Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

The Small Back Room (aka Hour of Glory), dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1949

Set in the London Spring of 1943, and adapted from Nigel Balchin’s novel published in the same year, this film with its modest title also focuses on a collection of modest figures in Britain’s war effort: the so-called ‘backroom boys’ who worked in science and engineering behind the (battle) scenes.

The clandestine ‘Research Section’ may be run by old Professor Mair (Milton Rosmer), but Sammy Rice (David Farrar) is “the brains of the outfit”, even if he is held back, both literally and metaphorically, by a prosthetic foot which give him a limping gait, ceaseless pain and considerable shame. He must contend with devious, often dumb bureaucrats and politicians, and with his own tendencies for self-pity and alcoholic self-destruction, as he struggles both to hold on to his sympathetic girlfriend Susan (Kathleen Byron) and to defuse a dangerous new kind of German explosive device.

Following the Technicolor extravagance of their The Red Shoes from the previous year, this monochrome release from Powell and Pressburger is a much more subdued affair — but that diminished scale suits a film about a kind of stiff-upper-lip domestic heroism which was understated, unseen and largely unsung during the war years.

The Small Back Room is available on Blu-ray/DVD/digital from 3 June via StudioCanal

The Lawnmower Man, dir. Brett Leonard, 1992

After his chimp subject dies, Dr Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan) continues his experiments in nootropics and accelerated VR learning on local intellectually disabled lawnmower man Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey), only to see the low-IQ labourer rapidly turn into a genius with psionic powers (and a vengeful streak) who wants to become a god in global cyberspace before the military can seize him as an asset.

Brett Leonard’s sci-fi thriller is a curio. Leave aside the laughably rudimentary, then cutting-edge early Nineties CG effects, the utterly bizarre kill sequences, or the fact that Stephen King litigated to have his name removed from the credits because of the film’s immense distance from his 1975 short story of the same name, and you still have a supposedly relatable protagonist who hardly treats Jobe better than the town bully (John Laughlin) or the abusive priest (Jeremy Slate).

Lawrence grooms Jobe, enticing him into his home with video games like a paedophile (“you must never tell anyone,” he says), and taking advantage of Jobe’s incomprehension to expose him to all manner of dangerous procedures. While ultimately the villain, Jobe is also a victim, and his retreat into the virtual world is entirely understandable.

The Lawnmower Man is available on Blu-ray in a boxset, in both theatrical and director’s cut, along with Farhad Mann’s Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1995) from 10 June via 101 Film

Sympathy for the Underdog (Bakuto gaijin butai), dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1971

“I don’t do things halfway,” says gangster Noburo Kudo (Noburo Ando), about halfway through Kinji Fukasaku’s film, “We’re into it now, let’s go all the way.” His former rival turned friend Masuo Gunji (Kōji Tsuruta) can only agree.

Fresh out of a ten-year stint in a Yokohama prison, Gunji has reassembled the remnants of his old gang, and moved in on Naha, Okinawa, whether for the criminal opportunities the American-occupied island capital offers, or perhaps because he is looking for his ex-lover there. This leads to conflicts with new local gangs, as well as with his old enemies from the mainland, as he and Kudo prove gutsy albeit outnumbered underdogs in some very unfair fights.

The ninth and final entry in Toei Studios Bakuto (‘Gambler’) series, this may be a yakuza film, but it plays more like noir, not least thanks to Takeo Yamashita’s hard jazz score, the flashbacks told in stylised photomontages, and the brooding fatalism that pervades everything. These characters are all in, even if they know there can be no going back, and as Gunji, sporting his characteristic shades, cuts a cool figure, this will also be his last stand, and his glorious revenge.

Sympathy for the Underdog is available on Blu-ray from 24 June via Radiance Films

Bandits of Orgosolo (Banditi a Orgosolo), dir. Vittorio De Seta, 1960

“Starring Sardinian shepherds” reads text near the beginning of Vittorio De Seta’s feature debut. This use of local, non-professional actors, all uncredited and, one suspects, playing versions of themselves, is part of De Seca’s allegiance to realism and his almost ethnographic approach to his subjects, whose harsh, ‘primitive’ (as a narrator puts it) way of life easily draws them to banditry.

The main character is Michele, a gruffly decent, modest man who, with his little brother, tends a flock of sheep on the outskirts of Orgosolo. When bandits from another part of the island — really just shepherds like Michele who have fallen into desperate times — seek refuge in his sheepfold, he finds himself blamed by the Carabinieri for their crimes. Going on the run, losing everything and acquiring further debts, Michele too finally turns to acts of theft and violence, while passing on the same legacy to his victim as the earlier bandits had to Michele himself.

“I don’t have a choice anymore,” says Michele near the film’s end — and that sense of inevitability is what gives De Seca’s anthropological observations such a tragic trajectory. Here misery and criminality are not just readily acquired, but redistributed across the entire community.

Bandits of Orgosolo is available on Blu-ray, with a second disc of 10 short films by De Seta, from 24 June via Radiance

Kill The Referee (À mort l’arbitre), dir. Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1984

“I don’t give a fuck about sports,” says the jaded, permanently smoking Inspector Granowski near the beginning of Jean-Pierre Mocky’s film, adapted from Alfred Draper’s 1972 novel The Death Penalty. The fact that Granowski is played by Mocky lends these words a certain programmatic authority, and sure enough, this film is less about the beautiful game than its occasionally ugly fans.

When, during the European Cup, referee Maurice (Eddy Mitchell) calls a penalty that leads to the Yellows losing the game, a group of hardcore supporters, led by middle-aged clownish psychopath Rico (Michel Serrault), seeks satisfaction from Maurice — but as their nocturnal pursuit of Maurice and his girlfriend Martine (Carole Laure) leads to catastrophic consequences, with Rico blaming every misstep of his own on Maurice, soon this band of thugs want less to “fuck the referee” (their stadium catchcry) than to kill him, even as Granowski struggles to sort through the incomprehensible chaos.

This vicious siege/chase thriller (like Paul Donovan and Maura O’Connell’s Self Defense from the previous year) also constantly traces the romance between Maurice and Martine, and is full of eccentric character comedy, letting Mocky score with the kind of tonal madness that was his forte.

Kill The Referee is available on Blu-ray as part of the boxset The Agitator: Three Provocations from the Wild World of Jean-Pierre Mocky (also including Litan, 1982 and Agent Trouble, 1987) from 24 June via Radiance Films

Agent Trouble, dir. Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1987

“A man finds a bus with 50 dead passengers,” museum worker Amanda Weber (Catherine Deneuve) tells her neighbour. “It’s the plot of a novel.” In fact it is not — for the man is a real person, Amanda’s nephew Victorien (Tom Novembre), who has chanced upon a bizarre conspiracy, and is about to draw his aunt into a chaotic, murderous cover-up. Yet Jean-Pierre Mocky’s film really is based on a novel — Malcolm Bosse’s The Man Who Loved Zoos (1974) — bringing a self-conscious irony to the neighbour’s reply: “It’s a stupid plot. Get another book.”

Mocky is barely interested in the mechanics of the plot and happily leaves events both unresolved and only vaguely explained. Instead his focus is on character, whether Amanda’s nothing-to-lose tenacity, or the melancholic charm of the assassin Alex (Richard Bohringer) who pursues anyone tied to the incident, or the grotesques who make up the rest of the cast.

Gabriel Yared’s score sets just the right jaunty tone to queer all the familiar cloak and dagger into something far richer and stranger. This mystery thriller is cynical, stylised and (in every sense) funny, as ageing characters take a bus excursion into their own mortality.

Agent Trouble is available on Blu-ray as part of the boxset The Agitator: Three Provocations from the Wild World of Jean-Pierre Mocky (also including Litan, 1982 and Kill the Referee, 1983) from 24 June via Radiance Films

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

Mansion of the Doomed, dir. Michael Pataki, 1976

After being at the wheel in a car accident that blinds his daughter Nancy (Trish Stewart), Hollywood eye surgeon Dr Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart) is driven by grief and guilt to abandon his principles in pursuit of living eye donors to drug and abduct for experimental transplants — who are then caged, eyeless, in his suburban home’s cellar.

This was the the first horror film to emerge from Charles Band’s Full Moon Features, and the directorial feature of Michael Pataki, better known as a prolific actor, whose only other directed feature would be the 1977 musical sex comedy Cinderella. Yet this suburban gothic comes with its own fairytale feel, not least because it plays like a reimagining of Georges Franju’s surgical fantasia Eyes Without A Face (1960), updated and inverted. For here the arrogant, obsessive doctor/father, his loyal, loving assistant (Gloria Grahame) and the repeatedly victimised daughter are all present and correct, even if it’s the faces that are without eyes.

Though never actually prosecuted, Pataki’s film was confiscated in the Eighties as a ‘video nasty’, no doubt thanks to increasingly graphic scenes of ocular damage to anticipate those in Bigas Luna’s Anguish (1987) and Maxi Contenti’s The Last Matinee (2020).

Mansion of the Doomed is available on Limited Edition Blu-ray from 6 May via 101 Films

Crimson Peak, dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2015

“Ghosts are real, this much I know,” says Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) in her opening voiceover. Yet later she will say of the supernatural element in her manuscript: “The ghosts are just metaphors.” It is the film’s central ambiguity: Edith sees dead people, but perhaps it is just the vivid imagination of a sensitive woman who lost her beloved mother at a young age, and is now an author of gothic fiction.

