Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone.  Settle down with your coffee and a danish and let's check out what weird stuff I found this week.

Troll 2: The 20th Anniversary Nilbog Edition.  Now, look, I have a weird love of absolute trash movies.  Sometimes, that leads me down the weird of watching something like Velocipastor (tagline: "He's A Man Of The Claw") and sometimes it leads me to weird semi-sequels like Troll 2, a movie that is barely a sequel and more of a weird continuation that involves creatures named Nilbogs (work on that anagram for a second) and a cast of really enthusiastic amateurs, including the local dentist.  So I was real happy to find this edition, in far more hi-def than this movie might deserve.

I'm a sucker for steelbooks.  If you're not familiar with them, they're (usually) limited editions metal cases that you can find at Best Buy or WalMart.  In this case, I went with an upgrade of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I because hey, it's a nice looking set.  (A few years back, Best Buy had a nice run of certain Bond films and the steelbooks all used the opening credits graphics for the films; I only grabbed the best Bond film, From Russia With Love, and should have gotten more.)

Another upgrade for this week; I adore the six novels in Melanie Rawn's Sunrunner series, set in a world where humans have a class of magicians who use sunlight for magic and can bond with dragons.  Not science fiction like the Pern novels, this is straight-up fantasy and enjoyable as hell.  My copy of this was really beat up so I found a nicer copy.  If you've never read this series, it starts with Dragon Prince and is damn good.

Ginger Snaps III: The Beginning.  Maybe my best find of the week; I'm a massive fan of Ginger Snaps, probably the best Canadian horror film and my intro to the great Katharine Isabelle (who you may have seen in American Mary or in the second season of Hannibal).  Two devoted sisters in the suburbs of Canada, one of whom gets infected by a werewolf and they have to deal with it and it's pretty great.  I've seen the second movie, which is fine, but I've never seen this 3rd movie, which apparently puts them...back in 19th Century frontier Canada?  I have zero idea if this is time travel, visions, sorcery, etc and I can't wait to see how this works out with, of course, more werewolves.

Do I think there needs to be an extended edition of Apocalypse Now, already a pretty long movie?  No, I do not.  Am I happy to find for $3 a Blu-ray edition that includes that, the theatrical version, a billion supplements with pretty much everyone who is still alive as well as including the excellent documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, directed by Eleanor Coppola and filmed why Francis Ford Coppola was making his movie?  HELL yes.  Gimme that crazy stuff like Larry Fishburne, lying about his age and pretending he was 18 when he was 14.  Martin Sheen having a heart attack.  Dennis Hopper being threatened by everyone to get his shit together.  I ordinarily really do not have much patience for "men being dicks while making art and excusing their terrible behavior because it's art, man" but everyone involved has been so upfront about this and apologizing to each other that I feel like I can deal with it.  And then I'll just watch the best jungle movie ever made: Predator.