CHALKDUST MEMORIES: CLASSIC CLASSROOM FILMS

PAST POTPOURRI

By SHAULA CLARK

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The whole "campy vintage educational films compiled for ironic enjoyment" thing has been done before (by no less formidable archive festishists than MST3K and the A/V Geeks), but Chalkdust Memories actually holds its own. All your basic classroom-enrichment food groups are covered here-sex, drugs, safety, the scourge of Communism-and most of it's highly fortified with vitamin WTF. Highlights include a vaguely racist film about syphilis; a Jimmy Stewart-narrated short on "tomorrow's drivers"; a rambling, off-the-rails condemnation of LSD; and the Cold War film Survival Under Atomic Attack, complete with chilling then-fresh Hiroshima footage. But two entries especially stand out, each for very different reasons: Facts of Life turns out to be not a sex ed film but pure balls-out hucksterism-it's actually a commercial hawking thinly disguised strokebooks to audiences at drive-ins (!); Hooked, meanwhile, is a rare antidrug film that ditches the shrill sermonizing and instead lets former addicts tell their own stories with heartbreaking honesty.

PASSPORT

RATED | NR

RELEASE DATE | 7.17.07

PRICE | $9.98