In this film, Mary Pickford plays not one, but two roles in a movie different from anything she had ever done before. One is beautiful, rich, but crippled Stella Maris and the other is deformed and abused orphan Unity Blake. For one of the first times in film, one actress would play two roles using double exposures and complex editing from director Marshall Neilan and cinematographer Walter Stradling.

Based on William John Locke’s 1913 novel, this begins with Stella Maris trapped in her London mansion bedroom. Unable to walk since birth, her wealthy family tries to keep her from the horrors of the world, such as World War I. There’s a sign on her door which tells anyone entering, “All unhappiness and world wisdom leave outside. Those without smiles need not enter.”

Unity Blake is an uneducated orphan who has been abused to the point that she is afraid of every person she meets. She’s been hired by Louisa (Marcia Manon) to work in the mansion.

John (Conway Tearle) may be married to Louisa, but it’s never been happy. He frequently visits Stella, who he has never told that he is married. Instead, he wants her to think that he is as perfect as her worldview.

One night, Unity loses the food she is delivering and as a result, a drunken Louisa beats her senseless. Louisa is arrested and jailed, while John decides to adopt Unity, who soon falls in love with him. Stella’s family wants her kept from the rich girl, as seeing another woman so broken will let her know that the world is a horrible place.

Unity decides to become educated, learning from her new guardian Aunt Gladys (Josephine Crowell), as Stella gets an operation which allows her to walk. She agrees to marry John, just as Louise gets out of jail, telling the young girl the truth about the man she is in love with.

That night, Aunt Gladys is overheard telling others that Louise will never allow John to live the life he deserves. Unity, realizing that John will only love Stella, murders Louise and kills herself, freeing John and allowing Stella to believe that there may be sadness, but there can also be joy afterward.

What I love about the golden age of media that we live in now is that movies like this, that may otherwise not be seen and could even be lost can now exist in my collection.

According to MVD, who released this film, “The Mary Pickford Foundation and the Paramount Film Archive partnered to access all elements available in the Pickford collections both at the UCLA Film & Television Archive and at the Library of Congress. Even though the archives were shut down during the pandemic, all parties cooperated to send the film elements to Paramount so they could be scanned in 4K resolution and commence work on the restoration.”

Using a 1967 35mm B&W Dupe Negative and an incomplete 1925 35mm Tinted Print, this has new digital inter-titles, repaired damaged to the prints, a stabilization of the actual playing of the movie and a frame rate that closely matches how audiences would have seen the movie in 1918.

Extras include a commentary track by Marc Wanamaker, author and film historian, as well as a pictorial book created by the Mary Pickford Foundation, a photo gallery and The Mountaineer’s Honor, an American Biograph short that has been newly mastered in HD with an original score by the Graves Brothers.

You can get this from MVD.

April 23: Get Out! — A haunted house movie is today’s pick.

Ghosts began production in 1993 under the title Is It Scary? with the director Mick Garris and was supposed to play before Addams Family Values. For a time, it was the longest music video ever — Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” is longer now — and is still the most expensive at $15 million. That’s because it was all paid for by its star, Michael Jackson.

A lot of that money is because Jackson backed out of the original plan. Garris went to film The Shining miniseries and Stan Winston, who did the makeup and special effects, took over.

Unlike Thriller and Captain EO, two of Jackson’s long and expensive videos that were seen by millions and can still be watched in some places today, Ghosts has disappeared after playing before Thinner.

In a small town, The Maestro (Michael Jackson) loves to scare kids — Mos Def is one of them — and perform magic tricks. The town’s mayor comes to kick him out of town, saying, “He’s a weirdo. There’s no place in this town for weirdoes.” If this feels like how the public was treated Michael Jackson in 1996, it’s no accident.

Also: the mayor — as well as the ghoul version of the mayor and two other characters, Superghoul and a skeleton — is played by Jackson.

