The Movie Sleuth

Cult Cinema: Chrystal (2004) - Reviewed

2026-04-14T14:38:00.002-04:00

Images courtesy of First Look Media

The films of actor-writer-producer-director Ray McKinnon, that familiar face when you need a quirky Southerner with a thick rimmed Georgian accent, have gained renewed interest recently thanks to Lightyear Entertainment’s digital restorations and rereleases of the Academy Award winning short film The Accountant and the 2007 screwball Southern comedy Randy & the Mob. An original screen talent both in front of and behind the camera with a distinctive Southern Gothic flavor who more than paved the way for his co-star Walton Goggins’ career ascension, McKinnon has remained prolific in the film world as an actor and sometimes television director but his directorial tenure of features seems to have dried up with Randy & the Mob. A shame as McKinnon’s films absolutely represent a far more authentic and palpably lived-in visions of the Deep South than most Hollywood or even independent regional productions have been able to get at.

In between his Oscar winning short and his presently final theatrical feature film, Ray McKinnon and his wife, co-producer and creative partner Lisa Blount in conjunction with Walton Goggins joined forces for ostensibly McKinnon’s first feature film effort with the hard-hitting Southern Gothic drama Chrystal. Coasting on the star power of Billy Bob Thortnon, himself a staple of the Deep South in films like Sling Blade and Monster’s Ball which Chrystal seems to have the most in common with, its a thoroughly dour, rough and sometimes gritty exercise in Southern Gothic and the small-town character driven backwoods drama. Produced McKinnon’s production company Ginny Mule Pictures, it all but completely does away with the surreal tongue-in-cheek humor in The Accountant and instead starts off in a kind of woodsy Southern purgatory not too far off from the grounds trampled upon by The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.

In Arkansas one night, a married man named Joe (Billy Bob Thornton) and his wife Chrystal (Lisa Blount) and young son are driving home one night down the mountain roads when he finds himself fleeing a high-speed police chase. Losing control of the car, he rolls it over down a hill and crashes into a tree, leaving Chrystal with a permanent neck injury while catapulting their son through the windshield to his death. Following a sixteen-year prison sentence, Joe returns home to find Chrystal never signed the divorce papers and has become a partially mobile quadriplegic who whiles away her time letting random young men take turns having sex with her. Amid her self-loathing and wallow in carnality, her mother Gladys (Grace Zabriskie) reenters her life fending off the return of Joe into Chrystal’s fragile sphere meanwhile Snake (Ray McKinnon) a local crank-snorting hillbilly aims to settle a longstanding score with Joe. All the while Chrystal herself isn’t sure whether or not to accept Joe back into her life given the tremendous damage and pain he has inflicted upon her. Does Joe have a shot at redemption for his own criminal past or, with the help of Snake and Larry (Walton Goggins), will he backslide into destructive and dangerous old habits including but not limited to drug dealing and brandishing firearms.

Featuring not one but two David Lynch players, with Grace Zabriskie donning a Southern accent and being a pillar of support to Lisa Blount’s titular heroine and an acoustic guitar playing cameo by the late and legendary Harry Dean Stanton including a somber original score by Stephen Trask amid needle drops by Jay Farrar, Tim Eriksen and the Drive-By Truckers, Ray McKinnon’s Chrystal takes audiences through some pretty dire places in the Deep South. From Capote and Lars and the Real Girl cinematographer Adam Kimmel’s woodsy amber lit camerawork to set pieces that look found rather than dressed, Chrystal starts out heavy and relentlessly chips away at our defenses until we’re left as frail and fragile as the woman herself. At once a small-town American drama, a scenic regard for the Ozark Mountains, a travelogue through dingy slummy bars and backwoods lots with parked cars and men lined up outside of them, McKinnon’s film gives us a far more understated and perhaps realistically unremarkable portrait of Southern pain than Monster’s Ball which, for all of its powerful performances and emotions, somehow feels less regionally authentic than this.

Playing at Sundance in the winter of 2004 followed by a limited theatrical release the following year and a home video DVD release through First Look Entertainment which also for at time had an exclusive deal with Blockbuster Video, Chrystal didn’t make too much noise originally though Lisa Blount won the Best Actress award at the Stockholm Film Festival for it. Ray McKinnon was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Though critically revered, the microbudget regional film didn’t take in much more than $80,000 during its initial run. Despite this, the film was a critical darling including some strong endorsements coming from Henry Rollins on the DVD cover and thanks to renewed interest in the works of Ray McKinnon, there’s ample room for this to garner a newfound audience. I myself probably wouldn’t have thought to check this out were it not for the studious efforts of Lightyear Entertainment and their rerelease of The Accountant which in hindsight is still McKinnon at his best in front of and behind the camera. Not as raw as the aforementioned Monster’s Ball but perhaps the truer of the two?

--Andrew Kotwicki

Saturn's Core Audio & Video: Sixteen Tongues (1999) - Reviewed

2026-04-13T16:32:00.001-04:00

Images courtesy of Saturn's Core Audio & Video

Five years after unleashing his transgressive pornographic shocker of a SOV (shot on video) zombie horror film Shatter Dead, Black Eyed Susan writer-director Scooter McCrae returned with incredibly an even more taboo imagery shattering sleazy body horror extremity in 1999 called Sixteen Tongues. Described as the pornographic version of Blade Runner or perhaps the late 1990s answer to Café Flesh by way of David Cronenberg’s Crash, it’s a nonstop attack of smut and cyberpunk, sex and surrealism all mashed together firing off every cylinder at once for every millisecond of its brisk but jam packed eighty-minute runtime. The kind of mixture of explicit sexual content, science fiction worldbuilding and general transgressive dystopian Hell you’d have a hard time adapting into a full length feature film let alone getting it released in theaters, the Saturn’s Core release of the original digital video production in conjunction with OCN Distribution and Vinegar Syndrome’s webstore represents for fans of edgier cinema an indelible if not aggressively tawdry and gross cyberpunk freakout.

Renegade cop Adrian Torque (Crawford James of The 6^th Day) lives in a scuzzy apartment complex surrounded by perpetual pornography on his television, his walls and all the hallways of his flat. Disfigured by a terrorist explosion from years ago, he has undergone an unusual surgical procedure which grafted the tongues of sixteen of the terrorist’s victims over his flesh wounds. As a result, his sores are particularly sensitive to the physical touch. Meanwhile Ginny Chin-Chin (Jane Chase) is a genetically engineered prostitute living with her lesbian lover Alik Silens (Alice Liu from Wolf and She Hate Me). On the murderous hunt for the scientist who surgically implanted sex organs under her eyelids, Chin-Chin is unaware Alik Silens is spying on her through the netherworld of computer hacking the abyss of digital pornography. Over the course of the movie, these disparate and violently psychosexual paths will inevitably collide into a crimson filled mashup of sex, fluids and brutal death.

Featuring arresting makeup effects work by Glenn Hetrick and Paul Sutt of The Hunger Games and Watchmen and appropriately grimy and depressive electronica rendered by Cerebellion and Geek Messiah and nearly all of the camerawork and editing by Scooter McCrae himself, Sixteen Tongues is a SOV transgressive pornographic shocker with a difference. At once openly filthy dirty but also loaded with intelligent science-fiction worldbuilding conceptualizing, it easily outdoes Scooter McCrae’s previous feature Shatter Dead in terms of full realization, size and scope. Though primarily set in an apartment hallway ala Jimmy and Stiggs where the mayhem and messiness gradually ratchets itself up, there’s a vastness implied in Sixteen Tongues not present in Shatter Dead’s open zombie world. There’s also a much better sense of lighting, color timing, production design and above all the performances from all the actors. In a film that constantly flirts with pornography with the walls and television screens constantly displaying graphic sexual content, you’d expect the cast to mostly consist of porno performers but that’s not the case here. It is a real film with real actors alive with genuine ideas that just so happens to be buried deep in the world of online psychosexuality and frequently repellent set dressing.

Centered around the triangular relationship between Jane Chase, Crawford James and Alice Liu, the film does still manage to be an ensemble piece and even works in Shatter Dead star Stark Raven. Jane Chase and Alice Liu go the full distance as far as casual screen nudity and/or sex scenes though in contrast Alice Liu has had a much more extensive film career in big Hollywood movies before agreeing to disrobe for this microbudget digital video production. Crawford James would show up later throughout television programs like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and The Guardian but here is almost like a Cronenbergian dark lord of this porn-heavy purgatory whose body and facial scars may or may not give him physical pleasure. Some of the film’s sexuality can be a bit much and borders on some Antichrist levels of bloodletting from places that should never bleed thanks to the props department. But somehow unlike the out of nowhere explicit shock that hit viewers watching Shatter Dead, everything that happens within the universe of Sixteen Tongues however vulgar seems somehow appropriate and consistent.

In recent years, Vinegar Syndrome and particularly Saturn’s Core Audio & Video have taken a liking to the works of Scooter McCrae who at the film’s introduction at Fantasia Festival (in the bonus features) describes it as ‘toilet paper displaying an image on the screen’. While self-deprecating, it speaks volumes to the strange awe and no-man’s land outlaw wonderment of the shot-on-video microbudget film. However you’re able to get your images and ideas onscreen is of the utmost importance irrespective of the perhaps shitty quality of the medium being used. All things said, Saturn’s Core have done an amazing job on their new limited edition Blu-ray special edition of Sixteen Tongues which is so stacked with extras including a handful of the director’s short films and a music-video tie-in to the film itself that you’re enamored whether you liked the film or not. Featuring his bonus short film Saint Frankenstein which includes a score by the legendary Fabio Frizzi (Zombie), Saturn’s Core Audio & Video have given this anarchic and perverse shocker of a film the elite home video treatment and fans of Shatter Dead and the darker, more extreme version of what we think to be the SOV film will not be disappointed.

--Andrew Kotwicki

KimStim: Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024) - Reviewed

2026-04-13T15:13:00.002-04:00

Images courtesy of KimStim

Polish novelist Bruno Schulz first published his dreamy Kafka-esque meditation on life and death under Polish authoritarianism with Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1937 where it quickly became a legendary piece of surrealist satirical literature. Loosely based on the author’s own life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire where he was born, the surreal exercise soon found its way onto the silver screen in 1973 with Wojciech J. Has’ cinematic adaptation The Hourglass Sanatorium with Jan Nowicki in the lead role. A major film in the annals of Polish cinema, its spooky haunted squalor and nebulous qualities helped usher Wojciech J. Has into the pantheon of the all-time great Polish directors and further cemented Bruno Schulz’s novel as an important contemporary literary work rife with cinematic possibilities.

Naturally, the story was ripe and ready for further screen potential from none other than the equally legendary team of American identical twin brothers and stop motion animators the Quay Brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay. Working for years in England, having directed many numerous short films including Street of Crocodiles and The Sandman and contributing a short segment to Julie Taymor’s biographical drama Frida, the Quay Brothers established their own wholly original aesthetic and style of animation and storytelling. Looking a bit worn or archaic like a series of found dolls or puppets being resurrected back to life or perhaps pushed even further into death, their style is akin to the work of Jan Svankmajer as Earthy tactile and worn Eastern European stop motion photography.

Ordinarily working in stop motion but sometimes dabbling into live-action photography as well, these two paths intersected in their second feature film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes which saw a wealth of footage with actors performing on sets intercut with sparse and occasional animation. It was a singular, impenetrable odyssey into the half-asleep subconscious co-produced by Terry Gilliam, but that was all the way back in 2005. Some twenty years later, following a theatrical tour of many of their shorts compounded with a documentary by Christopher Nolan, the Quay Brothers have returned to the feature film format with their loose, lyrical and elliptical adaptation of Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. A seventy-six-minute color/b&w production made between England, Germany and Poland as well as filmed in the Polish language, it takes the premise of the novel and impetus of the 1973 film as well as working over many of the Quays’ own recurring tropes and fixations like footage of a rubber band coming off of a knee played backwards.

On a ghostly train journey interspersed with fog and soft focus as the 5.1 surround soundscape reverberates over the viewer’s head and ear space, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass intercuts between a doctor in a sanatorium monitoring the gulf between sleep, the waking state and time itself. As he peers into a microscopic device into shapes and insignia, the film becomes a bit like a broken record with cuts and scratches in the grooves occasionally distorting or repeating what we see and hear. Much like Aleksandr Sokurov’s Fairytale or more recently Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, we’re thrust into a sleepy state of mind where characters speak softly with long pauses between words, accentuating the sleepy vibe of it all as characters seem to traverse places that doesn’t seem to exist in time or space.

The disc itself from new releasing company KimStim comes housed with plentiful extras including short documentaries of the Quay Brothers either being interviewed, introducing the film and there’s a video essay about how the Quays interpreted Bruno Schulz. A primarily Polish production previously adapted for Street of Crocodiles and featuring Christopher Nolan as an executive producer and presenter for the film featuring evocative and foggy cinematography by Bartosz Bieniek and a haunted ambient soundscape rendered by Timothy Nelson, watching and deciphering the film is a bit of an exercise in futility as the Quays further blurred the original narrative into incoherence deliberately. It’s a journey and you either surrender yourself to its nooks and crannies or you get exhausted by it within the first few minutes. As someone who is familiar with Quay’s second feature and their short film work as well as the aforementioned Wojciech J. Has film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass plays a bit like a video installation you drift in and out of, enchanted and sometimes disturbed but never really fully sure of what you’re seeing.

--Andrew Kotwicki

VCI Entertainment: Creepy Creature Double Feature Vol. 1 (1963) - Reviewed

2026-04-13T13:54:00.000-04:00

Images courtesy of VCI Entertainment

VCI Entertainment I’m always wary of in terms of picture and/or sound quality, but in recent years they’ve been pairing with Kit Parker Films and the Mary Pickford company and those releases have generally been solid on a technical front and/or packaging. Whereas VCI titles tend to be on the more public domain front, the Kit Parker releases are often furnished with a booklet detailing the film’s history and actually do come from 4K restored film elements. While rare for the company to do double-feature releases, sometime in the early 2020s they did unveil a two-film DVD set entitled The Edgar Allan Poe Heart-Quaking Double Feature which included The Tell-Tale Heart and Legend of Horror. Nothing extraordinary but bless VCI Entertainment for giving these two otherwise forgotten Poe adaptations new life of some sort in the home video world. Circa 2026, VCI seems to be renewing the double-feature format, this time in an ongoing series called Creepy Creature Double Feature with this new disc being the first volume, including two 1963 regional psychotronic sci-fi horror baddies The Crawling Hand and The Slime People.

