Another amazing month of offbeat Blu-ray treats, from sci-fi greats, to Fassbinder upgrades, 3 sensational thrillers starring Jane Fonda, Ingrid Bergman and Yvonne De Carlo, 4 fabulous Universal Studio chillers, an early Kathyrn Bigelow, and an exceptionally depraved Italian shocker.
This Island Earth (Shout! Factory) If you only know this sci-fi classic from Mystery Science Theater 3000’s merciless rip on it, this amazing 4k restoration will cause you to gasp. And for fans of the film, it’s satisfying to see the respect the movie deserves. Rex Reason stars as Dr. Cal Meacham, a scientist who receives mysterious equipment and blueprints to build a communication device that brings him in contact with Exeter (Jeff Morrow), an alien from the dying planet Metaluna. Faith Domergue plays another scientist who ends up kidnapped with Cal aboard a spaceship and hurtling towards the warring planet. The last half-hour of the film is when the movie kicks in, especially introducing the bug-like monsters with crab-like claws that are used as slaves on the planet. With scores of extras, this Blu-ray is just incredible.
Klute (Criterion) Jane Fonda deservedly won an Oscar for her thrilling portray of New York call girl Bree Daniels, who comes in contact with a wily detective (Donald Sutherland) searching for a missing businessman and puts her in the crosshairs of a psychopathic killer. The film works beautifully thanks to the masterful direction by Alan J. Pakula, Fonda’s tough, tart, whip-smart woman and the gritty, exciting portrayal of Manhattan in the 70s. The disc comes with a new interview with Fonda and extras about Alan J. Pakula and documentaries about the making of this terrific film.
Gaslight (Warner Archive) A luminous Ingrid Bergman plays Paula, returning to London after many years with her new husband (Charles Boyer) to her late Aunt’s house in Thornton Square. Her aunt was a famous singer who was mysteriously strangled, her murderer never found. Soon Paula starts to have troubling visions and begins hearing things- the gas lights dim, weird music plays, there are strange sounds in the closed-off attic- she is convinced she is losing her mind. A 17-year-old Angela Lansbury is glorious as a cheeky Cockney maid, Joseph Cotton plays a suspicious detective and a delightful Dame May Whitty is a nosy neighbor. Expertly directed by George Cukor, with astounding set design, a wonderful mystery from beginning to end with a subtle, stunning performance by Bergman, which won her an Oscar. This fabulous-looking Blu-ray also includes the 1940 British version of the film.
Evil Town (Vinegar Syndrome) This bizarre delight began as a Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential) film in 1970 but he abandoned it. It was finished by others and released and died at the box office. The story is actually kind of clever- a town full of senior citizens ward off further aging by kidnapping wayward travelers and having the local doctor (Dean Jagger) remove their pituitary gland to use in a serum that gives the town eternal life. Producer Mardi Rustam picked it back up- inserted many scenes of topless women running from kidnappers and rereleased it on VHS in 1987. This patchwork quilt of a flick is dementedly enjoyable though- if just for Dean Jagger’s unforgettable pronunciation of “pituitary.” I never dreamed I would ever see a restoration of this loony wonder.
Criss Cross (Shout! Factory) Burt Lancaster plays Steve, an armored car driver, whose obsession with Anna (the alluring Yvonne De Carlo) eventually causes him to conspire with Anna’s criminal boyfriend (Dan Duryea) on a holdup with Steve as inside man. Naturally nothing is as it seems and things spiral nightmarishly out of control. A terrific film noir (now with a wonderful 4K restoration) stylishly directed by Robert Siodmak.
BRD Trilogy (Criterion) New Blu-ray transfers of three films by the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder focusing on three women in post-World War II Germany. The Marriage Of Maria Braun stars one of Fassbinder’s muses- Hanna Schygulla as a woman who becomes the mistress of a black soldier after the war, thinking her husband was killed by the Allies. Unfortunately, he returns, which results in an accidental murder. Veronika Voss is a black & white film recording the final days of a silent screen legend Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech), unwholesomely attached to a sinister doctor because of her crippling morphine addiction. Lola is about a building commissioner who becomes obsessed with a gorgeous singer at a brothel- Lola (Barbara Sukowa) and reminiscent of The Blue Angel. Fassbinder’s trilogy was a sardonic exploration of the “economic miracle” of the 1950s in Germany, but each film startlingly different in stylistic approach.
