In 2021, the animated series Arcane, based on the popular video game League of Legends, debuted on Netflix, and fans and critics went wild. As is the case with many series that debuted on a streaming service, it was denied a physical media release. Until now, that is. The series will finally get a definitive, limited-run Collector’s Edition, 4K UHD, and a Standard Edition SteelBook Editions. There’s also a Blu-Ray Standard Edition, and on Digital Download-to-Own. All editions are currently available for preorder.

So what can Arcane fans expect? The limited-run Collector’s Edition is presented in a rigid clamshell box featuring original artwork. It contains all nine episodes presented in 4K resolution, mastered in Dolby Vision HDR. The edition also contains all episodes on standard Blu-ray discs. In addition to the full series, the set also has brand new exclusives to the Collector’s Edition.

This includes a double-sided poster featuring artwork from Piltover’s “Progress Day.” It features one side defaced by Jinx, six art cards with Powder’s illustrations, Caitlyn Kiramann’s map of Piltover, and an expansive dice set containing a Hexcore-inspired d20 die, seven liquid core resin dice inspired by Hex crystals, a protective pouch and decorative dice box. This set is limited to 6500 copies for North America.

The 4K UHD SteelBook features a stunning Jinx-themed outer package, containing the full nine-episode series presented across three 4K UHD discs. There’s also an additional Blu-ray disc containing over three hours of bonus features. The Standard SteelBook edition arrives in a Vi-themed outer package, containing the same nine-episode series and the same accompanying bonus features across three discs.

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The Standard Blu-ray edition presents the series and bonus features across three Blu-ray discs. Both versions of the SteelBook edition and the standard Blu-ray edition drop on October 8, 2024 from Shout! Studios. Bonus features on all physical editions include exclusive conversations with key creative talent and writers. Also, numerous scene breakdowns from the animation staff at studio Fortiche, “making-of” videos, and more. Arcane will be available in North America starting September 24, 2024 on digital download-to-own platforms.

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We had to wait much longer than we wanted to see Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, for reasons that had nothing to do with the movie. It had everything to do with studios dragging their feet on giving writers and actors fair contracts. But turns out there might have been an unexpected bonus to the film’s delay. It just arrived in theaters, yet it’s home release is already done and waiting for you. Movie lovers can already pre-order their own copy of Dune: Part Two, including a special Limited-Edition 4K Steelbook copy.

Some big-time retailers have already listed Dune: Part Two for sale. Fans and Fremen alike can put in their orders for a Dune: Part Two Steelbook 4K Ultra HD copy that also includes a Blu-Ray disc and a digital code. As of this writing Walmart lists the Steelbook edition for $34.96, while Amazon has it at $44.97. (We’ll bet that price will come down to match other sites soon enough.)

Amazon also has other options for lower prices available. Those include a standard 4K UHD copy ($39.98), as well as both a regular Blu-ray edition ($29.98) and a DVD version ($23.99).

The listings for the film don’t include any bonus features yet. As for when it will actually ship or hit stores, Amazon lists a May 14, 2024 release date. That could be totally accurate right now but still ultimately change. Dune: Part Two had a monster opening weekend. If it is still making money in theaters when May rolls around, you might have to wait a little bit longer to get your own copy. That’s fitting for a film that also got delayed.

The good news is this time a delay will be a lot easier to handle. You’ll actually be able to watch Dune: Part Two while you’re waiting to watch Dune: Part Two.

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks.

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Hard to believe, but the Saw franchise turns 20 years old this year. Yes, it’s been two decades since Jigsaw came into our lives, asking us to play a little game. To celebrate, Lionsgate is releasing the Saw 10-Film Collection 20th Anniversary Edition, which arrives on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital on March 5. After the critical success of Saw X last year, and the franchise officially grossing over $1 billion, this collection’s release arrives with perfect timing. The Saw 10-Film Collection 20th Anniversary Edition will be available for the suggested retail price of $79.99 for Blu-ray, DVD, and digital. You can see the packaging artwork right here, as well as read the official synopsis below:

Here’s what we know about this Saw collection:

All 10 films from the franchise that created a new horror subgenre – including the latest chapter, Saw X – are collected here in one terrifying set. Rewind to the beginning when Jigsaw first springs his diabolically ingenious traps on the morally wayward, then travel his long road of pain all the way to Mexico in the newest entry’s untold story of John Kramer’s quest for a cancer cure, inspiring his most personal game yet.

The original Saw the big screen debut of director James Wan. It became a surprise sleeper hit when they released it in 2004. Almost overnight, Jigsaw and Billy the Puppet became horror icons on par with the likes of Freddy and Jason. In addition, Wan became a modern horror maestro, following up Saw with Insidious, The Conjuring, and most recently, Malignant. The peak of the Saw franchise was in the 2000s, when a new installment seemingly came out every Halloween season. Yet the series kept finding new ways to reboot itself in recent years. Now with ten films in, it seems as if this series will continue on forever. Saw XI even comes out this fall, so we’ll have to get ready to update our ten film collection sooner than we think. Jigsaw, long may you reign.

The post Celebrate 20 Years of Jigsaw with New SAW 10 Film Box Set appeared first on Nerdist.

For those who still, and always will, prefer owning physical media, the streaming era is not exactly a golden era. Some of the best, most popular TV shows and movies only exist on myriad online services. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the dream we’d at least always be able to watch them from the comfort of our couch for a fee has been absolutely shattered by studios removing major parts of their libraries. But things might finally be improving for those who like owning hard copies of their pop culture favorites. Digital releases like The Mandalorian and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story have started getting home releases. Now one of Netflix’s biggest hits is joining them on store shelves. Wednesday‘s first season will soon be available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Director Tim Burton’s Wednesday: Season One starring Jenna Ortega is coming to DVD and Blu-ray this spring via Warner Bros. Discovery. (MGM Television, a division of Amazon MGM Studios, produces the show, which streams on Netflix. Modern Hollywood is weird and complicated.) The home release officially goes on sale March 26, 2024, but it’s available for pre-order now. If you decide to wait for its actual release date you can pick up yours online or in-stores from all major retailers. Fitting for a streaming show getting a home release.

The DVD will sell for a suggested price of $24.98 US (Right now it’s as low as $19.99 at some places.) The Blu-ray edition will retail for $29.98 US. Each copy of the eight-episode season will include 480 minutes of content. Both will also come in English, Spanish, and French audio and subtitles.

Meanwhile, work continues at Netflix on Wednesday‘s second season. The streaming site is also reportedly developing an Uncle Fester spinoff with Fred Armisen. Will both of those eventually get home releases, too? That will probably depend on if enough people buy a copy of Wednesday: Season One.

Something tells us there are enough fans of physical media to guarantee there will be. Especially when there are also people afraid of their favorite shows disappearing from streaming sites entirely.

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Best Buy is saying goodbye to physical media. The retailer plans to phase out Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD sales in stores and online in early 2024. The Digital Bits broke the news, which Best Buy has since confirmed. The company said, “To state the obvious, the way we watch movies and TV shows is much different today than it was decades ago. Making this change gives us more space and opportunity to bring customers new and innovative tech for them to explore, discover and enjoy.”

Best Buy’s supply of physical media has been dwindling in stores of late anyway. However, the retailer did offer exclusive SteelBook titles. The premium metal case releases come with custom artwork. And also, the SteelBooks look cool on a shelf.

The end of DVDs and Blu-rays at Best Buy hasn’t arrived just yet, though. Best Buy will continue to sell physical media for the holidays, online and in brick-and-mortar stores. They will also keep selling video games. But as one of the last big retailers consistently offering DVDs and Blu-rays for all your favorite movies, this doesn’t seem like a good sign. Who knows how long Target, Amazon, and Walmart will keep stocking discs?

With the ephemeral nature of digital media, it’s reassuring to get your hands on tangible copies of the stories you love. It’s why people were excited to see the release of The Mandalorian, WandaVision, and Loki on Blu-ray. Shows and movies disappear from streaming services at an increasing rate. Even digital media you purchase can vanish into the ether. The lesson is, if you want to own a film or TV series, buy a physical copy when you can. Maybe from Best Buy before their physical media is gone.

The post Best Buy Is Ending DVD and Blu-ray Sales appeared first on Nerdist.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One forced Ethan Hunt to face the demons of his past. The film also forced him into a tiny alley with two henchmen. And it did all of that at the same time with dual fights in Venice. That sequence was one of the movie’s best. It was also one of the most challenging to put together. How did the filmmakers combine two encounters—each filmed with different techniques and different actors—and make it feel like one coherent scene? Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton explain how in this exclusive look at a bonus feature from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One‘s home release.

The alley fight between Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and the team of Pom Klementieff’s Paris and another Entity henchman would have been a standout moment in a stand out movie all by itself. It was both beautiful and brutal. The same is true of the bridge duel between Haley Atwell’s Grace and Esai Morales. But by splicing them together the film heightened the intensity of both while also highlighting just how dangerous the Entity really is.

In this bonus feature with commentary from McQuarrie and Hamilton, we learn what went into making both halves work as one cohesive moment. The key turned out to be a simultaneous start to sync the two very different kinds of fights. From there, music cues, pacing, camera work, and the actors’ commitment came together to make movie magic.

Well, it’s magical so long as we don’t think about what happened after these two fights. (Though we’re hopeful Ilsa is actually just fine and enjoying this bonus feature right now.)

From Paramount Home Entertainment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One One will be available to purchase on Digital 10/10. All bonus features will be available with a digital purchase. The blockbuster hit will debut on 4K Ultra HD SteelBook, 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD on October 31^st.

The post Learn How MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE Pulled Off Two Fights at Once in Blu-ray and Digital Bonus Feature appeared first on Nerdist.

It wasn’t long ago when a big budget movie premiering on streaming was considered a bad sign for a film. Why would a studio pass on a theatrical release if it had a potential box office hit on its hands? In 2022 Prey showed why that way of thinking about modern media was already obsolete. The Predator prequel—starring Amber Midthunder as a young 18th-century Comanche Nation warrior named Naru taking on the iconic movie monster—was a success with both critics and fans alike. Now it’s breaking another misconception about the supposed limits of streaming. Prey is getting a traditional home release from Disney’s 20th Century Studios.

How did it manage to do what few other streaming releases have? To find out we talked to director Dan Trachtenberg about the process that brought Prey to disc, why he cares so much about bonus extras, the film’s deleted scenes, and whether a physical copy is prelude to a sequel.

Nerdist: Considering Prey debuted on Hulu rather than in theaters, how surprised are you we’re even talking about a home release right now?

Dan Trachtenberg: I don’t know how often this happens. I do know that this is happening for three big reasons. One because fans demanded it. There was an intense demand and I was forwarding that enough to my higher-ups to get interest.

The second part is the interest from the higher-up, Steve Asbell, who runs 20^th [Century Studios]. He did not become the head of a studio because he’s got business acumen, went to school for that, or rose the ranks through Hollywood stratagem. It’s because he’s a movie nerd. That’s why he is what he is, and that’s why he’s so good at what he does. He loves movies and he’s specifically a nerd for Predator and Aliens and stuff like that. So he also wants to make sure his boxset on his shelf is complete. He demanded it alongside everyone on Twitter and Instagram messaging me. That’s why we’re here.

The third part is just me, because I also want to have that stuff. I was very much raised by bonus features, by HBO behind-the-scenes making-ofs, and then, eventually when DVDs came out, audio commentaries. I really loved the idea of being able to participate in that myself and contributing to what could be the next crop of filmmakers and fans of appreciating the movie in a fully invested way.

You anticipated my next question. We’re a similar age and grew up with DVDs when they always had a director’s commentary. Since you already addressed why it’s important to you to do them, what do you think people who love the movie will get out of your commentary that they might not have picked up on without it?

Trachtenberg: I really wanted to assemble the commentary with an actor and also the technicians, the D.P. and the editor. Sometimes I have enjoyed actor commentaries because they’re more fun and you get a sense of what the camaraderie was like on set. Then the technician commentaries are more informative. I really wanted to combine both concepts.

One of the interesting things is we recorded the commentary and Amber brought up a scene cut out of the movie that was integral to her performance. And it’s from that conversation in the commentary that let us say, “Oh, let’s put that on the disc then.” So we hunted that down. I had totally forgotten about that scene, and now that’s on the disc.

The scene was [Amber] and a little girl having a conversation. Her performance in it was a super subtle, small thing. We hadn’t shot much of the movie yet before doing that, and when we did it was like, “This is the pace, this is the tone of this character.” Also it was a scene between a hunter and a young girl, a scene you don’t often see in the middle of this kind of genre. It was also setup for keeping Naru’s bow clean, which came back later in the movie. It was tough to lose, but we had to. I’m so happy that we could include it on the disc.

Editor’s Note: Prey’s home release also includes a pre-vis (previsualization) deleted scene that only exists as an unfinished animated sequence.

Pre-vis is something non-filmmakers never get to see. And some of the pre-vises I’ve seen in my life, not even just for my film, are oftentimes cooler than the movie. Maybe people will see this and think the same thing for a sequence that was going to be very challenging to make. It was a big treetop chase. The execution could have gone awry. We almost could have done it. It was going to be a tight squeeze.

Because I frankly was so nervous about failing the execution, I sort of let it be a bit of a bargaining chip to allow other stuff and things that I had a little bit more confidence in to get more time. But I’m happy it’s on the disc now. Especially because one of the things I love so much is a very clever use of the cut clamp that Naru uses against the Predator. I was sad to miss that. But if we had that in the movie, we would not have had the montage sequence of her preparing, setting the traps, the final bait sequence, which not only helps for clarity of story, but is also very, very Predator ‘87 in tone. That sequence allows for her to seem a little bit more clever inside, so it was a good trade, I think. And now people can see it.

In a feature out on the Blu-ray you said you waited your whole life to make a movie with great action scenes. Did getting to actually do that with Prey satiate your appetite or does it have you craving more action film opportunities?

Trachtenberg: No, it doesn’t satiate. It’s challenging because I love the action genre so much. I grew up watching Hong Kong action movies and I’m desperate to really dive in and embrace the fun kind of choreography that blew my mind growing up. That’s why I put so much effort into that one sequence where Naru takes down the fur trappers. It’s the only bit of melee in the movie. That and Dakota with the arrows and fighting Predator are kind of what I would love to do more of. But I keep getting more interested in telling great stories.

I’m always let down in a movie when the action scenes feel like, “Now we’re setting the story aside and now you’re just watching martial arts unfold,” like the movie is setting up playgrounds for action. I have to always follow, “What’s the best way to tell the story through action?” Because I know that those are the movies I end up really loving exponentially more.

I haven’t quite found the perfect film yet where it can be all that specific kind of action and also be an emotional movie. Hopefully someday soon.

On the Blu-ray, you do exactly what I think a lot of fans of the franchise would’ve done in your shoes. You geeked out pretty hard over the actual Predator and his props. While you were making Prey how often did you have to remind yourself that you were actually in charge and not just a fan getting to do something really cool?

Trachtenberg: You get so caught up in pulling it all off that you forget about that stuff. Sometimes it’s cool when you see the first design of it. You’re like, “Oh my God, that’s so cool. I can’t believe it.” Then we’re back to business.

There were a few moments where someone in the tent would we’d be like, “All right Dan, they’re ready,” and we’d look at the monitor and there’s the Predator. And we’re like, “It’s a Predator movie. We’re making a Predator movie. This is not a fan film. This isn’t just that we have something inspired by the Predator in our movie. No, this is actually canonically now [a Predator movie].” It’s crazy. It was so overwhelming when it would occur. When I would be reminded of it, when my script supervisor, anyone would be reminded, it was like, “Oh my gosh.” But a lot of times you’re just looking at the task at hand and seeing how we can pull it off that you kind of forget what you’re really a part of.

The movie came out more than a year ago. What reactions—good, bad, both—have surprised you the most?

Trachtenberg: I’ll go the two ends of the spectrum.

I’ve seen tears at the end and it’s so moving to see someone react the way, because, oddly, this is a personal story for me even though I don’t physically reflect a lot of what any of the characters are or who they represent. But emotionally, the story between Naru and her mother, and the story of Naru and herself, what’s going on with her feels very much from my heart. So when I see tears it’s just awesome.

On the flip side, a surprising reaction at one screening very early on. Someone said, “How come the blood wasn’t acid?” I was like, “Oh boy, pop culture has failed this person.” They conflated Alien vs. Predator. It all became one thing in their mind. That or we haven’t been making enough Predator films.

Considering the movie was a hit with both critics and viewers, and it’s now getting a home release, I have to ask this question. Any chance we will get a Prey 2?

Trachtenberg: I mean, there’s always a chance. There’s always a chance. And while making the movie, we kept geeking out over, “Oh my God, wouldn’t it be cool if we did X?” And there’s a number of, “Wouldn’t be cool if we did Y? Wouldn’t it be cool if we did Z?”

We’ve all been excited about what else we could do that is special. Prey, to us, felt very special and unexpected for the genre. Are there other things we could do that are unexpected? Not just for a Predator film, but also for the genre? Those are the kinds of things that we’ve been thinking or started thinking way back then. And they have never stopped the whole way through.

Have any of those ideas made it onto a computer or a piece of paper?

Trachtenberg: I mean, we’re on a computer right now talking.

You guys are always too good at this.

Trachtenberg: I’m not at liberty to say. I’m not at liberty to say.

Left unsaid is where a potential Prey 2 would debut. Would it come to streaming or make the jump to theaters? Considering how many other preconceived notions this film has busted, there’s no point in speculating.

Prey hits 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD on October 3 with over two hours of all-new bonus features.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

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2023 marks 100 years since Walt Disney and his brother Roy began the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. Needless to say, the entertainment world has never been the same since. Although the Walt Disney Company has produced all kinds of different forms of media, most will forever associate them mainly with animation. Now, as a way of celebrating a century of animated movies, Disney has announced the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection. It features 100 animated films from Disney, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Pixar on Blu-ray. The box set packages all these movies together in a hardbound, self-standing three-volume set that unfolds into your own storybook. However, the retail cost of this Disney collection is not exactly a fairy tale.

What Does the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection Cost, and What Does it Include?

As part of Disney’s 100th anniversary celebration, a limited number of these  Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection sets will be available for pre-order only on Walmart.com. This comprehensive Disney collection will go on sale beginning September 18, and each set will include a numbered certificate of authenticity. It’s a true collector’s item, and that means it comes with a true collector’s item price tag. Just how much will the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection cost? According to The Wrap, the collection will retail for $1,500. It’s enough for anyone to say “Holy Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.”

But does this potential expense buy a Disney fan? Well, the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection set includes 100 animated titles on Blu-ray and digital codes for each movie. The Disney box set also features the original theatrical poster art for each Disney animated movie and comes with a collectible lithograph from Disney Animation’s all-new animated musical Wish, as well as a collectible crystal Mickey ears hat with exclusive Disney 100 engraving. As for which 100 films from the Disney library made it onto the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection, the real question is, which ones didn’t? It seems every major animated Disney film is a part of this set, from 1937’s Snow White to this year’s Elemental. Below is the full list of films.

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Movies Included in the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection

1. Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937)
2. Pinocchio (1940)
3. Fantasia (1940)
4. Dumbo (1941)
5. Bambi (1942)
6. Saludos Amigos (1943)
7. The Three Caballeros (1945)
8. Make Mine Music (1946)
9. Fun And Fancy Free (1947)
10. Melody Time (1948)
11. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)
12. Cinderella (1950)
13. Alice in Wonderland (1951)
14. Peter Pan (1953)
15. Lady and the Tramp (1955)
16. Sleeping Beauty (1959)
17. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
18. The Sword in the Stone (1963)
19. The Jungle Book (1967)
20. The Aristocats (1970)
21. Robin Hood (1973)
22. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
23. The Rescuers (1977)
24. The Fox and The Hound (1981)
25. The Black Cauldron (1985)
26. The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
27. Oliver & Company (1988)
28. The Little Mermaid (1989)
29. The Rescuers Down Under (1990)
30. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
31. Aladdin (1992)
32. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
33. The Lion King (1994)
34. A Goofy Movie (1995)
35. Pocahontas (1995)
36. Toy Story (1995)
37. James and the Giant Peach (1996)
38. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
39. Hercules (1997)
40. Mulan (1998)
41. A Bug’s Life (1998)
42. Tarzan (1999)
43. Toy Story 2 (1999)
44. Fantasia/2000 (2000)
45. The Tigger Movie (2000)
46. Dinosaur (2000)
47. The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
48. Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
49. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
50. Return to Never Land (2002)
51. Lilo & Stitch (2002)
52. Treasure Planet (2002)
53. The Jungle Book 2 (2003)
54. Piglet’s Big Movie (2003)
55. Finding Nemo (2003)
56. Brother Bear (2003)
57. Home on the Range (2004)
58. The Incredibles (2004)
59. Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (2005)
60. Chicken Little (2005)
61. Cars (2006)
62. Meet the Robinsons (2007)
63. Ratatouille (2007)
64. Wall•E (2008)
65. Tinker Bell (2008)
66. Bolt (2008)
67. Up (2009)
68. The Princess and the Frog (2009)
69. Toy Story 3 (2010)
70. Tangled (2010)
71. Cars 2 (2011)
72. Winnie the Pooh (2011)
73. Brave (2012)
74. Frankenweenie (2012)
75. Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
76. Monsters University (2013)
77. Planes (2013)
78. Frozen (2013)
79. Planes: Fire & Rescue (2014)
80. Big Hero 6 (2014)
81. Inside Out (2015)
82. The Good Dinosaur (2015)
83. Zootopia (2016)
84. Finding Dory (2016)
85. Moana (2016)
86. Cars 3 (2017)
87. Coco (2017)
88. Incredibles 2 (2018)
89. Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)
90. Toy Story 4 (2019)
91. Frozen 2 (2019)
92. Onward (2020)
93. Soul (2020)
94. Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)
95. Luca (2021)
96. Encanto (2021)
97. Turning Red (2022)
98. Lightyear (2022)
99. Strange World (2022)
100. Elemental (2023)

Movies You Won’t Find on this Disney Set

We should note that these are only Disney’s theatrically released (or originally intended for theatrical release) films. So, none of the straight-to-video sequels to Aladdin and Lion King you watched on VHS back in the day made it into this set. Given how Disney has doubled down on streaming only these past few years, it’s nice to see a recommitment to physical media from them lately. Because the truth is, physical media is really the only way you’ll ever really own a movie, folks. But as mentioned, this Disney collection will set you back. The price is a not-so-thrifty $1,500. But we imagine there are many Disney die-hards out there who will want this baby on their shelves, regardless of price.

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Have you recovered from The Last of Us’ season one finale? No, we have not either. And that’s totally okay because this show always hits us square in the feels. The show’s first season was a complete knockout in the best way, expertly establishing its world and the bond between Ellie and Joel. It makes you want to watch it over and over again and learn all the intricate behind-the-scenes facts. If so, you’ll be thrilled to know that The Last of Us season one is coming to 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD this summer with a digital release on April 11. 

Those glorious physical copies of The Last of Us: The Complete First Season will be available on July 18. Outside of the obvious nine episodes, there are some rad featurettes including the cast and crew. Here are all the details, including what is digitally available vs. the physical copies only: 

• The Last of Us: Stranger Than Fiction (New Featurette Exclusive to 4K, BD and DVD) – Series cast and filmmakers are joined by experts in survival, microbiology, and parasitology for a chilling discussion on the realities of the invasive fungus and subsequent apocalypse in The Last of Us. 
• Controllers Down: Adapting The Last of Us (New Featurette Exclusive to 4K, BD and DVD) – Follow the journey of The Last of Us from console to screen as cast and filmmakers take us inside the process of expanding the world and breathing new life into the game’s beloved characters. 
• From Levels to Live Action (New Featurette Exclusive to 4K, BD and DVD) – Discover how The Last of Us incorporated and expanded fan-favorite game moments in the series.
• Getting to Know Me (4 Featurettes)
• The Last Debrief with Troy Baker (2 Featurettes)
• Inside the Episode (9 Featurettes)
• Is This A The Last of Us Line? (2 Featurettes)

The Last of Us season one Blu-ray and DVD release prices are as follows: 

Digital Purchase              $19.99 SD / $24.99 HD US; $24.99 SD / $29.99 HD (Canada)

4K Ultra HD                         $49.99 US/ $54.97 (Canada)

Blu-ray                                 $44.98 US/ $49.99 (Canada)

DVD                                    $39.99 US/ $44.98 (Canada)

We don’t know when The Last of Us season two is coming yet but, in the meantime, you can add this Blu-ray and DVD release to your collection. You will find it online and at major retailers nationwide.

The post THE LAST OF US Season 1 Is Coming to Blu-Ray, 4K Ultra HD, and DVD This Summer appeared first on Nerdist.

In any given year, there are countless horror films, documentaries, and shows, from mainstream franchises to brilliant independent works. And, out of that number, a few shine brightly as truly innovative works that elevate the genre. This year had a lot of horror gold, including Cabinet of Curiosities and Barbarian. But, for me, Smile just might be my favorite horror film of 2022. It played on some of my deepest fears, including being watched/followed/preyed on, losing autonomy over my mind and body, and not being believed when I know something is amiss. I knew 20 minutes into the film that I wanted to have a physical copy of it in my possession. And, reader, this Smile Blu-ray is worth having in your horror collection. 

Of course, it comes with a digital copy of the film that you can stream or download to any device. But the real perks are its special features. Something’s Wrong with Rose: Making Smile takes you further into this unnerving saga and leaves you with some fun facts to share with your fellow horror fans. Flies on the Wall: Inside the Score is for those of us (it’s me, I’m a part of us) who always want to know the details behind crafting a sinister score. 

While all of these things are great, a few other features stand out as my personal favorites. First, there’s stellar commentary by director Parker Finn. He dives deep into the creative decisions that went into crafting Smile’s narrative and scenes. You also get to see a host of scenes that didn’t make the final cut. There’s an option to include Finn’s commentary alongside them and you will want to hear that additional context.

And, the holy grail of bonus content is Laura Hasn’t Slept (2020), Finn’s original short film that caught the eye of Paramount Pictures and led to Smile’s creation. It is absolutely gripping and features the same actress, Catilin Stasey, that we saw in Smile’s intense opening scene. I will never get her face out of my brain. It is such a nice companion piece to the feature film. At this point, I want a full Laura prequel.

I say all of that to affirm that yes, it is 100% worth buying Smile if you are a fan of Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD, and/or DVD formats. The additional features will amplify your understanding of its greatest concepts. And you’ll see this terrifying tale through new eyes. 

Smile is now available on Digital HD and streaming on Paramount +. Smile will be available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray™, and DVD on December 13.

The post SMILE Brings Its Sinister Story and More to Blu-ray appeared first on Nerdist.

Any Doctor Who fan will tell you one of the joys of the series is when a past Doctor shows up to aid (and usually bicker) with the current Doctor. Despite having 13 (or really 15 or 16 depending on who you ask) Doctors at this point, team ups have been relatively few. Usually it’s only a major anniversary that gets that kind of crossover. But if you happen to be an Ultraman fan, these kind of team-ups happen pretty regularly. That doesn’t make them any less special, however. Perhaps none of the crossover Ultraman movies feels more like a glorious love letter to the fans and the history than Superior 8 Ultra Brothers, now out on Blu-ray from Mill Creek.

Note: like most Japanese titles, this movie has several translations. Mill Creek uses Superior 8 Ultra Brothers, but the literal title is Great Decisive Battle! The Super 8 Ultra Brothers, and other releases have it as Superior Ultraman 8 Brothers. So, you know, call it whatever you want.

