Murders in the Rue Morgue 4K (1971)

The latest in the ‘Hammer Presents’ range sees the label following up its release of CRY OF THE BANSHEE with another AIP-produced Christopher Wicking (writer) and Gordon Hessler (director) collaboration. In fact it was their last, and marked the final film in the lengthy series of Poe ‘adaptations’ (some of them stretch the definition a bit) the company had been making since the 1960s.

At a Grand Guignol-style theatre in Paris members of the repertory company are being bumped off by a fiend in a black cape who pours acid on them. The company’s leader, Cesar Charron (Jason Robards in a very Vincent Price-style role), also has other problems to worry about as his wife Madeleine (Christine Kaufman) keeps having dreams about a masked man swinging an axe. The police are baffled and as the murders continue, all set against the backdrop of the stage play ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ that is being performed at the theatre, it turns out that the answers to everything lie in the past.

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE is a bit too clever for its own good, wanting to do something different from adapting the Poe novel while acknowledging it, giving us a revenge plot filled with murders and even more stuff regarding the Charron family’s past. It’s all a bit much, not helped by having Christopher Wicking write the screenplay. Known for his rather oblique treatments of horror properties, Wicking’s scripts could tend toward the confusing and you really have to pay attention here to appreciate everything that’s going on. 

But for EuroHorror fans it remains a treat. Set in France and filmed in Spain by an American company operating out of its UK office, the film is an understandable mixture of actors, including Bond villain Adolfo Celi, Paul Naschy standby Maria Perschy, Hessler regulars Marshall Jones and Peter Arne, as well as international stars Herbert Lom, Lilli Palmer and Michael Dunn.  

Hammer’s disc features a commentary track from the always enthusiastic Chris Alexander (who performed similar duties on CRY OF THE BANSHEE) on the 1.85:1 aspect ratio director’s cut version. You also get the 1.66:1 framed theatrical release. The director’s cut runs 98 minutes, the theatrical runs 87 and also contain the tinted dream sequences some may remember from TV showings back in the day. Otherwise we get a new talking head piece from Kim Newman (21 minutes), an archival interview with director Gordon Hessler (12 minutes) image gallery, and a trailer. 

Gordon Hessler’s MURDERS IN THE RUN MORGUE is out in 4K as separate UHD and Blu-ray releases on Monday 20th July 2026

Wake in Fright 4K (1971)

“May You Dream of the Devil, and…”

Arrow are giving us a welcome 4K restoration on separate UHD and Blu-ray releases, of Ted Kotcheff’s masterful adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s novel.

It’s a pretty faithful adaptation as well, following the novel’s plot of teacher John Grant (Gary Bond) who works in a school in the middle of Nowhere, Australia, finishes up for the holidays and heads off to Sydney to be with his girlfriend. Unfortunately he makes the fatal mistake of stopping off in the mining town of Bundanyabba and the even more fatal mistake of having a few drinks and a bit of a gamble, the result being he loses all his money. 

Where WAKE IN FRIGHT scores all the points, however, is in how it portrays what happens next, with the new ‘friends’ John has made not caring a jot that he has no money and instead happy to involve him in the endless rounds of drinking, fighting and kangaroo hunting that make up their lives. And it’s not long before John finds it incredibly easy to just slip into that lifestyle as well, perhaps permanently.

WAKE IN FRIGHT boasts excellent performances, not just from Bond (a career high) but from the actors playing the inhabitants of ‘The Yabba’, especially Donald Pleasence as a burned-out doctor. The  harsh Australian vistas look even more bleached in 4K and cautious viewers should be warned that the kangaroo-hunting sequence is intact.

Arrow’s release gives us a lot more extras than Eureka’s Blu-ray of ten years ago. The commentary with director Ted Kotcheff and editor Anthony Buckley has been ported over, and we get a brand new second commentary by Peter Galvin, who wrote the book detailing the making of the film. There’s also a look at the film’s Broken Hill locations (an impressive 50 minutes), an interview with sound editors Keith Palmer and Eddy Joseph (15 minutes), and a profile of Donald Pleasence from Kim Newman (15 minutes).

Director Philippe Mora discusses the film with Paul Harris for 20 minutes, there’s a new interview with cinematographer Brian West (21 minutes) and archival interviews with Ted Kotcheff (13 minutes)  and actor Jack Thompson (7 minutes), as well as archival audio interviews with Kotcheff (a whopping 130 minutes) and composer John Scott (16 minutes). We also get Kotcheff’s Q&A from the 2009 Toronto Film Festival (46 minutes), alternate scenes from the UK & US version titled OUTBACK (11 minutes), a 1971 TV segment on the film (6 minutes) and another from 2009 on the film’s rediscovery (7 minutes), an obituary for actor Chips Rafferty (3 minutes), trailers and an image gallery. There’s also a fascinating 38 minute trailer reel of Australian films like THE SUNDOWNERS and WALKABOUT, all made by overseas film-makers. The disc also comes with a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film.

