In what appears to be the early 1960s, a coed teenaged assassin is sent on a mission to destroy some monsters lurking on an American military base in Japan. Those new to the world of anime could do a lot worse than Blood: The Last Vampire, a forty-eight-minute blast of atmospheric, graphic fantasy from the creators of Ghost in the Shell that combines animation with computer generated imagery (CGI) to startling effect. X is a post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure in which a young warrior returns to Tokyo to do battle with two conflicting otherworldly factions, the Dragons of Earth and the Dragons of Heaven. Both discs are released by Manga Entertainment, come laden with behind-the-scenes extras and provide a diverting change-of-pace from traditional genre fare.

Overachieving yuppie milquetoast Henry Creedlow (Jason Flemyng) is transformed by the pressures of crazy boss Miles (Peter Stormare) into a faceless killer. A roundup of fright-inducing films wouldn’t be the same without a George A. Romero title, and it would be exciting indeed to report that Bruiser, his first film since 1993’s The Dark Half, is a triumphant return to form for the creator of the enduring “Living Dead” trilogy. And for the first forty minutes or so it appears to be just that, as Romero sets up a provocative premise with flashes of his old malicious wit (there’s a sequence with a dead maid, a small dog and a table saw that’s as suspenseful as anything he’s ever done). Yet the inevitable tumble comes all too soon, as Romero is unable to sustain the film’s central conceit and falls back on the lame biker humor that’s plagued even his best films (think the last third of Dawn of the Dead). In fact, the Romero film Bruiser most closely resembles is Martin, as a weak but essentially good-hearted man has trouble making himself understood to strangers and loved ones alike, necessitating radical and violent action. Bruiser was shot in Toronto nearly two years ago and has had only sporadic theatrical release prior to this bare-bones Vidmark/Trimark DVD release. According to some sources Romero’s currently in pre-production on Stephen King’s “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” and new fans are urged to seek out Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and the vastly underrated Day of the Dead to see what a profound influence Romero’s had on the genre.

In the early 1960s unintentionally simultaneous American and Soviet nuclear testing throws the Earth off its axis; in London, hard-charging reporter Pete Stenning (Edward Judd) collaborates with wisecracking science editor Bill Maguire (a very young Leo McKern) and new squeeze Jeannie (Janet Munro, fresh from Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People) to get the word out before the world literally burns up. Anchor Bay’s DVD presentation of the previously hard-to-see cult item The Day the Earth Caught Fire is superb, with a pristine widescreen presentation that restores the bookended red-tinted sequences to the black and white print (the film was photographed by Harry Waxman, who went on to shoot The Wicker Man [see below]). A two-page booklet essay by somebody named Mark Wickum gives lots of interesting background material. For one filmmaker’s idea of what a post-apocalyptic world might have looked like, hunt down Luc Besson’s debut feature Le Dernier Combat (a.k.a. The Last Battle, France, 1985, August 21), an audacious wide-screen black-and-white suspense fantasy co-starring a young Jean Reno.

Sexually frustrated New York housewife Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is murdered after an illicit encounter. Her inquisitive son Peter (Keith Miller) hooks up with spunky witness Liz (Nancy Allen) to solve the crime, with little help from Detective Marino (a hirsute Dennis Franz) or Kate’s detached therapist Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine). Dressed to Kill, Brian De Palma’s most over-the-top pastiche of elements from various Alfred Hitchcock movies, is also among his very best films, a langorous, sexy and violent inquiry into the nature of dual personalities highlighted by some terrific camerawork by the recently-deceased Ralf D. Bode (Coal Miner’s Daughter) and a typically lush score by the great Pino Donaggio (Don’t Look Now). While a great many of De Palma’s films have been released on DVD lately (including his most popular, Carrie, and the earlier Sisters, the latter of which was reviewed last year in this space), MGM’s pressing of Dressed to Kill is perhaps the most satisfying total package: in addition to the numerous production featurettes and interview segments, the disc includes both the released and unrated versions, as well as a very illuminating comparison of the various cuts and trims made during the film’s adventurous early days (presented split-screen, of course, in keeping with De Palma’s penchant for that particular cinematic trick). The four-page brochure includes production trivia that’s interesting but not essential.