Since 2019, Mill Creek Entertainment has released pristine complete box sets of most of the Ultra series shows. Of the 31 official seasons that exist, the distributor has released 23, plus a few other specials and things. It’s incredibly impressive how quickly all of these have found their way to fans in North America. And since I’ve become a voracious consumer of these releases, a movie like Superior 8 filled me with the exact same fuzzy feeling that the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor,” did in 2013.

The greater Ultra universe deals a lot with parallel dimensions, which this movies focuses on specifically. The idea here is “Ultraman” as a concept can persists in the human hosts even in universes where it’s a TV show. Kind of funky, but it really works. It brings together four of the Showa era Ultras with four from the Heisei era. It’s legitimately a melding of generations, bringing together many different cast members.

The Showa Ultras in question are: the original Ultraman (1966-67); Ultraseven (1967-68); Ultraman Jack (1971-72); and Ultraman Ace (1972-73). The Heisei ones are: Ultraman Tiga (1996-97); Ultraman Dyna (1997-98); Ultraman Gaia (1998-99); and Ultraman Mebius (2006-2007). Mebius was the most recent new Ultra at the time. It’s especially interesting, then, that it’s not Mebius who takes the lead in the film. It’s stead it’s Tiga, and specifically his human host Daigo (Hiroshi Nagano), who drives most of the action.

The movie begins in 1966, on the very day of the premiere episode of Ultraman. Three young boys, Daigo, Asuka, and Gamu, run through their town, excited to check out a brand new TV series. We come back to these children later in the film, as adult Daigo remembers a time when the three met a young girl with red shoes at the very moment they all wished about what their futures might hold. This is key to the journey of not only Daigo in the movie but seven of the eight Ultra Brothers.

In nearly all of the Ultra shows, and certainly all eight of the lead-up series for the movie, a main character in human form works for a space/science/defense agency that investigates alien and paranormal activity. While there are many characters on those teams, it’s the main hero who turns into the Ultraman. This is either because they ARE an Ultra in human form (Ultraseven specifically), or usually because the Ultraman has fused with the human. For Earth-protecting reasons, you see.

That is one of the few immutable constants about the series. What makes Superior 8 Ultra Brothers so interesting is that it supposes a universe in which none of that is true. There are no giant monsters to fight, so none of the human hosts need to work for any such alien defense force. As such, their lives have largely been normal, often unfulfilling. Daigo wished to be an astronaut but is now a tour guide in Yokohama. Asuka wished to be professional baseball player, but gave up after high school. Gamu wished to be a scientist who could build great space traveling ships, but didn’t quite make it either.

As a grown-up, Daigo begins having strange dreams, in which giant monsters attack and elder members of the community become Ultramen. That can’t possibly be true, right? Well, wouldn’t ya know, the lines of dream and reality blur and a real Ultraman, Mebius, arrives to do battle with a real kaiju. After taking his human form, Mirai Hibino, Daigo takes Mebius around to see the Ultra Brothers, except in this universe, they’re all just old guys. But surely the spirit of Ultraman can break through!

This is not a movie with a lot of twists and turns. You pretty much know from the title that all eight people will turn into Ultramen by the end to fight ever enormous monsters. This doesn’t make it any less enjoyable when it does happen. Before that happens, there’s a surprising amount of drama and pathos as the mysterious villain wreaks havoc on Yokohama and Daigo and the others question their life choices.

Superior 8 Ultra Brothers has so many lovely meta moments as well. Each of the four Showa Ultras’ jobs in this parallel universe reflect the real actor’s passions and post-acting life. The lead actress from each of the shows are there as well, and where applicable, the real life children of these actors play their kids in the movie. It feels like a family affair all around. Especially exciting for me is a brief cameo by kaiju movie legend Kenji Sahara reprising his role as Jun Majome from the Ultraman precursor series Ultra Q.

Anyone who has kept up with the Mill Creek releases as I have will find this movie an absolute treat, a reward for following these stories for season after season. But even if you have never seen an Ultraman series before, the movie gives enough context, and it’s standalone enough, that you won’t have any trouble enjoying it. Not to mention all the great practical effects work and suitmation, which is a hallmark of all Tsuburaya Productions.

Bottom line, I think Superior 8 Ultra Brothers is a great introduction to the franchise. If you’ve never seen any before, this will give you a taste of eight different shows. It also works as a fantastic celebration of, at the time they made it, 42 years of one of Japan’s most enduring shows.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Trauma, as we all know, can be inherited in some form or another. Be it national, societal, or deeply personal, the adage “the sins of the father are visited on the son” remains as true today as ever. Because of this, and a growing acceptance and exploration of mental health, the horror genre has sought to tackle this hereditary grief in earnest over the past few years. And luckily for us viewers, this examination has given us some excellent and chilling movies. One fans simply mustn’t sleep on (har har) is the recent German movie Schlaf, or Sleep. The movie is available now from Arrow Video in one of the best single-title editions I’ve seen in a long time.

Director Michael Venus uses surrealist visuals and dream logic to peel back the layers of sins of a particular kind of German, all the way back to the Third Reich. Though that’s a lot to unpack for any one film, Venus does a masterful job of centering the events on one family and a little town full of secrets. Using the concept of dreams and nightmares allows him to utilize symbolism and allegory all the way through, but keep the emotions real and grounded. It’s a haunting film I haven’t been able to shake.

Marlene (Sandra Hüller), is a flight attendant who has horrifying recurring nightmares about a place she’s never been to. When she learns the place is actually real, she goes to check it out and suffers a breakdown. While she recuperates in a psychiatric ward, her daughter Mona (Gro Swantje Kohlhof), worried her mom’s psychological issues will appear in her, goes to the idyllic village of Stainbach to investigate. Why would this town have such a hold on Marlene?

Well, it turns out Stainbach, despite seeming like a nice vacation spot, has a lot of secrets. It seems the three most prominent leaders in town have recently all died by their own hand, glimpses of which Mona sees as she tries to get closer to the truth. Marlene’s nightmares begin to bleed into Mona’s waking life, and the elder generation sweep more and more of the sordid past under the rug. All the while, a mysterious blonde woman named Trude seems to have some hold over everyone, awake or asleep.

I don’t obviously want to give too much of the plot away, but I also kind of can’t? Sleep is the kind of movie that is more felt than understood. This is the feature debut for Michael Venus and it’s truly a staggering piece of work, visually and thematically. Co-written with first time screenwriter Thomas Friedrich, Sleep explores such heavy topics as fascism, misogyny, abuse, murder, and mental health. It’s not an easy watch on any level, but it’s explored with such a deft touch, and with such rich and well-rounded characters, that whether you fully grasp it all does not impact your enjoyment.

As though Arrow knew the movie had so much going on that it might need some examination, the Blu-ray edition comes complete with several outstanding extras to help you further appreciate Sleep. Filmmaker and author Sean Hogan and author and critic Kim Newman break down the film in a fascinating feature length audio commentary. Critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas takes a look at the fairy tale and dream imagery of the movie in a video essay. A second video essay from critic Anton Bitel explores the depiction of Germany’s national trauma explicit in the movie. And anthropologist, dream researcher, and filmmaker Louise S. Milne discusses the movie’s dreams and folklore in an lengthy interview. It’s really all you could possibly want to truly appreciate this complex and stirring film.

Sleep hits Blu-ray January 24 in North America, though you can stream it now on the Arrow Player app. Watch this movie, folks. It’s not your typical horror movie, in the best possible way.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Italian directors during the heyday of movie production in that country had to be versatile. Rare were people like Sergio Leone or Dario Argento who could only make a handful of movies in a specific genre and be considered huge successes and major artists. Most of the time, they had to direct whatever was popular at the time. Generally they also made a lot of movies, churning them out in rapid succession. That said, not all Italian directors were good at everything. Mario Bava, for example, was an amazing director of horror and suspense, but made some truly lousy westerns.

I remember when I first got into Italian movies back in college, seeing the name of director Umberto Lenzi on horror schlock like Nightmare City and the revolting Cannibal Ferox. I all but wrote him off as a result. Years later, however, I discovered some of his earlier works. His string of fascinating giallo movies with Carroll Baker have become some of my favorites. He’s also one of the very best at the poliziottesco, or the Italian cop-action-crime movie. One of these major titles in his catalogue, 1976’s Free Hand for a Tough Cop, is now out on Region B Blu-ray from Fractured Visions. It’s a supremely fun and action-packed movie.

One thing up front about these poliziotteschi is that they were borne out of a very turbulent time in Italy. They called them the “Years of Lead,” referring to all the political and social upheaval. I wrote about Arrow’s box set called The Years of Lead here. A lot of these police movies had a political edge, like Sergio Martino’s Silent Action which also came out in ’76. Lenzi’s actioners tended to be less about political corruption and more about horrible, violent criminals. They tend to be hyper violent and some, like The Tough Ones and Almost Human, are deeply unpleasant. Luckily for those with weaker stomachs, Free Hand for a Tough Cop is not as rough.

The movie centers on Police Inspector Sarti (Claudio Cassinelli) who is quickly running out of time to rescue a wealthy businessman’s chronically ill young daughter. The crime boss Brescianelli (Henry Silva) has kidnapped her and is holding her for ransom, using her need for kidney dialysis as a way to get the money quick. The problem, the police have no idea where Brescianelli is, and the criminal world has clammed up.

In order to get inside dirt on the underworld, Sarti stages an elaborate jailbreak for Sergio Marazzi a.k.a. “Garbage Can” (Tomas Milian), a petty thief and confidential informant. Sarti hopes that with Garbage Can, and a small cadre of hired goons, they can track down Brescianelli and rescue the girl before time runs out. And before the goons get wise that they’re working for a cop.

Milian is a Cuban-born actor who became a big star in Italian genre cinema. Though notoriously tough to work with because of his method acting, Milian was a staple of Italian westerns and, later, the poliziotteschi. Lenzi made a total of six movies with Milian, all of them poliziotteschi. And in each, Milian played some sort of criminal, often the most vile, frothing, disturbingly violent of the bunch. Here, however, Garbage Can Marazzi is a playful trickster, a lowlife who loves being a lowlife but has a heart of gold and a knack for using his brains to get out of jams. It’s really great to see Milian in this context. Sure, he overacts a bit, but you can’t help but get a kick out of Garbage Can.

Lenzi’s great prowess as a director comes in full-blooded action sequences. Car chases, elaborately staged shootouts, and quick-cut fistfights in his movies are some of the best in the genre. The beauty–or maybe the health and safety nightmare–of Italian moviemaking at the time is how they were able to perform hair-raising car stunts in and around the actual busy streets of Rome. They look dangerous because they are. They look fast because they had to be. Nearly 50 years removed, they still pack a wallop.

If you’ve never seen a poliziottesco, I’d say Free Hand for a Tough Cop is a pretty excellent one to start with. It’s got a lot of comedy, feeling at times like a buddy movie from the ’80s. The action is top notch, and the bad guys are awful without being repugnant. It ends with one of the best shootouts of the genre, and the whole thing hangs together because of the charismatic performance of Tomas Milian. You never thought you’d hear so many people call someone Garbage Can, but this is the movie that proves you wrong.

The Blu-ray is out now from Fractured Visions, a UK distributor. The movie is presented in a 2K restoration from the original camera negative. Extras include several interviews with cast and crew, an interview with Umberto Lenzi’s daughter Alessandra Lenzi, a video essay, and two commentary tracks. It’s absolutely worth a look.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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I’m going to say a potentially incendiary thing: Mario Bava is the best underrated director of all time. The Italian cinematographer turned director was one of the most prolific in his era. Though he directed movies in all kinds of genres, his forte was horror, creating some of the most visually interesting, creepiest films in the canon. Despite all of this, Bava was never appreciated during his time, looked over for young upstarts like Dario Argento. With his final film as a director, Bava’s Shock certainly bears some of the hallmarks of Argento’s brand of horror. But thanks to Arrow Video’s new Blu-ray presentation, we can appreciate an unsetting, surreal swansong from a true artist.

I remember seeing Shock maybe a decade or more ago on Netflix. I don’t remember thinking all that highly of it, despite a few effective scares. Over the years, I’ve become a massive fan of Mario Bava and his innovative filmmaking techniques and understated exploration of scarred psyches. Almost all of his movies have made their way to Blu-ray, and Shock represents the last of his major works to arrive. Even later than some of Bava’s offbeat non-horror output.

Shock is both a ghost story and a murder mystery, combining both of Bava’s most beloved styles, the Gothic and the giallo. Many balk at calling it one of the director’s best, owing to a number of outside factors. It was a deliberate attempt by the producers to ape the success of Argento. Prog rock band Libra provided the score, doing their best Goblin impression. It stars Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s romantic and creative partner, right after the dissolution of both relationships. And, chiefly, only a reported 75% of the movie was actually Mario Bava’s work. The rest was the work of Mario’s son and longtime assistant, Lamberto Bava. It was Mario’s subtle effort to give the younger man the push to feature directing he needed.

All of that setup out of the way, let’s talk about what’s actually in the movie. The story follows Dora Baldini (Nicolodi) and her young son Marco (David Colin Jr.) who move in to a very large, somewhat dilapidated house with Dora’s new airline pilot husband Bruno (John Steiner). The house is where Dora used to live with her first husband, Carlo (Nicola Salerno), Marco’s father, prior to his death.

Right from the get-go things seem off. Marco has an imaginary friend who we quickly learn is Carlo’s ghost. Dora has strange and upsetting hallucinations of a putrefied hand brandishing a boxcutter that she doesn’t quite understand. Bruno believes it’s just the stress of moving coupled with the buried trauma about Carlo’s death. However, it’s clear there’s more going on, both corporeal and supernatural. The truth surrounding Carlo and his apparently haunting/possession of Marco leads to horrifying truths and Dora’s ever-fracturing mind.

While Shock doesn’t bear many of the visual hallmarks of a Mario Bava horror film (most notably the lack of expressionistic colorful lighting), it does share much in common with his earlier ghost stories. The ghosts in Bava’s films are usually representations of the lead character’s scarred and depraved psyches. Bava’s 1963 film The Whip and the Body features a woman who continues a sadomasochistic relationship with her cruel suitor even after his death. The taunting image of the killer’s dead wife haunts him in the 1971 film Hatchet for the Honeymoon. And in 1966’s Kill, Baby, Kill, the little ghost girl holding a town in panic is acting out the anger of her vindictive mother.

The ghost in Shock may just be Dora’s hallucination, but that doesn’t quite explain Marco’s truly disturbing behavior, who seems to relate to his mother both with hatred and lust. Which only even partially makes sense if it’s Carlo acting through him. In this way, Shock bears more than a passing resemblance to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, except instead of governess and charge, it’s mother and son. One of the movie’s standout sequences finds Dora alone in her bed, experiencing some kind of orgasmic supernatural pleasure achieved by tying Nicolodi to the bed facing a fixed camera and rotating the entire rig so her hair moves as though floating.

Nicolodi gives a truly outstanding performance in Shock, perfectly encapsulating a woman on the edge of sanity. In truth, Nicolodi wasn’t far off from this herself. As I learned from Bava biographer Tim Lucas’s wonderful audio commentary and a video essay from critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Nicolodi had developed anorexia as a result of the stress and anguish stemming from her breakup with Argento. She’s incredibly frail in the movie, and seemingly channels all of her trauma into the role. By the actress’s own accounts in later years, Bava’s warmth and professionalism on set helped her during that exceedingly tough time.

While Shock is often criticized for its sparse plot and odd atmosphere, the Bavas cannot draw criticism for their effective and eerie in-camera effects. The movie is a surreal triumph and nearly every one of the scariest moments comes from a piece of design or nifty camera trick. Most famously, a terrifying moment where Marco runs toward his mother and becomes Carlo’s ghost in the same shot. It’s a very simple idea that, if done improperly, would have completely failed. The camera move needed to be absolutely precise to achieve the proper impact. Judge for yourself if it did.

Mario Bava made a number of classic and indelible movies during his long career, and it’s a shame that Shock is rarely listed among them. The performances are wonderful, and the story expects the audience to infer more than learn directly. This adds to the overall unease and growing tension. It’s exactly what I like from a ghost story and the filmmaker’s work in general. Shock is due for a reappraisal and thanks to Arrow, I hope it becomes the minor classic it ought to be.

The Blu-ray presentation is gorgeous, with a complete 2K restoration from the original 35mm film. The extras are wonderful, in keeping with Arrow’s usual high standards. It’s worth buying Blu-rays of any kind just for a commentary track by Tim Lucas. His tracks are thoroughly researched and always entertaining. When the movie in question is a Bava film, of whom Lucas is the world recognized authority, it’s all the better.

Heller-Nicholas’s video essay offers an in-depth examination of the movie’s visual symbols, most notably the large sculpture of a hand which is omnipresent and ties directly into the ghostly hand of Carlo, pulling the strings of the plot, as it were. Additional extras include interviews with Lamberto Bava, co-screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti, and critic and genre expert Stephen Thrower. If you’re a scholar of genre cinema or would even just like to know more about a movie you’ve just seen, you truly cannot do better than Arrow’s extras, and these specifically.

I love Mario Bava, and all of his movies deserve a deeper analysis. But Shock represents a master craftsman working at the end of his career under atypical circumstances who managed to turn in a thoughtful, creepy movie in an age of bombastic set pieces and excessive gore. Give Shock a chance and it will reward you.

Shock arrives on Blu-ray from Arrow Video on January 18.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Physical media forever! Look, I’m not so naïve as to think all that many people out there are going to choose to buy discs instead of stream things. It’s nearly 2022, a very futuristic sounding year. I get it. But, there are just certain pleasures a digital purchase simply cannot out perform a real thing. As such, this is a list of the best Blu-ray box sets of 2021, in no particular order. The ones I found to be the most worth-the-space on your respective shelves. Certainly there are a lot of great physical media distributors out there, so this list is by no means complete. These were just the ones I liked best. Do not begrudge an old fuddy duddy his small pleasures.

Once Upon a Time in China: The Complete Films

I love the fact that Criterion continues to surprise and delight with its ever-growing catalog of eclectic and disparate film choices. Their move into the realm of Hong Kong action cinema in recent years has been especially exciting. A few years ago they put out Jackie Chan’s first two Police Story movies; last year they gave us the complete Bruce Lee. Now they’re back with writer-director-producer Tsui Hark’s historical epics, Once Upon a Time in China, being the breakthrough franchise for up-and-coming Wushu champion Jet Li.

The series follows the legendary Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-hung, a martial artist and physician who had already been the subject of dozens of movies in the country. Tsui directed four out of the six movies; Li plays Wong in four of the six movies. The two men bring out the best in each other. The movies are not only outstanding, fast, exciting action films (hello fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping), but a real exploration of Tsui’s feelings toward Chinese history. Tsui is ethnically Chinese, born in South Vietnam, educated in the United States. As a result, he brings an outsider perspective and is both reverent and critical of China’s history. Even going on 30 years later, Once Upon a Time in China feels ahead of its time.

Years of Lead – Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers

Of all the Italian genre movies that I’ve fallen in love with over the past decade, the poliziotteschi, or Italian crime films, have been the ones that took the longest. Italy, which had enjoyed a decade of swinging progressiveness during the ’60s, was moving toward political unrest by the 1970s. Crime shot up sharply, terrorism from both far-left and far-right factions threatened the citizenry, and violence was always a hair’s breath away. This period, the “Years of Lead,” was tumultuous to say the least.

The poliziotteschi films reflected this unrest and ran the gamut from fun car chase movies to tough, downbeat crime flicks. This box set from the good folks at Arrow Films gives us five lesser known, but truly entertaining and thought-provoking movies from that period. For a full breakdown of the set, check out my review here.

The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Collection

Staying in Europe, Severin’s excellent (and thorough) box set explores some of the films horror icon Christopher Lee made in mainland Europe in the ’60s. Some of Lee’s most interesting films come from this period and the set includes three Italian movies, two West German movies, and a Polish horror anthology series he hosted in the ’70s. Three of the movies I think are absolutely worth it for any genre fan. Castle of the Living Dead and Crypt of the Vampire, both from Italy and released in 1964, and the German film The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism from 1967. Despite the latter’s salacious name, it’s easily my favorite of the set, with a gorgeously chilly Bavarian setting and lush color which highlights some of the gorier moments.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Complete Series Limited Collector’s Edition

One of the most important, influential, and ponderous anime ever, Neon Genesis Evangelion has never looked as good as it does now thanks to this new Blu-ray set from GKIDS and Shout! Factory. The complete series limited collector’s edition includes: all 26 episodes, plus both of the original movies, in both the new updated subs and dubs and the classic subs and dubs fans remember from the 2000s. If you like the show, this is the best way to see it and hear it.

Future Boy Conan The Complete Series

And speaking of GKIDS and Shout! Factory, they’ve teamed up for a real treat. The directorial debut of one Hayao Miyazaki (heard of him?!) the 26-episode series is at once a dark, post-apocalyptic adventure and a happy, lighthearted kids show. Oh, anime. The show originally aired in 1978 and hasn’t been easy to come by in North America until now. Boasting a brand new English dub and subtitle translation, the HD presentation on this set is absolutely stunning. You can absolutely see Miyazaki’s trademark mix of whimsy and dourness on display. It feels like a great companion piece to his later feature, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. No wonder he became the greatest animated filmmaker of all time.

The Daimajin Trilogy

Staying in Japan, we have a fascinating trilogy of kaiju movies that all came out within the same calendar year. Each of the films has a different director, different-ish story, and different characters. Well, mostly different characters; they’re all period-set, samurai historicals that happen to end with a giant living statue god wreaking havoc on those who would do harm to his worshipers. The product of Daiei Films, the same company that made the much more traditional Gamera series, the Daimajin trilogy are generally straight forward drama films punctuated by extended third-action kaiju destruction, some of the best in the genre. For a full rundown of this set from Arrow Films, click here.

Thundarr the Barbarian Complete Series

Most of the sets in this list from 2021 have a ton of extras or value added material. This one is on here just because it surprised me and I love it. I’d never seen Thundarr the Barbarian prior to getting the Blu-ray set this year and so I assumed, wrongly, that it would be a bit like The Herculoids or the original Space Ghost. Excuses for limited-movement animated action. But boy was I wrong. It only lasted 21 episodes, but it features some of the wildest post-apocalyptic scenarios I’ve ever seen. The titular Thundarr travels the wreckage of the Earth with his companions, Princess Ariel and the large, bestial Ookla the Mok. It mixes swords and sorcery with science fiction and technology. It’s a hell of a lot of fun. Click here to check out my full Thundarr the Barbarian review.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post The Very Best Blu-rays and Sets of 2021 appeared first on Nerdist.

It’s been a big year already for fans of Kamen Rider. To mark the Japanese tokusatsu series’ 50th anniversary, we’ve learned about a new big screen outing in Shin Kamen Rider; there will be follow-ups to beloved series Kamen Rider Black and Kamen Rider W; and, as we told you back in April, Kamen Rider Ryuki coming to TokuSHOUTsu. In that same announcement, we also announced the first North American Blu-ray for a Kamen Rider series was on the way. And now we finally have a release date for Kamen Rider Zero-One on Blu-ray. January 25, 2022!

Preorders for the set are available right now via Shout! Factory’s store. The eight-disc collection will contain all 46 episodes of Zero-One plus the movie REALxTIME and five special episodes. That is, by our count, a lot of Kamen Rider Zero-One to enjoy.

Zero-One originally aired in Japan from September 2019 to August 2020. It’s the first series in Japan’s nascent Reiwa era, and marks the 30th series in total to have aired since 1971. TokuSHOUTsu has brought the original Kamen Rider series to North America followed by the 2000s follow-ups Kuuga and Ryuki. While other seasons have popped up on streaming services, to date, Zero-One is the only one on Blu-ray. Needless to say, this is a pretty big deal.

Toei/Shout! Factory

The synopsis of the series is as follows:

Humagears (humanoid robots), created by the leading company for AI, Hiden Intelligence, serve humanity’s every convenience. But a cyber-terrorist organization begins hacking the Humagears in a conspiracy that turns them into monsters. Aruto Hiden has taken over at Hiden Intelligence, and along with the CEO’s post, he also takes over the responsibility for Kamen Rider Zero-One by using his company’s technology. Aruto tries to keep the peaceful world between humans and Humagears with his Humagear secretary, while A.I.M.S., a military squad, pursues the terrorists!

Also look for KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE: THE COMPLETE SERIES with REALxTIME to stream on TokuSHOUTsu in January ’22.

Featured Image: Toei

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE Blu-ray Pre-Orders Open Now appeared first on Nerdist.

In 1996, Scream hit the horror scene, changing the game with a chilling yet humorous story about a teen girl who discovers the grisly truth behind recent murders. The film sparked a resurgence in mainstream scary movies starring a swath of teen leads. Scream both honored its predecessors within its narrative while simultaneously clowning the genre’s many tropes and unofficial “rules.”

And when it came to this film’s rules and expertise, Randy Meeks was the one with the knowledge. Despite his death in Scream 2, Randy’s legacy continues to resonate within this universe. A recent Scream (2022) trailer shows Dewey and other characters discussing the rules of a horror situation, much like the video store employee did decades prior. Jamie Kennedy’s character is a staple in the franchise, the ultimate audience surrogate who spoke for us up until his shocking demise.

But, what if Randy had survived? What would he be doing right now? Kennedy thinks Randy would have taken his film love and knowledge to new heights. “He’d probably have snuck off and become a professor, staying low-key and teaching film somewhere, maybe out in Berkeley,” Kennedy tells Nerdist via Zoom. “Then [the other characters] would call him and be like, ‘We need you to guide us…there’s been another round of murders.’ And he’d be like, ‘No, don’t drag me back in.’ I think that’s what he’d be doing.”

The prolific actor and comedian completely embraces the fandom’s love for the character. In fact, if he could choose to be anyone in the franchise in real life, he’d choose Randy because, well, he is like him in some ways. He may not have Randy’s mental Rolodex of horror knowledge, but he surely has his humor and strong opinions.

Kennedy also gets good laugh out of the conspiracies that Randy is somehow alive. However, if there were an alternate Scream universe, he’d totally be on board with Randy faking his death. “I think he would do that,” affirms Kennedy. “Because he’s too smart. He knew that his time was gonna come, because he was getting too mouthy. He knew too much… But, he could still secretly help Sidney along the way.”

In retrospect, Kennedy marvels at Scream’s role in changing his life on a nuclear level as well as the trajectory of the horror genre. It led to him making “serious money,” as he says, and became the springboard for The Jamie Kennedy Experiment and other film opportunities like Malibu’s Most Wanted. (A film that is oft quoted in this millennial writer’s home. Don’t be hatin’.)

In terms of its cultural impact, Jamie Kennedy says Scream reflects a generation and shifts in entertainment in a brilliant way. Like many films of the ’90s, its a snapshot of the world during that time, for better or worse.

“Gen X was just like, ‘To hell with everything, question everything. This is what you left us!’ So, it definitely has that mid-’90s vibe of, ‘You know, man, this is all BS. What’s going on here?’ Scream was the perfect Gen X thing. It came during the start of The Real World and reality TV and seeing the façades broken. Scream was really the first meta movie, in the sense that it was commenting on what was happening, in its very Gen X way, as it was happening to the characters. It did it smartly without breaking the fourth wall. It’s exactly where we were in the zeitgeist of time…Scream is such a unique property, it’s not just a horror movie and different than a typical slasher movie. There’s psychological-ness and comedy to it.”

Dimension Films

Thankfully Jamie Kennedy got the best of both worlds from his Scream experience. He gets to be a horror film staple, going to conventions and being the subject of big love. But he didn’t get typecast into the funny sidekick or the “horror guy” roles. He has returned back to the thriller and horror side of things throughout his career in Ghost Whisperer, Criminal Minds, and Trick. But, if he dives into the genre again, he wants a project with a villain who can become a horror icon like Ghostface, Michael Myers, or Candyman. And, he doesn’t want to play a helper or victim like Randy. He wants to be the killer this time. We’d love to see it!