The publisher to whom she pitches her work suggests it needs ‘romance’, which del Toro will obligingly provide by having this young American marry the charming English baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). Edith moves in with him and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) to their Cumberland mansion, a dilapidated, winterbound edifice sinking into its own blood-red clay foundations, and gradually exposing the madness, perversion and, yes, ghosts hidden within.

As Edith, at the turn of the century, learns to use the past to forge her own writerly future, Del Toro too distils his own pure gothic from a toxic brew of literary and cinematic influences. This is headily sumptuous, seductive filmmaking, beautiful and grotesque, with the best-realised ghosts since del Toro’s own The Devil’s Backbone (2001).

Crimson Peak is available on 4K UHD Blu-ray from 20 May via Arrow

Luminous Woman (Hikaru onna), dir. Shinji Sômai

“It’s windy and surrounded with garbage,” says Sensaku (Keijo Mutô), traversing a junkyard. “This is Tokyo, right?”

Barefoot and bushy-bearded, dressed in a skin vest, and bearing a massive duffel bag to match his hulking frame, Sensaku is an antediluvian mountain man (expressly likened — twice — to King Kong) come from Takinoue on the island of Hokkaido in search of his fiancée Kuriko (Narumi Yasuda) who, while studying accountancy in the capital, has drifted into vice and addiction. Sensaku too will quickly be drawn into the capital’s netherworld, wrestling in death matches at the decadent club Giaconda run by Shiriuchi (Kei Suma), and spending time with Shiuriuchi’s girlfriend Yoshino (Michiru Akiyoshi).

A one-time singer, Yoshino regains her lost talent in Sensaku’s presence, and something like a romance builds between them. Meanwhile, Shinji Sômai directs his film like one of the operas that Yoshino sings, painting events as baroque, stylised melodrama, and transforming Tokyo into a hell of high and low entertainment. Filling his work with non-professional actors and strange plot turns, Sômai’s slow-burning love story seems to be a plea for a shift from urban modernity’s corrupting effect back to Japan’s older rural values, closer to nature’s rhythms.

Luminous Woman is available on Blu-ray from 20 May via Third Window

The Long Good Friday, dir. John Mackenzie, 1980

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman, with a sense of history,” says Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) to the guests assembled on his luxury boat. This day is meant to represent the culmination of a decade’s peacemaking and legitimisation, as the East End gang lord seeks a partnership with visiting American ‘businessman’ Charlie (Eddie Constantine).

Harold is a proud Londoner and patriot with a global vision for England’s future in its transatlantic ‘special relationship’ and in the European Economic Community, but even as he plans to make billions renewing the Docklands, he is wrong-footed by an enemy bombing his associates and his properties, and must get to the bottom of who is behind these attacks before the American mafia walks away from the deal. Yet in taking on the IRA, he may, like the nation he embodies, be punching above his weight.

John Mackenzie’s gangster film offers a panorama of Britain’s shifting place in the world during the Seventies. A Thatcherite avant la lettre, ambitious, upwardly mobile Harold longs for the same classy respectability as his girlfriend Victoria (Helen Mirren), but struggles to shake off the ruthless thuggishness on which he has built his fragile criminal empire.

The Long Good Friday is available on Limited Edition 4K UHD from 27 May via Arrow

A Queen’s Ransom (aka International Assassin, aka E tan qun ying hui), Ting Shan-hsi, 1976

Ting Shan-hsi’s feature opens with news footage from May 1975, as several intersecting realities converged on Hong Kong: a massive influx of refugees from the fall of Vietnam, and a state visit from Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip.

A series of coincidences will also drive the film’s fictive plots, interwoven into each other as well as into these historical events. Already stretched, the local police catch wind of a plot to assassinate the Queen. A gang of international criminals, led by George (George Lazenby), plans multiple ways of taking out Elizabeth, while some of their number work on a different, secret plot.

Meanwhile, sex worker Jenny (Tien Lie) cooperates with a police detective (Ko Chin-hsiung) after discovering a client is involved in the assassination plot, without realising that she is related by blood to another assassin (Jimmy Wang Yu) – and exiled Burmese princess Maria (Angela Mao) keeps being in the right place at the right time to help thwart criminals with her martial arts skills.

Like Hong Kong’s answer to Fred Zinneman’s The Day of the Jackal (1973), only much more complicated, this makes up for flat characterisation and misfiring comedy with an elaborate narrative and unexpected twists.

A Queen’s Ransom is available on Blu-ray from 27 May via Eureka!

A Band of Assassins (Shinobi no mono), dir. Satsuo Yamamoto, 1962

This is the first of what would become eight features from Daiei Motion Picture Company about the life of semi-legendary sixteenth-century outlaw ninja Ishikawa Goemon (Raizo Ichikawa), with the first three adapted from Tomoyoshi Murayama’s Shinobi no Mono novels (1960-62) — and though made in 1962, it lays out the tropes, techniques and weapons that would characterise all subsequent ninja films.

As ruthless, ailurophilic warlord Oda Nobunaga (Tomisaburô Wakayama) impiously razes temples and massacres monks in his bid for power, the Momochi and rival Fukibayashi Fortresses — both ninja strongholds — vie to assassinate him first. Goemon is Momochi’s most promising young warrior, though he is naïve and lacks the requisite guile of a ninja, making him all too easy for his General, the wily, double-dealing Sandayû (Yûnosuke Itô), to manipulate.

Goemon is the classic reluctant hero, wanting to get out of the ninja game altogether and to settle down with his beloved Maki (Shiho Fujimura), but finding, even as he breaks every rule in the ninja’s strict code, that he is still under Sandayû’s malign control. Yet while Goemon is certainly more kickass than his peers, it is Sandayû’s almost surreally convoluted scheming and subterfuge that keep propelling the plot.

A Band of Assassins is available on Blu-ray as part of the three-film Shinobi boxset from 27 May via Radiance

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

The Foul King (Banchikwang), dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2000

“Welcome to the real world,” a bank’s assistant manager (Song Young-chang) tells his employee Im Dae-ho (Song Kang-ho), having just held him in, and then released him from, a vicious headlock. “If you’re weak, you die.”

Dae-ho is a loser who wants nothing more than to impress his disappointed father (Shin Goo), and to break free of his boss’s humiliating hold over him. One day he spots an old wrestling gymnasium, where a tattered poster promises combat techniques that are “applicable to daily living!” — and so begins his double life, by day a banker, by night training hard in wrestling (and actually getting good at it). As these two worlds overlap, Kim Jee-woon’s second feature plays like a comic Korean rejoinder to Fight Club.

Dae-ho longs to be a ‘foul king’ like his former hero Ultra Tiger Mask, who specialised in cheating techniques. As Dae-il prepares to meet pro Yubiho (Kim Soo-ro) in the ring, he must decide whether to accept once more his scripted rôle of loser, or to give the match his all and show the ‘perseverance’ that is his gym’s motto. Somewhere in this ‘gripping’ underdog comedy is a real-world lesson.

The Foul King is available on digital from 8 April via Blue Finch Films

A Bittersweet Life (Dalkomhan insaeng), dir Kim Jee-woon, 2005

“You can do 100 things right,” says kingpin Kang (Kim Yeong-cheol) to his loyal enforcer Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun), “but one mistake can destroy everything.”

These words will be played out by the rest of Kim Jee-woon’s gangster revenge film, as the Sun-woo, a fastidious aesthete who likes to sweeten his bitter espresso with a sugar cube, and whose elegant dress and manner belie his thuggish martial skills, is about to see this clean, ordered world become a muddy, bloody chaos.

Sun-woo’s one mistake, when assigned to keep an eye on Kang’s musician girlfriend Hee-soo (Shin Min-a) with the boss out of town, is to develop tender feelings and to disobey a direct order. Now his well-tempered life comes apart at the seams, and a new self emerges. Ensuing scenes of Tarantino-esque mayhem, messy rebirth and ultra-violent destruction serve to dramatise Sun-woo’s conflicting inner desires as he shadow-boxes with himself as much as taking down everyone else.

This crazy genre-fied film, possibly just a romantic reverie, is no less cerebral, psychological, even spiritual than it is viscerally thrilling, with untold depths reflected in its brilliant surface sheen.

A Bittersweet Life is available on digital from 8 April via Blue Finch Films

I Was Born, But… (Otona no miru ehon – Umarete wa mita keredo), dir. Yasujirô Ozu, 1932

Yasujiro Ozu’s silent feature comes with a curious, paradoxical subtitle — “A Picture Book For Grown Ups” — whose meaning is only gradually resolved. The first part is easy to understand: for as manager Yoshi (Tatsuo Saitō) moves his family to the Tokyo suburbs to be closer to the home of his company’s executive Iwasaki (Takeshi Sakamoto), this new environment is focalised through Yoshi’s young sons Ryoichi (Hideo Sugawara) and Keiji (Tomio Aoki), who try to find their place amid the bullying and power plays of the other local lads. This is a funny, gently observed boys’ own adventure, playing out Yoshi’s (intertitled) assertion, “All young boys should have a little mischief in them.”

