Adaptation | Cagey Films

Dragons and ghosts, resurrected in 4K

Posted on June 28, 2023June 27, 2023 by Kenneth George Godwin

Julia (Mia Farrow) welcomes her own doom as expiation for her guilt in Richard Loncraine's Full Circle (The Haunting of Julia, 1977)

A pair of new 4K restorations resurrect two neglected films which deserve to be better known – Matthew Robbins’ Dragonslayer (1981), one of the finest fantasy films ever made which has never fared well on home video, but looks wonderful in this new edition; and Richard Loncraine’s atmospheric Full Circle (The Haunting of Julia, 1977), adapted from Peter Straub’s first horror novel, featuring Mia Farrow as a mother traumatized by the death of her child, who becomes immersed in a decades-old mystery when she moves into a haunted house.

Action and politics in ’70s thrillers

Posted on May 31, 2023May 30, 2023 by Kenneth George Godwin

Nice large-scale miniatures in Andrew V. McLaglen's North Sea Hijack (1980)

Thrillers may exploit real-world issues for story material, but often distort and trivialize reality in their quest to entertain. The terrorism which erupted and spread during the 1970s is used in quite different ways in Otto Preminger’s Rosebud (1975), John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday (1976) and Andrew V. McLaglen’s North Sea Hijack (1980).

Recent Severin viewing

Posted on March 22, 2023August 23, 2024 by Kenneth George Godwin

Alice Campos (Florinda Bolkan) searches for her own past in Luigi Bazzoni’s Le Orme (Footprints on the Moon [1975])

It’s taken me a while to work through some of the many Severin box sets that have been piling up over the past year – the folk horror set All the Haunts Be Ours, House of Psychotic Women and the latest set of Italian movies Violent Streets: The Umberto Lenzi/Tomas Milian Collection – along with some 4K special editions of movies by Dario Argento and Alex de la Iglesia.

Recent Arrow releases, part one

Posted on March 8, 2023March 6, 2023 by Kenneth George Godwin

Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) lurks in dark corners in Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003)

Recent Arrow releases include Japanese ghosts (a deluxe box set of Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On movies) and gangsters (Shinji Somai’s genre-bending Sailor Suit and Machine Gun [1981]) and one of the best early adaptations of an H.P. Lovecraft story (Daniel Haller’s The Dunwich Horror [1969]).

Memories of monochrome England

Posted on January 25, 2023April 29, 2023 by Kenneth George Godwin

The visit of a friendly policeman causes stress in John Kruse's October Moth (1960)

Network and the BFI deliver a potent mix of wartime propaganda and post-war crime in atmospheric black-and-white with Blu-ray releases of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) and Lewis Gilbert’s The Good Die Young (1954), and a massive 20-disk DVD set of B-movie thrillers from the early 1960s mostly adapted from the novels of Edgar Wallace.

James Whale’s Show Boat (1936): music and race in Golden Age Hollywood

Posted on November 2, 2022November 1, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Black labour with echoes of slavery in James Whale's Show Boat (1936)

Although now he’s best-known for his four witty Gothic horror movies – Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein – Show Boat (1936) is arguably James Whale’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker. One of the decade’s great musicals, it is also one of the most complex and nuanced treatments of race and its impact on American culture produced at the height of Hollywood’s studio era. Criterion’s Blu-ray does full justice to the film’s intrinsic qualities and historical importance.

Summer grab-bag, part four: (almost) all the rest

Posted on September 21, 2022March 11, 2024 by Kenneth George Godwin

A quick survey of four dozen disks watched over the summer months.

Edgar G. Ulmer’s Cossacks in Exile (1938)

Posted on September 17, 2022September 16, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Thanks to the Provincial Archives of Alberta I’ve been able to fill in another small gap in my experience of Edgar G. Ulmer’s eclectic filmography; although scanned from a very ragged print, the Archives’ upload of the Ukrainian-language musical Cossacks in Exile (1938) reveals some interesting connections between the 18th Century history of Ukraine and what’s happening there today.

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.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021): Criterion Blu-ray review

Posted on July 23, 2022July 22, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Intimacy is unavoidable in the confined space of a car in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (2021)

Taking its time, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s award-winning Drive My Car (2021) begins with a sense of detached observation and gradually draws you into emotional depths as its characters come to know each other and themselves during the process of rehearsing a performance of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. Criterion’s Blu-ray presentation features a beautiful image, supplemented with a making-of, an interview with Hamaguchi and a press conference from Cannes.

Tag: Adaptation