Italian horror director Lucio Fulci (1927-1996) was a medical student and an art critic before turning to filmmaking in the late 1950s, and that figures: amongst the goriest and subversively funniest films in the horror genre, his films are both precisely crafted to commercial specifications and resolutely eccentric in approach, giving to his large body of work a sturdy substance that ensures his legacy. After years of directing comedies, musicals, westerns and ever-increasingly controversial thrillers, he vaulted on to the international stage with 1979’s Zombi 2, so-called in an attempt to cash in on the European success of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which was called Zombi in Italy (Fulci’s other big hit was The Beyond, released in 1981). Of the seven films he made in the subsequent three years (!!!), three have been remastered by Anchor Bay with few extras but a refreshing attention to widescreen detail. Although frowned upon by the faithful for its lack of gore, The Black Cat is an atmospheric supernatural thriller set in a small English village. The House by the Cemetery is a full-on gorefest, with touches of The Shining and Poltergeist in its tale of some nasties that live in the basement of a Boston house. Manhattan Baby is the weakest of the trio, finding a young girl unwittingly bringing an Egyptian curse back to New York City. By the mid-1980s Fulci was preoccupied with personal and health challenges; his 1996 death has always been considered suspicious, as the director went to bed one night without taking the insulin he’d been dependent on for years. Anchor Bay is also offering two titles by Fulci’s one-time rival Dario Argento, the classic Suspiria and the later Opera.

After a decade as a free man, brilliant and suave psychotic Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) is flushed from his new life in Florence back into the public eye by the unwanted attentions of a shabby, greedy Italian cop (Giancarlo Giannini), the vengeful urges of a rich, now-disfigured victim (Gary Oldman) and his own yearning for FBI agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore). Director Ridley Scott’s operatic visualization of author Thomas Harris’ “sequel” to “The Silence of the Lambs” actually enriches the grand guignol absurdities of the novel (which, for the record, is the third appearance of Lecter, the first having come in Michael Mann’s terrific 1986 thriller Manhunte — which is itself in the process of being remade to capitalize on Hopkins’ newfound enthusiasm for the greatly expanded character). MGM’s state-of-the-art two-disc set features the film itself on disc one and a whole slew of extras on disc two. These embellishments include Scott’s typically detailed commentary; a seventy-six-minute soup-to-nuts production featurette (during which Hopkins asserts “a good director will tell you faster or slower. That’s a good director”); an alternate ending; a gallery of promotional spots and unused poster concepts; and, most valuable to the aspiring young filmmaker, a five-angle breakdown of the film’s opening shootout in a fish market that can be endlessly re-edited via the DVD player remote.

This rarely seen and one-of-a-kind Swedish silent film is nothing less than a first-person inquiry into the origins and history of witchcraft and related beliefs, presented by Danish writer-director Benjamin Christensen as a series of slideshow-type lectures punctuated by spooky dramatic recreations. If the name Häxan sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because the guys who made the equally legendary The Blair Witch Project named their production company after it. Criterion’s long-in-the-works DVD pressing includes a Dolby Digital 5.0 music track arranged by film music expert Gillian Anderson (whose notes on the restoration accompanies author Chris Fujiwara’s essay in the eight-page fold-out booklet); commentary from Scandinavian silent film authority Casper Tybjerg; writer-director Benjamin Christensen’s introduction to the 1941 rerelease; a brief collection of outtakes; a look at the film’s sources via vintage photographs; and the 1967 British re-edit of the film—called Witchcraft Through the Ages—which sports narration by William S. Burroughs and a jazz score featuring violinist Jean-Luc Ponty.

