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One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. It must have been a familiar scene for actor Patrick Magee. Here he was again playing an aging bachelor, surrounded by audio recording paraphernalia, listening to voices out of the past. The first time was on stage at the Royal Court Theater in 1958: a different room, different audio equipment, playing a different aging bachelor. The play was Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which the decrepit, solitary Krapp listens to tape recordings of his younger, sometimes comically confident self. Krapp, caustic and disillusioned, has diminished since making his first recordings, growing ever more contemptuous of his youthful enthusiasms. Though the role was played by many great actors, including John Hurt, Michael Gambon, and Harold Pinter, Beckett wrote the part for Magee, or more specifically for “Magee’s distinctively Irish voice,...

(Welcome to Year of the Vampire, a series examining the greatest, strangest, and sometimes overlooked vampire movies of all time in honor of "Nosferatu," which turns 100 this year.)

One of the best vampire films I have ever seen actually never uses the term "vampire" at all. Very early in Bill Gunn's unsung masterpiece "Ganja & Hess," we learn that Dr. Hess Green is addicted to blood. It's hard to tell whether this statement, delivered casually by Hess's chauffeur, is a literal fact or one that's yet to come to pass. 

The bloodsuckers in "Ganja & Hess" are unlike any audiences in 1973...

The post Year Of The Vampire: Ganja & Hess Is About So Much More Than Bloodlust appeared first on /Film.

The show must go on. At least the Venice Film Festival must go on. Even a pandemic can’t stop the oldest international film festival from taking place Sept. 2 through Sept. 12 in the picturesque of grand canals. Of course, safety is first with masks, social distancing etc. are all in place as critics get a first glance at possible award-winners.

Over the past seven years, the festival has held world premieres of such Oscar-winners as 2013’s “Gravity”; 2014’s “Birdman”; 2015’s “Spotlight”; 2016’s “La La Land”; 2017’s “The Shape of Water”; 2018’s “Roma”; and 2019’s “Joker.” Only two films that won the festival’s top prize have gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars: 1948’s “Hamlet” and 2017’s “The Shape of Water.”

The festival began in 1932 as part of the Venice Biennale, the city’s legendary exhibition of the arts under the guidance of President of the Biennale, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata,...

With the dog days of summer still upon us, here are a bunch of new home releases coming out this week that should help keep you entertained from the comfort of your own home. Arrow Video is doing the lord’s work this Tuesday, with a handful of killer collections that genre fans are going to want to pick up, including Flash Gordon in 4K, The Last House on the Left, Pitch Black and Gamera: The Complete Collection.

Scream Factory is also unleashing Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell this week, Cursed Films is being released by Rlje Films, and Alice Lowe’s Prevenge is finally coming home on both Blu and DVD. Other notable releases for August 18th include Open 24 Hours, The Barge People, Cannibal Corpse Killers, and Paramount has put together a Thrills & Chills 4 pack of movies which includes Pet Sematary (2019), A Quiet Place, Overlord and Crawl.

Review by Roger Carpenter

Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, long a filmmaker of experimental shorts, became a beloved celebrity of the arthouse circuit with his first two films, Goto Island of Love and Blanche. He began to fall out of favor with that crowd after his next two films were deemed pornographic and in bad taste, those films being Immoral Tales and, perhaps his most notorious film, The Beast. Lensing each of these films in France, where he made his home, The Story of Sin was his triumphant return to his Polish homeland.

The Story of Sin tells the tale of Ewa (Grazyna Dlugolecka), a beautiful yet pious young woman who strives to maintain a life free of sin. Her aging father cannot find work so the family lets rooms to keep afloat. Enter Lukasz (Jerzy Zelnick), a handsome young man separated from his wife and in need of a room.

The 23rd entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi is showing Jean Renoir's The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959) is August 3 - September 2, 2017 in the United States as part of the series Jean Renoir.Jean Renoir’s The Experiment of Dr. Cordelier (a.k.a. The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment, 1959), shot using the multi-camera set-up of a television production, is a free variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal tale, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). However, Renoir’s take on this material owes less to the horror genre than to a kind of speculative, philosophical fiction. Unlike in most screen versions of the Jekyll/Hyde duality, Renoir goes easy on the conventional distinction between the good and evil sides of a single personality. Yes, the figure of Opale, into whom Cordelier transforms himself, is destructive, bestial, cruel, and sadistic.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook)

The Handmaiden is pure cinema — a tender, moving, utterly believable love story. It’s also a tense, unsettling, erotic masterpiece. There’s a palpable exhilaration that comes from watching this latest film from Park Chan-wook. From its four central performances and twisty script to the cinematography of Chung Chung-hoon and feverish, haunting score by Cho Young-wuk, The Handmaiden is crafted to take your breath away.

