxy Brown and Coffy, then transitioning to mainstream success with Jackie Brown and TV's The L Word.

Here Grier and Markov are cast as Mamawi and Bodicia, two slaves whose abilities to get into fights with each other and their surrounding captors gives the powers that be a great idea: swap them out for the male gladiators in the ring and see what happens. At least that gives the women a break from all the chains and sexual assault, and soon they're dressed up for battle and waving spears at each other.

Originally released at 80 minutes in American theaters, The Arena was trimmed down to 72 minutes for its sole VHS release from Corman's New Horizons label under the title Naked Warriors. This was his common practice at the time to shove more trailers with the main feature onto a shorter (i.e., cheaper) videocassette, and unfortunately this unsightly, cropped, incomplete transfer was the only way anyone could see it for decades. Usable theatrical prints were also incredibly scarce, and when the time came for Shout Factory to revisit the title for a much-needed reissue, elements weren't as pristine as those for some of their prior Corman titles. Fortunately the results here are still pretty impressive considering the film's history; it's back to 80 minutes again, and it's all in scope with some minimal damage here and there (mainly a few scratches). Two scenes were missing from this source, so these are sourced in from a full frame master instead. As for extras, Carver chimes in with a feature-length track moderated by Katarina Leigh Waters, a WWE wrestler better known to video junkies as the horror hostess of Scorpion's ongoing series, "Katarina's Nightmare Theater." He talks about getting the job, his discomfort with shooting nude scenes, the Roman locations, and his visits on the set from Corman, among many other topics. Carver also returns for an 18-minute video featurette along with Corman and Markov, who talk in more depth about the genesis of the film, Corman's desire to make a T&A version of Spartacus, working with Grier, and the interesting careers and life changes of everyone during and after shooting. A theatrical trailer is also included.

Disc two is devoted to a pair of considerably lighter and more minor offerings, both directed by Filipino trash cinema veteran Cirio H. Santiago. Many of his films were released by Corman in the U.S., as the two men had originally teamed up when Santiago served as the local producer for Women in Cages and The Hot Box. Director Jonathan Demme got his start working on some of Santiago's projects as well, and it wasn't long before Santiago started directing American-friendly fare in the Corman vein for New World to release. The first of these is also feature number two in the set, 1973's Fly Me. The story here is an especially bizarre variation on the student nurses formula as three stewardesses catch a flight from Los Angeles to the exotic East, where they get involved in various separate hijinks mostly in Hong Kong and Japan. The new girl, Toby (Pat Anderson), almost causes a wreck on the way when she pops her top in the back seat for driver Dick Miller, and then tries to get a boyfriend after landing but keeps getting chased around by her Italian mother, who keeps saying "mama mia!" and harbors an unhealthy obsession with her daughter's virginity. Meanwhile Andrea (Lenore Kasdorf) supplies the martial arts portion of the film as she sharpens her skills and teams up with some high-kicking locals to bail out the third stewardess, Sherry (Lyllah Torena), who gets snatched by some white slave traders, raped, and shot up with drugs. It all climaxes in a ridiculous climactic kung fu/gunfight showdown in a go-go dinner club, as such things always must.

The third film, Cover Girl Models, is another three-girl Santiago romp from 1975 with Anderson jetting to pretty much the exact same locations as an aspiring model, joined by colleagues Mandy (Tara Strohmeier) and Claire (Lindsay Bloome). There they encounter a terrifying Mary Woronov, a dangerous roll of microfilm that tangles them with a nest of local spies, and a bossy photographer with a derriere exercise obsession who says things like "Your ass is a pain in my neck" and "I wanna hear your ass bumping good and hard on the floor!" Not surprisingly, both of these films also feature colorful bit appearances by Filipino '70s junk movie regular Vic Diaz (Wonder Women), who mostly sits at a desk and sweats.

Both films on the second disc look excellent overall, though Fly Me has some obvious damage during the first and last reels including some green emulsion scratches here and there. It's a pretty rare one though, so it's great to finally have it out on commercial DVD. Cover Girl Models was more commonly available since it was released on VHS from Nelson (which provided the source for a terrible bootleg DVD from Televista), but this is a far better transfer than it's ever had before; the film looks excellent from start to finish and, though it's the least substanital cinematic offering, it's the best preserved of the bunch. The only extra on the second disc is a fun fullscreen TV spot for Fly Me.

