Arrow’s Gothic Fantastico box set gathers together four lesser-known Italian genre movies from the mid-’60s from the period when Gothic horror flourished between Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and the rise of the giallo later in the decade, while Sergio Bergonzelli’s Blood Delirium (1988) from Vinegar Syndrome is a garish throwback long after the Gothic had faded away.
A few more comments on recent viewing, which includes a couple of interesting older horror movies and two overblown recent Hollywood blockbusters.
A few notes about disks from a couple of companies I’ve previously had little experience with – 88 Films and 101 Films, both from the UK – plus three box sets from Arrow.
Excellent Blu-ray editions from Criterion and the BFI respectively do full justice to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), two very dark examinations of the post-war crisis of masculinity.
Soon after Hong Kong was handed back to China by Britain, filmmakers Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak embarked on an ambitious project to revitalize a film industry in disarray. The result was the Infernal Affairs trilogy, which has its roots in the HK action movies of the 1980s, using familiar narrative tropes as a springboard for a complex meditation on identity amidst new political and economic uncertainties. Criterion’s three-disk Blu-ray set showcases the trilogy with an array of new and archival extras.
Revisiting some old favourites recently has taken in an eclectic selection ranging from a classic BBC television production to Spanish zombies, New York cops, a Las Vegas heist and an oblique alien invasion.
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.
Mexico looms large in the Western genre, in both its Hollywood and spaghetti iterations, but until now it hadn’t occurred to me that Mexican filmmakers might have made their own Westerns; that unasked question is firmly answered by the recent Vinegar Syndrome release of a pair of movies which seem to straddle the boundary between the classical Hollywood and Italian versions of America’s defining myth of masculinity and violence.
The rediscovery of a film commissioned by Lutheran Services from Pittsburgh’s The Latent Image company in 1975 shines a light on a transitional stage of George A. Romero’s career. The Amusement Park transforms a PSA about neglect of the elderly into a bleak nightmare of abuse and paranoia as Lincoln Maazel (Tata Cuda in Martin [1976]) is subjected to disdain, neglect and outright violence at a rundown amusement park.
Criterion’s new 4K restoration of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1996) captures all the film’s dark and unsettling mysteries with an impressive image and ominous soundscape.