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Argento's Dracula
BD - Which is to say that Argento's
Dracula 3D isn't so dispiriting because it's a bad movie, though
it is, but because there's virtually no sign of the filmmaker in
it, nor of any novel motivation to mount yet another version of
an oft-told tale. Sure, there are fleeting moments of erotic
kink courtesy of the occasionally heaving bare bosom, or of the
subtexts that remain of the novel itself, but the film nearly
plays as a low-rent adaptation you'd expect from the Syfy
channel: The plotting is traditional and plodding, the blocking
is flat, the editing poorly timed, the atmosphere flimsy and
cobbled together, and the score too consciously flippant in an
unsuccessful bid for self-aware cheekiness.
Blu-ray Release
date: January 28th, 2014
The Beast of Hollow Mountain / The Neanderthal Man
BD -
The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956): An American cowboy living
in Mexico discovers his cattle is being eaten by a giant
prehistoric dinosaur. The Neanderthal Man (1953) A mad scientist
transforms himself into a prehistoric caveman, his cat into a
saber-toothed tiger, and his housekeeper into an ape person -
which does not enhance his popularity. Blu-ray Release date:
January 28th, 2014
Frankenstein Created Woman
BD - Hammer Studios followed
up
Evil of Frankenstein with this entertaining sequel,
again starring Peter Cushing as the quintessential mad scientist
obsessed with the reanimation of dead bodies and the creation of
superhuman creatures. His latest project involves transferring
the mind of a wrongly-executed man into the body of his lover
(former Playboy centerfold Susan Denberg), whose own suicide
left her horribly disfigured. After restoring her beauty, the
Doctor performs the mind-transference, which comes off without a
hitch... until the lust for revenge against his executioners
begins to surface. He/she then pursues this vendetta by seducing
and murdering those who wronged him. Hammer stalwart Terence
Fisher directs this quirky entry with his usual flair -- aided
considerably by a decent budget -- and spices things up with a
fair share of titillation (courtesy of Ms. Denberg).
Blu-ray
Release date: January 28th, 2014
The Killer Elite
BD - After a brilliantly cryptic
opening, The Killer Elite settles into Peckinpah's most
apparently straightforward action film since
The Getaway. Built around the internal politics of a
San Francisco company which sidelines in dirty work that even
the CIA won't touch, it concentrates on the painful recovery of
an agent (Caan), wounded in knee and elbow in a double-cross,
and his search for revenge. During Caan's lengthy recuperation,
Peckinpah contemplates the old themes of betrayal, trust and
humiliation. And through the action of the second half, Caan
(like other Peckinpah heroes) comes to some sort of
understanding. The set pieces (a Chinatown shoot-out, a dockland
siege, the superb ships' graveyard climax) are excellent, as are
so many secondary scenes. There are echoes here of
Point Blank, and behind the deceits and
manipulations both are essentially simple films. Unmistakable
Peckinpah - not a masterpiece, but enough to be going on with.
Blu-ray Release date: February 6th, 2013
Violent Saturday
BD - In the unique marriage of heist
caper and overheated melodrama, Violent Saturday (1955), a trio
of bandits enter the quiet small Arizona mining town of Bradenville led by criminal mastermind Harper (Stephen McNally)
who is masquerading as a costume jewelry salesman. Joined by
Dill (Lee Marvin) and Chapman (J. Carrol Naish), Harper and his
gang hole up in the Bradenville Hotel where they plot their
robbery of the local bank. But in many ways, the heist is
secondary. For director Richard Fleischer and screenwriter
Sydney Boehm, far more interesting is their depiction of life in
Bradenville, an on-the-surface peaceful small town which in fact
harbors a number of feverish, sordid personal stories. At the
top of the scandal ladder are the local aristocrats Boyd
(Richard Egan) and Emily Fairchild (Margaret Hayes).
Blu-ray
Release Date: April 3rd, 2013
The Prey
BD - The Prey is a trim and exciting beach-read
of a movie—silly and formulaic, but executed with so much
confidence that you can't help but applaud the filmmakers'
moxie. It's essentially a neo-noir about a wrong man on the run
from the police to clear his name, overstuffed with incidents
and asides from seemingly every subgenre under the crime-film
umbrella. The film should be a hopelessly convoluted slog, but
director Eric Valette has a gift for maintaining a pop-narrative
momentum that draws you in, and there are dashes of legitimate
wit and perversity on display. Blu-ray Release date: January
21st, 2014
Kiss of the Damned
BD - Writer-director Xan Cassavetes,
daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, shifts gears from
documentary to feature work with this offbeat horror opus,
overtly inspired by the work of Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and
others of the same ilk. Set in New England, it tells the story
of two sisters. Both are French vampires - one evil, the other
benevolent. Milo Ventimiglia plays a screenwriter who falls hard
for the good sibling (Joséphine de la Baume) which incites the
anger of the other sister (Roxane Mesquida). That young woman
then decides to unleash fury on the local town.
