Martin Baker

Majestic animals we deem beautiful are well documented. Their stories are celebrated while we appropriate their regality, elegance and grace to adorn our company logos, be our sporting mascots and represent our families on crests. Then there's the other animals, the aesthetic outsiders we don't consider cute or cuddly. The critters we tend to laugh at or revile simply because they don't fit into what we deem as beautiful. The animals selected by natural selection to be beaten with the ugly stick. This is the time for the World's Weirdest Animal Faces to shine! A celebration of respectable irreverence, revealing the extraordinarily weird features these creatures possess.

“The Black Sabbath Story, Volume One” traces the roots and origins of Black Sabbath on an album by album basis and features rare performance footage including N.I.B. Paranoid, and War Pigs. Watch Ozzy and company slay the 300,000 plus crowd at California Jam 1974 with a blistering rendition of Children of the Grave. Black Sabbath is a highly visual band and one of the earliest metal groups to experiment with promotional videos. Their hilarious video for Sabbath Bloody Sabbath captures the spirit of similar videos put out by The Beatles. There are a couple of other songs here captured live from the “Never Say Die” tour including Snowblind, Symptom of the Universe, and Rock ’n’ Roll Doctor. All of these performances are professionally shot and Warner Bros. shows them uncut and without narration. “The Black Sabbath Story, Volume One” covers all the bases of the Ozzy years.

From Antiquity to the year 2000, the epic of hemp, told by itself. Religion, war, rebellion, the life of this plant has been so linked with that of mankind that for once we thought it right to let "Cannabis Sativa" speak for itself. Hemp first appeared in the Far East about 12,000 years before Christ. In daily life "Cannabis Sativa" or hemp was used for making cloth paper and bows. In sacred use it was a medicine and was used in many religious uses in India and with the Scythians. The twentieth century establishes the duality of the plant. In Europe as in China, hemp is used in the textile industry while it is used once more medically in the treatment of numerous disorders. Disadvantaged by the interdictions which it incurs as a psychotropic herb, hemp is a real economic and ecological problem today.

THE MAGIC WEED traces the story of the Cannabis plant, which has a ten thousand year history in human culture. With its origins in China, its uses have ranged from medicine, clothing, war, feed stock, and of course, recreational. Also explored in this documentary is the American relationship with hemp, including its ban during the 1920s.