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New to Blu – Week of 1/19/2016
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.
Some good releases in the US and UK this week. In particular I’m looking forward to Scream Factory’s release of The Guardian and Arrow’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Luther the Geek interests me quite a bit as well. Sounds like the type of weird cinema Vinegar Syndrome is known for.
US Releases
Nightmare Weekend (Vinegar Syndrome, Region Free)
Synopsis:
A maniacally evil woman manipulates a computer and uses it to warp people’s minds and turn them into crazed mutanoid zombies.
The Guardian (Scream Factory, Region A)
Synopsis:
William Friedkin, the Academy Award-winning director of THE EXORCIST, delivers a new kind of fairy tale for adults. When a wealthy young couple (Carey Lowell and Dwier Brown) hires a beautiful nanny (Jenny Seagrove) for their newborn baby, the cradle will rock with a secret of unspeakable horror. Based upon the bestselling novel THE NANNY, and featuring gruesome state-of-the-art special effects, THE GUARDIAN is a classic chiller of erotic intrigue and shocking twists.
The Ice Pirates (Warner Archive, Region A)
Synopsis:
In the far future water is the most valuable substance. Two space pirates are captured, sold to a princess, and recruited to help her find her father who disappeared when he found information dangerous to the rulers. A real Space Opera with sword fights, explosions, fighting robots, monsters, bar fights and time warps.
Harlock: Space Pirate (Twilight Time, Region A)
Synopsis:
In the future, mankind has discovered a way to travel faster than light and has built colonies on thousands of planets. But even the resources of the universe are starting to dwindle, so five hundred billion humans begin the long journey back home. The desire to repopulate Earth starts the so-called Coming Home War, until the universal government of the Gaia Coalition declares Earth a sacred, and thus inaccessible, place. In this dying universe, the space pirate Captain Harlock travels with his immensely powerful flagship, the Arcadia, to fulfill a mysterious purpose. The young Yama, brother of the Fleet Commander Ezra, is chosen to infiltrate the Arcadia’s crew and discover the objective of the pirate captain.
Luther the Geek (Vinegar Syndrome, Region A)
Synopsis:
As a child, Luther Watts was deeply affected by seeing a circus geek (someone who bites the heads off live chickens in a circus sideshow). Finally paroled after serving 20 years in prison, he terrorizes the residents of his hometown by making chicken noises, crowing like a rooster and attacking people. He winds up at a farm run by a woman and her daughter, where he takes them captive and then starts killing off her neighbors. The mother realizes she and her daughter must escape before he kills them, too.
UK Releases
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Arrow, Region B)
Synopsis:
Fun-loving bombshells Kelly, Casey and Pet have a rock band, and they’re headed to Hollywood to make it big. Thanks to Kelly’s well-connected aunt, they soon find themselves at a hedonistic love-in thrown by eccentric music promoter Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell. He takes them under his wing, and a new world of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll unfolds. Superstardom is within reach, if only their newfound distractions don’t get in the way!
The Ninja Trilogy (Eureka, Region B)
Synopsis:
Enter the Ninja (1981)
Franco Nero plays a westerner initiated into the arts and life of a ninja. A wealthy farmer engages Nero’s services to defend him from the evil intentions of an oil baron and his band of thugs. Because he is an American, and good at his trade, he is hated by his Japanese rivals and the feet and fists start flying.
Revenge of the Ninja (1983)
Martial arts action thriller. After his family is killed by ninjas in his homeland of Japan, Cho Osaki (Shô Kosugi) travels to America to make a new life for himself. His first job, however, involves working unwittingly as a front for drug smugglers, a situation which leads him on a collision course of deadly proportions.
Ninja III: The Domination (1984)
The body of a sexy aerobics instructor is invaded by the evil spirit of a dying ninja. At first, changes in her behavior is limited to having strange interactions with an arcade game, doing sexy things with V8 juice, and being attracted to an unusually hairy police officer. But soon enough, she’s systematically killing, ninja-style, the officers responsible for the ninja’s death, and can only be stopped by another ninja!
Blade II (Zavvi Steelbook, Region B)
Synopsis:
Blade forms an uneasy alliance with the vampire council in order to combat the Reaper vampires who feed on vampires.
Blade Trinity (Zavvi Steelbook, Region B)
Synopsis:
Deep in a remote desert, vampire leaders are resurrecting Dracula, the horrific creature who spawned their race. Now known as Drake, this awesome vampire has unique powers that allow him to exist in daylight. To make things even more difficult for Blade, the vampiric leadership launches a smear campaign against him, targeting him as a murderous monster and sendingthe FBI after him. After Blade and his mentor, Whistler, have an explosive showdown with FBI agent Cumberland and hismen, it’s evident that the Daywalker will need some assistance. Blade reluctantly teams up with the Nightstalkers, a group of human vampire hunters led by Whistler’s beautiful daughter, Abigail, and the wisecracking Hannibal King. While their blind scientist Sommerfield works on creating a final solution for the vampire problem, the Nightstalkers launch a relentless series of battles against Dracula’s gang of the undead, led by the powerful vampire Danica Talos and her fanged acolytes Asher and Grimwood. Ultimately, Blade finds himself taking on the greatest vampire of all time, as his own fate and that of humanity hang in the balance.
