Paramount’s contribution to Halloween ’23 — and its signal of support for hard video media — comes in the form of this horror gift box with five very different flavors of Scary: Rosemary’s Baby,  Pet Sematary,  Crawl,  Smile  and a  ‘mystery title’ we’ve been asked not to reveal. All are in 4K with Digital codes; three include Blu-ray copies of the features. The selection takes in a bona fide classic, a Stephen King adaptation, a ‘nature run amuck’ survival epic, a darker-than-dark conceptual shocker, and a muphlepylammerpough, angripplannety … ptooey … why didn’t the last part of that sentence get through? Yep, they’re thinking gift, what with the fancy box presentation and extra goodies.

Paramount Scares Collection Volume 1 4K
4K Ultra-HD + Digital + Blu-ray (only partly)
Rosemary’s Baby,  Pet Sematary,  Crawl,
Smile, +  ‘mystery feature’
Paramount Movies
1968-200? / Color / Street Date October 24, 2023 / Available from Amazon / 111.19
Directed by Roman Polanski  /  Mary Lambert  /  Alexandre Aja  /  Parker Finn  /  ?

An oversized, dark black & red box is on the horizon — it feels like the boom days of DVD when a disc set would come in something large and attractive, suitable for placement on a coffee table.

We don’t often think of Paramount as the Home of Horror, but their library has a sizable collection of scare shows, especially newish titles. The studio’s general Paramount Scares page is mostly geared to streaming customers, but also directs viewers to Amazon entries for disc sales.

Someone at ‘the mountain’ — Paramount is about three blocks from CineSavant Central here in the Larchmont neighborhood — is courting the hard media crowd that enjoys high-end titles in the popular 4K Ultra HD format. The five new-to-4K shockers in the decorative box come with an insert booklet published in the format of the magazine Fangoria, indicating an appeal to fans of contemporary horror.

Paramount Scares Collection Volume 1 has one hotly-desired classic, a Stephen King adaptation, two contemporary horror movies, and one title we’ve been asked not to name until street date. Its identity might leak, but not from CineSavant. We’re not even telling Gary Teetzel, and Gary Teetzel knows everything.

We’re going to give the shows a quick once-over. The individually packaged discs are not consistent in format. Each 4K Ultra-HD title comes with a corresponding Digital Code. Three of the five titles also include a Blu-ray copy.

Rosemary’s Baby
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code
1968 / 136 minutes.
Starring: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Victoria Vetri, Patsy Kelly, Elisha Cook, Emmaline Henry, Charles Grodin, Hanna Landy, Phil Leeds, D’Urville Martin, William Castle, Tony Curtis, Robert Osterloh, Almira Sessions, Tom Signorelli, Sharon Tate, Max Wagner.
Cinematography: William A. Fraker
Original Music: Christopher Komeda (Krzysztof Komeda)
Written for the screen by Roman Polanski from the novel by Ira Levin
Produced by William Castle
Directed by Roman Polanski

We sometimes make the mistake of assuming that a vague ‘everyone’ has seen all the mainstream masterpieces we hold dear . . . but a new generation of movie fans arrives every seven years, and 55 summers have passed since this very adult terror show arrived to scare one and all. Highly anticipated in 1968, the adaptation of Ira Levin’s best-seller held its own in a year festooned with screen landmarks — 2001: A Space Odyssey,  Planet of the Apes.

What you need to know, is that if Rosemary’s Baby hasn’t already been spoiled for you, take the time to see it when you can give it your full attention. It’s one of the best-directed films ever, the horror equivalent of Chinatown. After seeing Roman Polanski’s films up through Macbeth, we at film school were convinced that he was the best storytelling film director of our time.

There’s a lot to talk about with Rosemary’s Baby, and our full take can be glommed in a Blu-ray review for an older (2012) Criterion Disc. Everything about the picture is remarkable, superior. It’s the Paramount picture that got Polanski’s short-lived Hollywood career on the rails, after his misunderstood, playful MGM genre effort Dance of the Vampires. This show abandons fun & games, substituting creepy occult chills that go right for the audience’s throat. It’s an unusually adult picture, even though it has little in it that is overtly censorable.

The 4K disc for Rosemary has a retrospective extra done around 2018, although its interviews are surely from before — Polanski doesn’t look very old. The ’50th Anniversary’ trailer for streaming throws images at us, but cannot hold a candle to the simple, ominous 1968 trailer. The combination of the silhouette baby carriage and the tagline “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby’ is pure genius, the epitome of the conceptual sell.