Advertised as being restored in 4K and produced in conjunction with Kit Parker Films and MVD Visual, the two-film set housed on one Blu-ray disc sort of joins the likes of, say, Criterion’s Monsters and Madmen four-film quartet of low-budget regional monster movies as a welcome dose of early sixties high camp. Each film running just over an hour or so, both are credited as being released in 1963, are black and white and have a scrappy feel to them whose charm is infectious. Starting with The Crawling Hand, written and directed by I Was a Teenage Frankenstein creator Herbert L. Strock, it tells the tale of an astronaut who becomes demonically possessed by an alien in space with the effect creating deep cycles under his mad eyes. When the ship is exploded and remnants fall back to Earth, a severed arm of the astronaut ends up washing ashore on a beachfront only to be found by two teenagers romancing on the beach, Swedish girl Marta (Sirry Steffen) and science student Paul (Rod Lauren). As scientists Steve Curan (Peter Breck the hero from Shock Corridor) and Max Weitzberg (Kent Taylor) close in trying to contain the situation, the small town where Paul lives is about to be terrorized by the severed arm not only reanimating and committing murders but it seems to possess and infect the teenage science student as well.

Incredible shot by Academy Award winning cinematographer Willard Van der Veer for his work on With Byrd at the South Pole and a suitable fifties band sounding score by Marlin Skiles, The Crawling Hand is pretty hokey fare with an obvious off-camera hand moving itself about in between shots of actors pretending to choke themselves with the severed reanimated arm. The first astronaut who is possessed with blackened eye sockets indicating possession ala Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fine but when our main character Paul played by Rod Lauren is tasked with doing the same, the hokum factor flies through the roof with emoting that feels somewhere between James Dean and Tommy Wiseau. No matter as his Swedish girlfriend played by Sirry Steffen does okay when she isn’t strutting around near nude on the beach sequences. The best actor of the piece is undoubtedly Peter Breck who would achieve screen infamy in Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor as a reporter infiltrating an insane asylum who, under the duress of the task, actually goes insane himself. With his skeptical and matter of fact approach to the situation, we can very well see him diving into a madhouse head over heels. Also showing up in the piece is Alan Hale Jr. aka Skipper from Gilligan’s Island as the town sheriff not too keen on people from Washington closing in on his tight knit community.

Next up is actor-director Robert Hutton’s sublimely goofy apocalyptic survival horror thrillers The Slime People, a film somewhere in between Night of the Living Dead, Humanoids from the Deep and From Hell It Came involving an alien invasion coming from the underground wreaking havoc on humanity. With the film starting after the outbreak has hit Los Angeles with most of the survivors being murdered by spear-chucking fish-like hairy monsters in rubber costumers (reportedly $600 per suit at the time), we happen upon a small handful of survivors including a professor Galbraith (Robert Burton), his two daughters Lisa (Susan Hart) and Bonnie (Judee Morton) and a pilot Tom Gregory (director Robert Hutton) who lands his aircraft at a now mostly deserted airport. Banding together, they encounter a lone Marine who joins forces with them to try and barricade themselves indoors against the invaders who have created some kind of mushroom-like machine which generates a perpetual fog-wall that military personnel are unable to breach. It’s up to these survivors to try and figure out where the machine is before the last remnants of humanity are extinguished.

On paper, with a script vastly rewritten by producer Joseph F. Robertson’s wife Blair Robertson, there’s a decent conceptual road movie ala 28 Days Later with characters crammed into a car trying to survive the unthinkable. On film in practice, The Slime People is every bit as silly and corny as its title suggests. From the hulking rubber suited monsters which ate up most of the film’s budget, donning spears and behaving very tribe-like, to the cheesy borderline anti-acting by the cast members save for legendary The War of the Worlds actor Les Tremayne, you want to take The Slime People seriously but can’t bring yourself to. It doesn’t help that the soundtrack by Lou Frohman doesn’t seem to take the proceedings all that seriously either. Cinematography by Wiiliam Troiano is suitable albeit largely drenched in blinding fog, making it a little bit of a precursor to John Carpenter’s The Fog in some ways. Both movies are a hoot but this one particularly ratchets up the camp factor with scenes of the daughters turning into screaming damsels in distress being carted off by professional stuntmen in rubber costumes.

With both movies featuring on the original MST3K series, the first volume of Creepy Creature Double Feature is a nice package for VCI Entertainment including a limited collectible slipcover and reversible sleeve art, unheard of for the boutique label. There’s also a fair amount of special features included. Some of it like the video featurette Rubber Monsters, Real Fears: Mid-Century Sci-Fi are pretty basic but also included is a one-hour telephone interview with actress Susan Hart from The Slime People mediated by Rob Kelly that’s highly informative. Also included is a drive-in sci-fi poster gallery. Again nothing spectacular but in the right mindset and mood, these can be a lot of fun for group viewings and fans of high camp from the middle of the 20^th century. I had fun with both of these for what they were and VCI Entertainment and Kit Parker Films assembled a nice double-feature package, so stay tuned for further forthcoming volumes from the boutique label.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Arrow Video: Paul W.S. Anderson’s SOLDIER (1998) – The 4K Limited Edition, Reviewed

2026-04-12T13:21:00.000-04:00

All images courtesy: Arrow Video/Warner Bros

Before his filmography became primarily defined by the Resident Evil series, Paul W.S. Anderson had a very interesting and eclectic career in the 1990s. He started out with the British indie crime thriller Shopping, which introduced the world to Jude Law (as well as the 90s-staple song Halcyon And On And On by Orbital, which was written for its soundtrack). Then he helmed the original Mortal Kombat movie, which remains one of the best video game movies, and a beloved 90s-action favorite in its own right, thanks to its fantastic visual style and art design, its great action, and its era-defining electronic soundtrack. After that, his demonic-horror-in-space genre hybrid Event Horizon, which may have bombed in theaters, but was quickly canonized as a cult classic on DVD. He ended the decade with Soldier, an ambitious and visually stunning Kurt Russell sci-fi/actioner which likewise failed to connect with audiences at the time, but has gradually grown into a minor cult favorite, although not one of Event Horizon proportions. Now Arrow Video is releasing Soldier on a lavish, extras-packed UHD special edition, in a move which might just canonize it with cult-classic status, in the company of the rest of Anderson’s ‘90s output.

THE FILM:

In a future where the Earth empire is some sort of fascistic military state, ruling over wild-west-style outer colonies with an iron fist, soldiers are raised from birth to be optimally tough, ruthless killers: they suppress all emotions, barely speak except to answer to orders, and function more like anthropomorphized weapons than actual people. The toughest of all these soldiers is Todd 3465 (Kurt Russell), whose kill count in combat is legendary. But when an upstart colonel (Jason Isaacs, playing the slimy villain to Gary Busey’s comparatively less evil commanding officer) creates an even more perfect kind of soldier – genetically engineered to be superhuman – the new model (Jason Scott Lee)’s first test is to kill Russell’s obsolete one. Dumped on a landfill planet and left for dead, Todd 3465 survives and is nursed back to health by a ragtag band of shipwrecked outer-colony pioneers (principally Sean Pertwee, Connie Nielsen, and Michael Chiklis), who try to teach him how to be an actual human. But when Isaacs and his supersoldiers show up on a campaign of genocide against unregulated pioneer colonies, they’ll need Todd’s ruthlessly efficient combat skills if they are to survive.

Soldier starts off with a bang, impressing from the start with its every-dollar-is-on-the-screen ambitious visuals. One of the best things about this movie is that it is from the last days of that era when sets and effects were as fully practical as possible, and CGI was used to augment, and to erase signs of artificiality, rather than to build the world whole-cloth. This film was shot on absolutely massive soundstages, housing huge, intricate, very expensive sets that construct a whole artificial world. And Paul Anderson knows how to film gigantic, practical sets: in Mortal Kombat and Event Horizon the environments are characters themselves, and the same is true here. This is a gorgeously shot film, using cranes and dollies to get the most visual impact out of every elaborately constructed environment, and it is consistently a joy to watch on the strength of the visuals alone. The first act is very strong, and hooks the viewer in immediately, as we are introduced to this very disconcerting fascist society. Solider never has the depth or subversive political ideas that make Paul Verhoeven’s films like RoboCop and Starship Troopers work so beautifully, but it is vaguely reaching for that kind of thing, and enough ideas are there that it works pretty well, especially when aided by the visuals. It also makes a very, very interesting choice which really sells the first act: outside of the occasional “yes, sir,” Kurt Russell’s title character is basically mute, and he delivers an entirely physical performance. It’s such a fascinatingly unexpected choice, and one that hooks the viewer in, to make us see just what kind of journey this weird character will go on.

Unfortunately that last bit that helps make act one so compelling turns into a bit of a liability in act two. After a very propulsive first 40 minutes or so, Soldier slows down a lot, to try and become a more thoughtful and contemplative sci-fi film about a barely-human living-weapon learning to be a person for the first time. It’s an interesting concept, and one that Russell and co-starts Pertwee and Nielsen do an admirable job of trying to sell, but slowing down this much has a striking sense of whiplash, considering that up to this point Solider has been an action movie. And this movie just isn’t smart and sensitive enough to really sell that plotline emotionally; this feels like a riff on early-90s Arnold flicks, it isn’t The Iron Giant (It’s also no Blade Runner, although a throwaway line and some narrative similarities famously imply that it is set in the same universe). This section is also where it’s a bit of a problem that our main character basically never speaks, and barely shows emotion; that makes a tricky chunk of the film trickier, and puts Anderson and company a tad out of their depth. Also, it’s an odd choice to cast a movie star like Kurt Russell, who is known for his quips and charisma and sense of humor and big personality, and not allow him to use any of those assets, instead playing a character whose modes are fighting or catatonic. It feels like a role written more for a Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme, or Lundgren (indeed, according to the film’s assistant director in the extras on this disc, it was written for Stallone), and sees Russell playing very much against type in a way that works most of the time but not always.

Fortunately, Soldier resolves this shaky middle act in a very satisfying way – thanks to some very strong moments of acting from Russell that pay off his against-type gamble – and shifts back to full action-movie mode for act three, which inevitably sees Todd 3465 having to go head-to-head on the battlefield against the new supersoldiers who replaced him and left him for dead. It’s a great last act, which once again makes excellent use of the geography of the huge soundstage sets. It also fully utilizes the physicality of not only Russell, but also supporting actors like Jason Scott Lee and James Black as the other soldiers. Anderson is back on solid footing here, playing to his strengths, and ending the movie on the high note with which it started.

Soldier is definitely an uneven film, thanks to that middle act that tries admirably but doesn’t quite work, making it the weakest of Paul W.S. Anderson’s four 1990s movies by default. But it is still a very fun and worthwhile one, thanks to its very strong first and last acts, its stacked action-movie cast, and especially its fantastic and largely-practical visuals. Even with how the middle of the film drags a bit, I am genuinely baffled by what a massive flop this was at the time; it deserved better. The only thing I can think is that Soldier just was not the kind of blockbuster that was fashionable in 1998. It is very much a throwback to late-80s/early-90s Arnold or Stallone vehicles, and it probably would have been a huge hit if it had come out in the era of Commando or Timecop. But in 1998, a few years post-Jurassic Park, even fewer years post Jackie-Chan-mania, and just a year before The Matrix, Soldier probably felt like a stylistic dinosaur that showed up too late. Fortunately, all these years later that is no longer a problem, and Soldier can be appreciated for the strong if flawed sci-fi/actioner that it is, no longer hampered by bad timing in its release. I definitely hope this Arrow disc gets it a further reappraisal.

THE ARROW SPECIAL EDITION:

Soldier comes to us from Arrow as limited edition UHD package – although oddly (and surely because of rights stipulations from Warner) UHD ONLY with no blu-ray counterpart, so if you don’t have a 4K player you’re out of luck on this one.

Arrow’s brand-new 4K restoration of the film, supervised and approved by Paul W.S. Anderson, looks insanely good; no joke, this is one of the most stunning restorations of a film that I’ve seen yet this year. The movie’s largely-practical visuals look incredible, and Anderson shot the film in a very color-rich, hypersaturated palette that looks quite comic-book inspired, and it benefits hugely from UHD. A subtle but noticeable grain structure is present, and I did not notice any indication that DNR has been applied. The audio mix likewise sounds great, although even on the stereo mix, the sound effects are so aggressive that the dialogue is quiet by comparison, so you may find yourself reaching for the remote if you live in an apartment and don’t want to annoy the neighbors with booming gunshots and explosions.

The extras are absolutely stacked, and fantastic. Unfortunately, despite supervising the restoration, Paul W.S. Anderson did not contribute to any new extras, although he is featured in an excellent archival commentary from a past disc, along with his longtime producing partner Jeremy Bolt, and actor Jason Isaacs. And while it would have been cool to hear Kurt Russell look back on this interestingly against-type, mostly-wordless performance, it’s no surprise that such a still-busy actor did not sit down to discuss one of his least-successful films. There are a ton of new extras though, with people involved in various aspects of the production, and they are really interesting.

The first new extra will be fascinating to a very specific type of cult-cinema nerd, of which I am one: an interview with actor James Black, who plays one of the other soldiers. What makes this interview so cool is that Black spends a lot of time talking about his origins in the microbudget, shot-on-VHS, early-90s film scene in Akron, Ohio, where he was a prolific leading man in films like Zombie Cop, Galaxy of the Dinosaurs, and Ozone. I am a big fan of Ozone – a wonderfully ambitious and well-made (despite being shot on tape) microbudget horror-noir by The Dead Next Door director JR Bookwalter, so it was very cool to hear him talk about it. He then goes on to discuss how the lessons learned making those no-budget films translated to his Hollywood work, and comparing the experience of shooting spaceship-piloting scenes in Galaxy of the Dinosaurs in some guy’s basement in Akron, and then in Soldier sitting next to Kurt Russell in an expensive cockpit set – great stuff. Then when the credits rolled on the extras, I saw that not only this interview, but all the new extras on this disc, were produced and edited by none other than Ozone filmmaker JR Bookwalter! Small world. For my fellow weirdos who enjoy regional shot-on-video horror from Ohio, and are also interested in the Arrow 4K of Soldier, this review is specifically for you!

The extras continue with in-depth interviews with assistant director Dennis Maguire and associate producer Fred Fontana, who both share some fascinating insights into the production of the film – including how the script had been passed around for a few years, and was originally envisioned for Sylvester Stallone, and later recast with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves, before finally ending up with Kurt Russell. The three new features that will likely be of the most interest to many are those that dive into the film’s fantastic production design and visual effects, featuring production designer David L. Snyder and effects artists Craig Barron, Van Ling, and Michael Joyce. Rounding out the new extras are two new appreciations and analyses of the film, by film scholars Danny Stewart and Heath Holland. The disc also includes several vintage extras, including on-set interviews with the cast and crew shot for the digital press kit.

All in all, this is a stellar disc for Soldier. And a film that, despite its flaws, has a lot that makes it worth recommending, and that is absolutely worth this type of cult-classic treatment. While it’s no Mortal Kombat or Event Horizon, it is definitely a film I would recommend, and if you have any interest in it, this disc is the way to experience it.

