Boy, they are plenty of cinematic Valentines available on Blu-ray this month. From the uncut version of the well-loved slasher My Bloody Valentine to a rare, crackpot Serge Gainsbourg film starring Joe Dallesandro & Jane Birkin. There’s trash classics Kitten With A Whip and The Oscar, and a fascinating Joseph Losey film with a script by Harold Pinter. A landmark birth-of-a-baby exploitation classic. Not to mention a mesmerizing Pasolini film starring Terence Stamp. Start spreading these hearts around.
Kitten With A Whip (Universal). John Forsythe plays a well-respected politician, whose family is away visiting relatives. He discovers a strange girl- Jody (Ann-Margret)- who has broken into his house, and tries to help her out. What he doesn’t know is that she has just escaped from a juvenile facility after stabbing a matron. Jody ends up blackmailing him by threatening to ruin his career by claiming he raped her. She then throws a wild party at the politician’s house for her degenerate friends, and forces him to drive them all to Mexico. Ann-Margret is at her sex-kittenish peak in this 1964 trash masterpiece. The Blu-ray comes with no extras but looks spectacular.
My Bloody Valentine (Scream Factory) The 1981 slasher classic about a crazed miner running around cutting out hearts with his pickax on Valentine’s Day is given the deluxe treatment on this special edition. Directed by George Mihalka, and shot in Canada, this was heavily cut by the MPAA at the time, and now all the gore scenes have been put back (from a 4K restoration from the film’s uncut camera negative) so you can see what you missed. And trust me, there’s a lot that was hacked-out at the time. The notorious laundromat scene (with a body in the dryer) is particularly extended, as is the nasty “shower head” sequence. Included are copious documentaries about the making of the film and a filmed 35th anniversary reunion on stage of some of the original cast. I can’t tell you how much fun it was revisiting my slasher “roots”.
Underwater! (Warner Archive) A 1955 color adventure yarn about diving for sunken treasure in the Caribbean produced by Howard Hughes as an opportunity to showcase curvaceous Jane Russell in a swimsuit. Richard Egan stars as Johnny, an ex-Navy man diving with his wartime buddy Dominic (Gilbert Roland) who think they have discovered a sunken vessel containing a priceless jewel-encrusted Madonna. Jane Russell plays Johnny’s hot-blooded Cuban wife, and Lori Nelson is Dominic’s love interest. Gorgeous looking on Blu-ray (they filmed in Mexico and Hawaii and the views are luminous in color). Way too much underwater footage, though, as the merry crew battle sharks to find their treasure. The song “Cherry Pink & Apple Blossom White” premiered here and the film includes Mambo-king Perez Prado and his orchestra, who made the tune a huge hit.
Je t’aime moi non plus (Kino) A 4k restoration of a loony, little-seen 1976 film by Serge Gainsbourg that plays like the ultimate anti-erotic crackpot romance. Set in American, but feeling like it’s unfolding on another planet, studly Joe Dallesandro plays Krassky, a gay garbage man driving a Mack truck with his hot-headed boyfriend- Padovan (Hugues Quester). They roll up to truck-stop and Krassky becomes enamored of the boyish-looking waitress there named Johnny (Jane Birkin), which makes the boyfriend insanely jealous. Boris (Reinhard Kolldhoff) is Johnny’s brutal, farting boss who disapproves by saying, “Queers- I can smell them 20 yards away.” But Krassky & Johnny’s romantic trysts are usually interrupted when her screams of pain get them thrown out of hotels. (He can only make love to her by fucking her up the ass.) A young Gerard Depardieu plays a saintly figure riding a white horse who smells his fingers after grabbing his crotch. He tells a flirting Padovan he probably shouldn’t screw him because his “tool” has hospitalized too many guys already. A Saturday night dance is interrupted by women who are forced to do a humiliating strip tease. Gainsbourg was a real Renaissance man- he was a songwriter, poet, painter, author- he wrote and directed this film and composed the jaunty piano score and the lilting theme song “Je t’aime” which was a hit in France and banned in other countries because of its slyly suggestive lyrics. Joe Dallesandro does a fabulous and funny new interview on the making of the film, and there’s another extra with Jane Birkin and Dallesandro interviewed on stage at Lincoln Center.
Accident (Kino) Director Joseph Losey survived the blacklist in the 50s by moving to England. He ended up a perfect interpreter of author Harold Pinter’s screenplays such as The Servant and The Go-Between. Losey added a chilly intelligence and sardonic archness which was a perfect fit for Pinter’s fiendishly clever dialogue. This is a lesser known effort with a stellar cast, and I think it’s spellbinding. Dirk Bogarde plays a married Oxford professor who falls for a pretty student Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) who is engaged to another student (Michael York) he is fond of. Stanley Baker plays a colleague of Bogarde’s who is secretly sleeping with Anna. The film is framed by a devastating car accident which haunts this intriguing and under-appreciated 1967 drama.
Mom And Dad (Kino Classics) Gather around, children. In ye olden days, the only way an exploitation director could only show a woman naked on screen was either in a nudist camp film or a birth-of-a-baby movie like producer Kroger Babb’s sleaze classic. The film is about sweet, virginal Joan (June Carlson) who meets a fast-talking guy at the school dance and loses her head (and her hymen) in the moonlight. She finds herself knocked-up much to her horror. What’s a girl “in trouble” to do? Especially with a crusading, uptight, mother (Lois Austin). who, with her “women’s club,” gets a poor teacher fired for merely answering a student’s question about sex. The film ends with an entire birth sequence shown to the students in class. They even show a caesarian section, too! And a hideous short about venereal diseases. There’s also an intermission where “Dr. Elliot Forbes” (some quack shipped around to theaters) would talk hygiene on stage and push sex education pamphlets.
