Atwater, Barry

The Night Stalker/The Night Strangler (Double Feature)

This unforgettable first entry in the Night Stalker series introduced the world to the quirky reporter with a penchant for the paranormal and became one of the top-rated TV movies of all time (Chicago Tribune)! Investigating a series of Las Vegas murders Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) discovers that each victim has been bitten in the neck and drained of blood. Though Kolchak s outlandish theory about the murders gets him nowhere with the police his initiative to apprehend the killer himself gets him into hot water with a modern-day vampire!System Requirements: Running Time 74 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: HORROR Rating: NR UPC: 027616909152 Manufacturer No: 1006768

The Night Stalker
Wisecracking Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a rumpled news hound plucked from the fast-talking newspaper flicks of the 1940s and dropped into the swinging '70s. What makes the eccentric Kolchak even more unique, however, is his nose for the supernatural, a trait that leaves his editor (Simon Oakland) exasperated and the police less than amused. When he insists that a late-night Las Vegas serial killer (who leaves his victims drained of blood and sporting twin holes in the neck) is a modern-day vampire, he's practically run out of town by the local authorities. Naturally, he stalks the vampire himself, an unlikely Van Helsing armed with a silver cross, a wooden stake, and his ever-present tape recorder and flashbulb camera. Carol Lynley is his understanding girlfriend, and Ralph Meeker, Claude Akins, Kent Smith, and Charles McGraw costar as the Vegas cops and politicians Kolchak systematically alienates with his abrasive charm and smart mouth. Directed by Dan Curtis from a witty script by Richard Matheson, the quirky mix of horror and humor turned The Night Stalker into a ratings sensation that inspired a sequel (The Night Strangler) and a short-lived TV series (Kolchak: The Night Stalker). The X-Files creator Chris Carter acknowledges the show as a major inspiration, and has cast McGavin in a recurring role as a retired X-Files veteran with an acerbic personality and a familiar rumpled wardrobe. Kolchak lives! --Sean Axmaker

The Night Strangler
The Night Strangler finds down-on-his-luck investigator Carl Kolchak in Seattle, hot on the trail of a serial killer hiding in the underground city beneath the streets, a gas-lit fantasy world frozen in time (L.A.'s famous Bradbury Building--which has also appeared in Blade Runner and DOA--becomes the spooky city's architectural centerpiece). Exotic dancer and medical student Jo Ann Pflug tags along as partner and bait, and the exasperated Simon Oakland returns as Kolchak's harried editor. Genre fans will enjoy the appearances of popular character actors John Carradine, Margaret Hamilton, Wally Cox, and Al Lewis. Noted horror and science fiction author Richard Matheson scripted this meandering, low-key thriller with plenty of humor, which McGavin delivers with deadpan delight. --Sean Axmaker

Pork Chop Hill

Lt. Joe Clemons has been given the order: take Pork Chop Hill. If It"s taken by the Chinese U.S. negotiators at the Panmunjom peace conference would lose face with their Communist adversaries - and unthinkable outcome. And so Clemons leads his troops into combat to fight for an object that they know to be strategically pointless. But they also know that an order and they must take Pork Chop Hill - or die trying - so that millions can live in freedom tomorrow for what Clemons and his men will sacrifice today.System Requirements:ACTORS James Edwards Harry Guardino Gregory Peck George Peppard George Shibata Bob Steele Woody Strode Rip Torn Running Time: 1 hrs. 38 mins Classic Action / Adventure Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating:  UPC: 027616766922

This gritty, grim Korean war drama presents the grueling ordeal of a platoon charged with taking a hill of no military value during the final days of the war. While diplomats and generals argue over peace negotiations (in an appropriately wordless montage under the opening credits), tough but compassionate Lt. Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) leads a unit of 135 men up a well-guarded hill while miscommunication--and at times no communication--cuts them off from reinforcements and regimental command. Shot against a bleak, battle-scarred mountain of white dust honeycombed with black trenches, director Lewis Milestone presents the devastating battle as a meaningless sacrifice of hundreds of lives spent in a political game of chicken. Peck leads a terrific cast of young talents and character actors, many of them just starting their respective careers: Rip Torn, Harry Guardino, Martin Landau, Norman Fell, George Peppard, Gavin MacLeod, Bert Remsen, Harry Dean Stanton, plus veteran stalwarts Woody Strode, James Edwards, Robert Blake, and Bob Steele. Milestone had previously directed the pacifist WWI classic All Quiet on the Western Front and the compassionate WWII platoon drama A Walk in the Sun. Pork Chop Hill adds one more antiwar classic to his résumé, the angry power of his drama overcoming the hollow patriotic voice-over (reportedly added by Peck) that concludes the drama. --Sean Axmaker

