Tween-targeted adventure, fun and excitement arrives on DVD in the form
of The Suite Life on Deck: Anchors Away!, a sort of fleshed-out, thematically grouped spin-off offering of the hit Disney Channel
original series The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, starring Dylan and Cole Sprouse.

Reprising their roles from the show, the twins Zack and Cody Martin hit
the high seas with hotel heiress London Tiptoe (Brenda Song, above center), enrolling in a semester-at-sea program aboard the S.S. Tipton. Much to his chagrin, dutiful hotel manager Mr. Moseby (Phill Lewis, above right) also gets sucked along on the outing, assuming responsibility for all three youngsters. Hijinx ensue, don’tcha know, as well as romance; the boys try to woo some young ladies, to the extent that “action” involves holding hands and a peck on the cheek. Ashley Tisdale, of the High School Musical flicks, even reprises her role as Maddie from the original series.

Some of the outfitting is all wrong (hipster and vintage videogame T-shirts?), but the shaggy-haired Sprouse twins serve as harmlessly charming anchors for this slice of diverting adolescent entertainment. The direction is pretty flat and straightforward, and the writing makes sure to carefully underscore each set-up, but it’s all performed with cheery enough aplomb, and thankfully doesn’t feel the need to “dual-pitch,” with coded double entendres or other jokes for adults.

Housed in a white plastic Amaray case with snap-shut hinges, The Suite Life on Deck comes presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with a Dolby digital surround sound audio track, and optional French and Spanish language tracks and subtitles as well. The disc’s supplemental features include “Much Ado About Nothing” and “International Dateline,” two bonus episodes which offer up further sea-set adventures. The latter, in which the crew enters a time warp and is forced to repeat the same day over and over, is no Groundhog Day, but probably ranks as the best offering of the bunch. There’s also a 10-minute segment, “Debby on Deck,” in which the Sprouse twins goof around with and interview Debby Ryan (above left), the newest member of the cast, as well as an additional 10 minutes of glad-handing incidental footage from the on-deck premiere event for the show. Yes, parents, this is a suitably wholesome distraction. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Show) B- (Disc)

Nature documentaries are dime-a-dozen-type things, as any bored elementary schooler can attest. But advances in film technology have possibly impacted no other sub-genre quite like they have our pursuits of chronicling the animal kingdom, rendering laughably obsolete the 16mm Ciba Geigy filmstrips of yesteryear. Earth, which debuted Disney’s nature programming arm when it bowed theatrically this spring, is the latest documentary offering to offer up a snapshot of our changing planet, and animals’ place in it, and it’s a beautiful, engaging film, full of footage the likes of which may never be seen again.

Earth positions itself as somewhat of a macro docu-snapshot, but also smartly hones in on several storylines that help anchor and root the movie for younger viewers. In the Arctic, a mother polar bear trailed by her two cubs awakens from hibernation and searches for food as their icy hunting grounds melt away, and the father polar bear (above) swims further out to sea in search of food. A herd of African elephants slowly traverses the arid Kalahari Desert toward the water-rich Okavango Delta. A humpback whale and her calf, meanwhile, take part in a 4,000-mile, epic migration that takes them from tropical waters all the way to Antarctica. Remarkable high-definition footage captures these creatures in places that human beings rarely see, providing an enthralling glimpse of unique worlds.

A big part of this success must be credited to award-winning filmmakers Alastair Fothergill (The Blue Planet) and Mark Linfield, the latter of whom was also involved with the superlative Planet Earth miniseries, which was commissioned by the BBC and subsequently broadcast Stateside by the Discovery Channel. They obviously have a grasp of arresting natural visuals, but also figure out a way to weave together story strands in a manner that gives Earth a bit of an artificial narrative pull. Earth does toss in a few facts for narrator James Earl Jones to dole out, too, but the movie is chiefly driven by its stunning imagery, and in fact some of its writing (“This creature is the essence of wilderness” is the description of a lynx) comes across as silly and a bit indistinct. The only other big strike against the movie is its overly Disney-fied score, from composer George Fenton. The noise, only occasionally grating, can’t cancel out the power of the visuals, though.