Blu-ray
Release date: January 27th, 2014
The Wicker Man
BD - When a young girl mysteriously
vanishes, Police Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) travels to a
remote Scottish island to investigate. But the seemingly quiet
community is not as it appears, as the detective uncovers a
secretive pagan society led by the strange Lord Summerisle
(Christopher Lee). While the townsfolk tempt and threaten him
with bizarre rituals and wanton lust, Howie must race to
discover the truth behind the girl's disappearance before his
clash with Lord Summerisle builds to a terrifying conclusion -
one that has cemented this cult shocker as a modern horror
masterpiece. Blu-ray Release date: January 7th, 2014
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
BD - Stanley Kramer
followed his Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg with this
sobering investigation of American greed. Ah, who are we
kidding? It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, about a group of
strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure, is the
most grandly harebrained movie ever made, a pileup of slapstick
and borscht-belt-y one-liners performed by a nonpareil cast,
including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney,
Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a boatload of other
playing-to-the-rafters comedy legends. For sheer scale of
silliness, Kramer’s wildly uncharacteristic film is unlike any
other, an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery. Criterion
Blu-ray
Release date: January 21st, 2014
Death Wish
BD - This drama about a man who takes the law
into his own hands was wildly controversial upon first release,
sparking much debate about the perceived pro-vigilante stance of
the story, and established Charles Bronson as a major box office
draw in the United States. Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) is a
liberal architect living in New York City. One day, a group of
drug-crazed thugs break into his apartment while he's gone,
killing his wife Joanna (Hope Lange) and brutally raping his
married daughter, leaving her comatose. When the police are
unable to find the culprits, Kersey arms himself and begins
patrolling the streets, killing muggers and thieves as he
encounters them. While his obsessive search for street justice
sickens him at first, in time Kersey begins to enjoy it and
becomes a hunted man himself, as Police Detective Frank Ochoa
(Vincent Gardenia) tries to find the man who is doing the
police's job for them, and a bit too well. Jeff Goldblum made
his screen debut as one of the lunatics who attacks Joanna.
Blu-ray Release date: February 3rd, 2014
Cat People
BD - Beauty is the beast in Schrader's erotic
update of
RKO's 1942 horror classic. Kinski's ambivalently
bewildered Irena, subject to feline metamorphosis when aroused,
is the deadly composite of sex-kitten and femme fatale: the
virgin who literally develops claws (and more) in bed. Caught
between her similarly cursed brother's pleas for incest, and her
zoo-keeper boy-friend's ostensibly more natural desires, she's
ironically caged as much by current notions of psycho-sexual
'liberation' as by the bars which await her. The seductively
exotic surface of this mythically underpinned fantasy might be
offset for some by much graphic gore, but if you can buy the
romantic metaphors for the primitivisms of sexual obsession, the
film delivers down the line. Blu-ray Release date: January
21st, 2014
Blue Jasmine
BD - When Cate Blanchett first cruises into
Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” playing a Park Avenue
matron fallen on hard times, she looks like a million bucks.
She’s wearing pearls and a white Chanel jacket, with an Hermès
bag as big as a Shetland pony hanging off one arm. It’s the sort
of important accessory worn by women accustomed to being
chauffeured around town. Soon after, though, as she stands with
her monogrammed luggage on a nondescript San Francisco sidewalk,
she looks frightened, alone — like someone who could benefit
from some kindness. Instead, she waves off a stranger and,
posing a question that’s as existential as it is practical,
demands, “Where am I, exactly?”
Blu-ray Release date: January
21st, 2014
Captain Phillips
BD - “Captain Phillips,” a movie
that insistently closes the distance between us and them, has a
vital moral immediacy. It was directed by Paul Greengrass, the
British filmmaker who quickened the pulse of contemporary action
cinema with the second and third installments in the Bourne
franchise, features that proved yet again that big-screen
thrills and thought need not be mutually exclusive. Kinetic
action and intelligence are similarly the driving forces in “Captain
Phillips,” which, like Mr. Greengrass’s
Bourne movies,
shakes you up first with its style and then with its ideas.
Blu-ray Release date: January 21st, 2014
The Pretender - Albert Dekker plays a crooked investment
agent who embezzles a large sum from an estate, hoping to cover
his crime by marrying the estate's heiress (Catherine Craig).
The girl is already engaged, so Dekker arranges to have the
fiance killed. The hit man's only means of identifying the
victim-to-be is his picture in the society columns. But the girl
changes her mind and agrees to marry Dekker--meaning that it is
his picture that will appear in the columns, thereby condemning
him to death. Desperately trying to contact the hit man, Dekker
discovers that the man is dead...but the assassin's successor is
still at large. A cheap but tidy "hoist on his own petard"
melodrama, The Pretender was produced and directed by W. Lee
Wilder, brother of the more famous (and frankly more talented)
Billy Wilder. DVD Release Date: December 30th, 2013
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