However many times you watch a movie, there’s always a possibility to see something new and find new responses which surprise you out of complacent familiarity – two recent cases in point: Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
Continuing my quick survey of genre movies I watched over the past couple of months, I move on to a number of Severin releases, which include a few transgressive titles from the ’80s, pulpy kitsch from the ’60s and a couple of bargain-basement Italian zombie movies. There are also two excellent poliziotteschi from a relatively new label in the UK.
Recent releases from various Vinegar Syndrome partner labels offer a wide range of styles, from low-budget direct-to-video horror (Ronnie Sortor’s Sinistre [1995], Charles Pinion’s Red Spirit Lake [1993] and We Await [1996]) to a rediscovered slice of Cold War sci-fi/espionage from Switzerland (Jean-Louis Roy’s The Unknown Man of Shandigor [1967]).
A long cold winter, a working-from-home schedule and pandemic-induced malaise means I’ve been watching a lot of undemanding genre movies over the past few months. One of my primary sources in the past couple of years has been Vinegar Syndrome, a company whose dedication to unearthing obscure, often forgotten genre movies equals my own passion for watching them. Although by no means a complete account of my VS viewing, here are brief notes on two dozen titles.
Recent releases from Indicator have seemed oddly random – from an unexceptional genre movie (Kostas Karagiorgis’ The Devil’s Men [1076]) to an arthouse war film (Clive Rees’ The Blockhouse [1973]), a ghost story that comes across like a television play (Kevin Billington’s Voices [1973]) to an interesting if unsuccessful literary adaptation (Anthony Friedmann’s Bartleby [1970]) and a revisionist detective story which plays with the tropes of the English country house mystery (Chris Petit’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman [1982]).
John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky (2017) is a portrait of a man coming to terms with his own mortality, which is also a tribute to actor Harry Dean Stanton, on whose life much of the script was based. Generous and emotionally rich, the film surrounds Harry Dean with a flawless cast which forms a supportive community within which he comes to accept without fear or anger the idea of his own inevitable death.
Criterion have re-released Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful heist movie Le cercle rouge (1970) in a new dual-format 4K UHD/Blu-ray edition based on a 4K restoration by StudioCanal. Although there are no new extras (supplements adding up to almost two hours date back to the company’s original 2003 DVD release), the film looks better than ever, its narrative stripped to essentials as a meditation on professionalism, fate and the moral ambiguity of characters on both sides of the law.
As a filmmaker, Tobe Hooper’s creative interests were not always in sync with audiences and critics. His mixture of theatrical performance and constructed-in-studio settings are on full display in the generally disdained Stephen King adaptation The Mangler (1995), whose uneven dramatic execution undermines an often impressively menacing horror-fantasy about the bloody appetite of capitalism, an inhuman force which devours those doomed to serve it. Hooper’s Spontaneous Combustion (1990), on the other hand, is a half-baked mess which mostly lacks any visual interest to make up for its many narrative inadequacies.
With a new 4K restoration of David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Arrow Films and Koch Media have given us pretty much the final word on this magnificent, yet almost fatally crippled, epic, surrounding it with hours of new and archival extras (including two commentaries on the Arrow, and Daniel Griffith’s feature-length making-of on the Koch). The Koch edition claims primacy, though, for including not only a soundtrack CD, but also the remarkable, unofficial fan-edit by the anonymous Spicediver, who has used all publicly available material to construct an intelligent, thoughtful three-hour version which reveals that so many of the theatrical cut’s acknowledged problems were the fault of Dino De Laurentis and Universal Studios, and not Lynch; there really is a coherent, comprehensible narrative in what was shot, yet it was ruined by idiots whose only concern was keeping the movie under 135 minutes.
Arrow’s big pre-Christmas sale brought a wide range of titles, some old, some new: Juan Simon Piquer’s Spanish slasher Pieces (1982), Chelsea Stardust’s horror comedy Satanic Panic (2019), Giancarlo Santi’s spaghetti western The Grand Duel (1972), Lee Min-jae’s horror comedy Zombie for Sale (2019), Jill Gevargizian’s psycho horror The Stylist (2020),Nico Mastorakis incoherent first feature Death Has Blue Eyes (1976), a Japanese double bill of sci-fi crime movies, Nobuo Adachi’s The Invisible Man Appears (1949) and Mitsuo Murayama’s The Invisible Man vs the Human Fly (1957), Riccardo Freda’s mix of melodrama and giallo Double Face (1969), Jacques Tourneur’s late film noir Nightfall (1956), and Giorgio Ferroni’s atmospheric Gothic horror Mill of the Stone Women (1960).