Wizards
and warriors, knights and princesses will never leave us — there’s just
something indubitably kick-ass about chain metal — but the box-office
success of The Lord of the Rings franchise has definitely
helped unearth and reposition a veritable treasure trove of fantasy
adventure and Camelot-era entertainment product, and one such offering
is the animated Prince Valiant series.

Winner of the
1993 Humanitas Award in the category of Children’s Animation and three
Silver Angel awards honoring productions that uphold values of “moral,
ethical and/or social impact,” Prince Valiant is based on Hal
Foster’s comic strip of almost seven decades ago. In charting the
quests and escapades of its titular headstrong nobleman (voiced by
Robby Benson) and his quest for knighthood under King Arthur (voiced by
Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.), the series offers up lightly moralizing lessons
about navigating treachery and betrayal, “true worth being on the
inside” and the like. Along for the adventures are the loyal Arn
(voiced by Michael Horton) and feisty maiden Rowanne (voiced by Noelle
North), while wise old wizard Merlin (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer) also
pops up from time to time with shrewd advice or a helpful gift.

Accessible perhaps to a fault in its flatly rendered style, Prince Valiant’s
matte animation will likely bore latecomers to the medium who’ve been
raised on Pixar’s leaps-and-bounds improvement in background detail and
convincing shading. Likewise, those who don’t naturally gravitate
toward template narratives of honor, duty and sacrifice will likely
find the staid stories and bloodless action of no permanent consequence
herein fairly tedious. Still, across the 33 episodes gathered here
there are enough recognizable guest voice talents (Patty Duke, Wil
Wheaton, Roddy McDowell, Teri Garr, Marilu Henner and Ron Perlman,
among others) to help give the show a bit of a goosing nostalgic
appeal, if only one has sympathetic inclinations for the outmoded
technique on display.

Spread out over five discs and presented in 1.33:1 full screen, Prince Valiant: The Complete Series, Volume 1
comes housed somewhat awkwardly in a double-wide Amray case with a
snap-in tray and a bottom-entry cardboard slipcover. A nice,
eight-page, full-color insert booklet includes episodic summaries, but
the real bonus reward is found in the fifth disc’s collection of
interviews with series creator David Corbett, writer Brooks Wachtel and
comic strip historian Rick Norwood. An impressive storyboard gallery of
well over 150 images, a slideshow of character drawings and background
paintings, a selection of five scripts in PDF format and two episodic
audio-commentary tracks with Corbett, Wachtel and voice talent North,
on “The Trust Betrayed” and “The Awakening,” help mitigate transfers
that import wholesale grain and other artifact inconsistencies. C- (Show) B+ (Disc)

Misty Mundae has climbed the ladder to the top of the B-movie starlet food chain through performances both smolderingly sexy (Lustful Addiction, Girl Seduction) and slightly goofy and endearing (Spider-Babe, Erotic Survivor). Flesh for Olivia,
though, captures none of her innate charms. Representing her last
starring role for the notorious, underground Factory 2000 film studio —
for whom she starred in numerous features and shorts at the beginning
of her screen calling — it instead serves as an ignominious footnote
chapter in an otherwise successful career.

Written and directed by William Hellfire, Flesh for Olivia is billed as a grim and violent piece of erotica, and a putative sequel to 2001’s Silk Stalking Strangler.
In reality, though, it goes with an elliptical and impressionistic
approach that doesn’t at all suit its material. Further saddled with a
dispassionate voiceover, unfocused performances and lame, droning
music, the 2002 movie is a creative stillbirth and unworthy digression
for longtime fans of Mundae, or indeed anyone interested in this
fashion of indie exploitation.

The story finds Mundae’s title character under the thumb of a
sleazy, violent and voyeuristic pimp, Claudio (Dean Paul). At his
direction, Olivia spends her time seducing willing young women to put
on kinky shows, women like Melody (AJ Khan). When things get out of
hand, though, and Melody’s roommate Alice (Dr. Jekyll and Mistress Hyde’s
Julian Wells) returns and witnesses shocking in-camera footage, she may
be the next innocent beauty to experience the pleasure and pain of
Olivia’s devastating allure.

Hellfire has the barest strands of a narrative, and no real ideas about how to effectively stretch this out to feature length. (Flesh for Olivia
runs 73 minutes, and that’s including the world’s slowest credit crawl
ever.) He opts to flash back and forward through time on occasion, but
this gambit — like the movie’s love affair with affected slow-motion —
comes off as desperate and completely transparent. Mundae, too, seems,
terribly uninterested and uninvested in the proceedings, consigning Flesh for Olivia to the bottom-of-the-basement bargain bin.

Flesh for Olivia comes housed in a regular Amray case with a
full-color paper insert that includes a few cast photos, and is
presented in 1.33:1 full screen. Distributor EI Cinema typically goes
all out with their releases in terms of supplemental materials, but Flesh for Olivia
includes only an admittedly expansive trailer gallery for its other
films. Additionally, the disc is plagued by significant artifacting and
playback glitches around the 25-minute mark, making this seemingly
rushed-out flick one of their worst releases. D- (Movie) D (Disc)