Blackout Noir on the Criterion Channel

blackout noir

I had an enormous amount of fun watching and talking about all the Giallos on the Criterion Channel last year, so I thought it would be fun to do another series like that.

Today is thh start Noirvember, which brings together one of my favorite film genres with my favorite season. To celebrate, the Criterion Channel has put together what they are calling Blackout Noir. These are film noirs in which the main character has blacked out due to too much drink, amnesia, or some other thing, and awakens to find something terrible has happened. Or, as they put it:

Among the most agonizingly intense films in the history of film noir are those that adopt the point of view of characters tormented by amnesia, memory holes, and drunken blackouts, leaving them to grasp in the dark in search of an often terrifying truth. Waking up unexpectedly in a stranger’s bed is one thing . . . putting on your coat to leave and discovering a bloodstain on it is another…

I was going to be watching lots of film noirs this month anyway, so I thought it would be fun to watch and review all of these films. I’ve actually not seen most of these films, so that should be doubly fun.

Here’s the full list:

The Blue Gardenia (1953)
Black Angel (1946)
Blackout (1954)
Guilty Bystander (1950)
Framed (1947)
In a Lonely Place (1950)
Crossfire (1947)
Deadline by Dawn (1946)

Bring Out The Perverts: Giallo On The Criterion Channel

cover

Criterion was one of the first boutique physical media companies. They started making Laserdiscs as far back as 1984 and then eventually moved to DVDs, Blu-rays, and most recently 4K UHD. They specialize in arthouse, foreign, and independent movies. Basically, they are the film snobs’ religion.

But that isn’t really fair. While they do release films by non-American, art-house directors like Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Federico Fellini and independent film darlings like Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson, they also have boxed sets starring Bruce Lee and Godzilla.

The Criterion Channel does an even better job at this. Sure, you can watch the entire filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but they also regularly add in all sorts of obscure, goofy, and cult films like The Atomic Submarine, Atragon (about a giant sea snake that decides humans have become technologically advanced and attacks), Baba Yaga (based on a series of S&M friendly comics), and The Canyons (starring Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen).

Right now they are featuring thirteen Giallos. Fans of this site know I’m a huge fan of that stylish Italian horror genre so this is like catnip to me.

Even though I’ve previously watched all of the films, own most of them on DVD, and have even reviewed quite a few of them before, I thought it would be fun to watch them on the Criterion Channel and do a little write-up on each one.

Now that the music has moved to a separate site, I keep wanting to find ways to add value to this site. Something like this seems exactly perfect.

The name of this series, by the way, comes from Dario Argento’s debut film The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. A cop in that film has put together a lineup of crooks who might be the murderers of several beautiful women. He yells this when bringing them out. I thought it was a fun title for this series.

The films are as follows:

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Death Walks at Midnight (1972)
Deep Red (1975)
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Tenebrae (1982)
In the Folds of the Flesh (1970)
Who Saw Her Die? (1972)
Torso (1973)
What Have They Done To Your Daughters (1974)
Strip Nude For Your Killer (1975)
All the Colors of the Dark (1972)
The Evil Eye (1963)

Usually, Criterion presents their collections in chronological order, but lately, they’ve used some other criteria. I presume someone has ordered them in a way that makes for interesting viewing. I’ve decided to follow their order.

Foreign Film February: Encounter of the Spooky Kind (1980)

encounter of the spooky kind

I recently resubscribed to The Criterion Channel. It is without a doubt my favorite streaming service, but I have a tendency to put it on hold for a month or two. There are just so many other services and various other ways in which to watch shows and movies that I just can’t afford to subscribe to everything all the time.

One of the many things I love about The Criterion Channel is that it not only has some of the world’s greatest cinema on there – from Kurosawa to Bergman, Fellini to Welles, but it also has tons of oddball, weirdo films as well. The people behind it are just as comfortable with the arthouse as with the grindhouse.

Case in point I watched this film this weekend on the channel. Encounter of the Spooky Kind is a silly martial arts movie that blends low-brow comedy with horror with lots of crazy kung fu thrown in for good measure.

It was co-written, directed by and stars Sammo Hung as Bold Cheung a rikshaw driver. One day while working he discovers two men looking through the peephole of his house, excited that a couple is making love inside. Bold Cheung barges in, narrowly missing the man with whom his wife is having an affair.

That man is actually Master Tam (Huang Ha) Bold Cheung’s boss. Afraid that he will be found out and that Bold Cheung will have his revenge on him, Master Tam vows to murder Bold Cheung. But he cannot do it outright as he might get caught and be put in prison.

Luckily Master Tam knows a sorcerer. He tricks Bold Cheung into spending two nights inside a haunted house. There the sorcerer has control over a hopping vampire (seriously, apparently Chinese folklore involves living corpses that move around by hopping and sucking out your life force).

Luckily for Bold Cheung the sorcerer’s apprentice doesn’t think they should use their powers for evil purposes and he sets out to help Bold Cheung to survive.

There’s a bit of voodoo, some more vampires, and even a magic undergarment thrown into the mix. It is all very silly (a little too silly for my tastes) and it runs a bit too long, but mostly it’s a lot of fun. The kung fu is excellent which more than makes it worthwhile to watch.

Awesome ’80s in April: Yes, Madam! (1985)

yes madam

When I decided to watch a bunch of movies from the 1980s this month I was thinking about all of the stereotypical films from that decade that I knew of as a kid. I was thinking about dumb comedies, big action flicks, slashers, and low-budget B-movies. Lots of other movies were made in the 1980s, of course, but my plan was to stick to the kinds of movies that made me think of the ’80s. I wasn’t interested in foreign language films, or art-house movies.

I’ve mostly stuck to that, but the Criterion Channel is running a series of films starring Michelle Yeoh and I just “had” to watch at least one. Yes, Madam! is the film that made her a star in Hong Kong and is at least partially responsible for a slate of action films starring women that became popular at the time.

Yeoh stars as Senior Inspector Ng, a Hong Kong detective who teams up with Senior Inspector Morris (Cynthia Rothrock in her first big role) from London. They are after some secret microfilm stolen by some gangsters.

Well, actually it was accidentally stolen by a couple of bumbling crooks, but the gangsters want it so you get the cops and the gangsters chasing the dimwits, and the gangsters doing everything they can to keep the cops from getting it first.

It is very similar to a lot of American action movies made in the 1980s. The plot is pretty silly, and the acting is not always great, but the action is a lot of fun. American films tend to involve a lot of gunplay, but Hong Kong films eschew the bang bang for the kung pow. Both types of films usually involve some comedy, but American films tend to have a wise-cracking lead hero, and their Hong Kong counterparts are more slapstick, and more physical with the comedy.

So it is with Yes, Madam! Yeoh and Rothrock kick some serious ass. There are a lot of fight scenes and all of them are fun to watch. The comedy doesn’t fare as well, but I’ve never been a fan of slapstick silliness. It is big, goofy fun, and well worth the watching.