- Christopher S. Jordan

British horror indie Watch Me Sleep (2023) comes to the US – Reviewed

2026-04-11T00:16:00.000-04:00

All images courtesy: Wild Eye Releasing

The 2023 British indie horror film Watch Me Sleep gets belated US distribution this month from Wild Eye Releasing. But Wild Eye aren’t doing the film any favors, hiding the movie behind truly hideous cover art that reeks of AI slop, and bizarrely releasing the film only on DVD, as far as physical media goes (digital HD as well, at least). But look past the lame cover (which the filmmakers would have had no say in) and the SD-only physical release and give this movie a shot, because Watch Me Sleep is surprisingly good: a very effective indie chiller which builds up a palpable sense of dread and anticipation. It has some genuinely creepy moments, confident slow-burn pacing that pays off, and an unexpected but very welcome undertone of folk-horror. I must admit that after seeing the cover art, I popped this screener disc in with rock-bottom expectations; I was very pleasantly surprised to instead be won over by a horror indie that takes its clearly DIY budget and does some very impressive things.

Sean has just come home to the small town where he grew up to bury his mom. But he isn’t grieving; he’s relieved that she’s dead. As a child he was ritualistically abused by his mom and her circle of creepy friends, and left with knife scars all over his body, vague but disturbing memories of cult-like rituals performed on their property, and an alcohol addiction that he is struggling to stay clean from. In an effort to get closure and put his traumatic past behind him, he contacts a company called Watch Me Sleep, who sells battery-operated wi-fi webcams you can install in a loved one’s coffin; the idea is that one would use it to say a final farewell if the funeral is not closure enough, but he wants it so he can reassure himself that she is really dead, and he is truly free. But when he sees and hears some strange, inexplicable things on the webcam, he starts to fear that even in death his mom is still tormenting him, and that the ritualistic horrors of his childhood are not over. But as he struggles alone in his mom’s empty house, is he a victim of something paranormal or occult, or is it his own fraying sanity and struggle with addiction playing tricks on him?

Watch Me Sleep savors the slow-burn of that question, specializing in prolonged moments of dread where we are made to feel Sean’s uncertainty, and question the reliability of his perception. Many times throughout the movie, Sean sits with his laptop or phone open to the homepage of the Watch Me Sleep website, debating whether or not to enter the code to see the live feed of his mom’s coffin-cam, terrified of what he might see… and every time, we feel the tension and dread building in the air. Director John Williams builds suspense in the movie’s deliberately agonizing moments of waiting, making us imagine what we might see on the camera, and whether it’s better to know, or stay in ignorance. Williams’ pacing is confident, staying on shots and in moments long enough that stillness turns into anticipation of something frightening happening; it’s a classic slow-burn, executed very well. And the movie does a great job of making Sean an unreliable narrator, so that we are kept on our toes about whether all of this is truly supernatural, or if we are watching a descent into alcohol and trauma induced paranoia.

The movie is very, very low-budget, and clearly a DIY indie feature, but that confident slow-burn, and the creeping dread that it instills, overcomes most of its budgetary limitations and obstacles. Getting to this point, however, does take a bit. Until the atmosphere of dread has a chance to establish itself and sink its claws into you, the low-budget filmmaking and its rough-around-the-edges quality causes the movie to get off to a fairly weak start. The audio is uneven in quality, and the cinematography is mostly in the good-enough area, although the film does pull off some really strong shots and images from time to time. The acting is also the mixed bag one might expect from an indie like this. The lead actor, Darren McAree, in particular gives a performance which is oddly uneven. He can be very good in dialogue scenes; in one scene where he describing to an AA meeting why he feels such relief that his mom is dead, he is great. But when it comes to his physical acting and particularly his facial expressions, he can be so over-the-top and arch that his performance occasionally borders on camp. He feels a bit like a theater actor playing to the back of the house, but in close-up it’s way too much. Fortunately as the film goes on, and the movie gets more and more into his head, this is less of a problem, and I found that his performance improved as the film did, and was once again helped out by director Williams’ excellent use of tension and suspense.

One other obstacle the film must overcome is that the very premise of the Watch Me Sleep company’s existence feels far-fetched, and a little absurd; would enough people really want to see a live feed of their loved ones in their coffins that someone could build a business around it? Personally I doubt it, and I think the film would have worked better if the camera was something that Sean had installed on his own. Once the plausibility of that concept is put behind us, though, and we are in the reality of Sean alone in the house with the temptation to either look at the camera feed or not, it works much better. It is also worth noting that Watch Me Sleep came out in the UK a year before David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, which similarly has a central plot element of being able to see the dead in their coffins; I’m sure there will be viewers discovering the film as a US new release in 2026 who write the whole thing off as being a low-budget The Shrouds ripoff, but the film’s original release date shows that that is simply not true. It also takes that shared basic premise in a completely different direction, less about grief and more about trauma, and despite the initial implausibility, sells the premise quite effectively.

In addition to the confidently creepy and effective slow-burn, the other area where the film really surprised me and won me over was the inclusion of folk-horror elements. Sean’s nightmares/flashbacks include lots of spooky folk-horror imagery, shot in high-contrast black and white. Many of these shots are gorgeous, and very creepy – absolutely the most well-shot stuff in the movie, with an eerie dreamlike quality, and effectively teasing air of mystery. They add another layer to the obvious question of, “is this all real, or in Sean’s head:” if it is real, what kind of occult creepiness is going on here? These sequences really give director Williams and company a chance to show off what they’re capable of artistically, even on a shoesting.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised and pretty impressed by Watch Me Sleep, and wound up genuinely enjoying it. It is absolutely a very low-budget film, and has many of the flaws and shortcomings that one might expect from such a production, so a certain patience for those flaws and lenience with them will certainly help your enjoyment. But with that low budget it achieves some impressive things: strong atmosphere, some great folk-horror visuals, and a tense and palpable sense of dread. Those strong points more than outweigh its micro-budget quirks, and when Let Me Sleep works, it really works. This is quite a good indie.

And as such, it deserved better than the apathetic release it has gotten from Wild Eye. It may be a low-budget film that appears to have been shot on not the most expensive cameras, but it still deserved a physical blu-ray release, and not just DVD and HD digital. The encoding on this DVD is pretty apathetic as well, with moments of compression and blocking, and occasional frame rate issues; nothing ruinous, but indicative of the level of care (or lack thereof) put into the release. The cover art also reeks of AI slop, and the back cover description has a lot about it that is simply incorrect, and not accurate to the plot of the film, so it was clearly written by someone who didn’t even watch the movie (or it was also written by AI). But at least it is US distribution for the film, after a three year delay, so hopefully it will end up being a good thing for the filmmakers, despite the apathy of the release itself. And at least there is the digital HD option. I would definitely recommend that horror fans overlook the cheap nature of this physical release, and give Watch Me Sleep a chance. It’s a solid indie that deserves the look.

- Christopher S. Jordan

Radiance Films: Confessions of a Police Captain (1971) - Reviewed

2026-04-10T15:41:00.001-04:00

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Radiance Films have been doting a lot of love over the past few years on sardonic Italian crime thriller maestro Damiano Damiani, from their Cosa Nostra trilogy box of films with Franco Nero, Goodbye & Amen and most recently A Man on His Knees. A celebrated auteur whose work is only catching wind in the West now, Damiani’s tenure within the crime cinema subgenre began with his debut film Lipstick in 1960.

Following films within the giallo or the western, Damiani began more urgently moving towards a kind of Poliziotteschi film or Italian crime film drifting between action and/or drama during a period of sociopolitical turmoil known (and chronicled on film) as the Years of Lead. With his last crime thriller The Day of the Owl done in 1967 and covered in Radiance’s Cosa Nostra box, Damiani was ready for a full return to the poliziotteschi picture and in 1971 with his Golden Prize-winning Confessions of a Police Captain he perhaps delivered one of the very best possible examples of the subgenre.

1972 Sicily, Police Captain Bonavia (Martin Balsam of Psycho) one morning ventures to an insane asylum looking for a disturbed inmate to release back into the free world with the intention of settling a score with a ruthless construction magnate named Ferdinando Lomunno (Luciano Catenacci). What turns out to be a murder plot backfires when Lomunno is tipped off and three of his henchman end up taking a bullet for him in addition to taking out the assailant.

Meanwhile District Attorney Traini (Franco Nero) a by-the-book believer in the power of the law is tasked with handling the case where he discovers Lomunno not only holds a monopolizing grip on the construction industry in the area but further investigation points to none other than Captain Bonavia as the instigator of the failed murder plot. Key to this saga is the disturbed inmate’s sister Serena Lipurna (Marilù Tolo) who was not only once romantically involved with Lomunno but eavesdropped on many of his private conversations with government officials, pointing to an even grander conspiracy shooting all the way up to the highest levels of power. Very quickly, the hunter becomes the hunted as legalities force the Captain out of office and he arms himself before attempting to take the last remnants of the law left into his own hands.

Full of luminous, split-diopter heavy camerawork by Claudio Ragona and a sizzling sinister score by legendary Cannibal Holocaust composer Riz Ortlani, Damiano Damiani’s Confessions of a Police Captain represents a masterful return to the genre he would eventually make his trademark style of output. Though violent with some particularly brutal murders and methods of disposing of the body of evidence like hiding it in a cement block, primarily this is a dialogue and politics driven character and social study. Something of a continuation of the Cosa Nostra series which ruminated on the rise of fascism in Italy and the inseparability of sociopolitical machinations with the mafia, it easily informs later works such as How to Kill a Judge and The Case is Closed, Forget It for its somber but wise regard for how these kinds of embattlements play themselves out.

A stark, sobering antidote to some of the more fantasy heroic poliziotteschis which see the bad guys getting their just desserts as justice, law and order prevails, Confessions of a Police Captain while an ensemble piece essentially boils down to Martin Balsam and Franco Nero. Nero who was a mainstay in Damiano’s films as the idealistic attorney who doesn’t know the full extent of corruption Balsam’s beleaguered cop is privy to. Balsam, a recurring face in Hitchcock and Cape Fear, makes an excellent (albeit Italian dubbed) turn as the Captain who at first seems conniving and nefarious until over time we (the audience) slowly come to understand his position.

Making its US Blu-ray disc premiere via Radiance Films following some scant and slipshod DVD releases over the years, now restored in 2K digital with optional original Italian or English dubbed audio, Confessions of a Police Captain comes housed with new interviews with actor Franco Nero and Michele Gammino with editor Antonio Siciliano. There’s an interview with film score expert Lovely Jon ruminating on Riz Ortolani’s pulsing score, reversible sleeve art with original Italian posters, a limited-edition booklet with archival interviews with Damiano Damiani and the time-honored OBI spine on the Radiance amaray case.

For those who already have Cosa Nostra and A Man on His Knees, this is a most welcome addition to the poliziotteschi fan’s ever-expanding library and Radiance Films have once again assembled a wonderful, comprehensive Blu-ray package for newcomers and those well versed in the Italian director’s canon.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Radiance Films: Romancing in Thin Air (2012) - Reviewed

2026-04-10T14:16:00.000-04:00

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Johnnie To’s 2012 mountainous countryside dramedy Romancing in Thin Air coming to Blu-ray disc in the West for the first time outside of Hong Kong and released the same year as his action crime epic Drug War represents a side of the director few if anyone outside of the country has glimpsed. Ordinarily working within the action thriller subgenre with some occasional comedy, the award-winning Running on Karma director offered up perhaps the most impassioned and heartfelt meditation on the overarching power of cinema and its connections to love, loss and grief since Cinema Paradiso or Goodbye Dragon Inn.

A movie-within-a-movie premise that mashes up the fast-paced glib lifestyle of celebrity against that of the ordinary civilian growing up enjoying celebrity aura, the Hong Kong-Chinese co-production finally takes its rightful place in Western cinephile libraries as a contemporary romantic classic palatable across many filmgoing circles. You don’t have to be a studied fan of Johnnie To or Hong Kong cinema in general for this one to tether its hooks into your heartstrings.

Hotshot Hong Kong movie star Michael Lau (Louis Koo) has just won the Best Actor award for his latest film alongside his costar Ding Yuanyuan (Gao Yuanyuan) and is about to propose marriage to her as a star-studded engagement when she instead elopes with her first love, coal miner Zhang Xing (Wang Baoqiang). Leaving him heartbroken, he begins a self-destructive alcohol binge and avoiding paparazzi stows away into the back of a Shangri-La Country bound truck to the remote mountainous countryside Deep Woods Hotel.

Falling ill from altitude sickness given the location, he reawakens under the care of Sau (Sammi Cheng) a widowed woman still grieving the loss of her husband who disappeared several years prior into the sea of trees. At first Michael is a big problem, stealing and wrecking Sau’s piano, truck and motorcycle on a drunken effort to get back home. Over time however, the two start forming an unlikely bond as he learns more about Sau’s past as an art student in Hong Kong and Michael soon discovers there’s far more to their relationship than either of them initially realized.

One of Johnnie To’s most nuanced and emotionally powerful films, a tender-hearted meditation on the inextricable link between personal trauma and cinematic catharsis and how one medium can impact the life and outlook of another, Romancing in Thin Air is a wonderful romantic dramedy that deftly mixes comic melodrama and unadorned emotional weight. From its evocative score by Guy Zerafa to its scenic panoramic scope widescreen cinematography by Cheng Siu-Keung, the picture has a soft loveliness to it with occasional tranquil vistas of the high-altitude hotel.

Featuring gifted and heartfelt performances from the two leads, Louis Koo as the hot shot actor forced to slow down his routine and get some much needed perspective and especially Sammi Cheng as the grieving widow who has hit the pause button on her own life into a status quo of melancholic mourning her husband’s eventual “return” from the sea of trees. Supporting performers are strong like Li Guangjie as Sau’s late husband Xiaotian glimpsed in emotional flashbacks as a man caught in the middle of meeting his wife’s expectations while also dealing with her own obsession with movie star Michael before he one day unknowingly stumbles upon her domain.

Released in the Winter of 2012 in both Hong Kong and mainland China prior to his return to the crime film with Drug War, Romancing in Thin Air was one of the director’s few pictures that did not secure international distribution for over a decade. Thankfully now with the proliferation of boutique labels like 88 Films, Arrow Video or Eureka Entertainment who have been pumping out Hong Kong films like no tomorrow, audiences now finally have a chance to give Romancing in Thin Air its proper due course.

Radiance’s Blu-ray disc presented in scope 2.35:1 widescreen featuring both Cantonese 5.1 surround or 2.0 stereo audio is housed with plentiful extras including an audio commentary with Dylan Cheung, video essay by Sean Gilman, behind-the-scenes footage with a making-of featurette, collector’s booklet and reversible sleeve art with the time-honored OBI spine. One of the action director’s very best movies showing him working far outside of his usual genre, Romancing in Thin Air is a pitch-perfect little romantic gem and testament to the lasting power of the movies on human relationships for better or worse.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Liberation Hall: Soul to Soul (1971) - Reviewed

2026-04-08T13:24:00.001-04:00

Images courtesy of Liberation Hall

In the winter of 1971, several American, soul, jazz and gospel artists ranging from Ike & Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, Santana, The Staple Singers, The Voices of East Harlem and Les McCann & Eddie Harris ventured overseas to Ghana, West Africa to partake in a legendary concert experience project entitled Soul to Soul. As much a gift of performance art, music and culture given back to the West African people as it was an enriching return to ancestral homeland and rekindling longstanding cultural roots for the artists themselves, it was a major concert event paving the way for such equally seismic African music revues as the eventual Zaire 74 concert which featured B.B. King and the Pointer Sisters among the performers. There to capture the performances in front of over 100,000 Ghanaians seeing them for the very first time was two-time Academy Award winning filmmaker and documentarian Denis Sanders in easily one of the greatest soul music concert films ever produced.