The Maestro challenges the mayor to a scaring contest and the first to show fear must leave town. He brings his entire family of ghosts to dance with him, then possesses the mayor. After that, the Maestro says that he will leave town, but falls to dust and then rises as the Superghoul. This makes the mayor so upset that he dives out a window, allowing the Maestro to remain.

I do have to say, a thing lost about Jackson after all his life’s controversies is just how good his music is. This features several I hadn’t heard before–“2 Bad,” “Is It Scary” and “Ghosts” from HIStory and Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix — and they’re really amazing. The dancing is great, too, as are the effects, if somewhat dated.

Of course, this was made after the first time that Jackson escaped child molestation charges and this feels like, well, that trial. Except it gets supernatural.

Written by Jackson, Garris, Winston and Stephen King, this has one jaw dropping moment, when Jackson becomes a dancing skeleton and escapes his mortal form. I’ve always wondered if he wished that he could do that in reality.

Nathan Rabin explained the end of this way better than I can and his words prove why he inspired me to write about movies: “Ghosts has a happy ending: The common folk and especially their adorable children welcome Maestro back into the fold and embrace him for being a showman and an eccentric with a straight line to the spirit world. In the real world, alas, Michael Jackson wasn’t as lucky. He had to die young and mysteriously to rehabilitate his terminally tattered image.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum #25. Get it now on Etsy.

Renato Polselli isn’t the kind of director mentioned in the same breath as other famous Italian genre directors like Argento or Fulci. Or Martino, Margheriti or Deodato. Let’s face it. He barely gets mentioned at all. 

Yet we live in a golden age of home media, a time when even films that were unavailable during the VHS boom are now available for all to own. Several Polselli films – Delirium (Vinegar Syndrome), Black Magic Rites (Indicator), The Vampire and the Ballerina (Shout! Factory) and The Monster of the Opera (Severin’s Danza Macabra V1: The Italian Gothic Collection) have been released just in the past few months. 

While I don’t expect a critical re-evaluation, it’s exciting to watch Polselli’s work because it allows us to crawl down another cobwebbed corner or two of Italian films that otherwise don’t have that many footprints in the dust.

Polselli began directing films in the early 1950s, starting with Delitto al luna park, a romantic movie with some murder in it. But for readers of this tome, where Polselli becomes important is in 1960 with his effort L’amante del vampiro (The Vampire and the Ballerina). That’s because this movie is one of the first times where horror and eroticism worked in concert within an Italian film. That potent blend would be a major part of so many films that would gain audiences worldwide.

Written by Giuseppe Pellegrini and Ernesto Gastaldi (who admitted that the original script was a bit of a dog), the inspiration for this movie was Hammer’s Dracula, which was a big success in Italian theaters. And again, if you know anything of the Italian film industry, they believe in imitation as the best form of flattery.

Shot in the castle of Artena, a place where Polselli claimed real skeletons were used. It’s ridiculous and I say that in the kindest of ways, as the ballerinas are practicing their new act in a drafty castle when two of them go into the woods with their dates and learn that an undead countess is the next door neighbor.

The suggested eroticism of this film was amped up in Polselli’s quasi-sequel, The Monster of the Opera. A troubled production started in 1961 and was not released until three years later, it was started as Il vampiro dell’opera (The Vampire of the Opera) and once fortunes changed against vampires, the name was slightly altered. Along with Piero Regnoli’s L’ultima preda del vampire (The Playgirls and the Vampire), even more eroticism was added to the bloodsucking. Of course, Gastaldi also wrote that movie and this one too, even if he demurred that they were movies similar to others he wrote, only with vampires.

Yet others ran while Polselli walked, giving Italy a tradition of sexed-up horror. And while the director followed the trends of the 60s – he wrote the giallo Psychout for Murder and the Western Django Kills Softly – his true excesses were to follow.

