Recent Severin viewing

Alice Campos (Florinda Bolkan) searches for her own past in Luigi Bazzoni’s Le Orme (Footprints on the Moon [1975])

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.

Recent Arrow releases, part two

But once hired, Jack (Clive Owen)'s addiction to watching losers kicks in in Mike Hodges' Croupier (1997)

More recent releases from Arrow: Nightmare at Noon (1988), a horror-thriller from prolific Greek filmmaker Nico Mastorakis; The Righteous (2021), a bleak, Bergman-influenced study of guilt and grief with supernatural intimations from Newfoundland actor/filmmaker Mark O’Brien; and a superb hi-def restoration of Mike Hodges’ late career masterpiece Croupier (1997) in a two-disk set which includes an engaging documentary in which the 89-year-old filmmaker reminisces about his life and career.

Vinegar Syndrome January releases

Dr. Pretorius (ted Sorel) returns very much changed in Stuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986)

Vinegar Syndrome begin 2023 by casting a wide net to gather a range of exploitation movies from Hong Kong, Mexico and the U.S. It’s a mixed bag encompassing Stuart Gordon’s classic H.P. Lovecraft adaptation From Beyond (1986); three extreme horrors featuring iconic actor Anthony Wong; a sordid Mexican movie about a psychopath killing and raping for Satan; Tom Chaney’s Frostbiter (1995), a derivative low-budget horror from Michigan featuring ambitious special effects, miniatures, stop-motion animation and Evil Dead-inspired excess; and Curt Siodmak’s minor oddity Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956), the first from a new sub-label, Vinegar Syndrome Labs, intended to gauge interest in this kind of obscure title.

Back to the multiplex

James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) undergoes the duplication process in Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool (2023)

Two new movies by directors who interest me offer a mixture of pleasure and slight disappointment. Both Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool (2023) and M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin (2023) have a strong strain of psychological horror somewhat compromised by endings which are not fully satisfying.

Political thrillers, horror and metaphor

Three recent releases blend reality and fiction to explore political themes, with varying success. Alain Jessua’s Les Chiens (1978) is an allegory of Fascism, while Jean-Claude Lord’s Mindfield (1989) and Jayro Bustamante’s La llorona (2019) are both rooted in real crimes, the former turning history into pulp entertainment, the latter into a haunting exploration of national trauma.

2022 reading

Tony Dalton's biography of Terence Fisher from FAB Press

Three books which I read last year connect with my love of genre film, particularly horror: Tony Dalton’s hefty biography Terence Fisher: Master of Gothic Cinema from FAB Press; Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, edited by Samm Deighan and now available as an e-book from Spectacular Optical; and – somewhat more esoteric – Powers of Darkness, an alternate version of Dracula first published in a Swedish newspaper from 1899 to 1900 and recently unearthed and translated back into English, published in an impressive limited edition by Centipede Press.

Blasts from the past

More genre viewing – late Fall 2018: Part Two

Criterion Blu-ray review: Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962)

TCM Remembers 2011

William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949): Criterion Blu-ray review

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