Ted Kotcheff’s WAKE IN FRIGHT is out in 4K in separate UHD and Blu-ray editions on Monday 29th June 2026

Toomorrow (1970)

Hurrah for the BFI who, together with US boutique Blu-ray outfit Deaf Crocodile, are giving us a 4K restoration of writer-director Val Guest’s TOOMORROW, a bizarre but extremely watchable British science fiction pop musical starring Olivia Newton-John, complete with a bunch of similarly eccentric extras.

Toomorrow is a band whose music is apparently so amazing it’s going to save the universe (shades of BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE). The three guys in the band exhibit entry-level charisma but Olivia Newton-John is quite obviously a star in the making. Roy Dotrice is a clueless alien who has been reporting from Earth for 3000 years but still has to have the band pointed out to him by his bosses. Other highlights include BritHorror little girl standby Chloe Franks as Livvy’s character as a little girl and Margaret Nolan being very funny as a sexy alien who is given a crash course in how to seduce someone by being taken to see, amongst other things, Pete Walker’s SCHOOL FOR SEX. 

One for fans of really weird and obscure 1970s British cinema (which will be quite a few people reading this, I suspect), your mileage with TOOMORROW may vary but the film is never boring. Other faces familiar to enthusiasts of this period of British cinema include Tracey Crisp (Richard Gordon’s THE PROJECTED MAN) and Imogen Hassall (Freddie Francis’ MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY, Robert Hartford-Davis’ INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED and, of course, Gerald Thomas’ CARRY ON GIRLS).

As mentioned above, the release is a ‘co-production’ between the BFI here and Deaf Crocodile in the US, having undergone a 4K restoration from the original camera negative and presented here in High Definition. Extras include a commentary track from Andrew Sandoval which will tell you a lot you don’t know if you’re not as up on the musical trends of the period as he obviously is. There’s also plenty of good stuff about the trouble behind the scenes of the production.

Other extras include The Val Guest Guardian interview (62 minutes) from 1998 plus a ten minute piece from ten years earlier in which the director talks about the film’s troubled production over still images from the BFI archive. New material comes in the form of a video essay about the film from Celeste de la Cabra (17 minutes). A genuine highlight of the disc, as with so many other BFI releases, is the wealth of archival and sometimes frankly bizarre short subjects they’ve been able to dig up. First we get THE NOSE HAS IT!, an eight minute 1942 short starring UK comedy legend (yes he is) Arthur Askey telling you all to sneeze into your handkerchiefs to help the war effort. It’s included because it was directed by Val Guest and it also has photography by Arthur FIEND WITHOUT A FACE Crabtree. 

Then there’s TOMORROW NIGHT IN LONDON (5 minutes) which is a short travelogue-style piece from 1969. Also from 1969 is IF I COULD TURN YOU ON (13 minutes), a black and white record of a pretty bizarre live performance from US troupe Living Theatre that could be misconstrued as horror if you’re in the wrong / right frame of mind. And then, perhaps the oddest of all (especially for overseas viewers) there’s an episode of TV series Chimp-Mates entitled Alice Goes Pop! (17 minutes), a fine example of what we were watching as kids back in 1975. Written by Frank DEMONS OF THE MIND Godwin with music by Harry Robinson (TWINS OF EVIL, HAWK THE SLAYER and a lot of other great stuff) and featuring Roy Kinnear and Godfrey James (Angel Blake’s father in BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW) it’s the story of an adopted chimp who learns to play the drums. The first pressing of the disc also comes with a booklet featuring new writing on both the film and Val Guest as well as an essay on manufactured pop groups. 

Val Guest’s TOOMORROW is out on Blu-ray from the BFI in a 4K restoration on Monday 22nd June 2026 

Madhouse (1974)

        One of the films from the tail end of the golden age of British horror (arguably the Golden Age of Horror full stop) is finally getting a UK Blu-ray release courtesy of Eureka. MADHOUSE stars Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Robert Quarry and is getting a 1080p HD presentation with the original UK mono audio and a bunch of extras.

