Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your viewing list.
The true story of the 47 rōnin who took revenge for the death (by seppuku) of their daimyō Lord Asano after he assaulted the powerful court official Kira in response to an insult was regarded as an exemplum for the samurai code of honour known as bushidō, and has been the subject of many plays, television shows and films. Indeed over his career, beloved actor Toshiro Mifune appeared in three different versions of the story — Hiroshi Inagaki’s 1962 film Chūshingara, the 1971 TV series Daichūshingara, and this epic feature from Kinji Fukasaku, where he plays Lord Tsuchiya Michinao.
The climax will eventually deliver on the promised violence, including an intense, prolonged sword duel between Fuwa Kazuemon (Sonny Chiba), bodyguard to the rōnin’s leader Ōishi Kuranosuke (Yorozuya Kinnosuke), and Kobayashi Heihachiro (Tsunehiko Watase), bodyguard to Kira (Nobuo Kaneko). Yet for the most part Fukasaku plays a waiting game, focusing on the psychological tensions of a revenge that took place some 14 months after Asano’s suicide, requiring extraordinary trust and forbearance on the part of rōnin who were often as unsure as the authorities what, if anything, Ōishi was plotting. Accordingly this plays like Sam Mendes’ Jarhead, dramatising men of action reduced to inaction.
The Fall of Ako Castle is available on Blu-ray from 4 December via Eureka
After, cornered and dying, the ‘Lakeshore Strangler’ Charles ‘Chucky’ Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) uses a Voodoo spell to transfer his soul into a Good Guy doll, he hangs low in the elevated brownstone apartment of single mother Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) where he has become the beloved toy of her six-year-old son Andy (Alex Vincent). Eventually he reveals himself, pursuing a horrific vendetta against his enemies, and seeking a more permanent home in the body of his innocent new owner.
They say Good Guys finish last, but the Child’s Play franchise, far from ending, just keeps coming back, with its now iconic (and eminently commodifiable) villain, its multiple sequels (plus 2019 reboot), and its TV-series spinoff. Key to this success, now spanning over three-and-a-half decades, is its consistency, with key personnel (including Dourif and writer-turned-franchise-director Don Mancini) remaining in place, and its willingness to let the core mythology evolve in increasingly unhinged directions.
Also crucial, though, is just how good Tom Holland’s original film is: a Hitchcockian blend of high tension and dark comedy, with a rich seam of psychological subtext, as little Andy must decide between maternal influence and peer pressure.
Child’s Play is available as part of the Child’s Play boxset on 4K UHD/Blu-ray from 11 Dec via Arrow
In 1957, Riccardo Freda directed I Vampiri, Italy’s first horror feature with sound. Over three decades later, towards the end of his career, he would make this horror UFO – part late-entry giallo (complete with black-gloved killer), part modern gothic, part Satanic thriller.
Actor Michael (Stefano Patrizi), who tends to get carried away in his roles as stranglers, has an ‘irresistible impulse’ to revisit his mother Glenda (Anita Strindberg) for the first time since, as a child, he was taken away and institutionalised for murdering his own conductor father. In Glenda’s remote woodland pad (in Surrey!), together with his girlfriend Deborah (Silvia Dionisio) and some of the crew from his latest film (including his leading lady Beryl, played by Laura Black Emanuelle Gemser), Michael will find past trauma resurfacing, as the people around him start meeting grisly deaths one by one.
“The relationship between a mother and son is a mysterious one,” observes Glenda, cutting to the Freudian core of Freda’s Psycho-drama. For this who- and how-dunnit comes with the irrational trappings of a nightmare, as multiple narrative strands, dark magic and even metacinematic elements all converge to trap the viewer in a maddening fog of meaning.
Murder Obsession is available on Blu-ray from 18 December via Radiance
Released in 1987, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop sold itself, from the title on down, as a scuzzy sci-fi action B movie, but it also pushed cartoonish on-screen violence to new levels, while being both satire of the Reagan-era drive towards corporate privatisation, and, as Verhoeven himself would insist, an all-American retelling of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Eastwood Allen and Christopher Griffiths’ four-part, five-hour documentary mini-series traces the film’s genesis, its (sometimes difficult) production, and its reception and cultural impact.
All this is communicated through an impressively extensive range of talking heads — practically the entire cast and crew apart from those who have since died — ensuring palatable, often very funny anecdotes, as well as a masterclass on every aspect of filmmaking. Along the way you will learn things: that all the cops in the film were named after serial killers; that Peter Weller was a “pussy hound” on set; that RoboCop predicted both the DVD, and the militarisation of the police force; and that real police repeatedly interrupted the shoot because of alarm over the scale of explosions and fires on location. It is an exhilarating, exhausting tribute to Verhoeven’s infectious movie-making mania.
RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop is available on Blu-ray from 18 Dec via Icon Film Channel
“Everyone here has some kind of past. Everyone used to be somebody else before they ended up here.”
The speaker, old Dr Uchiyama (Isamu Kosugi), is not wrong. For he, though kindly, is a washed-up alcoholic, while restaurateur Jōji Shimaki (Yujiro Ishihara) is an ex-boxer with blood on his hands, and indentured chanteuse Saeko (Mie Kitahara) is “a canary that’s forgotten how to sing” — and all these characters will find themselves united by their loneliness and despair, in a demimonde of cabaret clubs, pool halls, love hotels and sleazy dives, as Jōji vainly pursues a dream that is long since over.
From its opening shot of a gutter-level puddle that, once the rain has stopped falling in it, reflects the neon sign (in English) for Jōji’s restaurant, Koreyoshi Kurahara’s monochrome feature is clearly one of several Nikkatsu noirs produced to fight it out with the American and French films that were doing so well at the Japanese box office. The shadows are long, Masaru Sato’s score is jazzy, and the crises that the players must face, though criminal in nature, are also existential, with the past proving as inescapable as the self, and love the only salve.
I Am Waiting is available as part of the Blu-ray set World Noir 1 from 18 December via Radiance
“You’ve seen the movies too,” Sandy (Harriet Harris) says of the alien (Jade Quon) — later variously nicknamed Jules or Gary — that has crash-landed into the back garden of her friend Milton (Ben Kingsley), ruining his birdhouse and azaleas. “You know what happens to these guys when they fall to Earth.”
The obvious movie reference point here is E.T., in which those who discover and befriend the alien must also protect it from government agents — except that, unlike the suburban children in Steven Spielberg’s film, Sandy and Milton are in their Seventies. So while they do their best to clothe and feed this recently arrived guest and to help him rebuild his damaged spacecraft, one might naturally also think of the geriatric close encounters of Ron Howard’s Cocoon. Meanwhile the similarly ageing Joyce, to whom Sandy addresses her words about movie aliens, is played by Jane Curtin, herself once a movie alien in Steve Barron’s SNL-spinoff Coneheads.
This is a gentle, somewhat mawkish allegory of Milton’s encroaching twilight years – for coinciding with Jules’ arrival is the early onset of the widower’s cognitive decline, so that he too is on a slow, difficult journey both home and heavenwards.
Jules in UK cinemas and on digital from 29 December via Signature Entertainment
Published 23 Dec 2023
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