Another mixed bag …

Emily (Mariclare Costello) haunts a Connecticut idyll in John Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

Another seemingly random collection of movies, this time including some cheap exploitation, cheesy fantasy, horror and noir. I revisit an old favourite, re-evaluate a low-budget Canadian film from the ’70s, and finally catch up with a couple of movies I’ve wanted to see for decades.

Pandemic viewing, Part Two

A psychotic YouTuber goes on a spree in Robert Mockler's Like Me (2017)

Social isolation and “working from home” mean a lot of time for movie-watching … and the volume far outstrips my ability to say anything substantive about many of the films I do watch: so here I mostly just acknowledge what I’ve been viewing in the past 4-6 weeks. Part two of four.

Camp Losey

Liz Taylor as wealthy widow Sissy Goforth clinging to life in Joseph Losey's Boom (1968)

In the middle of a career striving for artistic seriousness, Joseph Losey took a diversion into camp with three movies in the late 1960s. Gorgeously photographed and rife with scenery-chewing, one s a dud, one a great Gothic psychodrama and the third … well, it’s simply unclassifiable.

A Kino Lorber miscellany

Everything begins to look suspicious to Jane (Pamela Franklin) in Robert Fuest's And Soon the Darkness (1970)

In the past few years Kino Lorber has become one of the most prolific disk producers with a remarkably varied catalogue representing every imaginable genre. Here, I look at a half dozen KL releases by a range of interesting directors – Robert Fuest, Ken Russell, Alain Robak, Harold Becker, Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah.

Indicator’s Hammer Vol. 4: Faces of Fear

... at the perfect body (Michael Gwynn) the Baron (Peter Cushing) has fashioned for him in Terence Fisher's The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)

With Hammer Vol. 4: Faces of Fear, Indicator continue to prove themselves one of the finest companies producing exceptional Blu-ray editions of a wide variety of genres. This new set includes three of the studio’s finest features, each very different from the others, plus an interesting misfire. As always, there’s an almost overwhelming quantity of supplementary material to provide background and critical assessments for each film.

Blasts from the past

Criterion Blu-ray review: The Honeymoon Killers (1969)

The pleasures of hand-made animation

Arrow Video, part two: White of the Eye (1987)

Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

>