The golden age of the Three Stooges continues with this exceptional third
release in Sony’s chronologically ordered collection. These 23 shorts, spanning from 1940-1942, are all
digitally remastered for the highest quality in sight and sound, and
this collection is even more special than its predecessors, as it features an historical
first: Moe Howard playing Hitler, in
1940’s You Nazty Spy! The film marked Howard as the first American to portray the German dictator, and it was for this reason, among others, that the short remained one of his personal favorites from the entire Stooges canon.

I’ve written before about the sort of direct-line connection between base-level slapstick and the the things that first tickle our funny bones,
and few acts embody that synergistic relationship with more commitment,
fervor and longevity than the Three Stooges. To that end, The Three Stooges Collection: Volume Three gathers more slap-happy
hijinks from the lovable Larry, Curly and Moe, in the form of 23 chronologically
arranged, digitally re-mastered short films. This
latest volume follows the success of the first two sets of Stooges film shorts, released over the last 11 months by Sony, and comes in advance of more like-minded releases.

The debut releases covered 1934-36 and 1937-39, respectively, and this set picks up in 1940, with the aforementioned Spy! and Rocking Thru the Rockies kicking things off. Moe is also cast as a vicious dictator in the 1941 “sequel” I’ll Never Heil Again, powered by crackerjack visual gags. A Plumbing We Will Go is touted as being Curly’s favorite, and it’s easy to understand the “wow” factor of something like the brilliant sight gag of a burst of water popping forth from a new
television set just as it’s broadcasting a live report from Niagara
Falls when filtered through the rubric of the still-nascent medium.

A couple of the shorts here — Cuckoo Cavaliers, Dutiful But Dumb — are, comparatively speaking, big-time misfires, dashed-off japes that seem like they were conceived in one morning and shot later the same afternoon, but most are surprisingly smart and satisfying marriages of concept and set piece tomfoolery. While some of the more historically-flavored entries stumble a bit overall (speaking generally, not with respect to only this set), the wildly disparate settings and the license the Stooges take with them often help breathe invigorating life into their routines. Examples of these include the slapstick-perfect “All the World’s a Stooge,” with its well-timed visual gags; “Cactus Makes Perfect,” a desert-set prospecting spoof; and “Boobs in Arms,” in which the Stooges join the Army and run into a fellow they’ve crossed. With merciless wit, a strong sense of satire and of course impeccable timing, the Three Stooges made folks of different generations laugh together and, as this set shows, gave the world
a brave new perspective on the absurdity of evil and the world powers
of the time.

As with the other releases, this third volume comes presented on two discs in slimline cases that are in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover; the unifying color scheme this time is green. The shorts themselves are shot in black-and-white and presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with Dolby digital 1.0 mono audio track. Apart from a small handful of unrelated preview trailers for other Sony releases, there is unfortunately no supplemental material, a fact established by the first two releases in the series.
This cuts two ways; the six-hour-plus running time of the celebrated material — certainly anyone’s chief measuring stick for value — makes for plenty of entertainment, and
its straightforward cataloging is invaluable. Still, and to register the same complaint again, just a brief
talking-head retrospective or two would help contextually root the
material for a lot of younger viewers for whom the term “classic
comedy” perhaps only means Eddie Murphy, circa Raw. To purchase the set via Amazon, click here. A- (Movies) B- (Disc)

An underground, DIY-type horror flick, Home Sick angles to blend the surreal, gore-drenched and terrifying, and it achieves this left-field commingling to middling effect. There’s a lot to admire about the atmosphere and mood created on a shoestring budget, if ultimately Home Sick collapses under the weight of a thin premise and too much forced quirkiness.

Recently, if unhappily, back from Hollywood, Claire (Lindley Evans) submits to a small town homecoming get-together with Robert (Will Akers), Mark (Forrest Pitts), Candice (Nightmare Man‘s Tiffany Shepis) and others. The social awkwardness is back-burnered when a grinning idiot who calls himself “Mr. Suitcase” (Bill Moseley) crashes the party with a briefcase full of razorblades, and starts passive-aggressively forcing the partygoers to identify people they hate, all while slashing his own arms. Soon, a black-hooded supernatural killer is loose, killing each person identified by the teens. The terrified friends realize they may also be viciously murdered because Tim (Matt Lero) awkwardly joked that he hated everyone at the party, too. As the corpses pile up and the body parts fly, the surviving kids enlist the help of Uncle Johnny (Tom Towles, of Grindhouse and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), a crazed, chili-loving militiaman who has a stockpile of weapons that might help them stay alive.

While the slasher-gore quotient is straight out of an early Peter Jackson playbook, writer Evan Katz tries to fold in some of the off-kilter tonal quirks of David Lynch, which mainly seems to mean oddball, stilted dialogue and set-ups which lend themselves to artificially long pauses. As directed by Adam Wingard, though, some of this emphasis on atmospheric tension gets traded in for excessively bloody effects, which admittedly are fairly nicely rendered, except for too-red blood. The acting on display here runs the gamut, too. Moseley (Rob Zombie’s Halloween, The Devil’s Rejects) has a certain unhinged, manic energy, and his brief appearance is jolting and effective. Evans, in her debut, is also fairly engaging. Unfortunately, other actors seem to be very consciously channeling better known performers (Steve Buscemi is an influence), which gets irksome after a while. While we’re nitpicking, there’s a lot of willfully pallid, over-exagerrated eye make-up, too — a couple actors look like zombies pulling exam season all-nighters.