Available in a two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, Earth includes a small slate of bonus features that offer viewers an in-depth look at the making of the movie as well as an opportunity to learn more about our planet and its myriad fascinating inhabitants. Earth Diaries is a 45-minute making-of special that chronicles in exhaustive detail the five-year production of the film, which touched all seven continents, 62 countries, over 200 locations and spanned over 2,000 days in the field. This footage is often just as fascinating as the footage in the finished product, as is the case with watching the filmmakers deal with the challenges of navigating a low-flying hot air balloon around clusters of tree branches. Richard Burton, the movie’s aerial director of photography, speaks interestingly about the Cineflex camera used in the film, and co-director Linfield aptly points out regarding the production, “Things don’t go right all the time. And if they do, then you’re not trying things difficult enough.”

Given the stunning vistas on display, Blu-ray is definitely the way to go for this title, which maximizes the 1080p high definition and 1.78:1 widescreen presentation. (A single-disc version of Earth is also available, mostly targeted for rental.) Optional English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles are included; exclusive Blu-ray bonus features, meanwhile, consist of a set of filmmakers’ annotations that appear as pop-up facts, VH-1-style, during a viewing of the movie. Animated chapter stops and an array of trailers are also included, which slows down the disc’s tracking just a bit. To purchase the combo DVD-Blu-ray release via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Using its cross-platform marketing muscle to full advantage, the Disney Channel has done better than almost all of its corporate peers in both aggressively defined brand protection and identifying emerging trends, as with their zeitgeist-tapping, extremely lucrative High School Musical franchise and continued exploitation of all things Hannah Montana. Among its latest small screen hits is Sonny With a Chance, which centers on Sunny Munroe (Camp Rock‘s Demi Lovato, below, second from left), an enthusiastic young Wisconsin girl who, on the strength of her own series of wacky viral videos (?), nabs a spot as a cast member on So Random!, a hit sketch comedy show for tweens.

Introducing the main character and laying the groundwork for her wacky adventures, Sonny With a Chance: Sonny’s Big Break collects four episodes of the show. In the debut episode, life behind-the-scenes on a Hollywood set proves not quite as idyllic as Sonny imagined, especially because of one of her fellow performers — the self-absorbed Tawni (Tiffany Thornton, above left). While the rest of the cast — funnyman Grady (Doug Brochu), suave Nico (Brandon Mychal Smith) and quirky little Zora (Allisyn Ashley Arm), the flamboyantly costumed runt of the group — welcome Sonny, Tawni sees in her the potential for her own star being dimmed, and reacts with pettiness and jealousy.

Still, it’s all wildly pantomimed; slack-jawed sunniness is the dominant tone here, with subsequent episodes further sketching out Sonny’s not-too-secret crush on the dreamy Chad Dylan Cooper (Sterling Knight), star of the teen drama Mackenzie Falls, which films in the adjacent studio on the same lot. The inclusion of this vacuous pin-up character — and his simmering air-quote rivalry with select members of the So Random! cast — earns Sonny With a Chance a few degree-of-difficulty points on the adolescent entertainment meter, and allows it the chance to mine a few laughs from inter-industry joke targets. It’s not Get Shorty, or anything, but it helps the material play to a slightly older crowd, as well as young kids. As with 30 Rock, too, the sketch-show-within-the-show nature of the series allows writers to spin off quick, silly ideas with perhaps just a bit of naughty subtext (“Dolphin Boy,” for instance, in which Grady plays a kid who nervously shoots water out of his blowhole every time he tries to talk to a girl) without it interfering with the main plotlines, all of which are simplistic, hopelessly chipper, moralizing or some combination thereof.

Housed in a regular white Amaray case with snap-shut hinges in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover that offers up a cover-sticker coupon if the title is purchased in tandem with another Disney TV title, Sonny With a Chance: Sonny’s Big Break comes to DVD presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with English and Spanish Dolby digital stereo audio tracks and optional Spanish subtitles. The disc’s supplemental extras both extend the cross-promotional, show-within-a-show conceit (seven minutes of Mackenzie Falls‘ season-ending cliffhanger is included) worked so handily within Sonny, and extend its boundaries, breaking down the wall between performer and audience by including Lovato’s three-and-a-half-minute audition for the series from a casting session during the summer of 2007. Five minutes of footage spotlighting Disney kid icons Dylan and Cole Sprouse is included, as well as a bonus Sonny episode in which a well-meaning gift almost wrecks Nico and Grady’s friendship. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to view a trailer for the series, click here. C (Show) B (Disc)

A visually rich and exceedingly well ordered musical drama, Paris 36 tells the story of a group of unemployed French stage performers who form a sort of artistic collective and decide to reopen their neighborhood musical hall. With original, vintage-style songs from composer Reinhardt Wagner and lyricist Frank Thomas and plenty of top-shelf production design, the film successfully woos you with its surface charms long before one feels the effects of its sympathetic characters.

