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

“Moonshiners: Season 1”

Reality TV seems to have given in to a lowdown obsession with all things hillbilly (witness a recent succession of show such as “Bayou Billionaires,” “Hillbilly Handfishin’,” “Here Comes Honey Bob Boo,” “Duck Dynasty” and so on). One of the gnarliest and most obviously scripted of these hits the DVD shelves Tuesday with “Moonshiners: Season 1.”

This Discovery Channel show purports to provide a documentary view of Appalachian moonshiners practicing their primitive trade during the height of summer brewing season and the efforts of law enforcement agents (so-called “revenooers”) who try to stop this volatile and highly illegal activity.

Cameras follow modern-day bootleggers as they fire up their backwoods stills and brew their corn whisky (a.k.a. white lightning). It’s a storied activity that they claim is an honored part of their cultural history, and they initiate their young’uns into the scraggly fraternity early on. Several sequences offer detailed descriptions of how stills are built and corn whisky is produced, and grainy profiles are inserted featuring famous moonshiners of the past, such as Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton.

In parallel narratives, the series follows Special Agent Jesse Tate as he dogs the moonshiners – wheedling tips from informants, raiding storage houses, busting distillers and generally playing cat and mouse with the wily moonshiners.

As is the case with most reality TV these days, there’s far too much behind-the-scenes coaching (awkward dialogue abounds) and perfectly placed camera shots to make this show truly believable. Reality it’s not. Docudrama, maybe. But a couple of shots of white lightning could make it go down as smoothly as a rerun of “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

“Moonshiners: Season 1” is rated PG-13 and runs 352 minutes on two discs. It’s being released by Discovery Channel.

- Dennis King

In the freewheeling 1970s, William Friedkin was famous for scaring moviegoers half to death, for directing culture-changing, widely debated blockbusters and for breaking all the rules of the Hollywood establishment.

Now, at 77 and having suffered health problems and a prolonged creative dry spell, the maverick filmmaker seems as brash and grandiose as ever in “The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir” (Harpers, $29.99), the brutally confessional recounting of his life on and off screen.

In a frank, entertainingly written narrative the book ranges from his movie-besotted youth in Chicago to early days directing live television drama and his heyday in the early ’70s when he scored his greatest hits in “The French Connection” (earning him a directing Oscar) and “The Excorist,” through the downturn in his career marked by risky work such as “Cruising” and the costly misfire of “Sorcerer” that knocked him off the A-list.

Of his earliest influences in filmmaking, Friedkin credits Orson Welles and “Citizen Kane” with setting the course for his future.

“I watched it five times a day,” he writes. “And I couldn’t believe it. When I came out, it was like standing in front of a Vermeer or a Rembrandt. That’s the effect it had on me.”

Among the juiciest passages of the book are behind-the-scenes revelations about the conception and execution of signature moments in his best-known films. He talks about brainstorming and walking the streets of New York to come up with ideas for the breakneck car chase scene in “The French Connection” (which put lives at risk and involved a $40,000 bribe to an MTA official). And he writes vividly about actress Mercedes McCambridge voicing the demon’s lines in “The Exorcist.” It was a grueling, month-long process in which the actress, a stern Catholic who’d quit smoking and belonged to AA, employed the counseling of two priests and ample quantities of cigarettes and Jack Daniels to achieve the desired effect.

Friedkin’s confessions of poor judgment and bad behavior come grudgingly but honestly – the harshest relating to his breakthrough documentary “The People vs. Paul Crump,” which exonerated a guilty man, and the transgressions of three failed marriages. “I embody arrogance, insecurity and ambition that spur me on as they hold me back,” he writes candidly.

With much how-to detail and hard-won wisdom on the ins and outs of making films his way, Friedkin’s book works not only as a vibrant memoir but also as treasure trove of insights and information that should inspire young filmmakers for decades to come.

Written with the rich particularity and driving narrative force that have marked his movies – including such recent comeback successes as “Bug” and “Killer Joe” (based on Oklahoman Tracey Letts’ stage plays) – “The Friedkin Connection” is the work of a natural storyteller who has now deftly transferred his considerable gifts from the big screen to the printed page.

- Dennis King

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

“Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder”

Of all the writers and activists associated with the Beat Generation of the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is certainly among the most flamboyant and enduring. Still blowing and going at 93, he’s the subject of a hugely entertaining documentary, “Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder” (due out on DVD Tuesday).

This 2009 film from director Christopher Felver is an affectionate celebration of Ferlinghetti’s dramatic, knockabout life, his still-popular poetry and his landmark bookstore, City Lights Books in San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach district.

While Ferlinghetti balks at the label “Beat poet” for himself, he was certainly one of the postwar literary movement’s founding fathers. He opened City Lights in 1953, and it quickly became a seedbed for the restless band of writers who would become the Beats.