Delirio Caldo – released in America as Delrium and featuring a Vietnam vet plot that was pretty ahead of its time for 1972 – stars one-time Mr. Universe and the former husband of Jayne Mansfield Mickey Hargitay as Dr. Herbert Lyutak, a man who is a psychological consultant to the police and the serial killer they’ve been chasing. Of course, he is that killer, and he’s clued in his wife Marcia in on his secret, as she provides him with alibis and covers up for him. She kind of has to, as Herbert can only perform in the bedroom when he’s beating her senseless or murdering other women.

You know when an animal tastes blood and can never be domesticated again? That’s how Polselli feels from here on out, as his follow-ups are even more sexually explicit and filled with the supernatural and the occult. Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento… (‘Rites, black magic and secret orgies in the fourteenth century…) was released as Black Magic Rites, The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula and The Reincarnation of Isabel in other countries and I can’t even imagine what audiences felt when they saw it. 

It was banned by Italian censors – yes, there is such a thing – who said that it “consists of a rambling series of sadistic sequences, meant to urge, through extreme cruelty mixed with degenerate eroticism, the lowest sexual instincts.” 

Hundreds of years ago, Isabella (Rita Calderoni) was tortured and burned for being a witch as her lover swore revenge. Today, Jack Nelson (Hargitay) and his stepdaughter Laureen (also Calderoni) are celebrating her engagement in a castle without knowing that the cellar is host to the black magic rites of the title. And if they get seven sets of eyes and the blood of virgins, they can bring back Isabella.

This is the kind of movie that quickly moves to sex scenes or murder or Satanic rituals every time it gets the least bit dull. Polselli would follow it with outright adult fare such as Oscenità and Rivelazioni di uno psichiatra sul mondo perverso del sesso, often using the name Ralph Brown. 

However, it’s Mania that is the strangest of the strange films that this director made. Barely released in 1974, Mania was once a lost giallo until a 35mm print surfaced in 2007 at the Cineteca Nazionale film archive in Rome, which keeps every movie submitted to censors. Some kind soul uploaded it to YouTube and what emerged is pure strange magic.

Beyond playing twin brother mad scientists, Brad Euston paid for the movie to be made with the understanding that he be made the main character. It was also filmed with graphic sex scenes that somehow aren’t in the surviving print but were published when the fumetti – photo comic – of the movie was created in the 70s. 

It’s got snake attacks, wheelchair-bound lovemaking, burned-up twin brothers, a lead (Eva Spadaro) who is nearly the villain, multiple maids who yearn to make love to just about everyone and a BDSM machine in the lab. As if that doesn’t whet your Italian low-class appetite, the assistant director was Claudio Fragasso.

Renato Polselli may not be the kind of director who is going to get an extensive box set, but as time goes on, more and more people are finding and appreciating just how strange his films are. They’re also pretty high quality – the initial two vampire movies look great – and if anything, they have so many unexpected moments that you can’t help but be entertained.

When I was a kid, maybe around 1979, WPGH in Pittsburgh had an ad for a new show called SCTV. Now, the name means Second City Television from the Second City theater in Chicago, which always took pride as a second-rate city. Pittsburgh was way lower on the list of important cities, but the commercial pointed out that one of the cast members, Joe Flahery, was from here. And if anything, Yinzers are beyond proud of the people who come out of our city.

Starting at Second City in 1969. he eventually moved to Canada to start the second school. While there, he was part of the TV show SCTV and played numerous roles, such as TV newsman Floyd Robertson, who was also horror movie presenter Count Floyd. He based this role on “Chilly” Billy Cardille from his hometown, to the point that episodes where Count Floyd showed art movies and had to act like they were scary. This comes directly from Chiller Theater spending a few weeks under the title The Saturday Late Show, showing Italian films like Crazy Desire, No Love for Johnnie, The Reluctant Spy, The 10th Victim, Dingaka, Sins of Casanova, The Success, Casanova 70, Red Culottes, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, The Easy Life, Marriage, Italian-Style; Boccaccio ’70; The Naked Kiss and The Bigamist.So when Count Floyd showed Ingmar Burgman’s Whispers of the Wolf and asking when the werewolf would show up, it was based on movies he had seen growing up. Count Floyd was so complete with his Chiller Theater impression that he was often joined by a sidekick known as The Pittsburgh Midget, played by Flaherty’s brother Paul Flaherty. He’s a nod to Stefan, the Castle Prankster, who was played by Stephen Michael Luncinski on Chiller Theater.