Written and directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Christopher Barratier (The Chorus), Paris 36 unfolds in a grubby, somewhat bohemian suburb of northeast Paris between December 1935 and July 1936, during the “revolutionary” period of the Popular Front, which saw the first national introduction of paid holidays and a shorter working week. The film follows three unemployed performers — Pigoil (Gérard Jugnot, above right), a cuckolded veteran stage hand; Milou (Clovis Cornillac), a hot-tempered electrician; and jack-of-all-trades Jacky (Kad Merad) — who decide to reestablish their beloved music hall to its former glory. Business is slow and back-biting high until they audition and hire the beautiful Douce (Nora Arnezeder, above left), a young singer with a remarkable voice who holds the key to their collective success.

Paris 36 takes an obvious inspiration from Busby Berekeley musicals, as well as vaudeville and cabarets of yore, but it also recalls the heavily workshopped efforts of Mike Leigh, as well as Moulin Rouge — the latter not so much in terms of pop exuberance, but rather exacting construction. A study in well orchestrated, non-gloomy realism, the movie also benefits greatly from many of its cast members’ familiarity and obvious comfort with Barratier (Jugnot and Merad both costarred in The Chorus); the characters here are well sketched, and the acting so solid and of a piece that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the roles. If it’s a slight bit overlong at two hours (its introductory brushstrokes could have been shortened without much overall sacrifice), Paris 36 still connects as a sumptuous and emotionally substantive look at the triumph of artistic will in the face of difficult circumstances.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with a deep-set snap-in tray, Paris 36 comes to DVD with a heartening slate of special features that yet again showcases Sony’s admirable home video commitment to foreign language titles. Barratier dominates a feature-length audio commentary track with Arnezeder, waxing philosophic regarding his directorial opinions on playback, point-of-view shots and coverage. He also talks about the difficulty of communicating with the movie’s Czech extras, and his willful seduction of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby cinematographer, Tom Stern.

Twenty-three minutes of deleted scenes kick off the rest of the supplemental material, providing an even deeper portrayal of an artistically and economically tottering Paris. This material is less about discarded plot strands and more about around-the-edges color, and authenticity of setting. A special 10-minute featurette solely on Arnezeder has the potential to turn into hyperbolic fluff (it’s subtitled “The Young Revelation’s Beautiful Adventure”), but it actually comes across as an honest chronicling of a young starlet’s rise, in no small part due to the inclusion of insights and reminiscences from those both inside and outside the decision-making casting bubble. A hearty helping (a half hour’s worth) of subtitled interviews with the main actors gives an overview of the production from their perspective, while Thomas Lautner’s production design sketches anchor a 25-minute making-of featurette that looks at the all-important selection of Paris 36‘s locations. Trailers for Easy Virtue, It Might Get Loud, I’ve Loved You So Long and a quartet of other Sony DVD releases are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A (Disc)

A SyFy Channel original production, Merlin and the Book of Beasts is a fairly low-budget adventure tale, executed in middle-of-the-road fashion, that puts a savage new spin on the saga of Excalibur. Only genre devotees need enter here.

The age of knights was one of chivalry and honor, magic and mystery, passion and betrayal — qualities all that have long made it a rich setting for heightened-stakes drama on both screens big and small. Merlin and the Book of Beasts, however, unfolds at the tattered edges of that era; what remains is a shadowy world of fear and habitual unrest. Welcome to the dark side of Camelot. King Arthur is dead, the hallowed Round Table is in ruins, and a rogue sorcerer has unleashed a reign of monstrous terror upon the land. For the court’s last remaining knights, their only hopes lay in the powers of the now-bitter and broken wizard Merlin (Battlestar Galactica‘s James Callis, affecting an overly dramatic cadence). Can this once-great man of magic defeat a legion of creatures that includes Dragon Soldiers, Death Hawks and Gorgons, and reclaim the land? Merlin’s daughter Avlynn (Laura Harris, sporting a strange wig) is up for the challenge, and she’s joined in action by Sir Galahad (Donald Adams), the last remaining Arthurian knight; Lysanor (Jesse Moss), Galahad’s son; and Tristan (Patrick Sabongui), the son
of another legendary couple, Tristan and Isolde.