Attractively packaged in a regular Amray case with gold foil title lettering, Home Sick is presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo surround audio track. Director Wingard and writer Katz, longtime collaborators, sit for a nervous, chatty audio commentary track, and a menu screen with a background full of razor blades gives way to a slate of special features that include a deleted opening sequence and a trio of short film projects from the aforementioned pair — the seven-minute 1,000 Year Sleep, the 32-minute The Girlfriend and the three-minute Laura Panic, a nice, evocatively photographed mood piece in which a girl muses, via voiceover narration, that her murder of her boyfriend is but a “bump in the road” in their relationship.

There’s also an affected, experimental, very slickly (over-)produced 13-minute making-of featurette, starring Wingard, in which the director hyperactively recounts and acts out certain anecdotes from pre-production and production. Finally, Moseley sits for a six-minute interview in which he rather charmingly cops to the insecurities of an actor when, just prior to filming, a (supposed) friend asks him while running some lines if he’s going to give a performance based on such clichés. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. For further information on Home Sick, as well as other Synapse titles, visit their website by clicking here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Watching Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert 3-D, and looking into the faces of thousands of screaming pre-teens, I feel a strange kinship with the citizenry of sacked civilizations throughout time and the world. Seeing something at once so foreign to your being and day-to-day existence, and so full of force, vigor and furious noise — oh, the noise! — is partly how I imagine the Romans felt in 410, when the Visigoths came a-knockin’.

I don’t necessarily want to give the impression that Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds, a nice, three-dimensional concert film stunt spun off from a road tour from the hit Disney Channel series that stars the daughter of former mulleted, “Achy Breaky Heart” country crooner Billy Ray Cyrus, is bad, per se. Or that it will rape, pillage and plunder. It’s actually quite impressive. It’s just that it’s also such a fiercely indefatigable, in-your-face thing that it kind of takes one’s breath away.

Well staged by director Bruce Hendricks, the briskly paced concert features Cyrus belting out a bunch of tunes, and frequently waving her arm in triumphant declaration. I’m not super-familiar with her as a performer, but Cyrus certainly knows how to pull all the strings of an audience. She throws in plenty of friendly winks and waves to all the kids, works both sides of the stage, and, from the outset, says “I just have one rule — no sitting down!” Cue approving tween shrieks.

Performing for the first time ever as her pop star alter ego, Hannah Montana, Cyrus kicks off the show in high-energy fashion with “Rock Star,” and the production continues to pulls out all the stops, with solid sets, production design and dancing choreographed by Kenny Ortega, of the High School Musical franchise. There’s lots of colorful, cute, accessorized outfits that are a bit glammed-up (like this one), but not too slutty, a la Britney Spears’ cringe-inducing cock-tease years. Segueing into her own persona, Cyrus lets loose with “Start All Over,” the Jonas brothers also come out for a few tunes — “We Got the Party With Us” and “Year 3,000.” Little anecdotal behind-the-scenes bits and crowd interviews from the road tour are also interspersed throughout.

A to-scale smash at the box office this February, where it opened to over $30 million and went on to gross $65 million domestically, this is sunny, feel-good family entertainment… basically a Twinkie. But adults often forget that most tweens and teenagers have the metabolism to handle such artificially processed sugary delights, and in massive quantities too. Ergo, no harm, no foul — for its base constituency, at least. Others may be rightfully a bit bewildered.

The DVD benefits from superlative packaging and message control, too. Spread out on two discs — one of which contains the movie in regular form, and the other of which features the concert in 3-D, which can be enjoyed with the four pairs of 3-D glasses that accompany the release — the DVD is housed in a regular Amray case with a snap-in tray, and it comes with sturdy cardboard, holographic slipcover that, well, underscores the title, showing Cyrus in both brunette and blonde, in-character form.

A solid slate of bonus features includes a sing-along mode, additional songs not seen in the theatrical cut of the concert film (“Good and Broken,” “SOS”), and an 11-minute personal backstage tour from the very personable Cyrus that gives viewers a look at her costume-change area and the trap door she uses to pop up on the stage. I place the over/under on the number of times Cyrus playfully sticks out her tongue somewhere in the mid-40s, but she still seems a pretty grounded, friendly, reasonably normal young woman in her interview tidbits. The best chats come from supporting players and audience members. “It’s like standing behind a jet engine when it revs up, actually worse” says a sound tech of when Cyrus first appears on stage. Then there’s a weary, bewigged father, standing between his two beaming girls, decked out in Hannah Montana merchandise: “You know, I didn’t expect so much screaming.” You’re telling me! To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)