Harold & Kumar: Stash Box [Blu-Ray]

Are you sometimes forgetful enough that your life would be easier to organize with the aid of a stack of post-it notes? Do you have such a fondness for Harold and Kumar's first adventure that you'd be psyched to own a cheap, plastic hamburger keychain? Does the sight of Neil Patrick Harris riding a unicorn get you unreasonably excited? Do you need a place to store your weed? Even if you answered yes to all of these questions, you still don't need this crass cash-grab. In a box big enough to house the entire silly and vulgar adventures of this present day Cheech and Chong, and still have enough space for a bag of "viewing aids," only Go to Whitecastle and Escape from Guantanamo Bay are included. I guess the boob-, pot- and snack-obsessed odd couple's 3D Christmas offering too recently entered the home video revenue stream to be discounted in an over-priced box set. At least the two films included have the best supplemental material, but you'll have to pop in the DVD of White Castle to get the full experience ― the very funny and very long self-referential menu loop has been omitted on the Blu-Ray version. For the less absurdity-driven and more mean-spirited sequel, Escape from Guantanamo Bay, all of the features are collected on the Blu-Ray disc, including the inventive and engaging "Dude, Change the Movie!" mode. It's basically a "choose your own adventure" version of the film, where an option branch regularly pops up, allowing for minor changes like turning the bottomless party into a topless party, or major shake ups like having Harold convince Kumar not to smoke weed on the plane, or to go for the cock-meat sandwich instead of freedom while in prison, resulting in radically different conclusions. As these features demonstrate, the Harold & Kumar brand has been so giving of time and bonus material in the past that charging an extra 50 bucks for some largely pointless knick-knacks makes Stash Box feel like a malicious attack on fans' wallets. For all the subtlety of the series, and this package, I'm surprised they didn't just include rolling papers and a pipe shaped like Kumar's penis. It would have nearly added enough value to justify the price. Not that the "What Would NPH Do?" sticker isn't worth its weight in Kush.