CineSavant

Robert Aldrich promised no-holds barred rough-tough dramas, and his first two Associates & Aldrich productions certainly hit hard. This play adaptation shows its director's strength (no-flinching full shock impact) and weakness (theatrical overplaying) in full measure, but the unrestrained performances of Jack Palance and Eddie Albert are unforgettable. The main event can't have pleased the Pentagon: shooting one's own officer in combat. Plus, Lee Marvin and Richard Jaeckel get in early innings for their future work in Aldrichs's The Dirty Dozen. Attack Robert Aldrich rose from respected assistant director to near-bankability with his two pictures for Hecht-Lancaster, Apache and the remarkably violent Vera Cruz. He signed on with Victor Saville and UA for Kiss Me Deadly and soon had a multi-picture arrangement with Harry Cohn at Columbia. For his own deal at UA he formed a production...

Blu-ray Mister Roberts This popular hit from way back may be losing its core audience, as the generation it celebrates is quickly fading over the horizon. But we ’50s kids can certainly remember the smiles it put on the faces of our fathers, veterans that appreciated respectful comedies about their service. These valiant warriors simply haul food and...

Region B Blu-ray Dawn of the Dead (Region B) Two local TV station employees, Stephen (David Emge) and his girlfriend Francine (Gaylen Ross), attempt to escape the zombie apocalypse by absconding in a helicopter. Along for the ride are two AWOL SWAT team members, Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott H. Reiniger). The foursome land on the roof of a huge zombie infested shopping...

The Buster Keaton Collection Volume 4 The collector and distributor Raymond Rohauer ended up with the ownership of all of Buster Keaton’s films, which was a good thing in the long run because Buster himself might have let them crumble into dust. The collection is in the hands of Cohen Media now, which has been releasing them all in restored editions,...

Blu-ray Girlfriends A major discovery-re-appraisal is presently underway, of women directors, actresses, and just plain ‘women in film.’ I can’t say that my original crush on Girlfriends was for any gender-enlightened reason — I just thought that Melanie Mayron’s Susan Weinblatt was a wonderful person to spend a couple of hours with. In Vicki Polon’s screenplay feelings...

Blu-ray Danger: Diabolik Just when did the general run of fantasy fans become aware of Mario Bava and Dino De Laurentiis’ Danger Diabolik?  I think it wasn’t until the near-simultaneous breakout of the Internet and DVD, which made film culture news easy to disseminate and the films themselves more easily seen. In the decades previous almost the only...

Talk about the Lost Arts -- Animation of various kinds, even stop-motion, is now a major part of filmmaking entertainment. But back in the 1940s the wonder man for 'how'd they do that' Technicolor marvels was George Pal, a grateful displaced European who made marvelous 'trickfilm' animations using little wooden puppets with hundreds of interchangeable pieces. Arnold Leibovit follows up his first Puppetoon disc with a bounteous, bigger collection of animated gems in Blu-ray HD. They're fascinating to study in slow motion -- the volume of craft, patience and artisan labor that goes into these shows is staggering. The Puppetoon Movie Volume 2 Arnold Leibovit follows up his extraordinary, independently produced disc of The Puppetoon Movie with a second volume of restored George Pal short subjects. The Puppetoon Movie was actually a theatrical release compiled in 1986; the disc was released in 2013. The Puppetoon Movie Volume 2 features many more Puppetoons and earlier European stop-motion animated short...

Apache In 2001 I wrote, ‘Someday I’ll get to see a good copy of Robert Aldrich’s great movie Apache.’ Kino’s excellent new Blu-ray of a recent MGM remaster brings back the color and the correct screen shape, and even cleans up some wicked frame damage that’s been there for sixty years. The athletic Burt Lancaster will...

Blu-ray The Shop Around the Corner What exactly makes a film into a Holiday favorite, especially one that doesn’t include Scrooge, Santa Claus or reindeer in the storyline?   Does a Christmas movie need to be released near the holiday season?  Some were, like A Christmas Story — November 18, 1983. Others definitely were not. Miracle on 34th Street was released...

