Just as the stoic, skeletal holy man both defies and presides over the feverishly ecclesiastical business of the Palace of Mopu as an intransigent, blood-locked ghost, Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye. Now rather ironically viewed as perhaps the filmmakers’ most supernal visual achievement,Black Narcissus is nothing if not anomalous among the incomparable string of 1940s British masterpieces produced, written, and directed by collaborators Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The script was adapted from Rumer Godden’s ponderous, post-colonial allegory, rather than conceived in-house. The story teased and tempted Anglo nuns into a hornily unholy froth through the piercing clarity of the Himalayan elements and the ubiquity of Hindu fertility totems; regardless of the cosmic punishment eventually exacted for plummeting too far down the Great Chain of Sexual Being, the content’s untoward nature would have likely had the moralizing Glue Man of A Canterbury Tale breathily fidgeting with the control knob of his slide projector. And, rubbing angrily up against what was easily director Powell and cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s most sensitive, and most cerebral, photographic approach is an unprecedentedly curdled worldview, a visionary embrace of socio-cultural and interpersonal futility that one can’t quite take seriously without wincing—or succumbing to matte-induced vertigo.

The cinema of Stan Brakhage has been interpreted as abstract, mythopoeic, philological, and lyrical, but it’s his hyper-auteurist approach that might be most instructive. It’s surely an ironic stroke to associate the filmmaker with auteurism, a critical theory developed to celebratorily grant Hollywood directors ownership of the art they subtly baked into their cookie-cutter money-makers and crowd-pleasers; so draconian were Brakhage’s ideals that he once denounced all studio-produced movies as futilely inartistic. But engaging with Brakhage’s meditative, kaleidoscopic canon often requires doubting, scrutinizing, and—finally—redefining the tools with which one observes and processes art. And when the issue of authorship arises elsewhere, it’s hard to resist envisioning Mothlight or The Deadspringing directly and pugnaciously from their creator’s forehead in ebullient shafts of light, gawkily twirling about the nearest film projector to stun a small, unsuspecting audience, and eventually coming to rest with a defiant clang in a cylindrical encasing more akin to Aladdin’s lamp than a 16mm canister.

Inviting equal parts empathy, schadenfreude, fondness, and annoyance, Lou Costello’s finely tuned comic persona is one of the most recognizable, and most complex, of the early 20th century. It’s hard to imagine any comedian so shrill and yet so likeable; his signature shrieks of alarm can put you in stitches, but when braved through a hangover they’ll leave your temple throbbing mercilessly. Honed alongside partner Bud Abbott—who had been hailed, in his pre-Costello career, as the best straight man in the business—on the vaudeville and burlesque stage, Costello’s inimitable approach to funny has roots in slapstick and pathos but smartly infuses these stock elements with a galvanizing dose of embarrassed Depression-era fear. Unlike Curly, who nyuck-nyuck’d in the face of adversity, or Stan Laurel, for whom the world seemed a fascinating, accommodating oyster, Costello was a man doomed to fall backward into failure repeatedly while remaining utterly, and excruciatingly, self-aware.

The smug, often antagonistic Abbott must, of course, be partially blamed for the continual hardship; the famous “Jonah and the Whale” routine, perhaps the first and best of the “ruined joke” gags, depicts the very real showbiz threat of comic foil sabotage, while in a sketch like “Order Something” Abbott is simply playing unfairly with Costello’s ignorance of vernacular semiotics (the pressure to buy a meal in a diner is fabricated, for the sake of boyishly impressing a waitress). But Costello’s determination to get it right once and for all is always rendered with an undertone of pessimism; beaten and misunderstood with only his perennial immaturity to blame, Costello wrenches comedy from an intimidating, misleading, and largely self-made hell that, if nothing else, will always be worse than that of his audiences.

Historically speaking, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Volume XVII may be the most essential MST3K DVD package since Rhino issued “Manos, the Hands of Fate” and “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” on one single, hilariously cineastic disc. There’s no Gypsy or Cambot figurine to accompany the two-inch Crow and Tom Servo figurines fans may or may not have been awarded for their diligent, patient purchases over the last few years (insert “wink” emoticon for the benefit of Shout! Factory staffers here), but this season’s four-disc set comprises yet another tempered blend of the program’s various stages, and yet another five hours of camp-value examination as probing as it is tickling.

