Criterion gives Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Sam Peckinpah’s final, unfinished Western, stellar treatment in a two-disk Blu-ray set (also in a 4K UHD edition) with three different cuts plus extensive extras. The original theatrical release is presented alongside Peckinpah’s final preview cut and a more polished 50th Anniversary edit which restores and refines much of the material originally removed after the director walked away from the project.
I don’t get out to a theatre very often these days, so my choices of what to see are more judicious than they used to be, generally the work of directors I’m particularly interested in. The one dud is the latest superfluous entry in a franchise I’ve quite liked – Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes – but the rest have been satisfying to some degree: George Miller’s latest apocalyptic action epic, Furiosa; M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, which as usual I liked in contrast to the predictable critical derision: MaXXXine, the conclusion of Ti West’s trilogy starring Mia Goth: and the small Canadian drama The Burning Season by sometime Winnipegger Sean Garrity.
Bypassing Ridley Scott’s tediously pretentious attempts to reboot the Alien franchise, co-writer/director Fede Alvarez strikes gold with Alien: Romulus, a relentlessly-paced, well-designed return to basics which manages to reference all four of the original movies while creating something which feels fresh and original.
Recent Radiance releases include a pair of Italian police procedurals – Pietro Germi’s neorealist noit The Facts of Murder (1959) and Luigi Comencini’s satire on bourgeois hypocrisy The Sunday Woman (1975) – and some traditional and new wave martial arts from Japan with Yasuharu Hasebe’s pop-art Black Tight Killers (1966) and a set of the first three movies in Daiei’s Shinobi series of bleak Ninja movies, Satsuo Yamamoto’s Band of Assassins (1962) and Revenge (1963) and Kazuo Mori’s Ressurection (1963). And speaking of Ninjas, Neon Eagle have released a deluxe two-disk set of Godfrey Ho’s patch-job Ninja Terminator (1964) and the original Korean movie cannibalized by Ho, Kim Si-hyun’s The Univited Guest of the Star Ferry.
Imprint’s two-disk limited edition of Sam Peckinpah’s final film, The Osterman Weekend (1983), presents both the theatrical cut and the version Peckinpah initially handed to the producers – while there are numerous differences in the editing, neither version can make the murky story coherent. Some well-staged scenes and an interesting cast fail to breathe life into the Cold War paranoia and the filmmaker’s career ends with an air of disinterest and exhaustion.
Yet more recent viewing, ranging from several documentaries about the intertwining of personal identity and the cultural products we attach ourselves to and consume to unsettling explorations of sex, violence and misogyny and an ambitious, though not entirely successful, work of folk horror from Switzerland.
Continuing my survey of what I’ve been watching this Spring… Mondo Macabro Mondo Macabro is a label I haven’t mentioned much here, though they specialize in genre movies from around the world and I’ve discovered some real oddities through them – like H. Tjut Djalil’s Mystics in Bali (1981) and Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s Alucarda (1975). […]
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.
More recent viewing, with excellent restorations of classic fantasies by Arrow – Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968) and John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982); a pair of impressive German film school projects – Tilman Singer’s Luz (2018) and Lukas Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa (2017); a couple of entertaining Australian features which mix fiction and documentary in interesting ways – Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Stunt Rock (1978) and Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce’s Top Knot Detective (2017): and Shredder Orpheus (1990), a low-budget indie version of the Orpheus myth made by Seattle musicians and skateboarders.
Recent Vinegar Syndrome releases offer a range of genres and styles and widely varying degrees of satisfaction – there’s Hong Kong action, Indonesian horror, experimental indie sci-fi, neo-noir and feminist vigilante violence, giant rats, Biblical horror and quite a bit of sex and violence.