This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury”

Is it a satire on uber-action movies such as “Rambo,” or is just a self-consciously clunky piece of moviemaking hoisted on its own satiric barbs? That’s a puzzle that’s posed but never really answered by the super-bad “Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury,” due out on DVD Tuesday.

The cheeky promo material for the film claims that it was originally made in 1990 but was so terrible that the studio refused to release it. The supposedly “unearthed lost movie” – a hodgepodge of mockumentary devises, thudding parody, purposefully clumsy special effects, tasteless comedy and wink-wink, ham-handed acting – has all the markings of a straight-to-video cult wannabe.

Directed by TV actor-cum-auteur Garrett Brawth (best known for a Bud Light Super Bowl commercial) with frat-boy zeal, “Poolboy” seems designed to offend on all levels.

Marshaling the talents of name stars Kevin “Hercules” Sorbo, craggy-faced villain Danny Trejo and perennial “Clerks” slacker Jason Mewes, plus a cast of justifiably unknowns, the film plays out “Scary Movie”-style like a jigsaw collection of scenes and conventions from several different genres.

Taking its initial cue from “Rambo,” the story follows brooding Vietnam vet Sal Bando (Sorbo), a former Southern California poolboy, who returns to Van Nuys and a country much changed for the worse. While he was away at war, it seems, his wife cheated on him and “the Mexicans” have moved in to take over the pool cleaning business.

So the butched-up Bando sets off on a violent spree to reclaim his rightful poolboy business and to take bloody revenge on the brutal Caesar (Trejo), the evil crime lord that killed his family. The result is a carnival of bad taste, racist “satire” and just painfully bad judgment.

“Poolboy” aims for that “so bad it’s good” sweet spot. But it only hits the “so bad it’s bad” jackpot.

“Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury” is rated R (for crude and sexual conduct throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language, violence and drug use) and runs 90 minutes. It’s being released by Screen Media.

- Dennis King

BY GENE TRIPLETT

“Wild Bill” Wellman’s first major movie mission was in danger of crashing numerous times before it finally landed at the first Academy Awards ceremony.

But “Wings” did make it to the 1929 Oscars, swooping up the very first best picture trophy and best engineering (special effects) honors to boot.

Now, with the 84th Academy shindig just weeks away, Paramount Pictures is celebrating its centennial year with the release of a newly restored version of the silent World War I epic on DVD and Blu-ray.

“It totally knocks me out,” said William Wellman Jr., son of the Oscar-winning “Wings” director who also helmed such classics as the 1937 version of “A Star is Born,” “The Public Enemy,” “The Ox-Bow Incident,” “Battleground” and “The High and the Mighty.”

“I mean, I have hosted the picture in five countries since 1993, and I’ve seen the picture many times,” Wellman Jr. said in a recent phone interview. “And when Paramount did this restoration and they showed me the final version I was speechless, how beautiful it is. It’s just incredible. … I couldn’t be happier.”

Andrea Kalas, vice president of archives at Paramount, said the restoration of “Wings” was accomplished in a meticulous frame-by-frame process, with state-of-the-art digital tools normally used to create special effects.

Before restoration

“It’s really just been in the last few years that digital restoration technology has evolved to a point where we could actually do what we did with this film,” Kalas said. “The element we restored from was compromised with things like printed-in nitrate deterioration, which literally softened the sides of the frame. And there were extreme vertical hairline scratches. To just bring the picture back to a basic viewable form involved major technology.”

On DVD and Blu-ray, the film now appears as sharp and clean as the freshly-struck prints shown in the first road show engagements of “Wings” in 1927, Kalas said.

The film stars Clara Bow — who was a superstar at the time — Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen in a story of two men and the woman they both leave behind as theygo off to become fighter pilots in the “Great War.” Gary Cooper also appears briefly — but memorably — in what was only his second screen role.

William Wellman — a former World War I flying ace himself — was a relative newcomer in the film business, having directed only a handful of B-movies when he received the “Wings” assignment.

After restoration

“Paramount was the number one ranked studio in Hollywood because they had the best directors under contract,” Wellman Jr. said. “Cecil B DeMille, Victor Fleming, Allan Dwan …”

Studio cofounder Jesse Lasky was trying to decide on a director for “Wings,” which would be most ambitious project ever undertaken by the studio, when production head B.P. Schulberg recommended his protégé, William Wellman. But Lasky didn’t relish the idea of putting his epic in the hands of a 29-year-old second-stringer.