Yet his two sons’ struggles for supremacy over the other boys will bring them to question the importance of their father, who they see behaving subserviently to Iwasaki, even though they now boss around Iwasaki’s son (Seiichi Kato). Their subsequent disappointment and disillusionment is the first, tentative taste of a very adult lesson about patriarchy and pecking order in Japan’s social hierarchies. 27 years later, Ozu would reimagine the film as Good Morning, ringing the changes on this timeless principle with sound, colour and the advent of television.

I Was Born, But… is available on the Blu-ray set Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu (also including There Was A Father, 1942) from 15 April via BFI

The Cat and the Canary, dir. Paul Leni, 1927

“Medicine could do nothing more for Cyrus West, whose greedy relatives, like cats around a canary, had brought him to the verge of madness,” reads an intertitle near the beginning of Paul Leni’s comic horror/murder mystery.

In keeping with old West’s instructions, exactly 20 years after his death those same relatives are assembled at his remote New York castle to hear his last will and testament, and his most distant relative Annabelle (Laura La Plante) is nominated as heir to his fortune. Yet with ghosts and an escaped lunatic said to be lurking around the premises, with the next in line to West’s legacy still behaving like a predatory cat, and with the guests going missing one by one, it is going to be a long night.

The first of six adaptations from John Willard’s popular 1922 play, this silent film lands in the sweet spot between Leni’s German Expressionism and the camper American gothic of what would emerge as Universal horror in the early Thirties. With plenty of trickery and treachery on screen to match the inventive artifice of the film itself, this is a stylised succession saga of murder and madness, and a romantic melodrama with claws.

The Cat and the Canary is available on Blu-ray from 22 April via Eureka

Suzhou River (Suzhou he), dir. Lou Ye, 2000

“I could tell you that I saw a mermaid once sitting on the muddy bank, combing her golden hair. But I’d be lying.”

So says the Videographer (Zhang Ming Fan), unseen narrator and sometime focaliser of Lou Ye’s vibrant feature set in the grubby riverside demimonde of contemporary Shanghai. The videographer’s work brings him to Meimei (Zhou Xun), who does a mermaid act in a seedy bar — but as their affair is shown from the POV of his own camera, that same handheld documentary style is used to track the parallel, perhaps interrelated love story of motorbike courier Mardar (Jia Hongsheng) who falls for, betrays and loses his young ward Moudan (also Zhou Xun), only to become convinced, after a search for her spanning many years, that she is in fact Meimei. Unless of course the Videographer makes the whole thing up, as a counterpoint to his own rather less committed dalliance with Meimei.

Like its central motif of a mermaid, this mystery romance is a hybrid creature, split between truth and fiction, idealism and cynicism, and unfolding along a river where there are many stories, where everything is in constant flux, and where even love may be just another myth.

Suzhou River is available on Blu-ray from 29 April via Radiance

Footprints (aka Footprints on the Moon, aka Le orme), dir. Luigi Bazzoni, 1975

In blue-tinged monochrome, one astronaut drags another across the lunar surface, and then abandons him there, as Professor Blackmann (Klaus Kinski) in the control room looks on. This opening sequence from Luigi Bazzoni’s enigmatic feature is also the recurring nightmare of Alice Campos (Florinda Bolkan), a Portuguese-born interpreter in Italy who, like a man alone on the moon, seems isolated, alienated and lost in translation. Alice’s dreams are based on a sci-fi movie she saw years earlier that, horrified, she had to leave before its end, never learning the purpose of Blackmann’s cruel “experiment”.

After suffering a three-day memory blackout, Alice follows cryptic clues (a torn-up photo, a blood-flecked dress) to the liminal island of Garma and its Marienbad-like hotel that she half-remembers (and whose guests half-remember her). There, in keeping with her name, Alice goes down a rabbit hole of alter egos, repressive parenting, lost love, déjà vu and dissociative identity disorder. This is Lynch avant la lettre, with an archetypal paranoid-neurotic ‘woman in trouble’ undergoing a psychogenic fugue in which she tries to trace, in the footprints of mystery and madness, a meaningful yet forever misunderstood ending. Astonishing lunacy!

Footprints is available on Blu-ray and digital from 29 Apr via Shameless Films

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

Bodyguard Kiba, dir. Ryûichi Takamori, 1973

Near the beginning of Ryûichi Takamori’s manga-based action thriller, protagonist Naoto Kiba (Sonny Chiba) calls a press conference, having just single-handedly taken out a group of terrorist hijackers on a plane. On stage, he requests a branded drink, and slices it in half with his bare hand.

If this is product placement and ‘PR’, Kiba himself is the brand, exploiting his newfound celebrity to advertise his services as a bodyguard, and through that, to rehabilitate the Tesshin School of Karate that has fallen out of favour for its brutality. As Chiba’s first martial arts film, this was also PR for the badass actor, who one year later, as he promises in the closing line, would be “going global” with his first international hit, Shigehiro Ozawa’s The Street Fighter.

Kiba’s first job is to protect the mysterious Reiko Miwa (Mari Atsumi), who has pilfered the last drug shipment of her lover, a recently murdered New York mafioso, and is now being targeted by the ‘Yellow Mafia’, Japanese black marketeers, moonlighting American servicemen and various other freelance criminals. Bones will be broken and limbs severed in the ensuing chaos. Three years later, an expanded version called The Bodyguard (also included in this set), was released in America, and its intro would be quoted in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

Bodyguard Kiba is available on Blu-ray in a two-disc double package with Bodyguard Kiba 2 from 18 March via Eureka!

The Swordsman of all Swordsmen (Yi dai jian wang), dir. Joseph Kuo, 1968

Joseph Kuo’s Taiwan-set wuxia is a film of coincidences and clashes. When Tsai Ying-jie (Tien Peng) takes out a bullying martial arts master and his gang, he may contingently be helping defend a street performer and his daughter, but his only real motive is revenge against the master who, together with four others, had murdered Tsai’s parents 18 years earlier. Tsai even has a hit list of the five names inscribed on wooden tablets, with their leader Yun Chun-chung (Tsao Tsien) saved for last. Meanwhile, the swordsman Black Dragon (Nan Chiang) pursues a duel with Tsai not because he is Yun’s son and continuing this family feud, but merely because he wishes to prove himself the world’s finest swordsman.

“A true man repays kindness when helped, and gets revenge when wronged,” says Tsai — and yet both these principles will coincide and clash as Tsai struggles to reconcile his debt to Yun’s daughter Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) for saving his life, and his vendetta against wise old Yun. Accordingly, this is a martial arts film of a rather philosophical bent, constantly calling into question the meaning and value of the very conflicts that constitute its genre.

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen is available for the first time ever in the UK on Limited Edition Blu-ray (including Kuo’s The Mystery of Chess Boxing, 1979, on a bonus disc) from 18 March via Eureka!

Fear City, dir. Abel Ferrara, 1984

Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee always get cited as cinema’s great chroniclers of New York, but one should never forget Abel Ferrara, who thrives at the Scorsese end of the city’s mean streets but goes down sleazier alleyways for his art.

“Nobody’s clean,” says Detective Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams), investigating a sordid subculture in pursuit of a slasher (John Foster) mutilating and murdering his way through the stripper population. At first it looks like someone enacting a grudge against boxer turned ‘talent agent’ Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and his partner Nicky Parzeno (Jack Scalia), who provide dancers for the (mostly mob-owned) strip clubs, and whose women have been targeted — but as other agencies’ strippers fall prey to the ‘New York knifer’, it becomes clear that a Travis Bickle-like vigilante with a penchant for exotic blades has decided to clean up the streets himself, one ‘whore’ at a time. This triggers Matt — who once killed a man in the ring — to turn bruiser once more, heroically or otherwise.

Falling somewhere between Taxi Driver, Maniac and neon-lit neo-noir, Ferrari’s tawdry feature anatomises Manhattan vice in much the way that the killer carves up his victims.

Fear City is available on Limited Edition Blu-ray on 4 March via 101 Films

City of the Living Dead (Paura nella città dei morti viventi), dir. Lucio Fulci, 1980

“There are only two possibilities,” says Sandra (Janet Agren) in the first entry of Lucio Fulci’s ‘Gates of Hell’ trilogy. “Either I’m going out of my mind or something very, very strange is happening.”

Viewers may well feel similarly. The plot seems simple enough: following the suicide of a local priest, a village with a decidedly Lovecraftian name has become a portal to the dead which must be reclosed by All Saint’s Day to avoid a global apocalypse. Yet this is muddied variously by a séance; a premature burial; references to The Book of Enoch and the Salem witch trials; intestine vomiting; a wind-borne plague of maggots; super-leaping, brain-clawing sort-of zombies with trademark Fulcian hideousness; an American county whose residents are mostly played by Italians; and a panicky freeze-frame ending that defies all interpretation.

A woman with second sight (Catriona MacColl), a journalist (Christopher George) and a psychiatrist (Carlo De Mejo) attempt together to impose order and reason on all the sinisterly surreal goings-on, but like the fog that constantly shrouds Dunwich, there is something obscure and impenetrable about Fulci’s horror, creating its own uncanny vibe of hermetic irrationality. It’s both strange and maddening.