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. The retrospective The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk is showing February 12 - June 18, 2017 in the United States and in many other countries around the world.As the reverberation of horses fervently neighing and clomping their hooves begins to permeate the opening credit soundtrack of The Beast, one may recall the similarly orchestrated donkey brays that introduce Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966). Or, given its title, and the very basic concept of a young woman becoming enamored with an savage creature, one may be tempted to compare this 1975 feature to the many variations of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s classic fairy tale, La belle et la bête. One would be more than a little confounded, however, by making either inadequate association. If Walerian Borowczyk’s semi-porn-semi-art-semi-monster movie bears any resemblance to another film or story, it would be...

Shock takes a closer look at Eurohorror masterpiece The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Miss Osbourne. The Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk has long been spoken of in mythic terms mostly because his films have been so unavailable though the provocative images that have surfaced through the years have kept people intrigued enough to bandy…

The post Walerian Borrowczyk’s The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Miss Osbourne: An Appreciation appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.

The Beast

• Release Date: Available Now on Blu-ray

• Written By: Walerian Borowczyk

• Directed By: Walerian Borowczyk

• Starring: Sirpa Lane, Lisbeth Hummel, Elisabeth Kaza

I absolutely love the off-kilter, ridiculously horny horror flicks of Polish madman Walerian Borowczyk! While undoubtedly a master of softcore shenanigans, ol’ Borowczyk plied his trade in the horror biz as well (most notably with The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Miss Osbourne), and the film I’m goin’ to be turnin’ my putrid peepers on today, The Beast!

Originally created for (and then cut from) Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales anthology (also available from Arrow on Blu-ray, but I opted out on that one as it’s primarily a horror-less softcore art film), La Bête (the footage of which now comprises a sizeable chunk of The Beast) presented the simple tale of a young lass who has copious amounts of sex with a continuously ejaculating werewolf...

Our good friends and Mvd and Arrow Video USA have graciously provided TwitchFilm with yet another amazing prize pack for our readers. If you've been reading our reviews, you know how amazing these releases are, and here's your chance to own them!Up for grabs are Nico Mastorakis' Island of Death, Borowczyk's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, and the limited edition releases of Brian Yuzna's Society and Hasebe Yasaharu's Retaliation! If you weren't convinced before, check out the specs below (provided by Arrow Video USA) and the associated reviews. These are amazing releases, and they can be yours with just a simple e-mail.No fancy schmancy contests or trivia. Just let me know that you want in! Send an email to josh [at]...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Hot on the heels of Arrow Video's incredible (and incredibly sold out) Walerian Borowczyk Box set from last autumn, the company has dug deeper into the director's idiosyncratic oeuvre to deliver what is likely his most straight ahead horror feature, The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Miss Osbourne, also known as Dr. Jekyll And The Women. This film, while not straying too far from Borowczyk's core themes, definitely delivers a lot more blood to go along with its lust than most of his prior works (Erzebet Bathory's co-starring appearance in Immoral Tales notwithstanding). It's truly a fascinating film for adventurous viewers with a little patience and a lot of curiosity.The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Miss Osbourne comes at a time in Borowczyk's...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Is there a filmmaker better-suited to the classic Dr. Jekyll story than Walerian Borowczyk? In the five films (and numerous shorts) Arrow included in their box set last year, he again and again returns to the idea of people having two sides – a socially-acceptable, even enviable face they put to the public, and a sordid private life in which they commit all manner of sins. Unlike so much of Western fiction, this license to transgress was not granted exclusively to men, either. His women were often capable of much worse. Fitting, then, that his version of this story, which shares only the premise with Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, should include a woman in its title. All the more daring that this woman should be based, at least in name, on Stevenson’s own wife.

Like Borowczyk’s The Beast (or the even more-disturbing “Erzsébet Báthory” segment from Immoral Tales), Dr.

Olivier Assayas has managed to squeeze 22 films onto his list of top ten Criterion releases. His #1: Luchino Visconti's The Leopard. And we've rounded up reviews of three crime dramas by Yasujiro Ozu, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le silence de la mer, Jean Renoir's The River, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Germany Pale Mother, Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, Walerian Borowczyk's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne and twelve films by Koji Wakamatzu. Plus two video interviews with Costa-Gavras and reviews of his Z, The Confession and State of Siege. » - David Hudson...

Olivier Assayas has managed to squeeze 22 films onto his list of top ten Criterion releases. His #1: Luchino Visconti's The Leopard. And we've rounded up reviews of three crime dramas by Yasujiro Ozu, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le silence de la mer, Jean Renoir's The River, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Germany Pale Mother, Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, Walerian Borowczyk's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne and twelve films by Koji Wakamatzu. Plus two video interviews with Costa-Gavras and reviews of his Z, The Confession and State of Siege. » - David Hudson...