“But my father had a couple of things going for him,” Wellman said. “First of all he was a decorated fighter pilot in the first world war, so he was the only director under contract at Paramount that had frontline battle experience. And they felt that that’s what the picture needed.”

Lasky reluctantly agreed to meet with Wellman.

“Lasky said, ‘Well, what makes you think you can direct my big road show picture better than my veteran staff of directors?’ And my father said, ‘My war record does. And I’ll make it the best goddamn picture this studio’s ever had.’”

The senior Wellman had earned the nickname “Wild Bill” for his willingness to volunteer for the most dangerous dawn patrols during the war. He would continue to live up to it on the set of “Wings.”

For example, to achieve ultimate realism in the film’s aerial battle sequences, Wellman required that his two leading men, Rogers and Arlen,  take flying lessons so they could go up in real planes and activate cameras mounted in front of them.

Arlen had had some flying experience but Rogers had none at all.

“Never before had actors been photographed in the air,” Wellman Jr. said. “They usually simulated it on the ground. My father did that too but he didn’t like the way it looked.

“Well, the studio figured that he was gonna kill their stars by making them take flying lessons. I mean it went on and on and on. And you can understand the studio’s position. But my father was not going to do anything that wasn’t in the best interest of ‘Wings.’

“Of course, they way they did it, there was a safety pilot. They went up in two-seaters and there was a safety pilot who would duck down. … Buddy Rogers said that he was the director, the cameraman, the actor and the pilot for 400 feet (of film) … the film rolls were 400-foot rolls.”

Wellman said Rogers would immediately “lose his lunch” each time he landed after an aerial sequence.

The filming was also running over schedule, because Wellman would only shoot the air battles when the sky was blue, with white, fluffy clouds.

“My father thought that the planes would all look like they were flies up in the sky if you didn’t have the clouds and the blue sky,” Wellman said. “So there was a lot of down time and this caused the studio to be, you know, let’s say anxious about where their money was going.”

But “Wings” eventually did get off the ground and into theaters, and now present-day audiences can thrill to the still-incredible flight scenes Wellman managed to engineer.

“It’s just incredible to watch,” Kalas said. “I think (film director) Kevin Brownlow said something like, ‘“Wings’ captures the romanticism that veterans remember about war.’ Which is a great way of summing up some of the real emotion that stays with you when you watch this film. I mean, when you get to the end of this film there’s very few dry eyes in the house.”

If you didn’t catch up with “Drive” on the theater circuit, don’t miss this exhilarating ride on its home video run.

Nicolas Winding Refn (“Bronson”) directs sure-handedly from a brilliantly stripped-down script by Hossein Amini (“The Four Feathers”) based on the novel by James Sallis about a Los Angeles loner (Ryan Gosling) who works as a garage mechanic and part-time Hollywood stunt driver by day and moonlights as a wheel man for small-time heisters.

This may sound like potentially mindless action movie fare, this all-too-familiar plot, with an overabundance of car chases, explosions and brutal violence, and it does contain all of the above. And Gosling’s character at first seems typical of the genre, like Eastwood’s Man-With-No-Name (we know him only as “The Driver”), a man of few words or outward emotions, who remains cool and ultra-capable when the going gets rough.

But sweet, sad, vulnerable neighbor Iris (an irresistible Carrie Mulligan) and her little boy (Kaden Leos) jump-start deep feelings within The Driver and the film begins to reveal itself as a high-octane, 21st-century “Shane” in a souped-up Chevy, with not only action and suspense but all the heart, soul and heroism of that classic Western.

When Iris’ ex-convict husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), comes under threat for a debt he owes to mobsters — which in turn puts the mother and boy in jeopardy — The Driver offers his services in a pawnshop robbery Standard is forced to commit. When the job goes disastrously wrong, The Driver goes on the offensive to protect Iris from the retaliation of some very ruthless criminals, including ex-B-movie producer Bernie Rose, played with startlingly convincing bad-guy gusto by Albert Brooks in one of the most Oscar-worthy supporting turns of 2011.

Unfortunately, “Drive” itself is a robbery victim, garnering only a sound-editing nomination when it should have been a top contender for best picture. There’s a surprisingly tender love story in the midst of the bloody battle between good and evil, and drama as powerful as the supercharged engines beneath the gleaming hoods of all those muscle cars.

Bonus features include the featurettes “I Drive: The Driver,” “Driver and Irene: The Relationship,” “Under the Hood: Story” and “Cut to the Chase: Stunts.”

