The Oblong Box (1969)

"AIP from the BFI"

The BFI gives us a dose of gothic nostalgia as it releases American International Pictures' THE OBLONG BOX on Blu-ray.

It's 1860 and Sir Julian Markham (Vincent Price) is keeping his horribly scarred brother Edward (Alister Williamson) locked up in the attic. But Edward has bribed some crooked associates to drug him so he will appear dead and then dig him up after his 'funeral'.

Unfortunately body snatchers get to the coffin first and deliver it to Dr Neuhartt (Christopher Lee). Revived, the even more mad than he was before Edward embarks on a vendetta against those who messed up his escape, although when he finds out why he acquired his terrible injuries he comes after his brother as well.

By 1969 AIP's Poe cycle, which had started with FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER in 1960, had changed radically. Original producer-director Roger Corman had left, as had many of the personnel that had made those films so special. Michael Reeves was due to direct THE OBLONG BOX but was replaced by producer Gordon Hessler. For detailed reasons why listen to Steve Haberman's commentary, which goes into great detail about Reeves' contribution to the picture. 

It's by no means a great film, and one has to wonder why Christopher Lee didn't get cast as Edward so the two great stars could face off against one another. That said the combination of Hessler and screenwriter Christopher Wicking always yielded interesting results and their desire to produce something different from the horror cinema of even five years' previously is certainly in evidence here. 

As well as the commentary, extras include the short films THE PIT (1962), previously available on the BFI's disc of SCHALCKEN THE PAINTER, and two silent pieces: PRELUDE (1927) inspired by the Premature Burial, and THE BELLS (1913) based on a Poe poem. There's also a new 17 minute interview with Price's daughter Victoria and ten minutes of Roger Corman on Poe. The disc also comes with a booklet featuring writing on the film from Peter Fuller (about the film) Benjamin Halligan (about Michael Reeves' involvement) and James Bell (about THE PIT).

THE OBLONG BOX is out on Blu-ray from the BFI on Monday 21st October 2024

Starve Acre (2024)

 

"Just Like Some of the Best 1970s TV Horrors"

Writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo's adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley's novel gets a Blu-ray, DVD and digital format release from the BFI.

Rural Yorkshire in the 1970s. Archaeologist Richard (Matt Smith) and his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark) have come to live at Starve Acre, Richard's ancestral family home. With them is their son Owen (Arthur Shaw) who has started claiming that something is whispering to him and goading him to do things. When Owen blinds a horse his parents take him to a psychiatrist but before any diagnosis can be reached Owen dies of an asthma attack. 

As part of his grieving process, Richard becomes obsessed with the legend of a great life-giving tree, the buried stump and roots of which are supposed to be on his land. During his digging he discovers the buried skeleton of a hare. Soon its bones are developing new flesh, but that's the least of the horrors in store for Richard and his family.

It takes a little while for STARVE ACRE to find its focus, and an hour in to its 98 minute running time you may well still be wondering where the events are all leading to, if indeed they are leading anywhere at all. Be assured, though, that the finale is appropriately gruesome and horrific, with an ending that feels straight out of the best 1970s BBC and ITV horrors.

Extras include an excellent 20 minute interview with author Hurley, who cites influences that include James Herbert and Clive Barker as well as giving nods to Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman. Composer Matthew Herbert gives an overview of his career in a 24 minute interview, and there are also on-set interviews wite Matt Smith (3 minutes), Morfydd Clark (8 minutes) and the team who made the hare (16 minutes plus they've brought the hare with them). You also get five minutes of behind the scenes footage and a gallery, a one minute deleted scene and actor Sean Gilder reading an extract from the novel. The accompanying booklet includes essays by the director, Catherine Spooner, and Adam Scovell.

STARVE ACRE is out from the BFI in a dual format Blu-ray & DVD edition, and digitally on BFI Player, Amazon Prime and iTunes on Monday 21st October 2024

Haunted Ulster Live (2023)

     The spirit of Stephen Volk's GHOSTWATCH is strong in this Irish production that uses the same approach as that BBC drama but tries to take things in a slightly different direction. 

