Sagebrush & Spaghetti

  The Sergio Leone Anthology (MGM)

Sergio Leone made westerns like Wagner made ditties. This essential boxed set -- four films with four discs of supplemental material, much of it scholarly and insightful -- shows the Italian director supplanting the elegiac Monument Valley iconography of John Ford with a darker, ruder, more bleak-humored brand of mythmaking. It's all here: the rhythmic alternation of God's-eye vistas and flyspeck close-ups, the epic face-offs in whirling duster coats, the "two beeg eyes" filling the screen as Ennio Morricone's matadorial trumpets and razor-wire guitars sound the degüello. The surprise is Leone's little-seen 1971 masterpiece, Duck, You Sucker, about a priapic peasant (Rod Steiger) and an Irish revolutionary (James Coburn) fighting a class war in 1913 Mexico; it registers today as a haunting, disillusioned rejoinder to radical chic from the opening citation of Mao. It lives up to its title -- no small feat. -- Jim Ridley

Trading Places: "Looking Good, Feeling Good" Edition (Paramount)

Something about Trading Places always felt a little flat. And now it just looks so 1980s -- or '40s, rather, down to its Frank Capra fairy-tale moralizing and use of blackface, which would never fly at this late date. That said, it's funnier than you remembered, punctuated by the best-ever performances of Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and Jamie Lee Curtis; never again would they appear in a film as smart as they are (as illustrated by Norbit, also out this week). The making-of pays appropriate homage to its classy cast: Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche, and Denholm Elliott. And the Paramount-exec promo clip is indispensable; Murphy and Akyroyd sold the pic to their bosses using the word "cock." Astounding. -- Robert Wilonsky

H.O.T.S.

(Anchor Bay)

A godsend to teenage horndogs at the dawn of the VHS/cable boom, this 1979 breastfest has scarcely aged a day -- it's just as insipid as it looked back then, with the volume turned down in your parents' basement. Co-scripted by '70s sex starlet Cheri Caffaro, with all the storytelling savvy of bus-depot porn, the setup pits a rebel sorority of top-heavy hotties against their snooty rivals. The plot is best savored on chapter skip: Do you really need to know why the chick and two crooks are in a hot-air balloon with a bear, or why Danny Bonaduce is getting his 'nads licked by a seal? But pause when director Gerald Seth Sindell unveils his stroke of cinematic genius: a strip-football climax shot from underneath a topless huddle. And the first T&A appears all of 38 seconds into the movie. Like I said: genius. -- Jim Ridley

Fantastic Voyage

(Fox)