— Gene Triplett

Paul McCartney was in New York the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, sitting on a plane that was taxiing out for takeoff on a flight to Britain, where the singer planned to celebrate two of his kids’ birthdays. Then the captain announced that there’d been a “terrible accident,” and McCartney looked out the window to see one of the World Trade Center towers on fire.

At first everyone thought it was a tragic aircraft mishap until they heard the second tower had just been hit by another plane.

“Like everybody else, it was, ‘Oh no, wow. This is some act of sabotage.’ And then we heard about the Pentagon,” McCartney recalls in the opening interview of the documentary “The Love We Make.”

“I just started thinking, you know, what can I do? Because there’s going to be a spirit shift in New York, in America,” he says. “This is suddenly a place where people are gonna feel vulnerable for the first time in a long time.”

Born the son of a volunteer Liverpool firefighter during the World War II Blitz, McCartney decided to organize a small concert for the firefighters of New York, but he was persuaded instead to headline a much larger event, the “Concert for New York City,” which VH1 was planning at Madison Square Garden.

This fascinating and sometimes moving film documents the rehearsals, promotional interviews and McCartney’s solo wanderings through the streets of post-9/11 New York in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 20, 2001, all-star concert. This not a concert film, although there are brief clips of musical performances by McCartney and others throughout. This is more of an intimate portrait of a famous man, three years a widower at the time, moving through a wounded city, determined not to allow his fame to cut him off from real life. He politely accepts greetings and engages in conversations with all kinds of fans — from housewives and street musicians to more than a couple of crazies, friendly and willing to sign his name for the genuine autograph seeker but not the eBay hustlers, whom he instinctively recognizes. He’s also alert for cars following his limo a little too closely. “Let’s get some distance, George,” he tells his driver at one point.

Then there are his amusing and sometimes revealing backstage conversations with visitors and fellow performers including Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, Harrison Ford, Steve Buscemi, Leonardo DiCaprio and President Bill Clinton.

McCartney commissioned the film himself from filmmaker Albert Maysles, who was in the car with the Beatles the first time they drove into New York City in 1964. Co-directed by Bradley Kaplan, the film reveals a well-meaning human side of McCartney seldom seen in the past, emerging to help in one of the nation’s darkest hours.

— Gene Triplett

Praise be to Vera Farmiga for proving to be as miraculous behind the camera as she is in front of it with “Higher Ground,” one of 2011′s bravest dramatic creations, now available in a Blu-ray and DVD combo pack.

Many a filmmaker would be daunted by this bold screenplay based on a memoir by Carolyn S. Briggs about her life in an evangelical Christian community, but Farmiga steps up with a sure yet sensitive hand, drawing uniformly strong performances from an excellent ensemble cast.

And Farmiga shines brightest of all in the central role of Corrine, a woman who shakes up the devout members of the radical New Testament church when she dares to question the religious dogma she has embraced all of her adult life. Corrine and her husband, Ethan, had turned to dedicated Christianity as young newlyweds after their baby daughter narrowly escaped death in the crash of Ethan’s rock band’s van.

Now, after years of daily Bible study, strict family practices and bracing for the Rapture, a growing feeling of spiritual emptiness and disillusionment — plus a tragedy that befalls one of her best female friends — causes Corrine’s faith to falter, which in turn triggers the growing resentment of the rest of the flock and the unraveling of her marriage.

Farmiga’s sister Taissa makes an impressive acting debut as Corrine at 18, and Dagmara Dominczyk is priceless as best friend Annaka, a true believer with a bawdy sense of humor and an openness about sexuality that rekindles Corrine’s own carnal curiosity.

But what’s most remarkable about Vera Farmiga’s first time in the director’s chair is the skill with which she handles the touchy subject of blind faith and religious fervor without condescension, while presenting a truthful portrait of the self-described “Jesus freak” culture and one woman’s troubled spirituality. At the same time, she manages to tell a story that is emotionally rich and at turns funny, poignant and powerful.

Bonus features: Deleted scenes, commentary with Vera Farmiga, Joshua Leonard (Ethan) and producer Renn Hawkey.

— Gene Triplett

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Spork”

“Spork” only metaphorically refers those funny little spoon-and-fork combinations that they sell in camping supply stores. In writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr.’s cheeky teen comedy, due out on DVD Tuesday, it’s also the name of the film’s nerdy little outcast who somehow manages to get the best of her school’s cool kids.

