Midnight Video Dispatch – March 26, 2022

Welcome back to Midnight Video, the video store I opened in my basement! Here are some of our latest titles (which you can’t rent, because I keep the house locked).

The Sword and the Sorcerer

New Arrivals

I’ve written about The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) at length before, but it’s been quite some time since it’s been available on disc. Shout Factory compensates for the gap with a surprising 4K UHD + Blu-ray upgrade, replete with a limited edition poster, a 4K scan of the film from the original negative, a new audio commentary from director Albert Pyun, and in-depth interviews. This is a film cursed to never be as good as you remember it, but it does have its qualities, and it’s certainly a notch or two better than the many Roger Corman-produced pulp fantasy films that glutted the market in the 80’s (and which I love, if shamelessly). TV actor Lee Horsley received a rare starring role as Talon, a prince-turned-mercenary wielding a three-bladed sword, and he’s very well cast here, bringing some much-needed charisma to a character who’s actually quite the sleaze. Also well-suited to his role is sneering Richard Lynch (Deathsport) as the tyrant “Cromwell” (not Oliver Cromwell, so far as I can tell), who seizes the throne through the magic of a literally slimy demon sorcerer. The supporting cast includes more TV veterans: Kathleen Beller (Dynasty), Richard Moll (Night Court), and Joe Regalbuto (Murphy Brown). This was the first film from director Pyun, who would go on to a diverse array of genre films including Radioactive Dreams (1985), Vicious Lips (1986), Alien from L.A. (1988), Cyborg (1989), Dollman (1991), and many others.

A low-budget production that became an unexpected box office hit – no doubt in part because of its terrific poster – The Sword and the Sorcerer offers flashes of potential throughout, but they remain only brief flashes. Most of the film seems to be spent setting up the plot, and it only really cuts loose in a swashbuckling scene in which Horsley swings and swordfights from one corner of the palace to the other, at one point barging into a chamber of nude harem girls and stealing a kiss between sword-swings. There are some funny lines and moments, as well as atmospheric cinematography and sets – the 4K really packs its punch in the film’s deep blacks and reds that occasionally evoke the paperback covers of Frank Frazetta – but the film rushes to its conclusion just as things are getting going, promising a sequel, Buckaroo Bonzai-style, before rolling credits. The extras are revealing, with Pyun (who is now battling dementia) discussing his battle for control of the film with producer Brandon Chase, how he nearly quit the set, and how he was shut out of the editing room. He wanted to lean harder into more stylized violence, noting the Lone Wolf and Cub films as an influence. Beller explains that she’d hoped the film would be more comedic and fun, a la Raiders of the Lost Ark – in fact, her Karen Allen-esque performance is one of the film’s redeeming qualities. She also notes Pyun’s kindness but obvious inexperience, and begrudgingly admits, when she recently watched the film for the first time since its release, that it wasn’t quite as bad as she’d long believed. Yet, clearly, it could have been so much more.

Communion

Also new from Shout is Communion (1989) starring Christopher Walken, Philippe Mora’s adaptation of Whitley Strieber’s bestseller in which he claimed to have had an extraterrestrial encounter. It’s easy to see why this is one of Shout’s limited edition releases, exclusive to their website (and apparently 75% sold out already): it’s a very soft-looking HD transfer, lacking in detail and badly in need of a new restoration. Nonetheless, the disc ports over some valuable older features including a commentary track by Mora and William J. Birnes, the publisher of UFO Magazine, as well as outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage. And this is one weird-ass film that’s worth revisiting. Much like Mark Pellington’s underrated The Mothman Prophecies (2002), or – more relevantly – the alien abduction film Fire in the Sky (1993), Communion attempts to build credibility for its “true” story by creating intense and unnerving depictions of paranormal encounters. And, smartly, it leans into skepticism. As Mora describes on the commentary track, he’s not quite a believer himself, and neither was Walken. Working from Strieber’s own screenplay, the filmmaker avoids building this into some Close Encounters of the Third Kind faith redemption story, and there’s no giant spaceship to display in the climax. Instead, Strieber (Walken), his wife (House of Games‘ Lindsay Crouse) and their son remain shaken and perplexed even by the film’s end. (Since Strieber didn’t get carried away by a UFO, the narrative resolution is nothing more than, “And so he wrote a book about it.”) The film seems to acknowledge that the viewer may already believe that Strieber – a horror novelist (he wrote The Hunger) who gained his greatest fame with the book Communion – is the perpetrator of a hoax. But the film is effective at shifting the conversation from “nothing happened” to “something happened, but we can never know what.”