Until then, Jamie Kennedy will be impatiently waiting for Scream (2022) like the rest of us. “I’m definitely looking forward to the new film,” he says with a smile. “I don’t really keep up with the franchise. I see the actors when we go to conventions, and sometimes we’ll be there together signing, which is fun. But it’s been 10 years since [the last film] came out, so it’s nice… I’m just like you guys. I’ll be there on Friday night with my ticket. It’ll be great and I can’t wait see how it reinvigorates [the franchise]. I know there are some really good actors, young actors in this new generation, and I think that’s exciting.”

We are excited too, Jamie! In fact, Scream fans can grab 4K Blu-ray copies of the film starting October 19 ahead of the film’s 25th anniversary on December 20. The anniversary set includes a new documentary featurette with behind-the-scenes looks and commentary from the late great Wes Craven. There are also cast and crew interviews and production footage to enjoy. Get back into Scream mode and experience how it all began with Sid, Dewey, Randy, and the rest of the original crew once again.

The post Jamie Kennedy Says SCREAM Is the Perfect Gen-X Film appeared first on Nerdist.

It’s one of the best and easiest times to be an English-speaking anime fan. Between the now-merged Funimation and Crunchy Roll, you can pretty much find any and all animation from Japan you could want. Dubs or subs, you’ve got access to a whole plethora. Didn’t used to be the case, of course. Until fairly recently, if you came across anime in North America, it was recut, redubbed, and often entirely rewritten versions. Speed Racer was the Americanized version of Mach Go Go Go; Space Battleship Yamato became Star Blazers, stuff like that. However the most popular of these would arguably be Robotech, an animated series culled from a whopping three totally separate original anime series. The entire show is available now on Blu-ray from Funimation, and it’s a fascinating ride.

Robotech is a franchise from Harmony Gold, a burgeoning TV and film production company. One of its original remits was to import foreign entertainment to the United States. The company hired Carl Macek to adapt Japanese animated series. His choice was the 1982 series Super Dimension Fortress Macross, a show featuring a love triangle set against humans fighting against alien invaders with the help of jet fighters that turn into halfway mechs.

Unfortunately for Macek, Macross only had 36 episodes, far fewer than the 65 minimum needed for syndication. He would have to supplement it with two other series: 1984’s Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and 1983’s Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. Those shows have 23 and 25 episodes, respectively. With all of these together, plus some judicious reconfiguring, you get 85 episodes of Robotech. The problem is, of course, these three series are effectively unrelated. While Southern Cross was also in the Super Dimension metaseries (the third to Macross‘ first entry), MOSPEADA was not part of anything.

Funimation

The decision then became, how would these three similar yet disparate shows become one? This necessitated splitting the story of Robotech into three different sagas. Each saga takes place at a different time in Earth’s future history and concerns each of the three Robotech Wars. In order to tie all three together despite different characters and types of robotic mecha, the writers decided that each war would be for the powerful energy source “Protoculture.”

Part one, “The Macross Saga,” concerns humanity’s discovery of a crashed alien ship and subsequent battle against a race of giant warriors called the Zentraedi. We meet a young pilot named Rick Hunter as he first gets in the cockpit of a strange transforming jet fighter. He soon rescues a young singer named Lynn Minmei and as the fight to save humanity takes off, we get a lot of interpersonal drama between the people as they fight the Zentraedi. The would-be romance between Rick and Minmei hits a snag when Rick meets First Officer Lisa Hayes.

Earth nearly succumbs to the Zentraedi, but as you might expect, the good guys win. In the process, they learn about protoculture and the so-called Robotech Masters. This leads directly into part two of the series, “The Masters Saga,” set 15 years later. Here we see the arrival in Earth orbit of the Robotech Masters, who have come seeking what turns out to be the sole means in the universe of producing protoculture. After some poor diplomacy, the Masters spark a war with humanity. Among the Army of the Southern Cross are 2nd Lts. Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant, who pilot this portion of the story’s signature mechs.

Funimation

At the end of the Second Robotech War, Earth is covered in the spores of a plant called the Flower of Life. This flower, turns out, is the source of protoculture and a beacon to the mysterious Invid who scour the galaxy for its presence. The Invid eventually land on Earth 12 years later for the final Robotech War. “The New Generation Saga” finds the Invid totally in control of Earth.

This section feels the least connected to the previous two. However, fairly ingeniously, the first two sections have little references that set up how this one starts. We learn many of the heroes of the First Robotech War had left Earth to seek out the Robotech Masters on a preemptive mission. This Robotech Expeditionary Force sends missions back from across the galaxy to attempt a liberation of their homeworld. The storyline follows one group of freedom fighters as they work their way towards the final battle with the Invid.

Funimation

Obviously, with three separate TV shows all rolled together, Robotech feels a bit disjointed if you watch it all in succession. For most people, “The Macross Saga” is the one to watch. It’s the one that’s the most, to them, Robotech. Indicative of this is how Rick Hunter in his flight gear and his jet fighter are still the images most often associated with it. You can tell Macek cared the most about bringing Macross to television even when you watch it 36 years later.

That said, I think the second and third sections have some great characters. Dana and Bowie in “The Masters Saga” are a great one-two, and the mech design is my favorite of the bunch. “The New Generation Saga” has Scott Bernard as its hero and he’s just an overall badass, plus the transforming motorcycle mechs are likewise pretty dope.

Robotech has made its way to home media several times over the years, in various formats. In 2019, FUNimation got the rights, and it’s through them that we have this absolutely gorgeous collector’s edition set. In addition to all 85 episodes, conveniently split up into their respective sagas, you also get four embroidered patches, and a 1/100 scale transformable VF-1S Veritech Fighter, as piloted by Roy Fokker in “The Macross Saga.” It even comes with a Roy Fokker figure, though not small enough to fit in the cockpit.

The series looks and sounds gorgeous on Blu-ray, and really lets you experience Robotech in the best possible way. I only saw a few episodes in my youth, so watching it now feels like a brand new experience. Even if you’re iffy on dubbed anime, it’s a fascinating piece of animation history, when a company felt like bringing grown up animation to a different country and market it directly to kids. And by gum, it works.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post ROBOTECH Might Be the Most Unlikely Hit in History appeared first on Nerdist.

One of the best things about Roger Corman is he always allowed young filmmakers a chance to make something. The budgets were small, the time frame miniscule, but if you could bring it in on time and without spending too much, you were a filmmaker. A whole generation of Hollywood heavyweights got their start working for Corman; Scorsese, Cameron, Bogdanovich, Howard, Dante, Sayles. A veritable who’s who of ’70s and ’80s movie makers. The earliest of these is Francis Ford Coppola who, a decade before The Godfather, had eight days to make a little horror movie called Dementia 13.

As happens, after Coppola turned in his cut, Corman had Jack Hill write and direct extra scenes, cutting the original ending. The result was a mediocre affair; now Coppola’s original director’s cut has been restored and is out on Blu-ray from Lionsgate’s Vestron Video arm.

Dementia 13 never had much of a good reputation, especially considering its illustrious writer-director. Coppola shot it in Ireland, on off-days for Corman’s The Young Racers, even using a few of that bigger movie’s stars. After the Corman-mandated reshoots, Dementia 13 came out in 1963 as the bottom half of a double bill with Corman’s own classic X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes. X is one of the best movies Corman ever directed, and in comparison, the hacked to bits Dementia 13 looked especially lacking.

I confess to never seeing the 75-minute theatrical cut, but this 69-minute director’s cut, I must say, is pretty great. It’s a chilly, moody modern Gothic which benefits from the Irish castle locations and a script that feels like it prefigured Italian giallo films.

Lionsgate

The movie follows the, let’s say, complicated Haloran family, a wealthy Irish clan, the children of which spent much of their time in America. Adult sons John (Peter Read), Richard (William Campbell), and Billy (Bart Patton) have all returned home at the behest of their very ill mother (Eithne Dunne). John’s new wife Louise (Luana Anders) only has eyes for the family fortune and wants to Lady Macbeth her husband into taking it all for them. Richard is engaged to the lovely Kane (Mary Mitchel) and, because their mother can’t travel, the wedding will take place at Castle Haloran in a few days.

Now this all sounds relatively normal. It’s not. You see, a ghost haunts the family. The ghost of Kathleen, the family’s youngest and only daughter who drowned in the estate’s pond as a small child. Lady Haloran loved Kathleen best and every year on the anniversary they hold a funeral for her, as though she just died. It’s not healthy, and you’d think the family physician Dr. Caleb (Patrick Magee, at his creepy best) would have more influence, and yet. To make matters even more dire, an ax murderer lurks on the grounds, ready to destroy the Haloran line once and for all.

Lionsgate

Like I said, this feels like a Gothic giallo. There’s always inheritance plots and big rich families and bloody murders that could be the work of ghosts. There’s also creepy dolls. I’m a big fan of giallo, so these elements of Dementia 13 really did it for me. It’s also a surprisingly violent and bloody movie. My guess is the black and white photography allowed Coppola to get away with more than he could if it were in color. Even so, a lot of this movie feels much more modern than you’d guess a B-horror movie from the early ’60s would.

I’m not going to sit here and say it’s a work of untold genius, because it isn’t. The movie definitely has some issues, like a couple of duff performances, weird non sequiturs, and a choppy final act. But there’s something undeniable about the way the camera moves, the eye for detail, the pace of the murder sequences. Coppola put together the director’s cut in 2018 so it looks wonderful in HD, which helps a lot.

Lionsgate

The Blu-ray from Vestron Video contains the original “D13 Test” gimmick, a brief film purporting to be a real scientist administering a test to see if the audience has the emotional and mental capacity to withstand the horrors of Dementia 13. It’s weird, I have to say, but it’s fun. It has never been available before this, so it’s a fun treat. Additionally, the disc contains a very brief introduction from Coppola, plus a feature length commentary track, which is a delight for fans of low budget filmmaking and film history.

In this age of overblown, special effects-driven horror, it’s nice to watch a movie that went for visceral scares on a shoestring, and had a pretty interesting story to boot. Let me be the first to say, this Coppola kid is pretty talented.

Dementia 13 is available on Blu-ray beginning September 21.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Nearly 25 years ago, Warner Bros. Animation hit us with some incredible and enduring content. Superman: The Animated Series hit the airwaves in September 1996 and became a fave among ‘90s kids like myself. It became a gateway for many kids to fall for this iconic hero and dig curiously into his comic background. To honor this milestone anniversary, the company is partnering with DC for a Blu-ray box set of the entire series. That’s right, you can watch all 54 episodes (!!!) of Clark Kent’s journey, along with some other goodies, with this 6-disc collector’s edition.

The episodes are all remastered with color correction, a “grain reduction pass,” and crisper audio. This means you can still get all those nostalgic feels minus the quality of 1996 television. And that’s a great thing because older shows can look terrible on our fancy new TVs. The set also includes Superman: Timeless Icon, a featurette about the series.

Warner Bros./DC

According to a press release from Warner Bros., it “reveals the complicated journey of Superman: The Animated Series and those who created the new mythology for the Man of Steel, as told by producers Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, director Dan Riba, writer Bob Goodman, casting/dialogue director Andrea Romano, and Tim Daly and Clancy Brown, the heralded voices of Superman and Lex Luthor, respectively.”

There is also audio commentary for some episodes, including “Stolen Memories” and “The Last Son of Krypton Part 1.” Additionally, Bruce Timm, Dan Riba, and Paul Dini do a fun video commentary for the “Mxyzpixilated” episode.

This Blu-ray will be available on October 12 and set you back $70. Sure, it’s a bit pricey, but there are 21 hours of content. And, for the Superman collectors among us, it would be a cool addition to any collection. So make plans to fly (in your car…not the sky, obvs, unless…) to your nearest retailer and grab a copy of DC history.

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By the mid-’60s in Japan, television was destroying movies in a big way. Since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, almost every Japanese household had a TV, and they were watching it nonstop. Some stations started paying top dollar for movie-style spectacle for the small screen. This led to Tsubyraya Productions’ Ultra Q and Ultraman, both in 1966. Toho’s Godzilla franchise had to promise bigger things on smaller budgets. Meanwhile, rival studio Daiei’s little franchise that could, Gamera, was only just beginning. And yet Daiei weren’t content with their hyper violent kids monsters movies; for a brief and fascinating span of about eight months, the Daimajin trilogy reigned supreme.

The Daimajin trilogy has been something of an oddity since its creation; the new Arrow Video Blu-ray release is the first official release in the UK and one of only three ever home releases in the US. The titular monster—a giant statue of a god which comes to life to defend those who worship it—is an impressive sight. I’d never seen these movies prior to this release, and I was surprised at how much they held my attention in the lead-up to Daimajin’s eventual awakening. These are proper period samurai dramas… and then a monster shows up. What? And how?

Up to now, the kaiju films all dealt with monsters borne out of atomic mutation or the lone remnant of some long-extinct species. They may have had mystical or alien aspects to them, but they were very clearly animal. Daimajin, by contrast, is a demon god from the mountains in Japanese folklore. It’s an idol that comes to life only to exact revenge on those who profane his name and his followers. And, chiefly, all of the Daimajin movies take place in the past, unlike the very modern Godzilla or Gamera movies.

Daiei/Arrow

The first movie, Daimajin, sets up a struggle between an enslaved village and the tyrannical warlord who overthrew their previous ruler. The warlord’s legions, in an effort to quell a growing unrest and potential revolt, deface the statue of Daimajin. When one of the young peasant girls prays to the demon god for help, the statue comes to life and crushes the warlord with ruthless swiftness, and a fair amount of collateral damage to the town.

The movie is only 83 minutes long, and—true of many kaiju movies—the titular giant doesn’t awaken until the last 10 minutes or so. This obviously lessened the cost of the effects work and maximized what director of photography Fujio Morita and effects wizard Yoshiyuki Kuroda could do. The effects and trick photography are truly some of the best of the era. The rest of the story plays out like a typical samurai or Edo-period drama. Very well done, naturally, but not what you’d expect for a big spectacle kaiju parade.

Daiei/Arrow

But this was more about what Daiei had available to them. They made a lot of samurai movies in the period, had many directors and actors under contract, and could easily pluck whoever wasn’t working on anything else to make these three films. The original Daimajin‘s director, Kimiyoshi Yasuda, was a veteran of sword pictures; he directed six films in Daiei’s now beloved Zatoichi series. The studio as a whole made these movies like crazy, so why not merge them with the kaiju movie, one of the few things (at the time) that people couldn’t get on TV?

Daiei/Arrow

It’s clear Daiei and its president/the trilogy’s producer Masaichi Nagata wanted to get in on the craze before it started to go bust. They had only just made the first Gamera movie in 1965 and had a sequel, Gamera vs. Barugon, in the works. Daiei produced Daimajin to be GvB‘s backup feature for a kaiju double-bill. On April 17, 1966, both films debuted in Japanese cinemas… and flopped pretty hard. It would be a whole year before the third Gamera movie would come out.

Luckily, they already had two more Daimajin movies in the works. See, what is so especially strange about this trilogy is they were, effectively, produced back-to-back-to-back. Each movie had a different director, each of whom was an absolute pro. After Yasuda wrapped up the first one, duties for the sequel went to Kenji Misumi. Misumi was also a veteran of the Zatoichi series (he even directed the first one), and would go on to direct the majority of the Lone Wolf and Cub movies in the ’70s. Kazuo Mori, another stalwart director of Zatoichi and samurai fare, would direct the third Daimajin film.

Daiei/Arrow

Return of Daimajin, which came out in August 1966, had a completely different cast to the predecessor, but followed a very similar story. Peaceful villages fall under the thumb of an evil lord; the peasants flee to the Daimajin statue (in this one, it’s an island); they pray to it; it comes to life at the end and kills the baddies. Wrath of Daimajin from December 1966 focuses predominantly on a cast of children on a journey to ask Daimajin to free their (you guessed it) peaceful village from the evil lord who has enslaved all the fathers for slave labor.

The screenwriter for all three movies was Tesuro Yoshida, all he basically did variations on a theme. While I didn’t particularly care for the third movie (little kids, get out of here), the other two are very compelling dramas. And in each movie, the sequences of Daimajin’s attack are chilling and spectacular. Daiei may have been trying to catch up to Toho, but they made the smart decision to hire legendary composer Akira Ifukube—who did the music for all the Godzilla movies at the time—to score the Daimajin movies.

Daiei/Arrow

I should absolutely call out actor Riki Hoshimoto, who played the titular monster in each of the three movies. The costume was reportedly incredibly heavy, but his movements, his poise really make the character feel real. Not to mention his eyes! In the creation of the costume, they specifically wanted to utilize the real human eyes of the suit performer behind the grotesque mask. It adds a level of intensity that the puppet eyes of other kaiju could never match.

And then they were done. No more Daimajin movies. Three movies, all in the same calendar year, all of a very high quality of production, came, did their thing, and left. While the first movie made it to US theaters, the sequels only ever made it overseas as part of the same AIP television package that redubbed the Gamera movies. They even screwed up the titles of them, confusing people as to which they were actually watching.

Daiei/Arrow

Daimajin wouldn’t make a return of any sort until 2010 for a Japanese TV series called Daimajin Kanon, a modern-day retelling of the first one’s story. Takashi Miike has also included Daimajin in his upcoming film The Great Yokai War: Guardians, which is the sequel to a remake of Daiei’s earlier The Great Yokai War. It’s a very strange trajectory for a very cool and certainly unique kaiju monster.

The Daimajin trilogy is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining diversion from the Showa era kaiju boom. Now thanks to Arrow, who’ve yet again absolutely nailed the presentation and extras, you can watch all three movies in their full glory. I’d highly recommend them, even if I’m still not entirely sure what and why and how and why but also why?

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post The DAIMAJIN Trilogy Blends Samurai and Kaiju Carnage appeared first on Nerdist.

Maybe no other kind of tale is as prevalent in storytelling as the revenge story. Maybe up there with the meet-cute. It’s a universally recognized set-up: someone wrongs someone else; wronged party seeks retribution. Whether it takes a day or 50 years, whether the revenge-seeker is successful or not, the pursuit of righteous vengeance is a staple. And nowhere is the revenge story as ubiquitous as the Italian western cycle. Hundreds of Euro westerns came out in the ’60s and ’70s, and I’d bet a full 50% or more of them have a theme of vengeance.

However, as Arrow Video‘s new Vengeance Trails box set illustrates, there are many ways to depict revenge. The set contains four films from four different directors, all with the theme of vengeance. Each take is astonishingly different. Even though, ostensibly, they’re all about one guy trying to kill another guy because of bad stuff.

Let’s go through each of the films and how they each tackle their protagonists’ quest for blood.

Arrow Video

Massacre Time (1966)

Director Lucio Fulci‘s name is synonymous with gruesome, gory horror films adorning the video nasties list. But those largely came about later in his career. Earlier, he made all sorts of movies, from comedies to gialli to, yes, even westerns. Fulci didn’t make nearly the number of westerns as other Italian directors. The westerns he did make, though, are fascinating, often very bleak reflections on the cruelty of the world. His 1966 outing, Massacre Time, leans heavy into the sadistic violence for which he’d become famous, but also has a sense of adventure and offers some buddy comedy flare.

The film stars Franco Nero, fresh off of his success in Sergio Corbucci’s Django. He plays Tom, the son of a wealthy widow who had sent him away years earlier. Following her death, Tom receives a letter beckoning him back to his childhood home, but when he arrives he finds it abandoned. The town is now under the control of the Scotts, despite Tom’s brother Jeff (George Hilton) having been the beneficiary of their mother’s will. Tom quickly learns Jeff is a drunkard who allowed the Scotts to take the land. But the Scotts’ lineage is a bit more muddied, and Tom soon comes up against Scott’s eldest son and heir, Jason (Nino Castelnuovo).

Arrow Video

This is an interesting example of a revenge story that doesn’t seem like one for a while. Tom has no idea what has become of his hometown prior to arriving, and he doesn’t learn his personal truth until much later. The resentment Jeff has toward him after this revelation feels very relatable, and much of the movie’s success rests on wanting these two to make amends. Nero and Hilton, two huge stars of Italian genre cinema, are wonderful together, and Castelnuovo is perhaps one of the vilest villains in a genre full of them.

My Name is Pecos (1966)

One of the hallmarks of revenge in the western is the central figure of “the mysterious stranger.” This person (usually a man in these movies) strolls into town, their motivations hidden until the climactic moment. My Name is Pecos, also from 1966, plays into this trope. Everyone wants to know who this mysterious Mexican is who comes to Houston looking for retribution. All he says is his name is Pecos (Robert Woods) and he has his eyes focused squarely on Joe Clane (Pier Paolo Capponi).

As the movie unfolds, we learn that Clane killed Pecos’ family when he was a boy. Several people in town, including a cowardly saloon owner; an undertaker; and a showgirl; want to help Pecos and escape the tyranny of Clane and his gang. Add to that, hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen gold; a whole bloody affair commences.

Arrow Video

Of the directors featured in the set, Maurizio Lucidi is the one with whom I had the least familiarity. A film editor before turning to directing, Lucidi had only directed one film prior to My Name is Pecos. But because of his background in editing, there’s a pace and an energy to the movie that makes it one of the more frenetic outings in the genre. Yes, it seems very weird for a white American actor to play the Mexican Pecos; the genre already employed several actual Hispanic actors. Nevertheless, Lucidi imbues Pecos with all of the audience’s sympathies and as he edges closer to his intended target, we can’t help but cheer him on.

Bandidos (1967)

Other than Fulci, the director I was the most familiar with is Massimo Dallamano. Though he only directed 12 movies before his untimely death, Dallamano made a stamp in the giallo and poliziottescho genres. (I’ve previously written about both What Have They Done to Solange? and his final film, Colt 38 Special Squad.) And while 1967’s Bandidos is his only western as director, Dallamano was the cinematographer on both of Sergio Leone’s first two storied Dollars films.

Bandidos is a fascinating outing, just as much a tragedy as a revenge western. Enrico Maria Salerno plays Richard Martin, an arrogant sharpshooter who begins the movie as a passenger on a train. Unfortunately, the bandit Billy Kane (Venantino Venantini) and his gang hijack the train. Kane is Martin’s former student, and out of sheer sadism, the villain shoots Martin’s hands, leaving him unable to wield a gun. Just for good measure, he slaughters every other person on the train.

Arrow Video

Years later, Martin has resorted to making money as a traveling huckster. He becomes an alcoholic, deep in despair and self-loathing. Fortune smiles when he meets a young man named Ricky Shot (Terry Jenkins), who was falsely imprisoned for Kane’s crimes. Martin takes Ricky under his wing, teaching him the ways of the sharpshooter, so they can both take revenge.

I cannot express how much I love Bandidos; it might be my favorite in this set. It has a grandeur and scope most of these others don’t possess, but the story is very personal. Salerno’s Martin displays such deep sadness at the loss of his livelihood and self-respect, totally helpless in his own eyes. It’s also rare for the aging mentor figure to be the central character, and with that comes a maturity a lot of Italian westerns lack.

And God Said to Cain (1970)

Finally, we come to Antonio Margheriti’s And God Said to Cain, a late addition to the cycle. By 1970, the Italian Western had largely become a parody of itself. However, Cain, with its obvious biblical allusions, is deathly serious, and in fact skirts the line between western and another popular Italian movie genre, the Gothic. Margheriti was a veteran of the Italian Gothic cycle, a contemporary of the likes of Mario Bava. While I usually feel that his Gothic films pale when compared to Bava, here they imbue a sense of menace and foreboding that frankly makes the picture.

German actor and known real-life piece of shit Klaus Kinski stars as Gary Hamilton, a former army officer sent to prison for armed robbery. But here’s the thing; he didn’t actually commit this crime. It was in fact his friend Acombar (Peter Carsten) who planted evidence against Hamilton to frame him. After 10 years of hard labor, Hamilton gets parole and returns to his hometown, determined to get revenge on Acombar and his whole family, who are now wealthy landowners thanks to the money from the robbery.

Arrow Video

What makes And God Said to Cain stand out is just how close the execution hews to horror. Hamilton feels like a wraith or slasher movie villain. He’s always in the shadows, prepared to pick off another member of the Acombar gang. Most of the events of the movie also take place in the span of one night, in a single location (the small town and specifically the casino/hotel). In addition, a great deal of the movie features handheld photography. These elements give a more immediate, and often quite chilling, feel to the events.

The ultimate result is a revenge movie where, even though we know Hamilton is the wronged party and he technically deserves his vengeance, he comes across much more like the aggressor. He is the monster out to destroy a whole town of “upstanding” citizens. Worth nothing, the wrong he has suffered is far less dramatic than the other protagonists mentioned above. Naturally nobody wants to work on a chain gang for 10 years, especially not when you’re innocent; but his retribution feels a bit overboard, which is why the movie works so well as horror.

Vengeance, innit?

Arrow Video

I was very surprised by this box set. Even though I’d seen two of the movies previously, watching them in close succession really illustrated how different a revenge movie can be. At times I forgot these were all variations on a theme and instead I got lost in the wildly different visions from the filmmakers. The box set’s beautiful and informative booklet offered several thought provoking essays on the topic and the films. Is the dogged pursuit of revenge worth the lives it takes to get there. Some of these movies think yes; others are less sure.

None of these movies have been widely available in the U.S. but I’m very glad Arrow has graced us with beautiful restorations. Now, in the blazing heat of the summer, is the perfect time to see what the sweaty, teeth-gnashing version of a revenge tale should look like.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post VENGEANCE TRAILS Shows the Versatility of Revenge appeared first on Nerdist.

Post-fascism, Italy became the coolest place in the world. Fashion was king, style was everywhere, and their motion picture industry was booming. While directors like Fellini and Antonioni won favor with the arthouse crowd, dozens more made a career out of chasing Hollywood trends. They made them their own. Italian westerns are perhaps the most famous, followed by the giallo and horror booms. But another such cycle of movies that reflected both a specific cinematic tradition and a localized Italian moment is the poliziotteschi, or crime movie.

What Is Poliziotteschi?

Seemingly borne out of American cop movies like Bullitt and Dirty Harry, poliziotteschi became a supremely introspective look at the real-life uptick in crime, corruption, and violence in Italy. Arrow Video commemorated this unique cycle with a new box set, titled Years of Lead. This title derives from a specific period of political and social upheaval in Italy from the late-1960s to the late-1980s. Resurgence of both far-right and far-left extremism marked the real Years of Lead. All of that manifested in terrorism, major crimes, and political corruption.

I’ve written recently about a specific poliziottesco of this period, Sergio Martino’s fascinating and troubling Silent Action. In that piece, I spoke about the often militaristic, fascist-leaning supercop at the heart of most of the genre. That kind of hero in American movies started out of somewhere dark in the ’70s and became a cartoon character of machismo in the ’80s. However, as the box set explores, the “supercop” in Italy was less a propagation of macho stereotypes and more a reaction to a seemingly losing battle on all sides.

Arrow Video

The five films in the Years of Lead box set aren’t titles you’d expect at the top of any “most popular” lists of the genre. However, they each exemplify a different aspect inherent to the poliziottesco that make it stand apart. The cycle had different moods, if you will.

The first two films in the set represent a vein of poliziotteschi that is perhaps the least “fun” of the bunch. Thrill-seeking, bored middle- or upper-class people who commit increasingly heinous acts because they can.

Savage Three (1975)

Savage Three (1975) features three young men working mid-level positions at a computer company. The leader, Ovidio (Joe Dallesandro), has a loveless marriage. He sees himself as a toothless cog in the wheel of his own life. Ovidio and his friends begin embarking on a series of violent criminal acts, including murder and sexual assault. Throughout their crime spree, the three men return to work seemingly as a means to re-justify their murderous acts; the world shits on them, so they deserve to take it down.

