Alex Cox Coming Back To DVD In A Big Way

San Francisco-based distributor Microcinema International has announced they will be rounding up half a dozen films by cult director Alex Cox (“Repo Man”, “Sid and Nancy”) for DVD release.

New to the U.S. on DVD is “Searchers 2.0,” which serves as something of an unofficial sequel to the John Ford-directed western “The Searchers” starring John Wayne. The film follows two out-of-work actors traveling to Arizona to face a filmmaker that terrorized them early in their careers. The Roger Corman-produced film had a very limited handful of screenings in 2008, so the Microcinema release marks the first opportunity for most of us to check the film out. The film features a soundtrack of original music by frequent Cox collaborator Dan Wool that you can pick up on iTunes.

Also new to DVD in the U.S. is Cox’s 1991 film “Highway Patrolman,” a film about a young man rising through the ranks of the highway patrol in Mexico where he encounters a system of bribes and drug trafficking that challenges his world view. Other releases include the adaptation of the Jorge Luis Borges 1942 short story “Death and the Compass” as well as “Three Businessmen,” “Revenger’s Tragedy,” and “Straight to Hell Returns.” “Straight to Hell Returns” is actually an updated version of Cox’s film “Straight to Hell” that was originally released in 1986 with some new scenes and added violence. How necessary these updates are to the film is dubious, but it probably has something to do with “Straight to Hell” already having a DVD available.

More recently, Cox directed the not-a-sequel to “Repo Man” called “Repo Chick” (shot almost entirely on greenscreen) which Cox describes on his website as “a girly film, and a new take on the age-old crisis of capitalism, or, how to make the most money out of fleecing the poor.” We took a look at the trailer earlier this year and it is stunningly campy.

Here’s a look at a scene from “Searchers 2.0,” which makes it quite clear that the similarities between itself and the Ford original end at the title. There are no release dates set yet for these titles.