
Vinegar Syndrome’s October releases offer a satisfyingly eclectic selection of occasionally obscure genre titles — from mid-’80s gialli to Southern Gothic crime to mutant bugs and a Mayan death cult.
Indicator add another volume to their series devoted to Columbia Studios films noirs, with an eclectic selection of six moves covering post-war espionage, the activities of organized crime and a cop easily turned to the darkside by an attractive woman. Excellent transfers are supplemented with commentaries, March of Time shorts, featurettes on key cast and crew members … and, of course, half-a-dozen Three Stooges shorts.
New Blu-ray releases from Arrow revive an effective Satanic panic movie from the early ’70s and unearth a forgotten regional slasher from 1982. The former, Bernard McEveety’s The Brotherhood of Satan, is an atmospheric gem; the latter, David Nelson’s Death Screams, is kind of clumsy, though it does have a few effective moments.
Criterion showcase a key ’50s sci-fi movie with their extras-loaded Blu-ray of Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man. The 4K restoration makes this the definitive visual presentation of the film, while the numerous special features – commentary, interviews, documentary – cover the production and the critical importance of the movie in detail.
Indicator’s sixth box set of Hammer movies, Night Shadows, is a bit of a mixed bag, with a silly but entertaining Old Dark House throwback in John Gilling’s The Shadow of the Cat (1961), an overwrought psycho thriller in Freddie Francis’ Nightmare (1964), a historical adventure in Peter Graham Scott’s Captain Clegg (1962), and a pseudo-Gothic horror in Terence Fisher’s The Phantom of the Opera (1962).
Severin introduces the work of Eloy de la Iglesia, a little-known Basque filmmaker with three releases spanning the period from the end of the Franco regime to the transition to democracy in Spain. Two thrillers with a satirical edge made in the early ’70s give way to a trilogy of violent, neo-realist depictions of youth crime and drug addiction in the early ’80s. Dynamic and visceral, these films are deeply empathetic to members of the underclass – workers and dispossessed adolescents – and unflinching in their treatment of addiction and homosexuality in a repressive society.
Criterion’s new Blu-ray presents Luchino Visconti’s darkly perverse The Damned in a new 2K restoration whose dense colours emphasize the gloom hanging over a powerful German industrial family collapsing under the weight of its own decadence as the Nazis consolidate their political power in the early 1930s.