One of the rarest, weirdest, most fabulously fucked-up, movies- Jack be Nimble– is getting a gorgeous Blu-ray release from Altered Innocence. If you’ve never seen it prepare to have your brain scrambled.
Alexis Arquette is Jack, Sarah Smutts-Kennedy is his sister Dora. They were abandoned by the mother and dumped in an orphanage only to be separated when they are adopted by two drastically different families.
Jack ends up at a bleak rural farm with a father who whips him with barbed wire and four terrifying sisters with bushy black hair that delight in tormenting him.
Jack creates a weird machine that hypnotizes his mother and father into committing suicide and he takes off in search of his sister.
Dora has psychic abilities and can feel him coming. But those scary sisters are also headed their way in a beat-up truck, hell-bent on revenge.
This strangely lyrical 1993 New Zealand film by Garth Maxwell is definitely weird as hell and deserves to be better known. For years one of my prize possessions was the DVD of Jack Be Nimble that Mink Stole got for me after sneakily asking which DVD I never could track down. I had seen the film when it played in theaters and think I even reviewed it for Paper magazine. I even had the laser disc of it, but the DVD was elusive and went for hundreds of dollars on eBay. The DVD wasn’t even anamorphic and didn’t capture the visual surreal beauty that I witnessed in a theater. For years I prayed for this kind of a release and am over the moon that this Blu-ray from Altered Innocence is coming out. There are insightful interviews with the director on his inspirations for the film and a 2k restoration of Garth Maxwell’s 50 minute short film about an unconventional gay romance- Beyond Gravity– between an astronomy-obsessed, shy, loner and an impulsively wild Italian with a taste for criminality, which feels achingly personal.
Sounds Fabulous!