Director Warren Sonoda (Sleeptalkers, Coopers’ Camera) obviously isn’t given a huge amount of money with which to work, but neither does he distinguish himself via his choices in editing and staging. Likewise, screenwriter Brook Durham has an interesting backdrop for the movie, but has a leaden ear for dialogue and seems unable to craft characters that pop off the screen a bit and stand apart from their function. Of course, it certainly doesn’t help that the movie is so aggressively cued and forcefully acted that it feels at times like an incidentally screen-captured dinner theater performance.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover with slightly raised cover art, Merlin and the Book of Beasts is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English subtitles. Apart from a trailer for Dead Space: Downfall that auto-plays upon disc insertion, the only supplemental feature is an 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that intercuts on-set footage with brief interview clips. Some sort of exploration of the material’s historical roots, however perfunctory and hokey, would have been a welcome inclusion. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C (Disc)

Super-condensed, coming-of-age, military-threaded love story American Son is a sort of karmic prequel to something like Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, which detailed the shattering effects of the Iraq War on modern American masculinity. American Son isn’t a Coming Home-type drama, though; it’s a shipping-out drama, detailing the stomach-churning angst leading up to a tour of duty.

After completing his basic training at Camp Pendleton, 19-year-old Marine and California native Mike Holland (Nick Cannon) spends a four-day Thanksgiving leave back home with his friends and family, unable to admit to them that he’s preparing to ship out for his first tour of Iraq. Mike tries to reconnect with his mother (April Grace), stepfather (Tom Sizemore), sister (Erica Gluck) and father (Chi McBride), but the more time he spends around troubled best pal Jake (Matt O’Leary, breathing some life into a tough role, The Friend Left Behind), the more Mike becomes aware of the precarious future he faces. The girl both pleasantly distracting him from his impending order to report and making it loom in even starker dramatic relief is Cristina (Melonie Diaz), an unassuming young woman set to head off to college in the fall.

Director Neil Abramson — whose most notable credit, strangely, is the 1998 Jerry Springer flick Ringmaster — isn’t totally able to wean Cannon from his tendency to embrace glowering emotion, which dings a couple scenes. But Cannon and Diaz have a sincere, easygoing rapport and chemistry, and the banter in Eric Schmid’s script — discussing their personal travel
histories and brushes with fame, Mike notes that he once saw Clint Eastwood purchasing cheese — feels just off-kilter and esoteric enough to be real, in the way that awkward teenage romantic connection so often is. If the herky-jerky nature of Mike’s run-ins with Jake — who’s turned to selling drugs, and has to go from back-slapping to accusatory and back again, several times over — doesn’t really play, and the requisite physical flip-out moment seems a bit forced, Schmid also locates some tender moments. And apart from a few thumping party sequences, meanwhile, Abramson thankfully doesn’t try to amp up the story’s settings and interactions. He lets the drama develop slowly, naturally.

Consequently, the most arguably affecting parts of American Son are actually some of the least essential to the main Mike-Cristina storyline — Mike’s sister begging him to read her a storybook she’s long since outgrown, just so she can listen to him do the different character voices, or Mike visiting a gravely wounded Marine (Jay Hernandez) whom he doesn’t know at the behest of Cristina’s family, just to offer some brothers-in-arms support. It’s tough to balance, these senses of tenderness, grace and respect of roots, but Abramson communicates them with clear-eyed, non-judgmental precision, and nicely interweaves them with scenes showcasing Mike’s increasingly nervous jitters. For soldiers, one sees, the effects of war begin before it even starts, and of course last long after. I only wish the movie’s ending had a bit more punch, in either one way or another. I typically don’t mind narrative open-endedness, but here it feels a bit too removed, and free-floating.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case with snap-shut hinges, American Son comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, optional English and Spanish subtitles and a motion-animated main menu screen. A 12-minute making-of featurette delves into the movie’s 20-day location shoot in the California town of Bakersfield in April of 2007, though a good bit of this footage represents set-captured mayhem (weapons training, shot set-up, gun firing), complete with shoddy source sound. More interesting is a feature-length audio commentary track with director Abramson and producers Danielle Renfrew and Michael Roiff, in which the trio dissect the movie’s journey from script to screen, and ladle praise on cast and crew alike. There are also two excised scenes included, with optional commentary from the same group above: an extended beach chat between Mike and Cristina in which he more explicitly details his reasons for joining the military, and a one-minute goodbye sequence in which Mike drops Cristina off at her house. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

The early to mid-1980s was awash in farcical, lowball comedic fare designed chiefly to deliver bared breasts to a keyed-up young male demographic, particularly after the smash success of 1982’s Porky’s, and two more putative classics of this sub-genre — full of hot, teased-haired, scantily clad chicks playing cardboard-thin characters — hit DVD for the first time ever this week, in the form of a two-fer release from distributor Anchor Bay.

