More insanity on Blu-ray this month- from early body-horror from director David Cronenberg; sublime Bob Hope horror comedies; a little known black comedy starring Roddy McDowall and Tuesday Weld; an exquisite indie film from Bette Gordon; a new feature from Abel Ferrara; new Lucio Fulci restorations; a Rob Zombie trilogy; a homoerotic look at Australia’s mythic Kelly Gang; Claire Denis’s gorgeous, offbeat take on Billy Budd; and an intense performance by Jeremy Renner as serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Shivers (Lionsgate) David Cronenberg’s controversial 1976 first feature (released in the States as They Came From Within) is about a modern high rise complex in Canada infected with a venereal parasite that spreads quickly and turns people into ravenous sexual predators. A horny Night Of The Living Dead, so to speak. The disgusting worm-like creatures slither up drains and down people’s throats during kisses. A pre-AIDs cautionary tale? Hardly. Cronenberg’s cool caustic eye revels in the mayhem. Look for Cronenberg’s cameo- he’s busting out of a wooden storage area in the basement with other sexually crazed apartment dwellers.
The Mirror Crack’d (Kino) A sardonically fun, all-star Agatha Christie adaptation starring the sublime Angela Lansbury as the elderly, but wily, sleuth Miss Jane Marple. Elizabeth Tayler plays a visiting movie star at a small English town. During a party in her honor a local woman is poisoned and she may not have been the intended victim. With Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Geraldine Chaplin and a delicious Kim Novak, playing bitchy movie star Lola Brewster. Kim has some of the best lines, including her comment about a director’s last picture, “I could eat a can of Kodak and puke a better film.”
The Cat And The Canary (Kino) A group of relatives travel the alligator-infested waters of the Louisiana bayou to hear the reading of the will of an eccentric millionaire. Gale Sondergaard plays the spooky mistress of the house who lived with the rich man for years along with her black cat. Joyce (Paulette Goddard) discovers she is the heir but with a stipulation- she has to remain at the house (because of insanity in the family line) and has to stay sane for one month. Bob Hope plays Wally, a wise-cracking actor, who offers to keep Joyce company. Meanwhile a madman has escaped from a nearby asylum called the “Cat” and is headed their way. Almost sinfully enjoyable on every level. Creepy and funny and just perfect.
The Ghost Breakers (Kino) The beautiful Paulette Goddard plays Mary Carter, who discovers she has been bequeathed the deed to a mansion on an island off Cuba called “Castillo Maldito.” Bob Hope plays a radio host, who reports on crime, who mistakenly thinks he was involved in a mob shooting and hides out in Mary’s steamer trunk. When Mary discovers Hope aboard an ocean liner he convinces her to let him be her bodyguard as she investigates the spooky, haunted mansion she inherited. Just a blast. Director George Marshall combines the comedy and chills with great style and humor.
Lord Love A Duck (Kino) Director/writer George Axelrod’s dark satire about Alan Musgrave (Roddy McDowall), a mysterious figure who offers to grant pretty high school senior Barbara Ann Greene (Tuesday Weld) every wish her teenage heart desires. The fabulous Lola Albright plays Barbara’s seedy, cocktail-waitress mom. Barbara revels in her good fortune- from getting 12 cashmere sweaters so she can join a girl’s club, to meeting a producer of beach party movies who promises to make her a star. But all this comes with a hefty price when Alan goes murderously berserk (while driving a forklift) at the high school graduation. It’s the strangest damn movie, and I just adore it.
Love Me Tonight (Kino) To watch the first fifteen minutes of director Rouben Mamoulian’s pre-code musical comedy is to be awed by the director’s sheer inventive genius. Maurice Chevalier plays Maurice, a Parisian tailor who gets involved with a crackpot aristocratic family. Charles Ruggles plays an impoverished Viscount who owes Chevalier a fortune for clothes and doesn’t have the money to pay him. Maurice travels to the castle to get his pay and ends up falling for the gorgeous but haughty Princess Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald). With songs by Rodgers & Hart including “Mimi,” “The Son Of A Gun Is Nothing But A Tailor,” “Love Me Tonight,” and “Isn’t It Romantic?” The film is a delight from beginning to end.