But is the film any good? Well it’s early 1970s, British, with Price and Cushing so if you’re a fan of the era then it’s a must-see. Add Linda Hayden, Natasha Pyne and Adrienne Corri to the mix and, again, if you love this era of film-making then you have to have this one in your collection. However, if you’re a little more discerning in your horror movie tastes…

Vincent Price made MADHOUSE just after appearing in THEATRE OF BLOOD, arguably the pinnacle of his career, and it cannot help but suffer by comparison. The premise is a lot of fun - at a bitchy Hollywood party horror star Paul Toombes (Price) finds his bride to be Julie Crosthwait with her head cut off. The killer is never found. Paul undergoes rehab, and then when he returns, to television rather than film, he finds that people around him are being bumped off in a variety of grisly ways. But who’s responsible?

All of that sounds marvellous, doesn’t it? The main reason MADHOUSE isn’t as lauded as THEATRE OF BLOOD or THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES is that this entire premise gets a bit squandered with a script (rewritten several times) that doesn’t really know how to do this sort of thing in a style writers like Brian Clemens had perfected. Amicus made this as a co-production with AIP which allows use of the AIP back catalogues (ie the Corman Poe films) for clips of Toombes’ career which we get to see on the Michael Parkinson show. If you can isolate MADHOUSE from those other classics the chances are you’ll have a better time with it. At least it’s a lot better than Angus Hall’s source novel.

Eureka’s Blu-ray comes with a nice nine minute introduction to the film from Stephen Laws who amongst other things gives you some (highly recommended) post-film reading to look up. There's an academic video essay from Mary Going that looks at how MADHOUSE fits in to the traditions of the gothic and the slasher film (26 minutes), and a commentary track from David Del Valle that's up to his usual standard. There’s also a decent eleven minute archival making of featurette from 2015 that concisely tells you a lot about the making of the film. Eureka’s limited edition (2000 copies) also comes with an O card slipcase, a new essay on AIP, and an archival interview with director Jim Clark by John Hamilton which was originally published in The Dark Side and which is well worth a read. 

MADHOUSE is getting a limited edition Blu-ray release from Eureka on Monday 22nd June 2026

Empire of the Ants (1977)

Eureka are bringing one of writer-producer-director Bert I Gordon’s later (he’d been making them since the 1950s) giant creature features to Blu-ray. This time it’s Joan Collins fighting giant ants, so that's two major 1970s cult movie boxes ticked.

Property developer Marilyn Fryser (Joan Collins) has brought a bunch of prospective investors to an isolated beach location to give them a tour of where she intends to build a new community of luxury residences. However, she has reckoned without some pesky radioactive waste that has washed up on the shore and which the local ant population have, for some reason, found irresistible.

It’s not long before the cast of late 1970s B movie veterans and familiar TV faces (Robert Lansing, Albert Salmi, Robert Pine, Pamela Susan Shoop) are fighting off creatures that have exhibited miraculous powers of growth with the aid of just a few mouthfuls of silver stuff from an oil drum.

Before you ask ‘did H G Wells ever write such daft exploitative fare?’ well no of course he didn’t, but slapping old Herbert George’s name on THE FOOD OF THE GODS had done well for Bert the previous year so presumably doing it again seemed like a good idea, even if the movie is a far cry from its alleged source material. Back in the 1970s there were three ways of doing giant monsters: Ray Harryhausen-style stop motion, giant puppets or normal creatures filmed and blown up really, really big. Bert I Gordon (known as Mr B.I.G in some circles) always tended to go for the third option but there’s some decent puppet work in here too as Joan and the gang get to grapple with things as calculating, malicious and deadly as her own Alexis Carrington from TV’s Dynasty. Perhaps she used it for a few pointers. In fact the story goes that she was so upset at the 'low point' her career had reached with this she decided to radically overhaul things and starred in THE STUD the following year. The rest, off course, is history and, in way, she and her fans have Bert and his giant ants to thank for that. 

Eureka’s transfer is 1080p HD and unsurprisingly looks better than previous DVD releases. Extras include a jolly and affectionate seven minute introduction from Chris Cooke of Nottingham's Mayhem Film Festival which you might want to watch after the feature if you don't want to know too much about it, an 18 minute talking head piece from Kim Newman on the career of Bert I Gordon, and two commentary tracks, one with the director himself where he requires quite a bit of prompting from an interviewer who doesn't really know that right questions to ask, but don't worry because the other from David Del Valle and Michael Varrati is an absolute hoot with its anecdotes and facts you probably don't know including which kinds of flowers Madonna loathes. The limited edition of 2000 copies also comes with an ‘O’ card slipcase and a booklet featuring a new essay on the film, creature features in general and the 1970s in particular.

