Book Club is a film for women of a certain age. That age is somewhere younger than 67, the age of the four lifelong female friends who are the main characters in the film. Anyone that age or more, and anyone who knows women of that age or higher, will know how fake this movie is.

The four 67-year-olds who decide to spice up their lives after reading the trashy 50 Shades of Grey and its sequels in their book club are played by two 72-year-olds, a 65-year-old, and an 80-year-old.

72-year-old Diane Keaton is top-billed as the addle-brained widow of an accountant. On a plane to Arizona to visit her 40-ish daughters, she meets 62-year-old Andy Garcia, a pilot and self-made millionaire with a magnificent home in beautiful Sedona, who falls madly in love with her. She has a choice to make between moving in with her daughters or going for the gusto with Garcia. In real life, the Garcia character wouldn’t give her a second look, or if he did, would get away from her as fast as he could after the plane landed.

80-year-old Jane Fonda is second-billed as the never-married wealthy owner of a thriving Los Angeles hotel who reconnects with a lover of forty years ago, played by 68-year-old Don Johnson. Her story is that although she has had sex with many men, and continues to do so, she can’t fall asleep in a bed with any man until her second go-around with Johnson. After wooing her unsuccessfully, Johnson gets on a plane to return to New York but comes back. In real life, the Johnson character would have kept going.

72-year-old Candice Bergen is third-billed as a Federal Court judge, the only one of the four characters who looks, sounds and acts like someone of her age. Sadly, though, she doesn’t find anyone half as interesting as Keaton and Fonda do. She hasn’t had sex since divorcing her husband, 68-year-old Ed Begley, Jr., eighteen years earlier. Encouraged to try on-line dating, she is saddled with losers played by 70-year-old Richard Dreyfuss and 74-year-old Wallace Shawn.

65-year-old Mary Steenburgen is fourth-billed as the only happily married woman in the group, a restaurant owner and chef who sponsors an annual talent show. Trying to find new sparks in her marriage to 74-year-old Craig T. Nelson, she spikes his beer with Viagra in a bar from which they drive home with him in a very uncomfortable state. They’re stopped by a female police officer for added embarrassment.

Steenburgen does get to perform a tap dance at her own talent show which conjures up memories of her Oscar-winning performance in Melvin and Howard, but there is no similar compensation for Keaton whose Annie Hall mannerisms got old a long time ago and Fonda who looks glamorous but more anorexic than well-exercised with her red wig and form-fitting attire.

Book Club was helmed by first-time director Bill Holderman, an associate of Robert Redford, who produced several of his films including A Walk in the Woods. It is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Norman Z. McLeod’s 1938 film Merrily We Live owes as much to his 1937 film Topper as it does to Gregory La Cava’s 1936 film My Man Godfrey to which it is most often compared.

Three cast members from Topper, Constance Bennett, Billie Burke, and Alan Mowbray, are in Merrily We Live and a fourth, Patsy Kelly, would join the Topper team with 1941’s Topper Returns featuring Burke and Mowbray, but not Bennett, who was replaced in that one with Joan Blondell.

Brian Aherne, Ann Dvorak, Tom Brown, Bonita Granville, and Clarence Kolb are also on hand in Merrily We Live, and they’re all very good as are Bennett, Mowbray, and Kelly, but the film belongs to Burke in the only role for which she was nominated for an Oscar. Her character is even more delightfully ditzy than the one she first played in Dinner at Eight, a variation of which she would frequently return to throughout her later lengthy career.

ClassicFlix’s beautifully restored Blu-ray is lightyears ahead of the dismal DVD long on the market.

If you’re looking for more of Burke opposite Topper’s Roland Young, check out ClassicFlix’s recent Blu-ray restoration of 1938’s The Young in Heart.

One of the great novels of the 20th Century, Norman Mailer’s 1948 take on the war in the Pacific, The Naked and the Dead, was made into a film intended for release in 1957 by RKO before it went bankrupt. Its distribution was taken over by Warner Bros. in 1958. Never on home video in the U.S., it has at long last been given a superb Blu-ray restoration by Warner Archive.

Aldo Ray is the nasty sergeant, Cliff Robertson is the sympathetic lieutenant, Raymond Massey is the stern general, William Campbell, Richard Jaeckel, James Best, Joey Bishop, and Jerry Paris are among the men, and Lili St. Cyr is the stripper who suggests the naked counterbalance to the dead.

It was directed by Raoul Walsh (Battle Cry), photographed by Joseph LaShelle (Laura), and scored by Bernard Herrmann (Psycho)

Universal has released the last two Blu-ray sets in its Complete Legacy Collection series. Joining Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy are The Invisible Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Invisible Man features the previous Blu-ray release of the 1933 original starring Claude Rains, along with 1940’s The Invisible Man Returns starring Vincent Price, The Invisible Woman starring Virginia Bruce, 1942’s Invisible Agent starring Jon Hall, 1944’s The Invisible Man’s Revenge starring Jon Hall in a different role, and 1951’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, all of which have their virtues.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon features the previously released 1954 original starring Richard Carlson and Julie Adams, along with 1955’s Revenge of the Creature starring John Agar and Lori Nelson, and 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us starring Jeff Morrow and Rex Reason. 3D versions of the first two are included as extras.

This week’s new releases include Hereditary and the Blu-ray release of Scenes from a Marriage.