As a staunch atheist, it's a challenge to my lack of faith when a release like this appears, because if there was ever proof that God exists, it's the fact that Arrow Video is releasing Brian DePalma's masterpiece, Phantom of the Paradise, on Blu-ray.
This film, long ignored on US home video, has only been released on Blu-ray in France, so this release is more than welcome. DePalma's horror-tinged ode to Gaston LeRoux's oft-adapted Phantom of the Opera is a wonderland of craziness and blood, unlike anything that I've ever seen. If this world were a just one, Phantom of the Paradisewould have the kind of midnight-movie success that The Rocky Horror Picture Show has enjoyed. Here's the synopsis from Arrow Video:
Brian De Palma’s inspired rock’n’roll fusion of Faust, The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray boasts an Oscar-nominated score by Paul Williams, who also stars as an evil record producer who not only steals the work of composer/performer Winslow Leach (William Finley) but gets him locked up in Sing Sing - and that’s not the worst that happens to him along the way.
Few revenge scenarios have ever been so amply justified, but the film is also constantly aware of the satirical possibilities offered by the 1970s music industry, exemplified by Gerrit Graham’s hilariously camp glam-rock star. Jessica Harper (Suspiria) appears in her first major role as the naïve but ambitious singer, on whom Winslow secretly dotes.
Prodigiously inventive both musically and visually, this is one of De Palma’s most entertaining romps, not least because it was so clearly a labour of love.
I can't get enough of The Stuff!
Cult icon Larry Cohen's ridiculous satirical ode to consumerism makes its Blu-ray debut with Arrow Video next year and I couldn't be happier. This film is a litmus test for friends of mine, if you don't love The Stuff, you can get the fuck out of my life. A wonderfully sleazy performance by Michael Moriarty and a minor goofball turn for SNL's Garrett Morris are reason enough to check this out. That is, of course, if they idea of sentient killer yogurt isn't enough to get you interested.
Are you eating it ...or is it eating you?
The Stuff is the new dessert taking supermarket shelves by storm. It’s delicious, low in calories and – better still – doesn’t stain the family carpet… What’s not to like?! Well, for a start it has a life of its own, and we’re not talking friendly live bacteria…
Young Jason seems to be the only one who doesn’t love The Stuff – in fact he won’t go anywhere near it, after having seen the pudding crawling around the fridge one night. What’s more, everyone who eats The Stuff has started acting really weird... Now, teaming up with wise-cracking industrial saboteur “Mo”, Jason must put a stop to The Stuff and the organisation behind it or face a gooey, gloopy demise.
Coming courtesy of horror auteur Larry Cohen (director of the It’s Alive series and scribe behind the Maniac Cop trilogy), The Stuff is a titillating treat for the taste-buds which blends elements of films such as Street Trash with the straight-up B-movie flavour of The Blob. So grab a spoon and dig on into The Stuff – the taste that delivers… much more than you bargained for!
Hell Comes to Frogtown, the film that launched absolutely no one, is finally landing on Blu-ray. Perhaps the unlikeliest of cult hits, Hell Comes to Frogtown did, however, launch a trilogy (!!!) that has lived a long and healthy life of video store shelves. And why not? With "Rowdy" Roddy Piper as Sam Hell, b-movie icon William Smith as Count Devlin, and TV Western legend Rory Calhoun (Motel Hell) as Looney Tunes, what more could you possibly want? Arrow Video brings this WTF classic to Blu-ray for the first time anywhere.
With the 20th Century drawing to a close, nuclear war has wiped out civilization as we know it. The embattled human race’s last remaining hope lies with one man and his loaded weapon.
Sam Hell may be an ex-con, but he also happens to be one of the last surviving fertile men on the planet. Now, under the custody of a group of feisty female fighters, Sam finds himself enlisted on a mission to impregnate a harem of beauties. Sounds cushy enough, but the ladies in question are prisoners of Frogtown – home to a gang of mutant (and ill-mannered) amphibians!
Starring wrestler-turned-actor Rowdy Roddy Piper, known to John Carpenter enthusiasts for his body-slamming and bubblegum-chewing antics in They Live, Hell Comes to Frogtown is unashamedly a B-movie through and through with more guns and girls than you can shake a frog’s leg at.
