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New to Blu – Week of 2/1/2016
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.
First week of February is kicking off strong with some quality releases across the board! I highly recommend Hellions from Scream Factory and Highway to Hell from Kino Lorber, both are awesome releases. What I’m really looking forward to is that German release of The Switchblade Sisters. The more Jack Hill on Blu-ray, the better!
US Releases
Puppet Master 5 (Full Moon, Region A)
Synopsis:
Toulon’s secret continues…The fifth exciting entry in the Puppet Master franchise. In the darkened Bodega Bay Inn, the greedy Dr Jennings has come to pilfer Blade, Six Shooter, Jester, Pin-Head, Torch, Tunneler, and Decapitron to discover the source of their animation. Hoping to get rich quick, he plans to sell their secrets as implements of war. Sutec, the dark pharaoh from another dimension, has sent his own puppet, Totem, to continue his quest to kill Puppet Master Rick and steal the magic which animates the puppets. Caught between the two foes, the half pint heroes must revive Decapitron and preserve the magic formula which gives them life with the life of the Puppet Master hanging on a string!
Batman: Bad Blood (Warner Bros, Region A)
Synopsis:
Bruce Wayne is missing. Alfred covers for him while Nightwing and Robin patrol Gotham City in his stead. And a new player, Batwoman, investigates Batman’s disappearance.
The Last Witch Hunter (Linosgate, Region A)
Synopsis:
The last remaining witch hunter battles against an uprising of witches in modern day New York.
Highway to Hell (Kino Lorber, Region A)
Synopsis:
An eloping bride is taken into Hell, and her fiancée pursues.
The Giant Spider Invasion (VCI, Region Free)
Synopsis:
A black hole hits North Wisconsin and opens a door to other dimensions. Giant 15 meter spiders emerge from it, who have an appetite for human flesh! Dr. Jenny Langer and Dr. Vance from the NASA try to save the world.
Martyrs (Starz/Anchor Bay, Region A)
Synopsis:
In ‘Martyrs’ 10-year-old Lucie flees from the isolated warehouse where she has been held prisoner. Deeply traumatized, she is plagued by awful night terrors at the orphanage that takes her in. Her only comfort comes from Anna, a girl her own age. Nearly a decade later and still haunted by demons, Lucie finally tracks down the family that tortured her. As she and Anna move closer to the agonizing truth, they find themselves trapped in a nightmare – if they cannot escape, a martyr’s fate awaits them…
Extraordinary Tales (Cinedigm, Region A)
Synopsis:
Five of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories are brought to vivid life in this visually stunning, heart-pounding animated anthology featuring some of the most beloved figures in horror film history.
From Dusk Till Dawn: Season Two (Entertainment One, Region A)
Synopsis:
A Texas Ranger is in hot pursuit of the infamous Gecko brothers.
Zombie Fight Club (Scream Factory, Region A)
Synopsis:
It’s the end of the Century, at a corner of the city in a building riddled with crime …… Everyone in the building has turned into zombies. After Jenny’s boyfriend being killed in a zombie attack, she faces the challenge of surviving in the face of adversity. In order to stay alive she struggles with Andy to flee danger. The originally kind and warm hearted chemistry teacher, Wu Ming, who is now the zombie leader after the kayos broken out, has transformed into a cruel, vicious and selfish character. Violent activists match prisoners against zombies in a malicious killing game, the good side of humanity has seemingly all but vanished. Now that all order is lost, how will humans create a new century? A world of uncertainty awaits: The end? Hope? Or Death?
Hellions (Scream Factory, Region A)
Synopsis:
A teenager must survive a Halloween night from Hell when malevolent trick-or-treaters come knocking at her door.
UK Releases
Five Dolls for an August Moon (Arrow, Region B)
Synopsis:
Five Dolls for an August Moon is Mario Bava’s deliriously mad spin on an Agatha Christie-style whodunit. A space-age island retreat is visited by a group of friends and business associates—one of whom is a scientist who has invented a revolutionary chemical process. Soon the vacationers start dying, and the survivors begin to wonder who has the most to gain from these murders most foul.
Z Nation: Season 2 (Spirit Entertainment, Region B)
Synopsis:
Three years after the zombie virus has gutted the country, a team of everyday heroes must transport the only known survivor of the plague from New York to California, where the last functioning viral lab waits for his blood.
Austraila Releases
The Green Inferno – Director’s Cut (Pinnacle Films, Region B)
Synopsis:
A group of student activists travel from New York City to the Amazon to save a dying tribe but crash in the jungle and are taken hostage by the very natives they protected.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Cinema Cult, Region B)
Synopsis:
An extraordinary, fantasy filled masterpiece, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen highlights the amazing journeys of Baron Munchausen, who sets sail in a hot air balloon in search of his old comrades-at-arms. In his travels, the Baron journeys to the moon, visits Venus and Vulcan, and lands in the belly of a giant sea monster and that’s just the beginning!
Germany Releases
Deathgasm (Tiberius Film, Region B)
Synopsis:
Two teenagers who have started a heavy metal band unwittingly stumble upon an ancient text that contains a musical spell for summoning a powerful demon.
The Switchblade Sisters (Subkultur Entertainment, Region B)
Synopsis:
Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters is the outlandish, action-packed story of a tough gang of teenage girls – the all-female Dagger Debs – who are looking for love and fighting for turf on the mean streets of the city! bad girls to the core, these impossibly outrageous high school hoodlums go where they want…and create mayhem wherever they go! A riotously entertaining mix of sex, jealousy and massive firepower that critics loved – don’t miss your chance to see one of the wildest films ever made!
No, the Case is Happily Resolved (Camera Obscura, Region B)
Synopsis:
While fishing at a quiet lake, a blameless civil servant happens to witness a murder. Although he and the killer suddenly stand in front of each other, the witness (Signore Santamaria) manages to escape. At home, however, he decides not to call police, assuming that he won’t be bothered by the incident any further. The murderer, on the other hand, plays his only card: He goes to police, claiming that he is in fact the witness and that Santamaria is the killer.
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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