If you read enough of my writing, you’ll notice I say “blow ’em up real good.” That comes directly from Big Jim McBob, another Flaherty character. I also love Guy Caballero, the owner of SCTV, who uses a wheelchair for respect.

For as much as everyone worships the early years of Saturday Night Live, SCTV was always better.

Flaherty played a lot of cameos in his career. He’s probably best known for playing the Western Union worker who gives Marty the note at the end of Back to the Future 2 as well as the stalker who keeps bothering Happy Gilmore. He was also on Maniac Mansion.

But these are just roles. His family has lost a father, one who his daughter said he loved old movies and they got to share that together.

For me, he proved that you could be creative and come from Pittsburgh without losing who you were. So many episodes of Count Floyd had references to West Mifflin and the Golden Triangle, things no one in the rest of the country would know about.

Imagine my joy in learning that other people loved Flaherty and his roles as much as I did and they weren’t just from here.

If you’ve never watched any of his work, please do. It felt like such a secret language when I was young to know SCTV. Now, I want to share it and spread it. So much of what this great man did that made me laugh made me who I am and what I write.

Oh Harry Novak just seeing your name makes me realize that I am about to see something incredibly scum-sodden. You have such a fancy signature and make movies filled with such pulchritude. Let’s all have a moment to think of all Mr. Novak has done for us.

Like this movie, which is exactly what I was looking for when I started this week of drug movies.

Lila (Susan Stewart, The First Nudie Musical and credits for additional voices on Scooby-Doo, which really could be the best IMDB credits listing ever) is a go-go dancer who gets turned into a literal mankiller thanks to C₂₀H₂₅N₃O. All she wants to do is make it with the men she picks up on the Sunset Strip, but once they get back to her pad, she hears her theme song and sees an old man with a huge stack of money and a handful of bananas. That’s when she must kill them with garden tools and then she imagines that she is chopping up fruit while she’s really dismembering their bodies to dump off into cardboard boxes. I kid you not!

Then, we get lots of drug use, topless dancing and strobing and zooming camerawork. I’m in. I’m all the way in. And hey look — it’s Pat Barrington from Orgy of the Dead! Yay!

Speaking of Pat, she dated Melvin Rees at the time that he was arrested for mass murder. She was working as Vivian Storm in mob-owned go go clubs and he was a jazz musician. Pat’s life really could have been made into a movie, as she kept on dancing until the mid 1990’s when she was in her fifties. Rees? Well, he was arrested for at least five murders and numerous other crimes.

As for Mantis In Lace, it’s a film awash in sin and debauchery. They don’t, can’t, won’t and maybe even shouldn’t make them like this anymore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. Currently, in addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His upcoming essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” will appear in Drive-In Asylum #26.

Valentine’s Day is here, and I’m going to enlighten—or annoy—you with 10 of my favorite romantic films. And because you know me, upbeat and happy-go-lucky, you know that the films are going to be dark and depressing. You won’t find When Harry Met Sally or Love Story on this list.