Special Features:
-High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation
-Grappling with Green Gargantuans: Wrestling icon "Rowdy" Roddy Piper speaks about his leading man turn in Hell Comes to Frogtown
-Amphibian Armageddon: Actor Brian Frank remembers his role as Commander Toty
-Creature Feature Creator: Effects wizard Steve Wang reveals the secrets behind Hell Comes to Frogtown's mutant manifestations
-Reversible sleeve with original and newly commissioned artwork by Jeff Zornow
-Original Trailer
-Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by author and critic Calum Waddell
With the recent dearth of Asian cult cinema from Arrow, it's nice to see one of great Japanese madmen make his first appearance on Blu-ray. Teruo Ishii is one of the greatest makers of exploitation cinema the world has ever known. Largely unappreciated by western audiences in his own time, over the last decade labels like Synapse Films (The Horrors of Malformed Men) and Discotek (Blind Woman's Curse) have taken up the challenge of introducing these masterpieces of sleaze to American audiences, and it's great to see Arrow doing the same for the UK. With 91 titles under his belt, including the delightfully salacious Shogun's Joy of Torture (still seeking a legit English friendly release) and the possible record holder in the Most Tits per Minute section of the Guinness Book of World Records, Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight.
Blind Woman's Curse stars the queen of '70s female fronted exploitation, Meiko Kaji in one of her more iconic roles, and really delivers the goods in ways that even the current retro-grind wave is afraid to do.
From Teruo Ishii “The King of Cult”, Blind Woman’s Curse (also known as Black Cat’s Revenge) is a thrilling Yakuza film featuring eye-popping visuals, thrilling samurai fight sequences and the gorgeous Meiko Kaji (Lady Snowblood, Stray Cat Rock), in her first major role.
Akemi (Kaji) is a dragon tattooed leader of the Tachibana Yakuza clan. In a duel with a rival gang Akemi slashes the eyes of an opponent and a black cat appears, to lap the blood from the gushing wound. The cat along with the eye-victim go on to pursue Akemi’s gang in revenge, leaving a trail of dead Yakuza girls, their dragon tattoos skinned from their bodies.
A bizarre blend of the female Yakuza film and traditional Japanese ghost story, with a strong dash of grotesque-erotica (the same movement was a sensibility of Edogawa Rampo whose works were adapted by Ishii in Horrors of Malformed Men), Blind Woman’s Curse is a delirious mash-up of classic genre tropes, to which Ishii was no stranger having directed everything from Super Giant films to Biker movies!
The last three horror/thriller titles are films I haven't seen, so I'll not editorialize. However, they come highly recommended, especially White of the Eye, which I'm very eager to see. In addition, any new Jack Hill on Blu-ray is welcome, especially after the bang-up job done with Spider-Baby and Foxy Brown. I'll let Arrow tell you themselves...
White of the Eye
THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A HUNTER AND A KILLER …IS HIS PREY
A serial killer is on the loose in and around the small community of Globe, Arizona, and housewife Joan White (Cathy Moriarty) gradually comes to suspect that her opera-loving hi-fi engineer husband Paul (David Keith) might know more than he’s letting on...
So far so familiar, but in the hands of British visionary Donald Cammell (who wrote and co-directed Performance with Nicolas Roeg), the film becomes a dazzling kaleidoscope of images and ideas, spanning everything from Apache folklore, desert landscapes and stylish murder set-pieces that recall Dario Argento to a painfully vivid dissection of the emotional fissures undermining a modern marriage. It’s all set to an equally eclectic score co-written by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason.
Described by the distinguished critic David Thomson as "one of the great secret works in cinema", White of the Eye is one of the most bizarre and unforgettable thrillers ever made.
Pit Stop
RAW GUTS FOR GLORY! FLESH AGAINST STEEL!
The most dangerous game ever devised, to pit man against man, flesh against steel – the figure-8 race! Jack Hill (Coffy, Foxy Brown) follows up Spider Baby, once again teaming up with Sid Haig (House of 1000 Corpses) in one of his greatest roles for this action-spectacular crash-o-rama!
Richard Davalos (East of Eden) stars as Rick Bowman, a street punk who winds up in jail after a street race goes wrong. Bailed out by race promoter Grant Willard, Davalos is put in the deadly track where he comes up against Haig’s maniacal winner Hawk Sidney. Featuring an outstanding supporting cast including Brian Donlevy (The Quatermass Xperiment) in his last film appearance, Ellen Burstyn, billed as Ellen McRae (The Exorcist) and Beverly Washburn (Spider Baby) Pit Stop is one of Hill’s lesser known films but arguably his greatest.
Filmed on a real figure-8 track, Hill and his crew were able to capture gripping real-life car wreck scenes lending the film a brilliant sense of realism. You’ve never seen a motion picture like this before – can you take it?
Hellgate
BEYOND THE DARKNESS TERROR LIVES FOREVER
Legends abound of ‘The Hellgate Hitchhiker’. So the story goes, a beautiful young woman was once brutally defiled and murdered by a biker gang. Now, returned from the dead, she wanders the roadside luring unsuspecting motorists to their doom…
Refusing to heed the warnings of locals, a group of college friends set out on a cross-country road trip looking for fun and frolics. But they get much more than they bargained for when they wind up in the abandoned mining town of Hellgate and hemmed in by hordes of the undead!
