* indicates that this title is also available to rent, stream, or purchase on various platforms. Please note that streaming options may differ from these home video presentations in terms of visuals, supplemental features, etc.
“Shelf Life” (1993, Liberation Hall) A trio of siblings (O-Lan Jones, Jim Turner, and Andrea Stein) are dragged into a bomb shelter as children by their paranoid parents in 1963; three decades later, the parents are long dead, but the sisters and brother, now full-grown adults but with adolescent energy and emotions, continue to play elaborate and bizarre games in an attempt to make sense of their existence. Long-lost final feature from director Paul Bartel (“Eating Raoul) was based on a stage play written and performed by the three leads (and produced at the Lex Theatre in Los Angeles), whose full-throttle performances help the film from feeling stagebound. “Shelf Life” is very much a part of Bartel’s body of work, which found the humanity at the heart of outrageous situations; it’s unfortunate that it never saw a release during this lifetime (he died in 2000), but Liberation Hall helps to make up for this oversight with a Blu-ray struck from a newly discovered 35mm print; the cast is present on a commentary track (with DP Philip Holahan and filmmaker Alex Mechanik, who spearheaded the film’s revival), a Q&A filmed at the American Cinematheque, and in a new “interview” with the siblings.
“Night Falls on Manhattan” * (1996, Arrow Video) Newly minted New York district attorney Andy Garcia gets a crash course in The Ways Things Are Done when he takes on a case of police corruption involving a drug kingpin and the cops who targeted him, one of whom (Ian Holm) happens to be his father. Legal thriller from Sidney Lumet (“Dog Day Afternoon”) struggles with characters at times – Garcia is a colorless hero and Lena Olin has nothing to do as his love interest – but benefits from the writer-director’s understanding of the moral complexities of the justice system and a no-nonsense cast that includes Richard Dreyfuss, James Gandolfini, Ron Leigman, Colm Feore, and Paul Guilfoyle, Arrow’s Limited Edition Blu-ray includes archival commentaries by, among others, the late Lumet, Garcia, and Leibman, a 2002 documentary on Lumet’s celebrated career, and archival interviews with the cast, as well as new artwork by Tom Ralston and liner notes by Nick Clement.
“To Fire You Come At Last” * (2023, Severin Films) To bury his son, a 17th-century English squire (Mark Carlisle) enlists his servant (Richard Rowden), his son’s friend (Harry Roebuck), and a dissolute local (James Swanton) to transport the coffin along a corpse road – a path that connects rural towns to consecrated graveyards – at night, but the journey is beset by disturbing revelations, both personal and supernatural. Effective short (43 minute) from writer/director Sean Hogan hinges on the sins of the past – a recurring foundation for folk horror – and the hypocrisy that class can absolve them. Solid performances carry the story, with Carlisle and Swanton (who’s usually covered in layers of makeup) the standouts, but the highlight is Paul Goodwin and Jim Hinson’s black-and-white photography, which plunges the characters and viewers into an inky void that allows imaginations to run riot. Severin’s folk horror compendium “All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2” bundles “Fire” with commentary by Hogan, Goodwin, and co-producer Nicholas Harwood, a featurette on the history of corpse roads, and two excellent shorts: Hogan’s Christmas-themed “We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea,” which examines a similar theme to “Fire,” and Edwin Rostron’s animated short “Our Selves Unknown,” which looks at civilization as the slow death of the natural world.
