Springtime viewing includes monsters and murderous mayhem, found-footage rawness and classical Hollywood craft, psycho killers and ancient evil, along with a couple of westerns with different attitudes towards violence on the frontier.
A wildly varied selection of recent releases from the BFI, with Pat Jackson’s Western Approaches (1944) transforming propaganda into art via Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor photography; Roddy McDowall’s The Ballad of Tam Lin (1970) infusing folk horror with the Hollywood glamour of Ava Gardner; and Ken Russell turning the famous 1816 house party presided over by Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva into a fever dream of the Romantics’ fascination with love and death in Gothic (1987)
Recent BFI releases offer a selection of amateur and professional short films from the 1950s to the ’80s in volume 3 of Flipside’s Short Sharp Shocks series, as well as a provocative documentary lecture from filmmaker Nina Menkes which asserts that the apparatus of cinema itself is gendered and weighted against women.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964) uses the striking cinematography of Sergei Urusevsky to create a fever dream version of the Cuban Revolution, a series of archetypal moments of oppression and resistance leading to an ecstatic explosion of justified communal violence. Filled with heightened emotions rendered in breathtaking images and seemingly impossible camera movements, the film looks gorgeous in a 4K restoration on Criterion’s Blu-ray.
Sophie Compton & Reuben Hamlyn’s Another Body (2023) is an unsettling documentary which is also a horror movie and a detective story; when a college student discovers that she’s a victim of deep-fake revenge porn and that the legal authorities can’t/won’t do anything about it, she sets about tracking down the identity of her victimizer – which takes her to really disturbing corners of the Internet – and regains some control over her own identity.
Three two-disk sets from Eureka provide an overview of Universal Studios’ horror movies from the mid-’30s to the early ’50s, in the period when the first wave of early sound horrors petered out and briefly flourished again as low-budget B-movies as the Depression gave way to World War Two. Karloff and Lugosi are joined by notable, if lesser, genre figures like Lionel Atwill and Rondo Hatton in a mix of science fiction and the supernatural, with gangsters and Gothic trappings spicing the mix.
Severin’s recent release of Buddy Giovinazzo’s fourth feature, The Unscarred (2000), on disk reconfirms this outsider as an intriguing auteur; a chamber piece in which the psychological games of four old friends grown increasingly darker is a taut, polished piece of work which sent me back to watch his raw first feature, Combat Shock (1986), again. As technically different as the two movies are, both reveal a filmmaker with a bleak view of the world tempered by a deep empathy for broken people.
Criterion’s two-disk Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers showcases three of the director’s best movies, including the peak of his long collaboration with Lon Chaney in The Unknown (1927) and Browning’s masterpiece Freaks (1932) along with the lesser-known The Mystic (1925). Fine 2K transfers and some illuminating extras leave you hoping that more of Tod Browning’s work will turn up on disk in restored versions.
William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy aka The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) mixes self-aggrandizing national myth with a dark allegory of Capitalism in which a desperate New England farmer sells his soul to the Devil for wealth and power which he learns too late doesn’t bring happiness. Criterion’s new 4K restoration is visually stunning.
Alexandre O. Philippe’s Lynch/Oz explores the connections between Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the works of David Lynch through interviews with six filmmakers and a critic, discovering numerous reference points though the the ways in which inspiration affects meaning remain frustratingly unclear.