Alvarez Kelly

This is the story of a renegade adventurer ALVAREZ KELLY (William Holden) who gets caught in the middle of the Civil War. With no loyalties to either North or South Kelly is hired to drive a herd of cattle from Mexico to the Union Army in Virginia. However along the way he is captured by Confederate Colonel Tom Rossiter (Richard Widmark) who persuades him...by shooting off a finger to deliver the cattle to starving Confederates in Richmond. At a bridge leading to Richmond the Union Army attacks and a bloody battle ensues in which Kelly risks his own life to save a Confederate officer. In the end Kelly's fate once again lies in the hands of Colonel Rossiter.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/MISC. Rating: NR UPC: 043396011991 Manufacturer No: 01199

Alvarez Kelly (1966) isn't really a classic, but it's a pleasant enough Western, directed by Edward Dmytryk. The rather convoluted plot (adventurer plays one side off against the other on a cattle drive from Mexico during the Civil War) relies heavily on the charm of the two stars, William Holden and Richard Widmark, but the two prove as reliable as ever. There are some so-so action scenes, but it's the battle of wits between the two principals that supplies all the fireworks. By contrast Janice Rule is just adequate as the love interest. --Ed Buscombe

The True Story of Jesse James

Legendary fifties director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without A Cause) retells the Jesse James saga starring Robert Wagner as the legendary bank robber. As Jesse James attempts to evade the law those who know him best -- his brother Frank (Jeffrey Hunter) wife (Hope Lange) and mother (Agnes Moorehead) -- ponder the question "What turned this simple farmboy to a life of lawlessness?" And as Jesse continues his ride into notoriety the key events in his life are scrutinized in a desperate attempt to close in on him for good.System Requirements:Running Time: 92 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/MISC. UPC: 024543244455 Manufacturer No: 2234445

The best thing about this take on the celebrated Missouri outlaw is Nicholas Ray's dynamic use of CinemaScope, a format that left most mid-'50s directors flatfooted. Ray composes his action in slashing diagonals, over multi-leveled ground, with sectors of the wide screen defined by frames-within-the-frame and different qualities of light and color. Which is to say, he continues the radical experimentation of his 1955 James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause while attempting to develop a fresh, contemporary perspective on another violent young protagonist who's an outsider in his own society.

Nunnally Johnson's script for 20th Century-Fox's 1939 Jesse James is credited as source material, but Ray opted for a tortuous, balladlike flashback structure--beginning with the James-Younger gang's ruinous raid on Northfield, Minnesota, 400 miles from their Missouri stomping ground--that aims to deconstruct the outlaw's populist legend. "Jesse James" is an elusive subject; the Minnesota posse never sets eyes on him in the jagged first reel of the movie. How much of an Old West "Robin Hood" was he? And how murderously vengeful was his criminal career as he struck back against the railroads and their cold-blooded police force, the Pinkerton (here, "Remington") agency, and Union-sympathizer neighbors who hated this former member of the wartime guerrilla band, Quantrill's Raiders?

However radical the director's intentions, his movie runs afoul of studio recutting and an underwhelming cast of Fox contract players. Jeffrey Hunter (recently loaned out to play Ethan Edwards' companion in The Searchers) comes off best as Jesse's thoughtful brother Frank (a pattern that holds true for Henry Fonda in Jesse James and Stacy Keach in The Long Riders). But Ray was stymied by Robert Wagner as Jesse--in the phrase of Ray biographer Bernard Eisenschitz, a player "expressive of nothing but Californian physical culture." (James Dean being dead, Ray's first choice for Jesse was ... Elvis Presley!) --Richard T. Jameson

Welcome to the Grindhouse - The Teacher and the Pick-Up

Grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly showed exploitation films. To salute this film revolution of a bygone era this DVD double feature recreates this ephemeral experience of the Grindhouse theaters with a whole new interactive DVD experience. Included is The Teacher starring Angel Tompkins and Jay North - an explosively tense story about a beautiful provocative 28-year-old high school teacher whose seduction of one particular student proves fatal; and Pick-Up an off-beat story about 2 young women whose lives are forever changed when they hitchhike a ride in a mobile home starring Jill Senter and Alan Long.System Requirements:Running Time: 178 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 787364788392

