Welcome back to another edition of The Digital Wire. For this week’s roundup of the coolest upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release news, we have a sorely neglected summer sci-fi thrill ride, an epic documentary about one of the world’s greatest heavy metal bands, a Bigfoot movie made by a stand-up comedian, a pair of obscure westerns starring a baby-faced Jack Nicholson, and an Oscar-winning comedy starring Dustin Hoffman in drag.

Below you’ll find info on several future home video releases complete with technical specs, release dates, and links to pre-order at Amazon. We would greatly appreciate it if you use those links to order because a small percentage of each order helps keep this website running at max power.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
Coming to DVD
Directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
Starring Jessie Misskelley, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, Michael Moore, Lorri Davis, Mark Byers, Terry Hobbs, Burk Sauls, Dale Griffis, Natalie Maines, Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky
HBO
Aired: January 12, 2012

The new documentary, Paradise Lost: Purgatory, third in the Paradise Lost series, attains a sense of closure in the case of the West Memphis Three. Recalling and reprising events from the previous two documentaries, filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky also follow the developments of the preceding ten years, leading up to the release of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley in 2011.

Being a long-time believer of the innocence of, and a supporter of, the West Memphis Three, and this now being the year of 2012, I still find it difficult to believe that the convicted men are now free. I was always hopeful they would one day see freedom and liberty, but had a lingering, deep, dark fear that it would never be in my lifetime.

Just a few days ago, filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were on hand to film a new ending for their hit HBO documentary series, Paradise Lost. The moment was was when the West Memphis Three“”who had been imprisoned for almost two decades for the murders of three young boy scouts””were set free after DNA testing that didn’t exist when they were convicted proved that none of them were involved.

Some rather prestigious celebrity names were very supportive of the trio, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, and their release, doing everything in their power to see justice done. They include Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins, and Natalie Maines, as well as Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit director Peter Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh.

The upcoming release of Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, the third and likely final film in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky‘s award-winning HBO documentary series chronicling the strange case of the West Memphis Three and the circumstances that resulted in their wrongful imprisonment nearly two decades ago, just got a radically different ending.

Today all three members of the group — Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin — were released on suspended sentences with time served after spending seventeen years behind bars. They were convicted in 1994 for the brutal slaying of three 8-year-old Boy Scouts — Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers — in the wooded Robin Hood Hills area of West Memphis, Arkansas. The killing was said to have been committed as part of a Satanic ritual. Echols, who was 18 years old at the time, was given the death penalty, while Misskelley, 17, was given life imprisonment plus 40 years, and Baldwin, 16, was given life. Due to the lack of DNA testing available at the time and the questions that arose surrounding the police investigation and the three teenagers’ subsequent conviction, the case became a focal point of controversy across the country. It wasn’t until 2007 that testing proved that none of the DNA collected at the scene of the murders belonged to the defendants.