New Cult Releases May 1st - May 15th

Keeping you up to date on the best in cult and genre cinema

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Vinegar Syndrome Releases

After purchasing a property in Amityville, New York, Debbie (stage veteran Dawna Wightman) and her husband (Hangfire’s David Stein) invite three of their closest friends to help renovate. Immediately uneasy in her new surroundings, Debbie begins experiencing shockingly vivid nightmares. Vague unease turns to outright terror when the home’s inhabitants discover its brutal past, and a mysterious visitor turns up dead. As the line between nightmare and reality disappears, their focus shifts from renovation to escape, but it’s not clear who can be trusted – or who will make it out alive.

Extras:
  • Audio commentary featuring Paul Corupe of Canuxploitation.com and film historian Jason Pichonsky

  • Amityville Memories (2022, 16 min.) - An interview with director Tom Berry

  • Acting in Amityville (2022, 12 min.) - An interview with actress Dawna Wightman

  • Shooting Amityville (2022, 12 min.) - An interview with cinematographer Rodney Gibbons

  • Rodney Remembers (2022, 11 min.) - Gibbons reflects on his body of work

  • Booklet featuring a new Motion Picture Purgatory comic strip by Rick Trembles and an interview with ghost hunter/author Alexandra Holzer

Five military veterans, best friends since childhood, gather together in a Brooklyn brownstone several months after the end of World War II, and the metaphoric ghosts of their past become all-too-literal.

Extras:
  • Feature length audio commentary by writer/director Ted Geoghegan

  • Ghosts of the Past: The Making of Brooklyn 45 - A 30-minute behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film, featuring director and cast

  • The full, feature length film professionally recolored in glorious black-and-white

  • Detailed production notes chronicling the film from concept to release

The largest computer gaming firm in the country has just completed its latest and possibly greatest virtual reality game, “Pleasure”. But the erotic program has a deadly computer virus that meshes the realms of reality and fantasy when its host, Vixen (Tammy Parks, Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfolds), takes the player into a journey through the senses. Play at your own risk!

Extras:
  • Audio commentary with director Dale Frantz and producer/writer Kevin Summerfield

  • new interview with Dale Frantz,

  • new interview with Kevin Summerfield,

  • new interview with special effects artist Doug Ulrich

  • Behind the Pleasure

  • Deleted Scenes

  • Alternate Scenes

  • Raw Footage

  • Trailer

When a music video shoot on the seemingly tranquil Lake Infinity turns into smorgasbord of horror, death and blood-gushing mayhem, it can only mean one thing... ACID HEAD, a horribly scarred axe-wielding maniac with a grudge against interlopers, is loose!

Extras:
  • 1080p master upscaled and color corrected from producer Ollie Martin's original archival materials

  • Booklet with new essay by Dan Budnik

  • Audio Commentary with comedian Tony Martin and film historian Jarret Gahan

  • 30th Anniversary Monster Fest Q&A with Clayton Jacobson (editor), Brian Mannix (score), Don Bridges (cast), Stephen Whittaker (cast), Craig Alexander (cast), Christopher Young (cast), Warren Master (production) & Boyd Martin

  • You’ll Bar Up - Interview with actor Gavin Wood

  • A Hell Of A Lot Of Grunting - Interview with actor Zlatko Kasumovic

  • You Should Be Getting Some Of This On Film - Interview with actor Craig Alexander

  • You Don’t Have To Hate The Film People Forever - Interview with actress Louise Siversen

  • They Were Film People - Interview with actor Don Bridges

  • 52 Pick Up - Interview with editor/second unit director Clayton Jacobson

  • The First Girl - Interview with actress Alisa Meadow

  • A Fatal Vision - Interview with film critic and journalist Michael Helms

  • KILLER ZOMBIES [SD] - Short Film directed By Zlatko ‘Acid Head’ Kasumovic starring Ollie Martin & ‘Film Buff ‘ Paul Harris

