A lot of my recent viewing has been catching up on a range of movies from the ’60s through the ’80s, some of which I saw when they were first released, while others weren’t accessible to me at the time. These include some foreign classics … and quite a bit of trash.
This year’s New Year’s Eve movie binge with my friend Steve spanned from ’50s 3D Red Menace sci-fi to ’70s blaxploitation horror to a political thriller about right-wing apocalyptic political paranoia which, while dating from 1972, suggested the atmosphere of the coming 2020 presidential election year.
The usual year-end round-up – not necessarily the best movies or disks, but some of the ones I most enjoyed, from high art to entertaining trash. The sheer range of what’s available should lay to rest any lingering rumours about the demise of physical media.
International hit men, a widescreen travelogue, Asian action, World War Two, sex with an immortal monster, the zombie apocalypse, necrophilia and interstellar space travel … another mixed bag of recent viewing.
Horror, westerns science fiction, crime, magic, demons, vampires, zombies, witches, a one-legged detective, people trapped in a deadly house, a damsel in distress and a film editor driven mad by cheap exploitation movies …
Yet more recent random viewing: Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s movie-biz tragedy The Barefoot Contessa (1954); Lucio Fulci’s first and (almost) last gialli, One on Top of the Other aka Perversion Story (1969) anf The New York Ripper (1982); Ivan Nagy’s oddly poetic serial killer movie Skinner (1993); and some cheap bargains from the local drugstore.
More random viewing: two obscure independent films from the BFI, Margaret Tait’s poetic Blue Black Permanent (1992) and Maurice Hatton’s gritty fake-umentary about the film business, Long Shot (1977); and three from Twilight Time – George Sluizer’s interesting Americanization of his existential thriller The Vanishing (1993), Terrence Young’s straightforward fact-based crime saga The Valachi Papers (1972), and D.W. Griffith’s monumental but deeply troubling Birth of a Nation (1915).
A random selection of recent viewing, from Nazi propaganda to British Angry Young Men, from classic sci-fi to the 1960s revival of a French criminal mastermind as slapstick pastiche.
Produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin, The Power (1968) is a low-key sci-fi thriller with a strong cast and a no-nonsense style, which was barely noticed when it was released in the same year as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.
Three Blu-rays from Twilight Time span the espionage genre from World War Two to the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, each mixing personal drama with larger political issues in their own distinct ways.