Yet more wide-ranging genre viewing – from classic and modern samurai to spaghetti western and ’40s supernatural noir and ’70s hard-boiled romance, ’50s exploitation horror to Hitler, Bigfoot and haunted 12″ vinyl.
Time again to catalogue what I’ve been watching over the past couple of months, but haven’t yet mentioned. First, a mix of throwaway low-brow entertainment and more interesting genre movies from Severin – Italian horror spanning from the ’60s to the ’90s, some low-budget exploitation, and a box set of minor movies featuring Peter Cushing.
Arrow’s third collection of spaghetti westerns, Savage Guns, brings together another four movies which display the range and flexibility of the genre, from Lucio Fulci’s elegiac and mystical The Four of the Apocalypse (1975) to Mario Camus’ veiled political criticisms of the Franco regime in Wrath of the Wind (1970) and Paolo Bianchini’s intersection of personal motives and historical events in I Want Him Dead (1968). Edoardo Mulargia’s El Puro (1969), about a drunken gunfighter forced back into action, is the most conventional of the four features.
Indicator closed 2023 with one of their finest offerings yet – a four-disk, eight film box set of blood-and-thunder melodramas produced, and mostly directed, by George King and starring the inimitable Tod Slaughter as a roster of heinous villains portrayed with gleeful enthusiasm by an actor who devoted his long career to preserving an art form incubated on Victorian stages and largely fallen out of favour by the time these films preserved it with such relish. With striking restorations, mostly from original nitrate negatives, supplemented with commentaries, interviews and Slaughter-related ephemera, this is definitely the highlight of the past year.
Indicator’s Universal Noir #2 box set gathers six minor movies from the late 1940s, most of which can only qualify as noir if the definition is severely stretched, while William Wyler’s consummate craft lifts B-movie tropes to the level of art in The Desperate Hours (1955), beautifully restored on Arrow’s new Blu-ray edition.
Don Shebib, who died on November 5 at the age of 85, left an indelible mark on Canadian cinema with his first feature, Goin’ Down the Road (1970), a raw, realist depiction of the country’s economic inequalities and the failed dreams of a pair of working class friends who leave impoverished Nova Scotia for the promised land of Toronto.
This week marks the thirteenth anniversary of the blog and there’s still no clear pattern to what I watch and write about! The first post went up on October 22, 2010. Hard to believe it’s been going this long, with almost 900 posts and over 3200 reviews so far. I don’t think I’ve ever stuck with anything this faithfully in my entire life! Thanks for reading!