Euro Horror

Lucio Fulci as director "Lucio Fulci" going mad in Lucio Fulci's Cat in the Brain (1990)

Minor Euro-horror gets the deluxe treatment in several releases from Blue Underground, Grindhouse Films and Severin; three features by Dutch director Dick Maas – De Lift (1983), Amsterdamned (1988) and Down (2001) – and three from Lucio Fulci – Cat in the Brain (1990), Aenigma (1987) and Demonia (1990) – along with Simone Scafidi’s Fulci for Fake (2019), an illuminating documentary about Fulci.

World Cinema Project 3: Criterion Blu-ray review

... but Lucia (Adela Legra) refuses to be tied down in Humberto Solas' Lucia (1968)

With volume 3 of their World Cinema Project box sets, Criterion has released another treasure trove of largely unknown (in the West) features spanning five decades and six countries, from the Expressionist horror of Mexico’s Dos Monjes (1934) to the Neo-realist horrors of life on Brazil’s streets in Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1980), with stops in between in Indonesia, Iran, Mauritania and Cuba.

Creeps be creeping

The showdown with the monster re-enacted in Pete Schuermann's The Creep Behind the Camera (2014)

Pete Schuermann’s The Creep Behind the Camera (2014) is an odd hybrid, begun as a documentary and incorporating interview clips, but mostly a dramatization of the story of Art Nelson aka Vic Savage, a talentless sociopath who dreamed of being a movie director but was sunk by a lack of talent and his own increasingly violent sociopathy. Synapse’s Blu-ray includes along with the feature, a wealth of extras including a 2K scan of Nelson’s no-budget monster movie The Creeping Terror (1964).

Carroll Baker and Umberto Lenzi on Blu-ray

Carroll Baker is seduced by brother and sister Lou Castel and Colette Descombes in Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo (1969)

Unhappy with her career in Hollywood, actress Carroll Baker moved to Italy in the mid-’60s where she starred in a number of genre movies, including four erotic thrillers by Umberto Lenzi which bridge the gap between classic women-in-peril mysteries and the giallo. All four are collected together by Severin in their lavish The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection Blu-ray box set.

Cannibal feast

The Woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) offers Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers)' daughters an unexpected form of liberation in Lucky McKee's The Woman (2011)

In popular culture, and exploitation movies, cannibals are the disreputable cousins of the zombie; they have the embarrassing habit of eating unsuspecting people without any supernatural justification. There’s a distinct difference, though, between American and Italian cannibal movies – the former adhering to tropes related to serial killer stories, while the latter draw on anthropological ideas to provide a gloss of realism to graphic exploitation imagery. The contrast can be seen clearly between Andrew van den Houten’s Offspring (2009), Lucky McKee’s The Woman (2011) and Pollyanna McIntosh’s Darlin’ (2019) and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981).

Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979):
Criterion Blu-ray review

Painter Carlo Levi is escorted by police to exile in a remote village in Francesco Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979)

Francesco Rosi’s most emotionally resonant film, a four-part adaptation of the memoir of painter Carlo Levi, who was exiled by the Fascist government in 1935 to a remote corner of Italy, is a rich, contemplative study of a Leftist intellectual who comes to empathize with the harsh lives of peasants left behind by the modernization of Italy. Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition serves the striking imagery well and provides substantial supportive supplements which provide historical context and situate the film in Rosi’s politically informed filmography.

Two swansongs

Nothing goes right on board Stan's inherited yacht in Leo Joannon's Atoll K (1960)

A pair of Blu-rays from England showcase the final works of major artists who were considered at the time to be in decline: Laurel and Hardy’s last feature, Atoll K (dir. Leo Joannon, 1951) is a bittersweet mess which captures the Boys’ enduring charm while making their mortality all too clear, while Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960) comes full circle by reviving his Weimar criminal mastermind in a Cold War context which paved the way for James Bond’s high-tech thrills.

Blasts from the past

Summer viewing: all the rest

The pleasures of hand-made animation

Recent Arrow viewing

Stanley Kubrick 7: The Shining (1980)

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