New I Luv Video Pick Shelf for 6/18

VENUS IN FURS

I changed out my I Luv Video pick shelf, which I now do weekly. It's a welcome ritual that lets me wander the aisles for a few minutes and get excited about movies I haven't seen in a while.

At the Guadalupe store we have:

BONE: The oddball little comedy of manners directed by Larry Cohen and starring the great Yaphet Kotto as a home-invading philosophical thug. There's a lot of talking and pretension but it's all very entertaining.

SSSSSSS: This snake horror movie has the cheap, cost-cutting look of a lot of Universal films but it also has a lot of the strange vitality of the classic horrors. At times it feels like a TV movie-of-the-week directed by David Cronenberg.

DANCE WITH THE DEVIL: Here's a movie that gets no respect, and it's hard to blame anyone considering that the cover image is Rosie Perez' tits and a shotgun. But it's a really strong '90s exploitation movie. Javier Bardem is a brujo on the Mexican border who is assisted in his human sacrifice and drug smuggling efforts by Perez and Screaming Jay Hawkins. James Gandolfini plays Gene Hackman more or less as the DEA cop who pursues them. Pretty extreme and tasteless.

JUSTINE : Jess Franco's Sade adaptation is pretty faithful to the book. It's not very witty, as Sade is, but it's very pretty to look at. With Klaus Kinski, freaking out as Sade in a framing segment and Jack Palance, who looks like he snorted a family of small bears before the cameras started rolling. He's out of control like the Pentagon's checkbook. He is pure light.

Meanwhile over at Airport:

ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE: Talk about pretentious. This is nothing but. But that's a far less severe sin than playing it safe and being boring in my mind. Tons of tricky camera work, an amazing chase, lots of hippie philosophizing and at the core of it, Robert Blake - who puts a dress on it and takes it downtown. He's the man in this. The MAN.

THE PSYCHO LOVER: Ultra cheap sex/rape thriller produced by the Isley Brothers and directed by Robert V. O'Neill of WONDER WOMEN fame. This has some real crazy acid trip/dream scenes and phenomenal music. Whatever speed freak edited this thing deserves a medal.

GARGOYLES : This is one of those TV movies that a lot of us say when we were kids and that stuck with us forever. I remember channel 5 in Washington DC used to show this a lot and it's become part of my dreams. Credit the recently departed Stan Winston who designed and built the super-great gargoyle suits.

VENUS IN FURS : Another Franco. This one is very strange. Franco said it came from a conversation with Chet Baker about the wild places a jazz musician's mind goes when he takes a solo. Trumpeter James Darren's mind sure goes to some wild places in this. A purely cinematic phantasmagoria of '60s places and attitudes. Maybe my favorite Franco film.