As much of a concert revue featuring many of the aforementioned artists as it is a soul-searching journey for those involved in going through local villages, meeting kings and enjoying traditional meals, song and dance with many of the residents of Ghana, Soul to Soul is something of a travelogue through 1970s West Africa. Filmed in 16mm under the direction of cinematographer Erik Daarstad and sharp juxtaposed editing between interviews on the plane to Africa, the landing and initial greeting and reception, concert numbers and subsequent traveling within villages by editor Sidney Levin (reedited for 2025 by Steve Scoville to comply with the Roberta Flack estate who demanded her scenes be removed) unfolds like a tapestry of culture and music. Picture quality is variable as with many concert films captured on 16mm including some shots with hair or dust on the gate and the 2.0 stereo track sounds adequate if not a little scratchy on some of the vocals and instrumentation but it shouldn’t detract from the audiovisual viewing listening experience.

It should also be known it is as educational for the artists involved as it is for us as they venture down through some of the country’s darker chapters including the issue of slavery and imprisonment with rumination on a particularly disturbing monument that destroys the hearts and minds of any and all who come near it. Having this mixture of regarding the country’s violent past history with slavery interlaced with the music tour sort of gives an even greater contextual and emotional weight than the film would’ve had without it. By the end of the journey, you’re as profoundly moved as the murderer’s row of performers are who take back with them from Africa to America following their concert far more than they brought when they first arrived. Not to mention all of the indigenous Ghanian musical acts including Guy Warren, the Damas Choir, The Psychedelic Aliens and the Anansekromian Zounds which are integrated with the African-American performances on stage.

Released in 1971, this legendary concert film somehow remained unavailable on home video until 2004 when the Grammy Foundation granted David Peck and his restoration team access to the original film elements for Soul to Soul which required extensive digital scanning. Circa 2025, via boutique label Liberation Hall, the film has been restored once again with extensive extras including outtake performances, running audio commentaries and a new 32-page booklet about the film by Grammy winning author Rob Bowman. As aforementioned, the scratchy raspy quality of the audio might present an issue for some listeners and home theater audiophiles but if you take it in stride you’re in for a wonderful concert film documentary experience by one of cinema’s unsung heroes of the medium. Despite the absence of the Roberta Flack performances for aforementioned legal reasons, the disc is stacked with additional supplemental features and despite the sonic shortcomings is an indelible addition to anyone’s multifaceted concert film libraries.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Criterion Corner: To da Break of Dawn: House Party (1990) - Reviewed

2026-04-07T18:09:00.002-04:00

Images courtesy of New Line Cinema

House Party (1990) is, at its core, a celebration and a snapshot of black culture in the '90s, with all its ups and downs. This film was a staple for me growing up, though I was on the younger side when it came out. Since we owned it on VHS, it got a lot of playtime both at my place and at my friend's houses, and as I transitioned into my teenage years, it occasionally popped up on cable.

As a kid, I was attracted to the sizzling energy and the playful tone, and I just knew that as soon as I was old enough to go to a real house party, it would be full of people wearing cool clothes and rehearsed dance numbers. Unfortunately, the vast majority of house parties are just people awkwardly standing around, maybe drinking too much, and the shindigs promised to me by this film (mythologized in the opening, when a party is so hyped up it literally blows the roof off) never materialized.

As an adult, House Party hits very differently, and though it is still mostly a fun, carefree affair, the darker elements stand out more. Christopher, AKA "Kid" to his peers, is a high schooler who is aspiring to be a rapper. His life is a balance between doing well in school to appease his father, Mr. Robinson (Robin Harris), and trying to impress the ladies and his friends. Although Kid's father is portrayed as the main antagonist, this is only from his perspective; it's clear that his father is overworked and underpaid, and that he's a single dad as well.

Black films were just starting to become more mainstream in Hollywood at the time, and this was also when they were transitioning into mostly serious dramas about life in the hood. House Party is about young adults trying to have a fun night on the surface, but it is also about the transition of black culture from the '80s to the '90s and the changes that came along with it.

In 1983, director Reginald Hudlin made a short film called House Party for his college thesis, and he kept many of its sequences in the full-length 1990 version. Even as generations change, many things remain universal, and aside from differences in fashion and music, the vibe of the two works is similar. For Hudlin, making the newer version of the story must have felt nostalgic, as when he made the first film, he was closer to the protagonists' age, and now he was several years older and more experienced. That is why the adult characters feel fleshed out and complex, and there is an underlying sadness for the way that the older generations faded into the background.

All of this tug-and-war between the urge to party and deeper societal issues is wrapped in fantastic cinematography and popping colors. '90s hip-hop fashion was just coming onto the scene, full of bright primary colors and pattern mixing, and Peter Deming's cinematography helps it jump off the screen. Deming has worked with Sam Raimi, David Lynch, and Wes Craven, and has mostly shot horror and comedy films.

The dynamic way he uses the camera really lends itself to the party scenes, which have a thrumming energy and infectious vibe that make the viewer want to join in. The soundtrack is also an all-timer and filled with songs from Kid 'n Play, Full Force, and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam; it was one of my favorite cassette tapes I had, and it hardly left my tape player.

House Party is a film about dichotomies: colorism, old versus young, the past versus the future, and the choices people make that feel good in the moment, repercussions be damned. It's alive and joyful, and an excellent time capsule of the early '90s.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED CRITERION 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director of photography Peter Deming and approved by writer-director Reginald Hudlin, with 4.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack

One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features

New audio commentary featuring Hudlin

New conversation featuring Hudlin, producer Warrington Hudlin, and film scholar Racquel Gates

New cast reunion featuring actors B-Fine, Bowlegged Lou, and the Legend Paul Anthony of Full Force; Tisha Campbell; AJ Johnson; Christopher “Play” Martin; Daryl “Chill” Mitchell; and Christopher “Kid” Reid

House Party (1983), the student short by Reginald Hudlin on which his feature is based

Trailer

English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

PLUS: An essay by author Michael Harriot

New cover by Gabe Tiberino

--Michelle Kisner

Criterion Corner: Performance (1970) - Reviewed

2026-04-07T12:11:00.000-04:00

Images courtesy of Janus Films

Scottish painter Donald Cammell’s 1970 co-directorial effort with then-cinematographer Nicolas Roeg Performance is one of the greatest unsung psychotronic surreal horror freakouts of British cinema featuring one of rock and roll’s signature lords of darkness with Mick Jagger in perhaps his most striking screen time to date. A film on paper that should’ve been a music-movie vehicle for The Rolling Stones frontman that in practice turned out to be a poisonous provocation about the gulf between the British gangster and the British rock star, Performance quickly joined the likes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s equally divisive and hallucinatory provocation Zabriskie Point which also sported Pink Floyd music. What to do with this unreleasable underground kaleidoscopic elliptical abstraction(?), wondered Warner Brothers who kept it on the shelf for two years before dumping it in 1970 following the success of X rated films like Midnight Cowboy.

Mired in controversy and rumors about whether or not the sex and drug use onscreen was real (some of it turned out to be) or if the gangsters in it were real and not professional actors or the perhaps actual maddening toll it took on its lead actor James Fox who wouldn’t act again for another ten years, initially Performance was reviled upon release. A forgotten footnote in Roeg’s career while Donald Cammell only made three more features including the 1977 sci-fi horror film Demon Seed and the 1987 horror film White of the Eye before tragically dying of suicide in 1996. Roeg would overshadow Cammell substantially for decades including such renowned modern classics as Don’t Look Now, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, Insignificance and especially The Witches, something Cammell would later resent Roeg for as the film’s bold and pioneering elliptical editing style would become trademark across the rest of Roeg’s oeuvre.

The story, if there is a narrative in this hedonistic odyssey through headspaces, seems to involve an East London gangster named Chas (James Fox) whose job is to rough up debtors though for the most part its all an act. However, following a dispute with his boss over a betting shop resulting in the violent death of another gangster, he dyes his hair red, dons sunglasses and a trenchcoat and ventures out to the countryside to go hide for awhile. Landing in the Notting Hill Gate home of Turner (Mick Jagger), a hedonistic Bohemian ex-musician living with Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michele Breton) in a kind of drug and sex fueled hippie commune. Very quickly, the film becomes a late-sixties countercultural reinterpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona with the two vastly different lifestyles bleeding into one another. Aware of their new guest’s existential crisis, a dose of psychedelic mushrooms and Pherber and Turner engage with Chas into an androgynous, increasingly inebriated wallow into the inferno with Chas as Dante and Turner as this Hellscape’s Virgil.

The violent, angry birth of a boldly new style of storytelling and filmmaking, the emergence of Donald Cammell and particularly Nicolas Roeg on the silver screen, Performance is maybe the most singularly anarchic British film of the early 1970s next to A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs and The Devils. The most aggressively abstractly weird British film of the decade next to Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout, another sensorial interpretive psychotronic freakout, the film features amid the intentionally incoherent whirlwind editing of the first hour a gifted if not David Hemmings-esque performance (no pun intended) from lead actor James Fox. In the film’s early developmental stages when it was more of a carefree comedy before evolving into a production Warner Brothers wanted to wash their hands of, Marlon Brando was in consideration for the Fox role. Channeling Alain Delon’s Le Samourai in some respects before gradually morphing into Syd Barrett, its a committed out-on-a-limb piece of acting.

The beacon of this strange waking nightmare is Mick Jagger who technically made his screen debut with the western Ned Kelly but in actuality shot this two-years earlier. From his androgynous effeminate sexuality, constantly surrounded by nubile women falling out of their clothes, his eyelashes that seem to sparkle on camera, his sermonizing to the film’s hero, Jagger much like David Bowie who would star in Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth is an impenetrable force of nature. With magnetic, infectious screen presence which Roeg knows precisely how to capture and integrate the spirit of on 35mm film, Jagger despite having appeared on film many times later over the years gives whether he meant to or not something of a transcendent performance. One scene which particularly catches one’s attention is a surreal dream sequence in which Chas the gangster imagines going back to confront his fellow adversaries only this time rehabilitated into Turner form. As Turner cavorts about and scowls the lyrics to Memo from Turner and emasculates gangsters asking them to disrobe, we find ourselves in the uncharted sociopolitical satirical territory of Lindsay Anderson’s if… as well as its sister sequel O Lucky Man!

Also spectacular in this netherworld of hedonistic sensorial excess is Anita Pallenberg whose sex scenes with Mick Jagger (rumored to be unsimulated) created a rift with his The Rolling Stones bandmate Keith Richards at the time and they had to get Ry Cooder to step in to play the guitar on the film version of Memo from Turner. Despite the scenes of actual heroin use in one shot of Pallenberg openly shooting into her exposed buttocks, Pallenberg much like Jagger who was a part of their entourage before the film came along sort of joins Jagger’s Turner as the knowing seductive queen of this circle of Hell. Drifting in and out of this void is Lucy (Michele Breton) who also like Pallenberg is something of an impish succubus in Turner and Pherber’s sphere when little girl Lorraine (Laraine Wickens) isn’t popping about sporting a fake mustache, further adding to the madcap hallucinatory nature of the piece. Also for those who are really looking, Ken Colley aka Admiral Piett from The Empire Strikes Back and The Devils shows up in it as a close friend of the film’s hero Chas.

Much like The Devils, another X rated British shocker from Warner Brothers, the studio after financing and looking at the film tried to wash their hands of it before dumping Performance into theaters with an incoherent marketing campaign. Budgeted at $1.5 million, it was a take it or leave it proposition for the studio and churning out another X rated film might draw in some countercultural attention. Despite the almost universally negative initial reception it received, the film began garnering cult revival screenings until the 1990s had reversed its reputation completely into reappraisal. By the 2000s, it gained an ardent following with particular attention devoted to Mick Jagger’s acting with the periodical Film Comment naming it the greatest acting performance by a musician in cinema history. Later still Quentin Tarantino called it one of the greatest rock movies of all time and James Fox’s gangster his favorite British gangster portrait.

Since being canonized into The Criterion Collection in a new 4K UHD special edition, the reputation of Performance as a still distinctly bold masterwork eons ahead of its time continues to grow. With renewed attention through MTV and Big Audio Dynamite’s song E=MC² which featured audio samples from the film, Coil’s Further Back and Faster and Happy Mondays’ Bummed featuring several songs echoing the plotline of the film, it was coming up through musical circles which only fueled cult interest. Tony Scott was also an avowed fan and made references to it in Beat the Devil and later True Romance. Looking at it now, it is every bit as unbending to interpretation and inaccessible to the senses as it was when Warner executives first saw test screenings of it. A movie that seemed, much like Antonioni’s Blow Up, to capture the essence of the mod-sixties leading towards the darker themed violence of the seventies, Performance still won’t be for most people but others it will be a roller coaster ride that’s hard to know when to loosen your grip from.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Arrow Video: The Eye (2002) - Reviewed

2026-04-06T16:49:00.003-04:00

Images courtesy of Arrow Video

While Japanese horror or J-horror was on the rise following the release of Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge, Asian horror also started to see a flurry of activity and attention in China as well. Following the debut film Bangkok Dangerous from directorial duo Danny and Oxide Pang, known professionally as the Pang Brothers, they caught the attention of Three…Extremes producer and The Love Letter director Peter Ho-sun Chan who with screenwriter Jojo Hui mounted the Cantonese/Mandarin/Thai supernatural horror epic The Eye. A film whose opening credits borrow sound effects and music from Ringu, The Eye which saw two sequels also by the Pang Brothers and three remakes including a 2008 Hollywood film with Jessica Alba for me personally always sort of felt somewhere between Hideo Nakata and M. Night Shyamalan. Aspects of it will make your hair stand on end, particularly in this new Arrow Video 4K UHD special edition, but still it didn’t reinvent the wheel for Asian horror for me anymore than Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call did.

Blind musician Wong Kar Mun (Angelica Lee) undergoes an experimental cornea transplant surgery which restores her vision, illuminating the world around her. However, there’s a caveat: now she can also see gruesome visions of the dead The Sixth Sense or V/H/S 2 style. Initially conveying this to her psychiatrist Dr. Wah (Lawrence Chou) who is skeptical about her claims, the visions worsen with ghostly black apparitions coming to claim the spirts of the recently deceased. Then one morning, she wakes up and discovers to her horror it is not her reflection looking back at her but the spirit of some other entity that has attached itself to her. Desperate for closure and normalcy, she and Dr. Wah venture out to Thailand in search of the donor they got her new cornea from. As it turns out, Ling (Chutcha Rujinanon) was no ordinary donor but had the second sight ability to see premonitory visions of imminent disaster. But can they find out what Ling’s spirit is looking for before it takes suicidal possession over her new host Wong Kar Mun?