For more information about Lethal Ladies 2, visit Shout Factory!.

by Nathaniel Thompson

Criterion's new Blu-ray release regards Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla as a major landmark of postwar atomic anxiety. Ten years ago the original Japanese Gojira drew a flurry of journalistic interest on its belated American theatrical release in America. Audiences were impressed by its overt references to Hiroshima and the utter destruction of Tokyo. A fine DVD from 2006 double-billed Gojira (the original Japanese title) with its highly successful American version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Criterion's Blu-ray gives us new HD transfers of both versions, along with commentaries and interview extras that address questions that have bothered film fans for fifty years. Why would the only country ever to suffer nuclear attacks produce such a masochistic fantasy about their national trauma?

This original Japanese-language Gojira balances its spectacular monster rampage against human issues and post-atomic moral questions. Japanese sailors are irradiated and their ship sunk by an unknown flash of light and heat that continues to destroy other vessels. Searching for the cause, scientist Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) travels to a tiny fishing island, and is confronted by a colossal water dragon. It soon comes ashore to march through Tokyo, leaving a broad wake of utter destruction. Conventional weapons prove useless, which puts the mysterious, secretive Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) in a bind: he's invented a new device he calls an "Oxygen Destroyer" but refuses to use it against the monster. He feels morally compromised: if the device's existence is revealed, governments will rush to exploit it as another weapon of mass destruction. Serizawa's fiancée Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kôchi) begs the scientist to reconsider.

The scenes of Godzilla crushing Tokyo underfoot thrilled American youngsters of the 1950s. Toho would later expand and tame the franchise, adding new monsters and adapting the formula to create a series of increasingly juvenile epics. But every schoolchild of the late '50s knew that Godzilla was a symbolic substitute for The Bomb, and was curious why the Japanese would make such a movie. According to the esteemed Japanese critic Tadao Sato, the vision of Tokyo once again reduced to ashes allowed Japanese audiences to deal with the communal guilt still felt over the war. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka did not copy the theme of Ray Harryhausen's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a popular movie about a dinosaur revived by a bomb test. Godzilla is not a dinosaur but a new force of nature, a dragon that breathes Atomic fire.

Godzilla was made soon after the end of the American Army's occupation of Japan. Rather than address the wartime nuclear bombings, events still spoken of in hushed tones, producer Tanaka seized upon the topical Lucky Dragon 5 incident, in which a Japanese tuna boat defied warnings to stay clear of the Bikini Atoll, unaware that the U.S. was testing its new Hydrogen bomb. As critic David Kalat points out in his Criterion commentary, Gojira restages the event, substituting the radioactive monster for the nuclear blast. The horror-beast rising from the Pacific to threaten Tokyo is an enormous political statement: for much of the world, America will forever be seen as an Atomic aggressor.

Seen in this rejuvenated presentation, Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects look better than ever. Considering the limited technical means available in 1954, the resourceful Toho technicians found clever ways to combine their rubber Man-in-suit-a-saur with live action and impressive miniatures. Hand-rotoscoped mattes are employed to composite the beast into several shots. Stop-motion animation sees use in a couple of shots as well. What's most impressive is the depth of focus maintained on the miniatures, even with the camera rolling at four-times speed.

The "towering titan of terror" is unlike the giant monsters in American movies. Godzilla is not a dinosaur or giant animal, but a cultural fantasy. He rises from the sea not to eat or spawn, but for the express purpose of annihilating Tokyo. Godzilla is a post-modern version of a traditional Yokai demon, writ large. And that billowing, notably non-reptilian hide? He's meant to look like a walking atomic mushroom cloud!

Ishiro Honda's sober and respectful direction makes its anti-nuke statement without resorting to moralizing speeches. The specter of the bombings is always present, even if no spokesperson steps forward to deliver an overt author's message. Godzilla involves us in its human drama, even if the characters are orchestrated along familiar lines. The scientist has a beautiful daughter (Momoko Kochi, with her endearing, Gene Tierney-like overbite) who must choose between an eager young salvage operator and her fiancé, a morbidly-obsessed scientist who does bad things to goldfish in his Rotwang-like mad lab. All that is missing from the American formula is a representative of the military.

