Review: 'Häxan' Blu-ray

Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan is the rare movie that gets to have its cake and eat it too. The film wants to be a serious exploration of the very real, very vile, historical persecution of witches—and it manages to pull that off surprisingly sympathetically, though a bit patronizingly. It also wants to be a full-blooded horror movie at a time before that term had even been coined. This is where the film really soars like a coven of broom-riders. In illustrating the ignorant superstitions Christensen sought to dispel, he makes gold coins dance about a room, releases witches into the sky on their brooms, and unleashes some startlingly grotesque creatures, the most disturbing of which is the director, himself, dolled up as a devil with incessantly wagging tongue. 

Review: 'Blue Velvet' Blu-ray

Having begun his career as a pure avant gardist with challenging yet emotionally rich films such as The Grandmother and Eraserhead, David Lynch took an unexpected turn into the mainstream when he made the historical melodrama The Elephant Man and the space opera Dune. With his next feature, Lynch found the perfect balance between his most outré ideas and the more traditional storytelling that would make him America’s most popular surrealist. Nevertheless, Blue Velvet still split audiences, with some finding his S&M noir deeply compelling while others finding its extreme scenes of sexual sadism repelling.

As is usually the case with Lynch’s films, plot is secondary to style, world-building, and unfiltered emotion, but Blue Velvet is one of his more traditionally sensible stories despite odd elements such as the severed ear that draws clean cut college boy Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) into the seedy underworld in which repulsive thug Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) kidnaps the husband and child of nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) as leverage for forcing her into humiliating and violent sex acts.

Review: 'True Stories' Blu-ray

A mayor who never talks to his wife directly but talks with his hands incessantly. A gregarious yet lonesome soul determined to find a wife. An amateur voodoo practitioner. A woman dedicated to cuteness. A woman devoted to lying in bed. A woman simply devoted to lying. A narrator who finds them all worthy of wonderment and love. These are the inhabitants of Virgil, Texas, the mythical setting of True Stories.

David Byrne directed a few music videos to gear up for his transition from Talking Head to filmmaker, and there is music video style aplenty in his feature debut. Besides the actual musical interludes that include the “Wild, Wild Life” video, there’s the rhythmic editing, seemingly nonsensical juxtapositions, people and ideas that don’t exactly lead anywhere, and emotional focus that transcends meaning that beam through the entire picture. With their script based on some of Byrne’s doodles, Stephen Tobolowsky and Beth Henley string together the disparate characters of True Stories into something that makes sense even as it doesn’t not strive to make sense. When it’s all over, you do not want to say goodbye to any of these Virgil citizens even though they are flawed, even though they tend to lead you down narrative dead ends, because Byrne the director and Byrne the narrator present them with such judgment-free affection.

In a time when the nation is so divided along party and state lines, when real villains devoted to nothing more than what is worst for every American trample the United States, it is both heartening and sad to survey Virgil’s fairy land of mutual understanding and acceptance. Even that married couple who haven’t spoken to each other in years seem to do so more because they want their own entry in the Guinness Book than because they don’t love each other. The film itself finds a liberal from a signature New York City rock band welcomed into the heart of American conservatism. Did an America like this ever exist? I don’t know, but 90 minutes with True Stories is a warm escape from the America forced upon us today. Somehow this films makes laziness, the refusal to communicate adequately, conscienceless consumerism, and complete untruthfulness charming even in a time when America’s worst monster embodies all of these sins.

The Criterion Collection’s blu-ray edition of True Stories presents the film with its customary flawlessness. The Texan landscape is vivid, each frame is free of scratches or blotches, and the soundtrack ripples and booms. That entire soundtrack makes its CD debut (though you may not find things like Annie McEnroe cooing “Dream Operator” great listening when divorced from images of the world’s weirdest fashion show) and leads the way among several choice supplements.

The best video extra is a new hour-long documentary on the film, though it would have been nice if more of the cast members were among its talking heads. There are also shorter new documentaries about how the film’s locations have aged and Tibor Kalman, the graphic designer who masterminded the film’s opening montage and advertising campaign. Vintage material includes a 30-minute making-of featuring many of the original cast members in character (John Goodman on a tour of the house that served as the Ewing homestead on Dallas is pretty priceless) and 14 minutes of fairly interesting deleted scenes. The packaging is also praise worthy, especially the newsprint booklet designed as a mock tabloid.

