The ’80s were weird. People gave the Chiodo Brothers – three dudes who had never made a movie before – $2 million to write/direct/produce a horror film about a bunch of space clowns who come to Earth and turn people into Cotton Candy Slurpees.
And it’s pretty good.
I wish we had more of that weirdness today.
You can read my review of the film over at Cinema Sentries.
When I was a teenager and first beginning to truly love movies I sent off for a movie catalog. I saw an ad in the back of Rolling Stone or Spin or some such thing and I wanted to see what type of films were available outside of my little small town. What I got was a Xeroxed copy of a copy of a copy of some typed-out list of films. I think there were occasionally pictures and there were definitely some synopses of the films.
I didn’t buy any of the movies, or rent them, but I was endlessly fascinated by that catalog. Here were all sorts of films, hundreds of them, that I’d never heard of. I think they were mostly cult films, foreign films, low-budget B-movies, the type of films that I now love, but it opened up this idea that there was a cinematic world out there, just out of reach that maybe someday I could explore.
I mention this because I think of young cinephiles now. How literally nearly every film ever made is available to them if they know how to look. How sites like IMDB and Letterboxed and countless others give them information and recommendations for all sorts of films in every genre imaginable. What an amazing time it must be for them. I mean it is an amazing time for me, but I can’t imagine how awesome it must be for kids just now discovering movies.
I am, of course, a huge proponent of physical media. While I certainly stream my fair share of movies, nothing quite beats sliding in a disc and pressing Play. One of the things I love about all these boutique Blu-ray companies is that they regularly supply me with great films I never knew existed.
Goodbye & Amen is one such film. It is an Italian thriller about a C.I.A. agent living in Rome with plans to start a coup in some African country. But his plans are thwarted when one of his agents starts shooting random people and holds a couple of people hostage in a hotel room.
It is well-shot, and directed, and is an utterly enjoyable watch. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
We are neck deep into 31 Days of Horror. I love it. I love watching horror movies. I love writing about them. But I gotta admit, sometimes it is hard. Sometimes my “real” life wears me out, brings me down, freaking exhausts me.
This week has been a physically exhausting one for me at work. I come home and maybe watch a movie, but finding the energy to write about one has been difficult.
Luckily, I’ve written lots of other reviews for Cinema Sentries and now I get to share one with you.
Broken Oath is a Hong Kong, Kung Fu adaptation of the Lady Snowblood story. It isn’t as good as the original Japanese film, but it is still a lot of fun. You can read my review here.
One of the things I love about Boutique Blu-ray companies like Arrow, Criterion, and Radiance is that they fill their discs with lots of cool extras. There will be behind-the-scenes featurettes, interviews, and audio commentaries. I can’t say that I always watch and listen to all of these things, but I love that they exist. If you do dig into them through many films, you can get quite a cinematic education.
On one of the extras to The Facts of Murder, I learned that American Film Noir led to Italian Neorealism, which influenced Italian Crime Dramas which ultimately led to the Giallo. That’s one of those things that makes perfect sense when you think about it but that through line is not something I had previously thought about.
The film is a good one. It is an interesting mix of traditional film noir elements with Neorealism. It reminded me a little of a Maigret adaption with its investigation as slice-of-life feel. You can read my full review here.
I don’t read the trades or anything so I have no idea how many DVDs/Blu-rays/4K UHD disks are sold monthly. I don’t know how those decisions are made or what the margins are. I imagine there are still loads of homes that don’t stream. Whether it is a rural area without access, or older people who don’t understand how to connect, or people who simply can’t afford it. Or whatever. Lots of folks don’t stream movies and TV to their home. Some of those folks likely do buy the occasional disk. Lots of nerds like me collect physical media.
I’m fascinated by the rise of Boutique Blu-ray companies. Arrow, Criterion, Severin, Kino Lorber, and others are regularly putting out nice editions of all sorts of movies. Many of them are quite obscure and cultish. Yet here they are getting HD releases, often given new transfers and loaded with extras. I can’t imagine there are huge profit margins for these things. They seem to be put out by people who truly love movies and I’m all for it.
Radiance Films is relatively new to the market and they’ve been doing a phenomenal job. They seem to specialize in cult foreign language, genre films. But unlike Arrow Video and others, they seem to stray away from trashy films and b-movies. Their focus seems to be more on more artistic, meaningful cinema. They seem a lot like Criterion except they are choosing much lesser-known films.
I’m using the word “seem” a lot while discussing them. That’s because I don’t really know them that well. I’ve only reviewed a few of their films, and haven’t spent a huge amount of time digging through their stacks. So I could be wrong. I’m sure they sell some less-than-award-winning films as well.
My real point is that the films I’ve seen by them have been excellent. And now we’ll finally get to the film at hand. A Man On His Knees is an Italian crime film about a former bank robber just trying to get by. But when a mob lawyer’s wife is kidnapped and kept for days in secret in a building next door to his drink stand, our hero gets mixed up in trouble.
That sounds like a thriller, but in the hands of Damiano Damiani it becomes more art-house than grind-house and it is all the better for it. You can read my full review here.
My wife has been telling me to watch this French series for ages. It follows a group of talent agents as they navigate their professional lives (which involves a lot of crazy work with A-List French celebrities) and their personal ones (which involves a lot of craziness).
I finally sat down with it when I got a copy of the complete series and it is a delight. You can read my full review here.
George Lazenby has had a wonderfully strange career. His very first film was playing James Bond in Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) then he gave up that role thinking the 1970s would not be kind to Bond. Then he spent the next decade making wild European genre movies and has since played small roles in a variety of movies and TV series including a sting in some made-for-TV Emmanuelle rip-offs alongside Sylvia Kristel.
In A Queen’s Ransom, he plays an Irish mercenary out to assassinate the Queen of England on her visit to Hong Kong. The film actually shot footage of the real queen in her real visit to the Asian city and then basically built a movie around it. You can read my full review here.
You know that I love horror movies and film noir, but I also have a soft spot for really low-budget science fiction flicks, especially those made in the 1950s. I love alien invasions from space and giant creatures made from atomic radiation. Way back in October of last year I reviewed a three-film boxed set from Arrow Video. It is filled with giant birds, atomic brains and crazy zombies. Check it out.
Kino Lorber released two of their film noir sets in October which seemed weird to me since Noirvember was just a month later. But maybe they wanted to get them on the shelves a few weeks before the holiday so that fans would be ready to watch once November rolled around.
I watched these so long ago I had to read my own review just to remember if I liked this one (I did). You can do the same here.
I wrote about The Eyes of Laura Mars for 31 Days of Horror, but I also wrote a review of the Blu-ray for Cinema Sentries which you can read here.
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