The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray of Godzilla improves substantially on all earlier video versions. The blizzards of dust specks that marred earlier releases have been all but eliminated. Many scenes still carry fine scratches, but all the major damage has been repaired.

Criterion disc producer Curtis Tsui is responsible for some of the label's best fantasy discs, including Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face. His extras for Godzilla are on the same level as those for any other great work of world cinema.

First up is the 1956 American re-cut, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the version most commonly shown in other international markets. Director Terry Morse skillfully shoehorned additional scenes with Raymond Burr into the narrative. Burr's fly-on-the-wall reporter narrates the movie, aided by a newly imposed flashback structure. Rather than a pastiche, the American version is well written and cleverly assembled. This transfer is from pre-print film materials and looks far better than earlier videos. It includes the original Trans-World logo and closing credit crawl, albeit from a 16mm source. Author David Kalat provides an impassioned pair of commentaries for both feature versions. He explains what the original Godzilla represented to Japanese audiences, and examines the strange cultural re-mix of the American version.

Critic Tadao Sato explains some of the political context of the time in Japan, and offers his personal analysis of Japan's monster-who-became-a-friend. Other interviews give us input from the beloved composer Akira Ifukube, actors Akira Takarada and Haruo Nakajima, the man who played Godzilla inside the rubber suit. Two effects technicians also comment, but an effects-oriented featurette has only a few examples to offer. Much better is a piece about the terrible fate of the sailors of the Lucky Dragon 5. With last year's near nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, Godzilla's anti-nuke stance is more relevant than ever.

Trailers for both movies are included. The soundtrack for the King of the Monsters trailer throws an uninterrupted tirade of hyperbole at the audience, that must have left schoolboys in 1956 with their mouths hanging open:

Jean Rollin returned to the cradle of le fantastique with Fascination (1979) after an interval spent churning out pornography under the aliases Michel Gentil and Robert Xavier. The legitimization of hardcore porn worldwide by mid-decade had made redundant the erotisme of his earlier Pop Art horror films, from the comic book-inspired crazy quilt of The Rape of the Vampire in 1968 to the oneiric, epitaphic Lips of Blood in 1975. In 1978, Rollin signed on to direct The Grapes of Death, a bloody zombie movie (of sorts) with Gothic blandishments, set in French wine country. The production found the filmmaker working well outside of his comfort zone, incorporating graphic gore and an overall more naturalistic approach than that with which he had begun his feature filmmaking career a decade earlier; The Grapes of Death was at the time Rollin's most conventional production, tricked out with professional special effects and the beneficiary of a full budget.

In follow-up, Fascination had begun as a proposed sex film until Rollin suggested to his co-producer that they make instead a horror film combining violence and elements of fantasy. Assuring the money men that he would assume the burden of any budgetary overruns, Rollin was given the green light to write his own script. Limiting his locations for the most part to a single setting (as he had in his first films), Rollin spun the tale of Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire), a brash young thief on the run from accomplices he has betrayed who takes refuge inside a seemingly deserted chateau in the French countryside. Killing time until nightfall, Marc encounters the residence's sole occupants: the lady-in-waiting (French porn star Brigitte Lahaie in her first straight role), and companion (Franca Mai) of an absent noblewoman. Armed with a revolver, Marc seems to have the upper hand until his hostages reveal themselves as all too up for the play of power and he begins to suspect that he is the one being held against his will.