Review: 'Female Trouble' Blu-ray

Dawn Davenport is a thief and a shit kicker and she wants to be famous, and that is exactly what she does in John Waters’s way out Female Trouble. Well, his third feature film is way out by most standards, though compared to Pink Flamingos and its relentless freak parade of atrocities, Waters’ follow-up film is almost quaint. 

In lieu of Flamingos’ genuinely shocking scenes of tuneful sphincters, flaccid blowjobs, chicken murder, and shit eating, Female Trouble has something closer to an actual story as Divine’s Davenport goes through the paces of a twisted Douglas Sirk picture. She’s a juvenile delinquent who runs away from home when she doesn’t get the cha-cha heels she demands for X-mas (who wouldn’t?), gets raped (by a male character also played by Divine, which may defuse the horror of mining rape for laughs for some viewers), gets pregnant, raises a nasty daughter she can’t even control by whipping her with a car aerial, finds stardom as a murderous performance artist, takes a bath in a crib full of fish, and gets the chair. 

With so much to sink his (he always identified as male) teeth into, Divine gives his greatest performance, though Mink Stole as Dawn’s bratty daughter Taffy comes close to stealing the show…as was her tendency. Female Trouble feels a bit overlong and a bit flimsy in comparison to the more audacious pictures that bookend it, but since it is not as polarizing as Pink Flamingoes or as bizarre or Divine-devoid as Desperate Living (my personal favorite of Waters’s early films), it is probably the best entry point for potential new fans before they move onto the director’s hardier and better stuff.

Last year, Multiple Maniacs was the Criterion Collection’s first entry in the John Waters collection, and it’s good to see that the best home video company out there is continuing its relationship with the guy a lot of cineastes consider to be one of the worst filmmakers of all time (he’s not; he’s just the filthiest). Criterion treats this trash like its Citizen Kane, cleaning up the image beautifully—the colors in the X-mas tantrum scene are spectacularly saturated—and piling on the supplements. Waters’s feature commentary has been ported over from the DVD edition, but there are also over two hours of extra goodies, including Dennis Lim’s new interview with Waters, Waters’s charming new interview with the actress who played Taffy as a little girl, and vintage interviews with Mary Vivian Pearce (who seemed somewhat bitter about her director’s demanding methods), casting director Pat Moran, and clothing and makeup master Van Smith. Additional bonuses include 15 minutes of outtakes (mostly musical montages) and 11 minutes of on-set footage with Waters’s commentary (mostly identifying the people in each shot) from the main feature and 17 minutes of Female Trouble-centric interviews and outtakes from Jeffrey Schwarz’s excellent documentary I Am Divine. However, the most substantial supplement is a vintage and very funny 32 minute roundtable discussion featuring Waters, Divine, Stole, and David Lochary.  

Review: 'Mulholland Dr.' on Blu-ray

Getting into “Twin Peaks” in the nineties hipped me to the idea that television could be cinematic, experimental, genuinely scary, and uncomfortably challenging. I tried to sate my yen for such shows with things like “Northern Exposure” and “The X-Files”, but nothing came close to recapturing that air of dreamy creepiness and creeping dreaminess unique to “Twin Peaks”. So when I read that David Lynch would finally be returning to the little screen with a new show called “Mulholland Dr.” for ABC in 1999, I was thrilled. Unfortunately, after seeing Lynch’s pilot, the confounded ninnies at the network passed on it in favor of contemporary classics like “Oh, Grow Up” and “Odd Man Out”. Though heartbroken, Lynch has never been a guy who allows a good idea to go to waste. He reclaimed his 90-minute pilot, shot a new ending for it, and released it theatrically in 2001, thus cobbling together the best feature film of a decade that had barely begun.

(Spoilers Ahead, so you may want to skip to the next bolded heading.)

Review: 'Valerie and Her Week of Wonders' Blu-ray

Two years after the Soviet Invasion had ostensibly brought an end to Czechoslovakia’s Spring of liberalized creativity, Jaromil Jireš made one of the country’s most liberated and creative films. Perhaps Valerie and Her Week of Wonders passed muster with the communist regime— which preferred social realism and had no compunction about banning art— because it is so openly critical of Catholic hypocrisy. However, the ideas behind Jireš’s film are not nearly as interesting as its images. In fact, its “plot” could have been pulled right out of the “Experimental Filmmaking 101” text book if it hadn’t been adapted from Vítězslav Nezval’s novel of the same name (written before Nezval, himself, joined the Party).

