Beneath (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

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**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Daniel Zovatto, Bonnie Dennison, Chris Conroy, Jonny Orsini, Mark Margolis
screenplay by Tony Daniel & Brian D. Smith
directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw Between producing films for promising newcomers (Ti West and Jim Mickle among them), acting in movies like You're Next, and of course directing his own quartet of exceptional, loaded fright flicks (Habit, No Telling, Wendigo, The Last Winter), Larry Fessenden, quietly, surely, has become perhaps the most important independent voice in horror. He seems interested in the sociology of the genre, in how it's very much the "indicator species" in the cinematic swamp–how it, more than any other genre, has the potential to pull back the curtain. It's not just the affection for genre–and deconstruction is never the end goal–but also the understanding and reworking of the basic tenets of genre that distinguishes Fessenden's work from disrespectful "post-modern" bullshit like Cabin in the Woods. It never feels as though he's slumming (as it did when Coppola and Branagh dabbled in horror); his subtext remains subtext, his perspective is always the victim's rather than the bully's. His own take on the Spam-in-a-cabin/monster-in-the-lake concept, Beneath, showcases that intelligence, even as its energy–particularly when held against his last four films–flags through most of a soft introduction. But what it loses there it makes up for in spades in a piece that ultimately feels a great deal in mood and tone like Stephen King's short story "The Raft." For a child of the Eighties who devoured King's Skeleton Crew upon publication, there can be no higher praise.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – Blu-ray Disc

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Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras A
BD – Image D+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor
screenplay by Werner Herzog
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Nosferatu, the Vampyre isn’t scary so much as it’s just delightful; it’s not topical so much as it’s an extremely competent, sometimes inspired tribute to F. W. Murnau and his classic 1922 Nosferatu. Werner Herzog’s hand at the rudder is steady and Klaus Kinski’s performance as Count Dracula is definitive, but the picture is an exercise in style generally lacking in the New German auteur’s main throughlines, i.e., representation, class, and the vagaries of the creative process. What does survive relatively intact is Herzog’s nascent surrealism, which flowers during the picture’s endlessly disturbing tableaux of plague victims celebrating the last of life with rat-infested banquets and danses macabre. One could extend a little and support that the film’s scenes of apocalypse and pestilence hint at a loathing of immigrants and the perception of cultural corruption, but there’s a damning ornamental emptiness at the centre of Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (henceforth Nosferatu) that places it forever out of time–without a father, as it were. The film’s reason for being (it’s a shrine to Herzog’s favourite German director) is also the end of the conversation.

The Slumber Party Massacre Collection – DVD|The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

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THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE
(1982)

**½/****
DVD – Image C+ Sound C- Extras C+
BD – Image A- Sound B Extras C+

starring Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villella, Debra Deliso
screenplay by Rita Mae Brown
directed by Amy Jones

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II (1987)
**½/**** Image C+ Sound C Extras A-
starring Crystal Bernard, Patrick Lowe, Kimberly McArthur, Atanas Ilitch
written and directed by Deborah Brock

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III (1990)
*/**** Image C Sound C Extras A-
starring Keely Christian, Britain Frye, M.K. Harris, David Greenlee
screenplay by Catherine Cyran
directed by Sally Mattison

by Alex Jackson 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre isn’t a film so much as a work of film criticism. It was produced and directed by Amy Holden Jones, perhaps better known today as the screenwriter of Mystic Pizza and Indecent Proposal, and written by established Lesbian Feminist poet and author Rita Mae Brown, who is perhaps best known for the 1973 book Rubyfruit Jungle, typically considered one the earliest coming-of-age lesbian novels.

Cat People (1982) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

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***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nastassia Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole
screenplay by Alan Ormsby, based on the story by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer Amid the American horror boom of the late-1970s and early-1980s, when everything old was new again and once-dormant studio properties like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, and The Fly were suddenly valuable franchises, the script for a remake of Cat People, one of the most subtle of all horror classics, somehow ended up on Paul Schrader’s desk. Why Schrader? Dumb luck, mostly. Certainly he had no great love for the source material, a 1942 horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur that Schrader famously (and charmlessly) claimed “isn’t that brilliant.” But he must have seen in the raw material the opportunity to make a deeply weird movie, one that fused a new mythology with a contemporary melodrama of fear, desire, and violence. The result is not just a personal expression of Schrader’s own sex-and-death preoccupations, but a sort of high-water mark for the quixotic attempt to meld visually sophisticated erotica with commercially savvy narrative storytelling.

