Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF March 19th, 2018

Fakaalofa atu! Great week with Blu-ray reviews of packages by Kino, Umbrella, Signal One, Vinegar Syndrome, Koch Media, Masters of Cinema, Cult Films, Second Sight, Alive (DE), WVG Medien and others of films directed by Victor Fleming, King Hu, Dario Argento, Sergio Leone, Don Seigel, William Wellman, David Cronenberg, Sean Baker, Edgar Reitz, Nathan Juran, Chuck Russell, Jack Smight, Andrew V. McLaglen. Our Calendar has a massive update of films-to-Blu-ray, including June Criterions, works by Lino Brocka, Victor Erice, John Waters, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Medak, Mark L. Lester, Ridley Scott, Curtis Hanson, John McTiernan, Ewald André Dupont and we have our Feature Blu-ray is posted plus a massive CONTEST for the month of March with 3 amazing prizes. Enjoy!!

LISTING PAGES:

CREATURE-FEATURES (on Blu-ray!), PRE-CODE FILMs (on Blu-ray!), SILENT ERA FILMs (on Blu-ray!), HAMMER Studios (on Blu-ray!) The 100 BEST Neo-Noirs (on Blu-ray!), The GREATEST 100 Westerns (on Blu-ray!), Giallo on Blu-ray!, ESSENTIAL NOIR on Blu-ray!, Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.FR (France), Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.DE (Germany) and our LATEST ARTICLES: Movies From... the End of the World,  The Beauties of Star Trek (TOS)

DVDBeaver has their own store at Movie Zyng - check it out! Many have $1 shipping - even overseas!

Feature Blu-ray chosen for the Month of FEBRUARY!

FOLLOW US on TWITTER! (where we post important reviews, contests - prizes, polls, calendar updates - plus much more...)

Month of March CONTEST  details HERE to Win one of three, out-of-print, prizes; a sealed Criterion Blu-ray of "The Third Man", Criterion's AK Akira Kurosawa 25 disc collection, or the also out-of-print, Region 'B' Blu-ray set of Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection. Best of luck!

If there are DVD or Blu-ray titles you'd like us to cover - please feel free to recommend!

Gary at 2ze dot com

ONE VOICE (not Ellsworth Monkton Toohey): So much great stuff thus week on Blu-ray, iconic TV (Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany + The Outer Limits (Season One), classic science fiction (Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Spaghetti western (A Fistful of Dynamite), a master of Giallo (Suspiria (Cult Films added) a hegy legendája (Legend of the Mountain), Pre-Code (Stingaree), Jimmy Stewart war-western (Shenandoah), Ingrid Bergman as martyr, saint and military leader Joan of Arc, Noir (Highway Dragnet), Fantasy-Horror (The Dead Zone), modern verite (The Florida Project), notable and worthy remake; The Blob (1988), post-apocalypse - Damnation Alley, an odd-ball crime mystery; Star Time and two DVD reviews from Eric; Claude Chabrol's The Champagne Murders and Ozploitation actioner Run Chrissie Run!

'I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom..' - Laura (1944)

Have one responsive week!

Shenandoah BD - With the integrity and depth of an epic, Shenandoah tells the dramatic story of a man caught in a dilemma. James Stewart stars as a Virginia farmer during the Civil War. He refuses to support the Confederacy because he is opposed to slavery, yet he will not support the Union because he is deeply opposed to war. Blu-ray Release Date: November 24th, 2017

Star Time BD - An exceedingly odd first feature by writer-director-producer Alexander Cassini about an infantile young man (Young Elvis's Michael St. Gerard) who's lured away from committing suicide after his favorite TV sitcom is canceled by a fatherly show-biz type (John P. Ryan) who persuades him that he can become a TV star by committing gratuitous mass murders. A more maternal and law-abiding response is provided by a social worker (Maureen Teefy). Played half as arty allegory, half as satiric comedy, and generally as some species of midnight madness, this gaga independent item is most daring in refusing to focus on the violence that's its subject, while getting us to think plenty about what it means. Blu-ray Release Date: March 27th, 2018