10. Unfaithful, starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane and directed by Adrian Lyne, who also did Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, Flashdance, Jacob’s Ladder, and Nine ½ Weeks. That’s quite an eclectic filmography from an unpredictable director. Unfaithful is a remake of La Femme Infidele directed by Claude Chabrol, often called the French Hitchcock. I usually hate American remakes of great foreign films, but this one’s an exception. Diane Lane, always charming and wonderful, is married to Richard Gere. Yet, one day, she has a meet cute with a handsome stranger and impulsively has an affair. This has disastrous consequences. My wife thought that Lane’s cheating on Gere, who she noted is the perfect husband as he does the dishes, was inconceivable. It’s a fascinating film with Lane’s best performance; she got an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. One more thing about Diane Lane: If you watch her rom-coms—and she’s done a bunch—there are always two Diane Lanes. At the beginning of the film, her hair is up in a frumpy bun, and she’s sad. Later, when she falls in love, her hair is down. The Lane Rule: hair up, sad, no boyfriend; hair down, happily and passionately in love, a rule first noted by, I believe, the late critic Roger Ebert.

9. Leaving Las Vegas is a seriously depressing love story directed by the woefully underrated Mike Figgis with Nic Cage’s Oscar-winning turn as a depressed man who has come to Las Vegas to literally drink himself to death. He meets up with sex worker Elisabeth Shue, and they have a relationship of sorts. Will it be enough to save him? Don’t count on it.

8. Michael Mann is a world-class director of such lauded fare as The Insider, Ali, and Heat. His first film, Thief, was one of the best debut films of any director ever. James Caan, never better, plays a master thief fresh out of prison, who decides to start a new life, which includes having a family with waitress Tuesday Weld, also never better. But before that happens, he must do one last job for Robert Prosky, playing one of the most realistic, scariest mobsters ever. This job is, of course, going to cause problems for Caan and Weld. If you haven’t seen Thief, be prepared for a beautiful looking and sounding (courtesy the score by German electronic group Tangerine Dream) masterpiece from one of my favorite directors. Added plus: It has some lessons on how to crack safes … if you’re so inclined.

7. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. This Billy Wilder film, a big, expensive flop back in 1970, is a dark, yet moving, dramedy about a lost Sherlock Holmes case involving a woman’s missing husband, Queen Victoria, and the Loch Ness Monster. But central to the plot is a melancholy relationship between the misogynistic detective and a beautiful client, all punctuated by maestro Miklos Rozsa’s haunting violin concerto. Christopher Lee even shows up as Holmes’s brother Mycroft. Sad note: The studio, which was not high on the film, cut over an hour before release. This footage was lost and remains a grail quest for film buffs to this day.

6. Breathless, another remake of a French film, starring Richard Gere and directed by still another underrated director, Jim McBride. Gere plays a charming drifter who likes the music of Jerry Lee Lewis and Silver Surfer comic books. One night, he steals a car, shoots a cop, and decides to hook up with an old girlfriend. As the cliché goes, nothing good can come of this.

5. Sunset Boulevard. I had to include another film by Bill Wilder, the master of dark comedies (I could’ve also gone with Double Indemnity), and this one is on the National Film Registry of great American films. It’s narrated by William Holden, whom we first see lying face down in faded actress Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool. He tells the story of how he died. (I love movies that open in the middle of something, or as pretentious film scholars say, “in media res,” and then flash back to how we got there.) Phenomenal film.

4. Badlands, Martin Sheen’s a killer, Sissy Spacek’s his teenage girlfriend, and they’re cutting a swath of violence across 1970s South Dakota. I was tempted to put Bonnie and Clyde, The Honeymoon Killers, or Natural Born Killers, also about criminals in love, in this spot, but I went with Terence Malick’s gorgeous, relatively unseen, downbeat masterpiece. A friend of mine watched it recently and thought it was too slow. I disagree. It’s a great film.

3. The Voices.  Ryan Reynolds plays a nice guy who works in a warehouse and is looking for love from the likes of Anna Kendrick and Gemma Arterton. Complicating his life is that he’s schizophrenic, and he hears voices—his dog and cat talk to him. The dog, of course, is the voice of reason, while the cat tries to get him to do bad things. (Both are voiced by Reynolds.) It’s an off-the-wall black comedy from Iranian director Marjane Satrapi, certainly not for all tastes, but Reynolds once again shows his range in a serio-comic role. And the film’s depiction of mental illness is unique: When Reynolds is on his meds, the world to him (and the movie) is a bright, candy-colored land; when he’s off his meds, everything looks like downtown Youngstown, Ohio. (Trust me. You don’t want to go there.) And stay tuned for one of the best end-credit sequences ever.