Valerie has just turned thirteen (daringly bumped down four years from her age in the novel to Jaroslava Schallerová’s actual age when starred in the movie). Having her first period, she’s now sexually mature and must traverse a Lewis Carroll-esque landscape constantly bouncing her between Catholicism and sexuality. Neither is very appealing in Jireš’s film. Religion offers nothing but lecherous clergy and suppressed desire. Sex Land is full of incest and nubile young women dropping live fish down their bloomers. Both sides are full of vampires and monsters to the point that Valerie and Her Week of Wonders functions as both surreal fantasy and full-blooded horror film. Valerie greets all this stuff in a constant state of bemused defiance, which renders her kind of likeable even if it never allows her more than a couple of dimensions. But depth is not really what you’ll find in her movie. Instead, you get a non-stop montage of arresting imagery. Valerie relaxes beneath an elaborate network of machinery. A parade of nuns passes a couple having abandoned al fresco sex (the only truly positive sexual image in the picture). Valerie’s grandma (a young woman in white death makeup) flagellates herself while the priest she loves eats chicken. He cowers inside of a birdcage as more people copulate outside it. Valerie reclines in a coffin of green apples. Creatures with joke-shop fangs peer from every corner. It’s all beautifully shot, and the picture’s economical running time keeps the style-over-substance issue from ever becoming a real issue. This is what great cult movies are made of.

It’s also what great Criterion Collection blu-rays are made of. Jireš’s dreamy images look exquisite in this new 4k restoration, which is devoid of a single blemish. Lubos Fiser’s soundtrack sounds excellent as well, and its enchantments make the inclusion of a proggy alternate soundtrack fairly superfluous, though the fifteen-minute featurette on this so-called “Valerie Project” is pretty fascinating. There’s also a fairly worthwhile monologue about the main feature from film scholar Peter Hames. However, the gem of the extras is a trio of Jireš’s short films, which seem to plot his move from relatively conventional filmmaking toward the pure avant-gardism of Valerie. The six-minute “Uncle” (1959) is touching, funny, and a perfect example of micro-storytelling, yet only experimental in its mild quotes from German Expressionism. “Footprints” (1960) has a more open-ended narrative. “The Hall of Lost Footsteps” (1960) walks much further out, chopping together horrifying holocaust and A-bomb footage with shots caught at a train station and romantic images rendered hopeless by what surrounds them. Its fractured timeline and jumbling of the beautiful and the terrible is an effective lead in to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. 

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Don’t Look Now'

No one would ever label Nicholas Roeg a genre filmmaker, but he always manages to sneak a bit of horror into his films, whether it’s the nightmarish decadence of Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell), the demented obsessions of Bad Timing, or the shocking, out-of-left-field violence of Eureka. Among the few true horror films Roeg directed (he’d been cinematographer on Roger Corman’s genre masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death) is his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now. Yet as disturbing, violent, and supernatural as the film is, Rogue still isn’t content to play on a single generic field. At heart, Don’t Look Now is a family drama about a couple’s grief following the death of their child. The horrific elements of the film always carry the weight of that grief, making it incredibly sad even when playing with conventional horror elements.

All that being said, the less said about this sad, and surprising film to those who’ve yet to see it the better (I get more into plot in the film’s entry on my 150 Essential Horror Movies list), but rest assured that Don’t Look Now is the most artful and dramatic true horror film of the seventies. So who better to bring it to blu-ray than the Criterion Collection? Based on how above-and-beyond the company has gone with its new blu-ray, I guess the answer is “no one.” The film looks excellent, the new 4k digital restoration respecting its misty aesthetic while delivering the sporadic blasts of red with Technicolor punch. Because of the film’s intentionally soft look, this is not the kind of restoration that will stun viewers, but it is completely correct. 