Pet Sematary
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code
1989 / 102 minutes.
Starring: Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist, Michael Lombard, Miko Hughes, Blaze Berdahl, Susan Blommaert, Mara Clark, Kavi Raz, Mary Louise Wilson.
Cinematography: Peter Stein
Original Music: Elliot Goldenthal
Screenplay by Stephen King from his novel
Produced by Richard P. Rubenstein
Directed by Mary Lambert

There are “A+” Stephen King movie adaptations and the also-rans; too many King screen translations blur his distinctive voice. The celebrated author went in for his own weak imitations of EC horror comics, back in 1982’s Creepshow with George Romero. Along with stories about cars and trucks possessed by the Devil (more or less), King spun his wheels with this tale about a haunted pet boneyard that figures in the obliteration of an entire family, person by person. It sounds like a reaction to Steven Spielberg’s cheerful ‘sacred family unit’ visions. We’re told that King wrote his novel Pet Sematary during a very dark patch. He is said to have delayed its publication, perhaps wondering that it might be just too unpleasant.

Adapted by King himself, Mary Lambert’s movie Pet Sematary is truly upsetting and dispiriting. No sooner has a happy family entered the picture, than we realize that the prime subject matter is going to be mortal jeopardy to cute little children. The new house of Louis and Rachel Creed (Dale Midkiff & Denise Crosby) is on a rural road where semi-trucks speed by every couple of minutes, night and day. Pets and kids soon fall victim to poor parental oversight. Folksy neighbor Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne, the best thing in the movie) alerts the Creeds to a pet graveyard behind their property that might be haunted. There’s also a second cemetery nearby, a defiled Native American burial space. As this is a King story, it has become a supernatural portal to every manner of ghoulish horror.

The trucks continue killing, a ironic thing indeed considering that author King was himself hit and almost killed years later walking on a Maine roadway near his house. After the Creeds’ housecat ‘Church’ apparently returns from the dead, stories of other resurrected graveyard ‘oopises’ mount up, some from the past and some freshly disinterred. The jet-black third act sees the very young Gage Creed (Miko Hughes) returning as a zombie, and carving up his loved ones with a scalpel.

The plot aligns with the ‘campfire’ horror stories described by King in his nonfiction essay book Danse Macabre — stories whose only purpose is to be blood-curdlingly appalling. The good acting and direction draw us in, and the heartless events exploit our willingness to identify with the characters. The well-made show generates good nightmare imagery — but the relentless negativity also seems pointless.

Pet Sematary has a good commentary by its director Mary Lambert and a looking-back featurette, plus some image galleries. It comes with quite a few extra audio tracks and subtitle choices, including Czech, Magyar & Russian.

Crawl
4K Ultra-HD + Digital Code  No Blu-ray
2019 / 87 minutes.
Starring: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark, Ross Anderson, Jose Palma, George Somner, Anson Boon, Ami Metcalf, Tina Pribicevic, Srna Vasiljevic, Cso-Cso, Colin McFarlane, Annamaria Serda, Savannah Steyn.
Cinematography: Maxim Alexandre
Original Music: Max Aruj, Steffen Thum
Written by Michael Rasmussen, Shawn Rasmussen
Produced by Alexandre Aja, Sam Raimi, Craig J. Flores
Directed by Alexandre Aja

The third and forth shows in the set are late-model shockers from the last four years or so. I was wary of their effective theatrical ad campaigns, as I’ve bailed from many sadistic gore-fests with no reason to be, and have stopped seeking them out. There needs to be something on the menu besides galvanic-reaction trauma reflex filmmaking — sadism thrills never appealed, even when the blood ‘n’ guts were fake and played for laughs. Both of these pictures have merit; they’re also very different from one other. Although well-acted, neither features name performers — the story hook, the title and killer poster art are deployed to snag the loyal horror devotee, with the hope that word of mouth will bring in the crowds.

The action-oriented, CGI-driven Crawl appears to have been completely filmed in Serbia, despite being set in Florida during the kind of hurricane incident that now seems as regular as the tides. Everything ‘Floridian’ that we see was likely reproduced in Belgrade, with great skill; the lead actors are from England and Canada. Perhaps residents of Tampa or Tallahassee can point out errors, but not me — this not like the bizarre American-set The Last Man on Earth, where everything we see is obviously Italian. A recent point of comparison is the excellent The Impossible from 2012. It is set in Thailand and performed in English, yet was entirely made by Spaniards in Spain.

The horror in this film is of the non-supernatural Jaws variety. Circumstances force a father and daughter to fight off big alligators in a confined space; much mayhem, mutilation and familial bonding ensues. The show is at least 50% a disaster picture.

