There’s some good stuff out this week, but shockingly little of it belongs to new titles. The only one that’s particularly worth your time is Danny Boyle’s surprisingly fruitful return to the well, T2: Trainspotting, and the rest is either okay (The Belko Experiment, Power Rangers) or garbage on every conceivable level (CHiPS). Catalog titles, though, bring riches. If nothing else, this week sees the release of every Blake Edwards Pink Panther movie (plus Inspector Clouseau) on Blu-Ray, even if no one is excited about the Roberto Benigni one finally being available in HD. Elsewhere, Criterion brings Sam Peckinpah’s uber-controversial Straw Dogs back to the Collection and adds Alfred Hitchcock’s silent masterpiece The Lodger (along with another early Hitchcock work, Downhill), the Warner Archive Collection rescues Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty from open-matte DVD hell, Olive releases Nicholas Ray’s maddeningly hard-to-find The Savage Innocents, Kino makes up for its releases of the bad Pink Panther movies by giving Hell in the Pacific the Blu-Ray release it deserves, and Shout Factory gives us Walter Hill’s underrated thriller (and showcase for the late Bill Paxton) Trespass. But very best of all is Scorpion Releasing, uh, releasing the absolutely nutso musical extravaganza, and magnum opus of schlockmeister Menahem Golan, The Apple, complete with a commentary and interview with its star, Catherine Mary Stewart. If you haven’t experienced it yet, it’s never too late to discover that it’s a natural, natural, natural desire to meet an actual, actual, actual vampire.
The Apple (Scorpion)
The Belko Experiment (Fox)
CHiPS (Warner)
Curse of the Pink Panther (Kino)
Doberman Cop (Arrow)
Heli (Strand)
Hell in the Pacific (Kino)
Inspector Clouseau (Kino)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Criterion)
The Pink Panther Film Collection (Shout Factory)
Power Rangers (Lionsgate)
Running on Empty (Warner Archive Collection)
The Savage Innocents (Olive)
Son of the Pink Panther (Kino)
Straw Dogs (Criterion)
T2 Trainspotting (Sony)
Trespass (Shout Factory)