Co-writer-director Mark Griffiths’ Hardbodies, from 1984, is a quintessential bikini bimbo flick. Its beach-set credits — including a sequence in which girls play keep-away with the bathing suit top of one of their friends — unfold under a goofy pop tune that talks about “caressing the places unknown,” and before long we’re enjoying boobs (and just a glimpse of wang, if you want to go DVD slow-mo) during a post-coital embrace. For God’s sake, the movie even briefly features a biker gang called the Gonads! Apart from the bathing suits, all the costumes on the ladies look like they were nicked from the set of the music video shoot for Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical,”and the acting is certainly sometimes… oh, let’s say demonstrative. But Hardbodies‘ dialogue has a bit of unexpected snap, and it’s all executed with the sunny aplomb of a puppy golden retriever bounding thoughtlessly into the ocean after a Frisbee. This is a movie with streamlined purpose and clarity of vision, and it hits all its beats with charm and even some slickness, including a conversation in which girls (standing in front of a mirror, naturally) wonder why guys are so fascinated with boobs.

The story follows three middle-aged, fuddy-duddy single guys (Gary Wood, Sorrells Pickard and Michael Rapport) who rent a beach house as part of a vacation scheme to recapture their youth, then find themselves striking out with all the ladies. So they hire Scotty (Grant Cramer), a young stud in need of some cash for rent, to teach them how to score with the local beauties. Scotty drafts his goofball ginger pal Rag (Courtney Gains) to help him with his scheme, which eventually turns off Scotty’s most recent one-night conquest turned girlfriend, Kristi (Teal Roberts), since, you know, these three guys are so much more degrading toward women. No matter. Scotty rallies and wins Kristi back over, and even Rag finally gets some ass, courtesy of Kristi’s pal Kimberly (Cindy Silver). Further lending support are Darcy DeMoss (Reform School Girls), ’80s band Vixen and probably hundreds of Southern California’s hottest swimsuit models.

The 1986 follow-up to Hardbodies, on the other hand, is a dreadful misfire that seems hamstrung from the very start. Griffiths is back as director, but tries to use a film-within-a-film framing device that’s ill conceived to begin with and even more poorly executed than it is thought out. The characters of Scotty and Rags return, but they’re portrayed by different actors (Brad Zutaut and Sam Temples, respectively, the former letting his eyebrows and Flock-of-Seagulls-‘do do most of the acting). For no reason at all, they’re now successful actors (fatally undermining the boneheaded-kids-make-good vibe of the first flick), heading to Greece to shoot a teen comedy in which they smoke weed and get into various hijinks. To make matters worse, Griffiths brings back two supporting characters from the first film (the aforementioned Pickard and Roberta Collins), which only further underscores everything that’s jarring and problematic about this narrative choice. Once things get rolling, Scotty finds himself in a pinch, caught between his money-grubbing fiancee Morgan (Brenda Bakke, above left) and new gal Cleo (Fabiana Udenio), an acting neophyte drafted to play Scotty’s leading lady. Hmmm… I wonder who he’ll choose. In short, while nothing about Hardbodies 2 works as well as its predecessor, kudos at least go out to cinematographer Tom Richmond (who shot both movies, actually), for making both the locations and ladies look good.

Housed in a regular, white plastic Amaray case, the Hardbodies Collection comes to DVD with no supplemental extras, alas, which really dings its purchase value. The films themselves are presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English mono audio tracks and optional subtitles. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B/D (Movies, respectively) D (Disc)

For many years, throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Screw Magazine impresario Al Goldstein hosted a late-night public access New York City cable show, Midnight Blue, where he documented the smut business in cigar-chomping, larger-than-life fashion. Porn Stars of the ’90s, the informal seventh volume in a DVD series from Blue Underground that has chronicled the occupational insights of porn stars of previous decades as well as served as a digital-era cultural repository for its host’s frequent rants on all manner of free speech and sexuality, collects two hours of Goldstein’s interviews with various adult performers, slapped in between escort ads, phone sex promos and ball-busting celebrity endorsements (yep, that’s Gilbert Gottfried and Al Lewis, of The Munsters) that originally ran along with his program.

