More brief comments on recent horror viewing.
Fall viewing, part two
Commentary
Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999): Criterion Blu-ray review
Jim Jarmusch explores the melding of multiple genres and disparate cultures in his meditative tragicomedy Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), given a fine restoration on Criterion’s new Blu-ray.
Fall viewing, part one
A round-up of recent viewing, as usual heavy on horror and exploitation.
Miguel Llansó’s trash aesthetic
Once again, Arrow Video introduces me to a previously unknown filmmaker whose work is wildly imaginative, playful and challenging. Their two-disk set of Miguel Llansó’s Crumbs (2015) and Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019) is one of the year’s most engaging releases.
Euro Horror
Minor Euro-horror gets the deluxe treatment in several releases from Blue Underground, Grindhouse Films and Severin; three features by Dutch director Dick Maas – De Lift (1983), Amsterdamned (1988) and Down (2001) – and three from Lucio Fulci – Cat in the Brain (1990), Aenigma (1987) and Demonia (1990) – along with Simone Scafidi’s Fulci for Fake (2019), an illuminating documentary about Fulci.
Exiles at war
Two German emigre directors avoid Hollywood war movie cliches in a pair of Blu-rays from Masters of Cinema: Fritz Lang’s anti-nuclear Cloak and Dagger (1946) and Billy Wilder’s suspenseful character drama Five Graves to Cairo (1943).
World Cinema Project 3: Criterion Blu-ray review
With volume 3 of their World Cinema Project box sets, Criterion has released another treasure trove of largely unknown (in the West) features spanning five decades and six countries, from the Expressionist horror of Mexico’s Dos Monjes (1934) to the Neo-realist horrors of life on Brazil’s streets in Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1980), with stops in between in Indonesia, Iran, Mauritania and Cuba.
Creeps be creeping
Pete Schuermann’s The Creep Behind the Camera (2014) is an odd hybrid, begun as a documentary and incorporating interview clips, but mostly a dramatization of the story of Art Nelson aka Vic Savage, a talentless sociopath who dreamed of being a movie director but was sunk by a lack of talent and his own increasingly violent sociopathy. Synapse’s Blu-ray includes along with the feature, a wealth of extras including a 2K scan of Nelson’s no-budget monster movie The Creeping Terror (1964).
Carroll Baker and Umberto Lenzi on Blu-ray
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Unhappy with her career in Hollywood, actress Carroll Baker moved to Italy in the mid-’60s where she starred in a number of genre movies, including four erotic thrillers by Umberto Lenzi which bridge the gap between classic women-in-peril mysteries and the giallo. All four are collected together by Severin in their lavish The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection Blu-ray box set.
Cannibal feast
In popular culture, and exploitation movies, cannibals are the disreputable cousins of the zombie; they have the embarrassing habit of eating unsuspecting people without any supernatural justification. There’s a distinct difference, though, between American and Italian cannibal movies – the former adhering to tropes related to serial killer stories, while the latter draw on anthropological ideas to provide a gloss of realism to graphic exploitation imagery. The contrast can be seen clearly between Andrew van den Houten’s Offspring (2009), Lucky McKee’s The Woman (2011) and Pollyanna McIntosh’s Darlin’ (2019) and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981).