  • THE MAD DAREDEVILS DOWNUNDER [SD] - Feature-length documentary on Australian Stunt Men directed by Ollie Martin and featuring HOUSEBOAT HORROR segment with Billy ‘Super’ Smith

  • Digital Remaster Comparison

  • ‘Undiscovered Masterpieces of the Cinema’ - Sketch from THE LATE SHOW

  • Trailer

Forced to earn a living by accepting demeaning roles negotiated by her erratic husband, Nadine Chevalier (Schneider) encounters tabloid photographer Servais (Fabio Testi) on the set of her latest film. Desperate to win her affections, Servais secretly uses money borrowed from a shady associate to bankroll her next project, a production of Richard III with Nadine starring opposite the maniacal German thespian Karl-Heinz Zimmer (Klaus Kinski).

Extras:
  • Interview with Andrzej Zulawski

  • Original Trailer

  • Booklet with a new essay by film critic Kat Ellinger

In 1930, sea captain Russel Marsh saw the light, and for 93 years his body was not his own. Inhabited by a Great Old One, he committed unspeakable acts in the name of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Now free, he is in search of a way to go back in time to reverse the horrors wrought upon the world. But the cult has other plans and will stop at nothing to destroy him.

Extras:
  • Director Commentary

  • Making Of

  • Deleted Scenes

  • Special Effects & Makeup Test Footage

SAMURAI WOLF: Isao Natsuyagi stars as Kiba, a charismatic ronin who wanders into a small town and ends up ensnared in a local conflict that's more than meets the eye. After dispatching a pair of highway criminals seen robbing a courier wagon, Kiba agrees to assist a beautiful blind woman who runs the local shipping company. Double- and triple-crosses ensue, illustrated with savage but economical violence courtesy of famed director Hideo Gosha's (THREE OUTLAW SAMURAI, VIOLENT STREETS) striking black and white filmmaking. The result is a lean and mean triumph of samurai cinema, cementing Gosha's status as a master of the genre.

SAMURAI WOLF 2: HELL CUT: Charismatic ronin Kiba (Isao Natsuyagi) returns, once again entangled in a complex web of intrigue, involving a crooked goldmine owner, a cynical swordsman, and an arrogant dojo master. Master filmmaker Hideo Gosha brings his trademark tight pacing and stylish action to this brisk morality play, inevitably punctuated by the explosions of violent swordplay beloved by fans of the genre.

Extras:
  • Outlaw Director: Hideo Gosha featurette with Tomoe Gosha

  • Audio commentary by Chris Poggiali, co-author of These Fists Break Bricks

  • 20-page booklet with a new essay by Robin Gatto, author of Hideo Gosha, cinéaste sans maître

Originally created on the YouTube channel Slope’s Game Room, these popular short films look at how classic horror franchises such as Friday the 13th™, SAW™ and The Evil Dead™ began their gruesome journeys. We look at the creation of classic comics such as The Mask™, Howard The Duck™ and Scott Pilgrim™. Ever wondered how Robocop vs Terminator™ and Alien vs Predator™ began their timelines? What about the creation of classic cartoons shows such as Beavis & Butthead™?

Extras:
  • SLOPE'S MAZE GAME - The world's 1st blu ray 3D MAZE GAME

  • The 1st HD Video Game Ever

  • Disney's Best Selling Video Game

  • Richard Leinfellner (Evil Dead game) Interview

  • Chris Neary (Evil Dead game) Interview

  • 7 Stolen Trademarks Part 1

  • 7 Stolen Trademarks Part 2

  • GAME OVER! The worst video game movie EVER!

A 21-year-old debt collector making a dishonest living in the bustling criminal economy in the Sichuan Province city of Zhenwu, all while aspiring to a better life than that which his ailing, ex-gangster father (an excellent Qi Zhi) has lived.

