What to watch at home in January

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.

Lord of Misrule, dir. William Brent Bell, 2023

“All is as was,” recite various locals from the English village of Berrow, in this latest genre feature from William Brent Bell (Orphan: First Kill). Their words encapsulate the very spirit of folk horror, where ancient lore overlaps with modern, letting contradictions uncannily clash.

The Reverend Rebecca Holland (Tuppence Middleton) has recently moved into the vicarage with her husband (Matt Stokoe) and their young daughter Grace (Evie Templeton) – but when Grace disappears from a four-day pagan festival where she had been chosen to be the ‘Harvest Angel’, Rebecca is sent on a frantic search. This puts Rebecca at odds not only with Jocelyn Abney (Ralph Ineson), who, as the masked Lord of Misrule, heads worship of the old goat-skulled god Gallowgog, but also, eventually, with all the villagers.

A missing girl. Runic sigils. A cultic conspiracy. Puppets, jesters and people in animal masks. And of course, sacrificial rites. Yep, this plays out like a reimagining of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, although that film’s uptight male Christian copper has become a laid-back female vicar whose maternal status challenges the original’s patriarchal values, and allows for a different ending, with a real deity horrifically appeased and harmony restored.

Lord of Misrule is available now on digital platforms via Signature Entertainment

The Frightened Woman (Femina Ridens), dir. Pierro Schivazappa, 1969

Piero Schivazappa’s psychedelic allegory of sexual divisions was first released in the UK as The Laughing Woman (a literal translation of its Latin title Femina ridens), but later rereleased as The Frightened Woman. Both titles equally apply in this film of two halves, as the roles in its BDSM scenario reverse.

The opening sequence shows a gigantic sculpture of a female nude – like the one in Yasuzo Masumura’s sadoerotic The Blind Beast, from the same year – with a queue of enthralled men lined up between the legs to get a closer look. If the woman’s supine, spreadeagled pose suggests availability and submission, her vagina is conspicuously dentata, setting a tone of male anxiety. For although respectable-seeming philanthropist Dr Sayer (Philippe Leroy) spends his weekends sadistically terrorising and tormenting sex worker Gida (Lorenza Guerrieri), he is less misogynist than gynophobe, terrified of infertility, emasculation and outright redundancy in what is increasingly a woman’s world.

One weekend Sayer instead abducts his new PR Maria (Dagmar Lassander) – who had been writing an article on male sterilisation – to show her who is boss. Yet in this surreal battle of the sexes, tables will be turned, and this initially entrapped, imperilled woman will have the last laugh.

The Frightened Woman is available on Blu-ray via Shameless

Samurai Wolf (Kiba Ôkaminosuke), dir. Hideo Hosha, 1966

“You’re a good man,” says blind Lady Chise (Hiroko Sakuramachi) to the rōnin Kiba Ôkaminosuke (Isao Natsuyagi). “You pretend to be bad. You want people to think you’re a bad guy.”

Kiba is wandering through Arai village, a remote relay station on an important transport route – and with thugs killing Chise’s employees en route, with the Shōgun’s messenger (Tatsuo Endô) manoeuvring to displace Chise, with killer-for-hire Akizuki Sanai (Ryôhei Uchida) in town, and with several people out for revenge against past transgressions, Kiba is soon caught between multiple factions and double-crosses in an ever more complicated scenario.

Much as Toshiaki Tsushima’s score mixes a koto and Japanese percussion with a harmonica and guitar, Hideo Gosha’s chanbara is both eastern and western, placing itself in the same tradition as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, while also drawing on the spaghetti oaters that Kurosawa’s film had already inspired.

Kiba is a good man, cashless but willing to work for his keep, respectful to women and only killing in self-defence. Yet as Akizuki, who has long since broken bad, recognises of his opponent: “Another five years and you’ll be just like me” – and so Kiba, unable to settle, is in flight from himself.

Samurai Wolf (1966) releases on Blu-ray with Samurai Wolf II (1967) as a 2-disc set from 22 Jan via Eureka

Peeping Tom, dir. Michael Powell, 1960

“We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms”, said Stella (Thelma Ritter) in Alfred Hitchcock’s scopophilic Rear Window (1954), “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”

Six years later, Michael Powell would push this thesis further in a film which, along with Hitchcock’s Psycho in the same year, would stretch the notions of filmic decorum to a point of no return, changing cinema forever. Both films would eventually engender the slasher genre, although only Powell’s, initially excoriated for its shocking content, would effectively end his career.

The peeping tom here is Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm), ‘glamour’ photographer, studio focus puller and would-be director whose foreign accent, social awkwardness and ever-present camera all mark him as an outsider. He is also a serial killer, with a modus operandi that allows him simultaneously to terrorise, kill and film his female prey, in an attempt to work through the similarly recorded abuse that he endured as a child at the hands of his psychiatrist father.

Here voyeurism itself looks outwards and inwards, confounding perpetrator and victim, filmmaker and viewer, camera and phallic weapon, while observing a pathology as metacinematic as it is psychiatric.

Peeping Tom releases on Special Edition UHD, Blu-ray and DVD from 29 Jan via Studiocanal

Mad Cats, dir. Reiki Tsuno, 2023

When his archaeologist brother Mune (So Yamanake) vanishes shortly after returning from an expedition to Egypt, feckless layabout Taka (Shô Mineo) receives a mysterious cassette recording on which a woman instructs him where to rescue Mune and find a box. Assailed on all sides by well-armed, kick-ass women, hopeless Taka joins forces with the homeless Takezo (Yûya Matsuura) and the enigmatic Ayane (also played by Ayane, who is hardly playing herself).

This madcap adventure is the debut feature of writer/director Reiki Tsuno, whose previous collaborations with Troma show in a film that wrings all it can from its low budget, while clinging by the claws to its trash credentials. Given the prominence of “the catnip of Bastet”, it is hard not to think of Pitof’s Catwoman (2004), except that here, rather than a woman taking on feline powers, a clowder of she-cats has assumed human form while retaining their nine lives and being aggressively out for revenge against humankind (especially pet shop owners).

All at once a surreal road movie, and a series of vari-weaponed catfights, this also includes a very good dad joke – however unappreciated by the other characters – about a cockroach and a centipede.

Mad Cats (2023) releases on Blu-ray/digital from 29 Jan via Third Window

Alligator, dir. Lewis Teague, 1980

‘One for them, one for me’ is a principle embodied by early John Sayles, who would write other directors’ rip-off schlock to fund his own indies – except that even cash-in scripts for Piranha, Battle Beyond the Stars and The Howling showed a subversive intelligence that made its own toothy mark on the genre landscape.

Like Piranha, Alligator came in the wake of Jaws, while presenting as vicious parody. A baby alligator (named Ramone) is flushed down the toilet, only to emerge 12 years later supersized owing to its ingestion of illegally dumped experimental growth hormones – but then this whole town is toxic, from the predatory press to the corrupt mayor, police chief and bigwig industrialist. Only guilt-ridden cop David Madison (Robert Forester) and herpetologist Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker) stand in the way of this toothy killer.

Few other creature features include a hero whose masculinity is constantly undermined by a running commentary on his male pattern baldness, a ‘great white hunter’ (Henry Silva) who uses reptilian mating calls to flirt with a reporter, or an agonisingly taboo-busting child death. Earthy, bizarre and full-blooded, Lewis Teague’s B-movie brings its A-game and is no crock.

Alligator (+ TV cut) releases with Alligator II: The Mutation (1991) on 4K UHD/Blu-ray from 29 Jun via 101 Films Black Label

Published 10 Jan 2024

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