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.
Year End 2024
Tag: Western
Sam Peckinpah’s final western: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Criterion gives Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Sam Peckinpah’s final, unfinished Western, stellar treatment in a two-disk Blu-ray set (also in a 4K UHD edition) with three different cuts plus extensive extras. The original theatrical release is presented alongside Peckinpah’s final preview cut and a more polished 50th Anniversary edit which restores and refines much of the material originally removed after the director walked away from the project.
Aussie horror and Mexican luchadores and luchadoras from Indicator
Indicator continue to raise Mexican genre movies from obscurity with three recent limited editions of films by the prolific Rene Cardona Sr.: The Panther Women (1967), The Bat Woman (1968) and Santo vs the Riders of Terror (1970). In addition, they give substantial upgrades to a pair of early Ozploitation features – Richard Franklin’s Patrick (1978) and Simon Wincer’s Snapshot (1979).
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.
Winter 2024 viewing, part four: More other labels
Yet more wide-ranging genre viewing – from classic and modern samurai to spaghetti western and ’40s supernatural noir and ’70s hard-boiled romance, ’50s exploitation horror to Hitler, Bigfoot and haunted 12″ vinyl.
Movies and reality intersect in two recent releases
Our relationship to movies is complex; we know that we’re watching illusions, yet the intellectual and emotional responses we experience are very real. Movies give us access to a seemingly infinite range of experiences which take us out of out immediate lives. Two recent releases delve into this phenomenon in visceral ways — Giuliano Montaldo’s Closed Circuit (1978) addresses the metaphysics of movie watching with humour and suspense, while Charlie Victor Romeo (2013) provides disturbing access to an aspect of real life we might prefer not to think about: the moments during which flight crews try to deal with catastrophic technical failures immediately preceding air crashes.
Arrow’s Savage Guns: 4 Classic Westerns on Blu-ray
Arrow’s third collection of spaghetti westerns, Savage Guns, brings together another four movies which display the range and flexibility of the genre, from Lucio Fulci’s elegiac and mystical The Four of the Apocalypse (1975) to Mario Camus’ veiled political criticisms of the Franco regime in Wrath of the Wind (1970) and Paolo Bianchini’s intersection of personal motives and historical events in I Want Him Dead (1968). Edoardo Mulargia’s El Puro (1969), about a drunken gunfighter forced back into action, is the most conventional of the four features.
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.
What I haven’t been writing about
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.
Death and madness from Indicator
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).
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