New DVD's

Panic in Year Zero! Last Man on Earth

It's good to see that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, the new owners of the MGM library, has decided to continue the valuable Midnite Movies series that MGM's video division initiated a few years back. Many titles in the series are not MGM films at all (the bulk of MGM's library was sold to Ted Turner years ago, and now resides at Warner Brothers) but American International Pictures titles that went to Orion Pictures back in 1982, when Orion acquired Filmways Inc., which had merged with the economically strapped American International Pictures in 1979. MGM then acquired the Orion library when that company tanked in 1997.

Got that? In any case, there are four new double-sided discs in the Midnite Movies series, including a pair of doubled-up titles previously available singly: Roger Corman's "Tales of Terror" (1962), now backed by Sidney Salkow's "Twice-Told Tales" (1963), and Jacques Tourneur's "War Gods of the Deep" (1965), now available with Kevin Connor's "At the Earth's Core" (1976). New to DVD are Reginald Le Borg's Boris Karloff thriller "Voodoo Island" (1957) backed with Edward L. Cahn's "Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake" (1959) and, last but far from least, Ray Milland's profoundly antisocial "Panic in Year Zero!" (1962) doubled with what is perhaps the most important progenitor of the "living dead" genre, the striking "Last Man on Earth" (1964).

Milland, who died in 1986, remains one of the more intriguing and difficult to pin down figures in the film industry. Born in Wales, he spent much of the 1930's playing upper-class smoothies in pictures like "Three Smart Girls" and "Beau Geste," and then won an Oscar for shattering his image by playing a desperate alcoholic in Billy Wilder's "Lost Weekend" (1945). He used his new-found status to appear in, and occasionally to direct, a series of stunningly bitter, misanthropic films, including the dialogue-free thriller "The Thief" (1952), the western "A Man Alone" (1955) and Allan Dwan's strange, abstract chase film "The River's Edge" (1957).

Most of these movies feature Milland as an angry, estranged loner set down in an eerily depopulated landscape -- a tendency that came to a head with "Panic in Year Zero!," a microscopically budgeted drive-in picture that Milland directed for American International Pictures. Shot in that most forlorn of formats, widescreen black-and-white, the film stars Milland as a head of household who leaves on a camping vacation with his family -- his wife (Jean Hagen), son (Frankie Avalon) and daughter (Mary Mitchel) -- just in time to escape the nuclear devastation of Los Angeles.

Milland heads for the northern California hills, where he moves his family into a blatantly symbolic cave and arms himself against the handful of other survivors in the area -- a revolting collection of profiteers, looters and rapists. Naturally, the character has never been happier, and the director suggests he strongly identifies with him by shooting the requisite happy ending with a devastating, dismissive offhandedness. Milland's next picture for American International Pictures was the even more acrid "X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes" (also available from MGM Sony), directed (with a panache that Milland did not possess) by Roger Corman.

"The Last Man on Earth" has long been available in substandard public-domain copies but appears here in a sharp new print that preserves the widescreen black-and-white glories of Franco Delli Colli's cinematography. Based on the novel "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson, the film stars Vincent Price as the title character, a scientist who has mysteriously survived a global plague that turns humans into stupid, lumbering vampires -- imagery that George A. Romero brilliantly developed in "Night of the Living Dead" (1968).

Credited to the Hollywood veteran Sidney Salkow in the American prints, but to the Italian director Ubaldo B. Ragona in the Italian version, "The Last Man on Earth" was shot in Rome by an Italian crew, and includes, by chance or by design, a number of resonantly desolate locations familiar from contemporaneous Fellini and Antonioni films. The erratic English dubbing of the Italian supporting cast only adds to the sense of estrangement in this dark, claustrophobic film, which builds to a violent, thematically resonant climax in an abandoned church.

The Midnite Movies double features are priced at $14.95; none have been rated.

The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-Ton Megaset

And now, for something pretty much the same, but much better packaged. A&E Home Video has reconfigured its 14-disc collection of all 45 episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," tossed in two discs of live Python performances, and put the whole affair into Thinpak packaging that reduces the shelf-space required to own the entire Python oeuvre from approximately 300 feet to a much more manageable four and a half inches.

The familiarity of this classic material now makes the viewing experience seem closer to karaoke than comedy, given that most Python fans will be able to recite the lines right along with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and (here and there) Terry Gilliam, Carol Cleveland and other bit players. Maybe A&E should have included a bouncing ball along with the optional English subtitles.

Thirty-five years down the line, the nonsense humor seems as contemporary as ever, though the source material, runny 70's video, has begun to look awfully dated. There's not much that can be done about that soft video look, short of reshooting the whole series on 35-millimeter film, but for the whopping $199.95 list price, perhaps A&E could have run the material through a digital restoration process that might have removed some of the more egregious flaws (which include a lot of spotting and scratches on the intermittent filmed sequences). The extras are skimpy (and A&E has had the nerve to number a link to their online Pythonshop among them), but the set is no less essential for collectors of comedy.

Not rated.