Extras:
  • Interview with filmmaker Jiazuo Na

  • Theatrical Trailer

  • Booklet essay by Panos Kotzathanasis of Asian Movie Pulse

  • Booklet interview with filmmaker Jiazuo Na and actress Miyi Huang

Ultramegalopolis presents a 2 and a half hour psychogeographic tour through the vast, post-riot, urban sprawl of Los Angeles, California circa the early ‘90s. Explore the war zone from within its graffiti-covered walls as director Larry Wessel trains his camcorder lens on a dizzying display of the city's most peculiar niches and residents including disabled street performers, junkies, sidewalk religious zealots, ex-cons, celebrity impersonators, and living mannequins. Visit the site of the infamous McMartin pre-school, hear the confessions of Charles Manson’s former cellmate, and experience the subterranean boxing gyms, wrestling rings, graffiti yards, and bullfighting arenas of America’s smog infested City of Angels.

Extras:
  • Audio commentary with director Larry Wessel

  • Larry Wessel: The Walkertown Report -a career spanning interview with director Larry Wessel conducted by Dwayne Walker

  • “King of the Underground” -director Larry Wessel reads an excerpt from his upcoming memoir

  • “Boy Scout” -Paul Roessler music video directed by Larry Wessel

  • Larry Wessel short films:

  • Lust for Knife (Super 8mm / 1980)

  • Santeria! (2012)

  • The Sugar Weasel Story (2013)

  • Summer (2013)

  • Let’s Talk About Chemtrails (2012)

  • Trigger Happy (2012)

  • Have a Nice Day! (2012)

  • Oil! (2012)

  • "Larry’s Little Wonders": a collection of animated shorts

  • Larry Wessel trailer vault

Vacation! is an existential beach party movie about life, death, sex and drugs. When four college friends reunite for a girls’ week at the beach, it’s all bikinis, piña coladas and dance parties at first. But the fun soon fades away… After procuring a psychotropic drug from a sketchy surfer dude, the girls take a very strange trip into the abyss.

Extras:
  • Deleted scenes 

  • Miracle Bowel Cleanse infomercial

  • Commentary by Zach Clark

  • 20 page booklet

Follows a land surveyor on an assignment to measure an ancient forest for a developer but soon loses his reason in a supernatural environment that has its own plans.

Extras:
  • Introduction by Director Lorcan Finnegan

  • Three Story Board to Scenes Featurette

  • Six Deleted Scenes

  • Behind the Scenes Slideshow

  • Commentary with Director Lorcan Finnegan, Writer Garret Shanley and Actor Alan McKenna

  • Devoy’s Notebook Read by Eric

  • Lorcan Finnegan’s Short Film FOXES

  • Behind the Scene Footage: Eric is Hiding in the Water Stream

  • Trailer

  • Essay by Laura Kern: writer, editor, and horror programmer

Criterion Collection Releases

Brief Encounters 1967

Kira Muratova’s first solo feature already displays her sui generis approach to cinema, in an impressionistic portrait of women at work and in love. Through an intricate play of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Brief Encounters reveals the tangled romantic triangle that connects a hard-nosed city planner (played by Muratova herself), her free-spirited geologist husband (legendary Soviet protest singer Vladimir Vysotskiy), and the young woman from the countryside (Nina Ruslanova) whom she hires as her housekeeper. Blending observational realism with striking New Wave–style experimentation, Muratova crafts a wryly perceptive study of two very different women bound by chance and each navigating her own career, dreams, and disappointments.

The Long Farewell 1971

With its daring formalist freedom, Kira Muratova’s pointillist family portrait so perplexed and unnerved Soviet censors that it effectively halted her career for years afterward. A kind of psychological breakup movie, The Long Farewell traces the growing rift that develops between an emotionally impulsive single mother (stage legend Zinaida Sharko, transcendent in one of her first film roles) and her increasingly resentful teenage son (Oleg Vladimirsky), who upends her world when he announces that he wishes to live with his faraway father. The seemingly simple premise is rendered anything but by Muratova’s dreamy, drifting style, with off-kilter framing, editing, and dialogue continually pushing cinema’s aesthetic and expressive boundaries outward.