City of the Living Dead is available on 4K UHD from 25 March via Arrow

One Percenter, dir. Yûdai Yamaguchi, 2023

The title refers not to an economic élite but a fighting one, namely action actor Takuma Toshiro (Tak Sakaguchi) who has honed his ‘Assassination-jutsu’, ‘Zero Range Combat’ and bullet-dodging ‘Wave technique’ far beyond what is required on a movie set, and who longs to make a ‘100% Pure Action Film’ where his assailants come at him with real intent.

Ten years after his career has washed up, Takuma’s dream comes true — for while location scouting in an abandoned island factory, he comes under attack from yakuza, an assassination squad, and a kickass sensei, all looking for a large cocaine stash. Spotting an opportunity both to test his abilities for real, and to raise buzz for his next film project, Takuma instructs his young assistant Akira (Sho Aoyagi), “Film the whole thing.”

What follows is a paradoxical play on realism, as the closer this intense action star comes to the rôles he typically plays, the more absurdly postmodern the exercise becomes, with an array of cartoonish villains and impossible fights to prove that, as one hack director puts it, “You don’t get the reality, films are fiction, make-believe.” This fight club even brings a psychological twist to pin down its own fantasy.

Given how much this exploits Sakaguchi’s own image and identity, one should note that the actor is currently facing serious sexual assault allegations in Japan.

One Percenter is available on Blu-ray/digital from 11 March via Third Window

Dark Water (Honogurai mizu no soko kara), dir. Hideo Nakata, 2002

It opens with an image of abandonment, as nobody comes to pick little Yoshimi up from her preschool. Now, many decades later, Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki) is a mother herself, moving into apartment 305 in a brutalist old building with her own beloved preschool daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno) while undergoing divorce mediation and a bitter custody battle.

Even as anxious, overwhelmed Yoshimi finds herself repeating the past and failing to pick up Ikuko on time, a different kind of history reechoes. For a damp, dark spot on their apartment ceiling keeps leaking water everywhere, a young girl’s red handbag keeps rematerialising every time it is discarded, and little Mitsuko (Mirei Oguchi), who vanished two years earlier, makes her haunting presence ever more felt, heard and seen by both mother and daughter. With Yoshimi unravelling, a legacy of abandonment, part psychological, part supernatural, is passed on once more to the next generation.

Director Hideo Nakata will always be best known for the impact and influence of his 1998 J-horror Ring, but this is the better film — a ghost story of maternity and madness that is, beyond all its dripping atmosphere and uncanny creepiness, awash with moving waves of melancholy and loss.

Dark Water is available on 4K UHD from 18 Mar via Arrow

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

Marmalade, dir. Keir O’Donnell, 2024

Recently arrested for armed robbery, long-haired, doe-eyed Baron (Joe Keery) tells his life story to cellmate Otis (Aldis Hodge), hoping to convince this career criminal to help him escape and be reunited with his girlfriend Marmalade (Camila Morrone). Yet it is clear from the story that this manic pixie dream girl has been taking ‘dumber than a box of crayons’ mama’s boy Baron for a ride — and not just in the convertible she blew in on. She even nicknames him ‘Puppet’, while manipulating the besotted naïf into being her partner in crime. Otis too, as he listens to this one-sided love story, has his eye on a different prize, and out-of-his-depth Baron looks set to be played once again, inside and out.

Yet as Marmalade seduces her lovesick beau into donning a grotesque three-faced mask and aiding and abetting her violent heist, something in this Bonnie and Clyde masquerade does not quite add up. Baron insists to Otis of his story, “It’s all about them details” — and sure enough half the fun of in writer/director Keir O’Donnell’s genre-twisting romantic noir/escapist road movie is puzzling out where and how exactly the truth lies.

Marmalade is available on digital from 12 Feb via Signature Entertainment

Slotherhouse, dir. Matthew Goodhue, 2023

Even the most familiar of horror tropes can be given an unexpected spin by a ‘what if’. What if the zombies were actually zombified beavers? what if the mad scientist were surgically transforming lines of people into a centipede? Or in the case of Matthew Goodhue’s improbable follow-up to his sensitive, ambiguous indie Woe, what if the slasher in the sorority house were actually a three-toed Panamanian sloth? and not just that, but an uncharacteristically fast one, able to text, take selfies, post on social media, read a map, drive a car, and fight with a sword — and to survive being bitten by a crocodile, beaten, thrown out a window, stabbed and shot.

In other words, as one character puts it, this she-sloth is “like a cute Chucky… an adorable little killing machine”. Animated with old-school practical puppetry, she enters Sigma Lambda Theta (get it!) as a house mascot, and with Emily (Lisa Ambalavanar) and Brianna (Sydney Craven) viciously vying for popularity and the sorority presidency, the killer creature embodies all the tensions and aggressions in a hyper-competitive scenario that is part Mean Girls, part Election. This commits to its absurdly dumb bit, while slyly promoting sisterhood.

Slotherhouse is available on digital from 12 Feb via Plaion Pictures

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, dir. Philip Kaufman, 1978

In 1956, director Don Siegel adapted Jack Finney’s alien invasion novel The Body Snatchers into an allegory of McCarthyism, although whether it was presenting a takeover by insidious communism, or by a fear of communism, remained ambiguous.

In 1978, Philip Kaufman revisited these materials with similar ambiguity (and with a brief cameo from Siegel as a treacherous cabbie), as San Francisco Health Inspectors Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), and their friends Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright) and the psychiatrist David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) witness the population of San Francisco being replaced in a matter of days by near-identical (but emotionless) ‘pod people’.

Kaufman’s invasion tracks the encroachment of consumerist conformity upon the liberated individualism of Sixties Frisco – and would acquire new, unintended resonance when its theatrical release was immediately preceded by the collective madness of Jonestown. In truth, though, this is a highly flexible myth, playing on the fear of the self being ceded to outside (alien) influence – and were it made today, it might just as readily flirt with anxieties about the Great Replacement theory or conversely America’s infiltration by QAnon and MAGA. Still, Kaufman’s paranoid Seventies noir brings a special sense of doom.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from 12 Feb via Arrow

Yakuza Wolf 1, dir. Ryûichi Takamori, 1972

This sets out its stall in the opening scene, as the camera leers in close-up at a man and a woman copulating sweatily, only for both of them to be bloodily penetrated by an assassin’s blade. Sex and death are the two poles between which Ryûichi Takamori’s sensationalist feature operates, as Gosuke Himuro (Sonny Chiba) returns to avenge the gangland slaying of his estranged father and the abduction and rape of his sister Kyoko (Yayoi Watanabe).

This no-nonsense badass will pit three local rival gangs against one another, following a strategy first laid out by Akira Kurosawa’s jidaegeki Yojimbo, and then borrowed by Sergio Corbucci’s Django and countless other spaghetti westerns — and the debt is openly acknowledged by the way that our relentless antihero sports a cowboy hat and cloak, and engages in a series of showdowns shot at canted angles and accompanied by a score of jew’s harp and harmonica.

With the police happy to let him to do their work for them, Gosuke doggedly pursues the yakuza, proving so effective in the task that he takes on the big boss and his men despite the handicap of having both hands crippled. Lean genre goodness ensues.

Yakuza Wolf 1 is available in Special Edition Blu-ray boxset together with Buichi Saitô’s Yakuza Wolf 2 (1972) from 19 Feb via Eureka Video

Paths of Glory, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1957

Stanley Kubrick’s ironically titled monochrome anti-war feature is set in the killing fields of the Great War, focusing on the French 701st regiment, under constant bombardment in their trench and given orders to carry out a suicide mission to seize a well-fortified hill nearby.

There is little glory here. The German enemy remains unseen — although we certainly witness the deadly impact of their artillery — but the real enemy here is the French officer class who, from their opulently appointed chateau, use infantry as pawns in pursuit of personal promotion and in covering up of their own highly consequential failures. When orders lead to massive French casualties, three soldiers are selected for (kangaroo) court martial and executed for ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy.’ As the odious General Paul Mireau (George Macready) puts it, “If those little sweethearts won’t face German bullets, they’ll face French ones.”

Representing the accused is the genuinely brave and ethical former criminal lawyer Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), whose growing outrage and indignation at what is happening modulate the viewers’. He and his men are just like the German singing girl seen at the end (Kubrick’s future wife Susanne Christian, and the only female character): captive, mired and longing for home.

Paths of Glory is available on 4K UD from 26 Feb via Eureka Video

Psycho IV: The Beginning, dir. Mick Garris, 1990

“It’s lurid,” are the last words Norman Bates will ever utter to his mother (Olivia Hussey) while she is alive. He is describing her kimono, but those words apply equally to Mick Garris’ made-for-TV film, which serves as both prequel and sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho (while ignoring the two subsequent sequels).

Under the pseudonym ‘Ed’ (as in Gein, the real-life, mother-obsessed serial killer whose story inspired Hitchcock’s film), Norman (Anthony Perkins, two years before his death), now released from an asylum and married to psychologist Connie (Donna Mitchell), calls in to a radio talk show on ‘boys who kill their mothers’, and tells the story of his unhealthy relationship as a teenager (Henry Thomas) with his unhinged mother, and how this led him to poison her and her bullying new boyfriend Chet (Thomas Schuster), and to murder various other women. He also promises he will kill again this very night.

Even as it goes back to Norman’s traumatic adolescence, this ‘beginning’ is also a putative ending, as Norman seeks to ensure that the ‘bad seed’ he has inherited is never passed on. It is a gothic melodrama of twisted redemption, and (perhaps) also a new beginning.

