The year was 1982. In the wake of the late ’70s blossoming of the blockbuster, we find America in a state of craving big movies in genres previously seen as less than prestigious and only for the low brow grindhouse and drive-in crowds. But these films were doing boffo business at the box office now….
Dogra Magra [Radiance Films] Blu-Ray Review
A man named Kure Ichiro (Yôji Matsuda) wakes up to find himself in a mental institution with no memory of who he is or why he is there. He is told by a Dr. Wakabayashi (Hideo Murota) that Ichiro has killed his fiancée on their wedding day, and his amnesia is caused by his brain’s…
Demon Pond (1979) [Criterion Collection] Blu-Ray Review
Gakuen (Tsutomu Yamazaki) is a teacher and botanist who travels alone through the wilds of rural Japan, eventually stumbling across a drought-stricken village so desperate for water that breast milk is used as a substitution. He meets in this village an old friend, Akira (Go Kato), who is married to a mysterious woman named Yuri…
Family (2017) [Indiepix] DVD Review
Lily Brooke (Veronica Kedar) frantically arrives at her therapist’s house one evening demanding a session. The therapist is out but her bitchy teenage daughter Talia (Tommy Baremboem) is there and is willing to listen albeit in as judgmental a way as possible. Well, Lily needs someone to listen to her family problems, and Talia will…
The Convent [Synapse] 4K UHD Blu-ray Review
It’s 1960 and we watch as a catholic school girl named Christine walks into a nunnery, takes a swig of whiskey and proceeds to kill the shit out of every nun in the place, smashing them with a baseball bat, covering them in gasoline and setting them on fire and blasting them apart using a…
Blackout (2023) [Dark Sky Selects] Blu-ray Review
Painter Charley Barrett (Alex Hurt) has been having these blackouts lately and waking up in the woods covered in blood. It’s just one more thing to worry about in addition to his father having recently died. Plus the town he grew up in is being bought out by a greedy capitalist who thinks he owns…
The Million Eyes of Sumuru [Blue Underground] 4K UHD Blu-ray Review
Like the Christopher Lee-starring Fu Manchu films that Harry Alan Towers produced concurrently in the ’60s, The Million Eyes of Sumuru features a character torn from the pages of the novels of Sax Rohmer. Sumuru (Goldfinger Bond girl Shirley Eaton) is a dastardly yet sexy mastermind who is hell bent on world domination by systematically…
Cheeky! [Cult Epics] 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Review
Carla (Yuliya Mayarchuk) is out looking for an apartment to rent in London with her boyfriend Matteo (Jarno Berardi). She meets a sexy real estate agent named Moira (Francesca Nunzi) who is willing to rent Carla an apartment in exchange for certain…favors… Meanwhile Matteo discovers some old letters and pictures that Carla had kept from…
Blue Desert [IndiePix] DVD Review
Ele (Odilon Esteves) is a man unmoored in life in the distant future. Each day he boards some sort of space flight, the routine a kind of numbing influence on his life. He wanders across a desert where he meets an old man (Chico Diaz) who desire to spray paint the sand blue. Ele does…
Killers: Unrated Director’s Cut [Synapse Films] Blu-ray Review
Notorious killers the James Boys, Odessa (Dave Larson) and Kyle (David Gunn), who murdered their parents in cold blood, have escaped from San Quentin and find themselves on the run from a nationwide manhunt in a turbulent thunderstorm. They decide to seek shelter in a random suburban household, taking hostage the ‘gee golly’ All-American nuclear…