Though the film is very much from the point of view of Ovidio, Savage Three also has an “Ahab” character, an antagonist of sorts on the right side of the law. Here it’s Inspector Santagà (Enrico Maria Salerno, brother of the film’s director Vittorio Salerno). He has a Columbo quality about him, shabby and a bit scatterbrained. At least on the surface. He seems to know immediately that Ovidio is guilty but spends the bulk of the movie trying to prove it. Along the way, he has wry conversations about society and the place of men within it. It reminds me a bit of the scenes between Christian Bale and Willem Defoe in American Psycho.

Comma 9

While the atrocities the men carry out are horrendous, director Salerno and his co-writer, the great Ernesto Gastaldi, keep the story purely about the psychology behind them. They kill because they can, and they want to. And because, to them, modern Italian life has forgotten them, which ultimately makes the movie a success.

Like Rabid Dogs (1976)

However, I cannot say the same for Like Rabid Dogs (1976). This film likewise focuses on a trio of spree-killers, this time two men and a woman. All of them are the children of old-money and are simply bored and sadistic. They engage in a series of extended kidnapping, torture, and murder sequences of prostitutes in the area. The police are on their heels, but it naturally takes the entirety of the movie for any sort of comeuppance.

This one didn’t work for me, largely because it lacks the cleverness and the social commentary, and indeed the filmmaking prowess, of Savage Three. The real-life Circeo Massacre inspired the film. Director Mario Imperioli doesn’t shy away from depicting the depravities, and the laughing joy, of the murderers. It is shocking, but ultimately just feels sensationalistic.

Rewind Film

Despite not enjoying it, I will say that Like Rabid Dogs does a great job at showcasing this specific kind of poliziottesco. Unmotivated, sadistic crime was one of the many kinds on the rise during the Years of Lead. The police, here a seemingly ineffectual lot, can’t come to grips with senseless crimes such as these.

Colt 38: Special Squad (1976)

Which leads nicely into our next film, Colt 38: Special Squad (1976), a movie all about the police looking for any means to “take back” the city. This movie especially feels indebted to the Dirty Harry films, specifically the second, Magnum Force. A vile Marseillaise gangster (Ivan Rassimov) assassinates the wife of Turin police captain Vanni (Marcel Boffuzzi) as retribution for the death of his brother. Completely wracked with anger and guilt, Vanni puts together a team of young motorcycle cops. He gives each an unregistered Colt 38 Diamondback revolver in order to hit the criminals where it hurts.

Clearly this sounds like any of the various “supercop” styles of crime movie of the era, but writer-director Massimo Dallamano, while also giving audiences plenty of action, shows the inherent problem with giving cops so much power. The Marseillaise, an excellent supervillain-esque antagonist, begins upping the severity of the crimes in an effort to beat the vigilante police. Eventually, Turin becomes a war zone, its innocent citizens collateral damage. Ultimately, it’s not about ending crime. It’s a pissing contest between a cop and an assassin and nobody gets away unscathed.

Highway Racer (1977)

Easily the lightest movie in the set, we next turn our attention to Highway Racer (1977), one of the most fun action flicks I’ve seen in a while. A team of daring bank robbers led by a suave Frenchman (Angelo Infanti) make daring getaways in their suped-up sports cars. A veteran police captain (Giancarlo Sbragia), once one of the best drivers in Rome, decides to catch the robbers by modifying an old Ferrari and using a hothead young cop (Maurizio Merli) to infiltrate the gang and take them down.

Cleminternazionale Cinematografica

This movie is delightfully free of complicated socio-political questions and instead decides to entirely devote itself to what amounts to boys playing with full-size toy cars. The stunts and wrecks in the movie all mirror real-life police chases that had happened in Rome. They really are spectacular. Merli, maybe the most prolific poliziotteschi actor, turns in his feathered hair and mustache for a short buzz and a clean shave. It’s a nice stretch for him, and the movie’s just a blast.

No, the Case Is Happily Resolved (1973)

The final entry in the box set is an outlier, both in approach and in timeframe. It’s another movie by Vittorio Salerno, but it’s the earliest of the bunch. 1973’s awkwardly titled No, the Case Is Happily Resolved shows the real darkness behind the police during the Years of Lead. While many films focus on the police, whether corrupt or virtuous (although usually corrupt), here we have the police more as the clueless stooges of a deeply corrupt system and the machinations of the wealthy.

In the country, a young family man (Enzo Cerusico) on a fishing trip happens upon a grisly scene: a middle-aged man (Riccardo Cucciolla) beating a woman to death with a pipe. The two men lock eyes and the eyewitness scarpers quickly. Though he tries to get back to town—any town—to speak to the police, they seem uninterested in listening and thus ignore him. Eventually, he just decides it’s none of his business and goes home to his wife and daughter.

Unfortunately, the murderer—a wealthy university professor—has better luck and goes to the police. He presents himself as the eyewitness and his counterpart as the murderer. The family man, now terrified the police will track him down, grapples with whether to drop the whole thing, as the professor suggests to him once they finally meet, or whether to do the right thing. But is it too late?

This is a bit of a devastating movie for a number of reasons, but not least because it feels as though our poor witness is doomed from the start. The system itself is so stacked against him when all he did was witness a murder. The police are uninterested in the truth once they have a suspect they can prosecute and persecute. To wit, this is the only movie in the set without some kind of “sympathetic” police presence. Instead, our investigative character is a flamboyant veteran newspaper reporter (the director’s brother again) who believes our hero to be innocent and tries to prove it.

Give Them a Watch!

The Years of Lead were a truly volatile time for a nation only a few decades removed from fascist rule. It was during this period Italy made some of its most interesting popular cinema. Arrow’s Years of Lead set does an amazing job of reflecting all of the many facets of what a “crime” movie is. They’re very rarely glamorous, and often a bit tough to watch. As with the spaghetti western earlier, poliziotteschi would eventually become ridiculous, over-the-top parodies of themselves. However, when they work seriously, as most of these films do, they’re the most interesting and reflective of a country on the brink.

Years of Lead: Five Italian Crime Thrillers 1973-1977 is available now from Arrow Video.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post YEARS OF LEAD Explores Crime and Corruption in ’70s Italy appeared first on Nerdist.

There are some movies that we’ve all internalized, taken for granted, after years of viewing. On home video and cable TV over the past few decades, some movies have become ubiquitous. It’s like they’ve always been there. But let us all stop to think about the majesty, the monster movie perfection (pun intended) of 1990’s Tremors. What a weird concept, and yet what an amazing movie. And it just so happens that this week marks 31 years of Tremors‘ supremacy.

And so, to commemorate this, and the fact that Arrow Video has released a fantastic 4K restoration on Blu-ray, let’s talk about why Tremors continues to whip ass.

If for some reason you haven’t seen Tremors—and if that’s the case, you must have never turned on TNT ever—here’s the basic premise. In the middle of the desert lies the town of Perfection, NV, which has almost no people in it and one miniscule strip of mobile homes and a general store. It’s puny. Two of its residents, Valentine “Val” McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward), are local handymen who plan on getting out of the podunk town. On their way out, they find another local dead, up on an electrical pole. Seems he died of dehydration, too scared to climb down.

This is obviously fairly weird, but it’s not isolated. More people end up dead and soon Val and Earl learn the truth: there are enormous worm creatures under the earth. Luckily, the appearance of a seismology student named Rhonda (Finn Carter) sheds a little light on things; but that doesn’t make the town’s fight against the three carnivorous tubes any easier. Even with residents Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross and Reba McIntyre) who have a gigantic arsenal in their house.

As all things do, it starts with the script. Writing team S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock had already written the ’80s hits Short Circuit and *batteries not included. Their initial idea for Tremors was Land Sharks, which is pretty much still what it ended up being. Their script ended up as one of the funniest, smartest, and weirdest takes on a monster movie you could hope for. It seems obvious to mention mechanical proficiency, but they lay in set-ups, callbacks, and payoffs the whole way through.

Universal

It’s these little but important touches that help make the audience care about the plight of the characters. And the characters in Tremors are outstanding. Val and Earl’s relationship is pitch-perfect; there’s clear love between the two but they bicker and one-up each other at every turn. It’s one of the most believable fraternal bonds in any movie of its type. Rhonda manages to be both the exposition character and Val’s romantic interest without taking away any of her agency or capability. And the entire rest of the town—from the Gummers to Walter the store owner—feel like real people. Real oddball people, but real.

Universal

That Tremors is as good as it is also has a lot to do with Ron Underwood, the first-time director at the helm. This movie has a small cast but it looks enormous, and feels it too. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and we want these people to succeed. Success in this case is not dying, of course. Underwood, who collaborated on the script, absolutely understood how to balance the humor with the scares. The monsters are never played for laughs, but the characters’ reactions to them are.

It it contains maybe the best comedy reveal shot in any movie. (at about 1:10 of the below clip.)

In a period of time full of amazing practical monsters, the graboids in Tremors stand up as a beautiful, grotesque design. Big worms with tripod mandibles and offshoot mouth-arm things. It shouldn’t work, and yet it does. Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. designed the creatures and built the full-size puppets, while the Oscar-winning Skotak brothers realized the graboids for miniature shots. The craftwork on display is second to none, and honestly beats the pants off of anything CGI can do. Hell, something as simple as pulling a buoy underneath fake ground to make it look like a massive worm moving the Earth works to absolute perfection.

Universal

Basically what we’re saying is even if you feel like you’ve seen Tremors enough times, I’d urge you to give it another look, with modern eyes. It stands up remarkably well, even with a few early PG-13 hiccups. (They dub over some bad language, but keep a lot of gore…very weird days.) It’s maybe the best movie of its type anywhere.

And, hey, if you learn this cast list, you can very easily win the next time you play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post Why TREMORS Continues to Absolutely Own appeared first on Nerdist.

While I haven’t polled the entire world, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say 2020 hasn’t been anybody’s favorite year. As the year has gone on, we’ve needed anything we can to take our mind off of things. In other years, going to the movies was a very viable option. With a quarantine in full swing, watching things at home has been a must. Thank goodness for Blu-rays. Sure, you can watch a whole lot on streaming services. But physical media can offer a wealth of extras and bonus content you can’t get on Netflix.

Lucky for us geeks, the best Blu-ray sets on the market today are the work of boutique distributors who love classic and cult cinema. 2020 was at least still good in that department. Here now are my favorite Blu-ray sets of the year, the sets that helped me get through the madness.

Disclaimer: This list is not a complete list of releases from 2020 by any means. Nor is it meant to represent the best of all the worthy releases this year. Quite simply, I didn’t get to look at every set that came out. I’m only one man. So sets like Criterion’s Complete Agnes Varda and Essential Fellini; the newest editions of the BBC’s amazing classic Doctor Who seasons; or that new 4K Dawn of the Dead box aren’t on the list because I didn’t get ’em.

For more gift ideas for the movie geek, check out our holiday guide!

Gamera: The Complete Collection

Arrow Films

I had a lot of glowing things to say in my initial review of Arrow’s massive complete Gamera set. I’ve never seen so much care and effort put into a set, even for Arrow, who are always exemplary. Seeing the Showa-era films in gorgeous HD is a revelation. The writings and commentaries on each film gives context as to why they might have been lesser to Toho’s Godzilla franchise, but they’re still worthy of love. It was the three 1990s movies that really blew me away; they’re maybe three of the best kaiju movies of all time. Gorgeous artwork, heaps and gobs of extras—just a fantastic package.

Get the Showa Era films and the Heisei Era films.

Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits

Criterion

Bruce Lee’s filmography is as storied as any screen legend’s, but far shorter than it ought to have been. Thus, Criteron’s retrospective on his career is not nearly as extensive as some others the company has put out. But they were able to get Enter the Dragon in the set along with the three-and-a-half films Lee made in Hong Kong for Golden Harvest. More than just the movies themselves, the set is a deep celebration and examination of the man, his acting and fight work, and his legacy.

As Rosie Knight wrote in her full review of the set, it’s the most complete look at the man and his career to date. Not to be missed.

Buy Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue 4K

Synapse Films

One of the very finest zombie movies ever made, Jorge Grau’s 1974 film The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (one of a million of its titles) exists exactly in the sweet spot between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. The Romeo-style zombie “lore” doesn’t exist yet, so Grau can focus on an environmentalist allegory while directly pitting young “hippie” intellectuals against a proto-fascist conservative police inspector. It’s a gloomy descent into true horror. Read my full essay on the film here.

Synapse presents its gorgeous 4K restoration of the cult favorite in a beautiful steelbook special edition, complete with a bevy of extras and a whole third disc of the film’s music.

Buy The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue.

The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection

Severin Films

Severin has very quickly become one of the premier Blu-ray distributors for cult cinema, and specifically the giallo. Their recent discs for Sergio Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark and The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh are some of the best single-film outings in the last few years. But the one making my list for 2020 is truly a masterwork. They’ve lovingly gathered up all four of the filmic collaborations between underrated Italian cult director Umberto Lenzi and American ex-pat Carroll Baker. Full of sex, twists, intrigue, and murder, these are some of the best gialli of the era, and the set has heaps and gobs of extras to give you context for all the European goodness. Read my full review of the set and the films here.

Other gialli discs worth a mention are Vinegar Syndrome’s Forgotten Gialli vol. 1, a trio of obscure Italian and Spanish thrillers. I haven’t picked up volume 2 yet. Something to look forward to.

Buy The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection.

Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.

Kino Lorber

Like most Doctor Who fans, I always regarded the two Peter Cushing-starring feature films from the ’60s as a bit of a joke. Direct adaptations of the first two Dalek serials, the movies were bright, colorful, much more lighthearted… and kinda bad? But Kino’s restorations along with a pair of amazing audio commentaries (from scholar Kim Newman and Who writers Mark Gatiss and Rob Shearman) really turned me around on them. Cushing was a great lead, even if he is Dr. Who. Read my full review of the discs here.

Buy the Dalek films here.

Various Ultraman Releases

Mill Creek

If there’s an MVP in the Kyle Anderson 2020 Staying Sane game, it’s got to be Ultraman. Getting into this series and its 50+-year history has given me hours and hours of fun and enjoyment. While there are many seasons now on TokuSHOUTsu, I want to give special commendation to the classic Showa era Blu-rays coming out from Mill Creek Entertainment. In both standard and steelbook (above) presentations, the beautiful HD restorations make the giant monster battles even more grandiose. In 2020, they’ve come out with 1971’s The Return of Ultraman and 1972’s Ultraman Ace, which are excellent, enormous series. While there are no onscreen extras, each set includes a thick booklet with production history, character bios, monster dossiers, and episode descriptions. Really a great place to start. For more on Ultraman, click here.

Buy Mill Creek’s Ultraman Ace  and The Return of Ultraman.

RoboCop Director’s Cut Special Edition

Arrow Films

I’ve bought RoboCop in so many formats now, I’ve lost count. Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi/action satire just gains more and more depth from subsequent viewing. Arrow’s big ol’ director’s cut set is gorgeous and has a billion extras (exaggeration). Not a ton to say—just a great Blu-ray that looks great on a shelf.

Buy RoboCop Director’s Cut.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Complete Collection

Kino Lorber

There’s something about late-’70s space adventures that just always work for me. And even though the original Battlestar Galactica has a lot of great qualities and a fantastic premise, it’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century that I find the most fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and allows for the silliness of the premise—a 20th century guy ends up 500 years in the future—to feel totally believable. Gil Gerard as Buck and Erin Gray as Col. Wilma Deering are great together and the episodic future-espionage plots of season one are always a treat. Kino collected both seasons in beautiful HD along with the theatrically released pilot film. Looks great, sounds great, IS great. Read more about Buck Rogers here.

Buy Buck Rogers in the 25th Century The Complete Collection.

Here’s to more great Blu-rays in 2021! Physical media will never die.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post Our Favorite Blu-rays and Box Sets of 2020 appeared first on Nerdist.

There’s really no understating the stardom of actor-turned-director Clint Eastwood beginning in the mid-’60s. After a tenure on the long-running TV series Rawhide and a few notable Hollywood movies, it took a stint in Italy to turn him into a megastar. Three films under director Sergio Leone changed his career forever; the films he made in the wake of his sudden stardom prove an interesting case study. A trio of his early ’70s westerns have just received new HD transfers and Blu-ray releases from Kino Lorber, and with them we can see the interesting ways Italian westerns influenced American productions.

Universal

Italians and other Europeans made American-style westerns since the 1950s, but it was Leone’s landmark 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars that ushered in a specifically Italian take on the genre. While American westerns tended to be glamorizations of the good-guys-and-bad-guys Old West that might have been, Leone took those trappings, along with themes (and storylines) from Japanese samurai films to create a kind of mythic, never-real version of the American West. It was an Italian’s storybook version of the American westerns he’d watched as a child. They may as well be science fiction.

Hundreds of Italian and European westerns came in the wake of Leone’s three films with Eastwood—which also include For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—and they began to explore darker and more violent themes of revenge, persecution, and at times, full-on brutality. They also, because of the Dollars Trilogy, ushered in a new kind of film composing. Ennio Morricone’s stripped-down, Rock ‘n Roll-infused scores for those films begat dozens more soundtracks by him and others. The western not only looked different and felt different, it sounded different.

And so by 1970, four years removed from Eastwood’s final western in Italy, the now hugely popular action star could make whatever kinds of movies he wanted. While he’d done films, like Hang ’em High, that edged toward grittiness, it was Don Siegel’s 1970 film Two Mules for Sister Sara that officially began the melding of Eastwood’s American productions with Euro-western sensibilities.

The story of Sister Sara comes right out of the kind of political/revolutionary-themed westerns in Italy at the time. Eastwood plays Hogan, a mercenary in the years following the American Civil War. He agrees to help Mexican revolutionaries take out the occupying French army. At the beginning of the film, he saves a nun (Shirley MacLaine) from a group of bandits and learns she’s also trying to get aid to the revolutionaries. Though he’s only in it for the money, he learns to sympathize with the cause while learning the truth about Sister Sara.

Universal

One of the hallmarks of the Italian western boom is the idea of the supremely capable antihero who eventually becomes a true hero. In the Dollars trilogy, Eastwood’s Man with No Name acts as a trickster without scruples who merely wants a massive payday. As each movie progresses, however, his motives become more noble. The innocent lives the villains menace prove more valuable than gold. Mostly.

As the cycle progressed in Italy, filmmakers began to set their films during the Mexican Revolution. The narratives began to focus on an American or European mercenary who eventually teams up with a humble peasant or bandit-turned-freedom fighter. Both Italy and Spain, you’ll remember, had been fascist for quite a long time; as young people of that era came of age and began making films, they would use the western as a way to exorcise those 1930s and ’40s fascist demons.

Two Mules for Sister Sara doesn’t have that same personal political baggage attached, but it does use the same basic set-up of filmmakers like Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima. Sister Sara is also much more concerned with the personal relationship between its male and female leads. Romance is almost entirely absent from most Italian westerns. But something that definitely helps Sister Sara feel more Italian is the incredible score from composer Ennio Morricone. It’s easily one of his best, using the mules themselves—our heroes’ travel conveyance—as a motif for the percussive music.

Following Two Mules for Sister Sara, Eastwood made a number of really intriguing films, including the Southern Gothic The Beguiled for director Don Siegel and his own directorial debut Play Misty for Me (both also out on Blu-ray from Kino). In 1972, Eastwood would again make a western, this time for The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven director John Sturges. While a lesser film in most ways, Joe Kidd seems—at least according to author and audio commentator Alex Cox—to have its roots in one of the best spaghetti westerns ever made.

The aforementioned Sergio Corbucci was the second best director of Italian westerns, following Leone. This much is pointed out in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Corbucci’s Django remains one of the most influential films of the era; his later revolutionary westerns, The Mercenary and Companeros, are rip-roaring, high-action fun. But it’s his 1968 film Il grande silenzio (The Great Silence) which is his masterpiece.

20th Century

That movie features a bounty hunter called Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who only hunts other bounty hunters. Following an attack as a child that left his family dead and him unable to speak, Silence takes it upon himself to defend a peaceful mountain community in Utah from a greedy landowner who has dispatched a particularly nasty band of bounty hunters to drive the people from their land. The lead bad bounty hunter, Loco (Klaus Kinski), never kills anyone unless they draw first. You know, to keep it legal. Which is exactly the method Silence uses. So you can imagine the tension as neither man will kill the other one.

The Great Silence is one of the bleakest westerns ever made, and not least because of its striking snow-filled setting. According to Cox on Joe Kidd‘s commentary track, Eastwood had been interested in remaking the film in English, but that never materialized. Nevertheless, aesthetic aspects of the film show up in Joe Kidd without anything like the deep moral quandary and themes at the center.

Universal

Eastwood’s titular Joe Kidd is a former bounty hunter whom a greedy land baron (Robert Duvall) hires to track down a Mexican revolutionary (John Saxon) who has been preaching land reform. The setting is a mountain town, not quite as snowy as Silence but definitely going that way. Eastwood wears a flat, wide-brimmed hat, a scarf, and carries a machine pistol rather than a standard revolver. All of these are exactly the costuming of Silence. But Joe Kidd is just a guy, without much in the way of a backstory or ulterior motives. There’s some good action, but it’s a pale imitation (literally) of a much better Italian film.

However, it was Eastwood himself who’d bring everything together. He’d direct a movie that at once owes its whole aesthetic and tone to the Italian western, but is unquestionably American. High Plains Drifter is the very definition of a Gothic Western, as much about the supernatural (perhaps) than about gunplay. It was the second film he directed following Play Misty for Me and his first western. It’s a mean-spirited revenge story without a single truly redeemable character among them.

Universal

Eastwood plays an unnamed gunfighter, the titular drifter, who arrives in a small frontier mining town. Three tough men immediately start harassing him, and he kills them easily. The sheriff then offers him a job, which he turns down. Seems those men he killed were the town’s hired protection from a trio of outlaws who are just about to get out of prison. Those outlaws brutally murdered the town’s former sheriff; the stranger learns the townsfolk hired the outlaws specifically to kill the sheriff because their mine is secretly on government land. They then sold out the criminals and fear retribution. The stranger takes the job to “protect” the town from the baddies, but he has his own revenge scheme at work.

Universal

So, there are a number of interesting themes at work in High Plains Drifter. A lot of ink as been spent over the years about the nature of Eastwood’s character. Is he the brother of the slain sheriff? The man’s ghost? Just some avenging wraith? It’s never fully clear, nor does it truly matter. What does matter is the unconventional filmmaking techniques Eastwood employs, from handheld camera to frenetic editing to extreme angles. This might also be the least heroic of all of Eastwood’s western “heroes,” which is a very Euro-western idea. But one of the first things he does in the movie is sexually assault a woman; narratively it illustrates how the town is made up of cowards who stand by and watch travesties happen. But it smacks as a needlessly brutal moment, even more so as viewed in 2020.

All three of these movies point to the revising of the American western that began in the wake of the Italian western boom. While he apparently never loved working on the three movies for Sergio Leone, Eastwood has always acknowledged his influence on his own directing. These three films feel right on the cusp of New American Cinema, with its grittiness and stronger content, but they needed a push from Italy to get there.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Kino Lorber will release the 37-episode series on Blu-ray along with the theatrical cut of the pilot. So with only a couple of Mando episodes left, now’s the perfect time to check out the disco-dancing beefcake hero that is Buck Rogers.

The character of Buck Rogers actually dates back to 1928. He’s the creation of author Philip Francis Nowlan, and he first appeared in the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. In each iteration, William (or sometimes Anthony) Rogers is a modern-day Earthman who through accidental suspended animation ends up 500 years in the future. The concept proved a particularly fruitful one and many imitators sprang up afterwards. The most famous of these is Flash Gordon, who debuted in 1934.

Glen A. Larson was a TV-creating machine in the ’70s and ’80s. His hit shows include Quincy, M.E. (1976-1983); Magnum, P.I. (1980-1988); The Fall Guy (1981-1986); and Knight Rider (1982-1986). But he’s perhaps best remembered these days for creating Battlestar Galactica, which initially ran for 24 episodes between 1978 and 1979. That show pushed the envelope for TV special effects. As a result, it was way too expensive and got cancelled.

Universal

But, without Battlestar Galactica, we likely wouldn’t have gotten Buck Rogers. Larson was concurrently developing the two series at Universal; Rogers has veteran TV producer Leslie Stevens (The Outer Limits) as co-developer. The studio had success releasing the pilot movie of Galactica in cinemas overseas and in select cities in North America. They wanted the same for Buck Rogers, and the pilot film used several redressed sets and props from Galactica, which was still in series production. The designs for the ships for the later series used Ralph McQuarrie’s unused designs for the Vipers in BSG.

So there’s definitely something of a similar vibe to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as Battlestar Galactica, but I think it ultimately works a bit better for Buck. Not least because there’s a chance to have some fun with concept and execution.

NBC

As the opening titles state, William “Buck” Rogers (Gil Gerard) is a NASA astronaut from 1987 on the last manned mission to deep space. Through a malfunction, Rogers ends up frozen for 504 years before members of the Draconian Empire, specifically the scantily clad Princess Ardala (Pamela Hensley), revive him. He’s obviously fairly disoriented and the Draconians, whose general Kane secretly plans to invade the Earth, send Buck off again with a tracking chip.

When he finally gets to Earth, he meets Colonel Wilma Deering (Erin Gray), who doesn’t trust him at all. He also meets the head of the Defense Directorate, Dr. Huer (Tim O’Connor) who gives the 20th Century Man a robotic servant named Twiki (voiced by Mel Blanc), and a hyper-intelligent computer called Dr. Theopolis (Eric Server). Twiki and Theo are like Flava Flav and his clock, if that helps you picture it.

Universal

While Buck ultimately helps the Earth defense force fend off the Draconians, the pilot movie ends with him unsure if he’s really ready to sign up for full time military defense service. However, he does agree to help out when they need him. And, turns out, they need him a lot. Since he’s effectively a nobody in New Chicago (the new capitol of Earth), he can go undercover to infiltrate threats to the planet. He ends up becoming kind of like a future James Bond.

It’s in this way Buck Rogers in the 25th Century cements itself as a particularly effective space adventure. Each episode or two was a new mission with an overarching plot involving Draconia’s mission to overthrow the Earth in the background. Deering and Rogers have a strong working relationship but, of course, also have a constant will-they/won’t-they thing that kept audiences invested.

Watching it now, there’s definitely a vibe of Peter Quill to Buck Rogers. He’s a 20th Century Earth guy, a fish out of water who has natural charm and charisma that helps him get out of just about any jam. Unlike the prettyboy leads of BSG, Gil Gerard is a beefy, rugged screen hero and you can’t help but root for him. And, of course, there’s some tremendous late-‘7os sci-fi action all the way through.

Universal

The first season saw impressive guest stars such as Jack Palance; Frank Gorshin; Cesar Romero; Peter Graves; Woody Strode; Jamie Lee Curtis; Mary Woronov; Jerry Orbach; Richard Moll; Sid Haig; Vera Miles; and Julie Newmar. Why yes, that is three different villains from Batman 1966. Also Gary Coleman, because ’70s.

And like all of the best short-lived sci-fi shows, it seems, if it gets a second season, it’s completely different. Like The Outer Limits and Space: 1999 before it, a new group of producers took over between seasons and totally revamped Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Buck, Wilma, and Twiki remained, but Dr. Theopolis and Dr. Huer were out. Also out was the central concept; instead of defending Earth from threats, Buck and Wilma were now on a ship called Searcher seeking out the five tribes of humanity that left Earth after the nuclear fallout. If this sounds a bit like Battlestar Galactica, it’s because that’s exactly what the new producers were doing.

