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Mean cuisine

'MEET THE BLANDS ! They're square ... They're in LOVE ... AND they kill people." The tag line of Paul Bartels's 1982 black comedy Eating Raoul (Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, $19.95) may play off poster ads for 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, but it's also reminiscent of the sensationalistic ad copy for 1970's The Honeymoon Killers – and it isn't the only time bald Bartel nods to Leonard Kastle's lovers-who-kill tale. Eating Raoul's first glimpse of Mary Bland (Mary Woronov) resembles The Honeymoon Killers' initial gander at Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler). But whereas Nurse Beck pitches a fit and storms out of the hospital, her Bland counterpart administers tasteless medicine from the get-go. When a patient ogles her, she orders him to strip, then pages a male nurse to administer an enema.

Bartel owes a debt to Buñuel's bourgeoisie-basting and an assortment of bad-taste cannibal commentaries – most overtly, Fassbinder protégé Ulli Lommel's 1973 The Tenderness of the Wolves – but The Honeymoon Killers provides the prototype for his satire. In Kastle's only film, after lonely-hearted Beck strikes up a correspondence with a gigolo (Tony LoBianco), a shared love of crime soon blossoms. Though Eating Raoul's Paul (played by Bartel) and Mary Bland happen upon homicide by accident – after a swinger corners Mary in their apartment, Paul fends him off with a swift skillet stroke to the head – they're quick to transform it into a get-rich-quick scheme so they can buy a happy home. Or make that a house, one they hope to remodel into a profitable restaurant that Americanizes various cuisines. Its name? Chez Bland.

The victims in The Honeymoon Killers display at least one form of obnoxiousness, from yahoo patriotism to Jesus-freak stinginess, yet each death is more disturbing than the last, thanks to Kastle's cringingly realistic depictions of violence. In comparison, Bartel brings a queen's light touch to the U.S. of Assholishness and the topic of murder. His gallery of fetishists have money to burn until they're dispatched with a clang! to the cranium. Prim, proper, and puritanical Paul and Mary – who sleep in separate twin beds – meet their match when lusty locksmith Raoul (Robert Beltran) stumbles on their scheme; the sole wholly likable character is a dominatrix who tricks to feed her baby.

Bartel shot Eating Raoul when he could, raising the meager $350,000 budget from family and friends; his supporting cast includes regulars such as Don Steele, Ed Begley Jr., and the always fantastic Edie McClurg (as a kinky suburbanite: "We're into B&D but not S&M. We met at the A&P."). Columbia's DVD treatment lacks special features, and the transfer is shoddy, but along with 1975's prescient Death Race 2000 – which outfits David Carradine as a mystery figure long before Kill Bill and allows Bartel to nelly up the action genre, lampooning gladiator-style reality-TV spectacle in the process – this is the late director's best work. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Here on Earth

Nobody other than my housemate would watch it with me. When we dressed up as Liz and Maria for Halloween and walked around the Castro, by 2 a.m. only one lonely, ardent fan had identified us. I couldn't figure out why. Roswell, a 1999-2002 show that began on the WB, tragically migrated to UPN, then got slam-dunked into the dustbin of sci-fi shows, was clearly the best thing about adolescence to come to television since those 19 episodes of My So Called Life.

Populated by teenagers from outer space, their human allies, a shadowy team of alien-haters hell-bent on discovery, and a scattering of parents (including one played by John Doe), Roswell was built on the love between a soulful extraterrestrial named Max Evans (Jason Behr) and the equally dreamy high school sophomore, Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby), whose life he mysteriously saves in the pilot episode to the strains of Sarah McLachlan. With the exception of Starman, there isn't a lot of data about alien-human dating, and just waiting for Max and Liz to decide it was OK to make out provided enough tension to fuel practically the whole first season, collected here (20th Century Fox Television, $59.98). Story lines involving other members of their alien-human alliance – particularly Max's compatriots Isabelle (Katherine Heigl) and Michael (Brendan Fehr) and Liz's close friend Maria (Majandra Delfino) – were equally compelling and sometimes more complex.

What the show did well, at least for a while, is lyrically document the exhilarations and anxieties of adolescence by including the experiences of the truly out of place – giving new weight to the term universal. Because the thing about teen aliens, at least as envisioned by executive producer Jason Katims, who wrote the pilot and several other episodes (and not coincidentally also helped document the lives of preverbal teenagers on My So Called Life), is that they're kind of like alienated teens.

They have painful, relentless crushes, they don't trust authority figures, and they often feel overwhelmed by loneliness, by not knowing where they belong, by longing for someone on their own highly sensitive wavelength. Luckily for them, one of their gifts – which also include the ability to rearrange molecular structures, save lives, and reheat fajitas with their bare hands – is the capacity to let people see into their souls. Crap as that sounds, stargazing never looked as heart-stoppingly sexy and poignantly romantic as it did on the WB during this short-lived era of teen programming. (Lynn Rapoport)