Silent Hill (Shout! Factory) Director Christophe Gans’ (Brotherhood Of the Wolf) adaptation of the 1999 video game stars Radha Mitchell as Rose, a mother desperate to help her adopted daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferdland) who sleepwalks nightly and has scary visions of a town called Silent Hill (which was destroyed and abandoned years ago from a coal fire). Rose drives her daughter to Silent Hill but has a car wreck and when she comes to her daughter is missing. Her search causes her to enter the ghost town, where she is plunged into another dimension filled with frightening cult members and other disturbingly creepy things. I have a loose-tooth affection for a lot of this movie, which doesn’t make much sense but visually is incredibly inventive and surreal and sometimes gorily great.
The Leopard Man (Shout! Factory) Another superior mood-drenched thriller from producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur. What starts as a publicity stunt by a press agent (Dennis O’Keefe) results in a town in New Mexico plagued by violent murders by what appears to be a leopard. Officials are baffled when the body of the large cat is discovered and the killings continue. A scene where a little girl is returning home at night crossing underneath a shadowy wooden bridge is one of the most memorably suspenseful scenes ever.
The Loveless (Arrow) “Boy, where are you going on that motorcycle?” asks a woman to leather-clad 50s biker (Willem Dafoe) changing her tire on the side of the road. “To watch ‘em howl in Daytona,” says Dafoe in Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery’s highly stylized 1981 film. The plot, what there is of it, is about a bunch of cyclists stuck in some town when one of their bikes breaks down who get hassled by uptight locals. The film milks same rootless anger of The Wild One mixed with lots of tough-guy talk and the fetishistic imagery of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. Robert Gordon co-stars as a fellow biker and also did the soundtrack (with additional music by John Lurie). This was Bigelow’s first film but there’s a bar scene, where things spin crazily out of control, that will remind you of what she did later in Near Dark. The young Dafoe looks amazing on screen.
Universal Horror Collection 2 (Shout! Factory) Mad scientists and fiends abound in this sensational follow up box set of chillers from the vault with stunning 2K resolution. Murders In The Zoo stars Lionel Atwell as the fiendish owner of a zoo, pathologically jealous of his wife, who utilizes his animal menagerie to dispatch his enemies. The Mad Ghoul stars George Zucco as a chemistry professor working with an ancient Mayan gas, who transforms his student (David Bruce) into a grave-robbing ghoul searching for fresh hearts. The Mad Doctor Of Market Street has Lionel Atwill as a mad scientist running from San Francisco police who gets shipwrecked on a remote island with a handful of survivors after a boat fire, where the natives elevate Atwill to “God” after he cures the chief’s wife. The Strange Case Of Doctor Rx is more of a comedy/mystery with a sinister killer leaving his “Rx” calling card on the corpses of guilty criminals who were set free by the courts. There is a great extra on the disc “Gloriously Wicked: The Life And Legacy Of Lionel Atwill” which chronicles the great Broadway actor who made it big in Hollywood and his secret life of scandalous orgies at his home where the guests recreated pornographic movies he screened (while he allegedly lorded over the proceedings dressed in a Santa suit).
The Beast In Heat (Severin) One of the more appalling of the mercifully short-lived Nazisploitation Italian shockers. Set during the last days of World War II where the Italian resistance is desperately attacking the Nazi stronghold, while a fiendish female doctor experiments on a short, nude, hairy, horny monster in a cage which she feeds hapless women to. The actor playing the beast- Salvatore Baccaro– was a flower seller outside a film studio who suffered from Acromegaly. What saves this from having to watch in despair is the hilarious dubbing- the female doctor sounds like Judi Dench, and the Italian resistance sounds often like hammy British thespians. Scanned from the 35mm negative, this grindhouse great (also knows as SS Hell Camp) looks amazing and you need to watch the hilarious extra with author Stephen Thrower’s roaringly funny overview and begrudging appreciation of this celluloid atrocity.
