The beauty of the short-form FF format is that there’s little time for exposition, something which can destroy both horror and SF when not done well. These aren’t Cixin Liu short stories, designed to make you think differently about the nature of the universe -- they’re V/H/S short stories, designed to be spooky, nasty, scary or some combination of the three.
DVD, bluray & video
52 posts
What worked perfectly on a sketchy VHS at home suddenly seemed to fall flat on the big screen. It’s all about the suspension of disbelief -- being able to believe something you know intellectually is a fiction is real. Turns out it’s easier to do that when you’re not in a building whose very existence is predicated on showing people things that don’t exist, and when you’re not in the company of hundreds of people eating popcorn.
Initially conceived as a parody by feminist author and civil rights campaigner Rita Mae Brown, the film was ultimately financed by exploitation maestro Roger Corman, a man whose ‘bung some topless girls in it’ attitude to making his money back leads popular consensus to dismiss the film as the product of a bizarre marriage that ultimately serves to nullify the film’s best intentions.
...creatively, Jodorowsky has always embodied a near singular collision of European high art and Latin American magical (sur)realism. Despite having been born in 1929, and thus being over thirty before the Sixties even began, Jod’s unique and psychedelic approach to writing, art and film-making clicked into place during that decade like a machine-tooled piece of jigsaw, its liberated, vision-questing aesthetic perfectly in tune with the new age of Aquarius:...
Towards the end of FF’s reign came Ti West’s The Sacrament, which is definitely at the more awesome end of things, and is one of the few I’d save as an example of what CAN be done with the format. Nobody can accuse West of lacking ambition or creativity [...] and what The Sacrament lacks in budget it more than makes up for in sheer balls.
what these bright young directors did lead to was a further interest in the films that inspired them, largely the various European new waves of the late fifties and sixties. It seems to be the origin of this film, which liberally lifts from Georges Franju’s 1960 masterpiece Eyes Without A Face. Make no bones about it, it isn’t a nod, or an homage, it is a straight-up pinch of the whole plot. Well, it is not quite Eyes Without A Face; but it is Face Without The Eyes.
Ozu stands apart. There are few film-makers who command such unanimous acclaim, detractors few and far between, critics as one enraptured by his singular style of delicate, melancholy social satires. This acclaim largely sits upon his post-war films until his death in the early sixties, but his early films remain in need of being seen by a larger audience. It’s a task the BFI has set about with its ongoing blu-ray releases of early Ozu works, and they have chosen two more corkers to focus on this time around.
Well-regarded but under-seen on initial release a decade ago, The Borderlands has become something of a beloved cult favourite, one that along with Ben Wheatley’s early work was key with reviving folk at the centre of horror culture. On its tenth anniversary, this Second Sight re-release gives an opportunity to re-examine the film, and to find it even stronger than the first time round, standing head and shoulders above many of the films that have followed in its footsteps, whilst remaining kind of inimitable, a totally singular concoction.
Following up a breakout film is obviously a difficult position, a constant questioning of whether to continue doing what made you a success in the first place, or to experiment, to use the newfound resources that success affords to embrace grander visions. It’s a position that director Junta Yamaguchi and screenwriter Makoto Ueda find themselves in, and one in which they succeed and fail in equal measure.
This re-release of cult classic Alligator finds it in as joyous as ever; a fun, knowing creature feature wrapped in a lovingly extensive package of remasters and extras from the ever-reliable 101 Films.
There is something strangely admirable about how big Mad Cats swings, its commitment to its own childish rambunctiousness; but ultimately it can’t string itself together beyond a funny idea and some well-done set pieces. There’s certainly an interesting film-maker in there, and there is evidence of it here; but equally there is one that is still finding their feet, still to nail the difficult execution of a particular brand of absurdity.
Against the backdrop of a 2023 which brought a BFI retrospective, and what looks to be his late career masterpiece, EO, comes this release from Second Run of three of Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s key early works. They show a truly forward thinking director, whose work from this era remains relatively under-seen compared to his contemporaries, despite it containing some true classics of the European New Wave.
One of the great lost traditions of British television, the BBC’s Ghost Stories For Christmas ran through the seventies and remain fondly remembered, a singularly British reading of classic horror stories.
Blue Underground Blue Underground‘s 4k restoration of Lucio Fulci‘s The House By The Cemetery is a handsome beast indeed. Cloaked in a faux-3D lenticular cover, it consists of three discs — two blu rays featuring the movie itself and a really quite ridiculous amount of extras, and a CD of […]
Demiurg / London 3 March 2019 This is a story of two enigmas. One is an inscrutable totalitarian art-rock collective, and the other is the most secretive state on Earth. And this is all about what happened when the two collided to the strains of a much-loved feel-good musical with […]
Buried Treasure It’s taken me a while to process this. I’m still processing it. I’ve watched this right the way through three times and jumped around in it (you will go into it, if you bother to go at all) a few more; selecting little movements, trying to find ways […]
Cleopatra Entertainment Disney‘s Beauty And The Beast famously likes to call itself “a tale as old as time”, but traditional though a young girl marrying a lion may be in the circles YOU move in, I’d argue an older tale was that eternal staple of the cautionary tale, the tale […]
MVD For me, Morphine was one of the most important alternative bands to come form the USA in the Nineties. Their sound was unique and it is not often that can be said about a band, particularly a three-piece coming from the thriving post-punk and independent scene of Boston.
Bad Seed One More Time With Feeling was designed to ideally be watched before Skeleton Tree was released; so to watch it for the first time now, after living with that raw, naked and shivering mass of beauty and heartbreak is, clearly, a very different experience than that originally intended. […]
Drafthouse / MVD John Rad‘s Dangerous Men is probably, unfortunately for me, review-proof. Made on a shoestring by Rad, an Iranian who moved to America literally 24 hours before Khomeini got in and — understandably — decided not to go back, it’s a crazy slice of slam-bang crime action, and it […]