Saw (Zavvi Steelbook, Region B)
Synopsis:
Obsessed with teaching his victims the value of life, a deranged, sadistic serial killer abducts the morally wayward. Once captured, they must face impossible choices in a horrific game of survival. The victims must fight to win their lives back or die trying…
The Visit (Universal, Region B)
Synopsis:
A single mother finds that things in her family’s life go very wrong after her two young children visit their grandparents.
There’s something really insidious, in a great way, about setting a horror story in a movie theater. It’s something filmmakers have known for decades, going back to The Blob and beyond, but it never fails to strike a chord because, in a way, it hits us exactly where we feel safest. Seeing a horror movie on the big screen, surrounded by like-minded moviegoers, is a communal experience, one in which everyone screams and laughs together. We are together, and therefore we are much less vulnerable, so when someone punctures that bubble of safety, it’s all the more frightening.
Matinee (also released as Midnight Matinee in some territories) is a movie that understands this from the jump, setting up a stunning opening kill that predates a similar sequence in Scream 2 by almost a full decade. A smart, layered, very stylish Canadian slasher released at the tail end of the 1980s, it’s one of those films that’s spent a lot of time in the dark even among the horror faithful (I’m willing to admit that I hadn’t seen it until recently). Now, a new Kino Cult Blu-ray release is out to change that, and it reveals a slasher essential that, while not perfect, has charm and style to spare.
Two years ago, the Paramount Theater in the small town of Halston closed its doors when, during the theater’s annual horror festival, a young moviegoer was murdered in his seat, mid-movie. Leads in the murder quickly dried up, and the case is cold enough now that the town barely talks about it anymore. Fortunately for local horror fans, that means the Paramount can open again in time for its Halloween horror festival, and they’ve got a hotshot producer (William B. Davis) in town for just such an occasion.
As the festival draws closer, the film introduces us to a variety of characters, including rebellious teenager Sherri (Beatrice Boepple), her boyfriend Lawrence (Jeff Schultz), her overbearing mother Marilyn (Gillian Barber), and the theater’s kindly owner, Earle (Don S. Davis), who’s just hoping he can run a business without more bloodshed. But someone clearly remembers what happened two years ago, and their violent streak is on a collision course with opening night.
Matinee has quite a few things going for it, but what stands out right away, and maintains a consistent grip right up through a wonderful crescendo in the third act, is the film’s visual style. Writer/Director Richard Martin, cinematographer Cyrus Block, and special effects wizard Bob Comer make great use of the film’s limited locations, giving the movie a charming small-town feel reminiscent of Halloween or The Blob while building a self-contained little world inside the theater itself that’ll remind you of films like Popcorn and Demons.
The colors are striking, the framing is clever, and the film clearly has a ball making references to all kinds of other horror cinema moments ranging from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th. The kills, while relatively sparing with gore, are delivered with style and appropriate tension, creating that sense of unease right in the middle of a place where we as movie fans should be comfortable: The movie theater. Along the way, the Paramount itself becomes a character, and this release definitely dials up its retro splendor.
The Blu-ray upgrade preserves the film’s attention to detail and ambitious cinematography, helping the colors to pop while never letting go of the texture and feel of a relatively low-budget horror film made in Canada in the 1980s. There’s a certain gauziness to many exploitation films of this era, that haloed light you get when the scene is perhaps overexposed just a little too much. It makes the film dreamlike even when it reaches for realism, and Kino Cult’s upgrade preserves that feeling. Throw in a smart script and a whodunit plot that leans heavily into the psychological details of each character, and you’ve got a winner.
There are a couple of things that stick out as slight issues here, including the lack of special features beyond an excellent commentary from film historians and Kino regulars Jason Pichonsky and Paul Corupe. The disc is quite reasonably priced, so it’s not a letdown economically speaking, but I’d love a deeper dive into the film and the Canadian slasher boom in general, particularly for a movie like this that seems to have faded from so many memories, including mine. The sound mix also has some issues, probably left over from previous releases, that might have you playing with your volume settings a little more than you’d like over the course of a 90-minute film, particularly when lines of ADR dialogue crop up.
These are minor concerns, though, and they do nothing to diminish the impact of Matinee, or the joy that’ll come from watching this film for the first time if you’re a slasher devotee in search of something new, or even someone who saw this movie way back when hoping to relive its glories. This is one of those slashers I’ll be talking about with fellow horrorphiles for a long time, and it’s because of this disc.
Matinee is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Cult.
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