I continue my cold-weather plunge into the cheap, cheesy and outre depths of exploitation, finding a few gems among the dross of low-budget horror, science fiction, fantasy and comedy, ending up with an unsettling documentary about someone who devoted his life to filmmaking at the expense of everything including his identity.
It’s been a long time coming, but Paul Morrissey’s two unique Gothic horror movies from the early 1970s – Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974) – have finally arrived on disk in superb restorations, the former from Vinegar Syndrome, the latter from Severin. Both editions are packed with hours of extras, and Flesh for Frankenstein is finally available in 3D (both digital and anaglyphic) as well as flat. Together, the home video highlight of 2021.
It’s been a good year for movies on disk, with a remarkable range of releases from many companies which are devoting considerable resources to rediscovering, restoring and preserving movies in numerous genres. Ranging across nationalities and spanning cinema history, there was plenty to divert attention from a real world which has become so depressing and exhausting.
As the winter turns cold, I take another plunge into the depths of horror, exploitation, sex and death with a range of releases which vary widely in style and nationality. I just can’t stay away from this stuff – maybe I need therapy?
Criterion’s new Blu-ray revives Gordon Parks’ semi-autobiographical film The Learning Tree (1969), significant as the first movie produced by a Hollywood studio directed by a Black filmmaker. In this coming-of-age story set in a small Kansas town in the 1920s, the typical problems faced by a boy leaving childhood are complicated by the deeply embedded racist attitudes which surround him.
Arrow’s recent two-disk Blu-ray set showcases Chad Crawford Kinkle’s distinctive approach to folk horror in his subtle and disturbing features Jug Face (2013) and Dementer (2019), both of which centre on women whose lives are overshadowed by dark religious forces.
The Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society (1993), an aggressively stylish debut made when the twins were just twenty, is a nihilistically violent depiction of life in Watts in which kids grow up surrounded by violence and learn that there are few other ways to deal conflict. Criterion’s new Blu-ray, mastered from a 4K restoration, is vividly colourful, with a collection of excellent new and archival supplements,
Asian martial arts and fantasy movies can be exhilarating in their strangeness and invention, unbound by Western insistence on rational explanations. Arrow’s new box set Yokai Monsters Collection presents a world in which supernatural presences exist alongside human reality, while in Eureka’s release of Ching Siu-tung’s Duel to the Death (1983) martial artists defy the laws of physics in elaborately choreographed sword fights.
Vinegar Syndrome’s October package included a stylish but frustrating Uruguayan giallo, a catalogue title about a high school girl’s romance with a T-Rex and a box set of three Italian movies from the early ’70s featuring performances from Camille Keaton.
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.