Robowar (Severin) Director Bruno Mattai’s deranged mash-up of Robocop and Predator is shot in the Philippines and stars brawny Reb Brown as the leader of a bunch of commandos trying to rescue some missing soldiers only to find themselves fighting an unstoppable killing machine in the jungle. Catherine Hickland shows up and ends up fighting her way to freedom in this ludicrously enjoyable mess. The interviews with the cast are a riot (especially their revenge on a cast member thought to be a pederast). Also included are Catherine Hickland’s home movies joking with the Italian crew in the jungle.
The Reptile (Shout! Factory) This superior Hammer horror film is set in a Cornish village where the locals are dying at an alarming rate from what appears to be heart attacks, but all have snake bites on their necks. Moody and atmospheric thanks to the able direction of John Gilling (The Plague Of The Zombies), the elegant cast and the creepy premise of a cursed, shape-shifting snake woman roaming the moors searching for new victims.
Lust For A Vampire (Shout! Factory) Part of the “Karnstein” films that Hammer Studios introduced with sexy abandon in The Vampire Lovers. A writer (Michael Johnson) moves to a town as in entranced with a beauty Mircalla (Yutte Stensgaard) at a local finishing school, not knowing she is a vampire. Ralph Bates shines as a vampire-infected Renfield-like teacher. I always got a kick out of the cape-wearing Count (Mike Raven) who tries (and fails) to be a Christopher Lee-like screen villain. These later Hammer films don’t get a lot of love, but now seeing them restored, showcasing those vibrant colors, these gothic treats need a re-evaluation. As they say in the movie’s trailer: “Welcome to the finishing school that really does finish you…”
Quatermass And The Pit (Shout! Factory) One of the truly great, intelligent sci-fi movies made for Hammer Studios and directed by Roy Ward Baker. Workmen excavating a London subway find a weird, buried space ship. Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir) is sent in to examine, and slowly realizes that it might be the origin of human species, and that the spacecraft might not be as inanimate as first thought. This builds to a frightening climax that threatens London. The great Nigel Kneale wrote this chiller, which was first done as a BBC mini-series.
Quatermass II (Shout! Factory) Knows as Enemy From Space in the US, another superior sci-fi movie written by Nigel Kneale starring Brian Donlevy as the cranky Professor Quatermass who investigates a small English village beset by a meteor shower. The meteorites break open and infect their host and before long the whole village is in concert planning an alien invasion. An incredibly intelligent and wildly suspenseful film that always looked muddy and washed-out on home video.
Endeavour: Season 6 (PBS) Shaun Evans is just brilliant as the early incarnation of Inspector Morse. In this season, his whole squad has been disbanded but pledge to still solve the unsolved murder of one of their own officers. Through this season, DS Endeavour Morse is brought back to work with his mentor DI Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) at a police station run by some shady cops. The mysteries are just great- one about missing schoolgirls, another about a murder of an astrophysicist and his girlfriend, and also the murder of a chocolate factory owner and an Oxford librarian. This series just seems to get better and better, and Evans (now with a mustache) also directed one of the best episodes.
Dead Of Night (Kino) A 4K restoration of this classic British omnibus of terror tales with a wraparound story about a group of strangers gathered at an old country estate. There’s a young couple who purchase an antique and extremely haunted mirror, a racing car driver with deadly premonitions, etc. But the indelible entry is one about a ventriloquist (Michael Redgrave) and his dummy with a fiendish mind of its own. Ealing Studios brought 4 great directors to helm each story and Redgrave’s performance is a thing of haunting beauty. The disc includes a 75-minute documentary on the film.
Easy Living (Kino) Fabulous screwball comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen (with a script by Preston Sturges) about a simple working girl (Jean Arthur) whose life changes when a financier (Edward Arnold) throws a fur coat out the window and it lands on her. It screws up her relationship with a writer (Ray Milland) and everyone assumes she’s the rich man’s mistress. Absolutely sublime from beginning to end. The audio commentary is by film historian Kat Ellinger.