What’s so intriguing about Communion, especially viewed post X-Files, is that it doesn’t shy from the sheer unbelievability and strangeness – even silliness – of so many accounts of alien encounters, abductions and rectal probes. The insectoid grays have a rubbery face and elastic arms, wobbling about and dancing on a table like a cheap sideshow attraction. Troll-like bluish creatures with massive faces – at one point likened to kobolds of legend – are depicted in a completely different style of creature design, more detailed but absurd in their own way, pursing their lips and flexing their mouths, and they share space with the wiggling grays. At one point, Walken dances with them, high-fives them, dons an alien mask, and even kisses them on the lips. It’s ridiculous, and it’s supposed to be. When Walken is pressed by his friends to describe what he’s seen, he can’t stop laughing – though the laughter is increasingly hysterical as the story progresses (Walken’s in his wheelhouse, you can be certain). He’s uncomfortable attending a support group of fellow abductees, and maintains an antagonistic relationship with the hypnotherapist (Frances Sternhagen) who only uncovers details that are more disturbing and bizarre than enlightening. At one point, Walken tears at the face of an alien and sees that it’s just a mask for something more frightening underneath. But that too, he says, is just another mask. The value of Communion is presenting a story in which the truth is never even approached; it just grazes us, blinds us, like the lights of a UFO as it sears through the sky.

Morvern Callar

Fun City Editions, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome, recently released a much-needed Blu-ray upgrade (a 2K scan of the interpositive) of Morvern Callar (2002), one of the very best indie films of the 2000’s. Directed by Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and starring a young Samantha Morton (Minority Report), this adaptation of the 1995 novel by Alan Warner follows the titular character, a Scottish woman who, in the opening scene, has just discovered that her boyfriend has committed suicide. Rather than reporting the death, she keeps the body where it is, taking the mixtape he left her and his unpublished manuscript. Impulsively she decides to take credit for the novel, sending it to a publisher and receiving a surprising positive response. After slicing up her boyfriend’s body and burying it in the highlands, she withdraws his cash and invites her supermarket co-worker (Kathleen McDermott) to a resort in Spain for drunken partying and hook-ups. But Morvern remains disconnected all the while, seldom removing her headphones while she listens to the mixtape (and thus providing the film’s amazing soundtrack, which includes the Velvet Underground, Can, Stereolab, Broadcast, Aphex Twin, and the Mamas and the Papas). Increasingly isolated, she continues to shed her attachments in pursuit of some undefined future and freedom. Ramsay shoots Morton like she’s observing some creature from another world, Morvern’s unpredictable behavior and mysteriously naïve smile leaving her enigmatic to the end. It’s an intensely subjective film which, by design, never quite untangles its riddle of a subject. And it’s also darkly funny, particularly when Morvern finally meets up with her eager publishers. When they ask her what she’s planning to write next, Morvern, who has never even read the novel they’re discussing, replies with an irreconcilable mix of impishness and genuine confusion, “I work in a supermarket.”

 

Posted in Midnight Video | 1 Comment

Midnight Video Dispatch – March 12, 2022

Welcome back to Midnight Video, the video store I opened in my basement! Here’s a quick update on new arrivals (just down the stairs; bathroom’s past the first aisle on the left).

Delta Space Mission

New Arrivals

I’ve never been as excited about a new label as I’ve been about Deaf Crocodile, a film restoration and post-production company which is now expanding into Blu-ray releases of international titles as one of the latest partners of Vinegar Syndrome. They’ve already released Jean Louis-Roy’s surreal espionage movie The Unknown Man of Shandigor (1967) starring Daniel Emilfork (of The City of Lost Children fame) and Serge Gainsbourg. They’re also working on delivering new restorations of Aleksandr Ptushko’s Soviet fantasy classics Ilya Muromets (aka The Sword and the Dragon, 1956) and Sampo (aka The Day the Earth Froze, 1959), along with Karen Shakhnazarov’s satire Zerograd (Zero City, 1988). As soon as they announced the Romanian animated science fiction Delta Space Mission (Misiunea Spatiala Delta, 1984), I jumped on it – and I had never heard of the film before. Directed by Mircea Toia and Călin Cazan, this 70 minute feature was actually created on the back of a series of short “Delta Space Mission” films conceived by animator Victor Antonescu for Romania’s Animafilm studio. (Two of these, totaling 14 minutes, are included as extras on the disc.)