It's Halloween 1998 and Northern Irish TV channel NITV are broadcasting a live special in which veteran TV presenter Gerry Burns (Mark Claney) and promising newcomer (tipped to be the next Blue Peter presenter) Michelle Kelly (Aimee Richardson) are hosting an investigation into an alleged haunted house in Belfast.

This includes interviewing the family who live there (a single mother and her two children), and bringing in a psychic, paranormal investigators with the usual barrage of temperature gauges and night vision photography. Oh, and they've also installed famous DJ Declan in the attic to play records and broadcast on the radio.

Strange things soon begin to happen. The little girl is put into a trance by the medium and seems possessed, the medium herself has a seizure, one of the experts brought in says that the house was built on the site of a standing stone and it seems the house has been the site of unnatural apparitions for many years.

So far so GHOSTWATCH, which managed to achieve what it set out to do rather better than HAUNTED ULSTER LIVE does. That's partly down to the fact that the finale is a bit garbled with ideas that riff on John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS and Renny Harlin's  THE DYATLOV PASS INCIDENT. It's not a bad film at all, and if you liked GHOSTWATCH or LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL you'll probably have a good time with this. it's just not quite up to the films it seems to have been inspired by.

HAUNTED ULSTER LIVE is out on digital platforms on Monday 14th October 2024 

I Walked With a Zombie and The Seventh Victim (1943)

"Two Classic Lewtons get the 4K Treatment"

Bravo to Criterion, who are releasing two of the best films producer Val Lewton made for RKO in the 1940s on 4K UHD and Blu-ray.

Jacques Tourneur's (heavily Jane Eyre inspired) I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE is the story of a nurse, Betsy (Frances Dee) who takes a position on a Caribbean island looking after Jessica (Christine Gordon) the near-catatonic wife of Paul (Tom Conway). Apparently Jessica got that way after contracting a severe illness that affected her spinal cord, but the song Sir Lancelot (a mainstay of 1940s and 1950s movies) sings suggests more is going on. 

Falling in love with Paul and determined to help him at any cost, Betsy determines to cure Jessica with voodoo, and the result is one of the film's highlights - a midnight trek through the cane fields, including a confrontation with the zombiefied Carrefour (the iconic Darby Jones). 

Whereas many horror films of this period build to an often fiery climax, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE's strength lies more in the subtleties along the way, the character interplay and the dialogue, rather than in its ending, which is measured and sombre rather than a confrontation between 'good' and 'evil'. Tourneur's careful direction and the screenplay from Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray are all of a much higher quality than was probably required or expected by RKO, and the result is a classic you can show your non-horror loving friends to show how thoughtful and carefully put together classic genre cinema can be.

In THE SEVENTH VICTIM, Mary (a young Kim Hunter) learns that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has disappeared. Her attempts to find her lead to the discovery of the Palladists, a group of Satan worshippers, whom Jacqueline has betrayed and whom they now want dead. However the group has forsaken violence and so their intended victim (Jacqueline will be the seventh) has to kill themselves.

Some superbly atmospheric sequences help to paper over a screenplay that does feel a bit cobbled together, complete with an ending that must have left 1940s audiences open mouthed, and not in a good way. Lewton's films were always the antithesis of Universal's mid 1940s lumbering monster rallies, and while THE SEVENTH VICTIM is indeed haunting and ultimately desperately sad, it leaves too many important questions unanswered to be entirely satisfactory. That said, there's much to enjoy here, from the subway scene (did it influence de Palma?) to the numerology - there are plenty of instances of the number seven, or multiples thereof, and look at how many times the names of the places Mary visits consist of seven letters (an influence on Peter Greenaway's DROWNING BY NUMBERS, perhaps?). And of course there's that climactic scene where Brooks is pursued, perhaps by nothing more than her own anxiety and paranoia. Some think THE SEVENTH VICTIM is Lewton's best, but that's up to you to decide. 