Kentucky Kernels (Warner Archive) It’s amazing to see a Wheeler & Woolsey comedy on Blu-ray! The comic duo is little known now but were a force in early sound films. This one is directed by George Stevens (Giant) where Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey play magicians who accompany an adopted boy (Little Rascal’s Spanky McFarland) to a Kentucky plantation so the child can rightfully get his inheritance. There they find two warring families a feudin’ and fussin’. Spanky steals every scene- especially one where he serenades a dog by singing “One Little Kiss.”.
Demonia (Severin) A later film by Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci about an archeological dig in Sicily that stirs up the vengeful spirits of several nuns who were dragged off by villagers in 1486 and crucified under the convent. Liza (Meg Register) and professor Evans (Brett Halsey) are working with a team over an ancient Greek ruin but Liza uncovers the secret chamber in the monastery above them where the nuns are buried and their angry spirits invade the town. Included are some of Fulci’s gory set pieces- a butcher gets attacked by frozen meat and then has his tongue nailed to a cutting board; a man is torn in half out in the woods in front of his son, etc. But it’s a confused, frustrating movie in many ways. The Blu-ray looks amazing and the audio commentary is by Stephen Thrower, whose book on Fulci– Beyond Terror is invaluable.
Aenigma (Severin) Director Lucio Fulci’s supernatural tale set at St. Mary’s College in Boston, where the school maid’s daughter Jenny (Ulli Reinthaler) is horribly pranked by classmates and ends up in an irreversible coma at the local hospital. The pretty new student Eva (Lara Lamberti) is possessed by Jenny’s vengeful spirit and suddenly the students start dying in bizarre ways- one girl finds herself covered and smothered by snails; another is attacked in the museum by a live statue; even the coma patient’s handsome, randy doctor (Jared Martin) hallucinates a girl biting off his nipples. A crackpot addition to Fulci’s career, and definitely worth re-discovering with this 4K scan from the original negative.
Tommaso (Kino) There’s definitely an autobiographical feel to Abel Ferrara’s new film. Willem Dafoe plays Tommaso, an American director living in Rome with his Russian wife (played by Ferrara’s actual wife Cristina Chiriac) and beautiful 2-year-old daughter (Anna Ferrara). We follow him, taking Italian lessons, teaching acting classes, prepping for a new movie, doing yoga, going to AA. Much is spent on his loving home life with wife and daughter. But then Ferrara shakes things up with weird surreal interludes such as Tommaso seeing his wife making out with a long-haired man in the park (which may be imagined) and other odd moments, representing cracks in the bliss. Ferrara and Dafoe have such a wonderful shorthand with each other by now (they both live in Rome near one another). Willem gives a beautiful, naturalistic performance in this intensely moving, personal film.
Variety (Kino Classics) Dark, weird voyage of Christine (Sandy McLeod), whose job selling tickets at a NYC porno theater leads her down a sordid rabbit hole. She becomes unhealthily fascinated with the sleazy milieu, startling her boyfriend (Will Patton) with stream-of-conscious, X-rated rants. She even begins to obsessively follow one of the patrons- a shadowy underworld figure named Louie (Richard Davidson). This strange 1983 film by Bette Gordon, with a screenplay by late cult novelist Kathy Acker, is intriguing, muddled, creepy and kind of fabulous. With famed photographer Nan Goldin as Christine’s best friend, and cameos by author and John Waters star- Cookie Mueller; Mark Boone Jr., and Spalding Gray as an obscene phone caller. The cinematography is by Tom DiCillo (Living In Oblivion) and the evocative score is by John Lurie.