2. Blue Velvet. David Lynch is a polarizing filmmaker. You either love or despise his movies; there’s no in-between. In his masterpiece Blue Velvet, college kid Kyle MacLachlan returns to his North Carolina hometown, falls in love with lounge singer Isabella Rossellini (bad girl) and Laura Dern (good girl), and runs afoul of Dennis Hopper in one of the greatest screen-villain performances ever. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. And if you hate it, don’t complain to me.

And at #1, Body Heat, the first film written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Sleazy Florida lawyer William Hurt falls in with a classic femme fatale, Kathleen Turner in a stunning film debut, who eggs him on to kill her husband. It’s a film loaded with great performances (watch for Mickey Rourke as an arsonist), complicated plotting (there’s one point of estates law that just doesn’t make any sense), and some of the most quotable dialogue around. And I can’t forget to mention the perfect noirish score, all windchimes and saxophone, by the great John Barry. The film’s a modern classic.

I hope I’ve turned you on to some new movies. Or at least gotten you to think about revisiting old favorites. A friend of mine once told me he thought movies were “the most mysterious art form.” The films prove that statement: They’re dark and depressing, but you can’t look away. The power of cinema.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K Ultra HD is available at Best Buy.

The series has made more that $3.34 billion dollars worldwide on a $401 million dollar budget. When these movies came out, there was nothing bigger. I’m not certain we have anything like these any longer that draw a teen and female audience to theaters.  A reboot has been talked about but even with the 15th anniversary here, there’s no news.

There is this set which includes all five movies — Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn Part 1 and Part 2 — and wow, its packed with gorgeous SteelBook® packaging and so many extras, including a 6-part The Making of The Twilight Saga documentary.

Want some extras from our site?

Here’s the podcast we did years ago on the first movie:

Did you ever know I went to Forks?

“In the state of Washington, under a near constant cover of clouds and rain, there’s a small town named Forks. Population, 3,120 people. This is where I’m moving.” That’s what Bella Swan said when her mother hooked up with a minor league baseball pitcher and she ended up going across the country to live with her dad. As Bella prepared to move in, she felt only despair and a marked lack of joy. I completely understand how she felt and I was only traveling by car and ferry to see the town that the Twilight books and movies were based in.

Here’s something I learned as I was researching my trip — after I took it, mind you. While Twilight and its sequels are set in the town, not a single scene was filmed there. Nope, most of the movies were filmed in Oregon and some parts of Washington. Not in Forks. Zillow.com even called the Forks Chamber of Commerce to verify this and learned that yes, not one scene was shot in the town.

That’s probably because the location is very remote. And Washington state doesn’t make it easy for people to film there, with no tax breaks or incentives, which is why the filmmakers mostly shot in Oregon, Vancouver and Louisiana.

But Sam, tell us about Forks.

You got it.

Forks is located in Clallam County in the Olympic Peninsula and was incorporated on August 28, 1945. It’s a small town — around 3,500 people — and gets its name because it is quite literally near the forks in the Quillayute, Bogachiel, Calawah, and Sol Duc rivers.

Prior to what the internet told me was the town’s boom in tourism — more of that later — most people in the town are employed by the two jails and from sport fishing.

So you may wonder, how did I find myself on a ferry bound for the home of Edward, Bella and Jacob? Well, I love my wife. And I indulge her. And her aunt had suggested this. And soon, we’d be enjoying “27 minutes of our lives that we’d never get back,” to quote Becca.