Drawing heavily from the Bangkok gas explosion on New Petchburi Road on September 24^th 1990 which killed 88 people and destroyed 67 cars as well as a report in the Hong Kong press about a 16 year old girl who ad a corneal transplant and committed suicide soon thereafter, The Eye is more or less the Hong Kong version of Ringu replete with elements of the detective thriller as characters travel great distances to obtain clues pertaining to the strange phenomena. On the one hand narratively it is conventional despite having a pan-Asian cast and crew with a Malaysian lead actress Angelica Lee who gives an otherwise powerful scream queen performance, a Chinese-Canadian singer Lawrence Chou, a Signaporean singer Pierre Png and Thai actress Chutcha Ruhinanon. The crew also included Thai cinematographer Decha Seementa and Thai music group Orange Music and audiovisually the film looks and sounds lovely in between being hair raising.

On the other hand where it does work pretty well, much like Ringu, is in its ability to terrify by having a phantom slowly nebulously careening towards the camera. Some of its best scenes come in the first thirty minutes when our heroine takes her bandages off her eyes and can faintly see shapes and shadows but can’t make out why one of them is floating closer and closer to her face. Another standout scene involves an elevator spirit with its head hung low, something only she can see like a scream one can’t emit, playing on fear of the uncanny. Moments like this can still give goosebumps even to seasoned horror fans but the denouement for me diffused much of the tension that had been built up over the course of the movie.

Whatever your stance is or isn’t on this movie (I’m still split on it years after seeing the Palm Pictures DVD back in the early 2000s), Arrow Video’s 4K UHD is a vast and welcome improvement over previous releases. Palm Pictures’ DVD was a PAL to NTSC transfer originally, resulting in ghosting on the image which in theory can benefit a film like this but it was nice to finally see it without that PAL/NTSC conversion patina on the image. Sound wise it still packs a decent punch with frequent use of the building of strings by Orange Music. Arrow Video have also included in addition to an archival making-of press kit a new video interview with Peter Ho-sun Chan, a visual essay by Heather Wixson and an archival featurette on directors Danny and Oxide Pang. Though the sequels haven’t been included in this release, something which perhaps Arrow will resolve down the line, this new UHD of The Eye is most certainly the definitive home video release of this Chinese horror freakout. While I’m still divided over the thing as a whole, Arrow’s disc won’t disappoint fans keen on seeing the ongoing expansion of East Asian horror.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Visual Vengeance: The Paranormal (1998) - Reviewed

2026-04-06T15:52:00.002-04:00

Images courtesy of Visual Vengeance

Visual Vengeance continues to pick up steam as the new frontrunner of unearthing and rereleasing SOV (shot-on-video) films on Blu-ray disc in deluxe trinket-heavy special limited editions and their latest find, Todd Sheets’ contemporary Todd Norris’ 1998 supernatural movie-theater set horror flick The Paranormal is one of the company’s best acquisitions since The Abomination. Shot and set in the historic Kansas City Englewood Theater which is chock full of Old Hollywood movie memorabilia including but not limited to exquisitely framed posters and antiquated concession stands, the debut film of Todd Norris was considered for some time to be a lost SOV film. Barely given a distribution plan before being rescued by Visual Vengeance, it represents a videotape movie not only with a head on its shoulders but a genuine love for the magic of the movies including notions of cinema as a portal to other dimensions that would make Jean Cocteau or David Lynch blush.

In the beloved Englewood Theater whose marquee is proudly displayed throughout the film, some kind of poltergeist activity is afoot with lights turning on by themselves or ghostly apparitions starting the 35mm projectors on their own. Enter paranormal investigator Kyle Jennings (the director himself Todd Norris) a nerdy college kid who is laughed off by Professor Gumangan (Nenita Gumangan) but summoned by the theater to see what’s going on.

After bringing in surveillance video equipment and reuniting with an old high school friend working as one of the projectionists at the theater, the terror ignites when they find themselves trapped inside the theater Demons style and discover a portal appears on the movie screen allowing monsters from the film Z is for Zombie to actively spill over into the auditorium threatening the safety of the Professor and the projectionists. Eventually a search in the basement of the theater leads to the discovery of a cursed supernatural film reel which may hold the key to preventing the portal from unleashing unknown horrors into our universe.

Co-written by C. Wayne Owens and exceedingly well shot and blocked for a video feature by cinematographers Kurt Branstetter and Edward Stencel with most of the production work, editing and sound completed by Todd Norris himself, The Paranormal is surprisingly really good for what it is. A scrappy yet astute little number with colorful lighting, innovative visual effects including a sneaky cribbing of the Alien xenomorph scream that was more charming than cringey, a scene where 35mm film stock turns into a tentacled The Evil Dead styled monster and just a hint of Cocteau’s Orpheus permeating the whole thing, what could’ve been a tedious lo-fi SOV slog is a sharp and taut, lean mean indie. Pushing the envelope and expectations of what people think of when it comes to the SOV picture, The Paranormal soars past expectations large and small into the stratosphere. Rarely do little video numbers or pickups from Visual Vengeance get it so awesomely right!

Presented on Blu-ray disc in a new director-supervised transfer of the original tape elements, sometimes the audio or video can be spotty but overall it is clean and dialogue is audible. In addition to the director commentary, there’s a running commentary with the film’s composer Paul Andrew Roberts who also conjures up an overqualified score for this scrappy little indie. Just for fun, there’s a video interview pairing up The Two Todds aka Todd Norris and Todd Sheets. There’s at least four short films by Norris leading up to his feature film debut in the extras, deleted scenes, a blooper reel and even video of the Channel 5 airing bumpers. As always, Visual Vengeance goes above and beyond the call of duty providing a VHS sticker set, a set of paranormal glasses and a folded mini-poster. For those new and/or unaccustomed to the world of SOV films or Visual Vengeance, this might be their best new acquisition yet, surpassing my first of theirs The Abomination despite the lo-fi heights that one reached.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Arrow Video: Wandering Ginza Butterfly Collection (1972) - Reviewed

2026-04-06T15:10:00.003-04:00

Images courtesy of Arrow Video

At the height of Meiko Kaji’s career as a Japanese action heroine in the Female Prisoner Scorpion film series which began in 1972, the actress joined forces with recurring Delinquent Girl Boss and future Wolf Guy director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi in a two-film pair of gambling actioners Wandering Ginza Butterfly and its sister sequel She-Cat Gambler. Both films made in the same year as the first two entries in the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, they were a mixture of Meiko Kaji’s emergence as an important leading lady in the yakuza action subgenre which included gambling, the deceptive nature of hostess work and finally brutally violent retaliation. Previously released on DVD via Synapse Films, both films now come housed in a digitally restored Arrow Video Blu-ray disc with plentiful extras including a collector’s booklet and reversible sleeve art. For those just getting into Meiko Kaji as well as those well versed in her filmography, Arrow Video’s Wandering Ginza Butterfly collection represents Kaji at the peak of her creative powers and screen presence.

Higuchi Nami (Meiko Kaji) aka The Red Cherry Blossom, we learn over flashback and a cool sassy opening sequence where she puts a new fellow prison inmate in her place, was a Bōsōzoku (Japanese motorcycle gang) leader jailed for three years following the assassination of a yakuza. Following her sentence, she returns home seeking residence with her uncle at his pool hall whom she’s a skilled player at. Playing pool against a pimp named Ryuji (Tsunehiko Watase), with his help she picks up night shifts at a local hostess club in the Ginza. However when a rival yakuza gang led by Owada (Koji Nanbara) threatens to take over the club, murdering Ryuji’s brother in the process, Nami and her uncle take matters into their own hands defending his pool hall while seeking bloody vengeance against Owada’s gang.

Picking up where the first film left off and released that same year is Wandering Ginza Butterfly 2: She-Cat Gambler, a continuation (and quasi repeat of) the first film which pairs Kaji up with future Wolf Guy lead Sonny Chiba. With some of the events and names changed up, this time with Sonny Chiba playing Ryuji, we learn Nami is on the hunt for her father’s murderer in Hoshiden. Becoming a hostess at a Ginza club once more, her path crosses with Ryuji (Sonny Chiba) a street rat who takes a liking to Nami and soon joins forces on her quest for vengeance. Scouring one scuzzy gambling pit after another until they land at their destination, it sets the stage for an even grander action heavy finale than the first film with a high body count of well-dressed yakuza smashing through walls waving katanas about and ample arterial spray.

Both films co-written by Golgo 13: Assignment Kowloon screenwriter Isao Matsumoto and scored by Battles Without Honor and Humanity composer Toshiaki Tsuhima and released by Toei in between the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, the Wandering Ginza Butterfly collection is a splendid dose of 1970s yakuza action flair featuring one of its fiercest goddesses slicing and dicing her way through adversaries. With each film lensed in Toeiscope widescreen, the first by Graveyard of Honor cinematographer Hanjirô Nakazawa and the second by Karate Bear Fighter cameraman Yoshio Nakajima, the series looks radiant and luminous with frequent nighttime vistas of neon lights and signs illuminating Tokyo. Coasting off of the cool and quietly ferocious energy of Meiko Kaji as a seemingly kindly hostess who is secretly a bloodthirsty warrioress keen on righting wrongs percolating within the Ginza yakuza world. In the first film, Tsunehiko Watase does an admirable job of portraying her unlikely ally but it goes without saying Sonny Chiba is also arguably at the height of his screen persona and plays excellently off of Meiko Kaji’s fierceness.

Coming to Blu-ray disc for the first time via Arrow Video, each film includes both new and archival audio commentaries. There’s an archival interview with the director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi as well as an archival video essay on the work of Meiko Kaji alongside a newly filmed video interview with Patrick Macias and Matt Alt on the sequel film She-Cat Gambler. With each film running briskly within the 80 to 90-minute ranges, the double-feature collection of Wandering Ginza Butterfly while not nearly as talked about as Meiko Kaji’s Female Prisoner Scorpion series which began the same year is nevertheless an important addition to one’s yakuza film library and growing appreciation of Kaji’s oeuvre. Both transfers look splendid in 2.35:1 scope widescreen with lossless Japanese monoaural sound. The cool energy emanating off of both of these Kaji films is almost like an aura, a snapshot of then-modern Tokyo with one of its most violent heroines sneakily lurking its Ginza streets.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Criterion Corner: My Own Private Idaho (1991) - Reviewed

2026-04-01T14:16:00.000-04:00

Images courtesy of Janus Films

New Queer Cinema purveyor and torchbearer Gus Van Sant, the writer-director of Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy and much later winner of the coveted Palme d’Or for his Columbine based drama Elephant, is one of the great directors of our time. Though he’d eventually cross over into the mainstream with Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, Van Sant remained an arthouse auteur at heart. A much kinder, gentler kind of Gregg Araki with his camera trained on bisexual drifters or hustlers on the roads of the American Midwest foraging for survival fishing around for some measure of love however miniscule.

Following his second feature Drugstore Cowboy with Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch in the Portland, Oregon shot and set drug addiction dark comedy, Van Sant sought to do something far more ambitious and perhaps on the same level of experimental artistic intellectual acumen as his contemporary Todd Haynes and his own 1991 debut Poison. The result was a loose reinterpretation and transposition of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Part 1, Henry IV: Part 2 and Henry V into a modern-day odyssey of cross-country (and eventually international) self-discovery with the landmark epic My Own Private Idaho.

Mike Waters (River Phoenix in a career best performance) is a bisexual street hustler suffering from narcolepsy with frequent blackouts including during sessions with clients, often winding up in places with no sense of time or whereabouts. Abandoned by his mother as a child, glimpsed through grainy home movie styled flashbacks, he wanders the streets of Seattle amid other male prostitutes before ending up with an older female client Alena (Twin Peaks star Grace Zabriskie) alongside two other hustlers Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) and Gary (Rodney Harvey). Blacking out right before sex with the woman, he wakes up with Scott in Porland, Oregon. From here, Mike and Scott form an unlikely union working together as hustlers but mostly screwing around and playing ala The Last Detail.

A bit of a road movie, their sojourn introduces Mike to Scott’s friend Bob Pigeon (William Richert) a scruffy middle-aged former mentor to young hustlers seeking shelter in his squalid apartment building where it comes to light Scott is sitting on a pending inheritance from his father and Portland Mayor Jack Favor (Tom Troupe) who is put off by his son’s hustling ways. Mike, still yearning for reunion with his mother who comes into his every blackout, with the help of Scott and a dandy male client Hans (Udo Kier) and his fancy car ventures off to Idaho to meet Mike’s older brother Richard (James Russo) with the hopes of gathering information on his mother’s whereabouts. Turns out she herself went to Italy in search of her own ancestors, eventually leading our two heroes overseas in search of Mike’s mother. Instead they meet a young Italian woman named Carmela (Chiara Caselli) who lives there now and quickly steals the heart of Scott away from Mike who by this point has fallen in love with him.

Presented in a fragmented, elliptical style reflecting the half-awake and sleepy perspective of Mike Waters as his partner in crime and close friend Scott Favor navigates him through open plains and highways, grimy alleyways and dilapidated hotel grounds littered with drug addicts, petty thieves and dirty bathrooms filled with cruisers turning tricks, My Own Private Idaho is a tragicomic odyssey through the heart of the American Pacific Northwest. At once brutal and unforgiving while also being tender and romantic, from Bill Stafford’s gentle natured pedal steel guitar score to Eric Alan Edwards and John Campbell’s striking, Earthy cinematography from innovative uses of slow motion to curiously transcendent sexual encounters featuring actors in compromising positions that feel less like porn and more like artistic poses, the film is honest but never acerbic or abrasive despite the then-taboo subject matter.

In addition to Bill Stafford’s arrangements for Home on the Range and America the Beautiful and two Udo Kier tracks, the film is a cacophony of needle drops still without an original soundtrack album release. From Madonna’s Cherish and Elton John’s Blue Eyes to a striking recurring use of Rudy Vallée’s Deep Night, the film speaks to Gus Van Sant’s musical vocabulary and how Van Sant would later help secure the rights to the needle drops populating one man wunderkind Jonathan Caouette’s epic self- portrait Tarnation in 2003. As with My Own Private Idaho due to the nebulous rights issues surrounding many of the artists featured on the film, no soundtrack album exists for Tarnation at present, another vital chapter in the emergence of idiosyncratic and often experimental New Queer Cinema.

