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Survival Research Laboratories: 10 Years of Robotic Mayhem

Who wouldn't want to see machines destroy other machines? Long before Battle Bots, Terminator and the Matrix series, Mark Pauline and his collective of avant guarde engineers have been staging demolition derbies featuring custom built mechanical monsters. They spit fire, explode, squash metal, whack off parts and grind each other up - within feet of onlookers packed into a parking lot or highway underpass. The aim is to create danger and provoke the audience out of its passivity. This compendium of four past performances is the best of their influential grunge theater and robotic art.

-- KK

Survival Research Laboratories: 10 Years of Robotic Mayhem
Directed by Jonathan Reiss
2004, 60 min
$18, DVD

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Rentable from Netflix

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America's Funniest Home Videos

Go ahead and laugh. We do. This is slapstick comedy at its best and worst. Despite what our mothers told us, we laugh at other people falling down, getting hit, hitting themselves, throwing up, playing pranks, getting pranked, and being very stupid. I can't explain it, but no matter how many different ways you see it, it's still funny to watch a baby whack her daddy in the groin, or the bride fall into her wedding cake, or the idiot sled into the parked car. Without commercials, this version of the TV show is relentless in its delivery of visual gags.

-- KK

America's Funniest Home Videos: Volume 1
Directed by Vin Di Bona
1990, 720 min.
$36, DVD

Available from Amazon

Rentable from Netflix

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