Criterion's 4K transfers are, unsurprisingly, a huge improvement over the old DVDs. Comparing with the 1080p presentation on the Blu-ray there's extra crispness and detail that you would expect from the format, with a good level of grain in the image but the image noticeably clearer on the UHD.

Extras include an archival Stephen Jones & Kim Newman commentary for I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE while Steve Haberman performs similar duties for THE SEVENTH VICTIM (it's also an archival commentary - from the 2005 DVD release). Another alternate audio track on both films gives us excerpts from Adam Roche's eleven-part series about Val Lewton from his classic movie podcast The Secret History of Hollywood. 

Both the two films and the extras above can be found on Criterion's UHD disc. A Blu-ray is included with the UHD disc or it can be purchased separately. It includes all the above, but also: an erudite and well-illustrated talking head piece from film historian Imogen Sara Smith about the two films; the 2005 documentary Shadows in the Dark: the Val Lewton Legacy, which is excellent and it's good to see it resurrected on this set; 12 minutes of excerpts from the PBS series Monstrum about Haiti and zombies; more audio material from Adam Roche about Jean Brooks (53 minutes) and Tom Conway (69 minutes). There are also trailers for both films.

Finally, the set also comes with essays by Chris Fujiwara and Lucy Sante.

Val Lewton's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and THE SEVENTH VICTIM are being released on a single disc by Criterion as either Blu-ray only or a UHD / Blu-ray dual format package on Monday 14th October 2024

The Exorcist III (1990)

William Peter Blatty's own sequel to THE EXORCIST (and adapted from his sequel novel Legion) gets a 4K upgrade and a two disc release (one UHD, one Blu-ray) from Arrow.

An aging Lieutenant Kinderman (George C Scott, replacing the by then late Lee J Cobb from the original) is investigating a series of murders in which the victims have been decapitated and the head of a religious icon put in their place. The killer has the same modus operandi as the Gemini killer, who went to the electric chair fifteen years ago.

When Kinderman's hospitalised friend Father Dyer (Ed Flanders) becomes the latest victim, he learns that there's an inmate of the psychiatric ward who claims he is the Gemini killer, and also that he has connections to a certain exorcism performed fifteen years ago.

Taking a completely different approach to EXORCIST II Blatty's sequel is filled with impressive imagery and an endearing central performance. However when the film was finished executives insisted on an exorcism being included which is why Nicol Williamson's Father Morning has been rather obviously shoehorned in. It's also why Jason Miller is in here as well, apparently, as originally all the Gemini's scenes were played by Brad Dourif (and very good he is too).

Arrow's two disc set kicks off with a UHD that features a 4K UHD presentation of a 2K restoration of EXORCIST III. There's a new commentary from academics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson, an audio interview with Blatty, and a massive making of that at 104 minutes is nearly as long as the film itself.  There is also a stack of archival interviews with Blatty, Scott, Miller and others, a new interview with special effects artist Randy Moore, five minutes of bloopers and deleted scenes, a vintage making of and image galleries.

Disc two is a Blu-ray presentation of the original Blatty cut entitled LEGION, which was put together by the director and released under that title in 2016. This combines footage from the film with inserts from VHS tape, and has a different opening and ending. Unfortunately this was not provided for review but it does include a commentary track from Mark Kermode and Kim Newman.

THE EXORCIST III is out in a two disc UHD / Blu-ray combo pack from Arrow on Monday 7th October 2024

Interview with the Vampire Part II (2024)

Following its UK TV screening on BBC2, Acorn Media are releasing the eight-part second season of the TV adaptation of Anne Rice's INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE on Blu-ray, DVD and digital. They're also releasing a box set of the first two seasons, which is the best thing to get if you haven't seen season one, as you really need to before diving into this.

Season two carries straight on with the story, with Louis (Jacob Anderson) now relating his tale to Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) in the company of Armand (Assad Zaman). It's World War II and Louis and Claudia (now played by Delainey Hayes) are seeking more of their kind in Romania. They succeed, but it's in Paris, France where they get to properly meet more of their own kind at the Grand Guignol-style Theatre Des Vampires, which acts as a front for some very real bloodletting. It's also where Louis gets to meet Armand.