There are also more than three hours of supplements (only about an hour of which is spent discussing the film’s too-famous-for-its-own-good sex scene). The major new one is “Something Interesting”, a 30-minute assemblage of recent interviews with stars Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, co-screenwriter Allan Scott, and cinematographer Anthony Richmond. No disrespect to the guys behind the camera, but Christie and Sutherland are the ones who really fascinate in this featurette, discussing their very different reservations about making the movie, and Sutherland discussing the terrifying circumstances of the broken-gantry scene and hopefully demystifying that sex scene once and for all with a hilarious recollection of its filming.

There is also a 43-minute conversation with Graeme Clifford, whose editing is as integral to the film’s disorienting brilliance as Roeg’s direction or the stars’ performances. He reveals that he went so far as to alter the script in the cutting room. An 18-minute love letter to Roeg from Steven Soderberg and Danny Boyle is full of insights (particularly from Boyle, who convincingly compares the director to Pablo Picasso and David Lynch) and confessions about which scenes from their own movies they pinched from the master. As for him, Roeg gets his due spotlight in a 47-minute Q&A from 2003 and a 19-minute documentary on Don’t Look Now from Blue Underground’s DVD released the previous year. Unfortunately, Roeg has a tendency to reveal too much about his intentions for his films. I prefer it when filmmakers trust their viewers to decode their work. Another Blue Underground leftover, an interview with Italian pop-singer turned film-score composer Pino Donaggio, rounds out the definitive presentation of one of seventies cinema’s definitive films.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Safe'

The late eighties/early nineties was a boom time for young visionary directors, but your Steven Soderbergs and your Quentin Tarantinos and even your Lars Von Triers had nothing on Todd Haynes. His first film starred a Barbie and Ken doll as Karen and Richard Carpenter. Despite the silly premise and the offensive blandness of The Carpenters’ music, Superstar not only wasn’t a joke but it was legitimately disturbing, depressing, and moving. His second film, Poison, fell in line with his AIDS-awareness activism but did so with fearless originality, interpreting the writings of Jean Genet as a shuffled up portmanteau of horror, documentary, and prison mini-movies. Haynes’s activism became a lightning rod for some viewers, particularly those in the LGBT community, when he made his next and biggest budget (still under a million dollars) film to date. Because Safe dealt with disease, and featured implicit and explicit references to AIDS, other activists felt Haynes was selling out by making his main character a woman and her illness something other than AIDS.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Eraserhead'

Eraserhead has been streaming on Hulu as a member of the Criterion Collection for two years, which means excited speculation that Criterion might give it a proper home-media release has also been circulating for years. The ultimate cult movie meets the finest video-distribution company to achieve cult status of its own. That is a relationship much happier than Henry Spencer and Mary X’s.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'

With a sudden boost of government assistance by way of Prime Minister John Gorton, Australian cinema really came into its own in the seventies. The boom gave us some extraordinary films, such as Nic Roeg’s dizzying Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff’s brutal, horrifying Wake in Fright. But the most enduring masterpiece of that era is Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. Faithfully adapted from Joan Lindsay’s lyrical novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a dreamy and rather creepy allegory of Victorian sexual repression.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Breaking the Waves'

After starting his career with a series of highly stylized films, Lars von Trier made Breaking the Waves, his first after co-founding the Dogma 95 movement, which preached absolute austerity: only location and handheld shooting, only contemporary settings, no non-diegetic sound or optical manipulation, no superficial action, no credit for the director, etc. Typically, he had trouble even playing by his own rules, and von Trier’s break-through film arrived without Dogma 95-certification, largely because of the hyper-stylized, digitally-colored chapter titles accompanied by non-diegetic pop songs by the likes of Jethro Tull, David Bowie, and Elton John to establish the seventies time period.

20 Horror and Cult Classics That Deserve the Criterion Treatment

For thirty years, the Criterion Collection has been restoring “important classic and contemporary films” and releasing them back into the wild on laser disc, DVD, and blu-ray. As their inaugural titles—King Kong and Citizen Kane— indicated, Criterion has long had great enthusiasm for horror and cult films. Yet even with more than 700 titles under its belt, Criterion has not refurbished every horror and cult classic that deserves it. Some of the most deserving have not been well served in the blu-ray age by any of the company’s chief rivals either. So for Criterion or Twilight Time or Shout/Scream Factory or any other distribution company with a serious interest in seriously great movies, here are twenty terrifying and strange titles for your consideration.

1. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928- dir. Jean Epstein)

What is it? A masterpiece of bad dreaminess and surreal imagery. An essential French horror film, of which there are few.

Current Region 1 availability Image Entertainment’s 2001 DVD is out of print.

Why Criterion? The Fall of the House of Usher is certainly important in that it is arguably the first great feature-length Edgar Allan Poe adaptation. Its art house status is right up Criterion’s alley. Director Jean Epstein co-wrote the screenplay with Luis Buñuel at the same time he was making “Un Chien Andalou” with Salvador Dali. That short film would make a fabulous bonus feature!

2. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931- dir. Rouben Mamoulian)

What is it? The first and best sound adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s transfiguring horror classic. Released the same year as Dracula and Frankenstein, Paramount’s attempt to pounce on the monster bandwagon trounced Universal’s hits and helped complete the trio of classic monster movie tropes: vampire, creation monster, and transformation monster.

Why Criterion? Beautifully filmed, beautifully acted, and still really disturbing, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is important in that it is the first horror film to score an Oscar (Frederic March shared the best actor award with Wallace Beery). Obviously, it’s a classic for its quality too, though its underdog status next to the ubiquitous Dracula and Frankenstein makes it a perfect candidate for Criterion. MGM certainly doesn’t seem in any rush to restore this one and get it back on the streets.

3. The Old Dark House (1932- dir. James Whale)

What is it? James Whale’s second horror film is an alternately funny and frightening flick with a superb ensemble cast featuring Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff, Lilian Bond, Ernest Thesiger, Gloria Stuart, and Eva Moore.

Why Criterion? Well, Kino can do this one if they like, but if not, Criterion should swoop in and give it the business. Either way I’d be happy.

4. The Black Cat (1934- dir. Edgar G. Ulmer)

What is it? An adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe in name only, Edgar Ulmer’s demented art-deco pairing of Karloff and Lugosi is one of the most deliciously weird entries in the Universal horror canon.

Why Criterion? Well, Universal still has enough interest in this essential title— chosen ahead of The Mummy, the 1943 version of The Phantom of the Opera, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon by a panel of critics for inclusion in The 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die—to rerelease it in 2012, but its failure to refurbish the film for blu-ray is enough indication that an intervention is in order.

5. Mad Love (1935- dir. Karl Freund)

Review: The Criterion Collection's 'The Uninvited' Blu-ray

One of Hollywood’s first real ghost stories (i.e.: one in which the ghost turns out to be an actual ghost and not some shyster pulling a caper) has inexplicably never been available on DVD. The precise reason for this oversight is hard to determine, though I’ve read rumors that a lack of interest in lesser-known classic films is to blame. This theory is a bit tough to swallow since so many classic and not-so-classic old movies have made it to DVD and because The Uninvited is often spoken of in the same breath as The Innocents, The Haunting, and cinema’s other great spook shows. Deservedly so, because Lewis Allen’s adaptation of Dorothy Macardle’s novel Uneasy Freehold has so much going for it: pleasing interplay between stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as siblings who buy a haunted house; a charmingly naive performance from newcomer Gail Russell as the granddaughter of the house’s former owner and Milland’s love interest; a neat blend of romance, humor, and chills; and a really scary ghost that critic Farran Smith Nehma suggests may have inspired the spirits that swoop out of the Ark at the climax of Indiana Jones’s first adventure.

Fortunately, The Criterion Collection has rendered the often-asked question “Why isn’t The Uninvited on DVD?” obsolete with an all-new digital restoration available on DVD and Blu-ray. As is common in films of the forties, the image is soft, particularly in blemish-concealing close-ups, but it’s also clean with no serious flecks or scratches. This isn’t the kind of sharp-detail picture that will knock your socks off, but the film certainly looks good, especially in the shadowy nighttime scenes that showcase deeper blacks.