A dizzying opening introduces us to a confusing array of characters, previously introduced in the short films, including a pair of space pilots named Dan and Oana, who call to mind Valerian and Laureline from Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin’s classic French comics of the same name. The majority of these characters prove largely inconsequential. Instead, we spend most of the film’s running time with Alma, a green-skinned alien journalist with frizzy red hair, and her pet “dog,” the frog-like Tin which has stalk-eyes, walks on two legs, and gets into a variety of comic adventures with alternately hostile and unduly affectionate lifeforms. Alma has become the object of infatuation of a supercomputer which subsequently acts out by wreaking havoc, animating rock-creatures, city structures, and a tidal wave that rolls down a metropolitan freeway with grasping hands. Once Alma sets down on a strange planet and becomes separated from Tin, directors Toia and Cazan go full René Laloux – presenting its strange inhabitants with the same xenobiological fascination as Fantastic Planet (1973). Tin is also tormented by an army of miniature shape-changing robots, in a comical game of cat-and-mouse. Star Wars (1977), naturally, proves a big influence as well, notably in a dogfight with ships that look suspiciously like Tie Fighters.

But the style of the film is less easy to pin down. One word that kept springing to mind while watching was “liquid.” Humans and aliens, animals and plants, robots and spaceships – they all seem to swirl about each other like a multicolored liquid light show. When pausing the movie at random to let the dogs out, the frozen image revealed a character’s moving hand rendered by the animator into an abstract shape as though it were melting. The effect is almost subconscious when watching the characters in motion. And while most animated films follow a rigorous series of character models to maintain consistency, there is nothing consistent in the designs of Delta Space Mission, nor in characters or landscapes from scene to scene. The effect is truly dream-like, and it’s all accompanied by a pulsing electronic score by Calin Ioachimescu, like the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet (1956) reinterpreted for an 80’s video game. Indeed, despite the Star Wars influence, space battles on the surface of a space station look instead like a lysergic interpretation of the arcade game Zaxxon. Both my wife and I said almost simultaneously, “Oh, I’ve played this game.” But I still can’t say I’ve seen an animated film like Delta Space Mission before. (It would, however, make an excellent double feature with Laloux’s Moebius-designed Time Masters from 1982.)

Paranoiac

Shout Factory continues to work through the last remaining Hammer titles they’ve licensed, and has just about made Universal’s 2016 Hammer Horror 8-Film Collection Blu-ray set obsolete by fixing questionable aspect ratios and adding considerable supplements. (Granted, it’s a much pricier effort to buy these individually, but that’s the Shout model when it comes to their Hammer line.) One of those upgraded titles, Paranoiac (1963), was recently released with attractive new cover art by Mark Maddox, and the last, the Dr. Syn-based swashbuckler Night Creatures (aka Captain Clegg, 1962), is already on the way. Your mileage may vary, but I consider Paranoiac to be one of the lesser titles in that Hammer subgenre of black-and-white, Les Diaboliques-inspired thrillers. Having not revisited this film in many years, I’d largely forgotten its details, recalling only the rather terrifying-looking mask of the hook-handed fright you can see in the screenshot above. Well, that and the presence of young Oliver Reed, who is always wonderful even when Hammer miscasts him – which is certainly not the case here. He plays another of his hotheaded, internally tormented pleasure-seekers, not all that removed from his brutish role in Joseph Losey’s The Damned (1962). And Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Francis directs, which means that the film looks great, with some experimental visual flourishes here and there.

But the plot, in fact, is pretty unmemorable. Simon (Reed) and Eleanor (Janette Scott, now best known for being name-checked in Rocky Horror) are still recovering from the suicide of their brother Tony and the tragic death of their parents. Eleanor is an emotional basket case. The alcoholic Simon, while plotting to take his full inheritance, conspires with his lover, Eleanor’s nurse (Liliane Brousse from Hammer’s Maniac), who isn’t really a nurse after all. Also in the picture is the vaguely sinister Aunt Harriet (Sheila Burrell). Into this house of secrets and conspiracies comes a man (Alexander Davion) claiming to be their brother Tony – but is he really? Eleanor quickly comes to trust him – but is she also falling in incestuous love? And what’s going on in the chapel late at night, where someone is playing an organ, accompanied by an ethereally voiced singer? Oh, that’s where the creepy masked figure with the hook comes in. And it’s also a mite too similar to the midnight frights of that other Jimmy Sangster-scripted production, Taste of Fear (aka Scream of Fear, 1961), which would remain the gold standard for Hammer’s forays into the world of keep-them-guessing psychological thrillers. The old gaslighting plot was also wearing pretty thin by this point, but even Sangster, who could, at his best, be pretty rigorous at setting up some sturdy  twists that don’t fall apart when the curtain closes (see, again, Taste of Fear), gives a half-hearted effort here, with little logic given to Eleanor’s behavior, especially after she learns some critical information late in the film. But what may stick is the absolute depraved insanity of the final scene, in which Reed seems to preview his taboo-breaking work with Ken Russell. Is Paranoiac diverting? Sure! Does it make a lick of sense? Not at all!

