Joseph, Jackie

Gremlins 2 - The New Batch

The gremlins are back and this time theyve taken total control over the building of a media mogul. Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 11/13/2007 Starring: Zach Galligan Run time: 106 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Joe Dante

Zach Galligan, the star of the first Gremlins, is back, along with Phoebe Cates, his girlfriend from the first film. They're both working in an ultramodern skyscraper owned by a Donald Trump clone (a hilarious John Glover). Galligan's furry little buddy is captured by a mad scientist, who not only helps it multiply, but invests the nasty, scaly offspring with intelligence and the ability to talk. (Watch for the one that has Tony Randall's voice.) What follows is imaginative mayhem that spoofs old movies, modern television, and the conveniences of postmodern technology. In some ways, the sequel is even more inventive and laughter-inducing than the original. --Marshall Fine

Gremlins (Special Edition)

Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 01/08/2008 Rating: Pg

The Best of the New Scooby-Doo Movies

Studio: Hanna Barbera Release Date: 03/22/2005

With Six You Get Eggroll

The madcap courtship of two adults - an attractive widow with three sons & the single father of a teenage daughter - is the subject of this bright comedy about romance marriage & families. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 05/03/2005 Starring: Doris Day George Carlin Run time: 94 minutes Rating: G

After her long and wholesome run as America's Sweetheart, Doris Day quit movies with this well-scrubbed picture. With Six You Get Eggroll--oof, what a title--caught the wave of blended-family comedies, coming just after Yours, Mine and Ours and just before TV's The Brady Bunch. Doris has three sons, and new beau Brian Keith has an 18-year-old daughter (the still-baby-faced Barbara Hershey). It's family-friendly sitcom stuff, with both Day and Keith doing their comfortable, patented thing; when the two of them are onscreen together it's like watching a couple of old sweaters mate. This one is straight formula for fans only, although connoisseurs of camp will enjoy the whiff of Aquarius in the otherwise square proceedings (it was 1968, after all) when Doris goes to a nightclub where the Grass Roots are playing. There's also a hippie gang (featuring Jamie Farr and William Christopher, before M*A*S*H) with ponchos and love beads. The times they were a-changin', and kudos to Day for bowing out gracefully. --Robert Horton

Josie and the Pussycats - The Complete Series

Studio: Hanna Barbera Release Date: 09/18/2007 Run time: 352 minutes

Centered on a girl band with a knack for ending up in the middle of a mystery, Josie and the Pussycats is a 1970 Saturday Hanna-Barbera television cartoon series featuring Josie, a character conceived and drawn by "Archie" Comic legend Dan DeCarlo, his complete 16-episode series features band members Josie, Melody, and Valerie and their entourage Alan, Alexander, Alexandra, and cat Sebastian as they travel the world from one gig to another. Like the Scooby-Doo gang, Josie and her friends invariably find themselves involved in some kind of mystery at every stop. Whether it's saving a fleet of ships from a captain set on avenging his great grandfather, investigating alien invaders with an insatiable hunger for diamonds, or stopping a crazed scientist from controlling the world's weather with a nuclear powered weather machine, lead singer Josie, clever Valerie, and ditzy Melody can be counted upon to combine forces with Josie's boyfriend Alan, the cowardly Alexander, the self-absorbed and scheming Alexandra, and the snickering cat Sebastian to investigate and solve the mystery just in time to don their leopard leotards and deliver a great show. Josie and the Pussycats features the groovy music of a brief-lived 1970 girl pop band of the same name throughout the chase scenes of each show and has the honor of being the first cartoon series to regularly feature a black character (though it beat The Harlem Globetrotters by only half an hour). An interesting 22-minute bonus profile of Dan DeCarlo features extensive interviews with great Marvel cartoonist Stan Lee (Spiderman, Fantastic Four), writer Mark Evanier, cartoonist Scott Shaw, "Archie" chairman and publisher Michael Silberkleit, writer and producer Paul Dini, and a host of others who touch upon everything from this master cartoonist's real-life inspiration for Josie to his influence on future cartoonists and animators, sense of humor, and very distinctive style. (Ages 5 and older) --Tami Horiuchi

Small Soldiers

Meet the commando elite renegade action figures with an attitude. Theyve burst out of their boxes to combat their arch-rivals the gorgonites kindhearted but unusual looking creatures. Now small-town teenager alan abernathy gets enlisted to the gorgonites. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 02/08/2005 Starring: Kirsten Dunst Denis Leary Run time: 109 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Joe Dante

Here's the pitch: "It's like Toy Story but these toys that come to life really kick butt!" That's essentially it for this breezy popcorn flick. In a very smart first 10 minutes, new toy-company owner Denis Leary tells his crew he wants toys "that play back." Hence the small soldiers land in Anytown, U.S.A., and the loner kid Alan (Gregory Smith) opens them up before they are supposed to be on the shelves. Those military-grade chips sure make them smart and give the toys plenty of pithy retorts to boot. Plenty of violence, er, action, most of it fun enough. The vocal talents, including Tommy Lee Jones, Frank Langella, and cast members of The Dirty Dozen are inspired characters, the humans less so. With Gremlins director Joe Dante at the helm, it plays like a sequel to that '80s fantasy. Amazing visual effects, of course. --Doug Thomas

