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Behind the Door
BD - Hobart Bosworth stars as Oscar Krug, a
working-class American, who is persecuted for his German
ancestry after war is declared. Driven by patriotism, Krug
enlists and goes to sea. However, tragedy strikes when his wife
(Jane Novak) sneaks aboard his ship and is captured following a
German U-boat attack. Krug's single-minded quest for vengeance
against the sadistic German submarine commander (played with
villainous fervor by Wallace Beery) leads to the film's shocking
and brutal climax. Blu-ray Release date: April 4th, 2017
Eolomea
BD - Eolomea (1972) offers lots of moments with German
astronauts living on outposts deep in space, awash in dry
philosophical dialogue, drinking, and existential Solaris-ish
flashbacks. It all works to make a communist future in space
seem much more than plausible due to the lack of interference of
the financial sector that so undermines our own space program,
and this lack of financial concern frees the subjects to engage
in discourse of a much more philosophical nature than whether
funding will be cut off. Blu-ray Release date: May 15th, 2017
The Manster
BD - Larry Stanford assigned to a story on
evolutionary theorist Dr. Suzuki visits his secluded laboratory
high in the mountains for Japan. Unwittingly injected with an
experimental drug, Stanford becomes increasingly bitter and
irritable towards his boss and his wife. Then one day, the
appearance of a third eye on his shoulder hurls the reporter
into a state of terror. The eye soon develops into a second head
setting in motion a rampage of mayhem, madness and murder.
Blu-ray Release date: August 29th, 2017
Don't Torture a Duckling
BD - The oddly titled Don't Torture a
Duckling (taken from a minor plot point) is one of director Lucio Fulci's most linear and conventional narratives, relying
more on story and mystery than on gore and atmospherics. In a
rural Italian village, young boys turn up dead, and the
authorities are stumped as to who the murderer is. A reporter
lends his efforts to the hunt for the killer, many red herrings
turn up, and more kids are murdered while the police search for
the culprit. A sexually liberated young woman from Milan, a
local witch, and the village idiot all fall under suspicion
until the killer is uncovered. Arrow Blu-ray Release Date:
September 25th + October 3rd, 2017
The Lure
BD - This genre-defying horror-musical mash-up the bold
debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska follows a pair of
carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore to explore life on land
in an alternate 1980s Poland. Their tantalizing siren songs and
otherworldly auras make them overnight sensations as nightclub
singers in the half-glam, half-decrepit world of Smoczynska's
imagining. The director gives fierce teeth to her viscerally
sensual, darkly feminist twist on Hans Christian Andersen's 'The
Little Mermaid,' in which the girls' bond is tested and their
survival threatened after one sister falls for a human. A
coming-of-age fairy tale with a catchy synth-fueled soundtrack,
outrageous song-and-dance numbers, and lavishly grimy sets, The
Lure explores its themes of emerging female sexuality,
exploitation, and the compromises of adulthood with savage
energy and originality. Blu-ray Release date: October 10th,
2017
The Tragedy of Othello
BD - Gloriously cinematic despite its
tiny budget, Orson Welles’s Othello is a testament to the
filmmaker’s stubborn willingness to pursue his vision to the
ends of the earth. Unmatched in his passionate identification
with Shakespeare’s imagination, Welles brings his inventive
visual approach to this enduring tragedy of jealousy, bigotry,
and rage, and also gives a towering performance as the Moor of
Venice, alongside Suzanne Cloutier as the innocent Desdemona,
and Micheál MacLiammóir as the scheming Iago. Shot over the
course of three years in Italy and Morocco and plagued by many
logistical problems, this fiercely independent film joins
Macbeth and
Chimes at Midnight in making the case for Welles as
the cinema’s most audacious interpreter of the Bard.
Blu-ray
Release Date: October 10th, 2017
Stone Cold Dead
BD - This is a fast-paced, standard crime story
with Sgt. Boyd (Richard Crenna) as a lone cop out to clean up
the neighborhood. Kurtz (Paul Williams) is a wild gangster who
manages a ring of prostitutes, and right now he has problems.
