I had a bad hair night last night, incorrectly identifying Ellen Degeneres in If These Walls Could Talk 2, and Lisa Boyle in Let the Devil Wear Black. Here are the corrected images.

D-Tox (1999, or 2002 or something):

Talk about a rip-off.

I knew this Stallone actioner would be a bad movie. The studio kept it on the shelf for three years. The European critics ripped it a new one. It may be the biggest money loser in history. Columbia Tri-Star dumped $55 million dollars into this movie, and the domestic gross was $79 thousand, after which it disappeared from North American eyes for approximately another year until it finally made a Region 1 DVD appearance in December of 2002. Filming had started almost exactly four years earlier, in January 1999.

So I had myself steeled against a bad movie, fully expecting a major bomb. I figured I could handle a crappy movie in order to see the Dina Meyer shower scene (found in the Naked Encyclopedia, as captured by C2000). After all, it's not like I've never watched a bad movie to see a naked woman.

Well, guess what? No sign of Dina's bare bottom. I watched the entire full screen version, then I watched the entire widescreen version in fast motion. Nothing.

My hopes rose again. I saw that there were eight deleted scenes. Surely the nudity was there? Nope. It was even deleted from the deleted scenes. Yes, my friends, it was on the dreaded double secret deletion.

There is, therefore, no reason to watch this film. Beware D-Tox. Also beware of a film called "eye see you", with all cutesy lower-case letters, which is what the very same film is called in North American DVD distribution

The esteemed Mr. Stallone plays a Fed who is tracking down a serial killer of police officers. In the process of working the case, he has a breakdown when his own girlfriend is murdered in his own house. Ol' Rocky Balboa fails to solve the case, then hits skid row and ends up indistinguishable from Tom Waits, except maybe singing a little better. Rambo is eventually sent to a special d-tox center out in the wilderness, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

Let's see if you can figure out what will happen next.

Here are your clues:

• This is a d-tox center isolated in the wilderness.

• It is filled with pathetic alcoholic cops.

• They all have to surrender their weapons, so they are all pathetic, alcoholic, defenseless cops.

• The serial cop-killer has two goals in life (1) kill Stallone (2) kill cops.

Question 1: Where do you think the serial cop-killer will show up?

1. At the D-tox center filled with defenseless cops and a defenseless Stallone.

2. The Oprah Show.

3. A hippie commune in Taos

4. Nobody knows. He will reach 65 and retire, to kill no more.

Question 2: What will happen when the killer shows up?

1. The cops will say "fuck sobriety" and order in a keg of Pabst.

2. The killer will kill all the cops and Stallone.

3. The institute will spot the killer immediately, arrest him, and everyone will be blissfully happy.

4. The psychotic killer will murder many of the cops, whereupon all the remaining cops will accuse all the other remaining cops of being the killer. Stallone will find a way to arm himself, identify the real killer, take his revenge, and find a new love as well.

Oh, well, we did get to see Dina in another movie that someone specifically asked me about.

I took another look at Starship Troopers because one of our regulars was curious about the special two-disk set, particularly the deleted scenes, and the two separate commentary tracks during the communal shower scene.

• The deleted scenes. This consists of the same footage we saw on the first DVD. Nothing new.
• The commentary. There isn't much to say except that the actors challenged Verhoeven and his DP to take off their own clothes, "if it's so easy to do". The two old farts promptly stripped, and the actors promptly told them to put their clothes back on, and did the damned scene. Not much of an anecdote.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Starship Troopers has been issued in a new special edition 2-disc DVD set. There aren't any new deleted scenes or anything of that nature, but there are many, many elements for fans of the movie: two commentary tracks, and an endless list of  "making of" featurettes. If you are into this movie to begin with, and want to know how they did the special effects, it's a must-have. If you dislike the film, there is nothing new to persuade you otherwise.

As for me, I really have mixed feelings about Starship Troopers. It draws me into the story, then it loses me, then it hooks me back in again. I think the reason for that is that the film is ambivalent about its characters and the society they live in. Just as I'm about to root for the individual characters, it starts to make fun of them. Just as I am about to root for the humans in their battle against the bugs, the script goes to extra lengths to assure me that these people are neo-Nazis. On the one hand, it is a sprawling adventure, a juvenile story of the human race versus giant insects from outer space. On the other hand, it is a parody of that kind of film. On the one hand it is a cutesy teenage love quadrangle about how their young lives are affected by war, ala Pearl Harbor. On the other hand, it shows that none of those teens are capable of thinking for themselves, that they are only mouthing the words which have been washed into their brain, and the script feels free to kill off the principals in the quadrangle, thus simplifying the romantic choices considerably.