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) BD - There's something strange going on in Santa Mira. Children don't recognize their parents. Husbands have become estranged from their wives. Mass hysteria? Mass alienation more likely. Dr Kevin McCarthy discovers the secret: pod people are colonizing the earth, taking human form but dispensing with the soul. Shot in just 19 days, Siegel's economical adaptation of a Jack Finney story (script by Daniel Mainwaring of Out of the Past fame) is one of the most resonant sci-fi movies, and one of the simplest. It has been interpreted as an allegory against McCarthyism, though it could equally stand as anti-Communist. (In his book A Siegel Film, the director has nothing to say on the matter.) It's still a chilling picture, gaining over Phil Kaufman's smart remake by virtue of its intimate small town setting, and it has one of the greatest endings ever filmed. Too bad the studio insisted on adding a lame bookend framing device and voice-over narration to diffuse it. Alive (DE) Mediabook Blu-ray Release Date: February 23rd, 2018

Stingaree BD - William Wellman's Stingaree (1934), a sublimely outrageous hybrid of musical and Western adventure (although set in the Australian outback), is one of six RKO films of the 1930s previously thought "lost" but rediscovered and restored by TCM. The films were sold out of the RKO library to producer Merian C. Cooper in 1946 and until now have not been part of the Turner collection. Blu-ray Release Date: March 20th, 2018

Joan of Arc BD - Director Victor Fleming's final film features Ingrid Bergman as a vivid and luminous Joan of Arc, the 15th-century French peasant girl who led the French in battle against the invading English, becoming a national hero. When she was captured, tortured, and ultimately executed by the English, she was made a Catholic saint. Bergman's Joan is a strong and spiritual figure who proves her devotion to the Dauphin (Jose Ferrer), later to become the King of France. Blu-ray Release Date: March 27th, 2018

A Fistful of Dynamite BD - A Fistful of Dynamite is permeated with the political disillusionment of the sixties and its numerous depictions of human slaughter reflect the same sense of futility that marked America's involvement in Viet Nam. At the same time, the film often veers off into sequences of broad comedy creating an unusual Western hybrid that swings from high tragedy to low humor. With the added complication of a title change and some severe cuts in the English language version (the Italian release was twenty minutes longer)... Blu-ray Release Date: March 6th, 2018

Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany BD - Five years in the making, Heimat is one of the most compelling and highly praised dramas in television history. This epic tale of a family and their rural life in a small German village is told against the changing backdrop of a country's turbulent history from 1919 to 1982. From the aftermath of the First World War, economic hardship, the rise and fall of Nazism, the Second World War and the decades that followed, life in the village goes on and the values and aspirations of the people at its' heart are wonderfully brought to life in this gripping saga of an ordinary family living through extraordinary times. Blu-ray Release Date: April 9th, 2018

Suspiria (Cult Films added) BD - Suzy Bannion is an American ballet student, travelling to Germany to study at an exclusive dance academy in the Black Forest. After one of the students and her friend are hideously murdered in the first of Argento's breath-catching set-piece killings, Suzy discovers that the academy has a bizarre history and, as the body count rises, she gets involved in a hideous labyrinth of murder, black magic and madness. Utilising complex lighting systems, intense film processing techniques, wire-guided cameras and multi-layer music recording (highlighting a superb Goblin score), Argento paints a masterpiece of terror on a technically impeccable canvas. Cult Films Blu-ray Release Date: December 4th, 2017

Legend of the Mountain BD - Although most commonly associated with the Wuxia genre, in 1979 King Hu directed the epic fantasy-horror, Legend of the Mountain. Heavily influenced by traditional Chinese aesthetics and Zen Buddhist philosophy, it has come to be regarded as one of his greatest filmmaking achievements. Blu-ray Release Date: March 8th, 2018