Someone is shooting his hookers. A few of the undercover cops
get killed as they try to infiltrate the hooker trade, so Sgt.
Boyd is more or less alone in bringing in the sniper and giving
Kurtz his due. While he is focusing on those tasks, prostitute
Monica (Linda Sorenson) is focusing on him.
Blu-ray Release
date: October 3rd, 2017
Night Moves
BD - L.A. detective Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) has
problems. Missing persons and bedroom stakeouts are no match for
his glory days as a pro football player. His wife is having a
not-so-secret affair. And while sorting things out, he takes on
the case of a runaway teenager that may be a lot more than he
can handle. Director Arthur Penn, who worked with Hackman on
Bonnie and Clyde and Target, guides this spellbinding,
first-rate thriller where solutions to murderous riddles don’t
come easily. Joining Hackman and Penn are two actors just
starting out on the road to stardom: James Woods and Melanie
Griffith. The stars come out – and so does the excitement – when
the Night Moves. Blu-ray Release Date: August 15th, 2017
OSS 117 Five Films
BD - Before James Bond, there was Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, the hero of a long string of French spy
novels starting in 1949. The books were such a hit that after
the death of their author, Jean Bruce, his wife took over the
series. Hubert was an American colonel of French descent who
worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II
predecessor of the CIA. His code name: OSS 117.
Blu-ray
Release Date: September 25th, 2017
Take the Money and Run
BD - When Woody Allen's fans refer to his
"earlier, funnier" pictures, they often cite his directorial
debut as a shining example. Co-written by Allen and Mickey Rose,
this side-splitting takeoff of crime documentaries stars Allen
as Virgil Starkwell, a sweetly inept career criminal. The film's
most celebrated sequence involves Virgil's inability to write
coherent holdup notes ("I have a gub"), but others include
Virgil's losing battle with a recalcitrant coke machine and his
misguided effort to emulate John Dillinger by carving a gun out
of a bar of soap (his weapon disintegrates in a heavy rain). As
was often the case in Allen's early films, not all the gags
work, but for the most part, Take the Money and Run is a
delight, enhanced by the on-target supporting performances of
Janet Margolin, Marcel Hillaire, and (uncredited) Louise Lasser,
as well as the energetic musical score of Marvin Hamlisch.
Blu-ray Release date: May 15th, 2017
Kill, Baby... Kill
BD - This oppressive and visually
overwhelming exercise in the conjuring of atmosphere allowed
Mario Bava to crank the gothic stylistic tendencies of
Black
Sunday into overdrive, finally permitting him to churn out scene
after scene of hallucinatory intensity with only the barest
threads of a plot to hold it all together. The avenging demonic
forces of his past films have been distilled here into the
single, chilling image of a ghostly young girl, rolling a
sinister pale ball down hallways and street corners as she
drives those around her to certain death. Rarely has a more
haunting or unforgettable specter graced the horror cinema, and
even had he never made another film after this, Bava would have
already proven himself as a master filmmaker. Arrow
Blu-ray
Release Date: September 11th, 2017
Spider
BD - Vita, a beautiful teenage girl, is asked by a
controversial artist to pose as the Virgin Mary for a painting.
