Category: Reviews

A Man On His Knees (1979)

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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.

Call My Agent

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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.

A Queen’s Ransom (1976)

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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.

Cold War Creatures: Four Films from Sam Katzman

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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.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema IX

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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.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema X

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I’ve fallen behind in posting links to my reviews over at Cinema Sentries. I wrote this one for Kino Lorber’s latest film noir boxed sets back in October, but what better time to share it than the tail end of Noirvember? To be honest this set was probably my least favorite one they’ve done. Mostly because the three films are boxing movies and not really noir. But whatever, you can read my review here.

The Flash (2014): The Complete Eighth Season

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I’ve mentioned before that we are big fans of The Flash in my house, and I believe I also mentioned that the show was starting to wear thin. Season Eight furthered my thoughts in this regard. It is really starting to become a chore to sit through and that’s not good for any show. Season Nine will be its final season and I’m definitely glad. I’m sure I’ll watch it because I’d like to see it through to the end, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, which is such a shame.

Anyway, here’s my review of the entire season eight.

31 Days of Horror: The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)

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The story Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu is one of the earliest known works of vampire fiction. It is also the origin of just about every lesbian vampire trope out there. The Blood Spattered Bride is one of many adaptations of that story to film. It is beautiful to look at, mesmerizing, and eternally slow.

It is about a woman, Susan (Maribel Martín), who has just married a man (Simón Andreu). He is unnamed in the story which suggests that he is not that important. They return to his ancestral mansion. She is a virgin on their wedding night and while she enjoys the pleasures of his company as the days and nights pass he is increasingly aggressive and demanding, which makes her grow distant.

She keeps having dreams about a strange woman. One day that woman, named Carmilla (Alexandra Bastedo) shows up. She looks just like one of her husband’s ancestors. The story goes that the ancestor slaughtered her entire household after going crazy

Carmilla seduces Susan and drinks her blood. Then she tells her to kill her husband.

It is all very dreamy. The ladies wear those flowing white gowns. The lighting is soft. It is like a renaissance painting (albeit with a bit more neck biting) come to life. It is definitely a film that is best to just allow it to flow over you. Don’t come in expecting lots of action and violence (though there is one scene that is pretty gory), and you might be pleasantly surprised.

31 Days of Horror: Werewolf By Night (2022)

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I’ve recently dissed Marvel movies and TV shows in this very blog. The truth is I actually like most of their movies. I am a fan of the MCU. What I’m not a fan of is how they’ve basically pushed everybody else out of the sandbox. The cinematic landscape has changed dramatically since Iron Man (2008) first landed in cinemas. I live in a small town. We have one movie theatre. It only shows big-budget, blockbuster-type movies. I yearn for the days of mid-budget, smaller films that weren’t about superheroes and saving the world.

Yes, I can get those through Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO and the like. No, it is not the same. And Disney is doing their best to take over the television as well.

While I do like a lot of the MCU I have to admit I’m growing tired of it. I saw the new Dr. Strange movie in the theater when it came out. I mostly liked it. But it also felt like I had to do homework before I watched it. You really need to have seen the previous Dr. Strange movies, the last Spider-Man movie, and the entire season of Wandavision for it to make sense. And like all Marvel movies these days it spent part of its runtime setting up movies that haven’t come out yet. That’s a lot to ask for what should be a dumb summertime popcorn flick.

But like I keep saying, I do like a lot of the Marvel stuff, and I enjoy watching them with my family. Enter Werewolf by Night.

Pleasantly this is a film that essentially exists on its own. It is mostly in black and white and it has a unique visual style. The plot isn’t amazing, but it is fun and exciting. It involves a group of monster hunters who have gathered to mourn their fallen leader and to fight for his throne and some magic hubajoob.

The magic thingy is placed on a big, bad monster and the group must find and slay the beast inside a maze of buildings and capture the stone. Oh, and it is totally okay to kill each other too. There are two fighters who do not belong. The first is the daughter of the fallen leader (Laura Donnelly) who wants the magic stone so she can rid herself of her evil family once and for all. The other is someone (Gael Garcia Bernal) with a dark, mysterious secret.

It exists inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but you could easily watch this film without having seen anything else in the MCU. There aren’t any callbacks and it doesn’t push toward another sequel. I imagine if it is popular enough they will probably throw these characters into another story, or give it a sequel, but for now it is nice that it exists on its own. Like all Marvel things, it is full of action and humor. I don’t mean to pretend this is some brilliant new thing they are doing. But it feels different enough to make it refreshing before jumping back into another Thor or Spider-Man movie.