First off, the Forks High School looks nothing like the place where Edward saved Bella from that car, nor where they were lab partners. No, instead it’s a small school filled with teens that scowl instead of glow. After all, Twilight’s author Stephenie Meyer never visited Forks when writing any of the books.

Across the street, we noticed Leppell’s Flowers & Gifts, which was run by a nice-seeming older couple. As they were working on the concrete in front, we had to head around the back and go through an alley and a hidden door to find the store that some call Twilight Central. That’s when we noticed this tour bus!

We didn’t look into the tour and after spending just a bit of time looking at the scrapbook supplies, we bid the store farewell. Perhaps it’s just as well, as this amazing Yelp review did the store no favors.

We drove through the town some more, saw Bella’s truck (which probably wasn’t the one used in the movie), went in two more Twilight themed gift shops and then headed out of town to Thriftway/Forks Outfitters. For being in the midst of some of the greatest coffee in the world, we had the best coffee drinks of our entire trip at their cafe! And get this — a Twilight menu! That’s how you do business!

They had used Twilight movies and an actual rental store within this general store that seems to answer every need of the folks in Forks. Even better, their deli offers some choices for the discriminating Twilight fan, made of course with high quality Kretschmar deli meats and cheeses:

Why doesn’t Jacob get a panini? Where is Bella’s BLT? I have so many questions and once you’re in Forks, you never get any answers.

At least Becca got this lighter, which will keep her smoking for years after she has planned to quit:

On the way out of town and back to the ferry, an overall three-hour-plus trip, we stopped to get gas and caffeine. That’s when I met Forks, WA local favorite Barry, who had on no shirt and a jacket as he careened around the store, screaming at people that he was about to go to the casino (One Eyed Jacks?) and do some drugs. After that, he followed an employee outside who was about to cry and told her he was sorry about her sister, but some people have it coming. Barry seemed like a real pip.

Goodbye, Forks! Thank you for showing us the place that inspired a movie that no one has really cared about since 2012. I kid — most of the people in town seemed genuinely nice and totally not about to kill us as we wandered their theme stores, ala Captain Spaulding from House of 1000 Corpses.

Want to learn more about Forks? Sure you do! Check out their official site!

Don’t forget to buy THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K Ultra HD at Best Buy.

Arrow Video continues its releases of Italian Westerns that started with Vengeance Trails and continued with Blood Money.

Arrow Video’s Savage Guns box set has high definition 2K restorations of all four films from the original 35mm camera negatives, with El Puro newly restored by Arrow Films. Plus, you get brand new introductions to each film by journalist and critic Fabio Melelli, an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the films by author and critic Howard Hughes, a fold-out double-sided poster featuring newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx and limited edition packaging with reversible sleeves featuring original artwork and a slipcover featuring newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx. Plus, each movie has its own set of extras, including behind the scenes features, interviews, commentaries and even alternate titles.

The movies include:

I Want Him Dead: Clayton has lost his sister Mercedes to criminals but can’t go to the sheriff as he’s already killed that man’s brother in self defense. Now, he has to go after a criminal who wants the Civil War to keep killing people.

Wrath of the Wind: Wealthy landowner Don Antonio hires Marcos and Jacobo to put a stop to the revolutionaries that threaten his profits. He didn’t think Marcos would end up joining them.

El Puro: El Puro was once a dangerous and much feared gunfighter. But today, well, he’s a drunk lying low in a nothing town, concerned that a killer trying to make his name by shooting him is behind every corner. Can he get his iron back?

The Four of the Apocalypse: In Lucio Fulci’s brutal Western, professional gambler Stubby Preston, pregnant sex worker Bunny, the alcoholic Clem and an older man named Bud run into a Mexican gunman named Chaco who sets death and redemption for each of them.

I’m so excited that Arrow has kept releasing these sets and am ready for whatever comes next. It’s so great to have high quality versions of these movies for my collection. I’ve always wanted a better version of Fulci’s movie, so this is essential.