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The Horror of Hammer USA, 2001, Released 7.24.01 review by Eddie Cockrell

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Here’s a great idea: take a heaping handful of coming attraction trailers from the legendary Hammer Studios horror factory in Britain and stuff them on to a single DVD. That’s exactly what one David Kalat has done; from his “All Day Entertainment” shingle in Alexandria, Virginia, the fan has commissioned genre gurus Ted Newsom, Gary H. Smith and Stuart Galbraith IV to provide an alternate feature-length commentary on some fifty-three original theatrical trailers from Newsom’s own collection. While the physical quality of these coming attractions varies wildly, the very existence of this disc provides a great service to the fan. Beginning around 1956, the low-budget Hammer house took mainstays of 1940s American horror films—Frankenstein, the Mummy, Dracula, the Werewolf—and re-envisioned them for a new generation of horror film enthusiasts, spending no more than a half million dollars and twenty-eight days each to create gore-filled updates of classic genre stories. Such name performers as Peter Cushing, Raquel Welch, Christopher Lee (see The Wicker Man, below) and Ursula Andress all got their start at Hammer, and with titles like Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and Curse of the Werewolf, you know you can’t go wrong. By the early 1970s the studio was in decline, but those fifteen years provided a wealth of atmospheric, immediately indentifiable films that remain fresh and entertaining to this day. Also worth seeking out from All Day Entertainment is “Pulp Cinema,” a collection of forty-five vintage trailers of film noir titles (sans commentary track) with the wholly appropriate subtitle “Seduction! Betrayal! Murder!”

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The Ninth Gate France/Spain, 1999, Released 8.21.01 review by Eddie Cockrell

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Amoral rare book dealer Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is hired by mysterious moneybags Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to track down the remaining copies of a book that purports to have the power to summon the devil himself. The Ninth Gate, the latest thriller by journeyman genius Roman Polanski, is elegant and absorbing, even though it’s fairly obvious about an hour in that the director is more interested in surface and atmosphere than explicit genre thrills. Artisan’s fine DVD preserves the widescreen format of Darius Khondji’s diamond-hard cinematography (he also shot David Fincher’s Se7en) and Dean Tavoularis’ detailed production design. The best amongst a clutch of extras is an informative commentary track from Polanski himself, during which he ruminates on a career of English language thrillers shot outside the United States. Maybe next year in this space there’ll finally be a review of Polanski’s long-unavailable comic masterpiece, 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (amusingly subtitled, Pardon Me, Your Teeth are in My Neck).

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Theater of Blood UK, 1973, Released 8.28.01 review by Eddie Cockrell

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Incredibly hammy London actor Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) systematically kills the town’s prominent theater critics via gory scenarios inspired by Shakespeare’s plays in Theater of Blood, one of Price’s very best late-career larks. The supporting cast is a straight-faced “Who’s Who” of 1970s British film, and includes Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Harry Andrews, Coral Browne, Robert Coote, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Robert Morley and Dennis Price (the best bits are Lowe having his head sawed off while he sleeps and Morley being fed his poodles). One of only three movies written by Anthony Greville-Bell, the film is very funny and strewn with well-chosen Shakespeare quotes and scenarios. MGM’s bare-bones DVD (released under its “Midnite Movies” banner) restores the film to its proper aspect ratio via an OK print; there’s no brochure or even documented chapter stops, but that shouldn’t deter fans from giving this one a look. It’s a scream. 