Blu-ray The Curse of Frankenstein Ah, what was old is new again — with a generous application of digital rejuvenation. My pals were too young to catch 1957 films when new but The Curse of Frankenstein took our heads off in 1964 when it was lucratively double billed with its follow-up Horror of Dracula. What an afternoon — one of my...

Blu-ray Ladybug Ladybug — no spoilers — ‘War is not Healthy for Children or Other Living Things,’ reads the famous silk-screen poster from the 1960s. That sentiment may be numbingly obvious, but it accurately reflects humanity’s shame: we just can’t seem to take it to heart. Fresh from their smash art-house hit David and Lisa, husband & wife...

Blu-ray Major Dundee (Australian Import) Major Dundee is back again, just a year after I reviewed a German-language Blu-ray release that’s done very well. With the earlier Twilight Time disc sold out it’s possible that another U.S. label will release it again. In the interim the show has clearly found favor with a new label that has made good news...

Blu-ray The Day of the Locust Forty-five years after its premiere The Day of the Locust still amazes us with its excellence and originality. Just two features beyond his similarly pessimistic Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesigner went for broke with this expensive, uncompromised slice of ‘director’s cinema.’ He’d never again be set loose on a project this daring, although his 1981 Honky...

Dino De Laurentiis took a lot of flack for his underwhelming remake of the incomparable 1933 horror classic, which he promoted into a monster-sized hit. Nothing could eclipse the original but the good casting still appeals. An honest ad campaign would have leaned on two points: SEE Jeff Bridges and Charles Grodin carry an insultingly ugly production like real stars! SEE 'newcomer' Jessica Lange play a sexualized ditz so well that she retains her dignity! ...and most importantly, SEE the biggest special effects fraud ever perpetrated on movie screens! Umbrella Entertainment from Australia puts this one back in print, on Blu-ray. King Kong (1976) So far there have been two major remakes of the beyond-stupendous 1933 original King Kong, not to mention scores of imitations, homages, and other random sacrilegious oversized monkey monsters. When the 1976 King Kong arrived I was working for a company aligned with Dino De Laurentiis’s distributor, Paramount, so we were all invited to a...

Now for a real treat for musical fans, a core MGM dazzler with top stars, fully restored and looking incredibly good. Vincente Minnelli's snappy, funny 1948 show isn't ranked among producer Arthur Freed's best but it ought to be. Silly farce gets a high-toned, technically amazing workout as Judy Garland's demure señorita secretly lusts after the ruthless corsair of the title, Mack the Black! Gene Kelly's slippery carny womanizer impersonates her piratical fantasy sex object, and it all ends in clowning and killer musical numbers. Cole Porter's smart songs attest to the great orchestrators and arrangers in MGM's world-class music department; the new full digital restoration makes the movie look and sound better than I've certainly ever seen it. The Pirate I’m pretty much in denial about The Pirate being a non-hit in 1948. It was an instant hit with me, despite the fact that my first long-ago viewing was on a black and white TV. This new release really rocked me back — whether you’ve seen this one on TV, in 16mm or even on...

Blu-ray Silent Running I’m surprised that I’ve never reviewed this show, as I worked with many of the people that made it. Before all that happened, in my sophomore year at UCLA I somehow got invited to a Universal press screening of Silent Running. I remember being critical of it for possibly unfair reasons. It’s certainly original and...

Blu-ray The Gunfighter Here’s yet another opportunity to name-check Roger Corman while writing about someone else’s movie: one of Roger’s first Hollywood jobs was as a script reader. He called out this screenplay to his superior, who hogged all the credit when it was put on the production schedule. Seeing how things worked inside the studio system, Corman...

No, it's not the story of the 18th President of the United States. Kirk Douglas must have been a big hit in Rome, starring in one of the first and best of the Italo epic 'classics' years before musclemen cornered the market. Homer's tale of the husband who took ten years to come back from Troy is given real star power, a splendid production and best of all, an intelligent script. This disc looks a lot better than the ragged earlier DVD, plus it offers a superior Italian language soundtrack. And don't forget Gary Teetzel's recommendation: as an adaptation of The Odyssey, it's right up there with O Brother Where Art Thou! Ulysses (1954) The Italo peplum genre hasn’t been shown the respect it deserves. Most big Italo westerns and horror movies have by now been released multiple times on home video, but only a few samples of the enormous field of sword ‘n’ sandal movies have arrived in any form. When they do, they’re likely to show up...