Taking its title from the name of a French magazine, Fascination is a bit of a farmer's daughter story and recalls a number of earlier tales in which a cagey male finds himself at odds in a house full of designing women, from Réné Clement's Joy House (1964) to Don Siegel's The Beguiled (1971), with a hint of D. H. Lawrence's The Fox thrown in for good measure. Alliances are liquid within the walls of this chateau, with Eva (Lahaie) and Elizabeth (Mai) at first giggling and cooing over their new acquisition until Eva condescends to a sexual encounter with the stranger; Elizabeth's jealousy grows, stemming from unexpected feelings for Marc rather than Eva. When Elizabeth and Marc couple off at last, Eva turns in a fit of pique to his accomplices, who lie in wait outside the chateau. With the offer of their former partner's gold and her own body, Eva lures the criminals to a stable, dispatching every one of them with a scythe, and returning to the chateau with considerably more than a taste for blood. Though his cast is small and his setting contained, Rollin keeps the proceedings buoyant by never tipping his hand toward where the narrative is pointed. With Marc a standard issue cad whose comeuppance is as good as guaranteed (the film has the predetermined feel of one of EC Comics' "Jolting Tales of Tension"), it is Eva and Elizabeth who truly fascinate. (Rollin often twinned his female characters by dint of similar names - in Shiver of the Vampires, he filled the frame with Isle, Isolde and Isabelle and talk of the worship of Isis.) Possessed of an uneven acting ability but an undeniable screen presence, Brigitte Lahaie (whom Philip Kauffman would cast as Uma Thurman's doppelgänger in Henry and June a few years later) impresses from the outset with her uninhibited ferality. Lahaie's bit with the scythe (as she pads about nude under a cloak, no less) was immortalized in the posters and promotional art but it is the more demure Franca Mai who emerges as the precious find of Fascination. Introduced sipping ox blood as a remedy for anemia, Elizabeth evinces a quality of evil-in-innocence that lends to the fade-out a frisson on par with that of the "Wurdulak" episode of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura, 1963).

Fascination first found its way to American home video consumers in 1996 via an authorized VHS dupe courtesy of Video Search of Miami (which included specific introductions by Rollin himself). Digital rights for the films were acquired after the advent of DVD by the American arm of the United Kingdom's Redemption Films - Redemption USA - who released this and several other titles through Image Entertainment. The Redemption/Image disc, sourced from positive film materials, reflected a quantum leap forward in times of resolution and color even though degradation of the materials was evident in scratches, stains and splices. Redemption's new deal with Kino Lorber marks another step up in quality for Fascination (and several other titles included in an initial retrospective rollout of Rollin's work), remastered as it has been in high definition from the 35mm negative. Though painted from a considerably more muted palette than Rollin's previous films, Fascination looks impressive and magisterial on this new DVD, which is framed at 1.66:1 (a more generous aspect ratio than the 1999 disc) and anamorphically-enhanced. Extras include two extended sex scenes (which, though hardly graphic, upped the soft core quotient) featuring Brigitte Lahaie, an original theatrical trailer, and a 24-minute episode of the 1999 British TV series Eurotika!, which offers an entertaining and informative thumbnail primer on Rollin's career. A 20-page booklet contains mini reviews of the first Redemption-Kino Lorber Rollin releases and a career overview by noted film critic Tim Lucas.

For more information about Fascination, visit Kino Lorber. To order Fascination, go to TCM Shopping.

by Richard Harland Smith

An unexpected real-life demonstration of the "banality of evil," 1974's Swastika remains one of the most unsettling documentaries about Adolf Hitler. Rather than focusing on graphic atrocities or the infamous German leader's philosophies, it compiles over an hour and a half of rare archival film including obscure home movie footage (much of it in color) to present a dispassionate, shockingly ordinary portrait of the most reviled man in world history. The film caused a firestorm of controversy even before its release with Eva Braun's sister, Gretl, fighting to prevent its release and claiming ownership of some of the footage. Its screenings at festivals provoked violent reactions including vandalism in France, condemnation from writer James Baldwin over a snippet of Jesse Owens in the feature, and outcries over its "pro-Nazi" stance including its omnipresent poster art featuring the titular symbol.

After 1945, it took quite a while for cinema to come to grips with the aftermath of the Nazi regime. Across the board, politicians and educators presented the participants as nightmarish aberrations of humanity, demonic boogeymen now relegated to the distant past. Filmmakers took a somewhat more complicated view, whether it be in dramatized productions like Judgment at Nuremberg or epic-length documentaries like The Sorrow and the Pity. However, it was always clear that the filmmakers were absolutely damning Hitler and his followers in no uncertain terms.

