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

“Thor at the Bus Stop”

The weirdly titled “Thor at the Bus Stop” (due out on DVD Tuesday) is a hipster hash of Monty Python-esque skits, offbeat street denizens, existential philosophizing and low-low-budget ingenuity that shows some promise from filmmaking brothers Jerry and Mike Thompson.

Shot on a proverbial shoestring and freighted with all the usual flaws of DIY filmmaking – bad acting, cheesy production values, self-consciously jaded dialogue – “Thor” is nevertheless a pretty cool calling-card work for the obviously clever and inventive Thompson brothers. In this, their first feature-length collaboration, the writer-director-actor siblings display a strong penchant for quirky humor (of the Python kind) and world-weary nihilism (they’ve obviously watched a lot of Tarantino).

“Thor” is a comedy-fantasy that takes place in a glum, unnamed urban neighborhood populated by rigorously oddball characters. They include Ultra Stan the Everyman (who delivers pizzas), Bernard Barnard (a moronic TV reporter), Big Zed and Little Fred (they steal lunchboxes from school children), Passenger Seat Pete (a blandly submissive dupe), Beat Nick (a poet), White Trash Chuck (a wannabe hipster), One-Way Walter (a cool dude who highjacks cars), Detective Mergatroy (a TV camera hog) and, of course, the Norse god of lightning, Thor (passing through the neighborhood on the day he dies).

The slow-paced story unfolds mostly in short, loosely interwoven sketches and is weighted down with loads of philosophizing – some of it silly, some of it vaguely cool. In fact, the whole tone of this silly-smart flick might best be summed up by this observation from one street denizen, “There’s only two ways to act. Just two ways, Either be cool. Or not.”

“Thor at the Bus Stop” is not rated and runs 100 minutes. It’s being released by VCI Entertainment.

- Dennis King

Woody Allen’s history-hopping chameleon “Zelig” has nothing on the real-life cipher Juan Pujol Garcia, a shadowy Spanish double agent who changed the course of World War II with his amazing espionage exploits, which are compellingly detailed in the documentary thriller “Garbo: The Spy.”

This insanely clever and amazing true-life story from documentarian Edmon Roch reveals a masterly tale of intrigue and deception that might come as a surprise even to the most ardent World War II buff. It’s relates the audacious exploits of a freelance spy who wormed his way into the good graces of both the British and the Nazi intelligence services and proved such a great actor that he was given the codename “Garbo” (after the enigmatic actress Greta Garbo).

While, in truth, Pujol’s loyalties were to the Allied cause, he was so convincing to both sides (the Nazis codenamed him “Alaric”) that he was awarded an honorary knighthood by the British and the Iron Cross by the Nazis. And as Roch’s film relates, Garbo’s greatest triumph came in Operation Fortitude, in which, though a tangled web of made-up operatives and misinformation, he misled the Germans about the exact date and location of the D-Day invasion.

Since, naturally, there is virtually no film record of Garbo’s undercover deeds, Roch cobbles together the story with animated maps, talking-head interviews (mainly with novelist-historian Nigel West), archival war footage and, most cleverly, clips from classic spy movies (“Mr. Moto’s Last Warning,” “Our Man in Havana,” “Mata Hari” and so on) that mirror actual events.

Along with a gripping narrative of the spy’s wartime efforts, Roch adds on a surprising and poignant third act, which involved Pujol faking his own death after the war, moving to South America and operating a cinema for nearly 40 years. Most surprising is footage of an aged Pujol, returned to Normandy in 1984 to walk the beaches, tour the military cemetery and receive a medal of gratitude from the British government.

As espionage thrillers go, “Garbo: The Spy” is a bracing nail-biter, shaded with the gripping touches of an inventive director and with the added bonus of being largely factual.

- Dennis King

The best thing about studios celebrating their centennial anniversaries is that they tend to dig into their vaults and roll out restored versions of some of their greatest titles, and they don’t get much greater than Paramount’s 1974 neo-noir nugget, “Chinatown,” now on Blu-ray for the first time.