Sweet Bird of Youth

Drifter Chance Wayne returns to his hometown after many years of trying to make it in the movies. With him is a faded film star he picked up along the way Alexandra Del Lago. While trying to get her help to make a screen test he also finds the time to meet his former girlfriend Heavenly the daughter of the local politician Tom 'Boss' Finley who more or less forced him to leave the town many years ago.Running Time: 120 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 012569573123 Manufacturer No: 65731

Sweet Bird of Youth has the Tennessee Williams penchant for provocation and Southern depravity--although at this point, the bloom is somewhat off the hothouse flower. Paul Newman is a cad who dreams of glory; he's returned to his hometown towing a dissolute, over-the-hill Hollywood star (Geraldine Page re-creates her Broadway role), certain she'll be his meal ticket. He's ruined the only girl he really loved (day-dreamy Shirley Knight), who just happens to be the daughter of the town's boss (Ed Begley, in an Oscar^®-winning role). The play's more shocking elements have been euphemized, in the custom of the era's Williams movie adaptations. Director Richard Brooks handles it with intensity, and Rip Torn (who was married to Page) has some wicked moments, but the movie is bound to its theatrical roots and its inability to mention racism, syphilis, or castration. And that's Tennessee Williams without the hot sauce. --Robert Horton

The Teacher

TEACHER THE (DVD MOVIE)

A Time Out of War

Oscar-winning dramatic short film based on the Robert W. Chambers story, Pickets. It is about Civil War soldiers on two sides of a river who decide to call a cease-fire for a few hours -- creating a time out of war. A Time Out of War, the Oscar-winning Civil War short story film produced by Denis and Terry Sanders in 1954, was among 25 films named, December 27, 2006, to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Congress created the Registry in 1989 to preserve films of "cultural, historical and artistic significance." The List now numbers 450.

The Night Stalker/The Night Strangler

The Night Stalker
Wisecracking Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a rumpled news hound plucked from the fast-talking newspaper flicks of the 1940s and dropped into the swinging '70s. What makes the eccentric Kolchak even more unique, however, is his nose for the supernatural, a trait that leaves his editor (Simon Oakland) exasperated and the police less than amused. When he insists that a late-night Las Vegas serial killer (who leaves his victims drained of blood and sporting twin holes in the neck) is a modern-day vampire, he's practically run out of town by the local authorities. Naturally, he stalks the vampire himself, an unlikely Van Helsing armed with a silver cross, a wooden stake, and his ever-present tape recorder and flashbulb camera. Carol Lynley is his understanding girlfriend, and Ralph Meeker, Claude Akins, Kent Smith, and Charles McGraw costar as the Vegas cops and politicians Kolchak systematically alienates with his abrasive charm and smart mouth. Directed by Dan Curtis from a witty script by Richard Matheson, the quirky mix of horror and humor turned The Night Stalker into a ratings sensation that inspired a sequel (The Night Strangler) and a short-lived TV series (Kolchak: The Night Stalker). The X-Files creator Chris Carter acknowledges the show as a major inspiration, and has cast McGavin in a recurring role as a retired X-Files veteran with an acerbic personality and a familiar rumpled wardrobe. Kolchak lives! --Sean Axmaker

The Night Strangler
The Night Strangler finds down-on-his-luck investigator Carl Kolchak in Seattle, hot on the trail of a serial killer hiding in the underground city beneath the streets, a gas-lit fantasy world frozen in time (L.A.'s famous Bradbury Building--which has also appeared in Blade Runner and DOA--becomes the spooky city's architectural centerpiece). Exotic dancer and medical student Jo Ann Pflug tags along as partner and bait, and the exasperated Simon Oakland returns as Kolchak's harried editor. Genre fans will enjoy the appearances of popular character actors John Carradine, Margaret Hamilton, Wally Cox, and Al Lewis. Noted horror and science fiction author Richard Matheson scripted this meandering, low-key thriller with plenty of humor, which McGavin delivers with deadpan delight. --Sean Axmaker

Alvarez Kelly [Region 2]

Alvarez Kelly (1966) isn't really a classic, but it's a pleasant enough Western, directed by Edward Dmytryk. The rather convoluted plot (adventurer plays one side off against the other on a cattle drive from Mexico during the Civil War) relies heavily on the charm of the two stars, William Holden and Richard Widmark, but the two prove as reliable as ever. There are some so-so action scenes, but it's the battle of wits between the two principals that supplies all the fireworks. By contrast Janice Rule is just adequate as the love interest. --Ed Buscombe