Eschewing the usual condemning narration, Swastika instead compiles the footage into a compelling narrative showing Hitler in sequence through the years, intercutting footage of rallies and national events with tranquil scenes of him and Eva with their colleagues in the countryside. Seeing Hitler surrounded by puppies or discussing the potential dangers of cigarette smoking or boar hunting is a highly disorienting experience, and the film smartly avoids disrupting the proceedings with any sort of imposed creative viewpoint (apart from the surreal animated opening sequence, which features a swastika flying through space). The terse opening title card says it best: "If the human features of Hitler are lacking in the image of him that is passed on to posterity, if he is dehumanised and shown only as a devil, any future Hitler may not be recognized, simply because he is a human being."

One of the most unusual documentaries about the Nazi era, Swastika sports a surprising pedigree including co-producer Sir David Puttnam, a future Oscar winner for Chariots of Fire who had just started out with films like the sci-fi cult film The Final Programme and Jacques Demy's offbeat The Pied Piper. After this film he immediately moved on to a pair of far more outrageous films with elements of Nazi iconography, Ken Russell's Mahler and Lisztomania, before moving to more respectable territory with The Mission and Midnight Express. The film's other producer, American-born Sandy Liberson, worked with Puttnam on those same films through the Russell era and also had the 1970 classic Performance under his belt.

Swastika's director and co-writer, Philippe Mora, met both of the producers in 1973 when he moved to London from Melbourne, Australia, and they followed this up with a significantly tamer documentary about the Great Depression, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, in 1975. His career took a bizarre turn when he returned to Australia in the mid-'70s and helmed the violent western Mad Dog Morgan with Dennis Hopper, which led to a string of strange cult titles including The Return of Captain Invincible, The Beast Within, Communion, and the two most outrageous Howling sequels. In 1997 he returned to Nazi territory with the underrated Snide and Prejudice, which features asylum inmates taking on the roles of major Third Reich figures.

The final major player in the film is its co-writer, painter and exhibition director Lutz Becker, who had just directed a well-regarded documentary about Hitler's rise to power, The Double Headed Eagle: Hitler's Rise to Power 1918-1933 in 1973. He went on to work on a trio of later Hitler docs from 1977 to 1993: Hitler: A Career, Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth, and Good Morning, Mr. Hitler.

All four of these men participated in the DVD release of Swastika, which first appeared in and appears more or less in the same presentation for its American home video debut from Kino. The full frame transfer looks as good as possible considering the patchwork nature of the sources used to create the film in the first place; it's particularly shocking to see how clean and vivid the color footage looks, as it often feels like watching some bizarre alternate universe Hollywood production. Much of the raw film is now apparently locked away in the National Museum in Washington, so this film's importance in public perception of history through film can't possibly be overstated now.

Obviously a film like this requires some context to put it all in perspective, and the bonus features on the DVD are almost as valuable as the main program. After history professor Jonathan Petropoulos offers a two-minute introduction, the centerpiece here is a compelling half-hour discussion with Puttnam, Mora, Becker, and Liberson, which covers the aborted project which led to this one, the stormy international reception, and the insane true story of how some of the home movie footage was discovered. The 12-minute "Manipulation and Nazi Propaganga" offers an overview of the newsreels and documentaries shot in Germany during the period, after which Becker and Albert Speer are interview by Ludovic Kennedy for a 15-minute BBC Television interview in 1973. A quick two-minute look at Nazi color film features some highlights from various shoots which contributed to the feature (with voiceover from the discussion participants), while the nearly six-minute "Puncturing the Myth of Leni Riefenstahl" contains voiceover of Becker and Mora decrying her as "crooked" and "immoral" while demolishing the notorious female filmmaker's claims that she wasn't aware of the full horrific nature of the making of her films. They also explain why the then-unavailable Triumph of the Will wasn't integrated into Swastika, though from a current perspective, that's for the best as they now represent completely different, polar opposite cinematic perspectives of a chapter in human history that still refuses to fade away.

For more information about Swastika, visit Kino Lorber.

by Nathaniel Thompson

Cornel Wilde's grim, fatalistic end-of-the-world thriller No Blade of Grass is a forgotten dystopian classic of its time. Gritty and brutal, built on fears of ecological devastation through pollution and overcrowding (with hints of genetic manipulation gone bad), this 1970 eco-apocalypse thriller seems to have gotten lost in the overcrowded apocalypse now science fiction cinema of the era.