“Rampo Noir” * (2005, Arrow Video) Horror anthology featuring four stories rooted in extreme obsession, each based on the work of Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo and featuring Tadanobu Asano (“Shogun”) in three different roles. The Japanese title for “Noir” is “Rampo Jigoku” (“Rampo Hell”), which is a more apt description for the film, given its deep dive into nightmarish imagery and plotting (the “noir” here refers more to a literal blackness than to the film genre). “Mars Canal,” the opening sequence by visual artist Suguru Takeuchi, is a (mostly) silent and disturbing dreamscape that culminates in what may be a violent sexual encounter; the sequence establishes a foundation for the subsequent three stories in which the lines between sex and violence and reality and warped fantasy are blurred. Director Hisaysu Sato’s “Caterpillar,” about a disfigured war veteran’s sadomasochistic relationship with his wife, is the most effective and disturbing in this regard; manga artist Atsushi Kaneko’s “Crawling Bugs” opens up the visual palette to allow for some impressive dreamscapes but remains rooted in unpleasantness for its story about a disturbed chauffeur (Asano) driven by delusions to act on his warped affections for his actress employer (Fuyo Kinoshita). The subject matter may determine your appreciation for “Rampo Noir,” but the film is artfully directed and provides the talented Asano with some unique showcases (Kinoshita and Yukiko Okamoto – the wife in “Caterpillar” – are also standouts). Arrow’s Limited Edition Blu-ray features new commentary by Japanese film scholars Jasper Sharp and Alexander Zahlten, new interviews with the four episodes’ directors, “Caterpillar” DP Masao Nakabori and actor Yumi Yoshiuki, as well as a feature-lenght making-of doc, new art by Luke Insect, and liner notes.
25th September 1928: American comic actor Buster Keaton (1895 – 1966) wearing a baseball strip and boots. (Photo by John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images)
“Maniac” * (1934, Kino Lorber) Psychiatrist-by-day/mad-scientist-by-night Maxwell (Horace Carpenter) has created a “super-adrenaline” which can revive the dead, though not without drawbacks (the initial test subject, a young woman, is left stupefied). His assistant (Bill Woods) fails to find a follow-up corpse (he’s scared by a couple of fighting cats) but avoids being Maxwell’ss next experiment by killing the doctor. Woods – a former vaudeville impressionist – decides to impersonate Carpenter, which proves problematic, given that the doctor has not only a steady stream of patients but also the cops and his ex-wife on his heels, all of which drives him insane. This twist provides “Maniac” with its own dose of super-adrenaline as Woods decides to “treat” Maxwell’s patients, which involves injecting the nervous Buckley (Ted Edwards) with the super-adrenaline, which causes him to believe he’s the orangutan from Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and mutilate Maxwell’s cat (not real) for interrupting his attempts at heart surgery, which later proves his undoing. That I haven’t even addressed Maxwell’s neighbor Goof, who has hundreds of (real) cats in cages for the purpose of making coats from their fur or the hypodermic needle fight between Woods’s ex and Buckley’s wife should indicate to you that “Maniac,” directed by exploitation vet Dwain Esper and written by his wife, Hildegarde Stadie, is without question one of the most deliriously weird movies ever made, a sleazy exercise in bargain-basement cheap thrills (including brief flashes of nudity) tricked out as a faux treatise on mental illness laden with references to Poe and featuring clips from the 1922 witchcraft film “Haxan.” Esper, who specialized in trash masquerading as hot-button topics (“Marihuana“), was a technically atrocious director but knew how to keep audiences engaged with a non-stop barrage of salacious material; as such, “Maniac” is a rousing success, and one that paid dividends for Esper for decades through reissues (the film was later revived as part of the midnight movie circuit in the ’70s) and remains a must-see for badfilm fans who believe that They’ve Seen Everything. Kino’s Blu-ray – part of its amazing “Forbidden Fruit” series with Something Weird Video – features a 4k restoration taken from the original film negative and commentary by historian Bret Wood, as well as three vintage Esper shorts (including “You Can’t Beat the Rap,” featuring real-life criminal Roy Gardener, and “The March of Crime,” which offers a glimpse of the mummified corpse of Elmer McCurdy, which Esper exhibited at screenings of his anti-pot film “Narcotic” and later ended up as part of a haunted house attraction at The Pike in Long Beach) and an audio interview with Mr. and Mrs. Esper from 1982.