Blu-ray The Mortal Storm A lot has been written about Hollywood’s actions prior to our entry into WW2, when isolationist policies discouraged movie fare calling for the U.S. to get involved in another European war. When MGM finally got on the anti-Reich bandwagon, it at least did a class job of it. The screenplay for The Mortal Storm is...

Blu-ray Mad Max (1979) Talk about a franchise with legs, I mean, wheels!  Tough guy highway patrolman Max Rockatansky has seen duty in George Miller’s original extreme-action thriller, in the extravagant, exquisitely filmed motor mayhem of the follow-up Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and a second direct sequel that wasn’t quite as impactful (but that did give us...

976-Evil Guest reviewer Lee Broughton returns with an assessment of Robert Englund’s offbeat video rental store favourite 976-EVIL. Satanic panic ensues when two teenage cousins are foolish enough to start using an automated telephone “horrorscope” service. Dialling 666 just might be granting the pair a direct line to the Devil himself and there’s bound to be...

Blu-ray Dragnet (1954) Although irrelevant to the film school generation, actor-director-producer Jack Webb was a big man in Hollywood for thirty years. The first Dragnet TV show (1951-1959) is some of the earliest TV I can remember, and like everybody else in grade school I learned to recognize a great Joe Friday imitation on sight. The return of...

Region B Blu-ray-capable noir fans have a formidable six-pack of noir crime pictures on tap: a WW2 espionage thriller, two caper pix and the show that launched the notion of a hit man who's both charismatic and psychopathic. The list of leading actors is stellar as well: Glenn Ford, Kim Novak, Eli Wallach, Brian Keith, James Whitmore and Nina Foch. Do you like extras? Like to read about the movies you see? No video extra has been left behind, and PI's big yellow box contains a 120-page book. Plus -- several newly remastered Three Stooges shorts. Don't forget, Noir and Stooges go together like sanity and American politics! Columbia Noir #1 Having long ago exhausted Columbia’s Harryhausen pictures and drawing to a close on the studio’s Hammer Films co-productions, Powerhouse Indicator turns its attention to new filmic territory with Columbia Noir #1, a boxed set of six thrillers of the ’40s and ’50s. Some of these have been on Blu-ray before, but with few extras and...

Finally, a horror shocker that needs to make no excuses! Harry Kümel's interpretation of the Elizabeth Báthory legend excels in all departments and succeeds in each of its aims. Erotic Eurohorror meets Sternbergian visual decadence, making a vivid (and bloody) statement about classic screen exoticism. Given the full glamour treatment, silky Delphine Seyrig is striking as the deceptively congenial vampire queen. It's a rare throwback to the beginnings of erotic Eurohorror -- sex and death, together again! Blue Underground takes the leap to 4K Ultra HD and stacks the extras with key interview content, and a soundtrack CD. Daughters of Darkness This reviewer is a great fan of the early Eurohorror efforts that around 1960 bathed screens with morbid visions more openly erotic than the Hammer hits that ignited the horror boom. More often than not Mario Bava and others focused on a female star with a difficult-to-describe exotic appeal – Barbara Steele, Scilla Gabel, Daliah...

Region B Blu-ray + PAL DVD Dementia I screened John Parker’s Dementia at UCLA in 1972, at a time when the film seemed so obscure, I saved my Audio Brandon 16mm catalog just to be able to prove that it even existed. (I include that rental catalog entry near the bottom of the page. ↓ This most sacred of cult attractions became...

Blu-ray Shock Treatment What kind of thriller is this?  It’s the kind that can’t be discussed without a few spoilers. So be forewarned. This 1973 French import helps explain my lack of enthusiasm for a big, worthy hit from three years ago, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. As William Bayer said, the movies that take off are the ones...