Universal

So while season two does have a character named Hawk who is a Bird Person (seriously, the Rick and Morty team based him on Hawk), it loses some of the uniqueness. It feels just kind of like any other Star Trek-esque space series. And perhaps most egregiously, it made the character of Wilma Deering (a COLONEL let us not forget) into much more of a damsel. They even put her in miniskirts instead of the jumpsuit from season one. It may as well be a different character. It only lasted 13 episodes in its new format before sadly meeting cancelation.

While delightfully dated (Buck disco dances in the first episode), it also scratches a very particular sci-fi itch with me. The Mandalorian and its adventure-serial structure also scratches it. So if you need more spaceships zoom-zoom and laser guns pew-pew, I’d definitely recommend Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Kino Lorber has released the whole series plus the two-hour pilot movie in a complete Blu-ray collection.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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For the sake of pedantry, I need to point out that, technically, these aren’t Doctor Who movies; they’re Dalek movies. After their debut in December of 1963, the trundling, eye stalk-sporting death machines created something of a mania. Their creator, writer Terry Nation, had the rights to the creatures and the stories he wrote for Doctor Who, and he was doing everything he could to make the Daleks a global phenomenon as well as a British one.

As such, Nation sold the film rights to his first two Dalek TV serials to American ex-pat producer Milton Subotsky who, along with his partner Max J. Rosenberg, were excited to make big spectacle science fiction films… for kids. Subotsky, who adapted the scripts himself, saw the huge marketing potential for kids to see the Daleks in full-color, widescreen adventures. And to get a star like Peter Cushing to play the hero was something of a coup too.

AARU

But the devil’s in the details, and though Subotsky adapted the seven-part serial “The Daleks” into the 82-minute feature Dr. Who and the Daleks surprisingly faithfully, the differences are pretty profound. The biggest difference is that the movies didn’t (and couldn’t, legally) adapt anything that wasn’t in Nation’s scripts. Subotsky also needed to make the premise easy to relay for audiences who might never have seen Doctor Who on TV.

So this necessitated a quick change to the characters: the Doctor was no longer an alien, instead he was a doddering Earth inventor name Dr. Who. The time machine, though still a police box and still somehow bigger on the inside, was no longer the TARDIS, an acronym for Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space; now it was just a vessel named Tardis, which is objectively stupid without the acronym. Rather than a teenager, his granddaughter Susan (Roberta Tovey) was a child. And grown up school teachers Barbara and Ian are now Dr. Who’s twenty-something other granddaughter (Jennie Linden) and her bumbling, befuddled new boyfriend (Roy Castle).

Kino Lorber

When William Hartnell played the Doctor (which he was still doing in 1965 when the first movie came out), he was in his mid-to-late 50s, playing older via a wig and disposition. Cushing was only five years younger than Hartnell in life, but always seemed much younger. So in order for him to play Dr. Who, he plays up the avuncular elderly man aspect and, since it’s a movie aimed squarely at children, gone is any icy edge from the character. Dr. Who is fun where Hartnell’s Doctor is somewhat dangerous.

Which is so funny to think about, given that Nation’s scripts for “The Daleks” and especially “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” seven and six episodes, respectively, are supremely dour. The Daleks are the result of chemical warfare and genetic experimentation. In the first story, they’re confined to their metallic city, plotting their revenge against the now-docile Thals who defeated them eons ago. In the later story, Nation shored up a direct comparison to the Nazis.

AARU Productions

Dr. Who and the Daleks is a sumptuous, colorful romp. The Daleks, no loner confined to small black-and-white televisions, were larger, with bright reds, blues, and golds adorning their familiar frame. The jungles and ruins of the planet of Skaro were similarly lush (well “lush” in a studio setting) and the Daleks’ city was positively ornate. Director Gordon Flemyng made the story look as cinematic as it could, even if large portions of the story, written for TV, are deliberately small.

The sequel, released a year later, is in most respects a better movie. Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. finds Dr. Who and Susan, now with his twenty-something niece Louise (Jill Curzon), traveling to Earth’s future with Police Constable Tom Campbell (Bernard Cribbins) who accidentally enters Tardis thinking it’s an actual police telephone box. Go figure. When they arrive, they find a London completely ransacked. The Daleks have taken over the planet, turned the dead into mind-controlled Robomen, and are working to round up the remnants of resistance while mining the Earth’s core.

Where Dr. Who and the Daleks was a thoroughly alien plot—the Thals are weird, blonde pacifists who dress like Disney’s Peter Pan—Daleks’ Invasion feels supremely Earthly. Though nominally set in the future, it feels distinctly 1960s. There’s no escaping the WWII connections, and most of the threats in the second half of the film are humans willing to sell out our disparate groups of heroes to the Daleks for a little bit of food or preferential treatment. It’s all for naught, of course; the Daleks don’t care about humanity.

Kino Lorber

Which brings us to the Dr. Who-ness of it all. These movies were made at a time when the Doctor on TV was only ever William Hartnell, from scripts written before he was the forthright hero of the masses, instead a complex and often self-serving adventurer who would do anything to protect his granddaughter and himself. But Cushing’s version of the character, though much more comical, is the upstanding hero. You never once get the feeling that he’s anything but 100% forthright and upstanding in the face of danger. And truly, who better to face off against the Daleks on the big screen than Peter MFing Cushing?!

And Cushing’s portrayal may be much more influential than we realize. He’s much different from William Hartnell even with Hartnell-era stories, and that’s the point. No one had ever played the Doctor except Hartnell; Cushing is not doing a Hartnell impression, he’s doing his own distinct take on the material. He proved that you could replace the actor and play him differently and still be Dr. Who. The second Dalek movie came out in August ’66, and Patrick Troughton took over for Hartnell in November that same year. Would the producers have even thought they could replace the Doctor if not for Cushing?

The Kino Lorber Blu-ray editions of both movies contain a brand new audio commentary that is maybe the best Doctor Who value-added material in forever. It features film historian, author and critic Kim Newman leading the discussion along with Rob Shearman and Mark Gatiss, both enormous Who fans and writers who wrote Dalek stories in the new series. You’ll definitely want to listen to both back to back.

AARU

One of the most eye-opening things I’ve ever heard is on one of these tracks, and it absolutely pertains to Doctor Who fandom, and geek fandom in general. Shearman says when we’re children, we just like things. It’s only when we’re older that we overthink the things we liked, are embarrassed of liking childish things, and demand that our passions age-up with us. This is why Batman went from comedic in the ’60s to gritty and violent in the ’80s; the kids grew up and demanded Batman grow up too.

The Peter Cushing Dr. Who movies aren’t “cool,” and yes they aren’t in-continuity or mythology of the series. But Cushing is an excellent Doctor, Time Lord or otherwise, and these movies are big and fun and full of delightful ’60s spectacle, humor, and heart. I’m not going to be ashamed for liking them anymore, and neither should you!

Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. are both available on Blu-ray now from Kino Lorber.

Featured Image: AARU Productions

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Godzilla’s first mighty roar in 1954 kicked off an aptly named kaiju boom in Japan that lasted over a decade. While Toho Studios were the undisputed kings of giant monsters in the cinema in the 1960s, other studios attempted to bring their own behemoth beasts to the screen. Competitor studios put out their own giant monster flicks; Shochiku had The X from Outer Space; Nikkatsu tried Gappa, the Triphibian Monster; Toei co-produced Yongary: Monster from the Deep with South Korea; and Tsuburaya Productions owned television with its long-running Ultraman series. But if any company got closest to rivaling Godzilla, it was Daiei and its titanic terrapin, Gamera.

Made on a relatively low-budget, 1965’s Gamera: The Giant Monster was a black-and-white chiller that followed very much in the mold of the original Godzilla: a giant monster rises from the Earth’s crust and marauds across Tokyo and the Japanese countryside. It was a modest effort, but enough of a success to launch its own series of sequels in the late ’60s. To contrast with Toho’s monsters, Daiei clicked into two things that their series could do to set themselves apart. 1) they’d place the focus of the narrative on children more than the adults; and 2) they’d show a lot of monster blood and gore. Seemingly contradictory stances.

The Kaiju Boom

In total, from 1965 to 2006, Daiei produced 12 Gamera films, which are the subject of a properly massive Blu-ray box set from Arrow Video. Watching the complete series is a revelation, because the swing in tone and quality is staggering and amazing. While the early Gamera films are silly enough to warrant five inclusions on Mystery Science Theater 3000, they laid the groundwork for a trilogy in the ’90s that are as serious and scary as any monster movies in history.

Daiei

Generally most kaiju films, or Japanese special effects cinema in general, are designated by era. The Shōwa era effects are the birth of men-in-suit monsters which perpetuated during the first kaiju boom. There’s a quaintness and a warm familiarity to Japanese spectacle cinema during the Shōwa era. They look right at home with technicolor fantasy films from the west.

What is a Gamera?

Gamera‘s Shōwa era (1926-1989) films take up the bulk of the cycle. Director Noriaki Yuasa directed the first film, a sort of hail mary pass following the box office failure of his debut feature. It was a surprise hit; for the second movie, Gamera vs. Barugon, Daiei turned the director’s chair over to Shigeo Tanaka, a proven hit-maker for the company. Unfortunately, Barugon, a much slower and longer affair, failed to match the success of the original. But fortunately for Yuasa, who returned for the third film, Gamera vs. Gyaos; this movie featured a stripped down story and amped up the monster effects and action. From there we were off and running. Yuasa directed the next five movies, from 1968 to 1980.

Daiei

The Shōwa era Gamera sequels are… weird. On the one hand, they’re colorful and the monster designs are fun. Guiron has a head that looks like a butcher’s knife; Viras is an intergalactic squid beast; and Gamera’s most recurrent enemy, Gyaos, is a giant bird-bat-dinosaur based on Dracula. But as the series went on, the movies got smaller and smaller budgets (necessitating run times well under 90 minutes) and put a greater focus on children as the protagonists. They’re enjoyable on the level of children’s book fantasy; obviously these things aren’t real, because how could they be?

Daiei

Blood and Gore… for kids!

At the same time, the movies upped the blood and gore in a crazy way. Gamera’s fights often left him oozing green slime-blood, most graphically in 1971’s Gamera vs. Zigra where the sharp-finned evil shark slices Gamera right down the middle of his soft underbelly. In Gamera vs. Guiron, our two young heroes (always one Japanese kid and one Caucasian kid) witness a fight on an alien world between knife-headed Guiron and a silver Space Gyaos. It culminates in Guiron literally chopping Gyaos to pieces, sending the gnarly bat’s head flying with purple viscera dripping.

Daiei

To a generation of kids in Japan and abroad, Gamera was exuberant fun and mindless action. By 1980, though, the franchise was reduced to a badly produced clip movie, Gamera: Super Monster. It included musical numbers, clips from unrelated anime series, and parodies of everything from Jaws to Star Wars.

When Gamera Became Great

And that could have been it; Gamera could have been nothing more than an amusing footnote in the annals of kaiju cinema. That is, until the mid-90s. Toho’s Godzilla series was seeing renewed interest in a new continuity of darker, more grown-up films in Japan’s Heisei era (1989-2019). Daiei decided it might be time to bring their own terrible thunder lizard back the same way. They gave the reins to director Shusuke Kaneko and special effects director Shinji Higuchi. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Kaneko’s three Gamera films are, for my money, among the top five kaiju movies of all time. The other two are Godzilla (1954) and Shin Godzilla.

Daiei

So, why? Well, Kaneko does this by playing into what the Gamera movies always were. As scary as Heisei Gamera looks (and he does look terrifying), he’s a heroic figure. The first movie is called Gamera: Guardian of the Universe and it feels a lot like a disaster movie; flocks of giant Gyaos descend on Japan while at sea, tanker ships crash because of a gargantuan turtle. The government thinks this turtle, Gamera, is the bigger (ha) threat; an ornithologist thinks Gamera is a threat but the Gyaos are a more pressing problem. But a young girl touches an ancient medallion and forms a spiritual attachment with Gamera and learns that he is, elemental or atomic, a figure of protection and kindness.

The only early Gamera movie where Gamera is the all-out threat is the first one, but even in that movie, he saves a child from falling to his death. Gamera is a friend to children. In the second of Kaneko’s trilogy, Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, Gamera comes up against a hive of man-sized insect beasts which eventually form together into a giant nightmare thing. This movie is even scarier than the first one (the Legion bugs take out a subway car full of people and it’s up there with Aliens) but it also features a scene of Gamera saving a whole bus full of children.

Daiei

And finally, Kaneko’s crescendo, 1999’s Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris. There’s always been a spiritual, elemental aspect to Gamera, and that grows over the course of the trilogy. In the third part, Gamera faces an alien who feeds on the hatred of a young girl (whose family died because of the massive turtle in part one), and Gamera must sacrifice himself (possibly) lest the world become infected with the evil of revenge. Iris sucks the life out of humans in truly horrific ways, leaving a husk behind. At the end of the movie, Iris tries to suck the life out of Gamera’s hand and the terrapin blasts off his own limb to be able to keep fighting. It’s brutal.

Why You Need This Blu-ray Set

The Heisei Gamera trilogy honestly deserve a full essay unto themselves (which I may write one day), but in the context of this set, it sheds a light on something very integral to movies like these. The trilogy is only as good as it is because the audience understands the fundamentals of what and who Gamera is. They’re truly scary movies with the most impressive suitmation and miniature effects I’ve ever seen, but if Kaneko hadn’t kept the basics of the series true and just brought up the tone and quality, they’d all be for naught. You earn the Heisei trilogy by watching the Shōwa series.

There is one more movie in the set: 2006’s Gamera the Brave. It starts the continuity over again and while it maintains the impressiveness of the effects to a degree, new director Ryuta Tasaki aims directly for a child audience again. Gamera is friendly looking, the main character is a little boy. It’s perfectly passable, but a paltry shadow of the three that came before.

Daiei

In all of this essay, I’ve only just talked about the movies themselves, including American versions of a couple, but that is just a sliver of the greatness you’ll discover in Arrow’s Blu-ray set. On each disc, you’ll find a bevy of extras including an incredibly informative introduction on 11 of the 12 movies from scholar August Ragone; audio commentary on every movie from a host of experts; interviews with cast and crew; and brief documentaries on the Heisei series.

There’s also a full 80-page book including retrospectives on the series and interviews with various luminaries. And finally, you get a 130-page comic book including full-color reprints of the four-issue Gamera comic from Dark Horse in 1996. Plus, the first-ever English-language printing of the prequel comic, The Last Hope, by Matt Frank and Joshua Bugosh. The whole thing is packaged in a beautiful box with brand new, vibrant artwork by Matt Frank.

Arrow’s The Complete Gamera Collection Blu-ray box is without question the best such collectors set of 2020. Even if you only know Gamera from the MST3K episodes and think “Eh, those are dumb and bad movies,” you owe it to yourself to pick it up. It’s one of my favorite releases in literal years. And like Gamera himself, it deserves to be appreciated, understood, and celebrated.

Featured Image: Arrow Video/Matt Frank

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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It’s weird to realize now, but there was a time Vin Diesel wasn’t a household name. The world famous action star was just an up-and-comer like many a young actor. He has reigned in blockbuster supremacy for close to 20 years but he might not have gotten his earliest breakout role if producers had their way. Before Dominic Toretto or Xander Cage, Diesel donned the goggles of Richard B. Riddick in David Twohy’s Pitch Black. As we learn from Twohy in this exclusive clip from the making-of documentary on Arrow Video‘s new Blu-ray, Diesel was almost axed for a bigger star.

It’s always a crazy prospect when you find out who almost ended up in your favorite movies; Will Smith was almost in The Matrix but David Schwimmer was almost in Men in Black. Weird, right? But though Diesel is all but synonymous with his Fast and Furious family man now, it was Riddick in Pitch Black that clearly spoke to him first. After all, he turned down the chance to appear in the sequels to both F&F and xXx in order to make The Chronicles of Riddick.

Universal

If you haven’t seen Pitch Black, or haven’t in a while, now’s your chance to see it better than ever before. Arrow Video has released a special edition Blu-ray of the movie, complete with both the theatrical and director’s cuts. You also get two archival commentary tracks, one of which has writer-director Twohy, Diesel, and co-star Cole Hauser. Other extras include Nightfall: The Making of Pitch Black, featuring the full interview with Twohy; new interviews with actors Claudia Black and Rhiana Griffith; cinematographer David Eggby; visual effects coordinator Peter Chiang; and composer Graeme Revell.

Arrow Video

And for you big Riddick heads out there, the Blu-ray also includes the full animated short The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury. From Aeon Flux director Peter Chung, the short features the voices of Diesel, Griffith, and Keith David and bridges the gap between Pitch Black and its sequel.

Pitch Black is a pretty dope sci-fi monster movie and even without the Riddick sequels, it stands up there with the likes of Aliens. Check it out!

Featured Image: Universal

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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A ghost, by definition, is an entity trapped between worlds. It’s of the ethereal, unnaturally clinging to the corporeal. The ghost story, fittingly, often falls between two worlds as well; a tradition in English literature, it had its heyday at the tail end of the Victorian Era into the Edwardian, when modernity and tradition met. So often, these relics in the contemporary world create eeriness, malevolence. Many fabulously chilling ghost stories have found their way from page to screen over the years, but perhaps the most terrifying of all is the 1989 TV film of The Woman in Black. It’s newly remaster in HD from Network Releasing and it’s a thing of horrifying splendor.

Though Susan Hill’s novel of The Woman in Black was written in 1983, its setting and tone feels like something from the 1920s. Such a hit was this novel that it became a stage play in 1987. ITV commissioned a television adaptation, to broadcast on Christmas Eve 1989. Much like the BBC’s prior M.R. James cycle, the ghost story at Christmas was a staple of English festivities. Tasked with writing duties for the TV film was Nigel Kneale. Kneale is a legend of genre TV and film, creating the influential Quatermass series (and subsequent Hammer Horror adaptations) and other spooky films like The Stone Tape. To direct was Herbert Wise, who helmed the landmark BBC miniseries I, Claudius in 1976.

If you’ve seen the 2012 Daniel Radcliffe movie of the same name, then you know the basic story of The Woman in Black. A young solicitor in London, post-WWI, must travel into the country to see to the affairs of the late Alice Drablow. A reclusive widow, she died alone in her massive home, Eel Marsh House. The young man, Arthur Kidd (Adrian Rawlins), finds the townsfolk of the coastal village particularly standoffish. One of the few friendly faces is wealthy landowner Sam Toovey (Bernard Hepton) who seems particularly troubled by Drablow and her family history.

Network Releasing

In order to settle Drablow’s affairs, Mr. Kidd must travel to Eel Marsh House, across the treacherous Nine Lives Causeway, and go through all of the various papers and things she left behind. Right away, at the otherwise sparsely attended funeral, Mr. Kidd notices a black-clad woman mourning, though nobody else seems to pay her much mind. Once he arrives at the house, he sees the same woman standing amid the estate’s rundown marshy cemetery. This woman (Pauline Moran), as you might guess, is the titular Woman in Black, the vengeful spirit who presages a horrible fate for those who encounter her.

This film version of The Woman in Black does many things to set it apart from other ghost stories. First and foremost is the presence of the woman herself. Mr. Kidd sees the Woman several times prior to understanding who she is or what she represents. Rather than keep her hidden, or in shadow, the film shows her in wide shot, in broad (albeit gloomy) daylight. She’s a sinister figure from the start, but it’s only later, once we and Mr. Kidd understand the full breadth of what she represents, do we truly reel in horror. One particular moment at the end of the film’s second act is perhaps the scariest in a horror movie, ever.

Network Releasing

Another of director Herbert Wise’s great tricks is to represent most of the apparitions via sound rather than sight. For as gorgeously gloomy as it looks, this was still a relatively inexpensive television production. He didn’t try to use camera trickery or video effects to achieve the scares; instead sound effects, either a whisper or a scream, fill the soundtrack, while Rawlins’ brilliant and believable performance conveys the requisite terror. The setting creates the atmosphere, and the sound (or simple lighting) creates the terror.

Kneale’s work always melded the scientific with the supernatural; The Stone Tape, broadcast at Christmas in 1972, featured a group of researchers trying to record the existence of ghosts in a purportedly haunted mansion. The stones of the manor themselves seem to amplify the wails of the restless spirits; perhaps a house is a record of the evils perpetrated within it?

Network Releasing

The Woman in Black continues this idea to a degree, removing the modern recording equipment but another example of modernity amid the ancient. Mr. Kidd hears Alice Drablow’s voice in wax cylinders, describing the situations that created the Woman in Black in the first place. Her home, in the middle of the marsh, far from civilization, is both rundown and state-of-the-art. He’s surprised to learn upon arriving that the home has electric lighting via a generator out in the shed. It’s neither cold nor damp, though resting atop a marsh, it ought to be. These touches belie the evil we learn occurred on the grounds. No amount of creature comforts could keep the Woman from haunting Mrs. Drablow until her death.

And perhaps the most important touch in The Woman in Black, present in Hill’s novel and amped up in Kneale’s screenplay, is the motivation of the ghost. In traditional ghost stories, those of M.R. James and his ilk, the protagonist brought the ghostly terrors on himself, through greed or arrogance or other such vices. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, the main characters’ fragile mental state allows the ghosts to permeate and infect. But here, our main character has done nothing wrong. He bears no ill intent, and is indeed a forthright and dutiful family man.

Network Releasing

This only stands to make the Woman that much eviler. Mr. Kidd merely arrives to perform a simple task, and he bears the brunt of a curse he had no part in creating. We get the sense, even from early on, that every single person—from his boss to the randos in the town pub—know exactly what horrors will befall him, but they do nothing to warn him. It’s human indifference that created the Woman and allowed her to seek her spectral vengeance.

The Woman in Black was an impossibly successful hit in 1989. However, until now, it has been very hard to see via a proper release. Network has done a wonderful job with the presentation on Region B Blu-ray, in both its original 4×3 ratio and a widescreen format. The lone special feature is an audio commentary from author and critic Kim Newman, author and actor Mark Gatiss, and actor-director Andy Nyman. Between the three of them, there is no better group to talk about ghost stories. Newman is perhaps Britain’s preeminent horror scholar; Gatiss wrote and directed three Ghost Stories for Christmas as well as writing and producing Sherlock and Dracula; and Nyman co-wrote and co-directed the 2017 film Ghost Stories based on that cycle. Nyman also appears in The Woman in Black in a supporting role.

If you’ve never seen The Woman in Black, or only seen the 2012 Radcliffe version, you owe it to yourself to find this version. It’s an icy slow-build of a horror tale that peppers you with spookiness before absolutely hammering you with terror. It’s the perfect scary movie for a cool and quiet evening. But beware it’s not too quiet.

The worldwide Blu-ray debut of The Woman in Black is available exclusively from the Network website now.

Featured Image: Network Releasing

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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This year marks four decades since we first heard the “ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma” sounds in Camp Crystal Lake. That’s when the first Friday the 13th hit theaters. To celebrate forty years and 12 films in the iconic slasher franchise, those masters of digital horror at Scream Factory have announced the ultimate Jason Voorhees Blu-ray box set. The Friday the 13th Collection – Deluxe Edition will be available for purchase on Tuesday, October 13th, 2020.

Scream Factory

The 16-disc set is the definitive Blu-ray collection of one of the most influential horror franchises ever created. It includes all 12 original films from both Paramount Pictures and New Line Cinema. The entire campground horror series, which was split between the two different studios over the years, has never had a complete collection on home video such as this before. Leave it to the folks at Scream Factory to make the fan’s dreams come true with this comprehensive set.

Scream Factory

This set will include both new and existing extras, plus a collectible rigid slipcover with newly-commissioned art, a brand new 40 page collectible essay booklet with archival photography, and most importantly, new 4K film transfers for Parts 1-4. Part 3 will have its original 3D presentation. Additionally, each film comes with a dedicated Blu-ray case featuring original theatrical artwork. Read the list of bonus features is below. They’ll announce additional new extras at a later date.

Scream Factory

The 12 films included in this must-own set: Friday the 13th (1980), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993), Jason X (2001), Freddy vs. Jason (2003), and Friday the 13th (Remake) (2009).

Customers purchasing the Friday The 13th Collection (Deluxe Edition) on Shoutfactory.com will receive an exclusive, limited edition 36″ x 24″ lithograph featuring new artwork from artist Devon Whitehead and an exclusive, limited edition 24” x 36” Friday the 13th 40th Anniversary poster featuring new artwork from artist Joel Robinson, while supplies last.

Scream Factory pulled off a similarly fantastic Halloween box set a few years back, with brand new extras for each film. Similarly to Friday the 13th, the films in that franchise were spread across different studios, so that was also a miracle. And it’s truly one of the great horror box sets of all time. If Scream Factory can do something similar with Jason? Then we are in for a treat.

With mass consumption of physical media on the decline, major studios aren’t as willing to invest in new transfers and special features for classic films. But Shout Factory/Scream Factory has picked up the slack. And speaking of, if Scream Factory can give similar treatment to the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and maybe finally bring Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Blu-ray—we’d love that too. In Scream Factory we trust! In the meantime, we’ll just have to binge every movie in this set until the long awaited Friday the 13th: Part 13 finally comes out. Any time now, Jason.

To pre-order this comprehensive box set and get the complete special features details for each disc, head on over to Scream Factory.

Featured Image: New Line Cinema / Paramount Pictures

The post Complete FRIDAY THE 13th Blu-ray Box Set Coming this Fall appeared first on Nerdist.

When most people think of the giallo, the Italian thriller sub-genre, they think of high body counts and knife-wielding, black-clad killers. Dario Argento popularized this type in 1970 with his debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. But that was by no means the first-ever giallo; the kind produced prior to Argento had a very different tone and tactic. Murder? Sure, there was murder. But these earlier gialli focused much more on seduction, creeping paranoia, and multiple double-crosses.

Umberto Lenzi is perhaps the king of this variety. His four-film run with American actress Carroll Baker is the focus of a slick-looking new Blu-ray from Severin Films.

The movies in this box set are truly some of the best and most influential in the giallo genre. Lenzi and Baker began their collaboration with 1969’s Orgasmo. Baker plays the wealthy American widow who moves into an Italian villa with the help of her lawyer. Once settled, she meets a mysterious handsome stranger (Lou Castel) and they begin an affair. Not long after, his sister (Colette Descombes) arrives. Except maybe she’s not his sister; maybe she’s his lover and they have other things in mind for the poor, fragile millionaire.

Severin Films

Orgasmo is a twisty, nightmarish film in which we’re never certain who is out to get whom. We’re not even sure if any of it is really happening like we think. The success of Orgasmo led to more, often very similar movies for Lenzi and Baker. So Sweet…So Perverse the same year finds Baker in more of the aggressor role, teaming up with (or double crossing) the emotionally unstable Erika Blanc. A Quiet Place to Kill from 1970 has Baker as a race car driver whose new boyfriend (Jean Sorel) convinces her to help kill his wife. And the final collaboration, Knife of Ice, has Baker as a mute woman stalked by a serial killer.

Funny story: Orgasmo is the European title; U.S. distributors had to re-title it because Orgasmo is so scandalous. They chose the title Paranoia, a fitting name. However, later Lenzi decided to make a movie actually called Paranoia, and obviously the U.S. couldn’t have two movies from director Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker called Paranoia, so that second movie got the U.S. re-title A Quiet Place to Kill. Thankfully, Severin isn’t calling either of these movies Paranoia in the box set.

A Quiet Place to Kill has never before seen a Blu-ray release in North America; the other three have never been on Blu-ray at all. So even just for the films themselves, Severin is giving us a real gift. But the company is very good about packing their releases with extra features. The first three films feature audio commentaries by some of the luminaries of Euro Cult scholarship; Alexandra Heller-Nicholas provides the track for the European cut of Orgasmo with Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson on the U.S. cut. So Sweet…So Perverse has a track from author Kat Ellinger and A Quiet Place to Kill has one from author Samm Deighan (both favorite commentators of mine).

