Our Picks Recommended

Retrofantasma Classic 

You kids today with your CGI and your motion capture! Back in the day, you didn't need a degree in computer animation to make special effects. You just needed a guy with a basement, some models and a lot of patience. I'm talking about Ray Harryhausen, Academy Award lifetime achievement award recipient, who created films featuring old-fashioned stop-motion animation that blew the minds of young kids like Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. It might not have been Transformers knocking over buildings, but those films had personality! You can see for yourself with this double feature of two of his best efforts, drawn from classic mythology.

At 7 p.m. is perhaps his best-known film, 1963's Jason and the Argonauts, with sword-fighting skeletons, a giant living statue and a Hydra. Fifteen minutes after that's over, you get 1958's The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, which shook up the world by being the first stop-motion effects film shot in color. Harryhausen doesn't play around, people: This one has a Cyclops, evil two-headed birds, all kinds of crazy stuff. And bump that Clash of the Titans remake. We spit on that. —Zack Smith