Yet another mixed bag of viewing from classic westerns to Asian fantasy/horror, black comedies and science fiction, musicals and monsters.
Holiday viewing
Asian horror
Boxed In
From trash to art, boxed sets enhance the viewing experience by providing a broader context for individual movies – here, four more features from William Castle, The Trilogy of Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and a grab bag of five horrors from poverty row distributor Hemisphere.
Catching up on Arrow
My collecting obsession leads me to Arrow’s Ring Collection — Hideo Nakata’s hugely influential Ringu (1998), two divergent sequels, George Iida’s Spiral (1998) and Nakata’s own Ring 2 (1999), plus the prequel Ring 0: Birthday (2000). While the three follow-up movies can’t match the effectiveness of the original, Arrow present them all in excellent transfers, with a lot of supportive extras.
Speed reviewing, Nov. 2019
Horror, westerns science fiction, crime, magic, demons, vampires, zombies, witches, a one-legged detective, people trapped in a deadly house, a damsel in distress and a film editor driven mad by cheap exploitation movies …
Year End 2017
Some comments about the past year’s DVD and Blu-ray releases.
Evil and dead
Paul W.S. Anderson wraps up his 15-year zombie apocalypse with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016), one of the best episodes in the series, while Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016) scales the zombie heights in style.
Late summer viewing 2014, part one
Horror, action, mindless violence and exploitation: summer viewing has involved a lot of switching off my brain and watching undemanding genre movies.
DVD Review: Laddaland (2011)
Laddaland (2011) is a recent Thai entry in the Asian ghost genre. Interestingly, it also seems to draw on a western strain of horror, what you might call “real-estate anxiety” as exemplified by Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, even to some degree the Paranormal Activity series. Here the fear is rooted more in economic and status […] Read More
