4/5 Amazing Piece of Film History
  by A. Kieffer-higgins (Boston, MA, USA)
I have always loved this movie and I was thrilled to be able to get it on DVD.

5/5 dvd of Illustrated Man
  by Michael Lowenthal (Arlington, Texas)
I love this movie. Its been a long time since Ive seen real acting by actors from Hollywood. Rod Stieger is beyond excellent as an actor and would put to shame most actors today.



5/5 Good and creepy
  by R. Hinderer (Puyallup, WA)
I bought this for nostalgia purposes. My brothers and I stayed up and watched this creepy program several times in a row all night/morning long back in the early 70's (because there was nothing else on, and the station played it over and over again...). Personally, I see a parallel between this show and how life was around the late 60's/early 70's - , dad looking for work and us boys wondering where we're gonna live next.

4/5 Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man
  by Susan Thrapp (washington state)
this dvd arrived in excellent time and excellent condition. It is just as good as i remembered.

4/5 Bradbury's classic brought to life
  by wiredweird (Earth, or somewhere nearby)
Perhaps this was cutting edge fantasy forty years ago. Today, it might better be called a "cult classic," enjoyable as much for its dated look and effects as for its association with Bradbury's brilliant set of short stories, The Illustrated Man. This captures just a few of the short stories originally collected in the IM anthology. It starts with "The Veldt," one of the greats of the creepy-little-kids genre. The next story tracks astronauts stranded on Venus, back when Venus's shroud concealed a verdant monsoon instead of a burning desert, baking under sulfuric acid clouds. It ends with a tragic (if somewhat predictable) story of intellectual hubris gone wrong. The whole set is bound together by the Illustrated Man, whose magical tattoos act out these scenes - or cause them to appear in the viewers' minds.

The illustrations - Steiger's painted-on tattoos - form another story in the extras section of this disk. That goes through the months of planning, followed by long hours of intensive work transferring the images onto his skin. Today, the job would probably be done post-production in the bowels of a compute farm. Back then, it was real ink on real skin, producing a Peter Max-ish look that evokes Yellow Submarine.

Nostalgia buffs and Bradbury completists will enjoy this immensely. It dates from the era of the original Star Trek series, though, and carries some of the same look and acting style, for better or worse. If that works for you, great - it works for me.

-- wiredweird