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The Bitter Tea of General Yen
BD - Deliciously romantic
melodrama - and unknown Capra territory - which has the great
(and underrated) Stanwyck as Megan Davis, an American missionary
who comes to wartorn Shanghai in the 30s and is kidnapped by a
Chinese warlord. Coming across as a kind of raw, emotional
The King and I (but without the whistling of happy tunes,
thankfully), the film's narrative dips in and out of Stanwyck's
strange dreams, where she is both attracted and repelled by the
sophisticated General (Asther). A heady and sensual cocktail of
drama and emotion and, in pre-Hollywood morality code times, a
goodly amount of sexual tension.
Blu-ray Release Date: September 5th, 2017
Two Males For Alexa
BD - Curd Jurgens as the
betrayed husband is incredibly expressive and believable;
Rosabla Neri, as the philandering Alexa, delivers her usual
thoughtful performance and, in doing so, makes her potentially
cardboard cut-out character multi-dimensional, and Juan Luis
Galiardo, as Alexa’s heartthrob Pierre, also cares enough about
his craft that he avoids the trappings of a potentially
stereotypical character and, like Neri, makes him real and full
of depth. Blu-ray Release date:
May 15th, 2017
Krakatoa East of Java
BD - Smartly scripted, well
paced and, for the most part, solidly acted, this is a much
better film than its latter-day Sunday afternoon TV slots might
suggest. What really lifts it is its cinematography. Clever use
of filters, lighting and smoke create a shifting landscape that
becomes truly alien and a mood far more effective than anything
that could be conjured up with the standard flashes and bangs.
The weirdness of it is genuinely disturbing, building a sense of
fear and impending danger in the latter third, when the crew's
aged boat may prove the only hope of safety for endangered
islanders. Blu-ray Release date:
September 12th, 2017
Scream of Fear
BD - An above-par Hammer
thriller, scripted by Jimmy Sangster and brazenly plagiarising
Clouzot's
Les Diaboliques as
wheelchair-bound Strasberg arrives to visit her father on the
Riviera, believes she sees his corpse (more than once), but is
told that he's away on a trip. The plotting is very contrived
indeed, but thanks partly to Douglas Slocombe's camerawork and
to taut, shock-cut editing, Holt manages a tour de force of
brooding, genuinely unsettling atmosphere.
Blu-ray Release date: October 14th,
2016
The Lost World (1925)
BD - Follow Professor
Challenger, played by the inimitable Wallace Beery, as he and a
crew of curious explorers embark on an expedition in search of a
mythical, prehistoric plateau in South America. Along for the
adventure are eminent scientist Summerlee (Arthur Hoyt, the
director's brother), sportsman Sir John Roxton (Lewis Stone),
journalist Ed Malone (Lloyd Hughes) and Paula White (Bessie
Love), whose father disappeared on the same plateau. The party
is not there long before the "lost world" of the jungle begins
to reveal its secrets: a primitive ape-man, a Pterodactyl flying
through the air, a massive Brontosaurus feeding upon the trees,
the vicious Allosaurus, and many more monstrous beasts of the
Jurassic age. Blu-ray Release
date: September 19th, 2017
The Psychic
BD - Jennifer O'Neill is the
psychic woman who as a child had a vision of her mother's actual
death and who later as an adult has a puzzling vision of a woman
being walled up in the same fashion as in Edgar Allan Poe's
The Black Cat. Recently married O'Neill then spends some
time at her rich husband's lonely country estate where she
discovers the room from her vision, and a dead body behind the
wall... Blu-ray Release Date:
April 24th, 2015
Vampyr
BD - With Vampyr, Danish
filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's brilliance at achieving
mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling
imagery (The
Passion of Joan of Arc and
Day of Wrath) was for
once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result—concerning an
occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local
evildoers in a village outside Paris—is nearly unclassifiable, a
host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered
sounds creating a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling
fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of
cinema's great nightmares. Blu-ray
Release Date: October 3rd, 2017
The Man With Two Brains
BD - When brilliant brain
surgeon Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr (Steve Martin) accidentally hits
gold-digger Dolores Benedict (Kathleen Turner) with his car, he
takes it upon himself to save her life using his own surgical
technique. The two are soon married, but no sooner are the rings
on their fingers than the marriage begins to fall apart. While
honeymooning in Vienna, Hfuhruhurr is introduced to reclusive
scientist Dr. Alfred Necessiter (David Warner), who practices
some rather unorthodox procedures.