Welcome to “Target Practice”, where we here at Shock take a look at the output of Arrow Films. Arrow has brought the best in horror, cult and exploitation repertory titles into UK homes since 1991. Now they’ve finally crossed the Atlantic, delivering genre stalwarts and oft-overlooked gems via beautiful Blu-ray & DVD editions. This second…

The post Target Practice: Island of Death (1976) & The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981) appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.

★★★★☆ Walerian Borowczyk is a filmmaker whose enduring reputation was far from guaranteed. Initially heralded as a cinematic genius upon his emergence in the 1950s, his later career saw him pigeon-holed as a pornographer. It's not been until recently that his name has been somewhat rehabilitated. Following a wonderful Blu-ray collection of his work released late last year by Arrow, they're expanding their Borowczyk line with another impressive restoration, this time of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981). An erotic interpretation of the oft-filmed Stevenson story, it's an exemplar of why there is much more to Borowczyk's work than the 'flesh-flick'.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary horror classic Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1886, just a decade before the birth of cinema and only two decades prior to its first screen adaptation (William N. Selig’s now lost Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Since then a lengthy list of cinematic interpretations have come to fruition, from the 1931 film directed by Rouben Mamoulian which earned Fredric March an Oscar for his performance in the starring role, to the 1941 remake that boasted of names like Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner, through a TV movie featuring Mickey Rooney in his very last screen performance. Despite the lengthy list, there is certainly no adaptation quite like Walerian Borowczyk’s hyper sexualized The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne.

By 1981, the year of the film’s release, Borowczyk had (somewhat unwillingly) been pegged as an art house...

Currently ongoing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is the Walerian Borowcyzk series, Obscure Pleasures, and Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca fashioned a nice film essay to supplement the occasion. The above video considers how Borowcyzk’s animation background influenced his treatment of objects, which he often imbues with lifelike or plot-reflecting properties. In the opening film of the series, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, a phonograph is partially responsible for the third act climax. Lucca also considers the filmmaker’s disregard for shot-reverse-shot construction and his dedication to portraying female sexuality in a series of fairly Nsfw clips.

Currently ongoing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is the Walerian Borowcyzk series, Obscure Pleasures, and Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca fashioned a nice film essay to supplement the occasion. The above video considers how Borowcyzk’s animation background influenced his treatment of objects, which he often imbues with lifelike or plot-reflecting properties. In the opening film of the series, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, a phonograph is partially responsible for the third act climax. Lucca also considers the filmmaker’s disregard for shot-reverse-shot construction and his dedication to portraying female sexuality in a series of fairly Nsfw clips.

Following up their incredibly successful crowdfunding campaign a few months ago, Arrow Video USA is poised to bring some hotly anticipated titles to North American Blu-ray over the next few months. Among the titles are not only films previously released through the UK branch like Mark of the Devil, Spider Baby, and Blind Woman's Curse, but also some incredible and long unavailable horror titles that have been in limbo for a long time.Arrow Video USA begins their assault on North America in March with the releases of Blind Woman's Curse, Day of Anger, and Mark of the Devil. April will see the releases of Massacre Gun, Blood and Black Lace, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne. May brings Island of Death,...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Let's face it, Kier-La Janisse is a force to be reckoned with.

Over the past 15 years, she has created the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (Vancouver, BC, 1999–2005); founded the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies as well as the Blue Sunshine Psychotronic Film Center, Montreal's coolest micro-cinema (2010–2012); and programmed for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Austin, TX, 2003–2007). That's in addition to working for the Fantasia International Film Festival (Montreal, QC), being the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (Ashley Fester, 2004), writing A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (published by Fab Press) and contributing articles for Filmmaker magazine, Fangoria and Rue Morgue, among others. And this extensive list is only the tip of the iceberg that is this woman's achievements.

I first met Kier-La in 2009 when she generously agreed to contribute to my Bloody Breasts documentary webseries by letting me interview her amid the craziness that is the Fantasia Film Festival – she...

And here we are, a little late but back in the saddle back with a couple of very TV-oriented weeks in worthwhile DVDs. Check out what I like from the last two weeks below:

Grab ‘Em Right Away

Glee: The Complete Fist Season (Bluray)

Created by: Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk & Ian Brennan

Cast: Matthew Morrison, Jane Lynch, Dianna Agron, Chris Colfer, Jayma Mays, Kevin McHale, Lea Michele, Finn Hudson, Amber Riley, Mark Salling, Jenna Ushkowitz, Naya Rivera & Heather Morris.

Why should you buy this? Because it’s without a doubt the best new TV show from last season. The show does take about three or so episodes to really hit its stride, but take the time necessary. Every cast member sports an amazing voice and even better comedic timing which is what makes the show work. Jane Lynch is perfect; she is unrelenting in her desire to best Will...