Adapted from the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher, it has vague resemblances to the nuclear holocaust thriller Panic in Year Zero in its basic premise of a man hardening to deal with the brutal new world order to save his family. But in place of nuclear war (the favored device of most apocalyptic films of the era) is ecological collapse: a virus poisons the world's grass and cereal crops and causes a dire food shortage. As panic spreads across the globe, John Custance (Nigel Davenport), a former military officer and an affluent husband and father in London, makes plans to take his family north to his brother's fortified compound, prepared for just such an emergency. But he puts off leaving until it is almost too late: mobs start looting, riots break out and London is put under martial law with roadblocks posted to prevent a flight from the city. To save his family, John becomes as hard and as ruthless as the looters, the rogue militias and the roving gangs preying upon the citizens fleeing the cities.

Cornel Wilde is not the most subtle of directors. Here he's a provocateur, favoring primal images to make his points. A montage of scenes of nuclear tests, overcrowding, and pollution poured into the waters, pumped into the skies and spread over crops in the form of pesticide opens the film as Wilde's narration sets the stage of environmental devastation. Early in the film, as John meets with his brother in a city pub, images of famine and starvation and long lines for food rations play on TV news while customers gorge on the lavish buffet spread out in the bar. Wilde hammers the point home in blunt terms until the irony and social commentary shifts from a statement decadence to the willful ignorance of a population that still believes it can hold out. Flashforwards hint at the horrors to come while flashbacks recall a time before such threats were even imaginable. It's a rather clumsy and unwieldy tactic as executed by Wilde, and it tends to confuse the narrative until the audience gets used to his style, but it's all part of his rabbit-punch assault on our sensibilities. Before the film is over, we'll be subjected to images of dead livestock sprawled over the landscape (the virus infecting the grass kills the animals who eat it, all part of the ecological cycle of devastation), dead and dying victims of marauders, savage murders and even a live, clinically explicit hospital childbirth intercut with a premature birth delivered in a barn. Even "the miracle of birth" is seen as a violent and bloody event. A brutal rape scene, cut from some prints, gives the uncut film a far more grim sensibility than edited versions; in this world, the cavalry does not arrive in the nick of time.

Once the family takes flight, Wilde adds another horror: the complete breakdown of society, not simply law but the social contract that holds society together. A motorcycle gang prowls the highways for stragglers and abducts John's wife, Ann (Jean Wallace, Wilde's real-life wife) and daughter, while other bands of survivors become road pirates, pillaging any group they can overwhelm for food and supplies. "What kind of people are you?" demands Ann after their cars and supplies are stolen by a bigger, better-armed group of otherwise salt-of-the-earth types. "Same kind of people you are," one of them replies, and he's right. Our heroes are not simply survivors defending themselves from the worst instincts of survivors driven by panic and fear. John becomes a militia leader in his own right, drafting a young tough with a brutal streak, Pirrie (Anthony May), as his number two, and shooting anyone who would threaten his family or prevent their passage, and pillaging from the weaker they come across.

Wilde makes no pretence of these people struggling with the moral questions at hand. They act, and then weigh the moral consequences after (when John buries a victim, the act of asking forgiveness is more like a confession). This is a primal expression of Wilde's sensibility of man as the human animal driven to survive and protect its own at all costs. That doesn't just mean blood or family in this new tribal existence. After predatory gangs prey on his tiny group, John and Pirrie build up their numbers and soon lead their own militia, a group that John refuses to abandon when faced with a tough decision.

No Blade of Grass is an apocalyptic vision that Sam Peckinpah might have created, and it has more in common with Straw Dogs (which was released a year later, in 1971) than with most end-of-the-world movies before it. Unlike its American antecedents, which tended to jump right to the aftermath of the wasteland and the few stragglers left at the end of the world, Wilde focuses on the rioting, the anarchy, the regression to a tribal existence. How many American films before this showed the government instituting martial law and its heroes shooting policemen and soldiers to survive? It can't be coincidence that Wilde shot the film in England (as did Peckinpah with Straw Dogs), where films like The War Game, Fahrenheit 451 and Privilege (and later A Clockwork Orange) dared to portray social breakdown and governments transformed into repressive and authoritarian regimes, while in the U.S. even Riot on the Sunset Strip features no actual riot. No Blade of Grass is rougher and more blunt than any of those films, but his jagged, jabbing direction gives it a remarkable ferocity and savagery. Wilde goes for the visceral, delivering an ecological message writ large and an unforgiving portrait of humankind reverting to primitive form in the face of crisis. It makes the disclaimer at the end credits particularly evocative: "No living thing was harmed in the making of this motion picture."