She visits his studio and finds herself swept up into the
bizarre world of the artist and his bohemian friends. She seems
to see his paintings come to life and is pursued by strange
shadowy figures. Later she has nightmarish visions of the artist
visiting her at night in the form of a huge spider. The next
morning she finds marks on her body that look like the bites of
a large insect. Vita's mother becomes worried about her and
sends the girl off to stay with relatives in the countryside,
believing that the change of environment will help her to
recover. However, it seems the dark forces that threatened Vita
in the city have followed her and an ancient evil is being
awakened that feeds off Vita. Blu-ray Release date: September
12th, 2017
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (4K-restored)
BD -
Close Encounters takes the favoured dream of every UFO
enthusiast (that the US government has been operating a
cover-up) and turns it into a majestic and finally unprecedented
adventure story. As early references to The Ten Commandments and
Chuck Jones's Warner cartoons show, the film seems less
concerned with science fiction than with recapturing the wonder
of a child's first experience of the cinema, and the surprising
thing is that Spielberg moves into this territory so
effectively. 4K-Restored Blu-ray Release date: September
19th, 2007
That Hamilton Woman
BD - One of cinema’s most dashing
duos, real-life spouses Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier live
their greatest on-screen romance in this visually dazzling
tragic love story from legendary producer-director Alexander
Korda. Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars of the
late eighteenth century, That Hamilton Woman is a
gripping account of the scandalous adulterous affair between the
British Royal Navy officer Lord Horatio Nelson and the renowned
beauty Emma, Lady Hamilton, the wife of a British ambassador.
With its grandly designed sea battles and formidable star
performances, That Hamilton Woman (Winston Churchill’s
favorite movie, which he claimed to have seen over eighty times)
brings history to vivid, glamorous life.
Blu-ray Release
Date: December 10th, 2012
Three Films By Ken Loach
BD - Ken Loach is arguably
Britain's most lauded director of the last 30 years. This
collection presents three films emblematic of the acclaimed
filmmaker's talent for engaging with social injustice and
contemporary politics in stories by turn funny, heart-breaking
and harrowing. In Riff Raff Glaswegian jailbird Stevie
(Robert Carlyle) heads to London to find work but discovers a
world of corruption and degradation. Inner-city poverty is
brought to the fore in Raining Stones, as unemployed
Bob's (Bruce Jones) desperate attempts to afford a communion
dress for his daughter results in a succession of disasters.
Inspired by real events, Ladybird Ladybird is an
emotional and harrowing story of a woman's fight to keep her
children and relationship intact in the face of bureaucratic
interference. Blu-ray Release Date: September 25th, 2017
The Warriors
BD - From its powerhouse opening, in which
all the gangs of New York gather in tribal splendour in
Riverside Drive Park, to the last ditch stand in dilapidated
Coney Island, Hill has elevated his story of a novice gang on
the run into a heroic epic of Arthurian dimensions, with sex as
sorcery and the flick-knife as sword. Anyone expecting gritty
realism will be disappointed, because Hill is offering something
better: shooting entirely on NY locations at night, he has
transformed the city into a phantasmagoric labyrinth of weird
tribes in fantastic dress and make-up who move over (and under)
the streets as untouched as troglodytes by the civilisation
sleeping around them. The novice gang from Coney accidentally
encounters some middle class swingers on the subway, and the two
groups stare at each other like aliens from different galaxies
(while the gang's new female recruit has to be gently restrained
from instinctively putting a hand up to straighten her hair).
Mixing ironic humour, good music, and beautifully photographed
suspense, it's one of the best of 1979.
Blu-ray Release date:
January 24th, 2017
War of the Worlds (2005)
BD - Dockworker Ray Ferrier
(Tom Cruise) struggles to build a positive relationship with his
two children, Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin).
When his ex-wife, Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), drops them off at
Ferrier's house, it seems as though it will be just another
tension-filled weekend. However, when electromagnetic pulses of
lightning strike the area, the strange event turns out to be the
beginning of an alien invasion, and Ferrier must now protect his
children as they seek refuge. Blu-ray Release Date: June 1st,
2010
The Swarm - While investigating the bee-sting deaths of
Air Force personnel at a missile base near Houston, Texas, an
entomologist realizes that the dreaded African killer bees--long
expected by scientists--have arrived in the United States. The
hallucination-inducing bees derail a commuter train and destroy
a nuclear power plant, killing hundreds of people as scientists
race against the clock to develop an antitoxin to stop the
devastation of The Swarm. From "master of disaster" Irwin
Allen and based on the novel by Arthur Herzog. DVD Release
Date: January 28th, 2016 |