As the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl,” Ferlinghetti – who withstood a lengthy obscenity prosecution in its defense – is largely credited with fostering the free-speech movement and the counterculture upheaval that followed. He also was influential in other seminal works of the era, including Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch.” And as author of “A Coney Island of the Mind” and other collections, he’s still among the Beats’ most widely read poets.

Felver encapsulates Ferlinghetti’s Dickensian childhood in a colorful narrative of news clips, readings and anecdotes from the author and packs the film with pithy commentary from cultural notables, including Ginsberg, poets Gary Snyder and Amiri Baraka, playwright Michael McClure, actor Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, writer Dave Eggers and former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.

Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder” is not rated and runs 79 minutes. It’s being released by First Look Features.

- Dennis King

It’s generally recognized that the original “boy from Oklahoma” was the folksy, rope-twirling philosopher Will Rogers. So there’s a delicious and slightly ironic twist to Warner Bros. Studio’s DVD reissue of the 1954 oater “The Boy From Oklahoma,” which starred the Okie icon’s son, Will Rogers Jr., who was born in New York City and grew up in Beverly Hills.

Offered by the Warner Archive Collection manufactured-on-demand (MOD) DVD series, which has thankfully rescued this and scores of other mid-level programmers from the studio’s vaults, “The Boy From Oklahoma” is a surprisingly crisp, smart and complex Western directed by the studio’s workhorse helmer Michael Curtiz (whose high-end credits include “Casablanca” and “Mildred Pierce,” among others).

It’s Curtiz’s astute direction, keen casting eye and confident, efficient grasp of cinematic storytelling that raises this genre picture a cut above.

The novelty of casting the junior Rogers in the cowboy lead is trumped a bit by a film made two years earlier, in which Curtiz directed “The Will Rogers Story” with the younger Rogers in the role of his dad. Talk about meta-casting.

“The Boy From Oklahoma” stars the laconic Rogers as Tom Brewster, a timid law student, pacifist and teetotaler who comes to a dusty Western frontier town that’s in the throes of a political power struggle. The town’s mayoral campaign pits upright nice guy Paul Evans (Louis Jean Heydt) against corrupt gambler Barney Turlock (Anthony Caruso).

When Turlock wins the office in a landslide, he looks around for a milquetoast sheriff to do his bidding, and his eye falls quickly on Tom, who fares very badly in the local target shooting contest, although he turns out to be a skilled horseman and roper.

Tom initially turns the job down, until he witnesses a robbery of an incriminating letter left behind by the previous sheriff, who was brutally murdered.

Determined to find and punish the sheriff’s killer, Tom takes the badge and, inspired by Katie Brannigan (Nancy Olson), the dead sheriff’s sassy, sharp-shooting daughter, gradually transforms from a namby-pamby law student into a brainy, brawny lawman to be reckoned with.

Surrounded by a supporting cast of pros – ranging from the slickly sinister Caruso and the spitfire Olson to Lon Cheney Jr. as the town’s rabble-rousing drunk and Wallace Ford as Turlock’s shopkeeping lackey – Rogers turned in a solid if understated performance. Clearly, he lacked the charisma of his famous father, but he had enough of his dad’s aw-shucks modesty and wry humor to make Tom a most unlikely yet likable Western hero (note that a few years later the character became a model for TV’s “Sugarfoot,” about a timid Easterner who comes to Oklahoma Territory to practice the law).

“The Boy From Oklahoma” comes without any DVD bonus extras, but Sooners who’ve followed the ups and downs of Will Junior’s eventful but finally tragic life it’ll be a pleasure to see him roping and riding like a born cowboy in this solid Western.

- Dennis King

Ethan Hawke

That’s the unlikely – nay, utterly preposterous – premise of “The Purge,” writer-director James DeMonaco’s hazily satirical, sci-fi home invasion thriller whose one big idea is buried beneath a clumsy onslaught of genre clichés and tired old fright-movie tactics.

Following the well-trod path of several better movies, from Sam Peckinpah’s classic “Straw Dogs” to John Carpenter’s “Assault On Precinct 13” (which DeMonaco remade in 2005 with Ethan Hawke starring), this film starts with a pretty good idea – that even in well-ordered, security-obsessed suburbia, we’re never as safe as we hope to be.

But when the lights go out and the bloody-minded crazies emerge from the night, DeMonaco’s tale quickly stumbles and loses its way.

Purge night is the one government-sanction night of the year when people are allowed, actually urged, to indulge their vilest impulses. With certain restrictions limiting weapons of mass destruction and protecting higher ups in the government, people are encouraged to take to the streets to plunder, burn, maraud, rape and kill as they please – with no fear of repercussion.

Of course, this being America, the one-percenters such as James Sandin (Hawke) and his family – wife Mary (Lena Headey), older daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane) and younger son Charlie (Max Burkholder) – are free to lock themselves in their McMansions, arm their high-tech security systems and wait out the mayhem.