Other extras include interviews with Lenzi, who sadly passed away in 2017, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, and author Stephen Thrower. The set also includes two full audio CDs of soundtrack music. You can hear in the trailer above just how sumptuous and funky the scores for all of these movies are.

The four films Lenzi made with Baker represent some of the best in either of their filmographies. Lenzi directed many gialli including later entries like Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and Spasmo; gritty crime-action fare like Almost Human and The Tough Ones; and exceedingly schlocky faves like Cannibal Ferox and Nightmare City. But the director could be nuanced and chilling in addition to salacious. These films are clear evidence; clearly Carroll Baker had quite an impact.

The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection set will hit retailers on June 30.

Featured Image: Severin

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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John Carpenter is practically his own genre at this point. His takes on horror, sci-fi, and action were unique at the time, but with 20 to 40 years of hindsight, new filmmakers are aping his style, tone, and aesthetic left and right. Any horror movie you’ve seen recently with a warbly synth score has a debt to pay to John Carpenter. But it’s been awhile since Carpenter had a major film of his own. His last hit movie was 1998’s Vampires, which opened at #1 at the box office. After 21 years, it still feels like Carpenter, but definitely shows its age in some very particular ways.

I as 14 when Vampires came out and I remember the commercials vividly, but I didn’t see R-rated movies until I was age appropriate, so it wasn’t until I was in college that I first saw the movie. A confessed gore-hound in those days, I remember loving the prosthetic carnage of KNB Effects; in the opening vampire attack, one vamp gets a wooden stake through the forehead. When the movie’s main baddie lays waste to the reveling hunters, he slices one in half with his hands. Pretty awesome if you like that sort of thing. The movie also, obviously, takes its cues from classic Western iconography, which gives it a vibe that spoke to me in the mid-2000s.

But here’s the thing: while I still love the basic set-up and lore and the sun-scorched desert visuals, its attitude and the characters’ actions feel less “edgy” today than they feel backwards and problematic.

Sony

For those who haven’t seen, John Carpenter’s Vampires follows a group of vampire hunters in the American Southwest. Their leader is Jack Crow (James Woods), the Vatican’s number one vampire hunter. He lives his life by a very strict set of rules about what, where, and when vampire hunting should take place. His team is rough and tumble but highly funded and very effective. They spend their days hunting for master vampires and their nests, and their nights drinking heavily and partaking in drugs and debauchery. For the Lord, of course.

Carpenter wanted his titular bloodsuckers to be like rats, hiding in shadow during the day and then attacking like rabid animals at night. The movie makes it clear time and again that these aren’t people⁠—that once someone is bitten, they cease to deserve decency because soon they’ll just be another monster. As such, Jack and his cronies fire harpoons and arrows into the vamps and drag them out into the sunlight like flammable groupers.

Sony

Business is good for the slayers until Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), the very first vampire, arrives in search of a particular Christian relic that, legend has it, will allow him to walk in the daylight. He’d be unstoppable. He slaughters most of the slayers and sex workers in a particular motel one evening, leaving only Jack, Montoya (Daniel Baldwin), and a freshly bitten sex worker named Katrina (Sheryl Lee). Evidently, when a master bites someone, they’re psychically linked. So Jack thinks Katrina will be able to help them find Valek before she turns. That’s apparently all the good she is to them now. Eventually, a young priest from the Vatican, Father Adam (Tim Guinee) joins in the fight as well with all of humanity at stake. Pun. In. Tended.

Sony

So it’s a good set-up, as I said. It looks good, and a few needless music video transitions aside (because late ’90s), the editing heightens the tension. But it’s just the attitude. A lot of Carpenter’s movies have a nihilistic and cynical edge to them. That’s his vibe! But in all cases, that vibe seems to come from the point of view of people oppressed by The Man. There’s an angry counterculture tinge to them. Snake Plissken says “F you” to authority. Nada in They Live wants to take down the evil patriarchy. Even when the more backwoods protagonists, like Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China, say misogynist things, the movie makes them seem like idiots.

Sony

And yet. Jack Crow is sexist, homophobic, and disdainful of everyone. He smacks around Katrina and throws her to the ground a lot in this movie; he does the same to the meek beta male Father Adam and only respects the Padre when he “mans up” by the end. Montoya eventually falls for Katrina, but he treats her like shit up until then.

Shout Factory

This is not to say there’s nothing enjoyable still about John Carpenter’s Vampires. The action is great; the effects are terrific; the music (by Carpenter, natch) is fantastic. The elements are all there for a holds-the-hell-up action-horror flick. But even though the movie is 21 years old, its attitude feels more akin to something much older. Still, it’s probably Carpenter’s eleventh best movie.

John Carpenter’s Vampires is available in a fancy special edition Blu-ray set on September 24 from Scream Factory; another fantastic addition to anyone’s Carpenter shelf.

Featured Image: Scream Factory

Kyle Anderson is the Editor at Large for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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People sitting around, telling each other stories doesn’t necessarily seem all that cinematic. But in the hands of the right filmmaker, the right actors, the right studio, it can be magical. Or chilling, as is the case with 1945’s Dead of Night, a movie from plummy British film staple Ealing Studios. Known for dramas and comedies throughout the ’30s and ’40s, Ealing made its mark on the horror genre with the anthology film, utilizing the kind of ghost story only the English could produce. Dead of Night, despite its age, is still supremely effective, and influenced generations of portmanteau films to come.

There’s a tone throughout Dead of Night that puts the viewer ill at ease. Despite a lot of pleasant and even drolly humorous dialogue (so very British, and so very ’40s), the direction puts one off-balance from beginning to end. The film—which consists of five stories and an equally compelling wraparound narrative—has four directors, and it’s a wonder the movie doesn’t feel as disjointed as it might. Alberto Cavalcanti directs the second and fifth story; Basil Dearden directs the first story and the framing sequences; and future Ealing Comedies stalwarts Robert Hamer and Charles Crichton direct the third and fourth stories, respectively.

And what are these stories? A horror anthology is nothing without compelling and creepy stories. Well, the creepiness seeps in right from the start. The framing story finds a man named Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) driving to his friend Eliot Foley’s (Roland Culver) country cottage to spend a relaxing weekend. He’s had a spate of bad dreams and feels he could use the rest. However, upon arrival, Craig gets the strangest feeling of déjà vu. He tells his friend and the man’s assembled guests that he knows them all; they’ve all appeared in his dreams. Craig feels very out of sorts. Luckily, one of the guests is a respectable psychologist, Dr. Van Straaten (Frederick Valk), who tries to convince Craig that his fears of what else might come true are unfounded.

From there, we launch into a series stories from the assembled guests. Each of them, it seems, has had some interaction with the supernatural or uncanny. Race car driver Hugh Grainger (Antony Baird) tells a story about how, after an accident, he had dreams of a hearse-driver appearing and telling him there’s “just room for one inside, sir,” only for an ill-fated bus driver to say the same thing; the young Sally O’Hara (Sally Ann Howes) shares that during a Christmas party at an orphanage, she encountered the ghost of a young boy.

Later, once Sally goes to bed, the affluent Joan Cortland (Googie Withers) tells the terrible tale of her husband’s obsession with an antique mirror owned by a murderous hedonist; Eliot tells a humorous yarn about two golfing buddies (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) who fight over a girl, even after one of them dies; and finally, Dr. Van Straaten himself relays a case history of his, wherein an unbalanced ventriloquist (Michael Redgrave) believed his dummy was truly alive.

None of these stories do much to assuage Mr. Craig, especially when other moments from his dream begin to happen.

There’s a literary quality to the whole film; “The Hearse Driver” comes directly from a ghost story written by E.F. Benson in 1906. Though Benson is only credited with this one vignette, his other story “The Room in the Tower” appears to at least notionally have been the basis for screenwriters Angus MacPhail and John Baines’ framing story. They both involve a man plagued with recurring nightmares of a location he’s never been, only to end up going to that location and having the dream come true. Benson’s breed of ghost story—chummy, humorous, but deadly—is exactly the timbre of the wraparound segments. “The Golfer’s Story” is based on “The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost” by H.G. Wells but certainly feels more at home with bawdier comedy of the era.

There’d been anthology movies before Dead of Night, and even a couple of silent horror anthologies. But Dead of Night brought the format to the mainstream. It was a massive hit. And it did so by lulling its audience in a series of increasingly scary vignettes. “The Hearse Driver” is moderately spooky; “The Christmas Party” is effectively chilly; then we move on to some grown-up scares. “The Haunted Mirror” has a lot to say about seemingly idyllic relationships, and how beneath a prim and proper man can lurk a debauched and murderous side waiting to get out. “The Golfer’s Story” is a broad farce, taking the audience out of the scares and into the realm of light fantasy.

But that comedic longueur is just a diversion before the film’s most chilling segment. “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” is the birth of the modern “dummies are scary as hell” subgenre. Michael Redgrave plays the troubled ventriloquist who begins to believe his dummy, Hugo, is alive and malevolent. Neither actuality is very reassuring; either the man has split personalities with his domineering dummy character, or, even more upsetting, the dummy is alive. Alive and murderous, yet.

A precursor to things like Psycho or Magic, this segment is the most viscerally terrifying. Redgrave gives a wide-eyed and manic performance as a man at the end of his tether. And Hugo is really upsetting, his squinty-eyed grin and tiny voice belie true villainy, whether he’s alive or not. There’s a reason this segment is famous: it’s iconic.

Dead of Night ends with a swirling fever dream wherein Mr. Craig hallucinates (maybe) going through all of the stories he’s just heard. The camera swings wildly and the editing is suddenly frenetic; it’s a shocking ending to a movie that has done its best to make you feel somewhat safe. It’s anything but.

While relatively unknown in the U.S. after its initial release, Dead of Night became a staple in Britain. It inspired American expat producer Milton Subotsky of Hammer rival Amicus Pictures to launch a series of portmanteau horror films with framing narration, including the original Tales from the Crypt in 1972. Any movie of this nature—from Ghost Stories to V/H/S to ABCs of Death—owes a debt to Dead of Night.

If you haven’t seen this film, it’s out now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber with a thoroughly researched audio commentary by the great author and critic Tim Lucas. Despite its age, Dead of Night still packs a wallop and sends the shivers right up your back, even almost three-quarters of a century later.

Images: Ealing/Kino Lorber

Kyle Anderson is the Editor at Large for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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For every bit of modern science fiction one can credit to the influence of Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas, equal credit has to go to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. The husband-and-wife producing team gave television sci-fi some of the most interesting and complex stories of all time. They don’t get the credit they deserve because most of their great works involved puppets. The apex of their partnership, however, had a cast of hundreds and sets and special effects rivaling anything Star Trek ever produced. That series is the short-lived but wholly fascinating Space: 1999.

British Gerry and Sylvia Anderson pioneered the “Supermarionation” technique, a gimmick of marionette performance that mixed in elaborate and quite large miniature sets and model work. Their shows were staples of British (and later American) TV in the ’60s. Supercar, Fireball XL5, and Stingray were hits for commercial network ITV; the Andersons’ biggest hit was Thunderbirds, a series about a family of vigilante pilots and astronauts who rescue victims of various disasters. This show was massive for a series using puppets and miniatures and became an icon. This led to more puppet shows, of which Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons is my personal favorite.

But after a few more puppet series, Gerry Anderson wanted to branch out into live-action. His first fully live-action series was 1971’s UFO, which for all the world could have been another Supermarionation show, just with human actors instead of puppets.

Finally, in 1975, Gerry and Sylvia got to make Space: 1999, the most expensive series ever on television to that point. The British-Italian co-production got big American stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain and their idea was a series that mixed Star Trek with more ethereal storytelling, not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a remarkable if dated vision of the future (our old future, anyway), but it’s a series very much of two halves.

Year One set up the predicament. In 1999, a base on the moon–Moonbase Alpha–has a changeover of power. The former commander is replaced with Commander John Koenig (Landau), a decorated officer who nevertheless needs a win. The moonbase has around 300 crew members and one of their tasks is to dispose of nuclear waste from Earth. In the first episode, an accident occurs and the nuclear waste explodes, causing the entire moon to breakaway from Earth’s gravity and careen through space, farther and farther away from home. The people on the moonbase, the “Alphans,” then have to try to stay alive and somehow get back home. As the moon speeds through space, with only small mission ships called Eagles for reconnaissance, the Alphans run across all forms of sentient and non-sentient lifeforms and phenomena.

It’s a weird conceit, surely, but one that works for the strange, out-there storytelling at hand. Koenig’s main crew consists of head physician Dr. Helena Russell (Bain), chief science officer professor Victor Bergman (Barry Morse), chief pilot Alan Carter (Nick Tate), second-in-command Paul Morrow (Prentis Hancock), computer ops officer David Kano (Clifton Jones), and data analyst Sandra Benes (Zienia Merton). If the characters all sound very technical, that’s for a reason; the plots of the episodes were all very scientific and theoretical.

Some of the first season’s best episodes deal directly with strange occurrences and how they affect the crew. The episodes “Collision Course” and “Black Sun,” for example, each deal with the moon heading for certain doom, unable to control their course in the least. “Black Sun” is specifically interesting because it has the moon fly through a dark star, which zaps the base’s energy and sets the crew up to freeze to death. It’s a slow episode, but one that speaks to the dangers of space and how humanity deals with certain doom.

Other standout episodes of season one feature run-ins with strange alien creatures and races. “Force of Life” sees nuclear technician Zoref (a very young Ian McShane in a guest role) invaded by an alien entity that sucks up vast amounts of energy, causing him to become a kind of energy vampire. “War Games” finds the Alphans attacked by a society from a planet that sees the moon as an invading virus with no right to exist. The series’ best episode, “Dragon’s Domain,” finds a hero pilot (Italian guest actor Gianni Garko) again facing nightmares of a hostile alien that killed all the members of his crew years ago. No one believed him at the time, but now he has a chance to get revenge…or destroy Moonbase Alpha trying.

With the budget it had–for special effects, costumes, and sets–Space: 1999 also had a roster of impressive guest actors. In addition to McShane and Garko, season one also featured Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Richard Johnson, Catherine Schell, Julian Glover, Leo McKern, and Joan Collins. Season One is a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable 24 episodes.

The trouble is, the show was too expensive, and it was cancelled. For a bit, anyway. Eventually, ITV head (and huge Gerry Anderson fan) Lew Grade gave the show a last minute stay of execution, but some changes had to happen. In the interim, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s marriage and producing partnership dissolved; Gerry alone would produce Year Two, along with a new showrunner, American producer Fred Freiberger. Freiberger is infamous in sci-fi TV circles; he’s the producer brought in to “save” Star Trek for its third, final, and silliest season.

Freiberger’s changes for season two of Space: 1999 were drastic. The original set was deemed too large and difficult to light, so a completely different bridge set was built. All of season one’s costumes from award-winning designer Rudi Gernreich were gone, replaced with much more generic jackets and uniforms. The show’s storylines became much less ethereal and much more action and alien-monster based. Most outward of the changes came in the cast.

Landau and Bain both remained (though they did not care for the scripts this time out), but third lead Barry Morse was gone, along with Hancock and Jones. Tate and Merton remained in a lesser capacity, while Tony Anholt joined and the show’s new action-man hero, Tony Verdeschi, and season one guest star Schell joined as Maya, an alien shape-shifter who joins the crew in the season two premiere. Schell’s performance is easily the best thing about season two, even if her character’s ability to turn into things is fairly silly, ranging from animals like tigers and hawks to humanoid aliens to even a guy in a bushido outfit with a kendo stick.

These changes are most evident when you compare the season one opening titles (above) with the season two opening titles (below):

It’s reductive to say “all of season one is good and all of season two is bad,” which is certainly not the case. Year Two is not without its charms and there are a few standout episodes, including the two-part epic “The Bringers of Wonder,” in which it seems Earth’s forces have finally reached Moonbase Alpha, but Koenig believes the friends are actually monsters. There are also good episodes from Doctor Who writers Terrance Dicks and Pip & Jane Baker and a couple of others from bigger name directors like Val Guest and Peter Medak. And season two still benefited from the influence of season one’s most prolific writer, Johnny Byrne, though Freiberger’s sensibilities did not necessarily gel with Byrne’s.

Ultimately, it sort of depends on what kind of science fiction show you’re looking for. Season one is a trippy, thoughtful, character-driven sci-fi series, while season two is much more full of action and monster-of-the-week zaniness. But in an age that was nearly a decade away from Star Trek, science fiction was about to see a major change. All of Space: 1999 save the final five episodes aired in a pre-Star Wars world. Perhaps in this way, with season two’s greater emphasis on fantastical and monstrous alien threats, Freiberger had his finger on the pulse of space opera to come. Even Star Trek: The Motion Picture feels more akin to some of Space: 1999 in look and tone than it does to Star Trek: The Original Series.

For my money, though, season one is really where the show stood head and shoulders above other sci-fi, of the time or since.

Shout! Factory is releasing a gorgeous full series box set on Blu-ray on July 16, with all 48 episodes on 12 discs, plus a 13th disc of extras. It’s lovely to see the show look so good; it’s at once very dated and cutting edge. Highly recommended for fans of sci-fi/space opera of any kind.

If you’d like to watch the first episode, you can do so from Shout! Factory’s YouTube here:

Images: ITV/Gerry Anderson, Shout! Factory

Kyle Anderson is the Editor at Large for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Obviously the question was never “will Game of Thrones get a complete series box set,” it was “how good will it be”? Now we know the answer – “seven blessings good,” because a special edition version will also double as a gorgeous piece of art.

HBO announced (in news we first heard at Watcher’s on the Wall) that all eight seasons of the show will be available in an epic 33-disc set titled Game of Thrones: The Complete Collection. It comes in a wooden shadow box package featuring art from artist Robert Ball, creator of the “Beautiful Death” series.

When viewed together the box set creates a fantastic Westerosi diorama with some of the most famous House sigils, all held together with a Hand of the King pin.

Currently listed for pre-order on Amazon for $250, HBO also announced a more standard home release version of the series without Ball’s art. Game of Thrones: The Complete Series comes in standard Blu-Ray packaging, featuring ravens leaving the season eight logo of the Iron Throne with Drogon’s eyes, all set against a backdrop of ice and fire.

And if you are only looking to add season eight to your collection, the show’s final year will also be available separately.

Each of the three releases, which will be available in December, come loaded with extras and bonuses, including deleted scenes, new histories and lores (my personal favorite), and the making-of season eight documentary The Last Watch. You can find all of the special features below, including a special, never-bef0re-seen reunion show with the cast hosted by Conan O’Brien.

HBO has already shared a clip from the special.

Forget seven blessings though. That box set is going to cause seven bloody hells for our bank account.

Game of Thrones: The Complete Collection and Game of Thrones: The Complete Series on Blu-ray Bonus Features:

–Game of Thrones: Reunion Special: A reunion show shot live in Belfast with the cast, both past and present, hosted by Conan O’Brien and available exclusively on these complete series collections. The reunion special is assembled in segments focused on Houses Lannister, Stark, & Targaryen and concludes with the key players all onstage for their final reflections on the years they shared in Westeros and Essos.

–Bonus content and retail exclusive videos from previously released individual season box sets, totaling more than 15 hours of extra materials for fans to explore when they’ve finished watching the series.

Complete Series and Season 8 formats also exclusively feature:

–Game of Thrones: The Last Watch: A documentary featured on DVD in two parts by filmmaker Jeanie Finlay chronicling the making of the final season.
–When Winter Falls: Exclusive 30-minute featurette with showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with major stars and behind-the-scenes players, breaking down all that went into the colossal filming of the “Battle of Winterfell” in Season 8, Episode 3.
–Duty is the Death of Love: A compelling look at how the team behind Game of Thrones and its major stars, including Kit Harington, Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke, brought the show to its conclusion in the series finale, “The Iron Throne.”
–Audio Commentaries: 10 Audio Commentaries with cast and crew, including the show’s creators, Benioff and Weiss, on the final season.
–Deleted and Extended Scenes: 5 never-before-seen deleted or extended scenes from season 8.
–Histories and Lore: New animated pieces giving the history and background of notable season 8 locations and storylines.

Images: HBO

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When most people hear the term “Film Noir,” they tend to envision dark alleys, vile criminals, and steely private detectives out to give the bad guys the ol’ one-two.

But the hard-boiled variety is only one shade of the monochromatic noir color wheel. One of my favorite alternatives is the Gothic Noir, a subcategory combining Film Noir elements with those of Gothic romance literature and melodrama. They usually have women in the lead role rather than as the typical “femme fatale,” and they tend to blur the lines between crime fiction and horror.

One of the best examples of the Gothic Noir is the 1945 film My Name Is Julia Ross, a quick little B-picture that became a massive hit for Columbia and which feels incredibly fresh and immediate today, and terrifying to boot. The film is out on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy on February 19.

My Name Is Julia Ross is based on the novel The Woman in Red by Anthony Gilbert, the pen name of English author Lucy Beatrice Malleson. The screenplay was written by Muriel Roy Bolton and the film was directed by Joseph H. Lewis, an American filmmaker best known for his later 1950 film Gun Crazy. Unlike most noir of the time, My Name Is Julia Ross doesn’t revolve around two-bit hoods and tight-fisted tough guys, but instead focuses on a woman (played masterfully by Nina Foch) very much in peril—a peril placed on her for no reason other than her being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s forced to use her wits to save herself, which is especially hard as she’s on the verge of losing them.

The titular heroine is an American living in London without any family and only one friend, Dennis Bruce (Roland Varno), another American expat with whom Julia has the beginnings of a romance. She’s in need of work and is referred as the live-in secretary to wealthy widow Mrs. Hughes (May Whitty). After meeting Mrs. Hughes and her intense but seemingly harmless son Ralph (George Macready), Julia accepts the job.

Two days later, Julia wakes up in a large room in the Hughes’ seaside manor house. Both Mrs. Hughes and Ralph come in and speak to her as though she were Ralph’s ailing wife, Marion, who has had bouts of psychiatric trouble for years. The entire little town near Cornwall has been made aware that Marion Hughes would finally be joining her husband and mother-in-law, and no one will believe that Julia is, in fact, Julia, given what they know of Marion. So she has to use her wits to try to escape before the Hughes’ nefarious plot can come to fruition.

My Name Is Julia Ross was a suspenseful and often horrifying melodrama in its time; viewed through a contemporary lens, it’s all the more harrowing: a woman completely stripped of her identity and agency, thoroughly ignored by anyone who might be able to help, and constantly in danger of being killed. Nearly three quarters of a century after its release, a movie like this could be made today and change almost nothing of the plot and story. Gaslighting—the practice of systematically destabilizing a victim’s beliefs through denial, manipulation, misdirection, contradiction, and lies—was a term born of the 1938 play Gaslight about a woman driven insane by her evil husband, and is still a huge concern.

While firmly in the territory of the Film Noir, Julia Ross uses the trappings of Gothic literature to great effect. We have a giant, old-money mansion on a hill—overlooking a cliffside, even—a woman all but locked away in a room in said house, an old widow, and a psychopathic, overly coddled mama’s boy whose childishness is matched only by his quickness to violence. Ralph Hughes is one of screendom’s best boogeymen. Constantly running his fingers along some kind of knife, an extension of heavily implied sexual impotence manifesting in murder, Ralph feels like a clear progenitor of Norman Bates and Leatherface. His imposing physicality and wild eyes paint him as especially volatile.

But Ralph is the mad dog; none of this horrible plot would have been carried out if not for the conniving and thoroughly pitiless Mrs. Hughes. Like all great Gothic villainesses, Mrs. Hughes’ main goal is keeping her family safe and taken care of, even if it means covering up murder, kidnapping, and fraud. She’s the much more insidious figure in the film, and the one who truly enables Ralph to be the monster he is. She wields a high degree of control over her son and is trusted by the town simply for being old and wealthy.

A lesser movie might have made Julia truly doubt herself, and the movie does at times point to her perhaps having really lost her mind, but the film’s title makes it clear she has one universal truth to hang on to: her name is Julia Ross and someone will have to believe her. Much of the film’s runtime is devoted to her trying, often in vain, to reach someone who can help her, and ultimately she has to come up with a plan to help herself. The film’s would-be hero, Dennis, is little more than a plot point, the one person in the vicinity who can corroborate Julia’s truth. The actual heroism is all Julia; she’s a self-rescuing damsel.

My Name Is Julia Ross is a brisk 64 minutes long and was initially made as a cheapie B-movie, but it proved so well done that the studio moved it to A-status. All these years later, it’s a profoundly upsetting and troubling film, but one that’s intensely rewarding.

Images: Columbia/Arrow

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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If a filmmaker makes a name for themselves in the horror genre, it’s very difficult to convince the world they can do anything else, much as they might try. It’s been 30 years since David Cronenberg made a horror movie, for example, yet we still most associate him with the genre. Cronenberg, however, got out of the genre to critical acclaim; John Carpenter will forever be a horror/sci-fi guy, for good or ill. But in 1984, he took his stab at a mainstream Hollywood love story: Starman.

By 1981, Carpenter was on an amazing run of successes. Following his ostensible debut with 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13, he gave the world Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York, not to mention a critically acclaimed TV biopic about Elvis Presley and a made-for-TV thriller called Someone’s Watching Me. He was killing it, but after The Thing, his first movie for a major studio, turned out to be a bomb (despite now being hailed as perhaps his finest work), he was on a slide. 1983 saw a good-sized hit with Christine, but he needed to branch out; he needed to prove he could work in the studio system and made something far more palatable to mainstream audiences than The Thing.The original screenplay for Starman was written by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, with Dean Riesner doing uncredited rewrites after Carpenter was attached, and this was the best chance he’d get for the big time. The movie would employ some astounding effects work from make-up and creature legends Stan Winston, Rick Baker, and Dick Smith, and visual effects by the folks at ILM. But at its heart, it was a story of grief and discovery and love without reason. In short, it was something Carpenter was not the most obvious choice to pull off.Karen Allen plays Jenny, a grieving young wife whose husband Scott (Jeff Bridges) has just died tragically. An alien spacecraft has intercepted the gold disc from the Voyager 2 probe and comes to Earth to make first contact with humanity. The U.S. government, in its infinite wisdom, shoots down the alien ship over Wisconsin, and the alien entity makes its way to Jenny’s house where it uses a piece of Scott’s hair and pictures and video of him to create a human form for itself, to the utter horror of an onlooking Jenny. The Starman sends a message to his people that humans are hostile and arranges a pickup, in the middle of Arizona. Jenny agrees to drive the alien across the country, all the while pursued by government agents.So we have a road movie, and one that uses the landscape of the middle of the country very effectively. Carpenter and director of photography Donald M. Morgan show us sweeping vistas and forested mountain ranges along various highways and byways, and within that it allows the story to be quite intimate, with Jenny forced to care for this helpless entity that looks like the man she loved and lost. It’s emotional manipulation on the part of the alien, but it knows it. Along the way, because the alien is learning about humanity and Earth customs for the first time, there’s quite a lot of comedy to be mined, from the Starman recognizing a yellow light means “drive faster” to the subtle eloquence of flipping someone the bird.But the Starman also teaches, rejecting the human norm of violence and killing, as evidenced by a powerful scene in which he brings a dead deer on the front of a hunter’s truck back to life, sucking out the bullets and the pain in the process. Why would you kill for sport? Why would you treat life so meaninglessly? This theme is explored further by the interactions and different approaches of two government officials: the thoughtful SETI scientist Mark Shermin (Charles Martin Smith) and NSA director George Fox (Richard Jaeckel). We invited the alien to Earth, and yet for national security reasons, it needs to be vivisected. The desire for discovery and the fear of its reality. The hypocrisy of humanity.But sci-fi allegory aside, Starman is a rather profound love story. It’s not a meet-cute where the man and woman hate each other but romance grows; it’s a woman having her entire existence and thoughts about the universe blown wide open in the form of her dead husband—whom she watched grow from a fetus to a man in seconds, mind you—and putting her grief behind her for a moment to do something greater. It’s a way for her to say goodbye to Scott, who died suddenly, and to spend a bit more time with him, even just in physical space. And the Starman learns what love is by Jenny’s feelings for Scott, and that helps it learn humanity isn’t merely fear and hate. It’s a deeply sad, deeply moving way to do an alien on Earth story.Starman sadly didn’t do the business anyone was hoping, opening at number six at the box office the same weekend as David Lynch’s Dune and the week after 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Just like The Thing‘s box office was hurt by E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in ’82, Starman was hampered by too many aliens in theaters. And as the years have gone on, people tend to call this a lesser Carpenter outing, due to its soft-edges and less cynical approach. But Bridges did receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his role, the only Oscar nomination for a John Carpenter movie.While not as iconic or endemic of the director as some of Carpenter’s other films, Starman nevertheless proved he could work within that system and turn out a good movie, even if it didn’t terrify or menace. But that’s what the public expected from him, horror fans not accepting any other type of movie. It still feels like a John Carpenter movie, though, which is the mark of a great filmmaker, regardless of genre.Starman is available now on Blu-ray from Scream Factory with a new retrospective documentary and a classic commentary featuring Carpenter and Bridges. It’s a very worthy addition to your Carpenter shelf.

