Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson's dark glimpse into the rotting heart of the American dream baffled audiences and many critics when it was released in 1998. Many didn't know how to react to its hellish carnival atmosphere. I suspect the film made people uneasy because of its refusal, much like Thompson's novel, to simplify its balancing act between hysterical farce and sobering reflection. In a movie market which usually demands that a film be one thing or another for the purposes of consumption, Fear and Loathing was not easily digestible.

Showing resistance to smooth processing is to the movie’s credit. Once the frenzy surrounding the first release dies down, films can open themselves to more careful attention. This is often the case with cult favorites. The reappraisal always seems to swell slowly from early underground enthusiasm into a more general appreciation as time passes, and Criterion's release of a two-disc set of Fear and Loathing is a sign of the quality of the ultimate evaluation of the film.

As adaptations of literary works go, this film ranks among the finest. Beginning with the gloriously mad and skeweringly poetic tenor of Thompson's prose, the film elaborates on the substance of the text, going beyond the proscription of plot details instead of just incorporating them, yet never diverging from the original's intent. Film and book exist in a harmonious constellation.

The first disc contains the film itself as well as commentary tracks, deleted scenes and the usual grab bag of subtitles. The deleted scenes are few, but rewarding. Assembled from work prints, the sequences are washed-out and feature raw location sound, and yet are all the more compelling for it, as if one were actually watching Thompson, as his alter ego Raoul Duke, in his element. Of particular delight is a prolonged routine entitled the "DA from GA," a conversation between Johnny Depp's Duke, Benicio Del Toro's Dr. Gonzo and some baffled law official who is trying to come to terms with the savage pair's free-wheeling expose of the local rampant Satanist cults. It's clear why these three scenes couldn't find a place in the film, each being an extended side-step. Their removal from a film which could have been composed of nothing but a labyrinth of secret passages and manic asides stands as the proof that there has to be some kind of ultimate line drawn in the narrative sand, however unfortunate that may be.

The commentaries emerge as the other treasure on the first disc. First and foremost is the dazzling performance/recollection of Thompson himself, watching the film while being questioned by one of the producers and his assistant. His raspy mumbling and occasional bursts of wild hooting only compliment the hilarious oddness of listening to someone react to an impersonation of themselves; it's "a little freaky" as Thompson says. While Gilliam, Depp and Del Toro's tracks are equally as interesting, they are nowhere as twistedly monumental. The only slightly frustrating moment comes near the end when Thompson's "handlers" draw his attention away from the film to engage him with psuedo-profound probings about "the death of the American dream."

The second disc is completely given over to additional materials, broken up into sections entitled "The Film" and "The Source." Aside from the usual compliment of still galleries, collected production designs and marketing campaign information such as trailers, there’s a wide range of little treasures to be waded through. These gems include a 1978 BBC television special following Thompson around Hollywood and archival footage of Oscar Acosta, the model for Del Toro's Dr. Gonzo, reading from his novel "Revolt of the Cockroach People." The Acosta footage, almost hypnotic in its simplicity, shows the one-time Dr. Gonzo standing up on a stage with all of his majestic, imposing mass and performing, in a halting, impassioned style, a painful recollection of watching a dead young boy being worked over by a team of pathologists.

Along with the BBC piece is a short video documentary, reportedly from a longer work-in-progress portrait of the writer being compiled by filmmaker Wayne Ewing, detailing Thompson's visit to the set to film a fleeting cameo appearance. The BBC film has a far more coherent, if a bit too sensational, agenda, but Ewing's video is compelling in the same way as watching a boozed-up Broadway belter go charging the stage to scare off pretenders to the microphonic throne. Along with these iconoclastic depictions, there’s a further section which features Johnny Depp reading snippets from his florid correspondence with Thompson as well as a rather lousy fragment from the book being performed on tape by a less than rousing Jim Jarmusch and Maury Chaykin.

If all of this smacks of a borderline case of sycophantic hero-worship, I suppose that, on some level, it would have been nearly impossible for the DVD to avoid becoming anything less than adoring of its progenitor. Which is not to say that the celebration of Thompson's, and to a much lesser extent Acosta's, maniacal journey should not be a heroic one; after all, how often is a modern classic recognized as such while there is still an opportunity to pick the brain of its creator.

(Film originally released by Universal Pictures and rated "R" for pervasive extreme drug use and related bizarre behavior, strong language, and brief nudity.)