A massive hurricane pounds Florida. Competitive swimmer Hayley (Kaya Scodelario) can’t raise her father Dave (Barry Pepper) on her cell so defies evacuation orders to rush homeward. She finds him in the crawlspace below their ‘old house,’ and already badly wounded . . . because a pair of king-sized ‘gators have found their way in and chomped on him. The entire film becomes a protracted survival ordeal. Some pipe barriers have given Dave a respite from immediate death, but fast-rising water gives the advantage to the hungry hungry hippos reptiles. Potential help arrives twice, first with some opportunistic ATM thieves and then in the form of official rescuers. But both are overtaken by an onslaught of ravenous man-killers. Haley and Dave must improvise everything to survive — despite their best efforts, both get seriously chewed-up.

Crawl creeps into the ‘honest thrills’ category of suspense chiller, even if some of the gore seems over the top … can somebody really keep fighting monsters after having most of an arm ripped off?  That issue doesn’t bother us much, because most of the fight remains very believable. Rational cause / effect laws of physics have not been revoked. On the other hand, we do knit our brow when Haley, after sneaking very carefully into a gator ‘danger zone’ to retrieve her phone, pauses to look at messages rather than wade carefully back to safety.

The CGI is excellent, with no ‘impossible’ camera angles and no impossible alligator choreography. We see in the extras that gator mockups were used, but director Alexandre Aja tells us that most of what we see is CGI. The pixel-pushing computer magic must also have been used for the 15 minutes of excellent hurricane havoc we see. It all is very nicely put together.

It’s not a complaint, but the story’s ‘human interest’ angle could have come from a Hallmark Christmas Special — the parent-child relationship that can perform miracles. It feels mechanical here, if not as insultingly artificial as in shows like Contact. Dad was Haley’s childhood coach, see. He taught her to be feisty and never give up and hold her ground. When the going gets tough, Haley summons reserves of can-do-it from positive childhood memories.

Being an obstinate fighter is given way too much value. It grates when some radio banter proudly mentions that Florida is a ‘stand your ground’ State. Hayley ‘heroically’ runs the evacuation blockade, ignoring the deputies blocking the road. But who applauds the deputy who goes to find her, and for his valor becomes gator chow?  It’s not strictly Haley’s fault, but we almost want to root for the alligators.

The two newer features in Paramount’s package come with a generous choice of soundtracks and subtitles — this one has five language tracks and the next film has six, plus extra subs for five more.

The video extras for Crawl include deleted scenes, three production featurettes and an unproduced prologue in which an unrelated, unlucky family is wiped out by marauding alligators. It’s an ‘animatic’ with very limited animation artwork, like we used to create to pitch TV spots back in the 1980s.

Smile
4K Ultra-HD + Digital Code  No Blu-ray
2022 / 115 minutes.
Starring: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan, Gillian Zinser, Judy Reyes, Jack Sochet.
Cinematography: Charlie Sarroff
Original Music: Cristbol Tapia de Veer
Produced by Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Robert Salerno
Written and Directed by Parker Finn

Pet Sematary is wall-to-wall family trauma and Crawl is survivalist thrills “Plus Gore!”  2022’s Smile is unrelentingly dark and nihilistic — with even more Gore. It’s an elaboration on an 11-minute short film by Parker Finn, that became Finn’s ticket to feature filmmaking.

The days of cheap and exploitative horror drek are still here, but the genre is so popular that quite a lot of good work is made as well. Smile is ultimately just as dispiriting as Pet Sematary, but good key performances make us not want to look away — there’s at least someone to sympathize with as Fate makes her circle the drain. Terrible things happen to people in this world (and entire populations, tell us about it). But we will still clear away the emotional space to get involved with the problems of your average horror heroine, caught between demons or being pulled into any number of horrible fates.

In structure Smile is a gimmick horror related to ‘diabolical trap’ tales like that seen in M.R. James’ Casting the Runes: a necromancer can summon demons from hell to kill people, but finds his deviltry difficult to control. J-Horror landmarks like Ringu invent awful death games that work like a lottery, passing on a curse from one victim to the next. An excellent example of the ‘repeating curse’ is David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 It Follows. Why?  Because its situations and imagery remind us of our own nightmares.

The blood in this one is especially real-looking, and unnerving.

The grim curse in Smile concerns victims that recognize a horrid knowing Smile in people about to cut their own throats. The curse incurs a psychological warpage that includes horrid hallucinations, delivered with such a shock that we can’t tell what’s ‘real’ and what’s not. Psychologist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick) rapidly loses control of reality as the curse takes over. Rose doesn’t realize that she’ll soon be in the same frantic fix as her first patient Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasy), who can only tearfully relate a horror story that nobody sane could believe, about an irrational possession curse. Laura’s trauma transforms into bottomless malice when she suddenly sports a taunting, evil smile. Rose soon realizes that she’s seeing hallucinations, but it doesn’t matter. She uncovers a string of similar horrid deaths with the same parameters, and intuits a real curse that’s an unbreakable chain of Fate.

