I can now say from personal experience that watching horror movies a week after having a heart attack (even a relatively minor one) may not be the smartest idea – but I did enjoy these five eerie features.
Spooky
Tag: Actors
Chinese action and fantasy from Eureka
Recent releases from Eureka/Masters of Cinema showcase a range of Chinese martial arts movies, from Sammo Hung’s traditional The Iron-Fisted Monk (1977) to Tsui Hark’s genre redefining Once Upon a Time in China trilogy (1991-92) to Ricky Lau’s horror-comedy Mr. Vampire (1985) and Ronny Yu’s visually ravishing fantasy The Bride With White Hair (1993).
Indicator in a box
Indicator have done their usually exemplary job with a pair of recent box sets – one devoted to the five Fu Manchu movies written and produced by Harry Alan Towers in the late 1960s, all starring Christopher Lee in racial drag; the other showcasing six films from Columbia Pictures rather loosely gathered together and labelled film noir.
Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974): Criterion Blu-ray review
The quintessential ’70s paranoid thriller, Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), gets a stunning restoration on Criterion’s new Blu-ray.
Recent Indicator viewing
Indicator continue to release exemplary editions of a wide range of movies, from obscure genre titles to classics to exploitation and occasional failed experiments. Recent viewing ranges from Max Ophuls’ exquisite domestic noir The Reckless Moment (1949) to Blake Edwards’ taut thriller Experiment in Terror (1962) and Arthur Lubin’s surprisingly good Gothic romance Footsteps in the Fog (1955).
Recent Kino Lorber releases
Kino Lorber’s prolific slate of releases is making a wide range of genre of genre titles available, some for the first time in decades – including some from the golden age of made-for-television movies like Paul Wendkos’ Fear No Evil (1968) and Jerry London’s Killdozer (1974)
2020: Year-End Thoughts
It’s that time of year again. How to decide what’s “best” out of the six-hundred-plus movies I watched in 2020? It’s an impossible task, so here’s a fairly random selection of things which may not be best, but certainly appealed to me and stuck in my memory.
Recent Eureka/Masters of Cinema releases
Two recent two-disk sets released by Eureka in England provide two very different forms of popular entertainment. Two Films by John Woo contains a pair of top-notch martial arts movies from the first stage of Woo’s career, before he hit it big with the gangster films of the mid-’80s, while the three movies in their Bela Lugosi/Edgar Allen Poe set present some of the most deliriously perverse horrors of the pre-Code era. While the crown jewel is Edgar Ulmer’s expressionist masterpiece The Black Cat, the set’s revelation is the Easter egg inclusion of a “virtual director’s cut” of Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, which follows Tim Lucas’ suggestions, based on internal evidence, or what the film might have been before studio tampering made it a disjointed mess.
Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999): Criterion Blu-ray review
Jim Jarmusch explores the melding of multiple genres and disparate cultures in his meditative tragicomedy Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), given a fine restoration on Criterion’s new Blu-ray.
Tired ageing badmen: Criterion Blu-ray review
We love stories about bad people; even better, we love stories about bad people who begin to have doubts about themselves and the lives they’ve lived. Two new releases from Criterion explore that self doubt in genres tailor-made for such characters – the western (Henry King’s The Gunfighter, 1950) and the gangster film (Stephen Frears’ The Hit, 1984).
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