Extras:
  • Archival interview with director Kira Muratova

  • PLUS: An essay by film critic Jessica Kiang

  • Interviews with scholars Elena Gorfinkel and Isabel Jacobs

Centered on an intense reenactment of Coolidge’s experience of rape in her adolescence, the film casts Michele Manenti (also a survivor) as the director’s younger self, and observes the actor and her castmates as they engage in a profound dialogue about what it means to recreate these traumatic memories, and about their attitudes concerning consent and self-blame.

Extras:
  • Interview with Coolidge conducted by filmmaker Allison Anders

  • Old-Fashioned Woman (1974), a documentary by Coolidge about her grandmother

  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

  • PLUS: An essay by film critic Molly Haskell

The writer-director plays “Albert Brooks,” a narcissistic Hollywood filmmaker who plans to spend the year in Phoenix embedded with Warren and Jeanette Yeager (Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) and their two children, deploying an arsenal of cutting-edge equipment (including the over-the-head Ettinaur 226XL camera) to capture an American family’s ordinary day-to-day. Chronicling the project’s disastrous fallout, as the meddlesome Albert can’t help getting too close to his subjects, this pioneering mockumentary is more relevant than ever amid today’s media landscape.

Extras:
  • New interview with Brooks

  • New interview with actor Frances Lee McCain

  • 3D trailer directed by Brooks

  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

  • PLUS: An essay by critic A. S. Hamrah

Reeling after his second divorce and struggling with writer’s block, sci-fi novelist John Henderson (Albert Brooks) resolves to figure out where his life went wrong, and hits on an unorthodox solution: moving back in with his relentlessly disapproving, cheerfully passive-aggressive mother (Debbie Reynolds), whose favorite son has always been John’s younger brother, Jeff (Rob Morrow).

Extras:
  • New interview with Brooks

  • New interview with actor Rob Morrow

  • Teaser directed by Brooks

  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

  • PLUS: An essay by critic Carrie Rickey

The life of Emperor Puyi, who took the throne in 1908, at age three, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval within and without the walls of the Forbidden City

Extras:
  • Audio commentary featuring director Bernardo Bertolucci, producer Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Mark Peploe, and composer-actor Ryuichi Sakamoto

  • 218-minute television version

  • The Italian Traveler, Bernardo Bertolucci, a film by Fernand Moszkowicz tracing the director’s geographic influences, from Parma to China

  • Footage taken by Bertolucci while on preproduction in China

  • Two documentaries about the making of the film

  • Program featuring cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, editor Gabriella Cristiani, costume designer James Acheson, and art director Gianni Silvestri

  • Archival interview with Bertolucci

  • Interviews with composer David Byrne and cultural historian Ian Buruma

  • Trailer

  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

  • PLUS: An essay by film critic David Thomson, interviews with production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and actor Ying Ruocheng, a reminiscence by Bertolucci, and an essay by Fabien S. Gerard

BFI Releases

A mystery wrapped in conspiracy and secrets, Hidden City tells the story of James Richards (Charles Dance), a writer sucked into a search for a lost piece of film by Sharon Newton (Cassie Stuart), a video librarian. What they stumble upon are cover-ups, tense searches, and possible danger.

Extras:
  • Newly recorded audio commentary with writer and director Stephen Poliakoff and film critic Michael Brooke

  • Treasures from the BFI National Archive (1903-1947, 58 mins): a selection of archive gems, exploring some of the themes featured in Hidden City. The films: Cheese Mites (1903), Barging Through London (1924), Hop Gardens of Kent (1933), The City (1939) and Shown by Request (1947)

  • Inside the BFI National Archive (2023, 1 min): a behind-the-scenes look at the work of the BFI National Archive

  • FIRST PRESSING ONLY Illustrated booklet including Poliakoff's original introduction to his screenplay, a new essay on the film by John Wyver, a new interview with Stephen Poliakoff by Michael Brooke, new writing on Barging Through London and Hop Gardens of Kent by Ellen Cheshire and an essay on Public Information films and the National Archives by Sarah Castagnetti and Patrick Russell

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