Crawlspace (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

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**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Klaus Kinski, Talia Balsam, Barbara Whinnery, Kenneth Robert Shippy
written and directed by David Schmoeller

by Bryant Frazer I’m pretty much on board with a horror movie about a creepy landlord who stalks his college-aged tenants, waging a low-level terror campaign against them by deliberately releasing pests into their living spaces. If he’s a sadist and a serial killer who keeps souvenirs of his victims (by which I mean body parts in jars), that just seems to go with the territory. If he’s also a hardcore Nazi sympathizer with a daddy fixation and a concentration-camp victim locked up in the attic, well, that sounds like it might be a little over the top. But if that creepy landlord-sadist-sociopath-Nazi is played by Klaus Kinski? Now you’re talking.

Hannibal: Season One (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

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Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
“Apéritif,” “Amuse-Bouche,” “Potage,” “Œuf,” “Coquilles,” “Entrée,” “Sorbet,” “Fromage,” “Trou Normand,” “Buffet Froid,” “Rôti,” “Relevés,” “Savoureux”

by Walter Chaw I read Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon sometime in the summer of 1985, when puberty and a crippling stutter conflated new, confusing biological drives with defensive rage. It’s a wonder, really, that anyone gets out of junior-high alive. I had developed a taste for outré entertainments long around this time–thirteen, gawky, outcast in my mind, if not necessarily in reality. It was easier for me to identify with the Michael Myerses and Jason Vorheeses of the underverse: hiding, voyeuristic, jealous, yearning. I think we learn affinity with monsters as our own bodies betray us, metastasize around us, dosing our brains with liquid spikes of ecstasy and their attendant pitch-black abysses. I took refuge in movies rented from the local video stores in and around my suburban oubliette, and eventually in books like Harris’s masterpiece, which, once discovered, was something I came back to like a scab, like a totem to be worried. Watching Manhunter on VHS a year or so after its release, I was astounded to discover it was Red Dragon. I hadn’t considered that anyone else knew about, much less was interested in, the contents of my secret stash. In the years before Internet and the vast, instant dissemination of information, there were still such things as the private, the personal. Manhunter was validation, exposure, and sanctification of my perversion. I was outed.

Arrow: The Complete First Season (2012-2013) + Supernatural: The Complete Eighth Season (2012-2013) – Blu-ray Discs

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ARROW: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
Image A Sound B Extras B-
"Pilot," "Honor Thy Father," "Lone Gunmen," "An Innocent Man," "Damaged," "Legacies," "Muse of Fire," "Vendetta," "Year's End," "Burned," "Trust but Verify," "Vertigo," "Betrayal," "The Odyssey," "Dodger," "Dead to Rights," "The Huntress Returns," "Salvation," "Unfinished Business," "Home Invasion," "The Undertaking," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Sacrifice"

SUPERNATURAL: THE COMPLETE EIGHTH SEASON
Image A Sound B+ Extras B
"We Need to Talk About Kevin," "What's Up, Tiger Mommy?," "Heartache," "Bitten," "Blood Brother," "Southern Comfort," "A Little Slice of Kevin," "Hunteri Heroici," "Citizen Fang," "Torn and Frayed," "LARP and the Real Girl," "As Time Goes By," "Everybody Hates Hitler," "Trial and Error," "Man's Best Friend with Benefits," "Remember the Titans," "Goodbye Stranger," "Freaks and Geeks," "Taxi Driver," "Pac-Man Fever," "The Great Escapist," "Clip Show," "Sacrifice"

by Jefferson Robbins Kindred shows in more ways than just their sharing a network, a Vancouver, B.C. shooting base, and a David Nutter-helmed pilot, The CW's "Arrow" and "Supernatural" also share a gestalt. Post-"The X Files", post-"Buffy", they grapple with family legacies, duty versus desire, and bonds (specifically male) threatened by the intrusion of a) monsters and b) lovers. Watching the debut season of the former alongside the eighth season of the latter, it becomes clear that "Arrow"'s showrunners, headed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, are just as steeped in the modes and methods of this youth-oriented action programming as "Supernatural" creator Eric Kripke. Both series find young, handsome protagonists consumed with the bloody twilight work left undone by their dead fathers; and both–despite "Arrow"'s roots as a second-tier DC Comics property straining for multimedia relevance–are better, and bloodier, and in some ways more relevant, than one has any right to expect.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