Rob Zombie Trilogy (Lionsgate) Three films in director Rob Zombie’s nightmarish “Firefly” trilogy, charting the bloodthirsty antics of a family of serial killers. House of 1000 Corpses is about unwary travelers in Texas who end up at the blood-drenched house of a group of ruthless killers. Karen Black hilariously played Mother Firefly in this early entry. But Zombie’s, balls-to-the-walls, ferocious, horror sequel The Devil’s Rejects is a terror masterstroke. It reunites the murderous Firefly family (nicknaming themselves after Groucho Marx characters) who have eluded authorities and are on the run though Texas, kidnapping, torturing, and turning unwary strangers into Duck Soup along the way. Meanwhile, a psychotic Sheriff (William Forsythe), hellbent on revenge, tracks them down. Less jokey that Corpses, you’ve got to hand it to Zombie for keeping it relentlessly sadistic and nasty, almost to a fault. Sid Haig makes the clown-painted Capt. Spaulding particularly loathsome. Bill Moseley resembles a homicidal Greg Allman as Otis Driftwood. And Sheri Moon Zombie is sexy and vicious as “Baby”. Practically every minor cast member starred in a 70s horror film- less as an homage, but more to fill out the requisite universe for the kind of film genre Rob Zombie obviously relishes with maniacal glee. 3 From Hell resurrects the family from their certain death in the last film and has them escaping prison and raising hell, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake.
True History Of The Kelly Gang (Shout! Factory) There is a galvanizing, homoerotic, punk-rock energy coursing through director Justin Kurzel’s unorthodox retelling of the oft-told tale of mythic 19th century Australian bandit Ned Kelly (here played with fierce intensity by “1917” star George MacKay). Raised in a tin shack amidst an unforgiving, barren landscape, young Ned Kelly (astonishing Orlando Schwerdt) lived a rough, hard-scrabble existence with his siblings; their hopeless father and ferocious mother (the remarkable Essie Davis), who brazenly sleeps with a Sergeant (Charlie Hunnam) for cash to feed her family. After dad is dragged away for criminal activity, mom hands over young Ned to a feared outlaw (Russell Crowe) and the lad receives a brutal and horrific education on how to rob and kill. An older, tougher and more haunted Ned (the lean-faced, intense George MacKay) returns home years later only to find his siblings rustling horses while wearing flouncy dresses stolen from a nearby whorehouse. The drag is their attempt to disarm and freak-out the local authorities. Older Ned’s obsession with the iron-clad Monitor warship causes him to outfit his growing, lawless, posse in home-made bullet proof armor, and their criminal actions eventually end in an ill-fated, blood-drenched battle with lawmen that made a folklore anti-hero out of him. What’s fascinating about the film is the anarchic queer spirit and the bold stylistic choices director Kurzel infuses his movie with. It flies in the face of the usual hyper-macho posturing coursing through a story such as this. As the film spins savagely out-of-control, this barbaric outlaw tale begins to feel like a western on ‘shrooms.
Dahmer (MVD) David Jacobson’s chilling film is about the Milwaukee-based gay cannibal. This is not a stupid serial-killer knock-off- it’s actually a real movie, and a terrific one. Jeremy Renner is riveting as the tormented, predatory Jeffrey Dahmer, working at a chocolate factory and picking up guys to later drug and kill them in his apartment. What’s fascinating in Jacobson’s film is just how the scenes add up- like those with Dahmer and his dad (Bruce Davison), or with perspective victims, or how often the cops screwed up time and again in stopping him. Jeremy Renner gives an extraordinary performance- not only in resemblance to the real Dahmer, but in capturing the essence of his twisted soul.
Beau Travail (Criterion) Claire Denis’ strange, exquisitely beautiful, evocation of Billy Budd set in a remote East African French Foreign Legion outpost. Denis Lavant plays Sergeant Galoup, whose ordered existence is threatened by the arrival of a new recruit (Gregoire Colin), who is embraced by the troops and admired by the commanding officer. Denis refuses to explore Galoup’s obsessional animosity and the tragic consequences in any linear fashion. She shifts back and forth in time and shows scene after scene documenting the hermetically sealed rigors of the Legionnaire life. The exercises, training, punishment, the muscular bodies slamming into one another under the unforgiving glare of the desert sun. The results add up inexplicably, movingly. A haunting cinematic experience.