Criterion includes several supplements, the most substantial being a 26-minute “visual essay” by Michael Almereyda, the director of such features as Twister and Nadja and a really great episode of “Deadwood.” The essay is interesting yet odd because it isn’t really about the film but the careers and troubled personal lives of Milland and Russell with a strange detour about “real life” spiritualists. There are also two radio plays of The Uninvited, both starring Milland, and in the accompanying booklet, an essay about the film by Smith Nehma and an interview film historian Tom Weaver conducted with Lewis Allen in 1997.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Eyes without a Face'

France is renowned for its excellent filmmakers, but it isn’t known for its horror films. When considering the very best horror films, only a couple from France will likely come to mind, and one of those will most certainly be Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face. This grim tale of murder, megalomania, and face transplants has enough classic horror trappings to entrap classic horror fans (a mad doctor, extreme grisliness, Gothic imagery) and enough elegance and intelligence to place it as a specimen of early sixties French cinema.

In America, Eyes without a Face wasn’t treated with the respect it deserved: edited, dubbed, retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, and coupled with a cheapie called The Manster as a double feature for the matinee crowd. In 2004, Eyes without a Face finally received the stateside respect it deserved when the Criterion Collection released it restored and in its unadulterated form on DVD. Nine years later, that restoration literally pales next to Criterion’s most recent Blu-ray restoration. I tested the previous disc against the new one, and that 2004 DVD looks washed out compared to the high-contrast Blu-ray restoration. The blacks are much richer, which is important for a film in which darkness play such a key role. It’s hard to believe that this beautiful film will ever look more beautiful.

The extras have mostly been shuttled over from the old DVD, but the most significant one—Franju’s disturbingly chilly 1949 short documentary on slaughterhouses Blood of the Beasts—has been given the same high-def treatment as Eyes without a Face. That’s a true rarity for a bonus, though it does show its age more than the pristine feature film. The one new bonus to go along with the other previously released ones (archival interviews with Franju, the Eyes without a Face-centric parts of a 1985 documentary about the guys who wrote it) is an interesting 8-minute interview with star Edith Scob (who still makes experimental films…check out 2012’s Holy Motors!). The one extra that did not make the transition from DVD to Blu-ray is a photo gallery, though many of those pictures appear in the Scob interview.

Review: The Criterion edition of Rosemary’s Baby

Along with Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby was one of the crucial American horror films of the 1960s. A deeply unsettling and incredibly entertaining film, Roman Polanski’s parental horror is also significant for its attitude about supernatural fear films. It envelops the viewer in sincere terror only to pull back at the last minute to chuckle at all this demonic nonsense from the corner of its fanged maw. Living Dead would become the midnight movie phenomenon in the seventies, but Rosemary’s Baby better established the ironic tone of cult films.

Widely regarded as one of the very best of its genre, Rosemary’s Baby has simply been dying for proper treatment on DVD. Having already produced luxurious discs of Polanski’s Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-sac, Criterion was the natural choice to give Rosemary’s Baby a rebirth. When the company asked Facebook users for suggestions for future releases last year, I voted for Rosemary’s Baby. So naturally, I’m thrilled by Criterion’s new reissue of the film.

Criterion consistently delivers the finest remastering and packaging a film could receive, and Rosemary’s Baby is no different. It sounds and looks pristine while still retaining the earth-toned haze that makes it the perfect late-sixties time capsule. A bonus disc offers a 1997 radio interview with Rosemary’s Baby novelist Ira Levin, a feature-length documentary about jazz artist and soundtrack composer Krzysztof Komeda (featuring Polanski), and most appealing to fans, a 47-minute documentary on the making of the film. New interviews with Polanski, Mia Farrow, and producer Robert Evans carry the doc, which is also interspersed with enticing behind-the-scenes footage of Mia Farrow doing some hippie-ish clowning on set and producer (and thwarted director) William Castle’s cameo. According to Polanski, the original cut of the film was four hours, so it’s too bad deleted scenes weren’t available for this release. But my only real gripe is that the discs do not come out of the case easily. Every time I pulled one out, I was shocked I didn’t snap it in half! That would have been a terrible shame considering how fine these disc are.

Criterion Announces Late Summer Release for 'Quadrophenia' on DVD and Blu-ray

Followers of the Criterion Collection have surmised this has been in the works for a while, but only yesterday was it made official. On August 28, 2012, Criterion will be issuing Quadrophenia on DVD, and for the first time in the U.S., Blu-ray. Inarguably the greatest film ever based on a Rock album, Quadrophenia brought Jimmy the Mod from the grooves of one of The Who's greatest records to the screen. Devoid of the mushy surrealism of big-screen Rock operas like Tommy and Pink Floyd: The Wall, Quadrophenia is both a bitterly nostalgic look back at the Mods vs. Rockers clashes of the early '60s and a commentary on Britain's social and economic mire of the late '70s. As much a punk movie as a mod one, Quadrophenia is a vital, violent reflection of those vital, violent punk pioneers, The Who.

• Criterion's special edition, approved by director Franc Roddam, includes the following features (from criterion.com)
• New high-definition digital restoration of the uncut version, with the original 2.0 stereo soundtrack as well as an all-new 5.1 surround mix, supervised by the Who and presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray edition
• New audio commentary featuring director Franc Roddam and director of photography Brian Tufano
• New interview with Bill Curbishley, the film’s coproducer and the Who’s comanager
• New interview with the Who’s sound engineer, Bob Pridden, discussing the new mix, featuring a restoration demonstration
• On-set and archival footage
• Behind-the-scenes photographs
• Trailers
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Nick James, a reprinted personal history by original mod Irish Jack, and Pete Townshend’s liner notes from the album

Pre-order info to follow.

Review: The Criterion Edition of ‘Kuroneko’ (1968)

From out of the wind-rustled bamboo grove surrounding a small cottage creeps a samurai horde. They storm the cottage, rape the mother (Nobuko Otowa) and daughter-in-law (Kiwako Taichi) who live there, and burn the women alive. A black cat surveys the wreckage, crying. When it licks the women’s charred bodies, a demon spirit grants them renewed life in exchange for a vow of vengeance. The women are happy to oblige, as they must now drink the blood of all samurai who cross their vampiric path.

Director Kaneto Shindō (Onibaba) takes this seemingly simple premise into astoundingly complex territory with Kuroneko (Black Cat). Strategically placed peaks in the sound mix illustrate the animal brutality of both the samurai and their spectral victims. Subtle trick shots transform nature into a predatory entity stalking the samurai who fall into the specters’ trap. Sudden tempo shifts transform their feline attacks into shocking moments of horror. The rapes are so intrinsically horrific that Shindō doesn’t have to do much more than capture them and the leering faces of the onlookers. Most provocatively, his script does not spare these wronged women the dehumanizing effects of waging war. When they reunite with their abducted son and husband (Kichiemon Nakamura), they learn he has been decorated as a samurai during his absence and is now destined to be their next blood donor.

As all great antiwar films are, Kuroneko is harsh and profoundly tragic. It is also an eerie horror film and a dazzling showcase of cinematic magic tricks. Criterion augments this already rich film with an hour-long interview with Shindō from 1998 in which the director talks about his body of work, though oddly not Kuroneko. In another extra, film critic Tadao Sato rights that oversight with an insightful discussion of the film, focusing on its roots in kabuki theater and Shindō’s anti-samurai stance. Criterion presents the beautifully restored picture in its original ultra-wide 2:35:1 aspect ratio.

Review: The Criterion edition of 'The Night of the Hunter'

In 1955, actor Charles Laughton directed his first and final film and Robert Mitchum embodied one of the cinema’s most relentless, frightening, and oddly humorous bogeymen. Mitchum is Harry Powell, a psychotic Big Bad Wolf in preacher’s clothing on the hunt for a pair of children who know the location of a cache of cash (and how relevant is that theme of a predatory priest today, kids?).

July 16, 2009: Psychobabble recommends the new Criterion edition of Repulsion

At the time it was released, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) was arguably the subtlest, most mature, most artistic, and most genuinely disturbing horror film yet made. Think of it as a gender flip of Hitchcock’s Psycho or Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom: an attractive young person’s unhealthy attitude about sex fuels some seriously anti-social behavior. Catherine Deneuve plays Carol Ledoux, an uptight French ex-patriot living in Swinging London with her sexually liberated sister Hélène (Yvonne Furneaux). When Hélène takes a weekend trip with her lover, Carole is left in their creepy flat to stew in her own delusions, which gradually boil over into some genuinely shocking acts of violence. There’s a marvelously jazzy score by Chico Hamilton, stark black and white cinematography by Gilbert Taylor (whom Polanski hired after seeing his work on Dr. Strangelove), some terrifying hallucinations, an ambiguous but absolutely unnerving denouement, and a skinned bunny.