River Phoenix who would tragically pass away two years later following his Volpi Cup win at the Venice Film Festival and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor for My Own Private Idaho, is a subtle and nuanced yet fully committed and detailed performance from the multifaceted actor. Made the same year as Dogfight, another groundbreaking performance and Criterion Collection pickup, Phoenix achieves a palpable disorientation and emotional chilliness onscreen only rivaled by the likes of Mickey Rourke or D.B. Sweeney. Most startlingly for viewers is the arrival of Keanu Reeves on the dramatic stage as the adventurous alpha male lead in this unlikely couple of gay hustlers. Having recently been in the Bill and Ted movies, his commitment to the role of Scott Favor and his own respective character transformation almost makes you forget where you last saw him. Turning over strong supporting roles including Udo Kier including a hilarious bit where he sings a song he wrote specifically for the film, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, director William Richert in a rare acting bit and Grace Zabriskie in one of her few non-terrifying roles.

Premiering at the 48^th Venice Film Festival in the Fall of 1991 before being granted a limited theatrical release at the end of the month in the United States, the conceptually controversial $2.5 million evocative road movie with Shakespearean overtones did modestly well raking in somewhere around $8.1 million including Canadian and United Kingdom sales. An out of the gate critical triumph with many of the film industry’s top critics heaping effusive praise upon River Phoenix’s performance, it further went on to win both Best Screenplay for Gus Van Sant and Best Film Music for Bill Stafford at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Originally released on tape and laserdisc in 1992, the film was given a much-needed dose of adrenaline in 2005 thanks to The Criterion Collection who put together a comprehensive two-disc DVD set before rereleasing the film again in 2015 on Blu-ray in a new 4K digital restoration. An important film for all involved, particularly Van Sant in his first real enigmatic narrative predating Elephant and Last Days while also being perhaps the peak screen time with River Phoenix in a film that also helped Keanu Reeves grow his dramatic strengths, My Own Private Idaho remains an essential piece of 1990s modern cinema where all the stars aligned and shined brightly and proudly.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Classic Cinema: Footlight Parade (1933) - Reviewed

2026-03-31T15:22:00.000-04:00

Images courtesy of Warner Brothers

1933 was the year of the Warner Brothers Vitaphone pre-code musical escapist melodrama choreographed by Busby Berkeley, co-written by James Seymour and featuring original songs and music by Harry Warren and Al Dublin and the year that saved the studio and perhaps the musical subgenre itself. Comprised of Gold Diggers of 1933, 42^nd Street and today’s film Footlight Parade, all three pictures more or less unanimously aired the same declaration: there’s no Business like Show Business! Made and set amid the Great Depression, all three pictures concern failing musical directors or actresses or performers somewhere in New York trying to put on a successful show with all the behind-the-scenes drama on full display. Usually centered around the formulation of a show and uphill battles between stage director and performer, eventually the show inevitably goes on before a live audience and from there the film drifts freely into visually expansive fantastical musical numbers.

Chester Kent (James Cagney) is down on his luck in the Depression era Broadway musical circuit as a stage musical director. However, not all is lost as he shifts gears instead focusing on musical numbers called “prologues”, i.e. short live stage productions presented in movie theaters before a film is shown on a film screen. Weighing down on a beleaguered theater director who repeatedly decries “It can’t be done!”, Chester soon finds himself in over his head as investors demand he stages prologues throughout the country. Meanwhile competing rival outfits are busily trying to steal his ideas through a mole inside his own company. All the time, unbeknownst to the stressed and overwhelmed Chester, his dutiful and devoted secretary Nan (Joan Blondell) has fallen for him and through all of this is his closest ally. As the clock continues to tick closer to showtime, Chester’s hand is forced and he locks himself and his staff inside the theater to intensely rehearse and star in the show himself in order to prevent thievery of his musical theater concepts.

Written for the screen by Manuel Seff and James Seymour based on a story by Robert Lord and Peter Milne, Footlight Parade is perhaps among the most spectacular Busby Berkeley Depression era escapist musicals about show business in the trio of Gold Diggers of 1933 and even 42^nd Street. A vehicle for James Cagney to return to his vaudevillian roots and move away from the gangster film ala The Public Enemy, featuring a lot of singing and dancing including risque pre-code numbers like Shanghai Lil and the visually stunning By a Waterfall sequence including three hundred trained swimmer dancers, its at once bawdy and more than a little racist including some offending black face as well as yellow face with references to an opium den and brothel. Still, it is the first time Cagney ever danced onscreen in a film and the By a Waterfall montage which plainly influenced a certain parody in The Great Muppet Caper and later still Hail, Caesar! remains one of the seven wonders of the cinema world in terms of sheer grandiosity. Watching these scenes unfold in motion, your mind briefly forgets the very things that date it to the pre-code Hollywood era as you are swept up in the sensory overload. No excuses as well as no denying the visual splendor on display too.

Busby Berkeley’s choreography, it goes without saying, is almost like a Rorschach kaleidoscopic bending of the visual senses with arresting set pieces by Anton Grot and Jack Okey. Special attention goes to renowned Oscar-winning cinematographer George Barnes who was nominated for Best Cinematography a total of eight times before finally winning for work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. There’s also some movie-within-movie commentary on Hollywood, cinemas and the concept of the ‘prologue’ live theater act such as a notable sequence where the principal characters are in a theater and watch a short film before the screen lifts up and another live program goes on. And within the film itself is a literal walking censor in the form of Hugh Herbert who keeps stepping in to point out which elements of the show go too far.

The cast is star studded with a fantastic Joan Blondell as a wisecracking confident secretary who seems to always be cleaning up after her client James Cagney’s messes. Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Frank McHugh and Guy Kibbee make up much of the supporting cast while those who are really looking will spot an early role by future Legend, Rumpelstiltskin and Willow actor Billy Barty. Mostly though, it plays off of the screen dynamic of Blondell and James Cagney’s musical dancing talents in a role that all but completely dispels any and all notions of his gangster film fare. Late into the film when he has to take over finishing the show and locks everyone into the theater so they can rehearse without interruption, I was reminded of the dramatic turn he’d later take in Man of a Thousand Faces as Lon Chaney and how he was able to balance the role-within-a-role theatricality. In a role that’s alive with bursting energy and physical movement that took years of training, it speaks volumes to just how talented the actor really was and could do far more than appear intimidating or threatening.

Released theatrically in 1933, the film budgeted at around $703,000 raked in a staggering $2.4 million, making it one of the most profitable films for Warner Brothers of that year. In 1992, the film was inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and in 2006 was further nominated for the AFI’s Greatest Movie Musicals. Largely a chance for James Cagney to show what he really could do in a role that sort of reunited him with his roots, Footlight Parade while at times problematic in that pre-code way for some people is unquestionably an astounding achievement in technical filmmaking, choreography and larger than life screen personas lifting the hearts and minds of Depression Era viewership. One of a kind and still dazzling to the eyes in an almost hallucinatory fashion, Footlight Parade is both timeless and a snapshot of a transitional time of economic strife and survival for an entire nation of American filmgoers. Most of all, its really fun and kind of breathtaking at times.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Unearthed Films: Evilenko (2004) - Reviewed

2026-03-30T12:44:00.002-04:00

Images courtesy of Unearthed Films

Not wholly unlike Sean Connery following his turns in The Red Tent and The Russia House, Malcolm McDowell soon after starring in Karen Shakhnazarov’s 1991 Russian produced English language drama The Assassin of the Tsar began appearing in more Russian oriented casting roles. The most notable example, one which apparently was initially a problem for the actor, was in Italian writer-director David Grieco’s debut true-crime film Evilenko in 2004.

Loosely based on the director’s own fictionalized novel account The Communist Who Ate Children examining the life and exploits of Ukrainian born Soviet serial killer Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo with the last name changed to Evilenko, the 80s-set period crime drama saw McDowell in perhaps his most evil incarnate role to date, surpassing A Clockwork Orange and Disturbed even. Released in Italian and British cinemas before surfacing on DVD in the US via TLA Releasing, the film languished in rights limbo for years until boutique label Unearthed Films saw fit to dole out a full 4K UHD limited collector’s edition package.

1984 Kyiv, schoolteacher Andrei Romanovich Evilenko (Malcolm McDowell sporting thick-rimmed glasses in a raincoat with a tie and demonic gaze) is discharged from his position after attempting to sexually assault one of his students. Responding by claiming the school board “no longer represents true communism” following the collapse of the Soviet Union and left to his own devices, soon Evilenko unleashes a killing spree involving the rape, murder and cannibalization of women and especially children.

Meanwhile local magistrate and father figure Vadim Timurovich Lesiev (Marton Csokas) is tasked with tracking down and incarcerating the killer while psychiatrist Aron Richter (Ronald Pickup) tries to profile him. Supposedly through all of this, it is implied Evilenko has innate psychic abilities which enable him to easily lure in his victims and manages to claim as many as 55 victims before authorities inevitably do catch up to the beast in the act of feeding.

Made after the 1995 American TV film Citizen X which saw Jeffrey DeMunn in the role of Chikatilo with far more artistic liberties taken with the facts and figures in the 2004 film by David Grieco, Evilenko is an effectively draining and repellent crime scene investigation serial killer drama. Featuring McDowell in an unforgettably carnivorous performance as a pedophilic serial murderer who at one point is literally caught red handed feeding on a fresh kill, Evilenko from its grim visual aesthete by Fabio Zamorion to its overtly Twin Peaks sounding score by legendary composer Angelo Badalamenti is a thoroughly miserable and unsettling experience.

Moody and dour, the film is aided by a brave and at one point daring performance by Marton Csokas as the strained detective working in tandem with Ronald Pickup as the psychiatrist who is among the first of the authorities to figure out Evilenko is the killer. The ensemble cast of supporting character actors are also good though special attention goes to the underage cast who have to play against a pretty terrifying Malcolm McDowell.

Released in the spring of 2004 Italy, budgeted at around $9.7 million, the film gained a cult following thanks to its leading actor and original score by Angelo Badalamenti which also featured two songs with Dolores O’Riordan singing Angels Go to Heaven and No Way Out. The film was nominated for the prestigious David di Donatello Award for Best New Director and the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists as well as won the Fantafestival Grand Prize while Malcolm McDowell won the European Silver Ribbon for Best Actor.

Sometime in 2015, Ridley Scott and Daniel Espinosa did a big screen Hollywood film adaptation with the ghastly and ill-fated $50 million bomb Child 44, a curious star-studded misfire that’s largely been forgotten. While that film continues to burn into cinders and ash, the reputation of Evilenko just got a shot of adrenaline with Unearthed Films’ new 4K UHD made from the original camera negative and stacked with plentiful extras including a new commentary by McDowell and Grieco, an 81-minute cast and crew interview including McDowell and Angelo Badalamenti and an in-depth look at the real life of Andrei Chikatilo. While the subject has been tackled a few times in film with debatable results, despite the fictional aspects Evilenko is probably the definitive screen adaptation of one of the Soviet Union’s most bloodthirsty killers.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Arrow Video: Innerspace (1987) - Reviewed

2026-03-28T19:36:00.001-04:00

images courtesy of Arrow Video

Joe Dante is one of those directors the millennial generation will always remember fondly, followed shortly thereafter by the inevitable question: "Whatever happened to that guy?" After a quick visit to Mr. Dante's IMDb page, it turns out that the man who brought us Gremlins, The Howling, The Burbs, and Explorers hasn't made a film in over a decade. Other than stints on episodic television, his last feature was the forgotten 2014 horror comedy titled Burying the Ex, and it's safe to say it will never be included among his list of classic efforts, but Innerspace absolutely should be. If you counted this as a remake of Richard Fleischer's Fantastic Voyage (it sort of is), Innerspace would rank with the best 80s remakes, sitting right next to Carpenter's The Thing, Cronenberg's The Fly, and Russell's The Blob.

Like those other amazing remakes, Innerspace takes advantage of the technological leaps made in the years after its predecessor hit theaters in 1966, brings the story into the present day, and makes the characters more relatable. Instead of stiff scientists on a journey of exploration through the unseen depths of the human body, we have Dennis Quaid as hotshot pilot Tuck Pendleton. Imagine Pete "Maverick" Mitchell if he couldn't lay off the sauce, and Meg Ryan was his girlfriend instead of Goose's wife. His qualifications for getting miniaturized inside a submersible pod and sent into the annals of anatomy? "He was the only one we could find who was crazy enough to do it." Seems legit.

images courtesy of Arrow Video

Quaid has less than 20 minutes to let us know exactly who his character is, bare his flaws (and his ass), and gain our sympathies before the excrement hits the air conditioning. He nails it. The chemistry he has with Meg Ryan is off the charts, which is no surprise since the two eventually married in real life after meeting on the set of this film. The screenplay by Chip Proser and the prolific Jeffrey Boam (he also wrote Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) hits the ground running, and it isn't long before mercenary-style industrial sabotage turns a trial run for miniaturization tech into a field test with an unwilling guinea pig: None other than Martin Short as Jack Putter, a hypochondriac who should just buy his doctor a boat in lieu of forking over cash for his numerous office visits.

After fleeing from a half-cyborg assassin (just go with it), the doctor in charge of the experiment, played by Howling cinematographer John Hora, manages to dodge death just long enough to inject the miniaturized Quaid into Martin Short's buttocks. Quaid begins his journey by piloting through a sea of fat cells, and from here the movie belongs to Martin Short, whose gift for physical comedy is on full display. The moments when he first hears Quaid speaking to him are comedy gold. ("Somebody help me! I'm possessed!") He also has absolute banger chemistry with Meg Ryan. The two share a lot of screen time together, and one scene in particular that leads to the movie's most touching moment.

images courtesy of Arrow Video

The typical Dante regulars such as Dick Miller, Kevin McCarthy, and Robert Picardo are along for the ride as well. Picardo has so much fun with his part, he manages to steal the movie from Short for a while. As a character known only as The Cowboy, Picardo couldn't fit the bill any less than he does, but that's exactly what makes him perfect: He plays the part looking and talking like a Mexican Jew whose dad forced him to watch A Fistful of Dollars in between the ass-kickings that peppered his formative years. Eventually he gets laughs just by showing up, and that's the kind of screen presence you can't learn in school. Picardo truly is a national treasure.

You'll notice that I'm spending most of my time discussing the characters and the comedy. Pretty incredible, considering this is a movie that won an Oscar for its Visual Effects (the only Dante film to date to win any). Thanks to this outstanding 4K transfer by Arrow Video, taken from the original negative and approved by the director, Innerspace has never looked this good. Supervised by the impeccable craftsman Dennis Muren, these effects do more than hold up: They still inspire genuine awe and wonder after 40 years. Quaid's journey takes him through two different bodies, flying his tiny pod through arteries, behind the optic nerve, and even survives a rather perilous battle inside Short's ulcer-ridden stomach.

images courtesy of Arrow Video

All of that is truly wonderful stuff to behold. It's eye candy in the truest sense, but the effects work better because they're grounded by three terrific performances that keep our attention, keep us laughing, and generate sympathy from the audience. Quaid spends most of the movie in the pod, talking to Short only because the science team thought to equip him with tech that allows him to see and hear what his host experiences. So most of the time Quaid and Short are just talking to themselves on two different sets, likely on different days of shooting. The kinetic energy of the performances and editing make this all so convincing that it doesn't register just how great their acting is until you stop to think about it. Meg Ryan as Lydia plays a version of her usual lovable self. Casting her was a stroke of genius because we only have about ten minutes to fall for her before the movie has to sidetrack her for a while, but we never forget her, just like Tuck. Once she's in the thick of the action, she holds her own, and generates some of the movie's biggest laughs with that damn taser.