Psycho IV: The Beginning is available alongside Richard Franklin’s Psycho II (1983) and Anthony Perkins’ Psycho III (1986) as part of 4k UHD/Blu-ray Psycho – The Story Continues boxset from 26 Feb via Arrow

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

Lord of Misrule, dir. William Brent Bell, 2023

“All is as was,” recite various locals from the English village of Berrow, in this latest genre feature from William Brent Bell (Orphan: First Kill). Their words encapsulate the very spirit of folk horror, where ancient lore overlaps with modern, letting contradictions uncannily clash.

The Reverend Rebecca Holland (Tuppence Middleton) has recently moved into the vicarage with her husband (Matt Stokoe) and their young daughter Grace (Evie Templeton) – but when Grace disappears from a four-day pagan festival where she had been chosen to be the ‘Harvest Angel’, Rebecca is sent on a frantic search. This puts Rebecca at odds not only with Jocelyn Abney (Ralph Ineson), who, as the masked Lord of Misrule, heads worship of the old goat-skulled god Gallowgog, but also, eventually, with all the villagers.

A missing girl. Runic sigils. A cultic conspiracy. Puppets, jesters and people in animal masks. And of course, sacrificial rites. Yep, this plays out like a reimagining of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, although that film’s uptight male Christian copper has become a laid-back female vicar whose maternal status challenges the original’s patriarchal values, and allows for a different ending, with a real deity horrifically appeased and harmony restored.

Lord of Misrule is available now on digital platforms via Signature Entertainment

The Frightened Woman (Femina Ridens), dir. Pierro Schivazappa, 1969

Piero Schivazappa’s psychedelic allegory of sexual divisions was first released in the UK as The Laughing Woman (a literal translation of its Latin title Femina ridens), but later rereleased as The Frightened Woman. Both titles equally apply in this film of two halves, as the roles in its BDSM scenario reverse.

The opening sequence shows a gigantic sculpture of a female nude – like the one in Yasuzo Masumura’s sadoerotic The Blind Beast, from the same year – with a queue of enthralled men lined up between the legs to get a closer look. If the woman’s supine, spreadeagled pose suggests availability and submission, her vagina is conspicuously dentata, setting a tone of male anxiety. For although respectable-seeming philanthropist Dr Sayer (Philippe Leroy) spends his weekends sadistically terrorising and tormenting sex worker Gida (Lorenza Guerrieri), he is less misogynist than gynophobe, terrified of infertility, emasculation and outright redundancy in what is increasingly a woman’s world.

One weekend Sayer instead abducts his new PR Maria (Dagmar Lassander) – who had been writing an article on male sterilisation – to show her who is boss. Yet in this surreal battle of the sexes, tables will be turned, and this initially entrapped, imperilled woman will have the last laugh.

The Frightened Woman is available on Blu-ray via Shameless

Samurai Wolf (Kiba Ôkaminosuke), dir. Hideo Hosha, 1966

“You’re a good man,” says blind Lady Chise (Hiroko Sakuramachi) to the rōnin Kiba Ôkaminosuke (Isao Natsuyagi). “You pretend to be bad. You want people to think you’re a bad guy.”

Kiba is wandering through Arai village, a remote relay station on an important transport route – and with thugs killing Chise’s employees en route, with the Shōgun’s messenger (Tatsuo Endô) manoeuvring to displace Chise, with killer-for-hire Akizuki Sanai (Ryôhei Uchida) in town, and with several people out for revenge against past transgressions, Kiba is soon caught between multiple factions and double-crosses in an ever more complicated scenario.

Much as Toshiaki Tsushima’s score mixes a koto and Japanese percussion with a harmonica and guitar, Hideo Gosha’s chanbara is both eastern and western, placing itself in the same tradition as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, while also drawing on the spaghetti oaters that Kurosawa’s film had already inspired.

Kiba is a good man, cashless but willing to work for his keep, respectful to women and only killing in self-defence. Yet as Akizuki, who has long since broken bad, recognises of his opponent: “Another five years and you’ll be just like me” – and so Kiba, unable to settle, is in flight from himself.

Samurai Wolf (1966) releases on Blu-ray with Samurai Wolf II (1967) as a 2-disc set from 22 Jan via Eureka

Peeping Tom, dir. Michael Powell, 1960

“We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms”, said Stella (Thelma Ritter) in Alfred Hitchcock’s scopophilic Rear Window (1954), “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”

Six years later, Michael Powell would push this thesis further in a film which, along with Hitchcock’s Psycho in the same year, would stretch the notions of filmic decorum to a point of no return, changing cinema forever. Both films would eventually engender the slasher genre, although only Powell’s, initially excoriated for its shocking content, would effectively end his career.

The peeping tom here is Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm), ‘glamour’ photographer, studio focus puller and would-be director whose foreign accent, social awkwardness and ever-present camera all mark him as an outsider. He is also a serial killer, with a modus operandi that allows him simultaneously to terrorise, kill and film his female prey, in an attempt to work through the similarly recorded abuse that he endured as a child at the hands of his psychiatrist father.

Here voyeurism itself looks outwards and inwards, confounding perpetrator and victim, filmmaker and viewer, camera and phallic weapon, while observing a pathology as metacinematic as it is psychiatric.

Peeping Tom releases on Special Edition UHD, Blu-ray and DVD from 29 Jan via Studiocanal

Mad Cats, dir. Reiki Tsuno, 2023

When his archaeologist brother Mune (So Yamanake) vanishes shortly after returning from an expedition to Egypt, feckless layabout Taka (Shô Mineo) receives a mysterious cassette recording on which a woman instructs him where to rescue Mune and find a box. Assailed on all sides by well-armed, kick-ass women, hopeless Taka joins forces with the homeless Takezo (Yûya Matsuura) and the enigmatic Ayane (also played by Ayane, who is hardly playing herself).

This madcap adventure is the debut feature of writer/director Reiki Tsuno, whose previous collaborations with Troma show in a film that wrings all it can from its low budget, while clinging by the claws to its trash credentials. Given the prominence of “the catnip of Bastet”, it is hard not to think of Pitof’s Catwoman (2004), except that here, rather than a woman taking on feline powers, a clowder of she-cats has assumed human form while retaining their nine lives and being aggressively out for revenge against humankind (especially pet shop owners).

All at once a surreal road movie, and a series of vari-weaponed catfights, this also includes a very good dad joke – however unappreciated by the other characters – about a cockroach and a centipede.

Mad Cats (2023) releases on Blu-ray/digital from 29 Jan via Third Window

Alligator, dir. Lewis Teague, 1980

‘One for them, one for me’ is a principle embodied by early John Sayles, who would write other directors’ rip-off schlock to fund his own indies – except that even cash-in scripts for Piranha, Battle Beyond the Stars and The Howling showed a subversive intelligence that made its own toothy mark on the genre landscape.

Like Piranha, Alligator came in the wake of Jaws, while presenting as vicious parody. A baby alligator (named Ramone) is flushed down the toilet, only to emerge 12 years later supersized owing to its ingestion of illegally dumped experimental growth hormones – but then this whole town is toxic, from the predatory press to the corrupt mayor, police chief and bigwig industrialist. Only guilt-ridden cop David Madison (Robert Forester) and herpetologist Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker) stand in the way of this toothy killer.

Few other creature features include a hero whose masculinity is constantly undermined by a running commentary on his male pattern baldness, a ‘great white hunter’ (Henry Silva) who uses reptilian mating calls to flirt with a reporter, or an agonisingly taboo-busting child death. Earthy, bizarre and full-blooded, Lewis Teague’s B-movie brings its A-game and is no crock.

Alligator (+ TV cut) releases with Alligator II: The Mutation (1991) on 4K UHD/Blu-ray from 29 Jun via 101 Films Black Label

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

The Fall of Ako Castle, dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1978

The true story of the 47 rōnin who took revenge for the death (by seppuku) of their daimyō Lord Asano after he assaulted the powerful court official Kira in response to an insult was regarded as an exemplum for the samurai code of honour known as bushidō, and has been the subject of many plays, television shows and films. Indeed over his career, beloved actor Toshiro Mifune appeared in three different versions of the story — Hiroshi Inagaki’s 1962 film Chūshingara, the 1971 TV series Daichūshingara, and this epic feature from Kinji Fukasaku, where he plays Lord Tsuchiya Michinao.

The climax will eventually deliver on the promised violence, including an intense, prolonged sword duel between Fuwa Kazuemon (Sonny Chiba), bodyguard to the rōnin’s leader Ōishi Kuranosuke (Yorozuya Kinnosuke), and Kobayashi Heihachiro (Tsunehiko Watase), bodyguard to Kira (Nobuo Kaneko). Yet for the most part Fukasaku plays a waiting game, focusing on the psychological tensions of a revenge that took place some 14 months after Asano’s suicide, requiring extraordinary trust and forbearance on the part of rōnin who were often as unsure as the authorities what, if anything, Ōishi was plotting. Accordingly this plays like Sam Mendes’ Jarhead, dramatising men of action reduced to inaction.