Jack Nicholson was born to play sharp-dressed, wisecracking private investigator Jake Gittes, an ex-cop with some bad memories of his old Chinatown beat in 1937 Los Angeles, who’s doing much better for himself these days tracking down unfaithful wives and husbands — until he uncovers a monumental scam engineered by the corrupt powers that be that will shape the future of L.A.

One could argue that this film was a career best for many of its collaborators, including director Roman Polanski, production designer Richard Sylbert and cinematographer John Alonso, who created a beautiful film noir in color, its atmospherics enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score with its melancholy trumpet solos. Then there was Faye Dunaway, the lovely but flawed woman of mystery and tragedy with whom Jake becomes involved, and director John Houston in full acting mode as the mighty, menacing and unrepentantly sinful Noah Cross, the manipulator of deceitful doings within the Department of Water and Power.

And then there is the taut and complex screenplay that won an Academy Award for Robert Towne, who always intended “Chinatown” to be the first of a trilogy based loosely on the history of the shady dealings that built the City of Angels.

The Blu-ray edition contains a three-part documentary on that history, “Water and Power: The Aqueduct — The Aftermath — The River and Beyond,” plus commentary by Towne and director David Fincher (“Zodiac”). There’s also an appreciation of the film from prominent filmmakers and documentaries on the filming of “Chinatown” and its legacy.

And there’s that dark and jolting ending in a part of the city where things never went well for Jake, when one of his colleagues sadly implores him with that famous last line to “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Just try to forget it.

— Gene Triplett

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

“Man vs. Wild: Top 25 Man Moments”

British adventurer Bear Grylls is famous for seeking out some of the harshest, most life-threatening places on earth and demonstrating some of the radical survival measures necessary to make it out alive. Extreme and queasy highlights from his popular Discovery Channel series,” Man vs. Wild: Top 25 Man Moments,” are due out on DVD Tuesday.

The buff and gritty Grylls, a former member of Britain’s elite SAS and canny survival expert, has hosted versions of “Man vs. Wild” on British, American and international television networks and found a macho audience for his sometimes stomach-turning techniques for besting a wild and wooly Mother Nature.

Each episode of the show features Grylls (and his stalwart, behind-the-camera crew) being dropped off in some horribly inhospitable location, with minimal gear and resources, and showing viewers how to survive.

Over the course of the series, which debuted on Discovery in 2006 and was canceled this year due to a contract dispute, Grylls has scaled rushing waterfalls, dashed through forest fires, waded rapids, parachuted from helicopters, climbed slick ice faces and raced a speeding freight train through a Montana tunnel.

And in order to survive in various forbidding climates, he has wrestled alligators, eaten all manner of bugs, drunk his own urine from a rattlesnake skin, munched on deer droppings, field dressed a camel carcass and used the corpse of a sheep as a sleeping bag.

“Top 25 Man Moments” is a compilation of the worst and weirdest of these survival escapades, narrated with devil-may-care showmanship by the irrepressible Grylls, a man’s man who wisely leavens his macho bluster with some goofy, regular-guy humor.

“Man vs. Wild: Top 25 Man Moments” is rated PG and runs 215 minutes. It’s being released by Travel Channel – Gaiam.

- Dennis King

In an amazing burst of brilliance from 1939 to 1943, writer-director Preston Sturges virtually defined the “screwball comedy,” a uniquely American style of comedy characterized by farcical situations, witty dialogue, social satire and cheeky battles of the sexes.

In a frantic run of popular hits, Sturges (one of the first studio screenwriters allowed to direct his own scripts) turned out “The Great McGinty,” “Christmas in July,” “The Lady Eve,” “The Palm Beach Story,” “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Hail the Conquering Hero.”

But the crown jewel of that amazingly creative period was “Sullivan’s Travels,” the 1941 comedy of Depression-era Hollywood that starred Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake and followed the odyssey of a pampered director of escapist movies who goes on the road as a hobo to learn about life and discovers the healing value of laughter.

