Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		3.5

The Adam Rifkin Film Festival Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Brian Orndorf June 28, 2023

Adam Rifkin is a cult film director who’s been making movies for the last 30 years, perhaps best known as the helmer of 1991’s “The Dark Backward,” 1994’s “The Chase,” and 1999’s wildly entertaining “Detroit Rock City.” He’s not someone who’s experience tremendous success in Hollywood, but he’s kept going, making odd pictures and surviving quickie shoots, doing the work to remain employable. It turns out, moviemaking was always in Rifkin’s blood, with “The Adam Rifkin Film Festival” collecting short endeavors created during his formative years. The release is obviously odd, but it does offer those who enjoy Rifkin’s creative voice a chance to see where his sense of humor and love of visual chaos came from, with 22 offerings detailing a profound love of mischief, parody, and animation.

Shorts:

“The Lady Giant” (2:27)
“Monster BBQ” (2:45)
“The Demon Dog” (2:11)
“Lyclops” (3:26)
“Canned Rabbi and Other Shorts” (18:35)
“Untitled Atomic Bomb Frankenstein Film” (3:10)
“War is a 4 Letter Word” (2:21)
“The Burglar from Out of the Dishwasher” (4:07)
“The Paperboy Crimes” (2:55)
“You Are About to Witness a Crime” (2:44)
“Murder Can Kill You” (19:43)
“Cheep Remake of Alien” (:58)
“Armageddon” (7:33)
“Oh My” (1:00)
“Pork and Beans and Other Shorts” (10:07)
“A Cartoon That I Made That’s Almost Entirely Blurry” (3:37)
“Untitled Film Ephemera Montage” (3:21)
“Untitled Man Goes to Work” (2:11)
“Cornstawker” (4:16)
“A Pseudo-Intellectual Film” (8:38)
“Shuffle Shuffle Step Step” (9:34)
“Pervis Proves His Worth” (16:06)

The Adam Rifkin Film Festival Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The AVC encoded image presentation for "The Adam Rifkin Experience" is sourced from a variety of film and video segments, and everything here is quite aged. Detail isn't the point of this journey, and clarity is elusive, offering a basic understanding of screen activity, with blurriness even part of one of the shorts. Color has some fade, but a simple sense of hues is present.

The Adam Rifkin Film Festival Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The 2.0 DTS-HD MA mixes on the shorts also deal with age-related issues, keeping things expectedly uneven. Technical limitations are also encountered. Unintelligibility isn't a major issue, but some shorts certainly show more wear and tear than others.

The Adam Rifkin Film Festival Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Booklet (26 pages) contains an oral history of the Adam Rifkin experience, by Elijah Drenner and Scout Tafoya.

• Interviews (HD) are video conference discussions of Adam Rifkin with Adam Rifkin (19:27), his sister Lauren Hartman (7:46), and actors Greg Anderson (13:19), Adam Bitterman (11:42), Tom Hodges (7:15), and Miles Dougal (5:58).

• "Donahue" (44:36, SD) is a 1981 episode of the daytime talk show, which focuses on children experiencing divorce in their households. A young Adam Rifkin and sister Lauren appear on the panel, with the future filmmaker seemingly having some fun keeping things light while sensationalist T.V. ghoul Phil Donahue tries to make the kids feel bad about everything. Cruelly, there isn't an audio commentary from Rifkin concerning this extremely bizarre appearance.

The Adam Rifkin Film Festival Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

"The Adam Rifkin Film Festival" celebrates everything Adam Rifkin, providing a cinematic journey through his early years of creative expression in suburban Illinois, where the young man with access to a camera would employ family members and friends to star in his movies. It's an odyssey that highlights a ravenous appetite for tomfoolery and fandom, with cinema from the 1970s and early '80s offering direct inspiration for Rifkin, who aims to charm with his habitual silliness. The actual outside appeal of "The Adam Rifkin Film Festival" is open for debate, as the viewing experience is akin to watching a stranger's home movies without the stranger around to help put everything into context. Introductory information cards are provided, but there's a lot of unexplained, deeply personal activity in these offerings. Of course, if you're a fan of Rifkin, the creative adventure is interesting to see, with so much of the helmer's attitude and impishness present in the pictures he made as a boy. He's not necessarily working to hone his craft, but simply investigating the possibilities of experimental and comedic endeavors. It's a strange Blu-ray release, but I'm sure there's an audience for it.