All things Cult Cinema

Started by wilder, March 27, 2017, 06:00:36 PM

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WorldForgot

They released Freeway 1 in December -- and now FREEWAY II: Confessions of a Trickbaby






QuoteWhite Girl is a twisted teenage prostitute with a bad attitude and a nasty eating disorder, who's been sent to the slammer for 25 years. Her cellmate, Cyclona, is equally deranged, being a vicious killer. And, as like minds attract, the two are quick to form a truly twisted alliance. When the opportunity arises, White Girl and Cyclona manage to escape from the pen and embark on a non-stop orgy of violence and debauchery, all while hoping to make it across the border into Mexico in order to seek refuge with Cyclona's proxy caretaker, Sister Gomez. However, there's a big hitch in their plans as the good Sister isn't as "she" seems...

Somehow weirder, sleazier, and even more jaw dropping than its predecessor, director Matthew Bright's in-name-only sequel, FREEWAY II: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY regurgitates onto the screen with an unflinching barrage of gross-out-gags and adept social satire. Starring Natasha Lyonne (But I'm A Cheerleader, TV's Poker Face and Russian Doll) in one of her first, and most controversial, starring roles alongside Vincent Gallo (Buffalo '66), María Celedonio (Dragstrip Girl), and a rare on-screen appearance from filmmaker John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), Vinegar Syndrome is delighted to present the UHD debut of this demented reimagining of Hansel & Gretel, newly restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative, jam packed with extras, and looking so perversely crystal clear you can almost taste the perversion.

directed by: Matthew Bright
starring: Natasha Lyonne, María Celedonio, Vincent Gallo, David Alan Grier, John Landis
1999 / 98 min / 1.85:1 / English 2.0 Stereo
Additional info:

4K Ultra HD / Region A Blu-ray Set
4K UHD presented in High-Dynamic-Range
Newly scanned & restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative
"Once Upon a White Girl: Remembering Confessions of a Trickbaby" (98 min) - a brand new making-of documentary with the cast and crew
"Bright on Dark" (23 min) - an interview with writer/director Matthew Bright from 2018
"Disrupt and Revolt" (29 min) - an interview with producer Chris Hanley from 2018
Archival interview with Matthew Bright (4 min)
Archival interview with executive producer Samuel Hadida (5 min)
BTS Footage (28 min)
Still Gallery (7 min)
Reversible sleeve artwork
English SDH subtitles

WorldForgot

One of my friends gifted me Vinegar Syndrome/Saturn Core's double blu-ray of Red Spirit Lake & We Await

Video scuzzball poetry. Wes Craven and Lynch but neither and both simultaneously. AMPLIFIED mysticism. Genre and spirituality entertwined into bombastic grunge beauty. Degenerate, repulsive environments constantly edging into the divine before shattering and splitting your sidez.




QuoteSaturn's Core Audio & Video is a New Jersey based home video label devoted to releasing underground oddities and shot on video cinema on VHS, and now, blu-ray discs! In partnership with OCN Distribution, Saturn's Core will exhume forgotten or under-seen genre cinema from the 80s and 90s, with an emphasis on SOV horror features. Vinegar Syndrome's sister company, OCN Distribution, is thrilled to be representing this diverse and unique home video line!

One of the most visionary artists to arise from the pre-digital, shot on video underground, director Charles Pinion's awe-inspiring features fearlessly blurred the lines between punk rock, Cinema of Transgression, avant-garde surrealism, pornography and backyard splatter films. Saturn's Core is proud to present two of Pinion's most daring works with newly reconstructed, director approved restorations from the original analog master tapes.

Spoiler: ShowHide
Red Spirit Lake (1993): After a vengeful sorceress is tortured and killed by a corrupt industrialist looking to harnass the spectral powers of Red Spirit Lake, her niece arrives in snow covered Angel Falls to settle her aunt's estate. A meditation on The Old Dark House replete with UFO abductions, castration, frank nudity, witchcraft, fatal fistings, and slughterous saunas; Red Spirit Lake is a cacophony of subversive hyper violence, psychotic surrealism, salacious sexual choas, and picturesque winter vistas featuring acting performances by a cavalcade of legendary Cinema of Transgression era artists and filmmakers including Richard Kern, Holly Adams, Kembra Pfahler, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and Tommy Turner as well as an insurgent soundtrack featuring music by Cop Shoot Cop, Lydia Lunch, Clint Ruin, and The Lunachicks.