Previously released in a Universal Studios boxed set of Sturges films and a state-of-the-art Criterion Collections disc, “Sullivan’s Travels” is now available as a stand-alone DVD as part of Universal’s gala 100th Anniversary celebration.

The disc comes in a glossy foil slipcover that opens to reveal the original theatrical poster, facts about the film (it was actually produced by Paramount and later sold to Universal) and a studio timeline that places it in relationship to other Universal classics of the era (such as 1936’s “My Man Godfrey,” which is also receiving the royal anniversary treatment).

While the Criterion DVD contains the most extensive selection of extras, the new Universal release is more limited, with only two brief centennial featurettes included – “100 Years of Universal: The Carl Laemmle Era” and “100 Years of Universal: The Lew Wasserman Era.”

Younger movie fans might not be familiar with the witty, urbane Sturges, but “Sullivan’s Travels” is the source of one brilliant nugget that inspired a latter-day hit that should be familiar to all young hipsters – Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2000 hit “O Brother, Where Art Thou.”

In “Sullivan’s Travels,” the title character, Joel McCrea’s Sully yearns to leave behind his pampered life as a maker of glib Hollywood hits and go out into America’s heartland to learn first hand the rough-and-tumble life of the country’s poor and downtrodden.

His goal is to make a serious, socially relevant movie that will be “a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man!” The title of that proposed picture? “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

- Dennis King

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

“Rat Scratch Fever”

Writer, director, cinematographer, editor, actor, special-effects tech Jeff Leroy is the very epitome of do-it-yourself, micro-budget filmmaking. A veteran of the horror and Z-movie fringes with a dozen or so schlocky credits on his resume, Leroy’s most buzzed-about work of cobbled-together horror, “Rat Scratch Fever,” hits the DVD market on Tuesday.

Employing a cast of low-budget horror veterans that includes Ford Austin, Sean Cain and Phoebe Dollar, Leroy has concocted a story about a failed space mission that results in humongous alien rats being transported back to Los Angeles, developing a taste for human flesh and then causing bloody, rabid chaos in the City of Angels and beyond.

Typical of his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink style, Leroy employs several decidedly homemade techniques to construct his larger-than-life sci-fi adventure. He uses miniature sets, puppets, processed green-screen shots and the kindness of friends to make up for his miniscule budget. Trailers for the cheeky result have been circulating on fan sites for more than a year, so anticipation for this release is running at a fever pitch among horror and camp aficionados.

Some are touting this as Leroy’s “masterpiece,” which is saying a lot for a guy whose filmography includes such titles as “Eyes of the Werewolf,” “Creepies” and “Creepies 2,” “Werewolf in a Women’s Prison” and the TV series “Poorman’s Bikini Beach.”

“Rat Scratch Fever” is not rated and runs 90 minutes. It’s being released by Media Blasters, Inc.

- Dennis King

He’s an oddly named London copper with a tragic past and an avuncular, plodding way of getting at the solution to a crime. And he’s shipped off to the foggy northern provinces where he’s partnered with an ambitious, quick-on-the-trigger young detective sergeant who’s brashly impatient with his boss’s old-school ways.

That’s the essential set-up for the BBC crime series “Inspector George Gently,” a cerebral police procedural that’s winning a devoted following in the U.S. and that now has a spanking new first season out on Blu-ray DVD.

“George Gently – Series 1” offers up the first three 90-minute episodes of the series that first aired on British TV in 2007-8, and it aptly sets up the series’ premise and showcases the craggy beauty of the show’s locale (supposedly set in Northumberland, the first season was actually shot along the Irish coast).

Drawn from a series of 30-plus “George Gently” crime novels by the late Alan Hunter that were published from 1955-99, the series stars veteran TV actor Martin Shaw (“Judge John Deed”) as world-weary Inspector Gently and wiry Lee Ingleby (“Nicholas Nickleby”) as Detective Sergeant John Bacchus.

“Series 1” includes the pilot and two following episodes that are set in 1964, an era when England was wracked by social unrest and roiling cultural change – when corruption and violence were rampant in both London and rural environs and racist cops were often the norm.