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Dario Argento's Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn't? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento's work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he's riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he's lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn't really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he's made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento's Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all-time. Until you've endured it, I can't quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it's a fucking tragedy.

Night of the Comet (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B
starring Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Geoffrey Lewis
written and directed by Thom Eberhardt

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's a quote from the seventh season of "The Simpsons" that applies to the problem before us where Bart, happening on a "Schoolhouse Rock" thing and learning from Lisa that it's one of "those campy '70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers," says, "We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little." If there were, and if it had, we might've avoided the current rage for hipsterism–if the Joss Whedons of the world (and David Cranes and so forth) had found themselves casualties in some hostile jungle setting, then would this current youth generation have adopted, ironically, that last generation, and would people like me at my tender age of 40 be fuelling demand for hale distribution/archival companies like Shout! to produce exhaustively-supplemented HiDef releases of garbage like Thom Eberhardt's excruciating Night of the Comet? Look, I'm not immune–I wrote an entire monograph (200+ pages, no kidding) on Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile that, in my defense, was more memoir than anything else (or is that more disclaimer than defense?). Still, I'll proclaim to my grave that Miracle Mile has substance, while Night of the Comet has none. The first and greatest danger of nostalgia is that having grown up with certain artifacts, we treat them like family and tend to love them unconditionally, as family does. This affection doesn't mean that junior isn't a grinning idiot, however, because at least in this instance, he is. And I'm a strong believer that if one of your family members is a grinning idiot, it's actually your job not to inflict him or her on other people.

Body Bags (1993) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

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**½/**** Image A- Sound C- Extras B
starring Robert Carradine, Stacy Keach, Mark Hamill, Twiggy
written by Billy Brown & Dan Angel
directed by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer In 1989, HBO debuted a horror anthology show, "Tales from the Crypt", based on stories from the disreputable EC comic books of the early 1950s. Jump-started by a stable of Hollywood big shots like Richard Donner, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis, the show was a hit, and the wisecracking "Crypt Keeper" who introduced each episode quickly became a pop-culture icon. HBO's rival Showtime, known primarily for its softcore anthology "Red Shoe Diaries", was presumably aiming to duplicate that success when it backed Body Bags, an anthology project led by co-executive producers John Carpenter and his wife, Sandy King. Despite that genre pedigree, the series never got off the ground, but a pilot was completed: three half-hour segments with a goofy framing story involving Carpenter himself doing a deadpan Betelgeuse impression among the stiffs in a city morgue. The finished omnibus aired on Showtime as a one-off in the summer of '93.

Eyes Without a Face (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

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Les yeux sans visage
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C

starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin, Edith Scob
screenplay by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon
directed by Georges Franju

by Walter Chaw Five films changed the conversation in 1960. They were the fire, though the embers were stoked in the years leading up to them. Looking for signposts in the Eisenhower Fifties, you find the juvenile-delinquent cycle, plus the outré horror flicks of England’s Hammer Studios, or Japan’s tokusatsu, or France’s Nouvelle Vague. More directly, you find a pair of films based on works by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Diabolique and Vertigo. But in 1960, there was this quintet, each the product of parallel genesis, each proof after a fashion of a Jungian collective unconscious, perhaps, certainly that things long-simmering inevitably boil over. There’s an idea in my head, put there by Ethan Mordden’s Medium Cool, that everything that happened in the arts in the United States throughout the Fifties points to what was about to happen in our culture in the Sixties. Mordden is the source of my favourite teaching point when it comes to the two eras: that in the Fifties, if you didn’t listen to Mother, society was doomed; and in 1960, if you listened to Mother, you were Psycho.

