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Nico Mastorakis has an uncanny ability of pulling ideas from various sources and running them through the Cuisinart of his peculiar sensibility, producing something altogether idiosyncratic. The six films assembled in Arrow Video’s new box set—one evocative religious allegory and five bawdy action comedies—testify to Mastorakis’s skills as a pop-cultural bricoleur. As a result, they serve as a series of variably amusing time capsules, deploying plenty of medium-specific references that might just delight viewers who came of age in the 1980s and early ’90s. Others will have to spend some time doing due diligence on Wikipedia.

The Time Traveler, from 1984, stars Keir Dullea as a man who fell to Earth, found naked along the Mykonos shore by expat American widow Andrea (Adrienne Barbeau). The new arrival soon names himself Glenn (as in astronaut John Glenn) and proceeds to learn the ways of the world. Unsurprisingly, a...

John Schlesinger decided not to attend the Academy Awards in 1970, even though his film “Midnight Cowboy” had been nominated for Best Picture and he was up for Best Director. On the evening of April 7, 1970, otherwise known as Oscar night, the British director remained in London with his American boyfriend, the photographer Michael Childers. Schlesinger didn’t want to make the brutal 24-hour roundtrip flight to Hollywood and back, and besides, he was well into production on his follow-up film, “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” For him, it was a very personal project, and, in some ways, an even more controversial film than “Midnight Cowboy.”

As Schlesinger explained it, the genesis of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” went back to the early 1960s when he was directing his first play for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “At the time, I had a very intense affair with one of the actors, a man who was bisexual,” Schlesinger recalled.

Stars: Daniel Hirsch, Kelli Maroney, Nicole Rio, Tom Shell, Jared Moses, Crystal Carson, Joe Estevez, John Michaels | Written by Robert Gilliam, Nico Mastorakis, Fred Perry | Directed by Nico Mastorakis

You could say that the 80s are the decade that just keeps on giving, especially when it comes to cult movies. There are some that may pass by your radar though, and you miss out on their glory. This is the case of The Zero Boys for me, and lucky Arrow Video’s new Blu-ray has allowed me to fix this.

A group of survival game players, The Zero Boys decide to take a trip to the woods to let off some steam. With new friend Jamie (Kelli Maroney) tagging along everything seems to be going okay. When they discover a cabin in the woods though and decide to shack up there it doesn’t take long before they realise they...

Now that the 2010 line-up for the Criterion Collection has finally been announced with last week’s December titles, we can begin speculating on what we’ll get in 2011. With over 50 spine numbers in 2010, will we see # 600 in 2011? At the rate that Criterion is churning out these discs, we have to assume so. Where will they get all of these upcoming titles from?

Well, over the past few months we’ve seen several titles from MGM’s catalog announced, and hinted at in their monthly newsletter. Most likely due to MGM’s current financial problems, it’s nice to see Criterion stepping up to rescue these films from the abyss of “out of print”. If you head over to the various forums (CriterionForum.org, Mubi, etc.) you’ll find many people speculating on the MGM titles that Criterion has acquired the rights to. While some are mostly speculation, I have had...