By some strange cosmic screwing, I managed to miss Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle when it first played in cinemas. Now, thankfully, the film has been re-released in a special DVD edition, complete with a number of new extras, including—wait for it—an extended trailer for the sequel, due out later this month.

This is a stoner movie, and since I’m no stoner, I recruited one of my best stoner friends to watch Harold & Kumar with, just in case some of the humour went over my head. The set-up is simple: our heroes Harold and Kumar smoke a huge joint and are then fixated on eating White Castle cuisine (it’s a fairly nasty American fast-food chain). They set out to find a White Castle outlet, but run into any and all manner of nutcases along the way.

In one memorable sequence, the two young men hide in a bathroom stall in the ladies room, only to hear two hot chicks engage in a game of “Battleshits,” in which they attempt to out-do each other with their diarrhea. This totally grosses out our heroes, who must run screaming from the bathroom. A knee-slapper, if ever there was one. Even my stoner buddy gonged this movie. And just to prove we weren’t snobs about gross-out humour, we watched John Waters’ Polyester too.

In slightly classier DVD news, Kurt Maetzig’s classic East German film The Rabbit Is Me, banned during the Cold War due to its condemnation of the repressive East German regime, is now out in an impressive DVD edition. An extraordinary film.