The science of the film is just as inconsistent as the tone.

• On the one hand, the human race is capable of travel at ultra-light speed, and the teens talk of being "millions of light years apart". They have communications capable of simultaneous "live" transmission of battle reportage from a planet zillions of light years distant.
• On the other hand, they go into battle against the insects armed with World War Two armaments. Given that the entire world is controlled by a single militaristic government, you'd think that they would have made some progress in weaponry while they were developing spaceships and news broadcasts that can cross the galaxy instantaneously.

Frankly, I don't even understand the physics involved. The insects from a far-off planet are capable of launching their spores far into space as kind of a meteor. In fact, they use this technique to destroy Buenos Aires. But how can this happen? The insects have no technology - no weapons, no buildings, no electronics - they simply spit the spores into space. OK - I'll buy that for the moment, but how did they manage to get the spores to travel to the other side of the universe? "Millions of light years". Without the technology necessary to exceed the speed of light, wouldn't that attack take billions of years?

The strange dichotomies in the film, one might say schizophrenia, are a result of having been born from a militaristic mother, namely Robert Heinlein's juvenile novel, delivered by a libertarian midwife, namely director Paul Verhoeven. It's a strange combination that keeps the film from deciding whether it truly loves and admires the militaristic culture, or despises it. By the way, when I say Heinlein's novel is juvenile, I am not being pejorative. The nomenclature is his own. He wrote stories for adults and stories for boys. This story came from his juvenile series.

In the last analysis, the director and the screenwriter were too contemptuous of their source material. They want me to identify with individuals and a society that they are mocking. Well, boys, which is it? Are the humans Nazi thugs, or brave freedom fighters? I can't decide.

I couldn't laugh at the characters, and I couldn't identify with them. Just when I was laughing at the propaganda film which shows little children stomping cockroaches, because "everyone is doing his part" to defeat the insects, the script starts tearing my heart by showing that the giant insects really are trying to destroy the human race, and have wiped out Buenos Aires. Just when I have become convinced that it is a sappy love story, it turns into a space version of Saving Private Ryan.

The casting provides the same sorts of problems. It seems to me that Verhoeven's satirical eye disposed him to cast the worst actors he could find to play the two leads (Denise Richards and Casper van Dien), just for the purpose of showing us the sheer banality of the characters. These are shallow, beautiful people doing what the state tells them to do.  So I was treating these people as disposable props - until the script turns around and asks me to love their nobility and sense of sacrifice.

In the end, I still didn't know whether I am supposed to deplore the fact that the human race has evolved into a mind-controlling fascist state, or be thankful for it, since that seems to be our only hope for survival as a species.

Offbeat movie, to say the least. I love some things about it. I hate some things about it. 

• Dina Meyer (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

MAILBOX:

DB

Scoop:

Does anybody know which extra scenes are in the international version?

Words from Scoop.

.avi's from Shiloh.

.wmv files made by Scoop from Shiloh's .avi's.

"Best of" Classics:

• Julie Newmar in McKenna's Gold. Her only real screen nudity. (.avi version, .wmv version)

• Saturn 3. This isn't Farrah's only screen nudity, but it is the nicest look at her chest when she was in her prime. (.avi version, .wmv version)

• Basic Instinct. This is the best of Jeanne Tripplehorn's career. It would be the best of almost anyone's career, so damned hot that it made up for an otherwise chaste filmography for JT.  (.avi version, .wmv version)

Perhaps these tips will help if you have trouble with the codecs for these movies:

Shiloh says:

FYI when I hypercam vids to make the file size smaller I use DivX MPEG-4 Fast-Motion for the video compressor, then I use virtualdub to compress the audio. The properties for the vids says the video codec:  DivX Decoder Filter & audio codec:  Morgan Stream Switcher which I'm not familiar with. When I compress the audio with virtualdub I use MPEG Layer-3.  A friend of mine told me about compressing the audio about (6) mos. ago. Like I said previously, only been capping for a year & a half & I'm no expert. Hopefully this info will help members with the proper codecs for my vids.

 

When I cap big brother's I use hypercam mostly & sdp & asfrecorder if the set up allows me. I stopped using camtasia cause the file sizes were always too big, could never figure out the process, over my head lol, plus it cost too much to buy in my opinion.