Speaking of action, that holds up, too. There's one particular scene involving Meg Ryan chasing after a refrigerated truck holding the captive Martin Short, who is forced to sit through Kevin McCarthy's version of a Bond villain monologue while freezing to death. After a pep talk from his tiny passenger, Short attempts to make a break for it, which results in one of the funniest and most exhilarating stunts of its kind I can remember from this decade of filmmaking; it's clearly Short up there for a lot of the (relatively safer) stunt work.

images courtesy of Arrow Video

In case you couldn't tell, I could talk about this movie for hours, but luckily I don't have to: Arrow was kind enough to give us a limited edition full of extras. We get not one but two audio commentaries, including one with Joe Dante, producer Michael Finnell, Robert Picardo, Dennis Muren, and Kevin McCarthy. Add to that a bunch of behind the scenes footage and a brand new hour-long documentary called Shrinkage: The Making of Innerspace. By the time you're done watching the extras on this amazing disc, you'll probably know more about the movie than Joe Dante himself.

Innerspace used to be one of "those movies" that we all saw in pieces, usually with commercial breaks on cable networks like TBS. To be honest, I'm not sure I ever saw the opening scenes before I sat down to watch this release. This is how it was meant to be seen: Flawlessly transferred from a print that showcases its Oscar-winning effects, with both a brand new Dolby Atmos mix and a DTS track pulled from a 6-channel 70mm print. There are moments of inspired directionality from the soundtrack that had me grinning with appreciation. This is likely to be one of the best physical media releases of 2026, and it's all the more wonderful that it belongs to one of the best science fiction comedies of the 1980s. One that remembers character is what make visual effects truly special.

- Blake O. Kleiner

Radiance Films: The Dancing Hawk (1977) - Reviewed

2026-03-27T14:45:00.003-04:00

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Radiance Films continues to surprise and delight with their unveiling of previously hard-to-obtain Eastern European titles throughout the world in lovingly detailed deluxe limited-edition releases replete with plentiful extras and the time-honored OBI spines and in recent months they’ve started showing love for the work of Polish director Grzegorz Królikiewicz. Following the release of his debut work Through and Through from 1973, Królikiewicz found work in television between 1973 and 1974 up until his second feature Permanent Objections, the already experimental atonal avant-garde provocateur was about to deploy his most anarchically radioactive cinematic nuclear bomb with 1977’s feverishly phantasmagorical The Dancing Hawk. A film which feels like Andrei Konchalovsky’s decades-spanning Siberiade if it were directed by Sergei Parajanov by way of Shinya Tsukamoto, the film is furiously audaciously alive nonstop audiovisual sensory assault and though running at ninety-nine minutes it doesn’t waste a millisecond of time or space in the boldest Soviet Eastern European film since Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

Told in fleeting elliptical episodes that crash and subliminally flash cut against our eyes and ears, The Dancing Hawk more or less follows the upbringing and exploits of peasant farm boy Michal Toporny (Through and Through actor Franciszek Trzeciak) who quickly ascends the social ladder in post-war Poland faster than his ancestors ever could. Rather than follow in his father’s footsteps, he abandons his family including his wife and son to wed a socially upstanding woman in furtherance of his own career aspirations. Working his way up to becoming the head of a mining company, however, his new wife Wieslawa (Beata Tyszkiewicz of Sexmission) grows increasingly disillusioned with the amount of time Michal is spending on the job and eventually begins an affair with one of Michal’s younger engineers. Before we really have much time to process this, we’re propelled faster than the Stargate concluding 2001: A Space Odyssey into the future where we see Michal as an ailing elder trying to rekindle the frayed bonds with his long-estranged son.

Throughout this hallucinatory hyperactive psychedelic freakout, the film drifts in and out of visions real and imaginary of the changing sociopolitical landscape of Poland up through the Second World War up through the present. Bearing structural and thematic similarities to the aforementioned Andrei Konchalovsky four-hour saga but with the bug-eyed fever pitched hysteria of Polish maestro Andrzej Zulawski (Possession), The Dancing Hawk from its experimental and atonal, borderline industrial soundscape speaking to why David Lynch would eventually come to Poland for Inland Empire makes itself known as a wholly anarchic exercise in pure cinema. From Angst cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczynski’s utterly jaw dropping “how-the-Hell-did-that-do-that?!” camerawork including a rotating camera shot positioned between the floor and a bed to Killing Auntie composer Janusz Hajdun’s otherworldly atonal score which seems more like sound engineering than music, we are thrust head over heels into a sphere and headspace that’s wholly captivating and has the wide-angled bug-eyed feel of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange by way of the frenzied energies of Zulawski’s The Devil.

Performance-wise, the film is an ensemble chorus of supporting players including Blind Chance actor Tadeusz Lomnicki but between our two leads Franciszek Trzeciak and Beata Tyszkiewicz the stars of this madcap horror show are the cinematographer, production designer Zbigniew Warpechowski’s outlandish set pieces and co-editors Jadwiga Ignatczenko and Halina Nawrocka’s hyperkinetic phantasmagorical cross-cutting in a film that doesn’t seem to slow down as much as it keeps picking up speed. From beginning to end, it does not let up and seemingly unfolds with greater anxiousness. While ultimately a portrait of urbanizing and the overarching impact of capitalism on a communist society with ever shifting sociopolitical mores reshaping the country from top to bottom, you’re hit so fast with so many psychedelic hallucinatory images at times it feels like a Polish Stan Brakhage.

Making its worldwide Blu-ray disc premiere via Radiance Films in a sparkling new 4K digital restoration, crisply preserving the frenetic 1.37:1 camerawork with Polish monoaural sound, the disc comes housed with two short films by the cinematographer Soup and Oh! I Can’t Stop! as well as a collector’s booklet featuring essay writing by Polish film scholar Piotr Kletowski. Also included in the Radiance package’s time-honored OBI spine design and reversible sleeve art is an interview with film critic Carmen Gray. Already fond of the director’s debut Through and Through before being floored right off the racetrack by this wickedly energetic speed demon of a Soviet Polish film, The Dancing Hawk is from a viewer’s standpoint a sheer smashing into smithereens of the sensory faculties leaving you shattered but not necessarily broken into pieces by the overwhelming experience. Radiance Films have done it again with another fantastic release in a director’s oeuvre I hope to soon see more of!

--Andrew Kotwicki

Now Streaming: A Thousand Cuts (2026) - Reviewed

2026-03-27T14:15:00.001-04:00

Images Courtesy of Persimmon Films

Jake Horowitz's A Thousand Cuts is an unexpected Marvel. A comedy-mystery film that is a nesting egg of emotional torment, toxic relationships, and forbidden secrets. Using a chamber piece approach and a split timeline narrative, Horowitz weaves an interesting and surprising tale of madness and woe. Featuring a madcap duo of performances, intriguing visuals, and an interesting whodunnit, this is one of the most unique films of the year thus far.

Roberta and Frasier are a couple on the rocks who are also the co-hosts of a live true crime television special that delves into an unsolved 30-year-old murder, while broadcasting from the decrepit family's mansion where the crime took place. As things begin to unravel, Roberta realizes that many elements of the tragic couple at the center of the story mirror her and Frasier's decaying relationship, spinning things dangerously out of control as the night goes on. Horowitz also wrote the script and co-produced. The dialogue has notes of pitch-black humor, however at the center it is a gothic mystery entwined with a rather odd love story. Storm Steenson and Jonas Chernick star as Roberta and Frasier. There are some unique tricks that are used within the presentation that allow the viewer to exist both in the present and in the past with Bernard Balance (the victim) that is made possible by the pair's committed performance. Their chemistry is perfect, mimicking screwball sensibilities from the golden age while dovetailing with gothic tropes that enhance what could have been yet another streaming mockumentary.

The supporting cast is filled with memorable character actors, including Julian Richings (Supernatural) who portrays an ellusive grounds keeper who may know more than he lets on, and Canadian legend David Hewlett (Stargate: Atlantis) who plays an initial guest on the program who sets the ball rolling as secrets long held in shadow begin to come to light.

None of this would be possible without the stellar location used in the shoot. The mansion is a character unto itself, constantly threatening to collapse under the weight of the past transgressions committed within its walls. The title is a symbol, not only of the way Balance was killed, but also of the ways in which we hurt those we love, slowly and deliberately. This is enhanced by Jess Craymer's production design, filling each locale with possible clues and dangerous curios. The final piece is Paul D. Maxwell's cinematography. Maxwell's attention to detail and lighting allows two timelines, the past and the present to essentially live within each other and while changes to hair and makeup allow for some subterfuge, it is the framing of each sequence that allows the story to move to its inescapable conclusion.

Now available for streaming, A Thousand Cuts is an exceptional indie thriller. While its budget is meager, its talented director, cast, and crew use their considerable talents and clear passion for the material to create a quirky mystery with a lot of heart.

--Kyle Jonathan

Cinematic Releases: Mavka: The True Myth (2026) - Reviewed

2026-03-26T15:25:00.000-04:00

Images courtesy of Ukrainian Films USA

Ukrainian film director Katya Tsarik first emerged on the music video scene in the 2010s having directed videos for Sati Kazanova, Lyudmila Gurchenko, Anna Sedokova and more. Sometime around 2021, she wrote and directed the short film Hold Me about a lonely woman desperate for love wandering the streets looking for embracement from any random stranger. Then following the ongoing Ukraine invasion, she was involved in the 2023 television series Those Who Stayed about the initial days of the invasion comprised of six episodes. Around the same time, animation directors Oleh Malamuzh, Oleksandra Ruban and Yevgeniy Yermak unveiled their Ukrainian 3D animated fantasy film Mavka: The Forest Song, a fantasy epic based on Lesya Ukrainka’s play The Forest Song. It became one of the highest grossing Ukrainian films of all time and further entered the list of the twenty best Ukrainian films in cinema history and further saw theatrical releases around the world including the United States via Ukrainian Films USA.

A mythical forest creature depicted in Ukrainian folklore and mythology, it tells the tale of long-haired temptresses almost like sirens of The Odyssey who lure men to their deaths to siphon their life energy and leave them comatose at the bottom of the water. Usually sporting flowers in their hair, the Mavkas roamed the mountains and forests looking for men to tickle to death. However, in what is now shaping up to be the very first fully fledged feature film of Katya Tsarik in a film cowritten by The Rising Hawk as well as Makva: The Forest Song screenwriter Yaroslav Voytseshek, here is three years later the 2026 live-action scope widescreen adaptation entitled Mavka: The True Myth. With aspects of the story and look of the film updated to reflect modern times with a leaning towards the Twilight oriented Young Adult novel film, the film rethinks the lore somewhat and has the vibe of a teenage romantic horror fable that’s a bit sequel baiting but is nevertheless a beautiful looking metaphysical supernatural thriller.

In the forest roam nymphs such as mavkas and carnivorous mermaids who feed on the ‘defiled’ souls of men and women who supposedly took their own lives out of heartbreak. Among the mavkas is one who only refers to herself as Mavka (Arina Bocharova) who is tasked with an important initiation: lure your first human into forest swamp for the mermaids’ taking. The trouble is, once actually on the hunt and settling on Lukian (Ivan Dovzhenko) a biology student on an expedition who has been tagged after breaking his ex-girlfriend Khrystyna’s (Anastasia Iankova) heart, she begins developing romantic feelings for the boy. Showing her the way of the world including forest creatures like a huge beetle that can fly, her previously carnivorous thoughts of harming men begin to fade away, something the mermaids don’t take kindly to and try desperately to interfere with if not precipitate a breakup.

Largely bathed in dark nighttime blues illuminated by bright blue-green waters with mysterious scantily clad nymphs seductively strutting their way about the open waters trying to seduce and murder all men who cross paths with the forest grounds, Mavka: The True Myth is very much Ukrainian folklore for the Young Adult viewing audience. Pretty much a teenage date movie packaged inside the Ukrainian folk tale replete with fast frame dropping amid occasional high-speed photography for slow motion effects, it looks scenic and inviting with the forest taking on a kind of Avatar glittering shimmering effect. From the Earthy alluring costumes worn by the mavkas designed by Kseniia Mozhar, lensed with finesse in 2.35:1 scope widescreen by The Rising Hawk cinematographer Yura Korol and an ethereal score again by Mavka: The Forest Song composer Dario Vero, the world of Mavka: The True Myth is at once painterly and tranquil. Performances are generally good, particularly our lead Arina Bocharova though the most committed performances go to the three black-eyed mermaids who hiss and snarl their way through line readings, making them most deliciously evil if not cartoonish villains.

Released in Ukraine and across theaters touring the United States in the winter of 2026, Mavka: The True Myth in theory could be characterized as a sort of live-action Disney remake of one of their own animated properties ala 2023’s Mavka: The Forest Song. That said, it joins a growing list of one of many Mavka screen adaptations to be made amid the ongoing war. In limited release before a hopeful eventual streaming and/or disc release, Mavka: The Forest Song again feels like a Twilight young adult romance between a human and a mythical creature of the world. Looking at it as an outsider, Mavka: The True Myth at times almost felt like a Young Adult Friday the 13^th film with its very own Camp Crystal Lake full of bloodthirsty nymphs while dumb drunken if not horny men and women bumble about before meeting their ends at the talons of the mermaids. Still, it was painterly and beautiful at times with special emphasis on Ukrainian iconography near the finale that will leave an impression on most viewers. Also, there’s a post-credits scene hinting at another round of mavka-mermaid shenanigans, so stay tuned for more!

--Andrew Kotwicki

Lightyear Entertainment: Randy & the Mob (2007) - Reviewed

2026-03-26T13:48:00.001-04:00

Images courtesy of Lightyear Entertainment

Just a few years following the release of his 2001 Academy Award winning short film The Accountant, Ray McKinnon mounted his first feature film effort Chrystal in 2004 starring Billy Bob Thornton and McKinnon’s wife and co-producer Lisa Blount. A hard hitting Southern Gothic drama co-starring McKinnon, Walton Goggins, David Lynch regulars Grace Zabriskie and Harry Dean Stanton and Eddie King, it was an award winner for Lisa Blount for Best Actress at the Stockholm Film Festival but proved to be a strain on the director and his producing partners.