Convenient for the nouveau riche Sandins because dad made his money selling state-of-the-art computerized security systems to skittish homeowners.

But as the crazies take to the streets, things go quickly awry at the Sandin house when Zoey’s wayward boyfriend violates the security system and sensitive Charlie spots a homeless man running for his life from some rampaging preppies and opens the barred doors to let the poor man in.

Next thing they know, the Sandins are besieged by murderous gang of rich kids (wielding deadly implements and wearing fright makes, no less) who demand that John turn over the homeless man or they’ll take out the bloodlust on his family. That’s when Hawke butches up and morphs into action-movie mode.

What follows is a murky and rather pro forma series of eerie-creepy fright moments – nervous tiptoes down dark corridors, sudden starts, lurking shadows, things that go bump in the night. None of which particularly matters because the story rests on such a nutty premise and violates its own internal logic so many times that pretty soon you feel as though you’re just wandering through one of those kitschy Halloween funhouses from one shock to another.

Any allegory or satire that DeMonaco aspired to – concerning the fragility of social order or the illusion of techno-safety – is finally purged in “The Purge’s” doggedly predictable pursuit of manufactured, claustrophobic terror.

- Dennis King

“The Purge”

R

1:25

2 stars

Starring: Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Adelaide Kane, Max Burkholder

(Strong disturbing violence and some language)

What can you say of an actor whose film roles have included Baron Frankenstein, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Professor Van Helsing, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Who and the Grand Moff Tarkin in “Star Wars?”

In his 60-year career on stage, screen and television, Peter Cushing established himself as both a respected classical actor and an underground cult figure. Among horror fans, he’s celebrated for his masterly and chillingly operatic roles in scores fright films produced at Britain’s storied Hammer Studios.

But more than an unforgettable cult figure in horror films of the 1950s through 1970s, Cushing was one of England’s most recognizable and beloved actors of the era, and in “Peter Cushing: A Life in Film” (Titan Books, $24.95), author David Miller has produced a insightful and touching portrait of a brilliant actor who portrayed scary but by all accounts lived gently.

Compiling loads of anecdotal tales of Cushing’s acting prowess, along with analyses of his many roles – bolstered by conversations with his acting cohorts and friends (most notably his lifelong pal Christopher Lee), archival material from the BBC and Hammer Films, plus lots of private correspondence – the book presents a vivid and entertaining portrait of a man largely identified as a horror figure but one dedicated to the art of acting.

Cushing, who died 1994 at age 81 (the book was published to mark the centenary of his birth), began his acting career in small regional theaters and ended them playing small roles in tawdry, low-budget pictures. But, as Miller reveals, everyone who knew and worked with him, whether in big productions or small, described him in one word – “gentleman.”

While the author devotes ample space to Cushing’s high-profile roles (particularly Van Helsing, Frankenstein and Grand Moff Tarkin) and carefully analyzes many of his more obscure parts, the book’s big revelations come in delving into the famously private actor’s personal life.

There are details of his life in the U.S. before and during World War II (when he was ruled medically unfit for military duty), his early Hollywood piecework (a bit part in Laurel and Hardy’s “A Chump at Oxford”) his friendship with Laurence Olivier that led to a worldwide theater tour and a nervous breakdown, his devotion to his wife Helen, especially during her grave illness, and his love for painting and bird watching at his pastoral country home in Whitsable, Kent.

Miller dutifully covers the darker tones of Cushing’s life – his late-career disappointments, his lifelong battles with depression, hints of affairs and suicide attempts. Yet, even as Cushing bristled at the typecasting that locked him into the horror genre and limited his acting scope, friends such as Christopher Lee say he was never bitter and always maintained his grace, kindness and professionalism no matter how small or kitschy the role.

Miller is a widely published writer in magazines such as TV Zone, Starburst and Film Review and is the former editor of Shivers. He’s also co-author with Mark Gatiss of the book “They Came From Outer Space.”

- Dennis King

William Devane (“Marathon Man,” “The Dark Knight Rises”) is convincingly steely as Maj. Charles Rane, who returns home to San Antonio, Texas, with his friend, Sgt. 1st Class John Vohden (a very young Tommy Lee Jones), after both men have endured eight years of physical and mental torture in a Hanoi POW camp.

Rane finds his wife has fallen in love with another man — a local cop — and become engaged to him, and Rane’s young son doesn’t even remember him. Rane stoically accepts the situation, wanting only happiness for his family, but he’s determined to build a relationship with his son. Meanwhile, the city throws him a hero’s homecoming, and he is presented with a red Cadillac and 2,555 silver dollars — one for every day of his captivity — by local “Texas belle” Linda (Linda Haynes). Linda later hits on him in the bar where she works, but he acts politely uninterested.

