Two new Blu-rays showcase excellent restorations of a pair of late Boris Karloff movies – Daniel Haller’s Die, Monster, Die! (1965) from the BFI, Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers (1967) from 88 Films. Despite being unwell and in constant pain, in both Karloff gives committed performances which illustrate why he remained a beloved star for four decades.
Severin’s third Danza Macabra box set contains four Spanish movies from the early 1970s; it’s a mixed bag, from the arty anthology Cake of Blood (1971) and the poorly realized Necrophagous (Miguel Madrid, 1971) to John Gilling’s Cross of the Devil (1975), which echoes Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead movies (1972-75), and León Klimovsky’s The Night of the Walking Dead (1975), in which a dying noblewoman is attracted to the vampire lifestyle. A more modern range of Spanish horrors is presented in Lionsgate’s 3-disk DVD set 6 Films to Keep You Awake, a collection of short features produced in 2006 by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, who recruited other well-known genre filmmakers for a revival of his 1960s television anthology series Tales to Keep You Awake.
I don’t get out to a theatre very often these days, so my choices of what to see are more judicious than they used to be, generally the work of directors I’m particularly interested in. The one dud is the latest superfluous entry in a franchise I’ve quite liked – Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes – but the rest have been satisfying to some degree: George Miller’s latest apocalyptic action epic, Furiosa; M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, which as usual I liked in contrast to the predictable critical derision: MaXXXine, the conclusion of Ti West’s trilogy starring Mia Goth: and the small Canadian drama The Burning Season by sometime Winnipegger Sean Garrity.
Bypassing Ridley Scott’s tediously pretentious attempts to reboot the Alien franchise, co-writer/director Fede Alvarez strikes gold with Alien: Romulus, a relentlessly-paced, well-designed return to basics which manages to reference all four of the original movies while creating something which feels fresh and original.
A batch of new releases from Imprint in Australia introduced me to the first feature of Gordon Hessler, a noirish mystery called Catacombs (1965), and provided an opportunity to revisit Sidney Hayers’ excellent supernatural tale Night of the Eagle (1962), Basil Dearden’s doppelganger thriller The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), and for the first time since its theatrical release in 1970 John Sturges’ Marooned, a movie which bridges the gap between science fiction and naturalistic drama which happens to involve a space mission.
Indicator continue to raise Mexican genre movies from obscurity with three recent limited editions of films by the prolific Rene Cardona Sr.: The Panther Women (1967), The Bat Woman (1968) and Santo vs the Riders of Terror (1970). In addition, they give substantial upgrades to a pair of early Ozploitation features – Richard Franklin’s Patrick (1978) and Simon Wincer’s Snapshot (1979).
Frequently derided as the worst giant-monster-on-a-rampage movie ever made, Reptilicus (1961) gets a 4K restoration from Vinegar Syndrome in a three-disk, dual-format set which presents both the more familiar, shorter U.S. cut credited to Sidney W. Pink and the longer Danish-language version directed by Poul Bang. The effects are bargain-basement, but the movie has genuine charm and a few surprisingly impressive sequences.
Yet more recent viewing, ranging from several documentaries about the intertwining of personal identity and the cultural products we attach ourselves to and consume to unsettling explorations of sex, violence and misogyny and an ambitious, though not entirely successful, work of folk horror from Switzerland.
The new MUBI seven-disk set of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom provides an opportunity to re-visit the original two seasons from 1994 and 1997 and finally see the elaborate blend of satire, soap opera and ghost story reach some kind of conclusion with the third season made in 2022; while it proves impossible to attain the unique energy of the original, which achieved a perfect balance between horror and comedy, The Kingdom: Exodus does tie up many of the loose ends left dangling for twenty-five years. An even stranger piece of experimental horror has been restored by Le Chat Qui Fume with their 4K edition of Leslie Stevens’ Incubus (1966) in which a pre-Kirk William Shatner confronts demons while speaking Esperanto.
Continuing my survey of what I’ve been watching this Spring… Mondo Macabro Mondo Macabro is a label I haven’t mentioned much here, though they specialize in genre movies from around the world and I’ve discovered some real oddities through them – like H. Tjut Djalil’s Mystics in Bali (1981) and Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s Alucarda (1975). […]