A Guide for the Married Man

Directed with a lascivious eye by Gene Kelly, A Guide for the Married Man has the illicit kick of finding a vintage copy of Playboy in your dad's sock drawer. With its zoom shots of ample cleavage and jiggling bottoms, this sophisticated sex farce is Naughty with a capital N. Walter Matthau stars as a desperate husband with a roving eye who is "ready to take the plunge." Robert Morse costars as his philandering best friend who becomes his "coach." Morse's "pointers" are acted out by a stellar cast of comic actors. Scoring highest are Carl Reiner as a vainglorious movie star arranging a cross-global tryst; Joey Bishop as a husband who steadfastly denies, denies, denies even after he is caught in the act by his wife, and Terry Thomas as a man driven to an early grave after his paramour (Jayne Mansfield) loses her bra in his home. The film's bevy of beauties includes ravishing Inger Stevens as Matthau's unsuspecting wife and Sue Ann Langdon as the neighborhood tease. Just to make the film even more '60s, The Turtles perform the title song. A Guide for the Married Man is so wrong, so dated, and so sexist. It's a wonder it hasn't been remade! --Donald Liebenson

Director Gene Kelly demonstrates wonderful style and sophistication in this adult farce that stars Walter Matthau and Robert Morse as two husbands with one thing on their minds. Matthau is Paul Manning, a happily married "typical suburban male." Wanting other women but having no idea how to go about it, he turns to his friend, Ed (Morse), for a few tips on infidelity. And Ed willingly dishes up some of the funniest advice and anecdotes ever seen-brought to life by a top cast that includes Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Joey Bishop, Sid Caesar, Art Carney, Phil Silvers and Jayne Mansfield. Despite its delicate subject matter, this wild, wicked comedy is executed with such charm and affection that it won strong critical praise and was one of the top moneymakers of its year.

King Creole

Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 08/21/2007

Before his handlers convinced him to settle for the safety of a screen franchise, the young Elvis Presley harbored riskier dreams as an actor, not just a star. This 1958 drama, his fourth feature outing, hints at the underlying seriousness of that goal. Presley plays Danny Fisher, a New Orleans teenager struggling to graduate from high school while working in a sleazy French Quarter club to support his family. He's also characterized as a troubled youth with a dangerous temper and feelings of shame and resentment toward his meek, unemployed father (Dean Jagger). When Danny's gift for singing provides him with a potential career break (and the requisite excuse for Elvis's production numbers), his involvement with a ruthless gangster (Walter Matthau) and his sultry, alcoholic moll (Carolyn Jones) soon threatens both his future and his family.

That story line, with Danny torn between a budding romance with a good waitress (Dolores Hart) and the bad moll, Ronnie (Jones), proves as effective as it is predictable, hardly surprising given its source in an early Harold Robbins bestseller. But King Creole also boasts an impressive production pedigree (including the team behind no less a classic than Casablanca, producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz), and the supporting cast helps elicit one of Presley's most emotional performances. Jones in particular rises above her role's inherent clichés, her self-loathing and sexuality both palpable. Presley, still a few years away from the more sanitized image that would be integral to those franchise features, is young enough to be a credible teen, but more crucially he makes his rage and yearning largely convincing.

Ironically, the dramatic sparks prove all the more welcome in light of the largely forgettable music, which variously plunders Chicago blues ("Trouble," a knock-off of "Hoochie Coochie Man") and unconvincingly crosses Presley's Memphis rock with Crescent City jazz ("Dixieland Rock"), all to far less effect than Presley's two preceding movies, Jailhouse Rock and Loving You. --Sam Sutherland

Scooby-Doo Meets The Harlem Globetrotters

Studio: Hanna Barbera Release Date: 02/08/2005 Run time: 90 minutes Rating: Nr

Timeless, captivating fun for children and fine nostalgic nonsense for adults, the Harlem Globetrotters episodes from the Scooby-Doo canon border on goofy anarchy. During the four-year run of The New Scooby-Doo Movies on 1970s television, the Mystery, Inc. gang of Fred, Velma, Daphne, Shaggy, and the preternaturally skillful canine hero Scooby-Doo hooked up with cartoon versions of many real-life celebrities (who provided their own voices).

The Harlem Globetrotters, a traveling comedy act showcasing basketball tricks and unsportsmanlike high jinks, had a core team of well-known performers, led by Meadowlark Lemon, who were naturally funny partners in Scooby's ghostbusting investigations. This disc contains two of the three HG programs, "The Mystery of Haunted Island" and "The Loch Ness Mess," the former a somewhat creaky, run-of-the-mill Scooby haunting, while the latter features a more interesting conspiracy for Shaggy and the others to crack. --Tom Keogh

A Pup Named Scooby-Doo: The Complete First Season

Studio: Hanna Barbera Release Date: 03/18/2008 Run time: 264 minutes