My recent streaming seems to lean heavily into horror, with a few animated movies to lighten the tone.
Dipping another toe into the online stream, part two
Tag: Found-footage
A world of horror from Arrow and Severin
Two recent box sets – Arrow’s J-Horror Rising and Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours Vol. 2 – provide a dizzying range of horror and fantasy movies from multiple cultures and cinematic traditions. Each set includes a range of extras which illuminate not only the cultural differences but also similarities in theme and emotional impact displayed by these movies.
New limited editions from Second Sight, part two
Four new limited edition releases from Second Sight gave me a reason to revisit and to some degree re-evaluate movies I was quite familiar with. While my opinions may not have changed radically, each set did give me a new appreciation for the filmmakers’ work, most particularly in the case of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s influential The Blair Witch Project (1999). The care and attention the company lavish on genre films – here, in addition to Blair Witch, the Ginger Snaps Trilogy (2000-04), Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor (2020) and Ti West’s The Sacrament (2013) – is exemplary.
Year End 2024
It’s that time of year again – have to look back and think about whether the time I’ve spent watching movies has been worthwhile. Here, I glance back at eleven disk releases which stood out for me.
Spring 2024 viewing, part one
Springtime viewing includes monsters and murderous mayhem, found-footage rawness and classical Hollywood craft, psycho killers and ancient evil, along with a couple of westerns with different attitudes towards violence on the frontier.
Fall 2023 viewing, part one
As always, writing falls behind viewing and I’ve missed mentioning some disks that deserved at least a comment – so here are some quick notes on recent releases from Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and some smaller labels covering a wide range of genres from spaghetti westerns to East European animation, from low-budget sci-fi to documentary, from comedy to horror to exploitation.
Cauldron Films, round three
The latest releases from Cauldron Films are a pair of little-known found-footage horror movies which both have their moments, but suffer from the genre’s frequent shortcomings. Mike Costanza’s The Collingswood Story (2002) was the first movie to use on-line video chat as a storytelling medium, while Victor Dryere’s 1974: La posesión de Altair (2016) goes back to pre-video times, using super-8 home movies to show a young married couple under supernatural attack in rural Mexico.
Fall viewing, part two
More brief comments on recent horror viewing.
Catching up, part two
Continuing my notes on recently watched movies which I haven’t written about in depth …
Speed reviewing: 50 Capsule Comments
Very brief comments on several dozen disks viewed over the past few months.
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