New Blu-ray releases from Arrow revive an effective Satanic panic movie from the early ’70s and unearth a forgotten regional slasher from 1982. The former, Bernard McEveety’s The Brotherhood of Satan, is an atmospheric gem; the latter, David Nelson’s Death Screams, is kind of clumsy, though it does have a few effective moments.
Three recent box sets from Arrow will satisfy a wide range of genre appetites with five thrillers from Italy in the ’70s, four spaghetti westerns from the ’60s, and Daiei’s 1966 trilogy of period fantasies featuring a statue which comes to life to punish various cruel warlords who oppress local peasants.
A recent Arrow box set showcases yet another regional filmmaker who built a career on determination and very little money. Bill Rebane built his own studio in rural Wisconsin and beginning in the 1960s made a series of genre movies whose reputation echoes that of Ed Wood. The big surprise of the Weird Wisconsin set is that some of them are genuinely effective and entertaining.
Yet another wide range of titles from Arrow Video from a restored silent classic to aliens over Tokyo, woods infested with zombies, food which consumes those who eat it, apocalypse in an alternate future Los Angeles, friendship destroyed by political conflicts, rich people facing the loss of their wealth and a naively admiring time capsule of the U.S. on the brink of the ’60s.
With their new box set He Came from the Swamp, Arrow provide an impressive showcase for the low-budget exploitation movies of Florida filmmaker William Grefé, which feature cheap monsters, violent criminals, hippies and drugs and killer sharks.
It’s that time of year again. How to decide what’s “best” out of the six-hundred-plus movies I watched in 2020? It’s an impossible task, so here’s a fairly random selection of things which may not be best, but certainly appealed to me and stuck in my memory.
With the release of Second Sight’s massive edition of George A. Romero’s genre-defining Dawn of the Dead – all three cuts restored in 4K, plus commentaries and a supplementary disk with almost seven hours of new and archival documentaries and featurettes, and no less than three CDs of music including the complete Goblin soundtrack and hours of library tracks – the late, great director is given his due. Arrow’s 2017 three-disk set of early features, Between Night and Dawn, illuminates how he got there.
Like a monumental battle between formidable rival kaiju, Criterion and Arrow have released competitive Blu-ray sets devoted to Japanese monster movies. Criterion’s Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films 1954-1975 and Arrow’s Gamera: The Complete Collection offer eight disks of monster mayhem in packages too big to fit on my shelves. Binging more than two-dozen of these movies dragged my brain blissfully back to childhood.
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.
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).