Midnight Video

Posted in Midnight Video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Midnight Video Dispatch – Feb 22, 2022

Welcome back to Midnight Video, the video store I opened in my basement! Here’s a quick update on what I’ve been watching.

Day the World Ended

New Arrivals

Another Shout Factory limited edition website release, Day the World Ended (1955) is the second film directed by Roger Corman. As with most of Corman’s output (barring the occasional A Bucket of Blood or Little Shop of Horrors), this can be easily classified, in this case as a post-apocalyptic tale with the remaining survivors at each other’s throats – although it beat the most high-profile example, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), by a full four years. Corman, whether as director or producer, is a reliable entertainer, and Day the World Ended takes its potboiler idea and milks it for all it’s worth. Two survivors, a father and daughter (Paul Birch and Lori Nelson), are hunkered down in their home in a highly radioactive, depopulated, post-nuke Earth. They have just enough supplies to scrape by for the rest of their lives – until they are interrupted by strangers, who borrow their shelter and food. Two of the strangers, a gangster and his stripper gal (Touch Connors, aka Mike Connors, and Adele Jergens), plot the murder of the others so they can survive – at one point, the song “Ten Little Indians” is discussed. Another survivor is a friendly, intelligent geologist (Richard Denning of Creature from the Black Lagoon) who tries to keep everyone from killing each other.

Complicating matters are dangerous mutated humans (with great claws and oozing faces) and animals, including a monkey which has somehow become a hulking creature with horns and three eyes. Yes, Corman actually delivers on the film’s classic 50’s exploitation poster art, though the end result is more goofy than terrifying. He also keeps the pace lively, with the occasional fistfight and one surprisingly graphic scene in which Connors throws Jergens off a cliff. (The realistic dummy hits just about every rock on the way down.) Otherwise you’re in for more or less what you’d expect: lots of people growling at each other, discussing plans for repopulating the human race, and Jergens listening to a lot of sexy jazz music on the radio while snapping her fingers or practicing her striptease (with her clothes on). The end title card says “THE BEGINNING,” which was probably confusing for those who came in late. Notably, the Blu-ray features a new 40-minute interview with Corman that covers his entire career.

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy

The great Canadian sketch comedy group Kids in the Hall are returning to the small screen this year (on Amazon Prime) and also receiving a career retrospective documentary. I’ve been revisiting their original show in the meantime – a staple of my high school years, when I caught it on Comedy Central – as well as their only feature film effort, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996), newly available on a minimum-effort Blu-ray from Paramount. (Seriously, this thing doesn’t even feature the title of the film on the menu screen, let alone a chapter menu.) The film was intended to launch a series of films for the group, a la Monty Python, but such never came to pass: the underpromoted film flopped at the box office, and the group was already in the midst of breaking up. Dave Foley, whose star was on the rise with the cult sitcom Newsradio, wasn’t even on speaking terms with his sketch teammates when he was shooting his scenes for Brain Candy. Subsequently, they refused him writing credit on the film – for which they later expressed remorse – and he doesn’t feature as heavily in the film as do the others: Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson. McDonald plays the lead (Graham Chapman-like), the inventor of a Prozac-like drug which allows the user to revisit their happiest memory. After the drug becomes a massive hit, he learns that it has a nasty side effect: permanent coma. This is pretty dark subject matter for a comedy film, but as satire it’s on-point throughout, and there are some very, very funny pieces here: a closeted dad (Thompson) whose secret is known to everyone but himself, culminating in the hilariously low-rent musical number “I’m Gay”; a rock singer (McCulloch) who sheds his dark and edgy persona once he takes the pill, and finds a hit song with “Happiness Pie”; the narcissistic drug company CEO (McKinney), whose mannerisms uncannily resemble KITH producer Lorne Michaels; someone called “Cancer Boy” (McCulloch); a flashback involving a grandma (Thompson), her grandson, and a large number of balloons (which leads to the funniest line in the film, coming after the end credits). If the film lacks a big comedy set piece to really make it stick in the memory – something the Pythons were quite good at – it’s still an underrated gem that is consistently funny throughout, emphasizing the Kids’ talent for creating lived-in characters, both in and out of drag.

Posted in Midnight Video | 1 Comment