Highway Dragnet BD - Roger Corman's co-penned (the first appearance of his name in credits) Noir-esque thriller. It's an engaging mid 50's crime drama of the low budget variety. Conte as an Korean War Marine on the lam after a love-hate first chance meeting with bar girl and ex-model Terry Smith (Mary Beth Hughes) in a Vegas casino. He beds her and departs early the next morning but later she is found dead. He evades the police and thumbs a ride with female fashion photog (Joan Bennett) and her lithe young model (Wanda Hendrix) - hence the Highway Dragnet begins. The film's climax ventures to an atmospheric flooded house on the ocean. Romance and a surprise killer and lurking in the shallows... Blu-ray Release Date: March 20th, 2018

The Dead Zone BD - The combined talents of the novelist Stephen King, the director David Cronenberg (''Scanners'') and the producer Debra Hill (who has the second and third ''Halloween'' films to her credit) would seem to suggest something much scarier than ''The Dead Zone,'' a well-acted drama more eerie than terrifying, more rooted in the occult than in sheer horror. It's a sad, sympathetic and unsettling movie, quietly forceful but in no way geared to the cheap scream. Blu-ray Release Date: February 22nd, 2018

The Florida Project BD - On a stretch of highway just outside the most magical place on earth, six-year-old Moonee and her ragtag band of playmates spend an unforgettable summer at The Magic Castle, a budget motel managed by Bobby (in a career-best performance by Willem Dafoe). Bobby's stern exterior hides a deep reservoir of kindness and compassion as he watches over the kids' adventures, protecting them from some of the harsher realities of life. Blu-ray Release Date: February 20th, 2018

The Outer Limits (Season One) BD - The entire first season 32 Episodes You hold in your hands an artifact from a time now vanished forever; a compendium of portals into worlds unknown. A seven-disc set that controls over 27 hours of transmission from the 1963-1964 series, this vessel has sought you out for one specific purpose: to expand your mind to The Outer Limits! Blu-ray Release Date: March 27th, 2018

The Blob (1988) BD - Well directed by Russell, THE BLOB is fast-paced, frightening, revolting, and witty, delivering the goods that come with the genre while developing characters and themes at the same time. Although the state-of-the-art special effects are duly impressive and come at a breakneck pace, what works in this remake is not just the improvement in effects technology but also a striking rethinking of the film's subtext. If one accepts the popular notion that the original BLOB was a reflection of American fears in the late 1950s, the new BLOB serves the same purpose for the post-Irangate-Pentagon scandal of the 1980s. Blu-ray Release Date: November 11th, 2016

Damnation Alley BD - The world is devastated by a nuclear holocaust, causing the Earth to tilt on its axis and bringing vast meteorological chaos. As the weather stabilizes, mutated insects start to emerge, preying on the survivors. The surviving crew at a U.S. Air Force bomb shelter in the Mojave Desert picks up radio signals coming from Albany. The commander, Major Eugene Denton (George Peppard, The A-Team), unveils two armored vehicles he has constructed and announces a plan to cross Damnation Alley, the hundred-mile-wide strip between areas of radiation hazard, to join the survivors. They set off, taking on two civilians, a novice singer they find in the ruins of Las Vegas... Signal One Blu-ray Release date: January 28th, 2018

Run Chrissie Run! - Ozploitation thriller about 15-year-old Chrissie (Annie Jones) and her mother Eve (Carmen Duncan) who must suddenly leave their peaceful suburban existence and run for their lives. Hounded by an assortment of threatening characters bent on rape, revenge and murder, Chrissie and Eve try to shake off their pursuers in a deadly game of cat and mouse which ends when they realise they must stand and fight. Having learnt the terrible secrets of her mother's past and the shocking identity of her real father, Chrissie, a much older and wiser young woman, as old scores are settled in a final cataclysmic shoot-out. DVD Release Date: January 2018

The Champagne Murders - The most striking feature of Chabrol's glossy murder mystery is the totally incomprehensible plot, revolving around rivalry for the rights to a family champagne firm: Perkins has said that he took his part solely in order to figure out whodunit. Rather like a pop Huis Clos, it turns out that all four parties in the bourgeois household are as intolerable as each other, but who strangled whom and why remains opaque. Made by Chabrol's regular team, it's relentlessly stylish. DVD Release Date: February 7th, 2018

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