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.
Three recent releases spanning nine decades offer radically different viewing experiences, from James Whale’s pre-Code courtroom drama The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933), rife with bourgeois misogyny, to Patrice Leconte’s Man on the Train (2002), steeped in existential weariness, to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Something in the Dirt (2022), in which the residents of a nondescript Los Angeles apartment discover a portal to cosmic horror.
Thrillers may exploit real-world issues for story material, but often distort and trivialize reality in their quest to entertain. The terrorism which erupted and spread during the 1970s is used in quite different ways in Otto Preminger’s Rosebud (1975), John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday (1976) and Andrew V. McLaglen’s North Sea Hijack (1980).
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.
Criterion’s new dual-format release of Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967) showcases a 4K transfer of this radical deconstruction of the yakuza genre starring the idiosyncratic Joe Shishido as hit man who finds himself disappearing down a rabbit hole of paranoia and violence.
A new two-disk set from Vinegar Syndrome provides an impressive introduction to an unfamiliar Mexican filmmaker. Mexican Gothic: The Films of Carlos Enrique Taboada includes two atmospheric horror movies and a powerful drama about a man driven to extremes by the poverty that has trapped him his whole life.
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).
Collector’s Editions from 88 Films provide an opportunity to re-evaluate two familiar Italian horror movies. My opinion of Pupi Avati’s creepy Zeder (1983), always favourable, has been confirmed, while I now have a new appreciation of Mario Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970), which I’d always seen as a minor and not entirely successful addition to his filmography.
![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.