The Warner Archive Collection DVD-R is a "Remastered Edition" release and presents the film in anamorphic widescreen in its complete, uncut form (with the rape and childbirth scenes and brief shots of nudity intact). The presentation is on the coarse side, likely due to the grain of the print; it looks appropriate to the film, which was largely shot on location, and it is clean and undamaged, with strong colors, and is complete and uncut. The initial release of the title, however, had swapped two of the reels and presented the film out of order. The Warner Archive quickly corrected the error and automatically sent corrected discs out to all who purchased the film from their website. Where a normal DVD recall would require the buyer to contact the company and fill out a replacement form, Warner took the onus off the customer and handled the replacement entirely from their end, making this the most efficient and painless replacement process ever in a DVD recall. Well done, Warner.

For more information about No Blade of Grass, visit Warner Video.

by Sean Axmaker

By the mid-1970s, producer/director Roger Corman had fully adapated to the needs of drive-in audiences who had moved on from his beloved monster movies of the prior two decades. Greater screen allowances for nudity and violence had opened the floodgates for his successful women-in-prison cycle beginning with The Big Bird Cage in 1972, and even earlier he had discovered the magical formula for women's lib era exploitation: crafting an entire feature around the random exploits of a group of single, young professional women, who all happen to look like models and take their tops off every ten minutes or so. The first of these arrived in 1970 with The Student Nurses, directed by Corman's most notable female director disciple, Stephanie Rothman. Four more official films in the series followed, but Corman also found ways to inject the template into other projects as well. As a result, all of these films helped make his New World Pictures one of the most productive and memorable independent studios of the decade.

Lethal Ladies 2, a two-disc DVD release from Shout Factory, features three unusual offshoots containing elements of both the women's prison and working girl scenarios above. It's certainly a different beast from the previous collection, which combined a trio of straight-up action films (TNT Jackson, its virtual remake Firecracker, and the perverse Too Hot to Handle). This time the first disc is devoted entirely to The Arena, a Roman female gladiator quasi-epic from 1974. Today it's perhaps most notable as the directorial debut of Steve Carver, a Brooklyn-born filmmaker and photographer who became the proficient action specialist behind Big Bad Mama, Capone, Drum, and two of the best Chuck Norris vehicles, Lone Wolf McQuade and An Eye for an Eye. This film is atypical in many respects, as it was his only title shot in scope and his only one set prior to the 20th century.

Shot in Rome with a mostly Italian cast and crew (including cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi, soon to become infamous horror director Joe D'Amato, and Carver's future Lone wolf composer, Francesco De Masi), this film was given the green light by Corman when he decided to hand chief producer duties over to Mark Damon, his one-time leading man in Fall of the House of Usher and now an aspiring producer in Europe. Around this time, Damon was still acting in European horror films like The Devil's Wedding Night (opposite one of The Arena's most beautiful co-stars, Rosalba Neri) and Hannah, Queen of the Vampires. However, he soon became a still-busy fulltime producer with credits including The Neverending Story, The Lost Boys, and Short Circuit.

After some contention in the casting process, Damon and Corman settled on the two leading ladies for the film who became its primary promotional gimmick: Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, the racially diverse duo who became a popular team in the previous year's Black Mama, White Mama. Though Corman forbade dating on the set, Damon and Markov hit it off and were married soon after. Meanwhile Grier, a veteran of Corman's big three prison films, went on to become a cult icon in films like Foxy Brown and Coffy, then transitioning to mainstream success with Jackie Brown and TV's The L Word.

Here Grier and Markov are cast as Mamawi and Bodicia, two slaves whose abilities to get into fights with each other and their surrounding captors gives the powers that be a great idea: swap them out for the male gladiators in the ring and see what happens. At least that gives the women a break from all the chains and sexual assault, and soon they're dressed up for battle and waving spears at each other.

