Commentary | Cagey Films

Recent releases from the BFI Flipside

Posted on September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Ian (Edward Woodward) goes off the road, just as he did in his dream in Lindsey C. Vickers' The Appointment (1981)

Two recent BFI Flipside releases unearth an odd assortment of movies from the fringes – the standalone feature The Appointment (Lindsey C. Vickers, 1981) and volume 2 of the Short Sharp Shocks anthology series which includes the allegorical horror of Ian F.H. Lloyd’s The Face of Darkness (1976), a mix of crime and ghosts in John Gillings Escape from Broadmoor (1948), horror as feminist thesis in The Mark of Lilith (1986), the proto-music video Jack the Ripper with Screaming Lord Sutch (1963), a couple of unsettling PSAs and other ephemera.

Digital resurrection

Posted on August 17, 2022March 22, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

The blood-drinking witch (Henriette Gerard) peers into hero Allan Gray (Nicholas de Gunzburg)'s coffin in Carl Th. Dreyer's Vampyr (1932)

Digital tools put in service of restoring films from a century ago produce spectacular results with Blu-rays of Carl Th. Dreyer’s uncanny Vampyr (1932) and Louis Feuillade’s serial Tih-Minh (1919).

Murder, mayhem, sex and madness from Arrow

Posted on July 27, 2022July 26, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

The respectable doctor finds ecstasy in unrestrained violence in Gérard Kikoïne’s Edge of Sanity (1989)

Two new Arrow releases – and one older one – plunge into sexual confusion, insecurity, violence and romantic longing: Robert Day’s TV movie The Initiation of Sarah (1977) riffs on themes from Stephen King’s Carrie; Gérard Kikoïne’s Edge of Sanity (1989) gives Anthony Perkins a chance to unleash his inner demons in a career-topping dual performance as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and Kathleen Turner is fearless as a businesswoman who moonlights as a prostitute inspires romantic passion in one man and murderous passion in another, the latter another ferocious, jittery performance from Anthony Perkins.

Unearthing memories: BBC’s Maigret and rural Canadian violence

Posted on July 20, 2022July 18, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

A couple of things seen long ago have resurfaced on disk, tugging at vague memories: Network’s 11-disk set of all 52 episodes of the BBC’s classic series based on Georges Simenon’s novels about Superintendent Maigret (1960-63), and Brian Damude’s scrappy Canadian thriller Sudden Fury (1975) from Vinegar Syndrome reveal just how flawed my memory is.

Zale Dalen’s Skip Tracer (1977)
& the Canadian tax shelter era

Posted on July 13, 2022July 19, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Things get dark when John Collins (David Petersen) harasses George Pettigrew (Alan Rose) past the breaking point in Zale Dalen's Skip Tracer (1977)

Writer-director Zale Dalen made one of the most distinctive Canadian features during the tax shelter years, but Skip Tracer (1977) all but disappeared with the tide of low-budget disaster movies and slasher films produced by financial support from the government between 1975 and 1982. Dalen ended up doing mostly episodic television, though he did briefly return to features in the ’90s, culminating in the absurd but entertaining sci-fi martial arts potboiler Expect No Mercy (1995).

The low-budget art of Edgar G. Ulmer

Posted on July 6, 2022August 11, 2023 by Kenneth George Godwin

Enid Elliot (Margaret Field) has a close encounter in Edgar G. Ulmer's The Man from Planet X (1951)

A pair of recent Blu-rays from Kino Lorber bookend the career of “King of the Bs” Edgar G. Ulmer, who began his off-Hollywood career with a social issues drama about syphilis called Damaged Lives (1933) and ended it with a pair of cheap sci-fi movies, The Amazing Transparent Man and Beyond the Time Barrier (both 1960), with one of the highlights between being The Man from Planet X (1951), the latter three included in KL’s Edgar G, Ulmer Sci-Fi Collection triple-bill.

Truffles, a blood-fuelled car, zombies and a family in retreat from the modern world: recent viewing

Posted on June 29, 2022June 28, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Team members enforce their ideology off the field in Bill Milling's Wolfpack (1987)

Spanish zombies, rural American zombies, a Korean serial killer, monsters and illicit mindbending drugs, a blood-fuelled car, small-town fascism, an eccentric family in retreat from the modern world, and a man with a truffle-hunting pig – there’s no pattern here in my recent movie-watching other than a restless search for the original and the entertaining.

Andreas Marschall’s Tears of Kali (2004)

Posted on June 25, 2022June 24, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

I had to overcome numerous unforeseen difficulties to see Tears of Kali (2004), the first feature by German director Andreas Marschall (Masks, 2011), a stylish and artful collection of three loosely connected horror stories linked to a dangerous cult; each story centres on a couple of characters caught in psychologically tense conflict with occasional eruptions of graphic physical violence.

The future crimes of David Cronenberg

Posted on June 15, 2022June 14, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) rests after a surgical performance in David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future (2022)

David Cronenberg returns to his roots with a new movie which borrows its title and major themes from his early experimental feature Crimes of the Future (1970); once again nature responds to destructive human activity by accelerating the mutability of the body. This time Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) transforms his continually mutating body into an object of performance art, infusing the body horror with a powerful note of black comedy in the director’s best film since Crash (1986).

Miscellaneous May 2022 viewing

Posted on June 8, 2022December 11, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Would-be actress Stella (Susan Ermich) enrols in a prestige acting school in Andreas Marschall's Masks (2011)

Bertrand Tavernier’s epic eight-part documentary Journeys Through French Cinema (2017) offers a personal and idiosyncratic history rooted in the filmmakers personal passions; Enzo G. Castellari’s The Big Racket (1976) and The Heroin Busters (1977) showcase the cynical, violent action of Italian genre movies of the ’70s; Andreas Marschall turns homage into effective horror in the retro-giallo Masks (2011); and Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch Miller’s documentary Other Music (2019) captures an experience all-but-lost today with their account of the final days of a great independent record store in New York City.

Category: Commentary