DVD Corner

“Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season”: Who shot J.R.? This is the season that answers, though only the initial episodes maintain the energy of the third season. As Miss Ellie, Barbara Bel Geddes, who lived for years in Northeast Harbor before she died there last August, is the glue that keeps the series together; amid all the fireworks, the alcoholic benders, the backstabbings and the adulteries, she’s the backbone. Once, while we were having dinner, she told me she didn’t remember appearing in “Dallas.” She was joking – I think – but given her career in Hollywood before this bread-and-butter series came along, her point was well-taken, particularly when you look at the increasingly ridiculous plots and subplots that backbone of hers had to hold up. Grade: B-

“Doom”: Trash sci-fi that achieves a lean, focused center and final act that’s admirable in the tension it creates. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is Sarge, a tattooed beast leading an elite core of Marines on a rescue mission to Mars, where a mysterious 24th human chromosome is wreaking havoc on what’s left of the planet’s residents. Should one come in contact with it, the results are monstrous. With the film’s genesis steeped in computer code – the movie is based on the popular video game, which started a revolution – “Doom” predictably lacks soul, but it does generate the raw, sketchy rhythm of a B- movie, which gives it its gross-out jolts. Rated R. Grade: C+

“The Flash: The Complete Series”: If it weren’t for lab experiments gone awry, where would we get so many of our superheroes and villains? In “The Flash,” it’s just this sort of lab event gone wrong that gives John Wesley Shipp’s crime technologist, Barry Allen, his special powers as The Flash, a man who can move at superhuman speeds thanks to a lightning strike and a chemical spill. His foes sound like a certain administration – The Trickster, The Ghost, Mirror Master and Captain Cold. All prove formidable in a well-done series that was so expensive to produce, it lasted only one year. Grade: B

“Hill Street Blues: Season One”: From Steven Bochco, a groundbreaking series whose 1981 appearance on the scene marked a shift in the police procedural, which would turn more realistic, sexier and violent in its wake. The series didn’t deify cops, but instead revealed them to be human, capable of mistakes and addictions, which set it apart from all that came before it. Performances by Daniel J. Travanti and Veronica Hammel remain memorable. Still, 25 years after its release, the series now seems almost staid, particularly in the wake of all of the shows it helped to spawn along the way – from “Law and Order” and “NYPD Blue” to the “C.S.I.” shows and any number of others. It’s ironic, but not unusual. This most influential of television shows has been weakened by its own influence. Grade: B-

“The Legend of Zorro”: Legend? An overstatement, at least where this movie is concerned,. This self-aware, overblown follow-up to 1998’s entertaining “The Mask of Zorro” is a misstep, with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones reprising their roles, albeit without the sexual snap that drove the first film. Set in 1850, the film finds Don Alejandro de la Vega (Banderas) and Elena (Jones), parents of 10-year-old Joaquin (Adrian Alonso), splitting when Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, decides he must help the people of California, who are about to be duped as they prepare for statehood. The actors look fetching, but there’s the sense that they knows this, which turns the production inward. The film can be stultifying in its excess. Rated PG. Grade: C+

“Mr. Show: The Complete Collection”: The gloves are off and the good taste is in the can in “Mr. Show: The Complete Collection,” the outrageous sketch-comedy from HBO that essentially sets fire to political correctness and stands back to watch it burn. From creators David Cross and Bob Odenkirk – and co-starring the likes of Jack Black, Jon Stewart, Tom Kenny and Mary Lynn Rajskub – this brazenly funny show takes one theme at the start of each episode and runs with it throughout the sketches that follow. The series is fresh, innovative and appalling. Not unlike this summer’s smash hit, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” it’s raunchy as hell, but with writing this clever, it can’t be dismissed. Grade: A-

“Saw II”: Buzz kill. An ugly, joyless horror movie that belongs in the business end of 1988’s “Woodchipper Massacre.” Eight quarreling, previously imprisoned folks are locked within an abandoned house. There, madman Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is leaking poisonous sarin gas that will rot the lot from within. To stop this, they must either break free from the house, which proves impossible, or piece together a puzzle that will allow them access to an antidote, the likes of which is hidden within a series of death-inducing traps. Is the film’s unrelenting scenes of torture enough to keep the franchise going? The box office says yes, so brace yourself for a third film. Rated R. Grade: D-

“Time Tunnel: Vol. 1”: From Irwin Allen, king of screen disasters, comes a show that’s no disaster. From the 1966-67 television season, “Time Tunnel” takes the time traveling myth and mines from it a fun, sometimes exciting show that courts kitsch but which doesn’t feel as dated as you might expect. The series finds James Darrin and Robert Colbert literally stepping into harm’s way at the start of every show. Whether they were flashing aboard the “Titanic” just before it sank, or shooting through a window that positioned them in the middle of any number of war zones – Pearl Harbor, the D-Day Invasion, Little Big Horn – “Time Tunnel” had its head in the future, but its heart in the past. Grade: B