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.
Recently arrested for armed robbery, long-haired, doe-eyed Baron (Joe Keery) tells his life story to cellmate Otis (Aldis Hodge), hoping to convince this career criminal to help him escape and be reunited with his girlfriend Marmalade (Camila Morrone). Yet it is clear from the story that this manic pixie dream girl has been taking ‘dumber than a box of crayons’ mama’s boy Baron for a ride — and not just in the convertible she blew in on. She even nicknames him ‘Puppet’, while manipulating the besotted naïf into being her partner in crime. Otis too, as he listens to this one-sided love story, has his eye on a different prize, and out-of-his-depth Baron looks set to be played once again, inside and out.
Yet as Marmalade seduces her lovesick beau into donning a grotesque three-faced mask and aiding and abetting her violent heist, something in this Bonnie and Clyde masquerade does not quite add up. Baron insists to Otis of his story, “It’s all about them details” — and sure enough half the fun of in writer/director Keir O’Donnell’s genre-twisting romantic noir/escapist road movie is puzzling out where and how exactly the truth lies.
Marmalade is available on digital from 12 Feb via Signature Entertainment
Even the most familiar of horror tropes can be given an unexpected spin by a ‘what if’. What if the zombies were actually zombified beavers? what if the mad scientist were surgically transforming lines of people into a centipede? Or in the case of Matthew Goodhue’s improbable follow-up to his sensitive, ambiguous indie Woe, what if the slasher in the sorority house were actually a three-toed Panamanian sloth? and not just that, but an uncharacteristically fast one, able to text, take selfies, post on social media, read a map, drive a car, and fight with a sword — and to survive being bitten by a crocodile, beaten, thrown out a window, stabbed and shot.
In other words, as one character puts it, this she-sloth is “like a cute Chucky… an adorable little killing machine”. Animated with old-school practical puppetry, she enters Sigma Lambda Theta (get it!) as a house mascot, and with Emily (Lisa Ambalavanar) and Brianna (Sydney Craven) viciously vying for popularity and the sorority presidency, the killer creature embodies all the tensions and aggressions in a hyper-competitive scenario that is part Mean Girls, part Election. This commits to its absurdly dumb bit, while slyly promoting sisterhood.
Slotherhouse is available on digital from 12 Feb via Plaion Pictures
In 1956, director Don Siegel adapted Jack Finney’s alien invasion novel The Body Snatchers into an allegory of McCarthyism, although whether it was presenting a takeover by insidious communism, or by a fear of communism, remained ambiguous.
In 1978, Philip Kaufman revisited these materials with similar ambiguity (and with a brief cameo from Siegel as a treacherous cabbie), as San Francisco Health Inspectors Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), and their friends Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright) and the psychiatrist David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) witness the population of San Francisco being replaced in a matter of days by near-identical (but emotionless) ‘pod people’.
Kaufman’s invasion tracks the encroachment of consumerist conformity upon the liberated individualism of Sixties Frisco – and would acquire new, unintended resonance when its theatrical release was immediately preceded by the collective madness of Jonestown. In truth, though, this is a highly flexible myth, playing on the fear of the self being ceded to outside (alien) influence – and were it made today, it might just as readily flirt with anxieties about the Great Replacement theory or conversely America’s infiltration by QAnon and MAGA. Still, Kaufman’s paranoid Seventies noir brings a special sense of doom.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from 12 Feb via Arrow
This sets out its stall in the opening scene, as the camera leers in close-up at a man and a woman copulating sweatily, only for both of them to be bloodily penetrated by an assassin’s blade. Sex and death are the two poles between which Ryûichi Takamori’s sensationalist feature operates, as Gosuke Himuro (Sonny Chiba) returns to avenge the gangland slaying of his estranged father and the abduction and rape of his sister Kyoko (Yayoi Watanabe).
This no-nonsense badass will pit three local rival gangs against one another, following a strategy first laid out by Akira Kurosawa’s jidaegeki Yojimbo, and then borrowed by Sergio Corbucci’s Django and countless other spaghetti westerns — and the debt is openly acknowledged by the way that our relentless antihero sports a cowboy hat and cloak, and engages in a series of showdowns shot at canted angles and accompanied by a score of jew’s harp and harmonica.
With the police happy to let him to do their work for them, Gosuke doggedly pursues the yakuza, proving so effective in the task that he takes on the big boss and his men despite the handicap of having both hands crippled. Lean genre goodness ensues.
Yakuza Wolf 1 is available in Special Edition Blu-ray boxset together with Buichi Saitô’s Yakuza Wolf 2 (1972) from 19 Feb via Eureka Video
Stanley Kubrick’s ironically titled monochrome anti-war feature is set in the killing fields of the Great War, focusing on the French 701st regiment, under constant bombardment in their trench and given orders to carry out a suicide mission to seize a well-fortified hill nearby.
There is little glory here. The German enemy remains unseen — although we certainly witness the deadly impact of their artillery — but the real enemy here is the French officer class who, from their opulently appointed chateau, use infantry as pawns in pursuit of personal promotion and in covering up of their own highly consequential failures. When orders lead to massive French casualties, three soldiers are selected for (kangaroo) court martial and executed for ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy.’ As the odious General Paul Mireau (George Macready) puts it, “If those little sweethearts won’t face German bullets, they’ll face French ones.”
Representing the accused is the genuinely brave and ethical former criminal lawyer Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), whose growing outrage and indignation at what is happening modulate the viewers’. He and his men are just like the German singing girl seen at the end (Kubrick’s future wife Susanne Christian, and the only female character): captive, mired and longing for home.
Paths of Glory is available on 4K UD from 26 Feb via Eureka Video
“It’s lurid,” are the last words Norman Bates will ever utter to his mother (Olivia Hussey) while she is alive. He is describing her kimono, but those words apply equally to Mick Garris’ made-for-TV film, which serves as both prequel and sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho (while ignoring the two subsequent sequels).
Under the pseudonym ‘Ed’ (as in Gein, the real-life, mother-obsessed serial killer whose story inspired Hitchcock’s film), Norman (Anthony Perkins, two years before his death), now released from an asylum and married to psychologist Connie (Donna Mitchell), calls in to a radio talk show on ‘boys who kill their mothers’, and tells the story of his unhealthy relationship as a teenager (Henry Thomas) with his unhinged mother, and how this led him to poison her and her bullying new boyfriend Chet (Thomas Schuster), and to murder various other women. He also promises he will kill again this very night.
Even as it goes back to Norman’s traumatic adolescence, this ‘beginning’ is also a putative ending, as Norman seeks to ensure that the ‘bad seed’ he has inherited is never passed on. It is a gothic melodrama of twisted redemption, and (perhaps) also a new beginning.
Psycho IV: The Beginning is available alongside Richard Franklin’s Psycho II (1983) and Anthony Perkins’ Psycho III (1986) as part of 4k UHD/Blu-ray Psycho – The Story Continues boxset from 26 Feb via Arrow
Published 18 Feb 2024
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