We Await (1996): A con artist is held captive by an unhinged cannibal family that ingests copious quantities of hallucinogenic, green fungal goo covertly harnessed from an otherworldly, sentient crystal housed in their third third floor apartment of horrors. Featuring a man who willfully chooses to be a dog, sexual stimulation via blowtorch, and a corpulent, nude and blood soaked Godzilla-sized Jesus; We Await is a shot on video, urban riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that slowly descends into a psycho sexual, drug-fueled, analog aurora borealis nightmare like no other. Starring director Pinion, adult filmmaker David Aaron Clark, visual artist Alyssa Taylor Wendt, and boasting a blistering soundtrack featuring music by Crash Worship, Neurosis, and Unsane.

So far I've only watched Red Spirit Lake and all its extras but this is a FANTASTIC package. It includes a full concert set of 'COTA', an avant garde music project of Pinion's I think (there's no description of who the band is haha) as well as two short films, commentary tracks, and 'Rare Footage' shot by Pinion of Screw Magazine's bathroom - GRODY SCRIBBLED WALL-ART as it should be.


WorldForgot

https://twitter.com/SeverinFilms/status/1652000451435585536



Black Emanuelle box set! Very exciting to have all of this in one package.

wilder

May 30, 2023

Claude d'Anna's The Broken Mirror (1975) & Férid Boughedir's Unquiet Death (1970) double feature on blu-ray from Mondo Macabro



The Broken Mirror (1975)

Anne Lawrence lives in Brussels, where she works as a restorer of rare paintings. When Anne becomes pregnant, her widowed mother visits her, which brings back memories from Anne's past. Her mother asks Anne about the time she went missing and was found, lost in the city, clutching a strange painting with no knowledge of where it came from. Anne is fascinated by the painting but also scared of it. She becomes determined to discover why it now seems so important to her.
Strange incidents start to occur. Anne is pursued through empty streets by a large car with a hidden driver. She sees a man with a gloved right hand watching her from the deserted house across the street. She becomes frightened by her own reflection in mirrors.

As Anne sinks ever deeper into the mystery of her past, fantasy and reality start to merge and she finds herself entering a nightmare of fear and sudden violence from which she seems unable to escape.
Director Claude d'Anna's third feature film is a dreamlike and hallucinatory journey into altered states of consciousness; a unique film, full of images of beauty and terror.


Unquiet Death (1970)

Three sisters come from France to visit their wealthy uncle who lives on a remote island off the coast of Tunisia. The only other inhabitant of the island is the uncle's manservant. The uncle dies in mysterious circumstances and the girls are left at the mercy of the servant. Initially he seems cooperative but then, as the radio broadcasts disturbing reports of trouble and unrest on the mainland, he rebels, refusing to obey the girls' orders. Imprisoning them in the uncle's house, he sets them various bizarre tasks, challenges their sense of superiority and even tries to teach them a new form of language.

Finally their veneer of civilization cracks, and the girls resort to savagery. The servant disappears, seemingly dead. Sensing freedom, the girls celebrate. But then the servant returns. And this time he is angry...

Made in the shadow of the May 68 Paris "events", Unquiet Death is a truly revolutionary and radical film, one that throws all caution to the wind. Packed full of startling images that mix beauty and terror, there really is nothing else quite like it.








May 30, 2023

Kostas Manoussakis' The Fear (1966) on blu-ray from Mondo Macabro



Anna, a young female student living in Athens, returns to her family's large farm in the remote Greek countryside. She starts to feel the tensions that lie, repressed, under the apparently tranquil rural setting. Her father and mother are trapped in a loveless marriage and her half-brother, Anestis, seems even more of a brooding and dangerous figure than ever before. Anna's only real friend is the mute servant girl, Hrysa, who many of the local villagers see as some kind of saint due to her alleged sightings of the Virgin Mary in the lonely corn fields that surround the farm.

Hrysa disappears and is reported missing. Anna soon suspects her half-brother is responsible and has probably killed the girl. She starts to follow him, trying to trick him into a confession. Realizing that she might become his next victim, Anna starts to fear for her life. Confused and scared she accepts a marriage proposal from a local man. It's at the wedding ceremony, with the whole village watching, that the truth finally emerges and the terrifying last act of this rural psychodrama is played out.

The Fear was the third, and final, film made by director Kostas Manoussakis. It was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and was widely sold around the world. However, due to a series of problems, Manoussakis never completed another feature. Now acclaimed as a classic and one of the best Greek films of its era, The Fear has lost none of its power to grip the viewer with its striking imagery and pulsing, avant garde soundtrack.