Gently strides through this tawdry world like a noble knight errant, and the pilot (though drawn from the eighth book in the series) does an admirable job of establishing the stalwart personality of this disciplined, staunchly anti-corrupt cop and his prickly relationship with new partner Bacchus, a hard-nosed copper who’s inclined to cut legal corners.

The dramatic set-up of the pilot (titled “Gently Go Man”) finds the honorable Gently in London, at odds with his politically devious superiors, when his beloved wife is killed in a hit-and-run accident (in fact, it’s a cold murder engineered by a vicious gangster).

Following a tip about the murder, Gently agrees to take on one last cast in rustic Northumberland, where he’s teamed with the skeptical Bacchus and digs into a case that turns on a charge of homosexuality, still technically illegal in that time.

With the dynamic between the brainy, careful boss and hot-headed sergeant neatly established, the two following episodes – “The Burning Man” and “Bomber’s Moon” – build on that relationship and lay out complex, satisfyingly sinister crime puzzles that any mystery fan will quickly embrace. And the dominant presence of Shaw, tough yet vulnerable, noble yet flawed, results in a British copper memorable enough to sustain the series through four seasons and running.

“George Gently – Series 1” is the perfect introduction to this noble crime fighter. The Blu-ray extras here are sparse (text interviews with cast members), but the widescreen images and pristine photography beautifully capture the series’ moody, magnificent setting.

- Dennis King

Stephen King once said of novelist Donald E. Westlake that on sunny days he wrote comic crime novels under his real name about a hapless crook named Dortmunder, and on dark and rainy days he wrote serious pulp fiction under the pen name of Richard Stark about a hardboiled heister named Parker. At one point in his career, Westlake commanded more money as Stark than he did under his real name, and Parker was one of the most popular characters in the crime genre.

No less than six movies (not to mention a new series of graphic novels) have been based on the Parker books, beginning in 1967 with director John Boorman’s brilliantly stylized thriller “Point Blank,” based the first book in the series, “The Hunter,” and starring Lee Marvin as the relentless and remorseless anti-hero (with his name changed to Walker). The same book was adapted for the screen again in 1999 with less artistic success as “Payback,” starring Mel Gibson in the re-named character of Porter.

 Director John Flynn’s “The Outfit” (1973), starring Robert Duvall as Parker (changed to Macklin) is an obscure gem worth seeking out, as is French director Jean-Luc Godard’s “Made in U.S.A.” (1966), which is a very loose (and unauthorized) adaptation of “The Jugger.” A little-seen 1983 Canadian film treatment of “Slayground,” starring Peter Coyote as Parker (changed to Stone), is incoherent and unwatchable.

Which brings us to 1968′s “The Split” (now manufactured on demand by Warner Archives at wbshop.com) starring Jim Brown as Parker (renamed McLaine). It’s based on “The Seventh,” about the robbery of a professional football stadium’s box office receipts in the midst of a big game. Somehow, screenwriter Robert Sabaroff and director Gordon Flemyng managed to drain the story of all the noir atmospherics and suspenseful unpredictability that were hallmarks of the Parker books. The sunny L.A. locations look bleached out and storyline is as routine and clichéd as a ’60s made-for-TV movie. But it’s interesting to watch the stellar cast that includes Julie Harris, Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, James Whitmore and Donald Sutherland, all at their sinister best in spite of the mediocre script and direction.

 The period fashions and funky Quincy Jones soundtrack are a lot of fun, too. And “The Split” has the distinction of being the first movie to earn an “R” rating under the then-new MPAA system, but the violence that branded it is pretty tame by today’s standards, and especially Stark standards.

— Gene Triplett

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

“Anatomy of a Bigfoot Hoax”

“Finding Bigfoot,” one of the big-buzz shows on cable’s Animal Planet, is just the latest evidence of our endless fascination with the notion that something big, hairy and mysterious lurks in the deepest, darkest forests. And in 2008, that national mania to believe in the unbelievable led to a hokey swindle that became national news and is the subject of the clunky, self-serving documentary “Anatomy of a Bigfoot Hoax” (due out on DVD just in time for April Fool’s Day).