The Masque Of The Red Death (Shout! Factory) Director Roger Corman’s high-point in his Edgar Allan Poe-inspired films. Vincent Price plays the evil Prince Prosepero who lords over his people from a fortressed castle. Prospero has abducted a beautiful peasant girl (Jane Asher), grooming her for his satanic purposes and invites nobility to the castle for a feast. Meanwhile, the plague grips the land, and a mysterious figure in a red robe is spotted playing Tarot cards. Corman’s love for Ingmar Bergman bleeds throughout the film, from the hooded figure of death in The Seventh Seal, to Corman’s multi-colored robed emissaries of disease and doom. The color scheme in the film is stunning, and this new Blu-ray offers the theatrical cut and a new extended cut which includes snippets never seen before. I am so there!
Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (Vinegar Syndrome) Two gay guys on the run end up in a Miami suburb after they commit a jewel robbery and a murder. Sexy, simpleminded galoot Stanley (Scott Lawrence aka Wayne Crawford) wears snakeskin bell-bottoms, drives a van painted in swirling psychedelic colors and eats doughnuts out of a cigar box. Paul (Abe Zwick) masquerades as his Aunt Martha in ludicrously unconvincing drag and has jealous fits when Stanley gets stoned and brings girls home. Paul usually dispatches them with a knife and a shovel, while Stanley is left to whine. “One minute you wanna kill me, the next minute you wanna ball with me!” A junkie from their hometown of Baltimore shows up to complicate matters, and Stanley helps deliver the baby of a pregnant neighbor with a butcher knife. Brad Grinter, the director of Blood Freak, even appears as a cop in this indescribably sick 1971 treat from Thomas Casey.
Gemini (Mondo Macabro) Based on a story by Edogawa Rampo, this creepy chiller is directed by the unique visionary Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo/The iron Man). Set in 1910 Tokyo, Dr. Yukio Daitokuji (Masahiro Motoki) has taken over his father’s practice after serving in the war. His wife Rin (Ryo) has suffered amnesia after a fire. After Yukio’s father and mother die suddenly and violently, he comes face to face with his doppelganger, who imprisons him in a deep well and takes over his life and his wife. Visually quite beautiful, it is genuinely strange as hell.
The Lady Kills & Pervertissima (Mondo Macabro) French director Jean-Louis van Belle is an offbeat character who turned out many crackpot movies in the 70s. The Lady Kills is about a beautiful woman who travels from Dusseldorf to Paris to London and Rome seducing and killing certain womanizing men. (My favorite is pushing a horny photographer’s face in a basin of developing acid). Only near the end do you get a definitive explanation, but it’s beside the point by then. Pervertissima is a nutty Mondo-movie of sorts about a a pretty virgin who is hired by a scandal sheet to write a piece: “Love In Paris.” She visits a lesbian sauna, a swingers club, she interviews a whore, she even strips nude on stage, etc. Then she goes undercover and gets imprisoned in a clinic run by a loony doctor with a God-complex. Amazingly, these are 2K transfers from the negatives and the extras (especially a documentary about the director) are eyebrow-raising.
Endeavour: Season 7 (Acorn) This three-episode arc of the wonderful British prequel to the Inspector Morse series is so good, so intense, well-acted and satisfying, it may be their best yet. Shaun Evans is back as Oxford’s Inspector Sergeant Morse, still as cocky as ever. He finds love with a mysterious woman (Stephanie Leonidas) while on vacation in Venice, and she pops up later to haunt him. There is also major tension between he and Detective Chief Inspector Thursday (Roger Allam) over the solution of a series of murders of women on a river towpath. So many elements come together beautifully in season 7, and the art direction and costumes (of 70s England) are perfection.
Wow! Keep them coming Dennis! Thank you. How not to go out of your mind during a pandemic. You should get a medal of freedom award.