Blu-ray Release Date: August 29th, 2017
Festival
BD - Before Woodstock and
Monterey Pop, there was Festival. From 1963 to 1966, Murray
Lerner visited the annual Newport Folk Festival to document a
thriving, idealistic musical movement as it reached its peak as
a popular phenomenon. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny
Cash, the Staples Singers, Pete Seeger, Son House, and Peter,
Paul and Mary were just a few of the legends who shared the
stage at Newport, treating audiences to a range of folk music
that encompassed the genre’s roots in blues, country, and gospel
as well as its newer flirtations with rock ’n’ roll. Shooting in
gorgeous black and white, Lerner juxtaposes performances with
snapshot interviews with artists and their fans, weaving footage
from four years of the festival into an intimate record of a
pivotal time in music—and in American culture at large.
Blu-ray Release date: September
12th, 2017
David Lynch: The Art Life
BD - A rare glimpse into the
mind of one of cinema’s most enigmatic visionaries, David
Lynch: The Art Life offers an absorbing portrait of the
artist, as well as an intimate encounter with the man himself.
From his secluded home and painting studio in the Hollywood
Hills, a candid Lynch conjures people and places from his past,
from his boyhood to his experiences at art school to the
beginnings of his filmmaking career—in stories that unfold like
scenes from his movies. This remarkable documentary by Jon
Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm travels back to
Lynch’s early years as a painter and director drawn to the
phantasmagoric, while also illuminating his enduring commitment
to what he calls “the art life”: “You drink coffee, you smoke
cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it.”
Blu-ray Release date: September
26th, 2017
Death Laid an Egg
BD - A surreal Giallo which
ranges from serial killings to infidelity, industrial espionage
to romantic, sexual interludes - an odd love triangle existing
in a mechanized chicken farm (hence the title). Secretary
Gabrielle (Ewa Aulin of
Candy fame) is seducing
an estranged couple played by lothario Jean-Louis Trintignant
and Gina Lollobrigida - as the dissatisfied, domineering wife.
Gabrielle worms her way into their confidence.... and murder and
double-crosses are in the air. Blu-ray
Release date: March 26th, 2015
A Boy and His Dog
BD - World War IV has
ravaged Earth, and its survivors must battle for food, shelter
and companionship in a post-atomic wasteland. This classic
sci-fi tale follows the exploits of a young man, Vic (Don
Johnson), and his telepathic dog, Blood, as they struggle
through the barren wilderness. In the midst of their meager
existence, foraging for scraps of food and battling ruthless
gangs, Vic and Blood encounter a young woman who lures them into
a surreal city deep beneath the earth’s surface.
Blu-ray Release date: August 6th,
2013
Cyborg 2087
BD - It's the sort of
B-movie hokum that used to litter Saturday afternoon TV
schedules, and despite all of its shoddy production values, flat
acting, clichéd characters, wobbly time travel logic -- hell,
they couldn't even keep the camera still in order to properly
pull off a cheap-ass 'vanishing' effect -- it's still infinitely
more entertaining than any of today's insipid reality
programming... Garth (Rennie) is sent back in time, from 2087 to
(then present-day) 1966, with an important mission -- stop a
scientist's upcoming breakthrough in "Radio-Telepathy" from
turning the future into a totalitarian shithole in which all
free will has been destroyed. Blu-ray
Release date: September 26th, 2017
Cat People (1982)
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. Elephant Films Blu-ray
Release date: June 1st, 2016
Carriers
BD - Four kids are driving
through the desert on the way to the beach, their faces anything
but cheery: this isn't Spring Break. They're trying to outrun
the end of the world and each other. In Alex and David Pastor's
Carriers, no one is safe from the viral pandemic threatening to
wipe out the human race. Determined to elude the deadly virus,
Danny (Lou Taylor Pucci), his brother Brian (Chris Pine), his
girlfriend Bobby (Piper Perabo) and Danny's school friend Kate
(Emily VanCampo) speed across the Southwestern U.S. to reach a
place of possible safety. Over the course of four days, the
group is faced with moral decisions that no human should ever be
forced to face. They discover that their greatest enemy is not
the microbe attacking humanity, but the darkness within
themselves. Blu-ray Release
Date: August 28th, 2013
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