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New to Blu – Week of 3/29/2016
Each week here at Bloody Disgusting we like to highlight some of the new Blu-ray releases hitting shelves across the world. Please note that this isn’t every release for the week, just a few of the ones that jumped out at us.
This is a really fun week of releases. Lots of good titles out but the one I am more looking forward to is The Hateful Eight, which was hands down my favorite movie from 2015. Cannot wait to own this bad boy on Blu!
US Releases
The Hateful Eight (Starz/Anchor Bay, Region A)
Synopsis:
In post-Civil War Wyoming, bounty hunters try to find shelter during a blizzard but get involved in a plot of betrayal and deception.
Bicycle Thieves (Criterion, Region A)
Synopsis:
A struggling father tries to make ends meet for his wife and young son with the bicycle he uses to post flyers around Rome. But, when his bicycle is stolen he loses the only means for supporting his family. Forced into desperation, he tries to redeem himself in the eyes of his young son.
Frightmare (Vinegar Syndrome, Region Free)
Synopsis:
Drama students decide to pay tribute to their favorite horror star by stealing his body from his crypt for a farewell party. They fail to realize their violation of the tomb has triggered powerful black magic, and Conrad hasn’t taken his final bows yet.
Cherry Falls (Scream Factory, Region A)
Synopsis:
A killer is killing off the virgins of a small town high school.
Corruption (Vinegar Syndrome, Region Free)
Synopsis:
This is a story about a businessman that “sells his soul” for power. However, he is betrayed by courier/associate and finds himself answering to his formal employee. The businessman must then call upon his sleazy half-brother to help him set things right… or so he thinks…
Pigs (Vinegar Syndrome, Region A)
Synopsis:
Lynn Hart is a disturbed young woman who escapes from a mental hospital where she was committed for killing her abusive father who raped her. Stealing a nurse’s uniform and car, Lynn ends up in a small California town where she meets and shacks up with Zambrini, an old farmer who runs the local motel and roadside café. Zambrini also owns a group of pigs that he keeps in a pen behind his house who have somehow developed a taste for human flesh. When Lynn begins killing a number of men who remind her of her dead father, Zambrini helps her out by disposing of the bodies to the pigs. Investigating the disappearances, the local sheriff eventually becomes suspicious of Lynn’s past and a private investigator, hired by the hospital to find her, slowly close in on Lynn.
Murders in the Rue Morgue/The Dunwich Horror (Scream Factory, Region A)
Murders in the Rue Morgue
In turn-of-the-century Paris, actors aren’t just playing dead…they’re staying dead! In this mind-bending, macabre murder-mystery, a passionate lunatic out for bloody revenge brings the grisly horror of Edgar Allan Poe’s most frightening tale to gory, gruesome real life!
The Dunwich Horror
Dr. Henry Armitage, Sandra Dee and another girl who wasn’t in the book visit the library of the Miskatonic University where they are studying, and find a mysterious young man named Wilbur Whateley trying to borrow the Necronomicon (a book containing ancient rites to bring alien gods to our planet), and as it is a public library they let him. Sandra Dee offers to drive the moustachioed warlock back to his home in Dunwich, where he drugs her and makes her stay to be a part in his evil ceremonies…
The City of the Dead (VCI, Region A)
Synopsis:
College student Nan Barlow is researching the history of witchcraft. Taunted by her brother and fiance, who have voiced their concern over her silly notions, Nan arms herself with resolve and drives into the small New England village of Whitewood. She is glad that at least she was able to count on the support of her professor. A bit anxious but consumed with curiosity, she will soon embark herself on the journey of her life…!
The Sicilian (Shout Factory, Region A)
Synopsis:
Egocentric bandit Salvatore Giuliano fights the Church, the Mafia, and the landed gentry while leading a populist movement for Sicilian independence.
The Red House (The Film Detective, Region A)
Synopsis:
Teenage Meg convinces her schoolmate Nath to come help with chores on the farm where she lives with her aunt and uncle, Ellen and Pete. When Nath insists on using a short cut home through the woods, Pete warns him of danger associated with a mysterious red house. Curious, Meg and Nath ignore his warnings and begin exploring.
The Hidden Fortress (Criterion, Region A)
Synopsis:
Akira Kurosawa directs this spirited period action-adventure in which two conniving peasants are tasked with smuggling a general, a princess and the remains of her family’s wealth through mountainous, hostile territory in feudal Japan.
Code 7, Victim 5/Mozambique (Blue Underground, Region A)
Code 7, Victim 5
When a millionaires valet is murdered he hires a detective to discover by who and why his valet was killed, leading to connections of the nazi sort!
Mozambique
An out-of-work and penniless American pilot is offered work in Mozambique and promptly becomes an unwitting pawn in a world of drug smuggling, kidnapping and murder.