The Last Days on Mars (2013)

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*½/****
starring Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams
screenplay by Clive Dawson, based on the short story "The Animators" by Sydney J. Bounds
directed by Ruairi Robinson

by Walter Chaw Sort of expecting an impressionistic adaptation of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" cycle, imagine my surprise to discover that Ruairi Robinson's The Last Days on Mars is a derivative, flaccid little space-set horror flick that proves the maxim that movies with "Mars" in the title tend to suck. It boasts an exceptional cast, anchored by the ever-steady Liev Schreiber, who receives strong assists from Olivia Williams, Romola Garai, and Elias fucking Koteas. And it features a script by Clive Dawson, based on a Sydney Bounds short story, that is so familiar to genre enthusiasts by now that if you can't predict who lives, who dies first, even what the last shot will be, well, you just aren't paying attention. See, The Last Days on Mars is about the last hours for this scientific expedition looking for proof of life. On the verge of giving up, they find proof of life. But the life is evil and it turns them into space zombies. No, seriously.

Curse of Chucky [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

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**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fiona Dourif, Danielle Bisutti, Maitland McConnell, Brad Dourif
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Bryant Frazer Say what you will about the Child's Play movies, but don't accuse franchise creator Don Mancini of being a hack. Sure, his Chucky, a walking-and-talking "Good Guy doll" possessed by the soul of a serial killer, is a steal. Nothing original about it. Chucky is a foul-mouthed iteration of creepy Toys "R" Us killers from any number of horror films–most of them dating to Cavalcanti's famous segment from 1945's Dead of Night, though another key influence was the notoriously pants-wetting 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, with its murderous Zuni fetish doll sharing the screen with a terrified Karen Black. But something about Mancini's formulation clicked with Fright Night director Tom Holland, and the 1988 Child's Play, which detailed Chucky's origin story and pitted him against a young boy, was a low-budget success that naturally demanded sequels. Mancini remained on board as screenwriter as two more directors took on two more Child's Play entries. After 1991's Child's Play 3, the character seemed played-out, but Mancini successfully resurrected him with the tongue-in-cheek Bride of Chucky, which brought Jennifer Tilly into the fold along with director Ronny Yu, and Mancini finally took the directorial reins himself with the even more broadly comic Seed of Chucky, which numbered Britney Spears and Martha Stewart among its victims.

Snuff (1976) – Blu-ray Disc

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*½/**** Image B+ Sound C+ Extras B+
starring Liliana Fernández Blanco, Ana Carro, Enrique Larratelli, Mirtha Massa
written and directed by Michael Findlay (with additional footage directed by Simon Nuchtern)

by Bryant Frazer For the majority of its running time, Snuff is pretty standard grindhouse fare. Shot on the cheap and loosely based on the Manson cult murders, which were still big news when the film was being shot in 1971, it’s a potboiler about a serial-killing biker gang of women in thrall to a presumably charismatic, self-styled guru calling himself Satán. Shootings, stabbings, softcore groping, and general toplessness ensue. But it’s not your ordinary South American Satanic nudie cult film à clef. Among dime-a-dozen exploitation films, Snuff is special.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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any image to enlarge

THE
TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN

**½/****
BD – Image B+
Sound B-
Extras B+

starring
Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Jimmy Clem, Dawn Wells

screenplay
by Earl E. Smith

directed
by Charles B. Pierce

THE
EVICTORS

**½/****
Image B
Sound B-

starring
Vic Morrow, Michael Parks, Jessica Harper, Sue Ane Langdon

screenplay
by Charles B. Pierce, Gary Rusoff, Paul Fisk

directed
by Charles B. Pierce

by
Jefferson Robbins
Charles B. Pierce's
1976 thriller The Town That Dreaded Sundown makes
a fetish of breath.
The bag-headed killer, ripped from the headlines of 1946 Texarkana, is
a
mouth-breather, his mask working like a bellows whether he's exerting
himself
or not. He's announced by his respiring, as when rural housewife Helen
Reed (Dawn
Wells) ceases brushing her rich black hair to listen for him outside
her home.
And his most artful, or perhaps comical, kill is executed with a
bayonet
trombone, stabbing with each exhalation. He's the old stereotype of the
heavy-breathing phone pervert writ deadly, shambling up to parked
teenagers and
taking his jollies as he may. Sexual assault is implicit in his
approach but
quickly disavowed, although he heavily bites his earliest female
victim. An
oral compulsion that is sexual but not; a murder that is penetrative
rape but
not… As scripted, the never-captured Phantom Killer of Texarkana
would be a
pretty interesting psychological study.