Wanting to go back and do something much lighter but still distinctly Southern, McKinnon and his creative team in 2007 opted for an endearing PG rated screwball comedy entitled Randy & the Mob: a caper flick of sorts where Goggins gets to play the weird mysterious visitor ala The Accountant co-starring Bill Nunn, Brent Briscoe and even Burt Reynolds. A small movie largely shot in Atlanta, Georgia, the endearing caper flick which won the Audience Choice Award at the Nashville Film Festival and now via Lightyear Entertainment comes to Blu-ray disc for the first time.

Randy Pearson (Ray McKinnon) is a business entrepreneur who can’t catch a break and is knee deep in debt to the mob after a scheme to preserve his gas station business goes belly up. Seeking help from his gay identical twin brother Cecil (McKinnon in dual roles) and his carpal-tunneled suffering baton-instructing wife Charlotte (Lisa Blount), advice from gas station manager Wardlowe (Bill Nunn) while fending off the ongoing antagonism from Officer Griff Postell (Brent Briscoe), things don’t seem to be working in Randy’s favor.

That is until Tino Armani, a strange robotic speaking prophet who may or may not have ties to the mob, makes an unlikely appearance half-naked under Randy’s truck. At first the guy seems weird and ingratiating, but very quickly his penchant for high fashion, clog dancing and fine cooking wins the hearts and minds of the townsfolk, quickly becoming a pillar of the community. Even Randy’s own son starts to like him. Still, Randy’s debts haven’t gone away and eventually the mob will come back knocking on his doorstep.

Co-starring Paul Ben-Victor playing a mobster again ala Houseguest and The Irishman, Sling Blade and A Simple Plan actor Brent Briscoe and recent Oppenheimer actor Tim DeKay, Randy & the Mob is a lovely, charming and occasionally really funny Southern Gothic yarn. Again switching roles with McKinnon as the normal guy while Goggins gets to be the strange visitor with a peculiar particular manner of speech, the film features a gentle natured and playful Southern fried score by future Napoleon Dynamite composer John Swihart and Earthy, organic and rich cinematography by John Wick cameraman Jonathan Sela. A lighthearted ensemble romp that keeps you engaged but doesn’t tug too heavily at the emotional weathers like his previous film Chrystal, it went under the radars of many but nevertheless now is ripe for attaining cult status as a secondary feature to his Oscar winning short The Accountant.

Slated for Blu-ray disc release in April, Lightyear Entertainment’s Blu-ray disc and digital restoration of Randy & the Mob includes an original in-depth making-of featurette with detailed interviews with Ray McKinnon discussing the project. For someone who has only heard him affecting his Southern Georgian accent, hearing him speak candidly out of character on the project alongside Lisa Blount and Walton Goggins is an enlightening special feature.

Also include on the disc, as mentioned in my review for the standalone Blu-ray for The Accountant, is the Oscar-winning short film itself. Using the same transfer housed on the standalone disc, it begs the question why two releases were done when it could’ve been included as a bonus feature. Despite the double-dip, fans who want to kill two birds with one stone are inclined to get the Randy & the Mob disc which has everything rather than also buying The Accountant on its own. They could’ve licensed his previous film Chrystal on Blu-ray instead. Oh well, both titles are fabulous and highlight one of the film world’s most unique and ubiquitous talents who is finally getting his due on the home video platform.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Lightyear Entertainment: The Accountant (2001) - Reviewed

2026-03-26T13:13:00.003-04:00

Images courtesy of Lightyear Entertainment

Ray McKinnon’s a familiar character actor most notable for his appearances in films like Bugsy, Apollo 13 and O Brother, Where Art Thou? typically playing deeply Southern characters with thick Georgian accents as well as featuring in the HBO series Deadwood as well as FX’s Sons of Anarchy. A kind of blood brother to the likes of Walton Goggins and Billy Bob Thornton, McKinnon’s everywhere in film and television but rarely takes center stage himself. But in 2001, McKinnon, his recurring actor-producing partner Walton Goggins and McKinnon’s late wife-actress-producer Lisa Blount unveiled a forty-minute short film entitled The Accountant, a distinctly Southern-fried dose of Gothic dark comedy which took home the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film at the 2002 Oscars.

Inspired by the Drive-by Truckers song Sink Hole and boiled down to three principal actors Ray McKinnon, Walton Goggins and Eddie King with a distinctly Georgian sounding acoustic guitar score by Rusty Andrews, it tells the story of a Georgian farm on the cusp of foreclosure. Commandeered by the O’Dell brothers Tommy (Walton Goggins) and David (Eddie King), their shabby dilapidated shack being the sole building left on the multi-generational farmlands, they enlist the help of a nameless quirky accountant (Ray McKinnon sporting a dressy suit, tie and ridiculous sideburns). However, very quickly the accountant’s unconventional methods, including but not limited to smoking, drinking and gorging himself on white frosted donut holes, begin to derail from their initial intention. Ballooning into conspiracy theories about a corporatist drive to erode away at the American family unit with particular emphasis on a quest to preserve the American South and Southern culture, it becomes a one-of-a-kind Southern Gothic creative cinematic expression.

From its scratchy yet Earthy grainy cinematography by Blake B. Jackson, beautifully preserved on Blu-ray disc from restored film elements by Lightyear Entertainment, exquisitely capturing the ruin and dilapidation of the Old South and a dream for a newer, better one, The Accountant previously released on DVD in 2009 now gets a full blown 1080p digital upgrade on Blu-ray disc. Initially shown at Slamdance Film Festival, the film languished in the ether until eight years after the initial appearance. Walton Goggins who was a co-producer on the project with McKinnon’s wife and producing partner Lisa Blount is excellent in the leading part as one of the two brothers trying to sort out the problem of the farmland foreclosure alongside Eddie King as the beleaguered brother eager to wash his hands of the whole mess. McKinnon’s a familiar face across many films including the Coen Brothers and Ron Howard’s work, but as the titular The Accountant McKinnon all but completely creates a wholly original character from the ground up. Distinctly Southern fried, peculiar and mysterious but somehow speaking to a higher purpose, he feels at once mythic and/or simply a drunken fool. The film doesn’t really tell for certain which adds to its mystical allure.

Shown in 2001 but not receiving a physical release for eight years, now in 2026 Lightyear Entertainment who are also rereleasing McKinnon’s 2007 comedy Randy & the Mob, The Accountant is a splendid little short film that exudes a Southern Gothic vibe that at once satirizes Georgian rural life while also being a paean to preserving it. Ray McKinnon’s a unique and original, charming screen and filmmaking talent and Lightyear Entertainment have done a great job bringing this back to the public in 1080p. The only thing that’s somewhat perplexing about the release is that it has no special features to speak of and the same short itself is included in the Blu-ray extras for Randy & the Mob. While I have both copies currently for posterity, fans are inclined to just get McKinnon’s 2007 comedy as two-for-the-price-of-one. In any case, both The Accountant and Randy & the Mob are welcome, distinctly Southern dark comedies with a unique and endearing flavor you can’t help but want to come back for more of.

--Andrew Kotwicki

Eureka Entertainment: Cruel Tale of Bushido (1963) - Reviewed

2026-03-23T16:02:00.005-04:00

Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

In recent months, boutique labels such as Arrow Video with their Samurai Revolution Trilogy and now Eureka Entertainment’s forthcoming limited release of Until We Meet Again director Tadashi Imai’s Cruel Tale of Bushido (also reviewed here by Michelle Kisner) have been shedding light on a kind of jidaigeki film that is at once grounded in the past but allegorically speaking about the present. Taking formerly lofty escapist notions of the samurai epic period film and pushing for a far more socially realistic unforgiving aesthetic into focus, Imai’s films often focused on the plights of the poor whether it be women of the Meiji Era in An Inlet of Muddy Water and later Night Drum which was scripted by Onibaba director Kaneto Shindo.

Mid-career between his jidaigeki films and his more modern day set dramas, Imai in 1963 unveiled debatably his masterwork with Cruel Tale of Bushido: a Toeiscope widescreen black-and-white centuries-spanning epic restored in 4K by Toei and presented by Eureka Entertainment in both the original Japanese mono track as well as the rarely used 3.0 channel sound format last used in Shin Godzilla.

In the present, an average salaryman names Susumu Iikura (Kinnosuke Nakamura in one of many roles) returns home to find his wife has attempted suicide. Shocked and appalled, the grief-stricken jolt to Susumu’s senses sends him (and the film) reeling on a cross-century spanning odyssey over 350 years as he ruminates on previous family lineages with ancestors laying down their lives for the sake of the strict bushido moral code of the samurai. Covering roughly seven generations of the family dynasty ranging from the Tokugawa period up through World War II into the 1960s, we see brutally violent and unforgiving history repeating itself with each disparate subsection spearheaded by a different iteration of Susumu’s ancestors.

Co-starring Ko Nishimura from 11 Samurai, recurring Akira Kurosawa star Masayuki Mori and Yojimbo actor Eijirô Tôno, the ensemble piece presents several situations and iterations governed by the bushido code, including but not limited to grisly decapitations. All the time, through the use of Kinnosuke Nakamura across multiple parts, we get a sense of Japanese history, the ruthlessness of the bushido code and a sense of things not changing much over time and tide.

From The Insect Woman composer Toshiro Mayuzumi’s gloomy and frightening, sometimes experimental atonal score which frankly sounds at times like Krzysztof Penderecki to The Conspirator cinematographer Makoto Tsuboi’s luminous and radiant camerawork illuminating nighttime battles and daylight executions with distance and detachment. One sequence which springs to mind and seems to embody the title, translated as Bushido, Samurai Saga or Bushido: The Cruel Code of the Samurai in some territories, is a bold execution sequence in which several samurai are beheaded together jointly before a group of horrified onlookers. Seeing scenes such as these no doubt paved the way for some of the tortures glimpsed in Martin Scorsese’s Silence which is also as much about the medieval as it is about the modern day. Sets and costume designs are appropriate to each period which editor Shintaro Miyamoto freely fleetingly cuts between so we’re never really certain of which period we are in.

Given the amount of dramatic weight on the shoulders of Kinnosuke Nakamura who plays eight characters in total, it is remarkable how successfully Nakamura was able to convey the recurring encounters of the bushido code across many lineages. Able to differentiate each part without them overlapping despite the film’s emphasis on history repeating itself, Nakamura’s performance is comparable (at the time) to the work of Peter Sellers and is equally brilliant and nuanced.

Entered into the 13^th Berlin International Film Festival where it went on to win the prestigious 1963 Golden Bear Award, the daring and uncompromising widescreen epic jidaigeki as modern day allegory quickly ascended the ranks among the greatest samurai films of all time. Something of a stylized antidote to Seven Samurai despite featuring some of its key players and modern day sociopolitical allegory of things staying the same despite many eons of change, Cruel Tale of Bushido comes to Eureka Entertainment Blu-ray in a fairly stacked release featuring original essay writings by Hayley Scanlon who usually handles the subtitles for many Radiance Films releases, a new video essay by Jonathan Clements, video interview with Tony Rayns and a collectible slipcover.

Probably most interestingly of all, however, is the inclusion of ‘optional’ Japanese DTS-HD 3.0 audio which will remind listeners of the Perspecta sound format. Films and/or albums rereleased with multichannel audio are rarely limited to the three front loaded channels and whenever a mix of its kind is included, it offers a wholly unique kind of sonic experience. In any case, Cruel Tale of Bushido represents a stark contrast to previously romanticized samurai epics and Eureka Entertainment’s comprehensive disc release is a stellar way to absorb one of 1963 Japan’s finest moments on the silver screen.

--Andrew Kotwicki

MVD Visual: Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story (2024) - Reviewed

2026-03-23T14:28:00.004-04:00

Images courtesy of MVD Visual

The American punk rock group Redd Kross deriving their name from the most infamous scene from the film The Exorcist first emerged in 1978 amid the rise of the hardcore punk scene chronicled in Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization. Founded by brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald as Red Cross, performing at the ages of 11 and 14 respectively, the group was notable for opening for punk rock group Black Flag and featuring future Circle Jerks guitarist Greg Hetson and John Stielow on drums.

Following the release of their debut album Born Innocent, the group was threatened with legal action over the name by the International Red Cross and promptly changed it to Redd Kross before going on to make eight more albums over the next fifty years. Though the band itself featured a constant changeover of musicians transitioning in and out of the group, its primary founders Jeff and Steve McDonald remained together through all these years and continue to record and release music.

Enter Friends television writer turned first-time documentary filmmaker Andrew Reich, an avowed longtime superfan who grew up with the band when he was attending live hardcore punk rock shows as a kid. Someone who absorbed their music from top to bottom up through the 1990s when he finally got to see them perform live, Reich considered Redd Kross to be among the most important bands to emerge from Los Angeles albeit being overshadowed by The Beach Boys.

Sometime around 2015, Reich overheard a podcast on Damian Abraham’s Turned Out a Punk podcast where he recounted a story where an older woman, a mainstay at punk rock shows, abducted Steve McDonald in an underage sexual relationship when he was only 13. Disappearing from home for three months following a private investigation which tracked them down and ended the relationship, the story was enough to prompt Reich to try and make a documentary film on the subject. After more than ten years of research, meeting up with band founders themselves and earning their blessing, Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story moved forward.

Known as the first band from the hardcore punk rock scene to grow out their hair long with much of their music making pop cultural references to Linda Blair, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and even breakfast cereals, Redd Kross also ran counter to stereotypical fashion choices of the movement such as wearing glam outfits onstage against the backdrop of leather jacket and jean legged fans. Eventually making their way into the pop music scene, their paths crossed with Sofia Coppola (whom Steve McDonald was dating) on the album cover for Third Eye leading to a meeting with father Francis Ford Coppola on his estate and starring in screenwriter Roman Coppola’s film The Spirit of ’76 by Lucas Reiner alongside Devo, Redd Kross paths eventually landed them with bands like Soundgarden.

Much like the band White Flag, brilliantly chronicled in the documentary The Secret Lives of Bill Bartell, the group had its genesis in the hardcore punk rock scene but evolved into something far different from its roots. A crowdfunded labor of love co-produced by Reich and featuring crisp digital cinematography by Steve Appleford with archival footage integrated together by Erin Elders, Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story is most certainly the definitive screen account of the band and indelible contribution to the reemerging discourse surrounding the late 1970s/early 1980s hardcore punk rock scene.

Though made in 2024, the documentary film makes its’ long-awaited Blu-ray disc debut in a fairly stacked special edition. Featuring 5.1 surround sound and an audio commentary with Jeff and Steve McDonald mediated by director Andrew Reich, the disc comes with lots of featurettes chronicling many of their live performances from 1979, 1982 and 2015. Also included are featurettes on the films Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and Lovedolls Superstar, two important underground cult classics capturing the punk rock scene at its height. And according to the back of the slipcover, there’s more than can be listed. Inside the case itself are several pictures of the band and a booklet of liner notes featuring a detailed director’s statement printed on double sided paper. Fans and newcomers will be delighted with this two-disc special-edition release, jam packed with plentiful bonus contents sure to keen studious music aficionados busy for quite some time.

--Andrew Kotwicki