Artsploitation Films is a distributor with a taste for offbeat horror as represented in two recent Blu-ray releases, the German Der Samurai and the French (though shot in English) Horsehead, both visually stylized and more interested in metaphor and atmosphere than crude shocks.
Despite the dominance of computer animation these days, there are qualities in hand-made animation, whether drawn or stop-motion, which offer a richer, more aesthetically pleasing viewer experience, as evidenced by a random selection of new and classic releases.
Criterion’s Blu-ray edition of Fellini Satyricon should go a long way towards establishing this phantasmagoric adaptation of the ancient Roman novel as one of the director’s finest and most creatively significant films.
Despite perennial predictions of the demise of movies-on-disk, 2014 offered a rich and varied selection of new and old titles in often impressive editions from many different companies, though not necessarily from major distributors. The cream came from specialty labels like Criterion, the BFI, Arrow, Eureka/Masters of Cinema, Shout! Factory, Olive Films, Kino Lorber, Flicker Alley and Twilight Time.
Clive Barker’s second feature as a director was taken over by studio people who didn’t like the film he was making and ended up a crippled box office failure; Shout Factory has now released a “director’s cut”, more or less restored to Barker’s original intentions, which goes some way – though not all the way – towards making it an interesting horror fantasy.
The range of my recent viewing covers classic Italian and Eastern European films by Elio Petri and Karel Zeman as well as a pair of 1970s sci-fi/fantasy productions from the BBC, newly released on disk by the BFI.
A selection of recently viewed films ranges from revisionist horror to horror-comedy to experimental to Hitchcock imitation (or homage), all impressively presented on Blu-ray.
The latest Flipside release from the BFI, Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling, is like a cross between a gritty Ken Loach working class story and a Children’s Film Foundation fantasy of kid empowerment.
My genre viewing on disk over the past couple of months ranges from classics to crap, and I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed it all. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) From England, I’ve obtained impressive Blu-rays of three key movies from the period when “modern” horror was born: Hammer’s first two colour Gothic features, […]
One of the best things about Glenn Erickson’s DVD Savant column over at DVD Talk is his habit of posting, along with his knowledgeable reviews, interesting and useful links. A little while back, he alerted his readers to the website of a museum in the Czech Republic devoted to the work of filmmaker and animator […]