Ghuman’s low-budget feature debut, which premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, reveals a promising young director who wears his influences on his sleeve. There are strong, potty-mouthed echoes of John Waters here, plus an obvious affinity for the musical uplift of “Glee” and the droll nerdiness of “Napoleon Dynamite.”

Spork (Savannah Stehlin) is a bespectacled, wild-haired junior high student who happens to be a hermaphrodite and is thus an awkward outcast and object of ridicule at her school. The gang of mean girls who torment Spork are lead by a snotty blonde cheerleader with the decidedly unsubtle name Becky Byotch (Rachel G. Fox).

Naturally, at this lily-white school, Spork’s only allies are the minority kids – namely a sassy, fast-talking black girl named Tootsie Roll (Sydney Park) and an homily-spouting Asian-American named Chunk (Kevin Chung) – who team up to coach their misfit pal in some booty-poppin’ moves for the upcoming school dance.

Despite the thudding obviousness of the script and the heavy, ticky-tacky direction that over-emphasizes the surreal nature of the satire and its messages, Ghuman shows a winning sympathy for the underdog and an entertaining sense of the absurdity and pain of teenage rituals.

Also, his film features a kicking soundtrack of vintage ’90s tunes that includes 2-Live Crew, JJ Fad’s “SuperSonic” and Dimples T’s “Get It Girl,” plus a pretty cool score by Casey James and the Stay Puft Kid.

“Spork” is not rated and runs 86 minutes. It’s being released by Entertainment One.

- Dennis King

Many a Sam Peckinpah fan and especially admirers of the wild and woolly director’s 1971 version of “Straw Dogs” rolled their eyes at the news that film critic-turned-filmmaker Rod Lurie (“The Contender”) had had the audacity to attempt a remake of this controversial story of savage survival instinct awakened in the soul of a pacifist.

The original, co-written by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman from a novel by Gordon Williams, centered on peace-loving American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his restless British wife, Amy (Susan George), who move to her hometown and face increasingly vicious harassment from working-class locals, led by one of her ex-boyfriends.

Critics and moviegoers alike were polarized by the film’s excessive and graphic violence, and detractors labeled Peckinpah a “merciless misogynist” for making the Amy character a submissive, teasing, immature young woman who becomes aroused in the midst of being raped. In writer-director Lurie’s update, Oklahoma City-born actor James Marsden’s David is a nonviolent screenwriter and Kate Bosworth’s Amy is a strong, assertive film actress. Her small hometown is Blackwater, Miss., and the couple travel there to prepare her rural family home for sale after her father’s death.

Once there, conflicts emerge with local rednecks, including Amy’s old ex-high school football hero boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard) and his sadistic ex-coach turned town troublemaker and drunk (a well-cast James Woods), and tensions slowly build to an eruption of  wanton and life-threatening mayhem, eventually forcing both David and Amy to turn as brutal and deadly as their tormentors. 

While Peckinpah’s classic study in blood lust and what really constitutes rape brought accusations raining down upon him of galloping misogyny and shameless pandering to his audience’s baser instincts (as lamost all of his films did), Lurie’s new slant attempts to pose thoughtful questions about the moral price paid for loosing the killer inside.

Like the original, Lurie’s is a corker of a thriller. It just doesn’t bring the visceral gusto of  “Bloody” Sam’s double-barreled slamdance, which offers the rare opportunity of watching Dustin Hoffman turn bad-ass. 

DVD extras: “Courting Controversy: Remaking a Classic,” “The Dynamics of Power: The Ensemble,” “Inside the Siege: The Ultimate Showdown,” “Commentary with Writer/Director Rod Lurie.”

— Gene Triplett

Screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese brought to “Taxi Driver” not only a shared passion for European neorealist film but also the knowledge of what it is to feel lonely. The experience of isolation is what they both had in common with the film’s central character Travis Bickle, played with such implosive power by Robert De Niro.

“We identified with him,” Scorsese said of his first collaboration with Schrader. “We knew how he felt.”

Schrader was raised in Michigan by strict Calvinist Christian parents, and didn’t see a movie until he was 18 and could manage to sneak away to theaters, where he eventually fell in love with film.

Scorsese was born in Queens to devoutly Catholic Italian-American parents who often took him to the movies because he was too stricken with asthma to live a normal childhood playing with other neighborhood kids. He fell for movies early in life.

