1. The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932)
Between Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933), director James Whale made this over-the-top lark of a dark and stormy night with stranded travelers and a crazy family. In a wordless performance, Boris Karloff headlines as the deformed butler who inspired The Addams Family‘s Lurch. Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, Melvyn Douglas and Ernest Thesiger are among those so vividly present, and Whale has a ball directing them through a series of funny, stylish scenes. This new Cohen edition provides the extras from Kino’s old disc, including commentaries by Stuart and Whale biographer James Curtis. The astounding 4K restoration of sound and image blows previous editions away. There’s now zero hiss on the soundtrack, all the better to hear Massey starting things off with the first line of dialogue: “Hell!”
(Available from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)
2. The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, 2015)
Two mermaid sisters (Marta Mazurek, Michalina Olszanska) can summon legs at will to mingle on shore with the band at a Polish disco, where their siren act is a hit. In this dark reinvention of Hans Christian Andersen’s already dark The Little Mermaid, one love-struck sister is tempted to sacrifice her fishy nature for human mortality while her sister indulges moments of bloodlust. Abetted by writer Robert Bolesto and twin sister-musicians Barbara and Zuzanna Wronska, director Agnieszka Smoczynska offers a woman’s POV on the fairy tale crossed with her glittery childhood memories of ’80s Poland. The result: a bizarre, funy, intuitive genre mash-up with plenty of songs. This Criterion disc offers a making-of and two short films by Smoczynska, also on musical subjects.
(Available from Criterion Collection / Read PopMatters review here.)
3. Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016)
In the category of movies that don’t explain themselves in favor of leaving some of their mysteries intact, here’s Olivier Assayas’ follow-up to the luminous Clouds of Sils Maria. Kristen Stewart again plays a celebrity’s lackey with a nominally glamorous, actually stupid job, and she’s waiting for a sign from her dead twin brother. What about the ghostly presence of a stalker who sends provocative text messages to her phone? The story flows into passages of outright horror complete with ectoplasm, blood, and ooga-booga soundscapes, and finally settles for asking the questions of whether the “other world” is outside or inside us. Assayas has fashioned a slinky, sexy, perplexing ghost story wrapped around a young woman’s desire for something more in her life. There’s a Cannes press conference and a brief talk from Assayas on his influences and impulses.
(Available from Criterion Collection / Reader PopMatters review here.
4. The Ghoul (Gareth Tunley, 2016)
The hero (Tom Meeten) tells his therapist that in his dreams, some things are very detailed and others are vague. This movie tells you bluntly what it’s up to: a Möbius strip narrative that loops back on itself , as attributed to the diabolical therapists for their cosmic purposes. Then we just wait for the hero to come full circle and commit the crime that, as a cop, he’s supposedly investigating. But this doesn’t tell us whether he’s really an undercover cop pretending to be depressed, or really a depressive imagining he’s a cop, so some existential mysteries will never be answered. It’s that kind of movie, indebted to David Lynch and other purveyors of nightmarish unreality. Arrow’s disc offers a making-of, a commentary from writer-director Gareth Tunley and Meeten along with a producer, and a short film from Tunley and Meeten.
(Available from Arrow Video)
5. The Illustrated Man (Jack Smight, 1969)
When a young man goes skinny-dipping with a mysterious stranger (Rod Steiger) who’s covered with tattoos, the pictures comes to life in a series of odd stories, all created by Ray Bradbury and featuring Steiger and Claire Bloom in multiple roles. Nobody was satisfied with this failure, and it remains condemned to not having reached its potential. So why does Warner Archive grace it with a Blu-ray? Because even its failure has workable elements, including Jerry Goldsmith’s score and the cold neatness of the one scene people remember: “The Veldt”, which combines primal child/parent hostilities (a common Bradbury theme) with early virtual reality. It answers the question of why the kids spend so much time in their room, and why they’re hostile at being pulled away.
(Available from Warner Bros.)
6. The Hidden (Jack Sholder, 1987)
In one of my favorite action movies of the ’80s, a post-Blue Velvet and pre-Twin Peaks Kyle MacLachlan plays an FBI agent who forms a buddy-cop bond with Michael Nouri while pursuing a perp — a bodiless entity that plugs into the human id. In the midst of slam-bang action comes a pivotal moment when a startling question is asked: “How do you like being human?” The heart of the movie, rich in subtext, finds two men learning to embrace what’s alien to them. In pop-culture evolution, this movie falls between Hal Clement’s novel Needle and the TV series Alien Nation. On this Warner Archive Blu-ray, Sholder offers a commentary with colleague Tim Hunter.
(Available from Warner Bros.)
7. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)
Speaking of Twin Peaks, here we have a textbook example of a movie that pleased almost nobody upon its release but has now generated such interest, thanks in large part to this year’s Twin Peaks revival, that it arrives on Criterion. A feature-film prequel to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s original TV serial that answered none of its questions and tossed in a raft of new ones, the film functions as one of cinema’s most downbeat, disruptive and harsh depictions of a middle-class American teenage girl’s social context. Sheryl Lee delivers a virtuoso performance that deserved the Oscar there was no way she’d be nominated for, and she wasn’t. The extras, including a 90-minute film of deleted and alternate takes assembled by Lynch, have been available on previous sets.
(Available from Criterion Collection)
8. The Green Slime (Kinji Fukasaku, 1968)
Incredibly, Warner Archive upgrades its on-demand DVD of a groovy, brightly colored creature feature with this Blu-ray. As a clever reviewer indicated in this PopMatters review, what director Kinji Fukasaku saw as a Vietnam allegory functions more obviously as a manifestation of sexual tension between alpha-jock spacemen competing for the attention of a foxy female scientist, and this subconsciously creates an explosion of big green tentacled critters who overrun the space station. While we don’t believe in “so bad it’s good,” this falls squarely into the category of things so unfacetiously absurd, they come out cool. There’s a sublimely idiotic theme song.
(Available from Warner Bros.)
Let’s be honest — not everyone feels merry at this time of year. Psychologists say depression looms large around the holidays and one way to deal with it is cathartically. Thus, we submit that scary movies can be even more salutary at Christmas than at Halloween. So, Merry Christmas. Ho ho ho wa ha ha!