UK Releases
The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Collection (Arrow, Region B)
Love is Colder Than Death / Katzelmacher / Beware of a Holy Whore / The Merchant of Four Seasons / The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant / Fear Eats the Soul / Effi Briest / Fox and His Friends / Chinese Roulette / The Marriage of Maria Braun
Burial Ground (88 Films, Reigon B)
Synopsis:
A professor opens a crypt and reanimates rotten zombies. The zombies attack a jet-set-group which is celebrating a party in a villa nearby.
Death Walks Twice: Two Films By Luciano Ercoli (Arrow, Region B)
Death Walks on High Heels
Parisian nightclub singer Nicole Rochard is stalked by a demented masked man who may be the killer of her diamond thief father. With the help of a friend, Dr. Robert Matthews, she hopes to elude her pursuer by traveling to the English countryside. But Nicole’s merciless pursuer does not give up so easily, and soon more murders occur.
Death Walks at Midnight
Valentina, a hot-tempered fashion model, duped into trying an experimental psychedelic by a fast-talking tabloid journalist during a photo shoot, inadvertently witnesses a gory murder by a man with a spiked glove in the empty, next-door building. It won’t be the last!
The Vault of Horror (Final Cut, Region B)
Synopsis:
Five men trapped in the basement vault of an office building share visions with each other of their demise. Stories revolve around vampires, bodily dismemberment, east Indian mysticism, an insurance scam, and an artist who kills by painting his victims’ deaths…
Night School, director Ken Hughes and writer Ruth Avergon‘s tale of a headhunting slasher on the streets of Boston, arrived in the early Golden Age of the slasher film and never quite broke through the endurance test that other films in the subgenre, like Friday the 13th, managed to pass with flying colors. Blame it on a more cerebral tone, a crowded market, whatever you like, but saying it’s a shame that the film didn’t break through doesn’t begin to cover it.
Night School isn’t just an underrated slasher, or an underseen one. For my money, it’s one of the best films the subgenre has ever produced, full stop, and Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K UHD restoration, arriving just in time for the film’s 45th anniversary, is must-have proof. Stacked with special features highlighting the craft of the film and its place in slasher history, and headlined by a gorgeous restoration showcasing the wonderfully textured production, this is Night School as it’s meant to be seen for slasher devotees everywhere.
So, what makes the film so effective? It starts very simply, with the revelation that a killer with a very cool knife and a motorcycle helmet as a mask is murdering young women in Boston, taking off their heads, and dropping those heads in the nearest body of water (no matter how small).
Solving the case falls on Judd Austin (Leonard Mann), a detective with an academic background who traces all of the victims in one way or another back to a local night school. There, suspicion falls on a womanizing professor (Drew Snyder) who sleeps around on his research assistant and romantic partner, Eleanor (Rachel Ward), whose own death could be right around the corner.
I’m doing my best to stay as spoiler-free as possible here, not just because I think plenty of slasher fans still need to see Night School, but because the film is quite determined to be a whodunit in the classic Italian giallo sense. The kills are brutal and elaborate, the killer deliberately covered head-to-toe in leather and a gleaming black helmet, the knife and the headhunting a disturbing signature. Avergon’s script is well-versed in the trappings of exactly this kind of story, complete with red herrings galore. And yet, by the time it’s all wrapping up, there’s also the sense that the answer was right there in front of you the entire time, something the very best films by legends like Mario Bava and Dario Argento could also achieve.
But on to the restoration: Like the best of the gialli, Night School is also a beautifully engineered film full of colors and delicate camera compositions and sound design. The opening kill, which takes place on a playground carousel outside of a daycare, is rich in exactly this kind of thing, from the cityscapes that lead into the scene to the sound of a motorcycle slowly rolling forward, its engine already dead. Cinematographer Mark Irwin, best known for his many collaborations with David Cronenberg, paints the film in rich reds, absinthe greens, and haunting, chilled blue-white light on wet Boston streets, all of which are preserved beautifully by the restoration team at work on this one.
It’s a movie that very deliberately evokes a specific place – the aging streets of Boston in the 1980s, and the halls of relatively low-level academia – and then takes that place into haunted territory, saturating every frame with color and shadow that suggests a killer lurking just out of view.
Night School is not a massively gore-heavy film, but it does deliver the slasher goods with a series of tense, often unpredictable kills and body discoveries that range from the darkly comic to the flat-out jaw-dropping. That’s thanks to the sound design, the score, the editing from Robert Reitano, and more, all of which add to the film’s giallo soul.
In every case, the scene’s geography is outstanding, and it’s easy to see where the simplest possible kill shot might land, but the film never goes for the obvious. Throw in a surprisingly (for 1981, anyway) feminist bent to the storytelling and some very progressive moments for an early slasher film, and this one fits right in with Black Christmas and The Slumber Party Massacre as a film with depth you can just keep unpacking.
That depth, helped along by a load of featurettes and two new commentary tracks featuring members of the crew, is what stands out the most in this new 4K set. Night School may be a niche film recognized mostly by horror addicts and the slasher faithful, but it deserves to be something more, a landmark on the roadmap of slasher cinema history. It’s one of the best in the genre, and this restoration highlights, underlines, and shouts that from the rooftops.
Night School is now available in 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome.
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