Once again halving the collection to give equal time to both cast incarnations of the long-running, late-night spoof show, Shout! has dipped deep into MST3K’s chronological barrel to include their first non-KTMA episode: “The Crawling Eye,” which aired on The Comedy Channel in 1989. The inclusion is more rewarding for the insight it provides into the program’s genesis than for pure laughs; the bots get off some great lines as the tentacle-y ocular organs wreak havoc on the inhabitants of the tiny, snowbound mountain town, but Joel’s still awkwardly apologizing for his smart-ass inventions’ behavior at this point, and one can feel that the cast and crew aren’t quite as comfortable with the deprecating-yet-benign tone they’d later embrace with near-religious zeal. Still, it’s fascinating to watch a manifestation of MST3K that believes so wholesomely in its Saturday morning cartoon-grade guinea pig torture premise: While later seasons would wisely defenestrate the smarmily experimental feel for lack of creator Joel Hodgson’s crucially mechanical input, the show’s debut season still fancied itself as a research trailblazer in the field of human torment-by-failed art (just hear the observant comments by Dr. Forrester and Dr. Erhardt in the gawky sketch padding).

Tim is the well-meaning but deaf-to-social-rhythm man who’ll take advantage of the ability to purchase a stripper’s twirler brassiere for his long-suffering (but inconceivably committed) girlfriend Amy on Valentine’s Day, who’ll fondle and subsequently compliment the texture and buoyancy of the bosom of his significant other’s wheelchair-bound grandmother upon request, and who’ll mistake a pair of corporate clients for prostitutes after being goaded against his will to reluctantly anticipate the arrival of sex workers in the first place. We shake our heads upon watching Tim foolishly dither into a clown of mistaken appearances, but that’s not to say his behavioral handicaps don’t inspire empathy. Surely slapping the underage daughter of one’s boss on the rear end if she’s begging for some innocuous titillation from her chaperone can seem like a fine idea until the skin of the palm meets the curve of the buttock a shade too roughly on accident—can’t it?

The jewel of the 16th box is a powerhouse of a sixth season riff on Santa Claus, an English-dubbed Mexican holiday classic wherein Jolly Saint Nick rescues various children of the world from an impish, spandex Satan. (Or, as the denizens of the Satellite of Love would parse it, Santa’s “here to eat candy canes and kick ass, and [he’s] all out of candy canes!”) In the same frenzied league as the earlier, ubiquitously celebrated Santa Claus Conquers the Martians episode, and the similarly-mocked, wintry ethnic oddities of Jack Frost (a freakish Russian fairy tale whose low-rent magic and “mythic” undertones of pedophilia must be seen to be believed), the triumph of Santa Claus over the set’s ancillary inclusions also provides further evidence for the soft criticism that MST3K could only be as good as its filmic targets were abominable, though Mike Nelson’s subsequent classic and contemporary film “riff” projects are never less than entertaining.

One can’t help but feel there’s a competent, gallows humor-infused thriller buried somewhere beneath the camp affectations of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, even if one lacks the will power or desire to persuasively excavate it. The termitic meat of this Faustian exercise sits trapped under multiple, calcified layers of narrative and visual inanity: grubbily ostentatious foreshadowing, ham-fisted private dick-isms that would crinkle Mickey Spillane’s nose, roly-poly Su-thun-ah stereotypes, queasily curdled sexuality, highly unlikely deaths-by-gumbo cauldron, and purple voodoo orgies that make Nick Roeg’s equally flawed Eureka seem well-informed by comparison. From the masterfully shot but grimly artificial seediness of the New York opening to the flagrantly “What a tweest!” letdown of a demonic denouement, there isn’t a single believable or resonant moment in the entire film; even the highly celebrated, jagged-milieu “atmosphere” is more professional than evocative.

The weekly television dramas of the 1950s were in many respects an unruly, dirty-faced brood of ersatz art; unevenly combining dime store progressivism, woolly performance spontaneity, and impressive feats of technical derring-do, they appear now like primitive relics from an era of confoundingly desultory media developments. The prospective canon of kinescopes compiled in the Criterion Collection’s Golden Age of Television set (preserved from a PBS retrospective in the 1980s) includes a few examples of straight-forward dramatization—the clunky, melodramatic A Wind from the South suffers from the ever-neutering “filmed play” syndrome—but most blend flourishes of cinematic grammar (such as the use of prerecorded montages to suggest the passing of time) with the unnatural didacticism of radio speech (where all must be told rather than shown) and arrive at a pluckily alchemical genre of social theater. And for all its curatorial aspirations, one can’t help view the DVD set’s contents as a series of funhouse mirrors unintentionally reflecting the paranoid, conservative zeitgeist of their time.