The ability of laserdiscs to give unique dimensions to home video entertainment has reached a new plateau-you judge whether it’s high or low-with the release of director John Waters’ 1981 camp melodrama “Polyester” (Criterion Collection CC1362L, $54.95).
The movie-which featured Waters’ star, the huge drag queen Divine, as a beleaguered alcoholic housewife trying to cope with two obnoxious children and an abusive, two-timing husband who runs a pornography theater-is sharply reproduced in letterbox format and has several elaborate supplemental features, including interviews and memorabilia from the John Waters Collections of the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives and an alternate audio track with the director’s amused, amusing comments on the making of the movie.
The master stroke of this special edition, however, is the inclusion with the disc of a scratch-and-sniff card that duplicates all 10 smells of the movie’s original “Odorama” process.
As the movie unwinds and appropriate numbers flash on the screen, the viewer is supposed to scratch the corresponding numbers on the Odorama card. Aromas produced include roses and air freshener; but be warned that other smells-skunk, sweaty sneakers and flatulence-are not for the squeamish.
Lovers of the creepy and the campy also should turn their attention to the “Creature Double Feature” (MCA/Universal 41780, two discs, $59.98), which offers crisp black-and-white transfers of “Revenge of the Creature” and “The Creature Walks Among Us,” the two sequels to the original 1954 adventure of the monstrous Gill-Man, “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
Both features come with their original theatrical trailers and photo scrapbooks of production and publicity shots. “Revenge,” filmed in 1955 and originally in screaming 3-D, has the added thrill of seeing a callow Clint Eastwood appear very briefly in his first movie role, as an inept laboratory assistant.
“Ugetsu” (Criterion Collection CC1317L, $49.95), is a very different kind of tale of the supernatural, set in war-torn 16th-Century Japan.
A haunting and exquisitely photographed (in black and white) folk tale, director Kenjo Mizoguchi’s film was singled out as a prime example of post-World War II Japanese cinema when it was first released in 1953.
In its transfer to laserdisc, despite a few scratches and signs of age, the movie is still lovely to look at, and it has been given new, clear English subtitles.
Critical and historical notes by three authorities on Japanese moviemaking are provided on an alternate soundtrack, and there is a valuable filmed interview with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who explains how he used his camera to simulate the unfurling of an ancient Japanese picture scroll.
“The Films of Meredith Monk” (Lumivision LVD9244, $39.95) contains two works by the contemporary American composer-choreographer-singer-director that, though far from the commercial mainstream in their slow pace and nonlinear structure, were made with high technical skill and sophistication.
“The Book of Days,” a feature-length film shot in 1988 in Cordes, France, moves backward from our modern period to dreamily evoke, through time-lapse photography and overlapping dissolves, the people of the Christian and Jewish communities in a medieval village.
“Ellis Island,” a shorter work from 1981, creates a memory picture of late 19th-Century immigrant life within the abandoned structures of Ellis Island.
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, “The Secret Garden,” in addition to providing the inspiration for the stage musical running through Feb. 13 in the Shubert Theatre, has also been the basis for several screen versions.
One of them, made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1949 with Margaret O’Brien and Dean Stockwell as child stars, is now on laserdisc (MGM/UA ML102377, $34.98). It’s a black-and-white movie, but, in a nice touch, the segments taking place in the garden are filmed in Technicolor.