The surprising thing is how well all this holds up. The roster of interviewees here includes Teri Weigel, Veronica Vera, Christy Canyon (above), Jeanna Fine, Tom Byron, Sharon Kane, Randy West, Ashlyn Gere, Tami Monroe, Holly Ryder, Nikki Dial and more. Goldstein is unabashedly crude, and sometimes a little cruel — he gives Weigel’s husband, Murrill Muglio, all sorts of shit for his Cro-Magnon surfer look — but his interview technique is also laced with hearty self-deprecation, so he gets a pass on his coarseness because he so frequently makes himself the butt of the joke.

As for the interviews, Weigel talks about transitioning from Playboy and Penthouse to hardcore films; Ryder discusses the size of her clitoris (it’s large, don’tcha know); and Vera talks about her testimony at Arlen Specter’s 1983 Senate hearings, where she and Goldstein met. Meanwhile, Fine reminisces about doing it with Larry Flynt, talks about enjoying anal sex and gives detailed oral sex tips, saying that she likes “rompers,” which she describes as seven inches or less, “because you can do so much more with them.” There’s a lot of this sort of frank sexual discussion, naturally, but equal time and measure is given to letting the interview subjects showcase their off-screen personalities. Ryder’s segment is additionally entertaining since it turns out Goldstein went to school with her husband.

While it’s certainly the main sell-through appeal of the title, those thinking Porn Stars of the ’90s is all about cheap nostalgic titillation would be wrong. While film clips are interspersed throughout, they’re scrupulously edited to avoid hardcore material. Goldstein is also notable in that he provided one of the first outlets for some of the more articulate adult performers to take on critics of their industry. Ergo, Gloria Steinem comes up in several chats, and Canyon and Vera both speak intelligently and fairly persuasively in making the case that they’re the masters of their own situations. In this vein, Porn Stars of the ’90s has a weirdly academic value, serving as it does as a primary document.

Naturally, there are corresponding moments of queasy, jaw-clenching disbelief (as when Dial blithely denies any sexual history of sexual abuse, only in the same breath to talk about her first sexual experience being with another girl… in kindergarten), or those that are simply jarring, as when Ryder’s interview is then followed by an E! news segment detailing her later anti-pornography crusading. All in all, though, Porn Stars of the ’90s does a good job of simply presenting its archived material in straightforward fashion while adding a few tiny grace notes of contextualization via text updates. The inclusion of the period-piece ads — some of which are sex-related, some of which, as with commercials touting Goldstein’s barber, were probably run merely to help him score free swag, and services — helps further root this curious release, an indispensable time capsule of the adult industry at the tail end of the video age, pre-internet boom.

Housed in a sort of light blue, opalescent plastic Amaray case, Porn Stars of the ’90s comes presented in 1.33:1 full frame, divided into two dozen chapters, with a Dolby digital audio track that doesn’t sound like it provides much of a brush-up. The picture, too, is a bit shoddy, though the manufacturers at least score points for brutal honesty when, in a pre-program text crawl, they explain the image graininess — most notably featured in the title’s interstitial advertisements — by way of saying that “while the DVD features digital transfers from the original 3/4-inch master tapes, you can’t shine shit.”

The DVD’s most notable supplemental feature is a pop-up-style commentary track that provides the title with its own snarky, built-in self-critique, as well as all sorts of bizarre trivia and gossip, from Canyon’s dalliances a coke-fueled, limp-membered Robin Williams to Hyapatia Lee faking her own death. Points, too, for an imaginative, sort of purposefully crude menu screen that puts all the content options on a computer screen, with a bottle of hand lotion lurking nearby. Other bonus material consists of a four-minute guide to cunnilingus by ubiquitous porn star Ron Jeremy; a silly five-minute studio segment where Annie Sprinkles smears her breasts with eggs, flour and other cooking ingredients; and a four-minute, bitter, profane jeremiad by Goldstein against Jenna Jameson. Apparently Goldstein was angry that Jameson stood him up for a scheduled interview and post-chat dinner date with her manager, without ever calling. So he calls her a cunt, and gets even more explicit and offensive from there. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Show) B- (Disc)