March 8, 2023

Mexican Gothic: The Films of Carlos Enrique Taboada (1975-1984) on blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome



Bewitched children, revenge seeking spirits and murderous thieves. Revered in his country but criminally under-known outside of it, three of Mexican genre film master Carlos Enrique Taboada's most influential works are collected here for the first time on Blu-ray. Few directors other than Taboada have left such a distinct footprint on Mexico's horror genre. These three films, with ample violence, wretched depravity and supernatural evil, adeptly place their horror to Mexican society and culture at large and all have been newly restored in 4K by Vinegar Syndrome from their original 35mm camera negatives!

Poison for the Fairies
When young Flavia arrives at her new school she is quickly befriended by Veronica. What starts out as an innocent friendship turns terrifying when Veronica reveals herself to be a Witch. Unsure of the truth, Flavia enters into a manipulative relationship as Veronica's accomplice as the line between what is real and imagined blurs and leads to a spiral of magic, death, sacrifice and murder!

Darker Than Night
Ophelia has just learned of the death of her Aunt, whom she had never trusted. In a sinister twist of fate, she has now inherited her Aunt's estate, along with all of its tenants, living and dead. Inviting her three close friends along, Ophelia moves into the gothic house. But shortly after disregarding her Aunt's posthumous requests to care for Bequer, the house cat, their lives are turned upside down as horrors reveal themselves and a supernatural force starts to violently pick off the girls one by one!

Rapiña
Woodcutter Porfirio has always accepted his meager existence, however one day while working in a remote, forested mountain, Porfirio is the sole witness to the crash of a luxury plane. Desperate to escape his circumstances, he seizes the opportunity to loot the wreckage with his neighbor and co-worker, Evodio. But soon, best laid plans lead to treachery and murder...




March 28, 2023

Fabrice du Welz's Calvaire (2004) on blu-ray from Yellow Veil Pictures



Marc, a traveling entertainer, is on his way home for Christmas when his van breaks down in the middle of a village, where he quickly falls victim to a dangerously unhinged innkeeper determined to keep him captive. For the first time in the US, CALVAIRE will be available in high definition. The HD Remaster was created from the original print with new color grading supervised by original cinematographer Benoit Debbie and director Fabrice du Welz. This high water mark from the New French Extremity movement premiered at the Cannes Film Festival followed by TiFFF Midnight Madness.




April 25, 2023

Risto Jarva's Time of Roses (1969) on blu-ray from Deaf Crocodile



Finnish director Risto Jarva's fascinating, futuristic sci-fi mystery is set in a dystopian, Pop Art-designed world of gleaming white towers, Sony video monitors and inflatable furniture, where the beautiful inhabitants all dress as Edie Sedgwick-like pixie sprites or medieval page boys out of LOGAN'S RUN. A historian of late 20th century culture - "before class boundaries were abolished" – named Raimo (Arto Tuominen) is researching the death many years earlier of a free-spirited erotic model named Saara (Ritva Vepsä) who died under mysterious circumstances. (She caused a public scandal by asking three of her wealthy, powerful lovers to pay for an abortion). Raimo finds Saara's identical double – an earthy, uninhibited engineer named Kisse (also played by Vepsä) -- and tries to convince her to re-enact Saara's life and death for TV. Director Jarva was one of Finland's most acclaimed fiction filmmakers and documentarians before he was tragically killed in an auto accident returning from a screening in 1977. His fabulously quirky vision of Future World, with its fragmented & abstract political conversation and semi-orgies (all waving hands and sitar music!) would have delighted both Andy Warhol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.




April 24, 2023

Richard Loncraine's Full Circle aka The Haunting of Julia on 4K UHD blu-ray from BFI (UK)



Bereaved mother Julia flees her controlling husband Magnus, re-establishing herself in an old house in leafy West London. Yet she finds herself haunted by apparitions of a ghostly blonde-haired child, sending her on a strange journey of self-discovery - with dreadful consequences.




April 18, 2023

Richard Loncraine's Full Circle aka The Haunting of Julia on 4K UHD blu-ray from Shout Factory



Bereaved mother Julia flees her controlling husband Magnus, re-establishing herself in an old house in leafy West London. Yet she finds herself haunted by apparitions of a ghostly blonde-haired child, sending her on a strange journey of self-discovery - with dreadful consequences.