A reader says:

You mentioned that some users were having trouble with the videos on your site. There is a tool designed to determine what codec is needed for a video. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ Hope this is useful to you or your users.

Scoop says:

I made the .wmv versions of each video. The codecs for these: Windows Video V8, Windows Audio 9. The upside of these is that you know the codecs, and they'll play in the Windows Media Player. The downside is that they are slightly larger, and slightly lower quality.

Julie Strain was Penthouse Pet of the Month for June 1991. The year before, at the age of 27, she had appeared in her first credited nude scene in Carnal Crimes. Her latest pair of movies are in post-production, ones in which she is almost certain to run around topless at least for a little while. This is a woman who is very candid about coming to Hollywood with every intention of taking off her clothes whenever and wherever a movie called for it. Caps from 53 performances are in the Funhouse and Encyclopedia, and I figure there are at least another 20 that haven't been capped.

Well, make that at least 19. To celebrate all things Julie here are caps from an early (1992) performance, Witchcraft IV, a middling (1997) performance, Bikini Hotel and a late (2003) performance, Treasure Hunt. The first two have been capped before. I'm the only one crazy enough to watch Treasure Hunt just to cap a few morsels of Julie nekkidness.

None of these movies will challenge Return of the King in any category, and I am betting that together they have made less money than RTK did in the first 3.5 hours of its theatrical run. But they do have Julie, and that has to count for something.

Almost all her movies have been direct to video wonders. In the early years she played serious characters and did it rather well. Witchcraft IV is one example. Alternating between a strong, in-control woman and a victim of forces larger than her, she did a good job or carrying things.

Then there were comedies, light-hearted affairs in which Julie stripped to provide a bit more incentive for you and for me to plunk down our rental fees. She was funny, or at least as funny as some pretty lame scripts allowed her to be.

In the last few years it's all been parody, Bare Wenches and Erotic Ghosts, and lots of behind the scenes bare-breasted interviews. In Treasure Hunt that is her only role, as a mid-movie diversion, a vain attempt to distract us from the botched abortion that is this movie.

She keeps plugging on.

Julie in her early days... with legs so long they seemed to stop only when they reached her ears, and robo-hooters that were obvious but not obnoxious... well, she was damn fine. But we've all aged and whereas that ain't a bad thing if you're running a bookstore, it sorta sucks if your major contribution to the progress of humankind is taking off your clothes.

Ask a bunch of guys who share this hobby of ours, devotees of on-screen skin, who is it you would least like to see naked again? Leaving aside Rosie or Roseanne or anyone else 140 pounds overweight, the answer you get most often is Julie Strain.

She is partly a victim of her own success. Fifty-three... make that fifty-four... capped performances a-buffo and there is not much left to show, especially when a couple of those were opened-legged and bent-over Guccione-produced videos. And although I won't be the one to tell her, there is the matter that very few men, even ones pushing forty with wives who are doing likewise, want to see forty-one-year-old women parading around in public, dressed only in their birthday suits. It sucks, I know, and it's just not fair, but it's true all the same.

Guess I'll keep capping Julie movies until she stops. It's this obsessive-compulsive gene in fully amplified form. I'll do the movie when I find it, but it's gotten to the point where I can't say I'm looking forward to the next one.

• Julie Strain in "Treasure Hunt"
• Julie Strain in "Bikini Hotel" (1, 2)
• Julie Strain in Witchcraft 4 (1, 2, 3)

• Hilary Shepard aka Hillary Shapiro (1, 2)

Next, a few vids and comments from Striplight...
Here is the delightful Frankie Thorn going full frontal in scenes from "Warm Texas Rain". I admit this isn't a great movie, apart from the odd scene or two. But hey, at least I almost edited out Steven Bauer entirely, which has to be good news.

• Frankie Thorn

This time it's kind of an annoying spinning camera nude scene from "Viol@", starring Stefania Rocca. It's her final nude scene, where she is asked to go to an abandoned wharehouse and take her clothes off. Hmm, these sort of requests never work for me....

Anyway she looks bloody marvellous full frontal.

FYI, you can get this on DVD from the Italian internet ship VideoPark.

• Stefania Rocca

Simone-Elise Girard
(1, 2, 3, 4)

Christianne Gout
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)

"PASSION OF THE CHRIST" NEWS ROUND-UP
Blessed Are The Launderers - Mel Gibson did put some humor into the movie, if you can spot it. In one scene, Jesus speaks Aramaic, and the subtitle reads, "Take care," but he's actually saying, "Take care of the laundry."