A contest launched by Canadian distributor Unobstructed View has spurred me once again to take a look at my own movie collection … another reminder that I have a seriously out-of-control habit!
Collecting in the time of plague
Commentary
Camp Losey
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.
Trawling the Internet
With a little time and patience, it’s possible to dig up obscure and interesting movies on the Internet – some public domain, others no doubt illegitimate, some in pretty poor shape, others looking just fine. Here’s a collection of ones I recently discovered and generally enjoyed.
Catching up, part two
Continuing my notes on recently watched movies which I haven’t written about in depth …
Catching up
A quick survey of movies I watched recently which I haven’t already commented on …
Sex-Death-Exploitation-Art
Jörg Buttgereit’s transgressive films are notorious for their gore and disturbing subject matter – murder, suicide, necrophilia – yet for all their graphic exploitation imagery, they display genuine artistry and a serious perspective on life, death and the emotional and psychological ties which bind being and non-being.
Back to the ’70s
Revisiting movies from the early 1970s, I recently watched Howard W. Koch’s rather ugly cop feature Badge 373 (1973), with Robert Duvall as a rule-breaking, racist misogynist NYC detective; Willard (1971), Daniel Mann’s adaptation of Stephen Gilbert’s dark horror novel Ratman’s Notebooks; and two features by George Roy Hill, his faithful adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) and his most personal, and best, film The Great Waldo Pepper (1975).
Looking back …
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.
“Folk Horror”
“Folk horror” is one of those categories which is hard to define – but you know it when you see it, like film noir.Two very different features and two dubious documentaries seem to fit the category – Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer (1953), Malcolm Leigh’s Legend of the Witches (1970) and Derek Ford’s Secret Rites (1971) – all available in excellent Blu-ray editions.
Seeing in the New Year
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.