Originally released at 80 minutes in American theaters, The Arena was trimmed down to 72 minutes for its sole VHS release from Corman's New Horizons label under the title Naked Warriors. This was his common practice at the time to shove more trailers with the main feature onto a shorter (i.e., cheaper) videocassette, and unfortunately this unsightly, cropped, incomplete transfer was the only way anyone could see it for decades. Usable theatrical prints were also incredibly scarce, and when the time came for Shout Factory to revisit the title for a much-needed reissue, elements weren't as pristine as those for some of their prior Corman titles. Fortunately the results here are still pretty impressive considering the film's history; it's back to 80 minutes again, and it's all in scope with some minimal damage here and there (mainly a few scratches). Two scenes were missing from this source, so these are sourced in from a full frame master instead. As for extras, Carver chimes in with a feature-length track moderated by Katarina Leigh Waters, a WWE wrestler better known to video junkies as the horror hostess of Scorpion's ongoing series, "Katarina's Nightmare Theater." He talks about getting the job, his discomfort with shooting nude scenes, the Roman locations, and his visits on the set from Corman, among many other topics. Carver also returns for an 18-minute video featurette along with Corman and Markov, who talk in more depth about the genesis of the film, Corman's desire to make a T&A version of Spartacus, working with Grier, and the interesting careers and life changes of everyone during and after shooting. A theatrical trailer is also included.

Disc two is devoted to a pair of considerably lighter and more minor offerings, both directed by Filipino trash cinema veteran Cirio H. Santiago. Many of his films were released by Corman in the U.S., as the two men had originally teamed up when Santiago served as the local producer for Women in Cages and The Hot Box. Director Jonathan Demme got his start working on some of Santiago's projects as well, and it wasn't long before Santiago started directing American-friendly fare in the Corman vein for New World to release. The first of these is also feature number two in the set, 1973's Fly Me. The story here is an especially bizarre variation on the student nurses formula as three stewardesses catch a flight from Los Angeles to the exotic East, where they get involved in various separate hijinks mostly in Hong Kong and Japan. The new girl, Toby (Pat Anderson), almost causes a wreck on the way when she pops her top in the back seat for driver Dick Miller, and then tries to get a boyfriend after landing but keeps getting chased around by her Italian mother, who keeps saying "mama mia!" and harbors an unhealthy obsession with her daughter's virginity. Meanwhile Andrea (Lenore Kasdorf) supplies the martial arts portion of the film as she sharpens her skills and teams up with some high-kicking locals to bail out the third stewardess, Sherry (Lyllah Torena), who gets snatched by some white slave traders, raped, and shot up with drugs. It all climaxes in a ridiculous climactic kung fu/gunfight showdown in a go-go dinner club, as such things always must.

The third film, Cover Girl Models, is another three-girl Santiago romp from 1975 with Anderson jetting to pretty much the exact same locations as an aspiring model, joined by colleagues Mandy (Tara Strohmeier) and Claire (Lindsay Bloome). There they encounter a terrifying Mary Woronov, a dangerous roll of microfilm that tangles them with a nest of local spies, and a bossy photographer with a derriere exercise obsession who says things like "Your ass is a pain in my neck" and "I wanna hear your ass bumping good and hard on the floor!" Not surprisingly, both of these films also feature colorful bit appearances by Filipino '70s junk movie regular Vic Diaz (Wonder Women), who mostly sits at a desk and sweats.

Both films on the second disc look excellent overall, though Fly Me has some obvious damage during the first and last reels including some green emulsion scratches here and there. It's a pretty rare one though, so it's great to finally have it out on commercial DVD. Cover Girl Models was more commonly available since it was released on VHS from Nelson (which provided the source for a terrible bootleg DVD from Televista), but this is a far better transfer than it's ever had before; the film looks excellent from start to finish and, though it's the least substanital cinematic offering, it's the best preserved of the bunch. The only extra on the second disc is a fun fullscreen TV spot for Fly Me.

For more information about Lethal Ladies 2, visit Shout Factory!.

by Nathaniel Thompson