The Fall of Ako Castle is available on Blu-ray from 4 December via Eureka

Child’s Play, dir. Tom Holland, 1988

After, cornered and dying, the ‘Lakeshore Strangler’ Charles ‘Chucky’ Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) uses a Voodoo spell to transfer his soul into a Good Guy doll, he hangs low in the elevated brownstone apartment of single mother Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) where he has become the beloved toy of her six-year-old son Andy (Alex Vincent). Eventually he reveals himself, pursuing a horrific vendetta against his enemies, and seeking a more permanent home in the body of his innocent new owner.

They say Good Guys finish last, but the Child’s Play franchise, far from ending, just keeps coming back, with its now iconic (and eminently commodifiable) villain, its multiple sequels (plus 2019 reboot), and its TV-series spinoff. Key to this success, now spanning over three-and-a-half decades, is its consistency, with key personnel (including Dourif and writer-turned-franchise-director Don Mancini) remaining in place, and its willingness to let the core mythology evolve in increasingly unhinged directions.

Also crucial, though, is just how good Tom Holland’s original film is: a Hitchcockian blend of high tension and dark comedy, with a rich seam of psychological subtext, as little Andy must decide between maternal influence and peer pressure.

Child’s Play is available as part of the Child’s Play boxset on 4K UHD/Blu-ray from 11 Dec via Arrow

Murder Obsession, dir. Riccardo Freda, 1981

In 1957, Riccardo Freda directed I Vampiri, Italy’s first horror feature with sound. Over three decades later, towards the end of his career, he would make this horror UFO – part late-entry giallo (complete with black-gloved killer), part modern gothic, part Satanic thriller.

Actor Michael (Stefano Patrizi), who tends to get carried away in his roles as stranglers, has an ‘irresistible impulse’ to revisit his mother Glenda (Anita Strindberg) for the first time since, as a child, he was taken away and institutionalised for murdering his own conductor father. In Glenda’s remote woodland pad (in Surrey!), together with his girlfriend Deborah (Silvia Dionisio) and some of the crew from his latest film (including his leading lady Beryl, played by Laura Black Emanuelle Gemser), Michael will find past trauma resurfacing, as the people around him start meeting grisly deaths one by one.

“The relationship between a mother and son is a mysterious one,” observes Glenda, cutting to the Freudian core of Freda’s Psycho-drama. For this who- and how-dunnit comes with the irrational trappings of a nightmare, as multiple narrative strands, dark magic and even metacinematic elements all converge to trap the viewer in a maddening fog of meaning.

Murder Obsession is available on Blu-ray from 18 December via Radiance

RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop, dir. Eastwood Allen and Christopher Griffiths, 2023

Released in 1987, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop sold itself, from the title on down, as a scuzzy sci-fi action B movie, but it also pushed cartoonish on-screen violence to new levels, while being both satire of the Reagan-era drive towards corporate privatisation, and, as Verhoeven himself would insist, an all-American retelling of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Eastwood Allen and Christopher Griffiths’ four-part, five-hour documentary mini-series traces the film’s genesis, its (sometimes difficult) production, and its reception and cultural impact.

All this is communicated through an impressively extensive range of talking heads — practically the entire cast and crew apart from those who have since died — ensuring palatable, often very funny anecdotes, as well as a masterclass on every aspect of filmmaking. Along the way you will learn things: that all the cops in the film were named after serial killers; that Peter Weller was a “pussy hound” on set; that RoboCop predicted both the DVD, and the militarisation of the police force; and that real police repeatedly interrupted the shoot because of alarm over the scale of explosions and fires on location. It is an exhilarating, exhausting tribute to Verhoeven’s infectious movie-making mania.

RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop is available on Blu-ray from 18 Dec via Icon Film Channel

I Am Waiting (Ore wa matteru ze), dir. Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1957

“Everyone here has some kind of past. Everyone used to be somebody else before they ended up here.”

The speaker, old Dr Uchiyama (Isamu Kosugi), is not wrong. For he, though kindly, is a washed-up alcoholic, while restaurateur Jōji Shimaki (Yujiro Ishihara) is an ex-boxer with blood on his hands, and indentured chanteuse Saeko (Mie Kitahara) is “a canary that’s forgotten how to sing” — and all these characters will find themselves united by their loneliness and despair, in a demimonde of cabaret clubs, pool halls, love hotels and sleazy dives, as Jōji vainly pursues a dream that is long since over.

From its opening shot of a gutter-level puddle that, once the rain has stopped falling in it, reflects the neon sign (in English) for Jōji’s restaurant, Koreyoshi Kurahara’s monochrome feature is clearly one of several Nikkatsu noirs produced to fight it out with the American and French films that were doing so well at the Japanese box office. The shadows are long, Masaru Sato’s score is jazzy, and the crises that the players must face, though criminal in nature, are also existential, with the past proving as inescapable as the self, and love the only salve.

I Am Waiting is available as part of the Blu-ray set World Noir 1 from 18 December via Radiance

Jules, dir. Marc Turtletaub, 2023

“You’ve seen the movies too,” Sandy (Harriet Harris) says of the alien (Jade Quon) — later variously nicknamed Jules or Gary — that has crash-landed into the back garden of her friend Milton (Ben Kingsley), ruining his birdhouse and azaleas. “You know what happens to these guys when they fall to Earth.”

The obvious movie reference point here is E.T., in which those who discover and befriend the alien must also protect it from government agents — except that, unlike the suburban children in Steven Spielberg’s film, Sandy and Milton are in their Seventies. So while they do their best to clothe and feed this recently arrived guest and to help him rebuild his damaged spacecraft, one might naturally also think of the geriatric close encounters of Ron Howard’s Cocoon. Meanwhile the similarly ageing Joyce, to whom Sandy addresses her words about movie aliens, is played by Jane Curtin, herself once a movie alien in Steve Barron’s SNL-spinoff Coneheads.

This is a gentle, somewhat mawkish allegory of Milton’s encroaching twilight years – for coinciding with Jules’ arrival is the early onset of the widower’s cognitive decline, so that he too is on a slow, difficult journey both home and heavenwards.

Jules in UK cinemas and on digital from 29 December via Signature Entertainment

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

 

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1998

Fiercely indebted to low-ranking mafioso Louie (John Tormey) who once saved him from being killed, “Ghost Dog” (Forest Whitaker) carries out professional gangland hits for his ‘master’ – until internecine plotting drives him to have to take out the entire mob, and face his own death with an honour that most of them lack.

Where the none-too-bright mafiosi endlessly watch TV cartoons, Ghost Dog himself has broader interests, rigorously adhering to an Ancient Japanese warrior code (whose precepts regularly punctuate the film), listening to RZA’s hip-hop in stolen cars, communicating only by carrier pigeon, befriending a francophone man (Isaach de Bankolé) whom he cannot understand, and exchanging with a girl (Camille Winbush) a range of books as eclectic as writer/director Jim Jarmusch’s own influences, including the collection of short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa that inspired Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, with its parallel mix of perspectives and motives.

With several nods to Seijun Suzuki’s surreal Branded To Kill and to Jean-Pierre Melville’s similarly titled, similarly existential Le Samouraï, what might sound like an ordinary gangster picture is in fact a rich amalgam of crisscrossing genres, where East meets West and culture itself follows more than one Way.

Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai is available on 4K UHD/Steelbook, Blu/DVD/digital, distributed by StudioCanal

Royal Tramp, dir. Wong Jing, 1992

Set during the Qing dynasty, and adapted from Jin Yong’s novel The Deer and the Cauldron (published serially 1969-1972), Wong Jing’s comic wuxia follows Wei Xiaobao (Stephen Chow), a lowly brothel raconteur who is elevated by dumb luck as much as his own wits into a Forbidden City drama not unlike one of the shaggy dog stories he used to tell, all the while receiving endless undeserved promotions to surreally niche posts.

Wei is a mercurial antihero and venal timeserver whose picaresque presence always places him at the centre of key events — and Chow, already a hugely celebrated actor whose later, similarly celebrated directing career would not begin for another two years, imbues this slippery rogue with a real charm.

Here there is courtly intrigue, power struggles, double- and triple-crosses, crazy conspiracies, impostures both magical and more mundane, several sutra-sized Macguffins, gravity-defying wire-fu, telepathic tickling, beheadings, scalpings and bodymelts (graphic if weirdly bloodless) from the get-go, and a litany of dick jokes, as Wei crosses paths with royalty, religious leaders and various other pretenders from all sides of a strife-ridden nation. A sequel, clearly promised at the end, would come later that year.

Royal Tramp is released on Blu-ray along with Royal Tramp II (1992) as part of The Royal Tramp Collection, 13 Nov via Eureka! Video

Showdown at the Grand, dir. Orson Oblowitz, 2023

“I just happen to sell pictures and fantasies and maybe 90-minute vacations of escape from all that madness in the street.”

George Fuller (Terrence Howard) owns the Warner Grand, the classic Los Angeles ‘movie palace’ where he projects a repertoire of film reels from the 80s and the 90s. These mostly star Estonian ‘Force from the North’ Claude Luc Hallyday, a composite of Reagan-era he-men, aptly played by Dolph Lundgren. Hallyday is as faded as the films in which he appears, all post-apocalyptic trash, daft westerns, erotic cyberthrillers and vamp-slaying action. Yet as dodgy developers circle to take over George’s property by any means, George finds himself living out the plot of his beloved films, valiantly defending his old-fashioned workplace from aggressive corporate takeover, with help from the visiting Hallyday himself and armed with old film props.