Images: Columbia/Shout! Factory

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Yep, it’s ya boy Kyle, back on my B.S. talking about a giallo. But this one may be one of the most important of the cycle.Giallo is, of course, the shorthand for Italian mystery thrillers, which increasingly crossed into horror following Dario Argento’s 1970 movie The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. While Argento made three more gialli before breaking into new territory with Suspiria, dozens more European directors made hundreds of gialli in the early 1970s to capitalize on the craze. My favorite such director is Sergio Martino, who directed a string of five gialli from 1970 to 1973. I’ve already written about the twisted plot of The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail and the trippy, Gothic-inspired All the Colors of the Dark, and now I want to talk about the final of Martino’s five gialli: an unintended precursor to the American slasher movie, 1973’s Torso.

Torso had quite a lot of titles, and the English language title is perhaps the most appropriate. It starts by following the typical giallo formula, with a killer murdering people in a swank European town—here the idyllic Italian college town of Perugia—and an amateur detective tries to figure out who it is. However, Martino shakes things up almost immediately. The murder weapon is a red and black striped ascot rather than a knife or a straight razor, and the killer wears a distinctive white balaclava, presupposing the likes of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. The main characters are all beautiful college students, and the amateur detective is one of the women rather than a guy.For most of the runtime, it’s a whodunit mixed with scenes of violence. But about two-thirds of the way through the movie, the coeds all decide to leave campus and spend a week in a villa to get away from the danger of the city, only for the killer to follow them. One of the girls, Jane (British actress Suzy Kendall), falls and hurts her leg when the girls arrive and goes up to her room to rest. When she wakes up, she discovers to her horror the killer has broken in and has already murdered all the other girls, and is sawing up their bodies with a hacksaw.This begins a protracted, Hitchcockian game of cat and mouse, in which the wounded Jane attempts first to leave the villa and then get the attention of locals down the hill, all without the killer knowing she’s there. To make the tension last as agonizingly long as possible, Martino cuts back to town where a doctor (Luc Merenda) is investigating. All Jane has to do is somehow get the doctor’s attention.And this then begins what I consider to be one of the best scenes in all of horror cinema, which is just as influential on the slasher movie as Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood or Bob Clark’s Black Christmas.

Jane is unable to leave the villa because the killer has locked the door while he goes outside to dispose of the first batch of the bodies. So she attempts to get the doctor’s attention via a tiny hand mirror reflecting sunlight. This proves fairly ineffective, and time is of the essence. She quickly begins cleaning up her mess, making it seem like no one had been staying in there, throwing everything in a bureau, but as she’s just about finished, she notices she’s not wearing her shoes. They’d fallen off her feet when she ran back up to her room after seeing her dead friends. The killer will know she’s somewhere in the house, and so she goes to get them.

Jane knocks over a chair trying to get someone’s attention, and the killer walks up to investigate. Jane hides in the bureau, and luckily, the window bangs in the wind. She’s seemingly off the hook. The killer walks slowly out, shuts the door to the room, and locks it behind him. This is one of those old houses where every door has a key lock, and the key can go in from either side.So she’s stuck. But the killer has left the key in the door facing the other way. Jane thinks quickly and comes up with an ingenious plan: she’ll slide a page of newspaper under the door, then using a hairpin, she’ll push the key out of the hole onto the paper and pull it back to her side of the door.She carefully slides the paper and begins pushing the key. She needs to be quiet, but she also needs to push hard enough for it to fall out. And what will happen when the key falls on the wood floor? She’ll have to worry about that later. She pushes some more, until finally the key falls out the door.The camera then cuts to a shot of the newspaper from the outside of the door…and the key on the floor a couple of inches away from the paper. Jane doesn’t realize she’s failed and begins slowly inching the paper back toward her and just when we think all hope is lost…we know it definitely is.

A black gloved hand comes into frame, picks up the key, and carefully puts it on the newspaper.The audience sits in abject fear, knowing full well what will happen when Jane gets the key. She pulls the newspaper back in. To her mind, she’s triumphed! She’s beaten the killer. And she opens the door, relieved, only to walk directly into that gloved hand and the masked murderer it belongs to.Martino made some terrific gialli, and many of them have better stories or more interesting characters than Torso, but when it comes to pure cinematic suspense and terror, Martino never got better than the last 30 minutes of Torso and its truly revolutionary switcheroo.Torso is on Blu-ray now from Arrow Video, who graciously provided us with the above clips. Torso is another in a long line of brilliant giallo releases, with an essential audio commentary from author and film critic Kat Ellinger, an appreciation for the film by author and professor Mikel Koven, and interviews with Martino, Merenda, and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi.It’s got a pretty tawdry reputation, but Torso is an absolutely killer horror movie.

Image: Arrow

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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For most of David Lynch‘s filmography, he focused on the dark and troubling things happening in a version of the world that should by all accounts be wholesome and cheerful.

Clearly he sees the idyllic as a mask for seediness. Eraserhead was about the horror of the mundane and responsible; Dune, for all its faults, focused on a young man living up to expectations; and Blue Velvet dove into the darkness behind the veneer of cheery, picket-fenced suburbia. And then there’s Twin Peaks. But of maybe all of his work, no film proclaimed the power of youthful, reckless love quite like 1990’s Wild At Heart.

As is perhaps insanely fitting, Wild At Heart is also one of Lynch’s darkest and most brutal films, and not least because, unlike Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, the characters in Wild At Heart do not dwell in a happy, wholesome environment, but begin on the edges of hell and merely travel further in. The lead couple of Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) are brought up in a bad place to bad parents and are involved with bad stuff, and through their sheer, unwavering passion for each other, they spend the movie searching for the wholesome, for what’s over the rainbow.

The film opens with Sailor beating a man to death, and rather than be the catalyst for some kind of strife between he and his beloved, we then cut immediately to the end of his two year stint (it was self-defense, it was ruled) to show Lula picking him up from prison. We quickly learn it was Lula’s mother Marietta (Diane Ladd) who hired the man to try to kill Sailor. Marietta hates Sailor, on the surface because she says he’s bad for Lula, but truly because Sailor rebuked Marietta’s own advances. Marietta spends the entire movie sending people to kill Sailor, through various southern fried mobster and gangland types, resulting in some of the film’s bleakest and most upsetting scenes.

First, Marietta hires her reasonable, level-headed, and stupidly devoted boyfriend, private detective Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton), to find the kids when they skip town, but she knows Johnnie has a soft spot for Sailor and so hires her other boyfriend, the vile psychopath Marcello Santos (J.E. Freeman) to kill Sailor, which Santos then takes as leave to kill Johnnie too. One of the movie’s most terrifying scenes finds Johnnie captured by Juana (Grace Zabriskie), Reggie (Calvin Lockwood), and Dropshadow (David Patrick Kelly), a trio of sadistic assassins in New Orleans, who get sexual gratification through murder. This bad decision (to put it mildly) sends Marietta into a guilt spiral that makes her even more unhinged.

And while this makes up the bulk of the film’s plot, Sailor and Lula know almost nothing about it until the end. They spend most of their screen time driving from city to city, making love in crappy hotels, dancing in crappy bars, and talking about their weird pasts. (Lula’s story about her deranged cousin Dell, played by Crispin Glover, is one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.) They seem hellbent on ignoring the world and living in a state of perpetual, childlike bliss, even refusing to tell each other the dark parts of their own story (Lula’s sexual assault, Sailor’s history of criminal activity). The chemistry between Cage and Dern drips from the screen as Sailor serenades her with throaty renditions of Elvis hits while alternately gyrating to thrash metal.

Reality doesn’t start crashing down around them until they happen upon a horrible car accident off a dark, secluded highway. They witness a girl (Sherilyn Fenn) with a massive head wound search for her purse before seizing and passing away. This omen follows Sailor and Lula for the rest of the movie, and Lula discovers she’s pregnant just as they reach Big Tuna, TX, with no more money and nowhere to go. Enter Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), the sleaziest and most psychotic character in the whole movie, who convinces Sailor to help him rob a feed shop for some quick cash, after threatening Lula for no reason other than asserting power.

It’s Big Tuna that threatens the romance seemingly written in the stars, and the fire imagery Lynch uses for the film’s first two thirds goes away. Fittingly, while we’ve seen many scenes of Sailor and Lula in bed together, limbs intertwined in the afterglow of intense physical love, the last scene of this nature in the movie finds the pair each on a different edge of the hotel bed, unsure of the future. Despite all the over-the-top violence and menace which seems to be all around them, it’s them losing faith in each other and themselves together that is the real threat.

Lynch–who adapted Barry Gifford’s novel himself–seems to love this couple as much as they love each other. In typical Lynch fashion, the world of Wild At Heart is populated by the bizarre and macabre, but Sailor and Lula are quaint in their eccentricities, and this is, again, after we see Sailor brutally beat a man to death with his own hands. The fire I mentioned before is a light and a heat that can’t be put out by anything as long as the couple are together and strong. Strip away all the Lynchiness, the story is a fairy tale romance, modeled on The Wizard of Oz and the like.

And unlike Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the ending of Wild At Heart isn’t disturbing, it’s reaffirming. The power of love wins out, even if there’s violence and depravity along the way. It’s sweet when David Lynch does romance.

Wild At Heart is on Blu-ray now from Shout! Factory as part of their Shout Select series.

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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While Avengers: Infinity War was one of the most secretive big-budget movie productions ever, it’s remarkable how forthcoming its creators are now.

The new Blu-ray and VOD streaming copy features a commentary track by directors Joe and Anthony Russo, together in the same room with writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. It’s great that they’re all on the same page; even better that they manage to confirm a few theories along the way. If you haven’t had a chance to hear it yet, here are the best nuggets of info you might not have known (aside from ones we knew already, like that Kenneth Branagh cameo, or Hulk’s motivation).

The X-Men Connection

When Doctor Strange tries to bind Thanos with red energy beams, the Russo brothers confirm that he is indeed using the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak, which he previously used against Kaecilius. Cyttorak is a cosmic deity best known in the Marvel Universe for imbuing a gemstone with a fraction of his power, granting those who possess it the power of the Juggernaut. In comics he has also battled Strange’s master the Ancient One, so he’s apparently one of those characters like Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver who could potentially be part of both Avengers and X-Men rights. That won’t be an issue much longer, but with Juggernaut also having grace our screens so recently in Deadpool 2, it’s a fun coincidence.

Drax Is Sick of the Zune

In a deleted scene, Drax finally has had it with Peter Quill playing music all the time. The song that breaks him? Ace Frehley’s “New York Groove.” Perhaps coincidentally, Drax actor Dave Bautista was famously a WWE superstar, while Frehley’s band KISS were briefly affiliated with rival promotion WCW.

This Is How Gamora (Probably) Returns

From the moment Gamora died, fans have speculated that she’ll be resurrected due to being inside the Soul Stone now. The commentary confirms that the final scene between Thanos and Young Gamora after the snap is indeed taking place inside said stone, and clearly indicates that at least a version of little-girl Gamora is there too.

Thanos’ One Weakness

Though it’s never explicitly called out in the movie, the Russos had to think of a way that Thanos could actually be fought when wielding the Infinity gauntlet. They came up with a technicality: he can only use the power of the stones individually when his fist is closed. Attack him while his hand is open and there’s a slim chance, though once he has all the stones all bets are off.

If He Only Had…

When Thanos is done, in his final scene, look towards the lower left of the screen. It’s out of focus, but the commentary confirms that there’s a scarecrow wearing Thanos’ gold armor. This is a reference to his last scene in the Infinity Gauntlet comic, although in that case he had been defeated and was now living a simple life as a farmer.

Who’s the Main Hero?

While Infinity War is told as Thanos’ story, the hero’s journey of the film is undertaken by Thor, who sacrifices everything to get the weapon that can save the day. He even gives his life and gets a resurrection moment — that blast from the star was going to kill him, but in a callback to previous Thor movies, Asgardian weapons have healing/regenerative powers, and holding Stormbreaker is what saves him. In the same scene, Groot also continues a long tradition in Marvel movies of characters losing an arm or hand, a trend which Kevin Feige has confirmed is a subtle Star Wars nod.

In the next movie, however, you can expect Captain America to be the primary hero. As balance, the Russos initially weren’t even going to have him show up onscreen until he punches Thanos in Wakanda. They soon realized that was not a good idea.

Did you notice anything else in Infinity War? Leave us a comment below and tell us what it is!

The post The 6 Best Tidbits and References From the AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR Blu-ray appeared first on Nerdist.

We’re at a point now where newer filmmakers are just as likely to emulate John Carpenter as they are Spielberg or Scorsese. Carpenter had a string of hits in the ’70s and ’80s, and movies like Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York have come to be hailed as masterpieces of filmmaking. While his The Thing was a critically panned flop in 1982, it has since become the cornerstone of the director’s canon, roundly considered his best and most accomplished work.

All of this reappraisal of John Carpenter’s cinema is great for people like me who discovered him in college, and great for Shout! Factory and its horror imprint Scream Factory, who’ve been steadily releasing Carpenter’s filmography in special edition Blu-rays over the past few years. What’s even better is that we’re getting to the point now where they’re releasing the director’s lesser works. Upon watching several of them, even they are worthy of a look.

Going in chronological order, Scream has released Carpenter’s 1978 TV movie Someone’s Watching Me!, a movie I had never seen. After the modest success of 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter was working as a screenwriter and sold a script for a thriller and eventually negotiated to direct the movie as well, for Warner Bros. and NBC. Often called “the lost Carpenter film” for its scarcity on home video, it’s now got a fancy collector’s edition with loads of extras.

For a late ’70s TV movie of the week, Someone’s Watching Me! is surprisingly self-assured and has some legitimately innovative thrills, even if the interiors can’t help but look like a TV set. The story follows Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton), who moves from New York to Los Angeles to get a job directing live television. At her new station, she meets and becomes fast friends with production manager Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau). Leigh moves into a high rise apartment on Wilshire, part of a pair of tall apartment blocks, and quickly realizes someone is spying on her, and she receives a series of threatening phone calls and letters from a fake vacation sweepstakes called “Excursions Unlimited.”

The police are relatively helpless, nor can Leigh’s new boyfriend (David Birney) seem to do anything about it. Sophie thinks she oughta just leave, but eventually, Leigh takes matters into her own hands and decides to find the stalker and make him stop, one way or the other. The movie has a lovely sense of dread throughout and the stalker, though not in the slasher movie mold, remains an almost otherworldly enigma. There’s something of the giallo flavor about it, with the unseen figure wearing black gloves.

This movie was a surprise and a delight for me to finally get to see, and it proves not only Carpenter’s directorial chops, but that he was an ace screenwriter too. Each character on the movie’s small cast list feels real and important, and it even deals with relatively taboo topics for television at the time. Barbeau’s character is openly a lesbian, something which gets talked about not as an aberration but as a part of her life.

Someone’s Watching Me! was made just prior to Carpenter embarking on the production of Halloween, but didn’t end up airing until about a month after that movie’s runaway success, and the director’s string of hits (and a couple misses) was off and running. As such, it’s a fun time capsule of a pre-Halloween landscape.

This next movie, on the other hand, was never hailed as any sort of lost classic. It was one of the very last major studio productions Carpenter would work on, and by all rights it should have been a massive success. It just…wasn’t. Memoirs of an Invisible Man, released in 1992, was Carpenter’s follow-up to 1988’s They Live, and it’s a part of the corporate machine the earlier film railed against. Carpenter was a director for hire for it, and I will say, though it doesn’t exactly feel like a Carpenter movie, it does look like one.

Memoirs follows a stock analyst named Nick Halloway (Chevy Chase) who spends most of his time avoiding work but still succeeding (typical) who meets and falls for a TV producer named Alice (Daryl Hannah) but life gets, well, complicated when Nick, having a snooze while he’s supposed to be watching a lecture at a shareholders’ meeting for Magnascopic Laboratories. Due to his nap, he’s in the building when an accident causes some high tech equipment to go haywire, turning half the building–and Nick himself–fully invisible.

Being an invisible man is a lot of people’s dreams, but Nick soon learns it’s a nightmare; he can’t sleep because he can see through his own eyelids. He can’t eat more than Jell-O because he can see the food digesting in his stomach, and he can’t even see where he’s going or feed himself properly because he can’t see where his hands or feet are. This would be bad enough, but he’s also being hunted by a group of government agents–led by the sadistic Jenkins (Sam Neill)–who want to exploit Nick’s invisibility for spying purposes…or kill him and everyone he comes in contact with should he refuse.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is definitely not on the same level as a lot of Carpenter’s work, but I was fairly surprised by how moderately enjoyable it was. The special effects, by a pre-Jurassic Park ILM, were state-of-the-art, making Nick’s clothes seem like they were floating around rather seamlessly, and his make-up covered face seem two dimensional. The story is fine—one of the credited screenwriters is the legendary William Goldman, clearly slumming it—but I think the major drawback of the movie is Chase’s performance.

If the movie’s supposed to be a comedy, he’s playing it far too straight (one of the only moments that seems to be vying for outright “comedy” is a racist scene where Nick goes undercover as a cab driver, covering his face in very dark makeup, painting his invisible teeth with white-out, and wearing a turban) and if it’s supposed to be a serious sci-fi adventure, he’s not the right guy for it. Neill, on the other hand, is perfectly cast as the villain. This movie did not get the kind of extensive collector’s edition from Scream Factory the others in Carpenter’s catalog have—he himself doesn’t speak much of it. But the shame of it is that if someone more suitable to the task had been cast, it might have become a minor hit.

And finally, I want to mention a movie that was a financial disappointment upon its release, but has since garnered a major cult following, joining The Thing as the Carpenter movie that’s found its audience in ensuing years. 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness might have been too cerebral for the dwindling horror crowds of the ’90s, but it’s a masterful piece of cosmic and paranoid horror. I’ve written about the film extensively in the past (which you can read here) but it’s fantastic to have a collector’s edition now, with a brand new commentary by Carpenter and his producer/wife Sandy King and new interviews with cast and crew. It finally feels like In the Mouth of Madness has gotten the respect it deserves.

John Carpenter remains one of my personal favorite directors, and has only grown in my estimation upon countless rewatches. It’s a shame he wasn’t more respected during his latter career—though you can’t deny his films after They Live (Madness aside) don’t hold a candle to the ones before—but his influence on the current batch of genre filmmakers is firm and unshakable.

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post John Carpenter’s Lesser Works Are Still Fantastic appeared first on Nerdist.

If given the choice of viewing, most of the time I choose horror or sci-fi or action, mostly because they’re easy and fun and they’re genres which engage my mind (or not) and I can shut down my other functions. I tend not to watch too many sad or romantic movies because they engage my heart and I’m afraid of my own emotions and like to live as a robot.

But I’m not a robot; I like to feel things, I like to experience some love and magic in my movies, and for that there were no better filmmakers than Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and perhaps their finest work–1946’s A Matter of Life and Death–might also be the most romantic movie ever made.

If you’ve never seen a Powell & Pressburger movie, you’ll be immediately struck by the sumptuousness of their productions, full of rich, velvety technicolor photography (often, and indeed in this case, courtesy of the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff) and the way in which they blend the fantastical with the real. While both men are credit as writing, directing, and producing, it was the British-born Powell who directed and the Hungarian-born Pressburger who wrote, producing together under the title of the Archers. When you see their logo of an arrow hitting a bullseye, you know you’re heading into a magical world.

On the heels of WWII, the Archers were approached by the British government to make a movie about the continued relationship between Britain and America. Though the two countries had been allies, the relations between the Americans stationed in the UK and the British people hadn’t been the best. To build off of this, Pressburger focused on a story he’d heard of a bomber pilot who bailed out without a parachute and somehow survived. It all weaved together into a story of life, death, afterlife, and fellowship, and the unending power of love.

The film begins with a narrator telling us about the universe, and then we focus in on Britain, circa 1945, as an airman named Captain Peter Carter (David Niven), a poet and writer before the war, makes what he thinks will be his final transmission, to a young American female officer named June (Kim Hunter). His plane is on fire, all of his men have bailed out except for his gunner, and his own parachute is shot to pieces. Through the course of this very fraught but somehow upbeat conversation, he confesses his love for June, a woman he’s never met, and jumps out rather than burn up.

We then cut to “the other place,” a version of heaven full of bureaucracy and paperwork, but still remarkably pleasant. Peter’s gunner is waiting at the entrance for him…except he never shows up. You see, the soul charged with guiding Peter to the next realm–a 17th century Frenchman known in the film as Conductor 71 (Marius Goring)–misplaced him in the thick English fog. Peter instead awakens on the shore, completely fine, and makes his way toward the village, where he meets June. Once she realizes who he is, they both declare it a miracle and fall immediately in love.

The problem with this is twofold: Conductor 71 needs to retrieve Peter to balance the books, and he only has a few days to prepare for his trial, something the Other Place has never allowed before. On the other hand, he may just be a man with a severe brain injury, and it’s up to June’s good friend, the brilliant neurosurgeon Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey) to determine what the problem is. In either case, there’s a very great risk that this new love will have to end prematurely, even though it only truly began because Peter was meant to die but didn’t.

There’s a lot happening in the plot of the movie, but Powell and Pressburger keep it remarkably lively and intelligent. First, they made the amazing choice to have Earth in rich, vibrant color and the Other Place in monochrome, something which you’d imagine would have gone the other way if less fanciful minds had made the movie. Cinematographer Cardiff painstakingly transitioned between the black & white and the color by increasing or decreasing the color, by hand, frame by frame, for some of the most impressive dissolves in movie history.

But on a thematic level, this separation is much more evocative. Because it’s the “living world,” where Peter and June are together and happy, that is bright and colorful, while the afterlife (or just a brain hemorrhage-induced fever dream) is the grey and humorless one. The movie is about fighting for your life and your loves, so why shouldn’t that be the more visually appealing?

Following the film’s amazing opening, where these two people in close-up talk to each other for the first and possibly only time, the truth and fervency of the love between Peter and June is never in question. You buy it, fully and totally. Yes, it’s quick and rushed and sparked off by coincidence and divine non-intervention, but they quickly see right into each other’s hearts and it’s completely believable. It’s wartime, they’re star-crossed in a number of ways, and yet it’s the firmest bond in the movie.

The fight, the struggle of the movie is to convince the powers that be that love is worth overcoming death. Peter goes on trial, with the prosecuting counsel a revolutionary American named Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), who has a personal hatred of anyone British (makes sense, really), and initially a jury full of historical figures from countries that have been persecuted by Britain. But Peter’s counsel–I won’t spoil who it is for people who haven’t seen the movie–argues that Britain and America need to come together, and petitions to have the jury replaced with all Americans, who end up all being immigrants who became American citizens. It’s an amazing moment in the movie, and one that resonates in today’s American climate exceedingly well.

Because the movie isn’t just about the romantic love between two people, it’s about the love between fellow humans, and the common ground that love can be. Farlan initially resents Peter for beguiling an American woman from the great city of Boston, but ultimately he realizes the power of love transcends differences, accents, nationalities, and even life and death. Both Peter and June would die to save the other, and that is a universal kind of romance.

So whether Peter is truly having a celestial experience based on red tape and heavenly mistakes or if he just hit his head when he somehow didn’t die from jumping out of a plane, the themes and messages of A Matter of Life and Death are just as strong. It’s a movie that will make your heart open with the possibilities of the universe and the unending strength of human togetherness and affection.

A Matter of Life and Death is available in a glorious Blu-ray edition from Criterion, with an audio commentary from 2009 by scholar Ian Christie, an interview from 2008 with director Martin Scorsese, a new interview with Oscar-winning editor and Michael Powell’s widow Thelma Schoonmaker, a piece about the movie’s extensive and impressive special effects sequences, and some archival interviews with Powell.

This is a movie you need to watch, many times, because it’s purely and simply one of the finest films of any genre, of any age.

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH is Still the Most Romantic Movie Ever Made appeared first on Nerdist.

Are you having Gravity Falls withdrawals?

Are you missing the mysterious, supernatural adventure of the Pacific Northwest? So are we! From the fun art style, to the crazy yet heartfelt plot, to the lovable characters and vocal performances, it’s a summer we want to relive over and over again. This is obviously down to the amazing lead characters, particularly the eccentric and endlessly adorable Mabel, played by Kristen Schaal.

Known for her distinct voice and energetic personality, Schaal gets plenty of work playing characters for cartoons and animated films. In the exclusive clip above from Shout! Factory, we hear from fellow actor Jason Ritter, who plays Dipper, and creator and writer Alex Hirsch on how Schaal was such a great part of the show. Hirsch even divulges that he specifically wrote the part for her, and couldn’t picture, or hear, rather, anyone else taking on Mabel’s role. She also shares her experience on what it was like to play the character.  For many, Mabel is the heart of the show, so it’s difficult to imagine anyone else bringing her to life any differently.

And if you’re really missing the series and want to be able to own the entire thing for yourself, a 7-disc, collector’s edition box set is on the way! It will include the entire series, as well as special features such as deleted scenes, commentaries, behind-the-scenes footage, and more. The set will be available starting Tuesday, July 24, and is available on their site.

Tell us why you loved Gravity Falls and what your favorite episode is in the comments below!

The post Why Kristen Schaal Was the Only Choice to Play Mabel in GRAVITY FALLS (Exclusive) appeared first on Nerdist.

Horror movies used to be the chiaroscuro monster movies of the ’30s and ’40s, or the alien invasion allegories of the ’50s, or the technicolor costume dramas of the ’60s. But with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, horror became visceral, gritty, upsetting—it became real.

In the 1970s, as New American Cinema ushered in the age of the independent film, so too did horror get more homegrown, less glossy. And right at the forefront of that was Wes Craven. In 1972, the 33-year-old former professor wrote, edited, and directed a movie that’s still shocking and upsetting 46 years later: The Last House on the Left.

Based on, of all things, the 1960 Ingmar Bergman film The Virgin Spring, The Last House on the Left was Craven’s debut movie, seeking to skewer zany teen comedies and crime pictures in a package that’s at once quirky and dangerous. The movie was cut to ribbons by American projectionists who thought it was disgusting, with seven whole minutes lobbed off in the interest of an R-rating. It was outright banned in the United Kingdom until 2002, when it was released with 31 seconds cut in order to get that county’s 18 certificate. It wasn’t released uncut until 2008.