The Oscar (Kino) 1966) I am over the moon that this gloriously laughable film about a Hollywood cad- Frank Fane (Stephen Boyd)- is now available on Blu-ray. Tony Bennett has the unenviable job of playing Fane’s put-upon manager Hymie Kelly. “Where did you get the name Kelly, ‘Hymie’?” a Sherriff asks him, snidely. “From my father, Michael Kelly! And he got it from his father, Timothy Kelly! And my mother’s name was Sadie Rabinowitz, any more questions?” Frank is a womanizer (Jill St. John, Elke Sommer, Eleanor Parker), but a movie studio mogul (Joseph Cotton) sees his potential, “Once in a while you bring me meat like this. It all has different names: prime rib of Gloria, shoulder cut of Johnny. Meat.” And before long Fane’s fame rises. “Man, he wanted to swallow Hollywood like a cat with a canary. And he did!” Hymie muses to the audience. It all ends with a sleazy campaign to win an Oscar that ends with a whopper of a comeuppance. By then, Hymie has washed his hands of his old friend. “You lie down with pigs, you come up smellin’ like garbage,” he warns Fane. The golden-throated Bennett, fortunately, returned to full-time singing after this stink bomb.
First Love (Well Go USA) There’s a surprising tender heart beating beneath the deliriously violent, blackly funny surface of the exhilarating new film by prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike. Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a young aspiring boxer who is informed by doctors he has an inoperable brain tumor. One night he rescues a young woman- Monica (Sakurako Konishi) being manhandled by a corrupt cop and they go on the run- pursued by Yakusa, female assassins and a one-armed Chinese gangster with a pump-action shotgun. Poor Monica has been forced into prostitution because of her abusive dad’s debts, addicted to drugs and prone to loony hallucinations. A young gangster’s clumsy attempt to rob from his own gang is the genesis for all this out-of-control madness, which ends in a bloody showdown in a closed store in the dead of night. Miike plays much of the violence for dark laughs but the romance between Leo and the hapless girl is achingly poignant.
Roma (Criterion) An extraordinary, deeply personal, film by Alfonso Cuaron about the tumultuous year in the life of a Mexican household, mostly told from the perspective of the servant Cleo (the luminous Yalitza Aparicio). There’s so much heartbreak and beauty in the film thanks to the glorious black & white photography and the simplicity yet power of the storytelling. Yes, it is as good as people have told you. And I’m so glad Criterion is putting out some of these Netflix gems on disc.
Gerry (Shout! Factory) Gus Van Sant’s audacious 2002 movie is about two dudes (Matt Damon & Casey Affleck) who stray off a desert hiking path and get incredibly lost. Without food or water they trudge blindly over mountains and across sand for days as a hopeless resignation sets in. The two of them aren’t very interesting. Their conversations range from anecdotes about Wheel Of Fortune to creative lingo like: “rock-marooned” “dirt-mattress” and “mountain scout-about”. But the eerie moon-like terrain takes on cosmic proportions after a while. There’s no middle-of-the-road to an experiment like this- you either hate it or love it. There’s a hypnotic intensity to the film that really got to me.
Rasputin: The Mad Monk (Shout! Factory) Hammer Studios’ take on the mad Russian mystic who ambitiously rose from peasant to power in pre-Revolution St. Petersburgh. Christopher Lee gives one of his best performances as the lecherous, charismatic, faith-healer Rasputin. Directed by Don Sharp on sets from Dracula, Prince Of Darkness. There was on original ending shot with Rasputin dying on the ice, his hands clutched in prayer that was excised so as not to offend religious groups.
X-The Unknown (Shout! Factory) Having had a hit with The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2, Hammer Studios turned out this fake “Quatermass,” starring Dean Jagger as a scientist working with radio waves in Scotland who ends up fighting an enlarging radioactive mud monster that oozes out of the ground killing all around it. Another efficient script by Hammer’s scribe Jimmy Sangster who brings this 1956 sci-fi classic to creeping life. I just love a “blob” movie!
Paris Is Burning (Criterion) Jennie Livingston’s brilliant 1990 documentary about the drag balls of Harlem, where they originated. Sharing the top award for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award. It’s funny, touching and tough- and shows the alternative families where these lost (often homeless) kids gravitated to and were nurtured by. Interviews with ball luminaries like Dorian Corey, Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Octavia St. Laurent and many others are fascinating. And the ball footage is just thrilling. A 2K digital restoration from UCLA Film & Television Archive, new conversations with director Livingston and an hour of outtakes!!!!
Teorema (Criterion) One of cinema’s true poets, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s allegory about a mysterious stranger (Terence Stamp) who descends on a bourgeois Italian family, sleeps with all of them, including the religious maid. Then, when he leaves, they all go bonkers. The stunning Silvana Magnano plays the repressed mother in this mesmerizing, mysterious masterpiece. I have been haunted by this movie since I saw it years ago, and this Criterion version is a 4K restoration and includes commentary by Pasolini experts, a 2007 interview with Terence Stamp and an introduction to the movie by director Pasolini from 1969.