June 6, 2023

Paul Bartel's Private Parts (1972) on blu-ray Shout Factory



Cheryl fled an unhappy home in Ohio for the sunny skies of California with her best friend in tow; however, after they have a falling out, Cheryl is left with no place to stay. Remembering that her Aunt Martha runs a hotel, Cheryl arrives at the King Edward, a decaying residential inn located in one of L.A.'s less desirable neighborhoods, and persuades Martha to give her a room for a few days. Cheryl soon discovers the King Edward is home to a wide variety of eccentrics -- defrocked priests with muscle-men fetishes, falling-down alcoholics, senile old women, and a voyeuristic photographer named George. Cheryl, who indulges her own voyeuristic impulses by sneaking into the rooms of her fellow boarders, is attracted to George and enjoys playing dress-up as he watches her though a peephole, despite Aunt Martha's warnings not to interact with the other guests. But when Cheryl decides to cross the line into physical action with George, she learns his obsessions are more dangerous than she imagined -- and that both he and Aunt Martha have some rather surprising secrets.





Summer 2023

Paul Nicholas' Daughter of Death aka Julie Darling (1982) on 4K UHD blu-ray from Dark Force Entertainment



A teenage girl whose inaction caused her mother's death arranges a similarly gruesome fate for her stepmother and brother.




2023 TBD

R. Charleton Wilson's's Dandy (1970) & Krishna Shah's Rivals (1972) on blu-ray from Dark Force Entertainment



Dandy (1970)
Dandy (Cynthia Denny) is a free loving 18 year old girl who has no place to go. Unhappy with her parents and bored with her life, she decides to run off to the big city to try to make it in California. That leads to a series of unfaithful and abusive lovers, posing nude in skin rags, prostitution and more!

Rivals (1972)
A boy with an unhealthy and pathological attachment to his mother becomes increasingly jealous of the new man in her life. After his mother remarries, his rage and misery overwhelm him and he plots to kill his stepfather.




2023 TBD

Monte Markham's Neon City (1991) on blu-ray from Kino



Post-apocalyptic story about a group of scavengers in search of refuge from the lethal atmosphere




May 16, 2023

Byron Haskin's Conquest of Space (1955) & Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Married A Monster (1958) on blu-ray from Shout Factory



Conquest of Space (1955)
An American-led team of International astronauts leave their space station on the first mission to Mars, but the captain's religious beliefs may get in the way.

I Married A Monster (1958)
Aliens arrive on Earth to possess the bodies of humans. One of their first victims is a young man, whose new wife soon realizes something is wrong with him.




April 3, 2023

Robert Sigl's Laurin (1989) on blu-ray from Second Run (UK)



Children have been disappearing under mysterious circumstances in a 19th century German village. A young girl soon becomes haunted by disturbing visions of the missing kids.




May 1, 2023

Juraj Herz's Morgiana (1972) on blu-ray from Second Run (UK), also coming to blu-ray later this year from Severin



With delirious visuals conjured by cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera (Daisies, Diamonds of the Night) and often described as 'the last film of the Czechoslovak New Wave', Juraj Herz's delirious tale of terror is a surreal phantasmagoria of dark desires and splintered minds – a twisted Czech take on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Poe's 'The Black Cat'.

Based on a short story by Aleksandr Grin, (the 'Russian Poe'), Morgiana is the story of twin sisters, Klára and Viktoria who live a life of decadent opulence, somewhere in the late 19th century. Klára is charming, trusting and beautiful, whilst Viktoria is wicked, sadistic, bursting with hate and jealousy - and who hatches a terrible revenge by slowly poisoning her more popular sister. As the toxin takes hold, Klára begins to lose grip on her sanity...

Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, Morgiana is a full-blown hallucinatory experience from the director of the chilling The Cremator, Oil Lamps and Beauty and the Beast.





2023 TBD

Jean-Gabriel Albicocco's Le Coeur Fou (1970) on blu-ray from Le Chat Qui Fume (France)



Serge Menessier has been paid to shoot a reportage on his ex-wife's depression. Now remarried, he has accepted the job to pay his debts and maybe because he is still in love with her, a famous actress whose career he contributed to launch.


WorldForgot

Here's an essay by Curiosities and Classics and interview from Russian director Artour Aristakisian, covering two wayward films from Russia, examining extreme states of homelessness in turn of the milennium poverty.


Quote"This is not a socially conscious film. There is no society. It is nonexistent. It is not a philosophical film either. There are no authorial points of view or ideas. It has to be admitted this film is dangerous. Truly dangerous. As a matter of fact, it undermines the authority of the state. For it, too, is nonexistent."  So says Artour Aristakisian, in regards to his film A Place in this World (2001), the follow up to his documentary Palms (1994), two of the more harrowing and confrontational films I've seen in a very long time.