So why is the movie so upsetting? Has it gotten any less upsetting in the years since? These are the questions I asked myself when I sat down to watch Arrow Video’s new special edition Blu-ray of The Last House on the Left. And the answer: Despite some quaint bits of dated comedy, it’s still one of the most affectingly upsetting horror films of all time.

The story follows a 17-year-old girl named Mari Collingwood, a high school senior with ridiculously wholesome, loving parents. She and her friend Phyllis are off to attend a concert for her birthday when they hear a radio report of a mass prison escape by a collective of criminals: Krug Stillo (David Hess), a sadistic rapist and serial killer; his heroin-addicted son, Junior; Sadie, a promiscuous psychopath and sadist; and Fred “Weasel” Podowski, a child molester, peeping Tom, and murderer. The girls run into Junior almost immediately and try to buy pot off of him, and the boy leads them to his dad’s apartment, where the girls are trapped, and Phyllis is brutalized in front of the horrified eyes of Mari.

The next morning, the girls are crammed in the trunk of Krug’s car and taken to the woods where the criminals submit them to humiliation after humiliation before Phyllis is stabbed and nearly disemboweled, and Mari is raped, slashed, stabbed, and eventually shot out in the middle of the lake. After cleaning themselves up in the lake, Krug and company make their way to a nearby house for the night, intent on killing the owners the next day. However, they don’t realize it’s the Collingwood residence, and Mari’s parents are not just going to go quietly when they discover who Krug is, and what he’s done.

Parts of The Last House on the Left are purposely goofy—the podunk sheriff and deputy are clear comic relief, and the folk songs on the soundtrack by David Hess himself are hilariously upbeat and saccharine given the proceedings. Craven was a smart guy, and he didn’t so any of this by accident, instead intending to make a point about the perceived wholesomeness of America post-WWII conflicting with the horrors of the Vietnam War and dramatically rising crime rates.

And though it’s very clearly a product of its time, that doesn’t stop The Last House on the Left from remaining relevant and deeply upsetting in every decade. Craven pulls exactly zero punches, depicting heinous acts for maximum effect. But if it were all about gore and exploitation, the movie wouldn’t hold up at all. Craven puts the onus of the horror on us as witness to not only the vile acts, but the fear in the faces of the victims, and the sadistic revelry on those of the criminals. When Phyllis is raped, the camera doesn’t show you what happens, it zooms in on Mari’s face as she is made to watch. And then, for every act that follows, we do see what’s happening, and it’s us who are put in Mari’s shoes.

The final act of the movie is troubling on a different level. Craven makes us complicit in murder, not because we’re sadistic like the criminals, but because we want revenge on them like Mari’s parents. Just because Krug and his clan “deserve it” doesn’t take us off the hook. In between the increasingly out-of-place scenes of silliness and folk music, we’re witness to scenes of depravity and horror and Craven points the finger at the viewer. “You thought you were just going to the movies for a good time? Well, this is what’s going on in the world, and you have to watch it.”

The movie’s trailer features the infamous tagline, “To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie… only a movie…only a movie…'” It was a genius bit of marketing to bring in the punters, but you know as well as Wes Craven did, The Last House on the Left is certainly not “only a movie.”

The Last House on the Left is out now in a special edition set from Arrow Video, with multiple cuts of the film—the uncut version, the R-rated Krug and Co. cut, and another—several commentary tracks, archival interviews, and a brand new essay. There is no more definitive way to watch and learn about this movie, that’s still managing to drum up controversy even today.

Images: Arrow/Hallmark Releasing

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT Remains Horror’s Gut-Punch appeared first on Nerdist.

There had been westerns made in the American style in Europe since nearly the beginning of cinema, but it wasn’t until the success of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars that Italian filmmakers realized they could make westerns in their own, highly stylized fashion.

After Fistful, the Italian western floodgates opened and hundreds poured into cinemas between 1965 and 1975, roughly. And with them came ubiquitous heroes with names like Ringo, Django, and Sabata. But one you might not have heard of is Sartana, and there’s a reason for that we’ll get to; the Sartana movies, however, are excellent, and now all five “official” films in the series are available in a snazzy Blu-ray set from Arrow Video.

In Italy and the European market, there wasn’t such thing as “Intellectual Property,” meaning if they wanted to, a distributor could call a movie whatever they wanted to, mostly done to capitalize on another movie or franchise’s popularity. This happened with Ringo and Django, both of whom were characters used in a million other movies, even if they weren’t intended to be initially. But Sartana was different: Sartana’s popularity remained singular, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the lead actor.

In 1967, a movie was made in Italy called Mille dollari sul nero (released over here as Blood at Sundown) which featured a bad guy named Sartana, played by actor Gianni Garko. This movie became such a hit, and Garko’s performance became so popular, that the movie was even released in Germany as Sartana. The following year, they decided to give Garko a starring role as the hero, an unrelated character named Sartana, and it too was a monster hit. So Garko, being the smart fellow he was, went to court to protect the character–his visage, dress, and overall demeanor–as being his sole property and persona. And it worked! While other movies got labelled Sartana, only the five in this set are the canonical ones, and Garko doesn’t even play Sartana in all of them.

Sartana as depicted in these movies is something like a western James Bond mixed with Batman or something. He’s always impeccably dressed, in fancy black clothes with a red tie, looking a bit like a high stakes gambler. He’s got gadgets and trick weapons but is also highly intelligent and is essentially a detective through most of the movies. Like a wraith for righteousness, he comes into various towns to unravel dastardly plots and make himself a boatload of money in the process. The plots are usually exceedingly complex, owing in no small part to the writers being giallo or mystery writers elsewhere in their career. In short, Sartana is a total badass.

The first movie in the series was directed by Gianfranco Parolini, going by the Anglicized name of Frank Kramer (who left this series to direct his own Sabata trilogy), and the latter four were directed by Giuliano Carnimeo, credited as Anthony Ascott. Garko played Sartana in the first two and last two movies, while the middle film featured a Sartana played–with the okay from Garko–by another western star, George Hilton. And each of the movies has a phenomenally ridiculous title:

• If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (1968)
• I Am Sartana Your Angel of Death (1969)
• I Am Sartana, Trade Your Guns for a Coffin (1970)
• Have a Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay (1970)
• Light the Fuse…Sartana is Coming (1970)

So you can certainly sense a theme here. Sartana kills people a lot, and the reference to him as the Angel of Death is an apt one. He always seems to swoop in at the beginning of the narrative in time to start setting the pieces up for the villains and watch them fall. He doesn’t always save the good guys, but he always leaves the baddies in utter shambles.

The first movie has Sartana insinuate himself in the plot of several corrupt members of a town, and a couple of rival gang leaders as well, played by spaghetti western staples Klaus Kinski and William Berger. While fun, If You Meet Sartana is probably the weakest of the bunch. The second film feels a little more self-assured, with Carnimeo’s showier, more frenetic direction. In this one, a gang commits a bank robbery and one of them impersonates Sartana, leading the corrupt authorities to put a bounty on the famous gunman’s head. Bounty hunters from all over come to track down Sartana, who has to uncover the real culprits and prove his innocence. The bounty hunters are all unique and fun, and they include Kinski again, here playing the perpetually unlucky Hot Dead.

Both of the first two Sartana movies set up the iconic nature of the character while still being fairly by-the-numbers Italian westerns. With the next three, however, the stories would become much more complex and Sartana himself begins to appear more like an agent of retribution rather than a smiling, twinkly-eyed trickster.

Trade Your Guns for a Coffin is the lone Sartana outing for George Hilton, who by his own admission wanted to play the character as more of a romantic if enigmatic figure. In the movie, Sartana is a bounty hunter who gets ambushed by a gang of banditos just as he’s about to catch his prey, a man riding shotgun on a wagon full of gold. Except, as he soon finds out, the wagon contained only sand and the whole thing was a set up by a land owner who wanted the gold for himself. And as he sets up the bandits to take down the landowner, Sartana also has to contend with a greedy saloon owner (played by giallo staple Erika Blanc) and a rival bounty hunter named Sabbath (Charles Southwood, yes, the actor’s real name).

Hilton does an admirable job in the role, but the plot is particularly naff and isn’t quite as successful. Garko returned to the role, now sporting a huge blond mustache, and gave the series easily its two best entries. In Have a Good Funeral, Sartana witnesses a massacre and takes it upon himself to investigate. He’s sure the massacre had to do with the daughter of a friend of his, now entitled to a great deal of land, but he’s not sure who of the town’s many shady businessmen are behind it. Maybe all of them. And in Light the Fuse, Sartana comes to the aid of a former associate, wrongly imprisoned for his knowledge of a nearby gold mine. Corrupt lawmen and gangs of bandits descend, and Sartana has to sort out the mess. Also he plays a giant pipe organ in the middle of the town square that becomes a machine gun, soooooo….

Garko is in incredible form with these two movies, and Carnimeo’s direction was never better. There’s something almost supernatural about Sartana in the films; he’s too good to just be a roving do-gooder, and always seems to be exactly in the right place at the right time, just exactly what you want from a mythic western hero.

As with all of Arrow’s sets, the care and attention to detail for the Complete Sartana is second to none. Arrow oversaw beautiful 2K restorations of each of the movies, the first from existing film elements and the other four from the original camera negative. I’d seen some of these movies years ago on a bargain basement spaghetti western DVD set, and it’s night and day. There’s care here given to a genre that’s often mistreated by home media distributors.

This isn’t the kind of thing where one of the discs have a lot of extras and the others just have the movie. Each of the movies contains a bevy of extras. If You Meet Sartana contains a brand new commentary track by German filmmaker Mike Siegel, which Your Angel of Death and Have a Good Funeral contain brand new commentaries by writers/authors C. Courtney Joyner and Henry Parke. The latter two are featured on a number of spaghetti western commentaries and know a huge amount about the genre, and Siegel’s is a fascinating commentary from the West German perspective, where Sartana was an icon.

We’ve also got interviews with directors Parolini and Carnimeo, writers Ernesto Gastaldi and Fabbio Piccioni, and a number of the film’s main actors, including Gianni Garko, George Hilton, and Erika Blanc.

The Complete Sartana is one of the best box sets Arrow have put out recently, and that’s saying something. They continue to impress, and showcase movies that wouldn’t otherwise get the royal treatment.

Images: Arrow Video

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He is the writer of 200 reviews of weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe. Follow him on Twitter!

The post THE COMPLETE SARTANA Gives You Your New Favorite Spaghetti Western Hero appeared first on Nerdist.

Jodie Whittaker’s first season of Doctor Who won’t begin airing until October, but she’s already in august company. Every single actor who’s played the Doctor up to now has made an indelible stamp on the role right from the very beginning, and the odds have it that Whittaker will come out the gate with amazing stuff. There’s precedent for this; Matt Smith’s first season is by far his best, same with Jon Pertwee. And you can’t get too much better than Tom Baker’s inaugural season, which has been newly restored and released as a Blu-ray box set.

This set—touted as “Tom Baker Season One”—not only gathers all 20 episodes comprising five stories of Doctor Who season 12, which aired from December 1974 to May 1976, but fills the discs with over 17 hours of bonus material. It’s a staggering amount of extras, but as I’ll discuss in a moment, all incredibly worthy.

First a few quick notes about classic Doctor Who on DVD. Because of the way the show was serialized in the classic series, the DVD releases were all individual stories, consisting of between two and 10 episodes a pop. Only twice has a full season been bundled into a single release—season 16 and season 23—and both of those were because they contained a much more pronounced season-long quest arc within the different serials.

The other thing to note is that just about every episode of Doctor Who in the old days featured some form of videotape recording (usually for the show’s multi-camera interiors), and as such, there’s limited restoration that can be done for the HD format beyond what’s already been done by the amazing Doctor Who Restoration Team prior to the initial DVD releases. However, the Blu-ray for Tom Baker’s first season does look better than the DVDs, and they have a ton more space per disc for all the extras.

Tom Baker’s inaugural season was transitional on just about all fronts. Producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, who’d been the creative force behind all five Jon Pertwee years, were stepping down and a new young producer named Philip Hinchcliffe was taking over for Letts while longtime Who writer Robert Holmes took over for Dicks. The series would move away from the Earthbound UNIT years-style of storytelling and return to the Doctor traveling time and space. In order to ease the transition, Letts—whom Hinchcliffe shadowed for the first few weeks—commissioned stories written by established series writers and featuring returning fan-favorite monsters as much as possible.

The initial story, “Robot,” remained a UNIT story, the last to utilize the Pertwee years sets, and allowed Tom Baker to put a stamp on the character in an arena fans had only ever seen his predecessor occupy. And how different he was! Sillier, more irreverent, yet still quite imposing and altogether alien. This was followed by “The Ark in Space,” a story that is still considered one of the Fourth Doctor’s best, set on a near-deserted space station, with an alien running amok. The slight but enjoyable “The Sontaran Experiment” followed, giving the season some more location filming, and then we have the all-time classic “Genesis of the Daleks,” which introduces the Daleks’ creator Davros and is one of the bleakest allegories for Nazism ever in sci-fi. Rounding out the season is the goofy but harmless “Revenge of the Cybermen,” in which the Cybermen seek revenge…for something.

What makes the season so memorable and endlessly watchable is not necessarily the individual stories, but the interplay between Baker and his two companions. Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elisabeth Sladen, was still fresh off her first year on the show and continued to bring an energy and a savviness the role of companion dearly needed. She sparked well with the Doctor as well as the one-season companion of UNIT medical officer Dr. Harry Sullivan, played by Ian Marter, a character initially written in to be the one to do the action bits if they’d hired an older actor as the Doctor. Harry’s old fashioned mentality clashes with Sarah Jane’s modern career woman without being abrasive; if anything, Harry comes off as quaint.

I could talk for hours about the stories, but that’s only a percentage of what the Blu-rays have to offer. In addition to all of the extras that originally came with the individual stories, the BBC have commissioned literal hours of new content, including a full hour-long interview with Baker conducted by writer, TV presenter, and huge Doctor Who fan Matthew Sweet. It’s a career-spanning discussion of not just Baker’s first season but all of his time on the show and beyond, and the 84-year-old actor is his trademark mixture of self-effacing and batty, and gets quite candid and revealing.

The next new feature that I think is just about the best thing ever to grace a Doctor Who release. On each and every story there’s a feature called “Behind the Sofa,” referring to the common parlance of British people saying something was so scary they hid behind the sofa. This features an edit package (17 minutes for “Sontaran” and up to 45 minutes for “Robot”) in which two sets of people watch the stories and comment on them. The first set is Tom Baker, producer Philip Hinchcliffe, and Sadie Miller, daughter of Elisabeth Sladen. When it cuts to this crew, you get a lot of background information, reminiscences, and some irreverence, especially seeing the 33-year-old Miller at times humoring these two very old men.

The second half of each of these features has three actresses who played companions for Tom Baker later in his run, who have never seen these season 12 stories before. Louise Jameson played Leela, the companion immediately following Sladen’s exit, and she’s joined by Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton, who played Tegan and Nyssa, respectively, during the final Baker stories before becoming companions of Fifth Doctor Peter Davison. They take turns slagging off bad special effects, trying to remember things from their own eras, and just generally talking to the screen as if nobody’s watching. It is an utter delight.

In addition, each story also has a making-of featurette (“Sontaran” and “Cybermen” each got a newly commissioned one), and there’s also the whole four hours of “The Tom Baker Years,” a VHS release from 1991 in which Tom Baker himself watches and comments on clips from his seven years on the series. 5.1 sound mixes grace “The Ark in Space” and “Genesis of the Daleks,” and you can watch new special effects for “Revenge of the Cybermen.” There’s also the rarely seen “Genesis of the Daleks” omnibus movie version that was recently screened in cinemas.

I’ve long said I’m not the world’s biggest Fourth Doctor fan, but you can’t help but be enthralled and delighted by each and every minute of the “Tom Baker: Season One” Blu-ray set. If this is the primer for future such classic Doctor Who releases—perhaps they’ll do more Tom Baker seasons or full seasons for other Doctors—then I don’t think any fan will be let down. This is the best of the best.

Images: BBC

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor and the resident Whovian for Nerdist. Follow him on Twitter!

More for the Whovian!

• Have you been watching the Doctor Who Twitch stream?
• Steven Moffat found the silliest way to make Peter Cushing canon in Doctor Who!
• Breaking down Jodie Whittaker’s first scene in Doctor Who!

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The anthology series was a staple of the early days of television. Rather than a connected story and set of characters, it was a way to produce a different drama for an hour or so once a week. Nowadays, that format is largely gone and when they do pop up, it’s almost always with horror/sci-fi/fantasy stories. This was almost certainly due to the success and acclaim of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone which ran from 1959 to 1964. While that series was in production at CBS, the other networks tried their hand at the scary and mysterious. ABC’s answer was The Outer Limits, and while it was never as popular, I think in its own way, it was better than The Twilight Zone.

Now I would never be so foolish as to say The Twilight Zone wasn’t great television, nor that The Outer Limits‘ 49 episodes were better across the board than the 156 made for Twilight; however, The Twilight Zone formula, while groundbreaking, was always safe. That series looked like other black and white, studio-lot series of the time, and each episode featured an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation, always with a twist ending. The Outer Limits was never that formulaic, and with a much less ample budget, it led to some visually and mentally disturbing images you’d never get anywhere else. After watching/rewatching the first season thanks to Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray set, it’s clear that The Outer Limits wasn’t always perfect, but it was never safe.

The Outer Limits was created by Leslie Stevens, a self-identifying “hack writer” who had written, produced, and directed several TV shows prior to 1963. Unlike The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limitstold stories about people who were anything but regular and their situations were truly singular. Rather than a mix of supernatural or fantastical plots, The Outer Limits stayed very heavily in the science fiction realm, but quickly moved into Gothic Science Fiction, i.e. sci-fi stories that used the trappings of Gothic horror to create unease and scares. It was incredibly effective.

After the first several episodes were commissioned and shot, Stevens, weary from dealing with the network, handed the show’s day-to-day production and operations to Joseph Stefano, the writer of the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Stefano himself would write 14 episodes of The Outer Limits and would oversee the entire first season. Stevens and Stefano created much of the narrative archetypes for the series, and this was complemented by the visual prowess of directors like Gerd Oswald and Byron Haskin, and directors of photography Conrad L. Hall and Kenneth Peach. They brought German expressionist lighting, canted angles, and strange lenses which created the series’ sense of gloomy terror.

The stories in the series always had smart and disturbing sci-fi premises, but what made The Outer Limits stand out is that the episodes weren’t about the premise, but instead about how the characters dealt with that premise, realistically, so the terror felt real. In the episode “Corpus Earthling,” frequent guest star Robert Culp plays a man who can “hear” alien space rocks in his mind, and they eventually kill and take over the bodies of the dead. It could be a silly prospect, but Culp’s sweaty, wide-eyed performance and Oswald’s direction lead us toward terror. The following episode, “Nightmare,” has astronauts caught in an alien POW camp, and while the aliens are impressive, the harrowing, gut-wrenching performances by Martin Sheen and others make it thoroughly believable.

In the case of many of the best Outer Limits episodes, there was a basis in reality and real events. The Cold War, or a Cold War, seemed ever present; the show premiered with the Bay of Pigs failure and the Cuban Missile Crisis still on the public consciousness, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination a mere two months away. It was an incredibly turbulent time in America, and it would only get more tumultuous. The entire first season of The Outer Limits reflected the paranoia and the fear of alien (read “foreign”) infiltration.

In Culp’s first episode, the utter classic “The Architects of Fear,” he’s part of a think tank that seeks to unite humanity in a war against a common, alien menace…that they create at the loss of Culp’s own humanity; “The Zanti Misfits” finds a small military outpost terrified at warning issued by an alien government that they are to allow their “undesirables” to remain on Earth, unmolested. Fear quickly takes hold and a battle takes place; Both “O.B.I.T.” and “The Invisibles” feature aliens insinuating themselves or their influence on powerful Americans; and in “The Bellero Shield,” a benevolent alien appears before a meek scientist (Martin Landau) wishing to spread knowledge, but his devious wife (Sally Kellerman) and her even more devious maid (Chita Rivera) want Landau to steal the technology and take the credit for himself, with disastrous results.

But The Outer Limits wasn’t always political; in fact, some of the best and perhaps most underrated episodes gave us out-and-out horror, cosmic and otherwise. Donald S. Sandford–a veteran writer of the Boris Karloff horror anthology Thriller–penned the episode “The Guests,” in which a leather jacketed ruffian happens upon a spooky old house, in which people are taken out of time by an alien being who resides in one of the bedrooms. The episode (directed by Paul Stanley) becomes a surrealist nightmare as the young man learns how labyrinthine the house can be. Both this and the oft-derided, cheapie episode “Production and Decay of Strange Particles” veer into nigh Lovecraftian territory.

Another wonderful example is the season’s finale, “The Forms of Things Unknown,” written by Stefano and directed by Oswald. The plot involves two women who kill a blackmailer. Driving through the countryside with the body in the trunk, looking for a good place to bury him, they take refuge from a storm in a house containing a blind man and a strange young inventor who is experimenting with time. Unlike the traditional “time travel” devices, this one is intended to “tilt the cycles of time” and bring the dead back to life…which is what happens to the murdered blackmailer. Never before has the idea of time travel, and the person doing the traveling, been so upsetting.

And ultimately that’s why I think The Outer Limits is better than The Twilight Zone; it was lightning in a bottle. Its first season had lows (“The Mutant” is very stupid, certainly) but it also had amazing highs and was consistently good for the majority of its 32 episodes. The second season–which saw the departure of Stefano and Hall–has a couple of good episodes, and the masterpiece of Harlan Ellison’s “Demon with a Glass Hand,” but it was marred by being run by a network suit. But when the Stefano-era episodes hit, and even sometimes when they didn’t, they stuck with you, and influenced sci-fi and horror writers and filmmakers for decades to come.

There are a lot of things like The Twilight Zone; there’s nothing quite like The Outer Limits.

The Outer Limits season 1 is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber on March 27, featuring brilliant critical commentary by the likes of David J. Schow, Tim Lucas, Reba Wissner, Craig Beam, Gary Gerani, Michael Hyatt, and Steve Mitchell, and is compulsory for fans of anthology horror and science fiction storytelling.

Images: Villa di Stefano/Kino Lorber

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He is the writer of 200 reviews of weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe. Follow him on Twitter!

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There’s been a Stephen King reawakening.

Of course, he remains one of the world’s most popular and bestselling authors, and has had dozens of his stories turned into feature films or miniseries. (Seriously, check out our ranking of his 13 miniseries and 44 feature films!) But, with The Dark Tower, It, and Gerald’s Game all coming out in 2017, this year is surely a resurgence. However, 2017 doesnt have anything on 1983 trhough 1985, when eight feature films hit the silver screen straight from his stories, including 1984’s down-and-dirty cult classic, Children of the Corn.

Children of the Corn was a short story King had published in 1977, in Penthouse magazine of all places, before collecting it into his landmark 1978 volume Night Shift. This collection had some of King’s most beloved stories, many of which would become films themselves (The Lawnmower Man, Trucks, The Mangler, etc.). Of these, Children of the Corn was the clear standout to film producers at New World Pictures, who were looking for fresh acquisitions following the sale of the company by founder Roger Corman in ’83. It had to be made relatively cheaply, and it had to be scary.

What’s scarier than murderous zealot children worshiping a monster of some kind?

While King himself wrote a screenplay draft, it was deemed a bit too exposition-y, so the reigns were turned over to relative newcomer George Goldsmith and directed by first-timer Fritz Kiersch. They filmed on location in Iowa, and made extensive use of that state’s boundless supply of corn stalks.

In a very weird happenstance, the film’s stars were Linda Hamilton — soon to be a huge star following The Terminator‘s release in ’84 — and Peter Horton, who’d go on to be a regular on TV’s Thirtysomething. Why weird? Because Hamilton and Horton, playing a young dating couple in the movie, had been married between 1979 and 1980. Incidentally, at the time of filming, Hamilton was married to Re-Animator‘s Bruce Abbott and Horton was married to Michelle Pfeiffer. Anyway.

Horton plays Burt, a young doctor on a road trip from Chicago to Seattle to start an internship. He’s joined by his girlfriend Vicky (Hamilton). While traveling through Nebraska, they hit a teenager in the road, but they didn’t actually kill him…he’d been dead already, his throat cut. They put the boy in the trunk (gross) and try to find the nearest town. That town happens to be Gatlin, NE, which, for the past three years, has had a population of almost entirely children and young people. And it ain’t Candyland there, let me tell ya.

At the beginning of the movie, we see an idyllic Sunday afternoon turn into a blood bath, led by the sinister Isaac (John Franklin), where children rise up and slaughter all the adults. The only two not on board are Job (Robby Kiger) and Sarah (Anne Marie McEvoy), the latter of whom has the gift of the “second sight,” allowing her to draw cutesy little pictures of the grim and violent future events. Isaac is pretty damn scary, but his chief enforcer Malachai (Courtney Gaines) is much, much worse. Isaac speaks to a bloodthirsty deity called “He Who Walks Behind the Rows,” who demands adults be sacrificed. If the kids start getting too old, they get groomed for sacrifice as well. It’s an imperfect system, really. But, hey, True Believers and all that.

For a good portion of the movie’s runtime, Burt and Vicky wander around the empty town of Gatlin, ignoring what common sense would dictate: getting to the bigger town 20 minutes away. They find Sarah alone in a farmhouse and while Vicky stays with her, Burt goes off to explore some more. This leaves Vicky free for the treacherous Malachai to kidnap her, directly defying Isaac, and attempt to lure Burt to join her as one of the sacrifices. And if it were just crazy kids with scythes and knives and axes, it’d probably be pretty easy to get away, but there’s that monstrous god-thing and he wants him some human meat, no matter who it is.

As presented, Children of the Corn is equal parts effective scares and silly plot and actors. One of the things King’s draft had that was ultimately cut out is more of an explanation of the three years with Isaac in charge, and what exactly He Who Walks Behind the Rows is. King’s work often employed use of unknowable, Lovecraftian entities (hell, Pennywise is one) but he always provided some kind of explanation. Here, the beast rumbles from under the corn using an effect out of Tremors and Carpenter’s The Thing, or appears in the form of weird, jittery ’80s optical effects. Like a VHS blob more than anything specifically scary.

The addition in the screenplay that King objected to are the characters of Job and Sarah, who act as friendly comic relief, aloof audience surrogates, and exposition. Why Sarah is psychic is never really discussed, but they do spend an awful lot of time on the fact THAT she is. However, it almost doesn’t matter if Job and Sarah, or even Burt and Vicky, don’t quite work, because the movie lives and dies on the backs of Franklin’s Isaac and Gaines’ Malachai. They are so twisted and intensely good in their respective roles and so malevolently magnetic that they make up for a lot. Isaac’s rueful screams as he’s betrayed will haunt you almost as much as Malachai’s constant shouting of “Outlander!” to Burt. They ARE Children of the Corn.

The movie has had a very long life outside of its initial release, spawning one not-good theatrical sequel and five direct-to-video sequels, as well as a reboot in 2009 that had two sequels of its own. There’s definitely a cult following for this movie about a cult following, and that’s on full display in the extras of Arrow Video’s new Blu-ray release. In addition to a mostly-informative commentary by a critic and an uber-fan, there’s a making-of and interviews with Linda Hamilton and writer George Goldsmith. The latter proves the most enlightening as he says he used Iran Contra as a basis for the plot and characters. I’m not sure anyone really got that in 1984, but it does make for an interesting reading on the film.

While nowhere near the best adaptation of a King story, Children of the Corn works quite well for what it is, and remains the go-to reference for any kind of scary children. Who hasn’t wished their parents into the corn field once or twice?

Images: New World/Arrow Video

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He writes the weekly look at weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe. Follow him on Twitter!

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