The Conjuring (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

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**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that a pineapple is an apple, James Wan’s latest exercise in jump-scare theatre is the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The Conjuring. In it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film begins lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of ghost-hunting, confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they’re called to the modest New England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former home of a WITCH! Can you fucking believe the luck? An evil witch lived in this house. Fuck. A witch. Motherfucker, am I right? You buy a house and you think that…anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts out innocently enough with the largely indistinguishable Perron girls getting jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of hide and clap (which sounds venereal but isn’t, unless you’re doing it really wrong) that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight of stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That’s when daddy Roger (Ron Livingston) calls the Warrens… Well, he doesn’t, because he’s away on a week-long business trip and he’s a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn after the fact… Um… He’s not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan seems distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

Psycho II (1983) [Collector’s Edition] + Psycho III (1986) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

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PSYCHO II
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Robert Loggia, Meg Tilly
screenplay by Tom Holland
directed by Richard Franklin

PSYCHO III
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Anthony Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey, Roberta Maxwell
screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue
directed by Anthony Perkins

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For a fool’s errand, Psycho II–a decades-belated, colour follow-up to a seminal black-and-white horror by a filmmaker whose mythical stature had only grown since his death–is nothing short of a miracle. The story goes that in the early-Eighties, when sequels were the new Gold Rush, Universal–who’d seen healthy returns on Jaws 2 and Smokey and the Bandit II–realized it had a sequelizable property in Psycho but intended to hedge their bets with a telefilm for the burgeoning cable market. When Anthony Perkins got wind of the project, he expressed an unanticipated interest in reprising the role of Norman Bates, having done so one time before in a warmly-received sketch on the first season of “Saturday Night Live”. Australian Richard Franklin, a USC graduate back in Hollywood to direct the picture, realized the studio could be shamed into releasing Psycho II theatrically were Perkins to star in it, and recruited The Beast Within screenwriter Tom Holland (who went on to give us Fright Night and Child’s Play) to craft a script the actor couldn’t resist. Once Perkins said “yes,” Universal begrudgingly bumped it up to a feature but still expected it to be made quickly and cheaply like the original–probably to the perverse delight of Hitchcock scholar Franklin, who prided himself on doing things the Master’s way all through production, going so far as to cameo in the film.

John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

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***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blount, Victor Wong, Jameson Parker
screenplay by John Carpenter (as Martin Quatermass)
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The first of two low-budget films that John Carpenter wrote pseudonymously and directed in and around downtown Los Angeles in the late-1980s, John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is one of the creepiest movies ever made. Underrated at the time by critics who called it “cheesy” (Vincent Canby)1 and said “[it] stinks” (Richard Harrington), Prince of Darkness was clearly made fast and on the cheap, and it’s roughly-crafted by Carpenter standards. Still, it’s a triumph of mood. Filling out a mystery-of-the-ancient-artifact yarn with a cosmic-horror mythology, Prince of Darkness lives in a sweet spot between religious thriller and Satanic potboiler where science is the way, the truth, and the life, for better or worse.

MHHFF ’13: Shorts Program #4

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Next Exit **/**** (UK, 14 mins., d. Benjamin Goodger) A light bit of nothing, Next Exit is a little Ludditism along the lines of that one episode of the American "The Office" where Michael Scott follows the bad instructions of his GPS directly into a lake. The performances are good, the direction is fairly pedestrian, and the story, about a girl who accepts a ride home from a pub one night, has a couple of decent twists but is ultimately more mildly clever than disturbing or compelling. In its short time, it does manage to cover the bases in terms of going out of cell-phone range and the suggestion of a cyclical ending, but it fails mostly in terms of generating much in the way of horror or comedy. Mostly, I had trouble with the idea that anyone would think a hotel–or a hospital, or anything–is located in the middle of the woods.