Writer/director Orson Oblowitz has lovingly crafted a feature presentation as meta-cinematic as it is nostalgic, conjuring a dying breed of scuzzy old-school cinephilia in an age of digital uniformity. John Savage turns up too, as George’s pawnbroking neighbour Lucky who, like George or indeed this film, deals in the abandoned treasures of yesteryear with an incorruptible affection.

Showdown at the Grand is on digital platforms from 13 Nov via Signature

Typhoon Club, dir. Shinji Somai, 1985

“Can an individual rise above a species? Is death a species’ victory over an individual?”

So asks Mikami (Yuichi Mikami), an earnest pupil in his final year at the rural Ota Junior High. Shinji Somai’s feature, written by Yuji Kato, captures a classroom of children on the cusp of adolescence, as they start to negotiate their sexuality, even their mortality, and to discern the difference between their dreams and the more likely reality that their futures will bring.

This is a coming-of-age drama, but without any sentimentality towards its young characters. In the opening sequence, Akira (Toshiyuki Matsunaga) is nearly drowned by a group of girls who find him watching them from the pool. Coming from a loveless homelife, disturbed Ken (Shigeru Benibayashi) tries to express his desire for Michiko (Yuka Ohnishi) by pouring acid down her back — and later will attempt to rape her. Two girls are exploring their emerging lesbianism, while Mikami’s neighbour Rie (Yûki Kudô) runs away to Tokyo, in flight from the constrained destiny she sees for herself.

The typhoon that these schoolmates use an excuse not to go home also serves as an objective correlative for their raging, potentially dangerous emotions, as death makes its first encroachment on their not-so-innocent lives.

Typhoon Club is released on Blu-ray (4K digital remaster from original negatives), 27 Nov via Third Window Films

Tremors 2: Aftershocks, dir. S.S. Wilson, 1996

Some years after the events of Ron Underwood’s original film, with Kevin Bacon committed to Apollo 13 Val McKee now happily married, it is left to his broke friend Earl (Fred Ward), and eventually also to divorced military nut Burt (Michael Gross), to eliminate a new population of ‘Graboids’ terrorising an oilfield in Chiapas, Texas. “Maybe this is your big second chance,” Earl is told by new hunting partner Grady (Christopher Gartin), practically announcing that this is a sequel – although the giant Pre-Cambrian worms now reveal their own second chance, in the form of an additional metamorphic stage that resembles the ostriches which Earl has been failing to breed back home.

These bird-like aggressors represent a new kind of threat, influenced by the raptors in Jurassic Park, while themselves influencing the aliens in A Quiet Place. The hungry, heat-seeking predators reproduce asexually, which might at first make them resemble the terminally single Earl— until, that is, Earl ends up meeting his literal dream girl, geologist Kate (Helen Shaver), who admires his rear as enthusiastically as he admires hers. This is a charming, knowingly silly comedy creature feature, directed by S.S. Wilson who also co-wrote the franchise’s first four films.

Tremors 2: Aftershocks is released on 4K UHD/Blu-ray, 27 Nov via Arrow

The War of the Worlds: Next Century (Wojna swiatów – nastepne stulecie), Piotr Szulkin, 1981

Piotr Szulkin’s SF allegory begins with a text dedication to H.G. Wells and Orson Welles — the former the author of influential Martian invasion novel The War of the Worlds (1898), the latter famous for adapting the novel into a live radio drama so convincing that some listeners believed they were hearing a report of a real alien takeover.

Szulkin’s own version deviates considerably from Wells’ original. For here the Martians are humanoid ‘midgets’ in silver puffer jackets, briefly visiting in the lead-up to the year 2000 in search of love and blood, and facing not so much resistance as accommodation from the local Polish authorities.

Yet taking inspiration from Welles, Szulkin focuses on how this otherworldly encounter is mediated. For his protagonist Iron Edem (Roman Wilhelmi) is an ordinary middle-aged married man who dons a wig to become the trusted presenter of Independent News, and now finds himself coopted into a bizarre pro-Martian propaganda campaign. As he bears witness to the way television is used to numb the people (himself included) into submission, and comes to question his own dual nature as everyman and entertainer, Szulkin’s bitter satire shows the state playing us all as semi-willing puppets to someone else’s script.

The War of the Worlds: Next Century is released in a 2K restoration together with O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilisation (1985) and Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986) as part of the three-disc Blu-ray limited edition set The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin, via Radiance Films

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

The Others, dir. Alejandro Amenábar, 2001

It is 1945 and the war has ended, but on the contested ground of Jersey in the Channel Islands, only recently liberated from Nazi occupation, Catholic, neurotic Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) still feels “totally cut off from the world.” Her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) has not returned from the front, her staff have fled without warning, her large estate is shrouded in fog, and she cannot leave the property, or there would be no one to look after her young children Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley).

Their extreme photosensitivity requires that the house be kept in shadow, and Grace’s proclivity to migraines necessitates quiet – but the arrival of three replacement staff members (Fionnula Flanagan, Eric Sykes, Elaine Cassidy) will coincide with escalating paranormal activity, and eventually let in some light.

With its dark old house, its persistent past and its invasive hauntings, writer/director Alejandro Amenábar’s fifth feature offers all the trappings of a classic gothic, while turning the screw with a very unusual perspective on these supernatural goings-on. Playing out in a post-war, post-traumatic daze, this ghost story shows the others reinhabiting these stuffy, repressive interiors, while family and class relations remain unchanged and eternal.

The Others is released on 4K UHD/Blu/DVD, 2 Oct via Studio Canal

Delicatessen, dir. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991

In a sepia-toned all-analogue retrofuturist post-apocalyptic Paris, where food is scarce, pulses are currency and civilisation barely holds on, a dilapidated apartment building’s residents are more or less complicit in the crimes of their landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who lures in strangers on the promise of live-in work, then butchers them at night to feed everyone else. For his next victim, Clapet lines up multitalented ex-clown Louison (Dominique Pinon), whose essential decency wins over Clapet’s daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac). Hoping to save Louison, Julie turns to literally underground vegetarian rebels, and chaos ensues.

The pipes and ducts of this creaky old structure reecho with the rhythms of the residents’ lives, making it a microcosm of French society, for better or worse. There are also, in keeping with Louison’s former profession, plenty of sight gags, slapstick pratfalls and grotesque, larger-than-life characters. All at once nightmarish cannibal horror and romantic comedy, good-natured fairytale, and hyper-stylised allegory of French wartime collaboration and resistance, this collective debut from Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet is dizzyingly difficult to pin down, but full of surprise and charm from bitter beginning to sweet end. A classic.

Delicatessen is released on 4K UHD/Blu/DVD/digital, 16 Oct via StudioCanal

Meatcleaver Massacre, dir. Keith Burns and Ed Wood, 1977

This is a film of misnomers. Where its early working titles Morak’s Chant and Cantrell’s Messiah work, it was released in 1976 as Hollywood Meatcleaver Massacre – in lurid imitation of Tobe Hopper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), despite a conspicuous absence of cleavers – and then rereleased in 1977 with a shortened version of the title but a longer version of the film (an added prologue and epilogue, in fact repurposed from an entirely different project, have Christopher Lee narrating gothic generalisations to camera). The director too, named as ‘Evan Lee’, was really Keith Burns, until he was replaced mid-production by Ed Wood (!).

When a quartet of thrill-killing male students, led by the psychopathic Mason (Larry Justin), invade the home of academic occultist Cantrell (James Habif), murdering his wife and teen children, the professor, now paralysed in hospital, summons the Gaelic god Morak to wreak vengeance upon them one by one – or are the young men just overcome by their own guilt?

Improbably blending pagan folklore with a post-Manson mindset, this is a bad trip through the paranoia of 1970s Los Angeles, where monsters and madness cohabit. It’s cheap, scuzzy and bonkers, with its own psychedelic vibe.

Meatcleaver Massacre is released on Limited Edition Blu-ray, 16 Oct via 101 Films

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, dir. Anthony Hickox, 1992

“Demons aren’t real – they’re parables, metaphors,” insists a priest (Clayton Hill) near the end of this second sequel to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987). Yet here demons are both. For Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and his all-new, ridiculously Nineties army of Cenobites are any number of things: transgressive art come to life, the trauma of endless war made flesh, avatars of forbidden pleasure, doppelgängers of our dark side, Freddy Krueger-like dream warriors and also just plain demons who lampoon Jesus and the Sacrament for edge lord kicks.

Director Anthony Hickox relocates the action to New York City (or at least to Greensboro, North Carolina, standing in for the Big Apple), where ambitious reporter Joanne ‘Joey’ Summerskill (Terry Farrell) investigates a bizarre murder at the vaguely BDSM Boiler Room nightclub and takes guidance from Great War veteran/interdimensional ghost Captain Elliott Spencer (also Bradley) in how to put his id-like alter ego Pinhead back into the box. The ensuing pandemonium, lacking the bite of the previous two films, just goes through the mythic motions. Also, while Bradley is probably the best performer here, it’s tempting fate to have him utter the line: “I cannot act in your world.”

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth is released on UHD/Blu as part of the Hellraiser Quartet of Torment, 23 Oct via Arrow

Messiah of Evil, dir. Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, 1974

“They say that nightmares are dreams perverted. I’ve told them here it wasn’t a nightmare, but they don’t believe me.”