Providing gore and gags in equal measure, Hellgate recalls the good old days of early 90s fright flicks and challenges other gleefully twisted flicks such as Re-animator and Return of the Living Dead for sheer grisly delirium!
Special Features:
-High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation of the main feature
-Road to Perdition, B-Movie Style: An extensive interview with Hellgate director William A. Levey
-Alien Invasion, Blaxploitation and Ghost-Busting Mayhem: Scholar, Filmmaker and fan Howard S. Berger reflects on the intriguing film career of William A. Levey
-Video Nasty: Kenneth Hall, writer of the Puppet Master series, speaks about the direct-to-video horror boom that allowed Hellgate to become a classic of the cassette rental era
-Reversible sleeve with original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys
-Collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Lee Gambin, illustrated with original artwork and stills
I like big butts, and I cannot lie.
So does Tinto Brass.
After making his first appearance at Arrow Video with his most notorious film (and one he's disowned), Caligula, Arrow have gone back and begun delivering the films that more accurately represent his oeuvre. The latest in the series are Cheeky and Frivolous Lola. If you're an ass man, you'll need these in your collection.
Cheeky
When free-spirited beauty Carla (Yuliya Mayarchuk) moves to London, her search for a flat leads to a lesbian seduction by estate agent Moira (Francesca Nunzi), much to the horror of Carla’s boyfriend Matteo (Jarno Berardi) still stuck in their native Venice. And then he discovers a cache of letters from an ex-boyfriend, accompanied by a highly revealing and very public photograph of her...
Ravishingly shot in two of the world’s great cities, bouncily scored by Pino Donaggio, and crammed with wall-to-wall nudity and casual sexual flings, Cheeky is as lighthearted as its title suggests, but it’s subtler and more philosophical than the average sex romp.
In particular, it’s a genuinely moving look at problems arising when a desire to remain scrupulously faithful collides with the lure of baser instincts. Carla genuinely loves Matteo, but how can she reassure him when he spots temptation around every corner?
Frivolous Lola
One of the sunniest of Tinto Brass’s erotic comedies, this sets its breezy tone from the opening scene in which Lola (Anna Ammirati) cycles around a small Po Valley town in a flapping skirt that leaves nothing to the imagination.
But it’s the 1950s, and her baker fiancée Masetto (Max Parodi) is determined that Lola remains a virgin until their wedding night. However, she is equally set on establishing whether or not he’s a good lover before they tie the knot. His dough-kneading technique seems promising, but how can she be sure without an expert to compare him with? In short, can Masetto live up to the erotic ideals professed by Lola’s mother’s lover (Patrick Mower)?
Fortunately, the outwardly innocent town turns out to be a hotbed of licentiousness, with opportunities for voyeurism and maybe more around every corner - all in the interests of self-improving research, of course.
We now move from the trashier side of Arrow to the classier side with the latest announcements from Arrow Academy.
First up is Preston Sturges glorious ode to the wonders of filmmaking, Sullivan's Travels.
VERONICA LAKE’S ON THE TAKE
Director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is one of Hollywood’s hottest talents, with an uncanny gift for getting audiences rolling in the aisles. But he’s dissatisfied: he wants to abandon comedy for Serious Statements, and buys the rights to celebrated social-realist novel ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’
To make his masterpiece as realistic as possible, Sullivan naturally has to understand how the book’s downtrodden characters must have felt, so he takes to the road as a hobo, is taken under the wing of a failed actress (Veronica Lake), and learns several valuable home truths about the importance of not patronising his audience.
Writer-director Preston Sturges had an inspired run in the 1940s, turning out some of the funniest American comedies ever made (The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek). Sullivan’s Travels is one of his best: not just hilarious but also truly wise.
Next up is The Killers.
THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO KILL A MAN…
"I gotta find out what makes a man decide not to run. Why all of a sudden he'd rather die."
So muses hitman Charlie (Lee Marvin) after his high-priced victim Johnny North (John Cassavetes) gives in without a fight. Obsessed with the answer, Charlie and his hot-headed associate Lee (Clu Gulager) track down Johnny's associates, and uncover a complex web of crime and deceit involving his femme fatale girlfriend Sheila (Angie Dickinson) and ruthless mob boss Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan in his last screen role).
Loosely inspired by the Ernest Hemingway story, and directed by Don Siegel (whose many other taut, efficient thrillers include Dirty Harry and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers), The Killers was commissioned as the very first 'TV movie', but was given a cinema release because of its violence - although a cast like that really belonged on the big screen in the first place.
