Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Re-Animator, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, The Covered Wagon, Roaring Abyss.
Re-Animator
Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), a third-year medical student, is having roommate problems. And since he attends Miskatonic University, can weird science and gruesome experiments be far behind? In this blood-splattered 1985 adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story, the weirdly saturnine roommate, Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), is reanimating dead human tissue—and dead people—with terrible results. Director Stuart Gordon, a one-time UW-Madison theater major, was important for his work with Chicago’s Organic Theater.
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Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno
When a jealous husband gazes onto a lake and sees his wife in a boat with another man, the water turns blood red. French director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (1964) was a dazzling visualization of obsession. But the project collapsed in confusion, leaving behind 13 hours of film, most of it seen for the first time in this documentary. Interviews with cast and crew suggest Clouzot went off his head trying to juggle Inferno’s many facets.
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The Covered Wagon
The Covered Wagon (1923) was the western that set the standard—blazed the trail if you will—for things to come. It catches the dusty grime of a wagon train rolling toward Oregon in the 1840s and encapsulates the American mythology of “lion-hearted” pioneers who “carved a splendid civilization out of uncharted wilderness.” The western lingo was spelled in intertitles (“I’m mighty well pleased, m’am”) and many of the genre’s stock characters were already fully sketched.
Roaring Abyss
In tin-rooted dance halls, village commons and parks, traditional music flourishes across Ethiopia. Director Quino Piñero ventured beyond that nation’s cities and into the countryside where ancient harps and pipes are still played against the hypnotic rhythms of hand-slapped drums, where vocal groups sing with an urgency strangely reminiscent of rap and a brass band bends its European instruments to the demands of East Africa. Interviewed are people who make no separation between music and life.
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