Based on French science fiction novelist Stefan Wul's Oms en Serie ("Oms by the Dozen"), René Laloux's La Planète Sauvage (its title changed to Fantastic Planet for the U.S. release) paints an animated tale of humans kept as domesticated pets by an alien race of blue humanoid giants called Traags. The story takes place on the Traags' planet Ygam, where we follow our narrator, an Om called Terr, from infancy to adulthood, when he escapes his subjugation with a Traag learning device with which to educate the savage Oms and incite them to revolt. As a French-Czech coproduction, this story had much resonance for its makers as an allegory of Czechoslovakia's invasion by Soviet troops in the late '60s, and had to be completed in Paris due to political pressure. While the story does not distinguish itself in the annals of science fiction, the imagination invested in the surreal backdrops, with its eerie creatures and landscapes, does. The animation technique--moving paper cutouts across backgrounds--contributes to the overall feeling of other-worldliness. Fantastic Planet won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973. Included on the DVD are three early short subjects by Laloux showing his evolution toward Fantastic Planet. You have your choice of audio: French with English subtitles, or English with English subtitles. But choose the latter so you can see how much the subtitles are cheating you. --Jim Gay

"A comedy Full of Cheeky fun with buckets of raspberry hued gore" —Eddie Cockrell, Variety A zombie horror-comedy about finding the meaning of life! A blind philosopher, a shotgun wielding children’s TV show star, a nihilistic hero, and a brain in a plastic bucket have signed up for Professor Reinis’s weekend course about discovering the meaning of life. In a forest crawling with undead woodsmen, the trainees learn something about living... and a lot about surviving. Smelling of pine needles, decay and blood, a clan of zombie woodsmen emerge, with their bleeding eyes they hunt the flesh of the living. A favorite in the MIDNIGHT SLOT at the Tribecca Film Fest NYC 2004.

Awards winning DVD directed by Petr Vaclav (Parallel Worlds) in 1996. A humanistic attempt to show how an abandoned gypsy boy, incarcerated since age 3, grows up to be a criminal because the institutionalized violence and abuse to which he's subjected corrupts his wild spirit and destroys his gypsy heritage. All Code/NTSC. Original Czech dialogue/ optional English & Chinese subtitles. 2002.