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The Vanishing Spoorloos/L’Homme qui voulait savoir Netherlands/France, 1998, Released 9.18.01 review by Eddie Cockrell

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While on a cycling holiday in France, the vivacious but tightly-wrapped Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) disappears from a roadside service station, sending her boyfriend Rex (Gene Bervoerts) on a three-year odyssey of mystery and frustration. The twist of George Sluizer’s extraordinary thriller is that parallel to this action the audience is also privy to the meticulous preparations of everyman psychopath Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) as he sets up and carries out the abduction of Saskia. Thus robbed of its central mystery, The Vanishing becomes something far more disturbing in its exploration of two men haunted by fatally intertwined demons. Although there are no commentary tracks or extras of note beyond a fine and detailed brochure essay from novelist Kim Newman, Criterion’s spotless DVD pressing is a keeper; with typical attention to detail they’ve created a digital transfer from nearly original material that belongs in the collection of every genre enthusiast. To avoid at all costs: Sluizer’s own 1993 Hollywood remake, in which Kiefer Sutherland’s Americanized Rex (named Jeff, of all things) becomes a pro-active avenging angel. The original French title is The Man Who Wanted to Know, not to be confused with the upcoming Coen Brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There, and the film is based on Tim Krabbé’s novel, The Golden Egg.

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Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde USA, 1920, Released 10.9.01	FULL REVIEW BUY VIDEO
The Penalty USA, 1920, Released 10.9.01 review by Eddie Cockrell	FULL REVIEW BUY VIDEO

Drew Barrymore’s grandfather John solidified his own substantial acting career by playing Robert Louis Stevenson’s legendary and tragic Dr. Jekyll and his violent alter ego Mr. Hyde in 1920 for Paramount and director John S. Robertson. With a transformation achieved more by body language than makeup (note the bizarre finger extensions), it’s a performance at once theatrical and frightening in a version long hailed as the most faithful to Stevenson’s original novella. Kino on Video’s source material isn’t bad, and the tinting helps—as does Rodney Sauer’s traditional score, performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Extras include the pun-filled 1925 Stan Laurel one-reeler Dr. Pyckle & Mr. Pride; a 1909 audio recording of a performed Jekyll/Hyde transformation; an excerpt from actor Sheldon Lewis’ rival version released at about the same time; and an illustrated essay on the many movie faces of the celebrated doctor. Film fans only vaguely aware of the great, chameleon-like Lon Chaney still seem to know that story about how he had his legs bound up in a painful pair of braces to play the criminal mastermind Blizzard, fated for a life on the wrong side of the law when an impulsive doctor accidentally amputates his legs as a child. The Penalty is that film, and Kino has found and tinted a fine quality print for this release. The disc also includes a scene comparison among the novel, screenplay and film; a production budget sheet; an essay by biographer Michael F. Blake; a fascinating video tour of Chaney’s actual makeup case; and trailers and fragments of other Chaney films. Of special note is Michael Polher’s genuinely creepy score.—Eddie Cockrell

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The Wicker Man UK, 1973, Released 8.21.01 review by Eddie Cockrell

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In the early 1970s, a policeman (Edward Woodward, later the star of the American TV program “The Equalizer”) from the mainland traveled alone to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young teenaged girl, and was never heard from again. Amongst the most sought-after genre titles out there, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man is a creepy and genuinely unsettling thriller that mixes elements of witchcraft and horror into a story both plausible and otherworldly. The victim of shaky funding and diffident executives, The Wicker Man was cut by some fifteen minutes and only sporadically distributed in the United States, achieving cult status by virtue of its straightforward narrative and word-of-mouth endorsement (Christopher Lee, who plays the breezy yet chilling patriarch Lord Summerisle, has called it “the best film I’ve ever been in"). Anchor Bay Entertainment has made two versions of the film available, the American theatrical version (eighty-eight minutes), with extras, and a two-disc wooden box set (limited to 5000 numbered copies) that has the theatrical version plus extras on one disc and the expanded, close-to-original ninety-nine-minute version on a second disc (the new footage is immediately recognizable by its grain, as the original trims were destroyed and the restoration was achieved via an extant video copy). While the packaging of the boxed set is underwhelming, it is the only way to get the ninety-nine-minute version of the film and is thus recommended. The extras include a fine production featurette (during which Roger Corman calls The Wicker Man something “between an art film and a commercial film”) and the usual assortment of trailers and bios. In either configuration, The Wicker Man is a revelatory experience.

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