John Holmes Exposed (Umbrella Entertainment PAL DVD/Region 0/Zero)
PLEASE NOTE: These John Holmes DVDs can only be operated on machines capable of
playing back DVDs that can handle Region Zero/0, PAL format software, and can
be ordered from our friends at Umbrella Entertainment at the website address
provided at the end of the review.
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C Documentary: B-
No matter
how mainstream or legitimate any film media is, sooner or later, they have to
deal with the phenomenon that was John Holmes.
Such a product of the 1970s, though also timeless as far as explicit XXX
cinema is concerned, several films have recently been made about him directly
and indirectly. People always have
something to laugh about since, despite supposedly sexually more open
societies, it is not real sex and becomes a subject people have issues
with. John Holmes Exposed is a new DVD set that tries to
set the record straight.
The main attraction here is a documentary that this set
would commit commercial suicide by being named after: Wadd – The Life & Times Of John
Holmes that does an exceptional job documenting his discovery, success,
exploitation, crazy times and shocking death of a star the industry built
itself on before VHS & Beta brought it down a few notches and how it could
not protect (or cared to protect) one of the biggest stars it will ever have in
(of course sexual organ size) and name.
The big surprise is how when Holmes starts to try doing crime dramas,
many will recognize it as the same story as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights.
Though
Holmes only appears in one scene in the first film for a few minutes, one of
the few that has any ambition, Fantasm
and Fantasm Comes Again are here as
a double feature on one DVD by virtue of being two of the few films at the time
co-produced by the Australians. They are
not that good, have just enough explicit action to be NC-17 and are more a
novelty than anything else. Oddly, few
of Holmes films are in print on DVD as of this posting despite reportedly
having sex with something like 3,500 persons in his short career. They seem incidental to the documentary in
any case.
The 1.78
X 1 letterboxed image on Times should
have been anamorphically enhanced, but still plays back as well as the 1.33 X 1
films included. The various clips of
past film releases and other vault footage is in better shape than
expected. That leaves the Fantasm films passable, but nothing
particularly impressive except that they look better than the majority of XXX
material shot on analog NTSC tape from that same industry in the last 25+
years. All are Dolby Digital 2.0 sound,
with all mono, though parts of Times are in simple stereo at best. The only extra is deleted scenes from the
documentary.
As noted
above, you can order this import John
Holmes set exclusively from Umbrella at:
http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/
- Nicholas Sheffo
