Fantasy | Cagey Films

Recent disks from England, part two: Arrow

Posted on March 2, 2022February 25, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

A young woman's psychic powers make her a target of nefarious forces in Nico Mastorakis' Death Has Blue Eyes (1976)

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).

Recent disks from England, part one

Posted on February 16, 2022February 25, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

The climactic battle between Cyclops and Dragon in Nathan Juran's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

Recent disks from England include Franco Parolini’s late spaghetti western Sabata Trilogy (1969-71), the classic Ray Harryhausen Sinbad fantasies (1958-77), Carl Franklin’s revisionist neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Tsui Hark’s influential martial arts fantasy Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), and David Greene’s tense submarine disaster movie Gray Lady Down (1978).

Early winter viewing, part 2

Posted on January 12, 2022January 9, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

A Chinese demon possesses a New York businessman in Barry Rosen's Devil's Express (1976)

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.

Ghosts, Monsters and Swordplay

Posted on December 1, 2021March 18, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Agi (Chiaki Kuriyama) with one Kato's Yokai-machine hybrids in Takashi Miike's The Great Yokai War (2005)

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.

Noriaki Yuasa’s intimate Yokai horror

Posted on November 10, 2021November 9, 2021 by Kenneth George Godwin

Tamami transforms into the Snake Girl when angry in Noriaki Yuasa’s The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

Arrow releases the uncanny horror-fantasy The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968), showcasing this mix of Japanese folktale and western fairytale directed by Noriaki Yuasa between episodes in Daiei’s Gamera series in a Blu-ray edition featuring a moody transfer and illuminating extras.

Summer viewing: all the rest

Posted on September 15, 2021November 17, 2021 by Kenneth George Godwin

10-year-old Brian Bonsall is a cold-blooded "bad seed" in Dennis Dimster-Denk's Mikey (1992)

In addition to all the movies I’ve reviewed here in the past three or four months, I’ve watched many more; here I acknowledge more than seven dozen movies and television series I’ve seen over the summer.

Recent Arrow box sets

Posted on August 25, 2021August 23, 2021 by Kenneth George Godwin

Wronged man Gary Hamilton (Klaus Kinski) looks for revenge in Antonio Margheriti's And God Said to Cain (1970)

Three recent box sets from Arrow will satisfy a wide range of genre appetites with five thrillers from Italy in the ’70s, four spaghetti westerns from the ’60s, and Daiei’s 1966 trilogy of period fantasies featuring a statue which comes to life to punish various cruel warlords who oppress local peasants.

Home-Grown Horrors

Posted on June 16, 2021June 15, 2021 by Kenneth George Godwin

Monsters emerge from a student's dreams in Jay Woelfel's Beyond Dream's Door (1989)

Vinegar Syndrome’s Home-Grown Horrors box set presents three ultra-low-budget regional movies on Blu-ray, really entertaining and looking better than they ever deserved to, and accompanied by surprisingly substantial extras about the fun and frustration of making movies without sufficient resources.

Winter viewing: Severin Films

Posted on March 13, 2021March 11, 2024 by Kenneth George Godwin

Graf Saxon (Howard Vernon) engages in gruesome medical experiments in Adrian Hoven's Castle of the Creeping Flesh (1968)

Bingeing has been my default viewing mode for some time, but it’s only more recently that it’s come to encompass indulging in multiple releases by a particular company – which in turn is a result of those company’s offering regular sales and discount packages of monthly releases. The most prominent examples of this are Vinegar Syndrome and Severin Films, both of which specialize in genre and exploitation titles, pulling me into deep, often sordid, black holes.

Chinese action and fantasy from Eureka

Posted on February 24, 2021December 25, 2021 by Kenneth George Godwin

Yuen Wah as the distinctive Chinese hopping vampire in Ricky Lau's Mr. Vampire (1985)

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).

Tag: Fantasy