Writer Finn wisely frames Rose’s dilemma in a series of awful social situations. Both her boyfriend and a consulting psychologist scoff at the problem, withdrawing support and making things worse. The horror has a psychological root related to Rose’s relationship with her mother, which at least lends Smile a human dimension. Is the message that ‘we suffer because we care?’  One doesn’t look for happy endings in modern ‘All Awful, All The Time’ horror pictures.

The suicides are hideous but director Finn’s use of the smile motif is even more unnerving — the horrid grinning faces generate a powerful frisson.  Seasoned students of horror may ask where they’ve seen ‘creepy smile’ imagery before . . . as a possible prime source we nominate the Carl Dreyer classic Vampyr, from way back at the dawn of sound. Actress Sybille Schmitz plays the victim of a vampire, who suddenly awakens into a realization of her own new-found bloodlust, marked by a wicked smile that spreads across her face like a disease. Vampyr is sometimes difficult to understand, but Schmitz’s hungry grin grabs us by the throat. The operative message in Smile is, ‘Evil Has Entered the Room.’

The smile business is director Finn’s biggest achievement, even though his makeup effects people have dressed the picture up in one gruesome, over-the-top horror hallucination after another. Think ‘grotesque mutilation’: Rose hallucinates people ripping their own faces off, etc.  After a few movies like the Saw franchise, the market has decided that normal bad endings won’t do. Horror movies need to end in total awful, awful ugliness.

Smile carries a director commentary. Parker Finn is intelligent and creative, and for his own peace of mind we urge him to invent some original, sweet G-rated picture that opens our eyes to cinema’s wholesome potential. Only partly kidding, there. In addition to a selection of deleted scenes, a making-of video piece and one on the music score, Paramount has generously added Finn’s short subject Laura Hasn’t Slept, his golden ticket to feature work. He’s guided some very involving performances here and we wish him the best.

‘Mystery Feature’
4K Ultra-HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

I had decided to ignore Paramount’s wishes and reveal the identity of their fifth ‘mystery title’ in their Scares box, so here goes: the secret movie is utherflabty troushynex palabble. This is indeed troublesome — every time I type mwithsoutkey wschplafooeydimblah scrimplelishtic, my keyboard refuses to cooperate. The fifth disc is a new-to-4K high-end release and unlike any of the other entries in the box.

It’s a sure bet that them thar beans will already have been spilt long before you read this. Rest assured that CineSavant, obedient little scrivener that he is, will be annoyingly cooperative with Paramount’s wishes.

Paramount Movies’ 4K Ultra-HD of Paramount Scares Collection Volume 1 4K is nicely organized. It takes a couple of minutes to open everything and lay out the box contents, a positive for a gift box. The transfers of the five films are up to Paramount’s high standards. Each Keep Case lists Dolby Vision and other logos for audio configurations.

I have associates that make a living helping to generate the video and audio files for today’s movies on video — in multiple formats and delivery systems, with myriad audio tracks. Each of these discs must need 50 hours of concentrated QC attention. Problems in final disc products have become extremely rare. Why can’t baby food and car seats be so reliable?

The box contents seen just above lay out what one gets, showing the red & black presentation box and the matching sleeve art for each film. The actual keep case covers aren’t shown; they stick closely to the films’ standard theatrical poster artwork. The issue of Fangoria serves as an illustrated set of program notes and hype for the films. A sixth disc box, added for balance, carries some stickers (‘All of Them Witches’) and the attractive ‘Paramount Scares’ button plugged in the ad sheet.  →

Forgive the grousing, but here’s one last thought about Paramount’s 4K discs — they take all too much attention to get running. One must either wait for 12 multi-language disclaimer cards to slowly play out, or click through them with one’s chapter button. Then we choose a language from a menu before getting to a main menu screen. We almost expect a prompt asking us to declare “I’m not a Robot” and click on squares with traffic lights. Is somebody trying to make hard media home video more troublesome than the ‘Three Clicks’ norm for seeing something on a Streaming site?

Paramount Scares Collection Volume 1
4K Ultra-HD rates:
Movies: Rosemary Excellent; Pet Good; Crawl, Smile Very Good; Mystery Very Good +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Excellent.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Five keep cases in card sleeves, each with one 4K Ultra HD Disc and a digital code; Blu-ray discs for three of the titles. Discs presented in showcase box with ‘Fangoria’ insert pamphlet plus stickers and decorative pin.
Reviewed: October 16, 2023
(7016scare)

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Text © Copyright 2023 Glenn Erickson

Here’s Oren Peli on Rosemary’s Baby: