The Movie:

Adapted from the novel penned by Tsutomu Minakami, Tomu Uchida's 1965 film A Fugitive From The Past takes place in 1947 when a massive typhoon hits a ferry taxiing passengers from Hokkaido and the mainland of Japan. The ferry is destroyed and the island thrashed and hundreds of people die, but in the chaos that ensues, three men are seen running away from a pawn shop set ablaze in the island town of Iwanai. The local police understandably assume that this is a case of burglary and arson and Detective Yumisaka (Junzaburo Ban) is tasked with investigating.

As Yumisaka starts working the case, he discovers some strange clues, first in the form of a burned out husk of a boat and then, more shockingly, the dead bodies of two men, leading him to wonder what exactly the third unknown suspect has been up to here as he know these men were not killed when the ferry...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Arrow Video's Running Out Of Time Collection brings together the two thrillers directed by Johnnie To in 1999 and 2001 respectively in one handsome collector's edition double feature Blu-ray release.

Running Out Of Time:

The first film, written by Frenchmen Laurent Courtiaud and Julien Carbon and then worked on by Hong Kon's Nai-Hoi Yau, introduces us to a man named Cheung (Andy Lau) who is told by his doctor that he's in the late stages of terminal cancer and has only got seventy-two hours left to live. He heads outside and without any hesitation whatsoever, robs a building in the middle of Hong Kong where he takes a hostage. The police send in Ho Sheung-sang (Lau Ching-Wan), the best of the best when it comes to dealing with situations like this, and Cheung essentially tells Ho that, over his remaining seventy-two hours, he'll be playi...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Joel Schumacher is an underrated director who, before his death in 2020, was unafraid to take chances on unique and risky projects. He got his start writing films like The Wiz and Sparkle before hopping into the director's chair on St. Elmo's Fire and The Lost Boys. Most of his films offer flawed, relatable characters and each has a style and personality that is all Schumacher. Even his worst films (I am looking at you Batman & Robin) offer unique visuals and plenty of scenery for the actors to chew. His 1990 thriller Flatliners is not t...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Though it flopped at the box office, this unlikely pairing of kinetic director Tony Scott and novice screenwriter Quentin Tarantino absolutely works at every turn, even when it shouldn't. How many love stories offer pulpy violence, witty dialogue and an absolutely stacked cast of genre favorites like Dennis Hopper and Gary Oldman? True Romance may be the only such film. It is surprising that Scott and Tarantino made this film together at all. The late director came off a string of hits like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop and Days of Thunder as the 1980s ran into a new decade, and Tarantino had just written and directed his breakthrough, Read the entire review

The Movies:

Arrow Video compiles three more giallo pictures in one convenient boxed set titled, appropriately enough, Giallo Essentials Volume 3. Here's what is contained in the set…

Smile Before Death:

Directed by Silvio Amadio (the same man who gave us Amuck), who co-wrote with Francesco Di Dio and Francesco Merli, 1972's Smile Before Death introduces us to a photographer named Marco (Silvano Tranquilli) and his wife Dorothy (Zora Gheorgieva), a husband and wife who are in an open marriage that isn't quite going as smoothly as maybe they'd hoped that it would. This complicated situation is made to be even more complicated as Marco has taken Dorothy's best friend, Gianna (Rosalba Neri), as his lover.

Soon enough, Dorothy is dead, and although it looks like she killed herself (she was found dead with her throat slit in a ro...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written by, directed by and starring Mark O'Brien, 2021's The Righteous follows an older man named Frederic Mason (Henry Czerny) who, along with his devoted wife Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk), still grieves the loss of their adopted daughter. Frederic has spent most of his adult life working as a priest and left the church to marry Ethel. Losing the girl has caused him to have a crisis of faith that is proving quite difficult for him to deal with.

Their lives take a strange twist when a young man named Aaron Smith (played by O'Brien) shows up at their home with an injured foot and in need of help in the middle of the night. Although Ethel isn't keen on the idea at first, the Masons, who live in vert remote, woodsy area, show him the Christian charity he needs and welcome the man into their home. As they care for him and start to get to know him, Frederic starts to see ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Not to be confused with the 2006 remake of the same name, The Initiation Of Sarah is a 1978 made for TV movie directed by Robert Day which follows the story of Sarah Goodwin (Kay Lenz). When we meet her, she and sister Patty Goodwin (Morgan Brittany) are saying goodbye to Sarah's adopted mother (Kathryn Grant) and heading off to college just in time for pledge week. Pretty Patty gets accepted into the fancy ‘hot chicks' house lorded over by bitchy Jennifer Lawrence (Morgan Fairchild) thanks to mom's connections but no such luck for Sarah. She gets accepted into one house and one house only, and the woman in charge there is a creepy older lady named Erica Hunter (Shelly Winters).

As the two sisters go about their business, Sarah befriends a girl named Alberta (Tisa Farrow), nicknamed Mouse because she's a bit on the shy side. When Sarah runs into Patty o...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Gerard Kilkoine in 1989 for producer Harry Alan Towers, Edge Of Sanity opens with a scene that introduces us to a young Henry Jekyll and explains in no uncertain terms why he'll grow up to have… issues. And grow up he does (at which point he's played by Anthony Perkins), after attending medical school and setting up practice as a doctor in London. Here he seems to live a comfortable life along with his pretty wife Elizabeth (Glynis Barber), but appearances, as we all know, can be deceiving.

Henry's life starts to unravel once he starts experimenting with alternatives to pain relief, specifically through the use of cocaine, and who better to test it on than himself? Of course, once that gets mixed, accidently, with another chemical he doesn't just get high but in fact transforms Jekyll's alter ego, Jack Hyde. As the story goes, Hyde is everyt...Read the entire review

The Movie:

I guess I either never understood or got behind the long-term sustaining fascination with Wild Things. It made a modest amount of money theatrically, spawned several straight to video sequels, most everyone involved seemed to be strangely entertained by the schlock involved, and when I saw it back in the day, I guess I didn't really get it? It was one thing to be sensationalist, and the film sure was that, but past being a garden variety soap opera running 110 minutes, I remain unsure what all the fuss was about.

Stephen Peters wrote the film that John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) directed. Set in the fictitious Blue Bay, Florida, Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon, Crash) is a popular figure at the local high school, a mix of passio...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

A friend and I recently discussed why I have lukewarm feelings about Kenneth Branagh's 1994 horror drama Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The British actor and filmmaker has adapted numerous written works for the screen, including Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet and Murder on the Orient Express, and Branagh tends to be slavishly loyal to the novels and plays he adapts. For a film adaptation to work, it has to use its source as inspiration to create cinematic magic. The best adaptations celebrate their sources while giving viewers a reason to see a visual depiction of the narrative. There are numerous examples of such adaptations, with Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written by, directed by and starring the late, great Jimmy Wang Yu, 1972's One-Armed Boxer (also known as The Chinese Professionals) tells the story of Yu Tian Long (played, of course, by Wang). He's the best of the best to come from the Zhengde Martial Arts school, led by Han Tui (Chi Ma), and is, for all intents and purposes, a man of honor. The members of The Hook Gang, however, are anything but. More of an international criminal gang made up of members skilled in different fighting styles then an actual martial arts school, they control a lot of the vice that runs through town. When Yu Tian Long gets into a squabble with Ma Tian Bao (Chun Lei) , a Hook Gang member, the bad guys don't just target Yu Tian Long but his school as well.

As the rivalry between Yu Tian Long's school and The Hook Gang intensifies, Yu Tian Long's school are challenged a...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Arrow Video's Rogue Cops And Racketeers Blu-ray collection brings together two vintage cop thrillers directed by the inimitable Enzo G. Casetellari.

The Big Racket:

On of a few notable high octane crime films directed by Enzo G. Castellari (The Cold Eyes Of Fear, The New Barbarians), and starring the always reliable Fabio Testi (Contraband, Revolver), Il Grande Racket, or The Big Racket as it's known stateside, is a superior example of the 70s Italian crime film.

Fabio Testi plays a rough and tumble police officer named Nico Palmieri, who gets involved in trying to break up a protection racket being run by some hoods in a small Italian town. They've been going around extorting insane amounts of money from the local businessmen using the all too real threat of sadistic violence against them should the...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed and released in 1986 by filmmaker Kaizô Hayashi, To Sleep So As To Dream tells the story of a private eye named Uotsuka (Shiro Sano) and his right hand man Kobayashi who are approached by a Madame Cherryblossom (Fujiko Fukamizu), a one-time actress who has aged and left her best years behind her. She tasks them with tracking down her daughter, who is known by the name of Bellflower (Moe Kamura), who she believes has been kidnapped.

As Uotsuka and Kobayashi start working the case, they follow what few clues they can find and eventually things start pointing towards a film studio called The M. Pathe Company. While in the studio, Uotsuka experiences a vision where he meets a beautiful actress from a Chanbara film made way back in 1915 that was never finished. From here, the lines between the ‘real world' that Uotsuka and Kobayashi exist in and the one in...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by the great Lau Kar-leung and released by the legendary Shaw Brothers in 1984, The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter opens with a dramatic scene where the eight Yang brothers and their father square off against an opposing horde only to be ambushed by General Pan Mei (Lin Ke-Ming). Only two brothers survive. The sixth brother (Alexander Fu Sheng), who has gone completely insane, and the fifth brother (Gordon Liu), who has gone into hiding what he assumed to be the abandoned home of a hermit. When the hermit discovers him, they fight, but not for long as Pan Mei's crew has come looking for him. The eight brother escapes through a back entrance and winds up taking solace at a nearby monastery.

Initially the monks do not want to let him join them, they sense he has anger and violence in his heart. Of course, eventually he convinces them that he's got the rig...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In the opening scene of Come Drink With Me we witness a roving clan of thieves laying waste to a government convoy and the kidnapping of an important political officer. The reasoning behind their actions is that they intend to use their captive friend as a bargaining chip, so that they can force the government to release their leader who has recently been locked up for his criminal activity.

In order to free the hostage without having to give up their prisoner, the local officials decide to send in Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei Pei, who is probably best known to western audiences for her appearance in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). She is a brilliant swordswoman who disguises herself as a male, the hope being that she'll be able to take on the bandits and save the day. She soon, by chance, meets a likeminded individual named Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua of The Iro...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In 1987, during the height of eighties hysteria, the now defunct Orion Pictures unleashed a new hero of sorts emerged onto screens across the continent. Part man, part machine, but all cop, director Paul Verhoeven's Robocop met with huge success and spawned two theatrical sequels, a television series, a toy line, a video game, and a comic book series. In 2014 there was even a remake, but it's the original, the one that started it all, that remains the most beloved of the franchise… and rightly so, because it holds up incredibly well more than a few decades after it originally hit theaters.

Set in the Detroit of the not too distant future (which was actually Dallas… but don't tell anyone!), crime is rampant. The city is run by a huge corporation called OCP (which stands for Omni Consumer Products) and nothing gets done without its say so. To combat t...Read the entire review

The Movie:

One of those rare horror-comedy hybrid films that actually works really, really well, John Landis' An American Werewolf In London remains a textbook example of just how well ‘funny' can mix with ‘scary' effectively when given a smart script, a talented director and a strong cast.

The film begins with two American guys, David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffen Dunne), backpacking their way through the remote countryside of England. After hitching a ride on a truckload of sheep they decide to take shelter from the lousy weather in what, on the outside at least, appears to be a quaint little pub called The Slaughtered Lamb. Once they enter, they find the locals none too warm to their company (look for a cameo from a young Rik Mayall here), particularly when they start asking about the ‘pentangle' on the wall. They're soon on their way, warned to stay o...Read the entire review

Watching My Stepmother Is An Alien decades after the fact, in an era where '80s nostalgia is overwhelming, it seems like there was a formula here. Take Ghostbusters star Dan Aykroyd, headlining another sci-fi effects comedy, throw in future Batman star Kim Basinger, nab Back to the Future composer Alan Silvestri, and put Richard Benjamin behind the camera (not exactly a household name, but hey, The Money Pit was a hit), and you've got a winner. Sadly, the results are significantly less than the sum of their parts.

Aykroyd plays Dr. Steve Mills, who's testing two things: the ability to send messages into deep space, and his boss's last nerve. When he fires up his organization's satellite dish beyond the recommended limits, thanks to a lightning storm raging and a jacket conveniently left in the right place, he manages to beam a message all the way to ano...Read the entire review

The best film of Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura, at least among the dozen or so top contenders I've seen, Red Angel (Akai tenshi, 1966) is a kind of female-centric Human Condition, director Masaki Kobayashi's massive three-film epic from Junpei Gomikawa's novel. Both are bleak, uncompromising war movies set on the Japan-colonized Manchuria. In The Human Condition the protagonist was a leftist labor camp supervisor while in Red Angel the heroine is a nurse at frontline military hospitals. In The Human Conidtion much of the focus was in the dehumanization of the Chinese by the racist captors, and later of the soldiers themselves, by their own comrades in arms. In Red Angel the focus shifts to the soldiers' brutality of women, both "comfort women" and, surprisingly, even the Japanese nurses, who are routinely raped. And, where in The Human Cond...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Arrow Video's boxed set release of Lies And Deceit: Five Films By Claude Chabrol is, just as it sounds, a collection of five films from the filmmaker many consider to be the French Alfred Hitchcock. While many consider Chabrol's earlier films to be superior to the ones included in this collection, those willing to give this material a chance will find quite a bit to look in both the feature films it offers up, and the care that Arrow has put into the set.

Chicken With Vinegar (a.k.a. Cop Au Ain a.k.a. Poulet au Vinaigre, 1985):

The first film begins when a photographer covertly snaps pictures of the attendees at a birthday party being held for a wealthy socialite woman named Delphine (Josephine Chaplin). Various characters are introduced here, fairly quickly and without a whole lot of focus, after which we meet up with a postman named Lou...Read the entire review

Cinematographer-turned-director Mario Bava (1914-1980) was a great artist yet virtually unknown in Italy even in the decades following his death, when his work was rediscovered and reappraised by writers such as Tim Lucas, whose huge, exhaustive biography is only slightly smaller than a Toyota Land Cruiser. However, Bava's films were big hits in many parts of the world, particularly the U.S., the U.K., and Japan. American International Pictures' Sam Arkoff admired Bava's ability to make super-cheap films looks far more expensive than they were and co-financed some of his best films.

More important, though, was that Bava was a true innovator. His Black Sunday (1960) inaugurated a new type of European-style horror film, while The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) effectively became Italy's first giallo. Planet of the Vampires (1965) was hugely influential on Ridley Scott...Read the entire review

Shaw Scope: Volume One (you mean there will be more!?) is a massive boxed set from Arrow Video, an eight-disc, 12-movie set of representative (sort-of) titles from Shaw Brothers (HK) Ltd., the dominant Hong Kong-based movie company of the 1960s and well into the ‘70s. Though various Shaw brothers had been kicking around the Asian film industry since 1925, it was this company, founded in 1958, that is most famous. Their Clearwater Bay studios, with its 15 soundstages, two backlots, state-of-the-art equipment and 1,300 employees, many culled from other parts of Asia, including Japan and South Korea, all but defined Hong Kong cinema for two decades. Their main rival, Cathay, ceased film production in 1970, but soon after a more lasting upstart, Golden Harvest, partly composed of disgruntled ex-Shaw employees, and a glut of far smaller but prolific independents, eventually led to Sha...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

This German psychological-horror import is directed by Michael Venus and stars Gro Swantje Kohlhof and Sandra Hüller. When flight attendant Marlene (Hüller) begins having disturbing visions of men committing suicide at a hotel, her daughter Mona (Kohlhof) worries she is having a psychological or emotional breakdown. But Marlene discovers an advertisement in a magazine confirming the mysterious hotel is a real place, so she travels to that town alone in an attempt to determine why the building keeps appearing in her dreams. At the hotel, Marlene has a psychotic episode that sends her to local hospital in a catatonic state. Mona decides to travel to the hotel, too, and gets to know the owner and his wife, Otto (August Schmölzer) and Lore (Marion Kracht), who have their own issues and unpleasant ties to Germany's past. As Mona dives deeper into the town's secrets, ...Read the entire review

An Italian-French co-production partly shot in Holland, Mill of the Stone Women (Italian title: Il mulino delle donne di pietra) has been rediscovered in recent years, praised by genre scholars for its modest artfulness and placed alongside other watershed horror titles all released in 1960: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Mario Bava's Black Sunday, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Roger Corman's House of Usher, Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face, Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku and others.

I confess to not warming up to Mill of the Stone Women to the same degree as its most fervent advocates, including Glenn Erickson (aka Cinesavant) but I am certainly equally intrigued by its unusualness. The film liberally draws inspiration from earlier, sometimes much earlier horror films and yet has its own unique look. It certainly doesn't resemble ot...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Arrow Video compiles three of their previously released giallo pictures in one convenient boxed set titled, appropriately enough, Giallo Essentials. Here's what is contained in the set…

What Have They Done To Your Daughters?:

Massimo Dallamano directed this 1974 film as a pseudo follow-up to What Have You Done To Solange?, a picture he'd made two years prior but this film is far less a traditional giallo than the earlier picture. Rather, the film blends giallo elements with the type of action and high-intensity police procedural aspects that were common in the police films popular in Italy at the time. The results are impressive.

Inspector Valentini (Mario Adorf), a cop based out of Rome, gets a phone call from an unnamed informant and based on the information he receives, heads out to investigate. This leads him to an old abandoned a...Read the entire review

For the uninitiated, giallo, in the movie sense, refers to a primarily Italian film genre that developed during the 1960s, peaking in the first half of the 1970s before gradually trailing off significantly by the end of the decade. These distinctive movies were generally mystery-thrillers, usually incorporating psychological horror and erotic elements. They are often puzzle films, typically revolving around a protagonist trying to solve a murder or series of murders with bizarre and/or inexplicable aspects. Sometimes the protagonist witnesses a murder or seemingly innocuous or confusing incident that only makes sense during the climax, when All Is Revealed, and here the best giallo are often very clever. Pushing the boundaries of sex and violence, these films are somewhat similar to Hitchcock's later thrillers (Marnie and Frenzy are very giallo-like) and often ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Made in 1989, Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge, which was directed by Richard Friedman, tells you everything you need to know about the story right there in the title, but for those who need a little more than that, it follows a young man named Eric Matthews (Derek Rydall) whose ex-girlfriend, Melody Austin (Kari Whitman), along with her friend, Susie (Kimber Sissons), gets a job at a store in the new Midwood Mall just before it is set to open to the public. Eric watches Melody from the shadows, steals himself a few duds and a crossbow and basically stalks her around the place. See, a year or so ago, Eric and Melody were very much in love but a fire ravaged his family home and supposedly killed him. Obviously it didn't, but it left physical and clearly emotional scars and this new mall? It's been built on the land where Eric's home once stood.

As thing...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) is one of Dario Argento's best-known films, a signature giallo that has the seemingly perfect blend of simmering suspense, operatic camerawork, and gory kills. It has resurfaced many times in the home video disc era: DVD Talk reviewed it in 2000, in 2011 on Blu-ray and upgraded DVD, and in 2018 when Arrow sent us a check disc for their Blu-ray version. I'm not one to reinvent the wheel, so I'll defer to those great critical offerings and be brief with my personal assessment of the...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In The Chinese Boxer Jimmy Wang Yu plays a noble Kung Fu student named Lei Ming. One day, a gang of vicious Japanese Karate punks burst onto the scene and kill everyone at his school except for him. Everyone is dead, even his teacher. This inspires Lei Ming to master the art of the iron palm technique and avenge everybody else's death by taking down the Japanese devils and making them pay. One by one, he tracks them down and squares off against his enemies until it's time for the ultimate showdown.

One of the first big stars of the Shaw Brothers martial arts films, Jimmy Wang Yu has a fantastic screen presence and that sort of cool charm and charisma that always makes for a good leading man. Sure, maybe his martial arts skills were a little below some of his contemporaries and yeah, okay, a lot of his movies relied more on gimmicks than really good fight ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Director Ridley Scott followed up his legendary Alien and Blade Runner, which was considered a disappointment at the time of release, with this original, epic dark fantasy film starring Tom Cruise, Tim Curry and Mia Sara. Scott, now infamous for his extended and director's cuts of films, battled with the studio over final cut of Legend, and the film ultimately arrived in theaters in an 89-minute version with soundtrack by electronic band Tangerine Dream. There was a slightly longer European version of the film, and in 2000 the folks at Universal Studios found a pristine print of Scott's 113-minute preview cut with score by Jerry Goldsmith. That became the director's cut that was thought lost, and this new Arrow Video Limited Editio...Read the entire review