From her asylum home, Arletty (Marianna Hall) is recounting a story of the recent past, where a trip to Dune on the Californian coast in search of her missing artist father led to the discovery that this ordinary, respectable small town is falling prey to a Lovecraftian apocalypse foretold a century earlier. As the blood moon approaches (and the colour red dominates), Dune’s denizens bleed from the eyes and hunt in canine packs, gradually “spreading their sickness” beyond the town’s limits.

Or that, at least, is Arletty’s version of events, as co-writers/co-directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz confound life and art, reality and dreams, sanity and madness in their surreal vision of conservative America succumbing to – or biting back against – the encroaching counterculture. The townsfolk’s behaviour may somewhat recall George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead, but the somnambular vibe is more akin to Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls or Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. In this haunted community, or at least in Arletty’s nightmare in a damaged brain, nowhere – not the consumerist supermarket nor even the cinema – is safe.

Messiah of Evil is release on Blu-ray, 23 Oct by Radiance

Door, dir. Banmei Takahashi, 1988

With her husband Satoru (Shiro Shimomoto) often away for work, and her young son Takuto (Takuto Yonezu) at school all day, Yasuko Honda (director Banmei Takahashi’s wife Keiko Takahashi) spends a lot of time alone in their high-rise home, beleaguered by an endless array of insistent door-to-door salesmen. When one of these, Yamakawa (Daijiro Tsusumi), a little too keen to hand over a leaflet on English lessons, tries forcing open her bolted door, Yasuko slams it back hard on his hand – and so this man, as lonely as she is, begins an escalating campaign of harassment to reassert control and remasculate himself.

Coming out in the same year as Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap, this home invasion thriller is another early Japanese slasher that, in the absence of local antecedents, makes up its own rules (although it does crib from both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Shining). Here marginal characters sound bizarrely like they are talking on the phone. Here a frantic dash around the apartment is tracked at a high angle like a videogame – or like John Wick: Chapter 4 avant la lettre. And here Yamakawa’s intrusions are overtly sexualised, as he attempts more than one kind of forced entry. This is man, woman and chainsaw, sexed-up and stylised, exposing a Japanese housewife’s indoor appetites and anxieties.

Door is released on Blu-ray, 30 Oct by Third Window

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.

Gothic, dir. Ken Russell, 1986

In 1816, England’s most famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands), his lover Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson) and her stepsister Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr) visited the self-exiled Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) and his biographer Dr John Polidori (Timothy Spall) at Villa Diodati in Geneva – and from this meeting would emerge Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and Polidori’s 1819 short story The Vampyre. 

Ken Russell and his screenwriter Stephen Volk reimagine these events as a hallucinatory psychodrama of the creative process. With Byron playing devilish, omnisexual master of ceremonies, the five – all under the heady influence of laudanum – engage in childish games and regressive rituals, “beckoning the spark of creation” for a storytelling contest. In a castle full of gothic props – cobwebs, skulls, suits of armour, automata, mirrors, a mask, a goat and a snake – traumas are triggered, nightmares come to life, there are visions of future doom and a tripping, terrified Mary will be galvanised into merging her past grief and present panic into a story of monstrous rebirth. 

Russell’s exuberant style is perfectly suited to a libertine story which finds entirely visual means for showing the complex, often grotesque workings of an author’s imagination. It is a reflexive orgy of future horrors.

Gothic is released on Blu-ray, 18 September via BFI

Valley Girl, dir. Martha Coolidge, 1983

“I definitely need something new,” Valley girl Julie Richman (Deborah Richman) tells her female friends as she contemplates dumping her long-term, locally enviable boyfriend Tommy (Michael Bowen) whom she is starting rightly to recognise as a ‘total pukoid’. To replace him, Julie has another San Fernando Valley bratboy lined up, but then ‘trippindicular’ Hollywood punk Randy (Nicolas Cage, in his first starring rôle) comes crashing into a Valley party and into her life – and the rather naïve Julie will have to decide between popularity among her peers, or embracing difference in pursuit of love.

Self-consciously modelled on Romeo and Juliet (a neon sign for which is visible at one point on a Sherman Oaks theatre marquee), Martha Coolidge’s feature offers all the dilemmas and transgressions of a coming-of-age romance. As Julie takes her walk on the wild side – the ‘real world’ of central Los Angeles from which the Valley has sheltered her – we are also getting a time-capsule view of two different subcultures (three if you count Julie’s ageing hippie parents, played by Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest) as well as a whistle-stop tour of LA hangouts from the early Eighties. Great soundtrack, too.

Valley Girl is released on Blu-ray, 18 September via Eureka!

The Dead Mother (La madre muerta), dir. Juanma Bajo Ulloa, 1993

While robbing the home of a restorer of religious art, brutish Ismael (Karra Elejalde) is distracted by a painting of a mother and child with the canvas between them slashed, and when the restorer interrupts him, he shoots her dead, and her young daughter too. Many years later, Ismael is unreformed – abusive to his girlfriend Maite (Lio), and murderous to others – but when he spots the little girl Leire (Ana Alvarez), alive as though resurrected and all grown up, but mute and childlike owing to her head injury, he is not sure whether he wants to murder, fuck or parent her.

Juanma Bajo Ulloa’s second feature is a baroque melodrama about more than one broken family. Classically crafted and at times near Hitchcockian in its suspense, the film catches us between a rock and a hard place, in this case a man who seems utterly irredeemable, and a young woman so affectless and unresponsive (except to blood or chocolate) that any characterisation can be projected onto her. Ismael keeps promising to kill Leire, but something keeps stopping him – and so this violent devil will also, paradoxically, end up an iconic, stigmatised Jesus, whose damage is in need of restoration. 

The Dead Mother is released on Blu-ray, 18 September, via Radiance Films

Targets, dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968

Byron Orlok is an old-school horror icon so plainly modelled on Boris Karloff (who plays him) that excerpts from an actual Karloff film (Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code, 1930) are here expressly used as part of his own filmography. As Byron contemplates retiring from acting, young director Sammy (Peter Bogdanovich) tries to persuade him that there is still a place for him in modern cinema. Meanwhile, family man Bobby (Tim O’Kelly) goes on a shooting spree that will end at a drive-in presentation of Byron’s latest movie. 

“My horror isn’t horror anymore,” Byron tells Sammy, offering as contrast a newspaper article about a supermarket massacre. Coming out in the same year when Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead would usher in a new age of horror, Bogdanovich’s sophisticated, meta cinematic feature debut brings into confrontation Karloff’s era of castle gothic (which Byron complains is now viewed only as ‘high camp’) and a more contemporary, ripped-from-the-headlines realism that is finding its way into the genre, and into films like this one. Itself loosely drawn from the recent University of Texas Tower Shooting, this is a sly, serious examination of the violent intersection between different horrors, fanciful or real.

Targets is released on Blu-ray, 25 September via BFI

Psycho III, dir. Anthony Perkins, 1986

“The past is never really the past, it stays with me all the time,” says Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, also directing for his first time). It is not just that his long-dead mother lives rent-free in his head while being literally mummified in the old gothic house behind the rundown motel that he manages, but also that his latest guest, Maureen Coyle (Diana Scarwid), shares both her appearance and initials with Marion Crane, whom Norman both fancied and murdered 22 years earlier. Meanwhile journalist Tracy Venable is digging for missing local woman Emma Pool (from Richard Franklin’s Psycho II), while grifting musician Duane Duke (Jeff Fahey) is looking for any money-making angle. 

Maureen has her own internal conflicts, as a novice nun forced from her religious order after her doubts and desires led to the death of her Mother Superior. Where Norman imagines Mother is still alive and still murderously jealous, Maureen has a vision of her dragged-up would-be killer as the Holy Virgin – and so these two, both torn between lust and guilt, both with respective mother issues, seem oddly compatible. Yet this knowing sequel, unable to free itself of its established serial tropes, is inevitably a tragic romance.

Psycho III is released on UHD and Blu-ray, 25 September, as part of Arrow’s Psycho Collection boxset

Don’t Look Away, dir. Micheal Bafaro, 2023

“It’s everything you ever wanted,”, says doctoral student Steve (Colm Hill), after laying out his plans for their next five years together. His younger girlfriend Frankie (Kelly Bastard) is not so sure – after all, Steve is controlling, and she still fancies old flame Jonah (co-writer Michael Mitton). Now, a third man has entered her life – an inchoate mannequin whose path of supernatural violence will help her determine what she really wants.

“Frankie, this is your dream”, Jonah says, inadvertently decoding the nightmarish illogic of this horror from director/co-writer Micheal Bafaro (also appearing as old expositor Viktor Malick). It certainly plays out like a surreal remix of horror motifs. “It follows,” Frankie says (twice) of the mannequin, unconsciously citing a major influence. For like the Annabelle doll, and especially like Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels, this inexorably murderous stalker is never seen moving, but radically changes position every time it is unwatched, as an uncanny antagonist of cinema itself. 

Meanwhile, after Kelly’s friends are shown watching The Shining on television, Steve goes all Jack Torrance, talking to a barman who isn’t there and writing the same word over and over in his thesis. Still, as Frankie says, “Dreams can change.”

Don’t Look Away is released on digital,  25 September, via Central City Media