As with season one, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE PART II (the onscreen title) is executed superbly - production design, photography and acting are all top notch, and even if the Anne Rice novel might not have been your thing it's still definitely worth giving the series a look as this really is as good as gothic television drama gets. 

Acorn's Blu-ray set spreads the eight episodes over three discs. Extras include a four minute pre-premiere look with brief interviews with some of the principal cast members, 'insider' featurettes for each episode which last between five to eight minutes, a behind the scenes featurette and a Making Of featurette ('Show Me More') that's 42 minutes, all of which include interviews with cast and crew. There's also a two minute blooper reel.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE PART II is out on 

Blu-ray, DVD and digital from Acorn Media, 

as is a Season One and Two Box set on 

DVD and Blu-ray, on Monday 7th October 2024

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

"Excellent Presentation of a Unique Sequel"

Fans of John Boorman's sequel to William Friedkin's original THE EXORCIST have a treat in store as Arrow releases a two disc Blu-ray set of both the original 118 minute US version and the shorter, re-edited 103 minute international cut.

It's four years since Regan MacNeil's possession by the demon Pazuzu and her subsequent exorcism by Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow), who died in the process. Now the Catholic church, represented by Paul Henreid's Cardinal, have decided to recruit Father Lamont (Richard Burton) to investigate the case and find out if some of Merrin's wilder claims were true.

Meanwhile Regan (Linda Blair) is undergoing hypnotherapy by Dr Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) and her flashing light box. These therapies are conducted in the least confidential clinic room ever, where all the walls are made of glass and the many children that are presumably also Dr Tuskin's patients can see in when they're not being distracting by pushing large plush toys around or wheeling what looks like a huge soft sponge hexagon nut. 

Father Lamont straps on one of Dr Tuskin's leather headbands and joins in because Dr Tuskin doesn't seem to be too worried about medical ethics either. Soon he's seeing visions of locusts, Africa, and James Earl Jones. It seems Pazuzu is still 'deep within' Regan and that's because she is one of a number of people who have been born as 'forces for good'. This is explained in more detail using locusts as an analogy. Yes it is. Eventually Lamont and Regan end up back at the house from the first EXORCIST where we are treated to a climax of locusts as the building falls apart and it takes the surrounding neighbourhood ages to notice.

I can imagine back in 1977 Twentieth Century Fox arranging a screening of EXORCIST II for Mike Hodges, Stanley Mann, and other personnel and saying 'This is not how we want OMEN II to turn out - understand?' In fact it's a bit of a mystery why Warners thought they were onto a winner with this one (it received a massive release in the US) as, rather than John Boorman's proposed meditation on the power of good, EXORCIST II is a mess of incoherence, stultifying dullness, and laugh out loud Bad Film moments. Richard Burton looks understandably bewildered throughout, while Ennio Morricone's main theme is beautiful but doesn't fit with anything it's used to underscore. In fact Quentin Tarantino put it to better use in his 2015 THE HATEFUL EIGHT. What you do get is something fascinating to film students but perplexing and ultimately unsatisfying to the mainstream audience it was intended for.

Arrow's Blu-ray set brings us the full 118 minute version on disc one, with no fewer than four (!) commentary tracks. One is archival from John Boorman and the other three are academic - an archival one from Scott Michael Bosco and two new ones from Paul Kittredge and the late Lee Gambin, and Kelly Goodner and Jim Hemphill. The Boorman is best if you want explanations about why he made it, while the others all touch on different aspects of the film, with Kittredge and Gambin to be congratulated on their effusive enthusiasm while the Goodner and Hemphill is just as good if rather more restrained. Other extras include two archival interviews from 2018's Shout Factory release with Linda Blair (20 minute) and editor Tom Priestley (7 minutes).

Disc two has the international cut and a commentary track from Mike White who very helpfully points out the differences, although no-one will need any help spotting the cobbled together opening. Add in trailers and image galleries and it's quite the exhaustive (and exhausting) package.

John Boorman's EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC is out in a two disc Blu-ray set from Arrow on Monday 7th October 2024