All of this fascinating background comes from a rich package of bonus features included in the 35th anniversary Blu-ray edition of “Taxi Driver,” featuring a revelatory making-of documentary and engagingly forthright interviews with Schrader and Scorsese, who also collaborated on two other modern classics, “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Fortunately for both men, they found better ways to work through their alienation than Bickle does. Their unbalanced, insomniac Vietnam vet takes a job as a dusk-to-dawn cabbie on the sleaziest streets of New York, meets and is rejected by a beautiful-but-vapid campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd), fails in an attempt to assassinate her candidate, meets and makes a connection with a young prostitute (an amazingly savvy 12-year-old Jodie Foster) and (spoiler alert!) at the peak of mental overload slaughters the little girl’s slavers in one of the most shockingly realistic, graphically bloody denouements ever seen in a mainstream non-genre film.

Schrader’s pitch-dark screenplay was rejected by many a timid studio until producers Michael and Julia Phillips (“The Sting,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) stepped in to champion its cause, finally securing a deal with Columbia Pictures.

Bernard Herrmann finished the masterfully haunting, atmospheric musical score on the day of his death, Christmas Eve 1975, less than two months before the film‘s release. In remastered 5.1 surround, it’s never sounded better.

Packaged in a hardback cover with postcard reproductions of the U.S. poster and scenes from the film, this one is a must for any film buff’s collection.

— Gene Triplett

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Beware the Gonzo”

Hunter S. Thompson meets “Revenge of the Nerds” in the smart but snarky teen-angst comedy “Beware the Gonzo,” due out on DVD Tuesday.

This feature directing debut by Bryan Goluboff (who penned the script for 1995’s “The Basketball Diaries”) might be slightly behind the curve when it comes to modern students and their interaction with media. It does, after all, concern a hotshot reporter for the school newspaper (they still have those?) at a tony New York prep school.

That reporter is Eddie “Gonzo” Gilman (Ezra Miller of “We Need to Talk About Kevin”), whose big investigative piece is sabotaged by his school paper’s snooty, insufferably popular editor, Garvin (Jesse McCartney).

In retaliation, Eddie goes underground and starts an alternative newspaper, The Gonzo Files, that speaks up for the school’s freaks and geeks, targets the hypocrisy of the elite snobs and rankles the starchy reserve of the administration.

Eddie’s muckraking revelations about the school’s spoiled and venomous popular crowd serve to make him an underground hero (think of Christian Slater in “Heathers”) and win the loyalty of such outcasts as Schneeman (Edward Gelbinovich), a classic nerd who’s been a hazing target for the school jocks, and sexy, brooding rebel Evie (Zoe Kravitz, daughter of rocker Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet).

Although his film is fairly by-the-book as teen angst comedies go, Goluboff benefits from a better-than-usual leading cast and a supporting roster that includes such comic stalwarts as Amy Sedaris (“Strangers With Candy”) and Judah Friedlander (“30 Rock”).

“Beware the Gonzo” is not rated and runs 94 minutes. It’s being released by New Video Group.

- Dennis King

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Eat This New York”

New York gobbles up new restaurants and spits them out mercilessly. In fact, about 1,000 new restaurants open in the city each year, and four out of five of them fail within the first five years. That’s a sobering fact that informs the tasty documentary “Eat This New York,” due out on DVD Tuesday.

This 2004 film from directors Kate Novack and Andrew Rossi follows two corn-fed novices from Minneapolis as they move east and decide to open a trendy new bistro in the toughest restaurant city in the world.

Best friends Billy Phelps and John McCormick, two long-time motorcycle enthusiasts, had no experience at all in the food industry when they decided to stake out a small corner space in gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2001 and open a cozy little place called Moto.

These dreamy entrepreneurs envisioned their restaurant as a comfy community hub in the old neighborhood where Hispanic and Orthodox Jewish communities once bumped together and where now hip young scensters with fat trust funds reign.

As the two idealists tackle the vagaries of the New York City real estate market, a faltering economy, skittish loan officers, demanding potential chefs and multiple delays in opening, the film follows a parallel track by featuring pithy interviews with some of the city’s most successful chef-restaurateurs. This celebrity list includes TV chef Rocco DeSpirito, Daniel Boulud (Café Boulud), Siro Maccioni (Le Cirque), Keith McNally (Balthazar), Danny Meyer (Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern), Drew Nieporent (Nobu) and Jean-Georges Vongerichten (Jean Georges), all discussing the tangled difficulties of opening and running a successful restaurant in this most demanding and discriminating city.

“Eat This New York” is not rated and runs 85 minutes. It’s being released by First Run Features.

- Dennis King