Grindhouse Releasing have resurrected one of Florida exploitation master William Grefé’s best films with an impressive two-disk set showcasing Impulse (1974), starring William Shatner as a con-man/killer, along with two other features plus hours of extras.
I’ve been revisiting some familiar movies in upgraded editions, with new transfers and extras; some I haven’t seen in years, even decades, They run the gamut from horror to comedy, thrillers to superheroes, zombies and monsters.
Although I write regularly here about the movies I watch, there are a lot more I don’t get around to mentioning – the reasons for what write about or ignore are not entirely clear.
Emerging from the depths of winter, I glance back at a motley collection of movies watched over the past few months — this batch all from Vinegar Syndrome: sleaze, horror, sex and violence, war, comedy, action, fantasy and lo-fi science fiction, plus the first feature I’ve ever seen from Tunisia.
A pair of recent Indicator releases resurrect a couple of all-but forgotten features with major stars. Richard Widmark plays a Western lawman whose time has passed in Death of a Gunfighter (1969), the first movie credited to phantom director Alan Smithee, while George C. Scott is a former New York judge dealing with grief by taking on the identity of Sherlock Holmes; his therapist just happens to be named Dr. Watson (Joanne Woodward).
The passage of time has complicated Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), Joan Micklin Silver’s well-observed comedy-drama about a broken romance; the behaviour of obsessed romantic Charles (John Heard) now seems much darker and more troubling than it may have when the film was first released.
![Alice Campos (Florinda Bolkan) searches for her own past in Luigi Bazzoni’s Le Orme (Footprints on the Moon [1975])](https://www.cageyfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/footprints_01.jpg)
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.
Asian genre movies often contain a dizzying mix of exhilarating action, slapstick comedy, graphic violence and gore, and wild supernatural horror – all of which are on display in recent releases from 88 Films and Eureka.
A couple of Christmas movies showcase Barbara Stanwyck’s range in comedy and drama, while Indicator’s fifth Columbia Noir set focuses on Humphrey Bogart’s screen persona in several routine movies and one classic.
A relatively new label, Canadian International Pictures, has resurrected Gerald Potterton’s light and charming character-based comedy The Rainbow Boys (1973) in a fine Blu-ray edition with substantial extras. Another CIP release showcases Potterton’s National Film Board short The Railrodder (1965), a travelogue starring Buster Keaton towards the end of his life, along with John Spotton’s documentary about the making of the short, Buster Keaton Rides Again (1965), and another NFB travelogue, Eugene Boyko’s Helicopter Canada (1966), made to mark the country’s centennial.