Another eclectic selection from my recent viewing, from an old fondly remembered BBC sci-fi series to an unsettling French psychological thriller, from a nasty John Frankenheimer thriller to a pair of atypical Rossellini features striving to break out of the confines of neorealism.
The 3rd volume of Shout! Factory’s Vincent Price Collection, anchored by William Whitney’s severely under-budgeted Master of the World (1961), seems more threadbare than the previous volumes, although there are still points of interest. Roger Corman’s Tower of London (1962) seems ripe for reevaluation, and set allows viewers to compare Gordon Hessler’s original cut of Cry of the Banshee (1970) with the producer’s cut, released theatrically. The high point is Price’s one-man TV show An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (1970).
A mixed bag of recently viewed disks, from an obscure, poetic black-an-white drama to a garishly perverse piece of Greek exploitation, with some gialli and Japanese sci-fi animation thrown in.
Kids and monsters, kids in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and a couple of cousins from Israel who tried to take over Hollywood in the ’80s: all help to take one’s mind off the tedious last days of winter.
Polish director Andrzej Zulawski has died, age 75, just as a restored version of his ambitious science fiction epic On the Silver Globe is scheduled to premiere in New York.
Twilight Time revive Gordon Douglas’ The Detective starring Frank Sinatra and Michael Winner’s Scorpio starring Burt Lancaster, a couple of largely forgotten movies from the late ’60s and early ’70s in editions which highlight their interest as time capsules of attitudes and filmmaking styles which have since all but disappeared; and revisit Mysterious Island, one of Ray Harryhausen’s better movies, with a new edition featuring some interesting supplements.
Although I saw fewer movies in theatres than ever, this year offered a rich array of films on disk, belying continuing prophecies of the medium’s demise in the face of on-line streaming.
Sony’s Icons of Horror Collection: Sam Katzman DVD set presents an entertaining selection of low-budget genre movies from the mid-’50s. While they’d never be mistaken for art, they’re undeniably entertaining.
Since the end of the studio system, the term B-movie has come to refer more to content than budget; recent viewing covers a wide range of styles within this nebulous category.
Hard to Be a God (2013), the final film of Russian director Aleksei German, more than a decade in the making, is a dense, obscure, visually stunning adaptation of a novel by the Strugatsky brothers. While German’s storytelling is extremely oblique, this depiction of a brutal medieval world which eventually corrupts Earth scientists who have traveled there to study a Renaissance which failed to happen, is realized with such visceral power that the viewer becomes immersed in the filth, madness and horror, occasionally gleaning brief moments of transcendent beauty.