Bert I Gordon’s EMPIRE OF THE ANTS is out on Blu-ray from Eureka on Monday 22nd June 2026

The Cars That Ate Paris 4K (1974) and The Plumber (1979)

“Impressive Package of Early Peter Weir Works”

The BFI are releasing, in a limited edition two disc set, with either one 4K UHD disc and one Blu-ray or two Blu-rays depending on your preference, director Peter Weir’s first feature film, along with his later THE PLUMBER (1979) featured on the second disc.

Disc One: The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)

The residents of the small Australian town of Paris have developed a novel way of sustaining their town: they set traps for people driving past so that they crash. The townsfolk strip the cars and, depending on their mental capacity after the accident, the victims are either absorbed into the community or become fodder for the local doctor’s brain surgery experiments, with most of them ending up as long-term psychiatric patients on Bellevue Ward at the Paris hospital. Arthur (Terry Camileri) is ‘lucky’ enough to be forced into joining a community where the bizarre annual local ball and the frustrations of the local youth in their souped-up salvaged cars are all going to collide.

THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS is a strange film that’s difficult to categorise. Featured in Philip Strick’s book Science Fiction Movies it isn’t SF really, unless you imagine we are seeing the behaviour of a small town just a few years into the future. Indeed, you can see a young George Miller relishing the mad vehicles and car crashes and saying “See? THAT is what I want for MAD MAX”.

It’s not really a horror film either, although it certainly has horror elements and that is how its director describes it in the extras. However, it’s also easy to see Peter Weir’s Monty Python-style group TV origins as well, and sometimes the film feels a little like a bizarre French black comedy (perhaps the name Paris isn’t so random after all). Castwise there will be some familiar faces for film fans including John Meillon from CROCODILE DUNDEE as the town mayor who runs everything, Bruce Spence from MAD MAX 2 and a hundred other highly recognisable character roles as one of the locals and Kevin Miles, veteran of literally hundreds of episodes of Australian television, as the doctor. 

Extras include a commentary track by Australian film expert Dr Stephen Morgan who, amongst other things, helpfully contextualises the film in relation to the state of small Australian towns at the time. Morgan also contributes an essay to  the accompanying booklet. There are two Weir-directed short films: 3 to Go: Michael is a 31 minute 1970 black and white piece commenting on contemporary youth, whereas Incredible Floridas is a 12 minute 1972 documentary short (12 minutes) about the avant composer Richard Meale and his piece of music which was inspired by the writings of poet Arthur Rimbaud.

There is a new interview with star Terry Camilleri (21 minutes), and archival ones with producer Hal McElroy (6 minutes), a 2003 interview with Weir about the film (11 minutes) and a longer career-length Guardian interview from 1985 which runs 70 minutes and is provided as an extra commentary track. There’s also a 15 minute video essay about the film from Chris O’Neill and the usual image gallery and trailer.

Disc Two: The Plumber (1979)

While her husband Brian (Robert Coleby from The Young Doctors and Chopper Squad) is busy engaged in medical research at the university, Jill Cowper (Judy Morris who also co-wrote the animated penguin movie HAPPY FEET) stays in their campus accommodation studying for her masters degree in anthropology. Her peaceful days are interrupted by Max the plumber (Iver Kants) who proceeds to turn the family bathroom, and thereafter her life, completely upside down, and not in a comedy way. Eventually things get so bad that Jill has to resort to desperate measures to get rid of a man who may be simply a ‘harmless character’ or a gaslighting maniac.

THE PLUMBER feels like an Australian take on the works of British writer Alan Ayckbourn, taking what initially seems to be a simple domestic situation and quickly escalating it to unbearable intensity. Weir keeps everything tight and at 77 minutes the tension never drops. It’s a fascinating well-made and well acted piece that Weir made after his classic THE LAST WAVE (1977).

Extras on disc two include a chatty commentary between Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson, an eight minute interview with Weir about the film from 2008 and, perhaps most interesting of all, Peter Weir’s Dream Within a Dream, a 19 minute installation piece that uses alternate takes and unused footage from his classic PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK alongside a new narration Weird recorded for it. Some of the footage looks a little rough but this is still essential viewing for PICNIC obsessives and a very nice addition to what is a very well put together set of early Weir works. Finally the set also comes with a booklet which features writing on both films as well as a Weir interview. 

Peter Weir’s THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS in 4K and THE PLUMBER in 1080p are being released by the BFI in a limited edition two disc set (one UHD & one Blu-ray or two Blu-rays), as well as on Apple TV and Amazon Prime on Monday 25th May 2026