The film is largely the work of Tom Biscardi, a determined player in the nutty world of Bigfoot aficionados who himself had – depending on how you view it – either a duplicitous or a dunderheaded role in the hoax.

The event started simply enough: in July 2008, a couple of yahoos in rural Georgia reportedly discovered the frozen body of a dead Sasquatch in a forest and posted a video on YouTube.

Soon, the video went viral and Biscardi, CEO of Searching for Bigfoot Inc., was called in to investigate and arranged a $50,000 good-faith payment to the two yokels. Then followed a big media frenzy with many major TV networks covering the story and a tsunami of internet hits on Google.

But the whole thing quickly became unraveled when the Bigfoot body arrived in a block of ice, and Searching for Bigfoot “researchers” thawed it out. Turns out the monster was just a rubber Halloween costume.

Biscardi, who early on had gone on TV to vouch for the authenticity of the discovery, was left with egg on his face, and “Anatomy of a Bigfoot Hoax” is his strained effort to paint himself as an innocent victim of the tawdry affair.

Well, it all set off a big argument within the Bigfoot community as Biscardi’s supporters and detractors have weighed in to defend or debunk the film. Whatever, the documentary offers a goofy peek into the world of true believers and conspiracy fanciers and for that alone has a certain oddball entertainment value.

“Anatomy of a Bigfoot Hoax” is not rated and runs 60 minutes. It is – not surprisingly – being released by Searching For Bigfoot, Inc.

- Dennis King

Movies, which seem like such a pervasive and permanent part of our culture, are in fact quite fragile and perishable. A stunning number of important works shot on flammable and unstable nitrate film stock in the early 20th century have in fact deteriorated to dust and are lost forever.

Which is one reason that, for all its flaws and political shortcomings, the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress is such a godsend to movie lovers.

So any film buff who understands the need for careful preservation and thoughtful stewardship for America’s rich and diverse film history should check out the DVD release of the documentary “These Amazing Shadows,” an informative overview of the Film Registry and its work in recognizing movies that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

This Sundance Film Festival discovery by directors Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton takes on the sweeping subject in easily digestible bits and chapters, and also provides personal perspective and insights from a handful of notable film lovers and historians.

While the documentary features the requisite number of clips from familiar classics – “Casablanca,” “Gone With the Wind,” “West Side Story” and so on – it also duly notes the diversity and democratic leanings of the Registry, which has added at least 25 new films to its vaults each year since its founding in 1988.

Along with the expected “classics,” the Registry has cast a wide net to include selections from nearly every genre – Hollywood blockbusters, silent films, documentaries, newsreels, avant-garde works and even home movies. Thus, alongside “Citizen Kane” you can find such oddities as “Gus Visser and His Singing Duck,” the famed Zapruder footage of John Kennedy’s assassination, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video and the 1957 cartoon intermission teaser, “Let’s All Go to the Lobby.”

Although some topics get a rushed, slightly perfunctory treatment (the whole subject of film preservation and restoration), and in touting the important work of the Registry the tone often slants toward infomercial pandering, the documentary pleads its case in informative and sometimes touching vignettes (as when George Takei contrasts his family’s experience in World War II Japanese interment camps with images from the documentary “Topaz,” or when Pixar’s John Lasseter rhapsodizes about Disney cartoons, or Rob Reiner waxes poetic about “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

And the filmmakers note with vigor the losses of cultural treasures that occurred before the Registry was formed. Half of all American movies shot before 1950 are now lost, and more than 80 percent of silent-era films are gone forever. Even the original negative of such a recent classic as “The Godfather” was in danger of irretrievable deterioration before the Registry came to the rescue.

So if “These Amazing Shadows” occasionally slips into self-congratulatory mode, it nonetheless makes a powerful case for the Registry’s profound importance as America’s movie time capsule.

- Dennis King