To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Jul

Howie Mandel obeys his animal instincts in this comedy, which gets a streamlined presentation for its release on DVD. Walk Like a Man has been transferred to disc in the full-frame aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and the audio has been mastered in Dolby Digital Mono. The dialogue is in English, with optional subtitles in English, Spanish, and French. As a bonus, this release also includes the film's original trailer.

It's astounding how timeless 1980's The Elephant Man is. David Lynch's studio debut, set in Victorian England and based on the true story of the hideously deformed John Merrick (John Hurt), boasts as much emotional impact today as it did when it was first released. Much of that timeless quality is credited to the Oscar-nominated Art Direction and Costume design, but particularly to the choice of shooting on true black-and-white film stock instead of eliminating the color in postproduction (according to co-executive producer Mel Brooks in a retrospective interview). That could account for the lack of radiance in the gray tones -- the grays don't have the shimmer we've come to expect from digital transfers -- but again, it only heightens the old-fashioned feel of the film. Lynch's trademark ambient industrial sounds emerge from all directions in the Dolby 5.1 transfer, giving dimension to the intriguing, carefully arranged sound design. It would have been nice if Lynch himself had appeared in the interview segment, but Oscar-nominated makeup artist Christopher Tucker, who also narrates the brief photo gallery and gives a tour of his shop, fills the gap nicely.