When he returns home, four border thugs are waiting for him: “The Texan” (the excellently loathsome James Best), “Automatic Slim” (Luke Askew) and two Mexican toughs. They demand the silver dollars and torture Rane to find them. Rane goes into his hard-learned torture resistance mode as they beat him and even shove his right hand down a garbage disposal, but they still fail to break his resistance. Then Rane’s wife and son come home, and his son quickly hands over the hidden silver dollars. The gang then shoots all three of them in cold blood, leaving them for dead. Rane survives but his wife and son do not.

Next, after healing and having a hook installed in place of his right mitt, an instrument which Rane sharpens into a fine, deadly point, our hero saws off a shotgun, loads a few handguns and enlists the help of Linda and Sgt. Vohden (who has been unable to re-adapt to his own family situation and civilian life in general) to go a-hunting for the bad guys, who are headquartered in a brothel below the border.

The hunt and the showdown are predictably blood  – sometimes excessively so – but the story is well-acted, well-written and well choreographed thanks to a script written by Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver”) and Heywood Gould (“Fort Apache, The Bronx”), and directed by John Flynn, who helmed “The Outfit,” one of the best film interpretations of Donald E. Westlake’s (writing as Richard Stark) Parker crime novel series ever made. AIP may have kept production budgets tight, but the seldom scrimped on writing talent, having employed such talents as Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell even during their drive-in double-feature period.  
- Gene Triplett

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

“Horrid Henry: The Movie”

While young American readers follow the antics of Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid books and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona novels, British youngsters seem equally dedicated to their own spunky young troublemaker in Francesca Simon’s popular Horrid Henry series. Now this spirited English rascal (like his American counterparts) takes his antics to the big screen in “Horrid Henry: The Movie” (due out on DVD Tuesday).

Populated with a floridly named band of nemeses and sidekicks – Moody Margaret, Perfect Peter and the teacher Miss Battleaxe – the books follow the hijinks of the rebellious grade-schooler of the title as he leads a gang of pranksters called the Purple Hand Gang, defies rules of propriety and does battle with school authorities.

In the movie, Henry (Theo Stevenson) pulls one too many pranks and embarrasses his school during a big inspection. As a result, his stern teacher Miss Battleaxe (the estimable Anjelica Huston), with whom Henry has a love-hate relationship, gets fired and his school is put on probation.

So Henry winds up being sent off to a prissy, private all-girls school (his dotty, rich aunt believes he’s a girl). Miserable there, Henry concedes to join forces with his rule-following brother Perfect Peter (Ross Marron), his archnemesis neighbor Moody Margaret (Scarlett Stitt) and sweet teacher Miss Lovely (Parminder Nagra) to rescue his old school and even save Miss Battleaxe’s job.

“Horrid Henry: The Movie” is rated G and runs 93 minutes. It’s being released by Peace Arch Trinity.

- Dennis King

What does William Makepeace Thackeray’s satirical Victorian-era novel “Vanity Fair” have in common with writer-director Preston Sturges’ 1941 screwball comedy “The Lady Eve?”

In the seemingly counter-intuitive thesis presented in “Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship” (Stanford University Press, $60), author Nora Gilbert argues that both works were made better by the restrictions of their era’s censorship codes.

It’s a fascinating premise that Gilbert presents with insightful scholarship, some sharply startling insights and a lucid, engaging writing style. Indeed, hers is that rare scholarly book that’s also quite entertaining to read.

While most criticism of Victorian literature equates England’s censorship process with fostering an atmosphere of prudery and repression, the strictures imposed on novelists paradoxically encouraged a deeper, richer if more slyly tangential examination of issues relating to sex, feminism, politics and other taboo topics.

So too, Hollywood’s puritanical Production Code of 1930, aimed a cleaning up the movies of a rampant sexual frankness in previous years and making cinema safe for family viewing, helped spawn a slyly subversive impulse in filmmakers that led to the flowering of genres such as screwball comedies and film noir. If filmmakers couldn’t be explicit in their depictions of the battle of the sexes or the deadly demons in men’s souls, then they would find a way around the censor’s knife with innuendo, double entendre and other fairly sophisticated tactics.

Gilbert takes a shrewd and imaginative path in pairing the two unlikely eras and comparing and contrasting the resulting reactions to censorship restrictions. In both corseted Victorian England and in libertine Hollywood, the author finds wellsprings of artistic freedom that allowed artists to co-opt the very forces that were put in place to restrain them and to use censorship to turn our notions of repression and expression upside down.

Gilbert, an Assistant Professor of English at North Texas State University, has produced a smart, witty and irreverent work of off-track scholarship here that should fire the imaginations of film buffs and avid lit fans alike. And artists – those natural-born subversives always pushing the bounds of society’s rules – should applaud this book.

- Dennis King