Clásicos de lo ridículamente sublime. (Camp).

DVD Critic's Choice

New DVDs By DAVE KEHR Published: June 26, 2007 CULT CAMP CLASSICS.

Warner Home Video Eric Fleming and Zsa Zsa Gabor in "Queen of Outer Space."

Warner Home Video has brought a very diverse group of 12 films together into four box sets collectively called "Cult Camp Classics." Unsurprisingly, not all of them are cult films (if there is any fan frenzy over John Guillermin's "Skyjacked," it is certainly muted); a few aren't even campy (Howard Hawks's "Land of the Pharaohs" could be the most down-to-earth costume epic ever made); and none of them would qualify as classics, even in the Ed Wood pantheon. What these films have in common is a starless obscurity that makes them difficult to release into the name-driven DVD market. If the condescending "cult camp" label gives them a commercial hook, I guess that's for the good, at least as long as it means getting prints as carefully restored and transfers as technically perfect as these. With a clean face and pressed clothes, even a desperately impoverished drive-in picture like Edward Bernd's "Queen of Outer Space"(1958) can make a good impression. One of a large number of low-budget films from the Allied Artists library now owned by Warner Brothers, this tale of virile American astronauts landing on a Venus populated by scantily clad women (Zsa Zsa Gabor among them) probably looks better now than it ever did at the drive-in. With its once-faded DeLuxe color pumped back up to something like its original intensity, William P. Whitley's cinematography takes on the Pop Art shimmer of Pedro Almodóvar's early films, a crazy quilt of violently mismatched hues.

Warner Home Video Looking big: the title character from the 1959 "Giant Behemoth."

The two other titles in the "Sci-Fi Thrillers" box are "The Giant Behemoth," a sleepy 1959 monster-stomps-city epic featuring some of the last work of the stop-motion animator Willis O'Brien ("King Kong"), and the strangely riveting "Attack of the 50-Foot Woman," a sort of down-market science-fiction variation on "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" A boozy, battling couple played by Allison Hayes and William Hudson slap each other around on various flimsy sets, until Ms. Hayes's character resolves the standoff by shooting up to a height of 50 feet, thanks to an accidental encounter with a radioactive alien. As an outrageously literal metaphor for unleashed female anger, "50-Foot Woman" achieves a kind of demented grandeur. Apparently the director, Nathan Juran, didn't see the poetry: he signed it with a pseudonym, Nathan Hertz, his first and middle names. Poor Dana Andrews comes in for a beating in the box Warners has titled "Terrorized Travelers." This former A-list star, who had become the embodiment of the returning World War II veteran in William Wyler's" Best Years of Our Lives" (1946), was deep into a struggle with alcoholism by the time he appeared as the traumatized ex-fighter pilot in Hall Bartlett's 1957 "Zero Hour!" and as the embattled husband and father in a duel with thrill-seeking teenagers in the 1967 "Hot Rods to Hell." The second film, in particular, draws on Mr. Andrews's 1940s stardom, pairing him with his "State Fair" co-star Jeanne Crain under the direction of John Brahm, another '40s figure. In a plot line that could be a parody of a World War II campaign picture, Mr. Andrews plays a debilitated authority figure (he can't drive as a result of a devastating car accident) trying to transport his wife and children across the California desert to what seems like a grim new life managing a small-town motel. The family's caravan of middle-class decency is attacked by speed-crazed youths in souped-up cars, urged on by a decadent blonde played by Mimsy Farmer. The film may be stiffly executed, but its underlying anger and bitterness are hard to shake. Given the year of its making, "Hot Rods to Hell" may represent one of the last times that the aging, pre-boomer generation got to have its cranky say in a movie industry that would soon shut out most voices over 40.

Warner Home Video In "Hot Rods to Hell" (from left) Jeanne Crain, Laurie Mock, Dana Andrews and Tim Stafford flee speed-crazed youths in the desert.

John Cromwell's 1950 "Caged" is at once an obvious and an inappropriate choice for a box devoted to "Women in Peril." A researcher looking for a trashy women's prison film would understandably be drawn to the lurid title. But the movie is no spoofy, salacious Roger Corman "women in cages" picture. It's a sober, well-filmed drama in the old Warner Brothers school of social issue movies, effectively an update of "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang," with Eleanor Parker (too breathy and theatrical) as the fresh fish in the tank, and the unforgettable Hope Emerson, all 6 foot 2 inches of her, as a sadistic guard. Ms. Parker, Ms. Emerson and the screenwriters, Virginia Kellogg and Bernard C. Schoenfeld, were all nominated for Oscars. The whole "Cult Camp Classics" enterprise is justified for me by the presence of "Land of the Pharaohs" in the "Historical Epics" volume. Howard Hawks's only film in CinemaScope, it has been hard to see in its original format. This transfer not only gets the framing right (I noticed, for the first time, that Hawks has placed a rectangle around the opening credits to establish the correct aspect ratio for the projectionist) but also restores a long-lost four-track stereo soundtrack. It's still not a great movie (it features Joan Collins; need I say more?), but it's far from the disaster it has often been portrayed as. For Hawks, the epic form is not about the DeMille pageantry of dancing girls and muscled Nubian slaves. (For that sort of thing, see its box companion, Richard Thorpe's garish biblical blockbuster "The Prodigal"). Rather, in typical Hawks fashion, Topic A is the business of getting a dangerous job done: in this case the construction, under the Pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins), of the Great Pyramid of Giza. (To capture its scope, Hawks allows himself one of the few showy shots in his career, a 360-degree pan around the construction site that embraces thousands of extras.) The art direction, by the incomparable Alexandre Trauner ("Children of Paradise"), alludes to the Fascist architecture so recently and disastrously popular in Europe, and Hawks makes the dictatorial Khufu an ambiguous figure: admirable for his ambition and energy, dangerous in his contempt for human life and fierce commitment to a cruel religion. Hawks's films always seem conspicuously secular in the context of the religiosity of much Hollywood cinema; "Land of the Pharaohs" is quietly, confidently skeptical of all things transcendent. The Cult Camp Classics Collections: "Sci-Fi Thrillers," "Women in Peril," "Terrorized Travelers" and "Historical Epics," $29.98 for each volume of three films; single titles are $14.98 each. All films in the collection are unrated, with the exception of "Skyjacked," part of the "Terrorized Travelers" box, which is PG.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007