Hey, I’m using the year in the titles now! Shows I didn’t have much confidence that I’d keep this going a year ago. Well, a big raspberry to younger me.
We’re getting spooky again, of course, with a lineup that is varied both in types of horror and in quality. I think we have another contender for worst movie to ever play on the Channel — read on to find out which one.
The first featured collection is Directed by John Carpenter. Good choice; he’s a master and he deserves first billing. This is not just his horror movies; it includes early efforts like Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13. Alas, no Halloween or The Thing, although we do get Big Trouble in Little China. If you haven’t ever seen the other two films in his Apocalypse Trilogy, In The Mouth of Madness and Prince of Darkness are very interesting. This collection also includes Ghosts of Mars, which is the aforementioned strong contender for worst thing on the Channel. So it goes.
Next: 2000s Horror. Honestly a mixed bag. Ghosts of Mars again! Trouble Every Day is phenomenal; [•REC] is really good, and I will probably now get around to seeing Lake Mungo finally. I like this as an overview of what was going on in that era. Playing backseat programmer here: I think Cabin in the Woods could have been in this collection as an interesting summation of the era even if it came out in 2011.
Skipping ahead one collection to hit another horror-themed one: Body Horror is way too big to capture in 12 movies but this is a noble attempt, going all the way back to Eyes Without a Face through some excellent Cronenberg all the way to Bug. Missing the recent wave of body horror, alas.
OK. We’ll return to a final horror collection and mention a couple of horror-themed individual restorations/Criterion editions before we’re done. For now, let’s move on to the incredibly exciting October collection, which was pre-announced a couple of weeks ago.
Hong Kong Action Classics! This requires some history. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were three significant Hong Kong studios. Most people have heard of Shaw Brothers, which popularized the wuxia (kung fu) genre in the 60s and 70s. In 1970, a few executives at Shaw Brothers went off to found Golden Harvest, which succeeded after making a few movies with this young guy named Bruce Lee. They also worked with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Both Shaw and Golden Harvest have big libraries which have become fairly available on streaming services and physical media over the years. You can see their movies.
The third studio was Golden Princess. This studio has a slightly complex story involving comedy specialists Cinema City Entertainment; for the purposes of this overly long digression, what matters is that they produced legendary Hong Kong action movies from the great John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and others. Unfortunately, the rights to their library wound up with (as I understand it) a large Hong Kong real estate developer which was uninterested in doing deals for single pictures. These absolutely seminal action movies have languished in rights limbo for decades.
Until Shout! Studios bought the rights as a package. They are busily releasing them on Blu-ray, creating new restorations, and apparently licensing a bunch of them to the Criterion Channel. The new collection includes a lot of those movies, plus some from other studios. It’s too much to summarize: watch The Killer, Hard Boiled, Police Story, Once Upon a Time in China, Heroic Trio, Peking Opera Blues, Election, Infernal Affairs, Prison on Fire, and then follow up on any of the directors or stars you liked. 30 year old me would have been unable to comprehend having access to this collection on demand. I’m not sure 55 year old me really gets it.
OK, deep breath. Some director spotlights! Kira Muratova is a Ukrainian filmmaker; promising me a “dark con-artist comedy” is enough to get me interested in The Tuner. Any other month I’d expect the Edward Yang collection to get top billing; he’s one of the masters of Taiwanese cinema and this is a small but brilliant collection. It’s nice to see Charles Burnett getting a spotlight, including a rediscovery, The Annihilation of Fish — plus a bunch of shorts which is nice for someone like me who wants to familiarize himself with Burnett’s style.
And then there’s another horror collection: Scary Sexy: 6 Films by Jean Rollin. I have only seen one of his movies, The Living Dead Girl. Rollin is a guy who puts his entire psychosexual outlook right up there on the screen; it’s not always anything I care about, but it’s certainly interesting. I like the idea of watching movies from most of his career, watching the way he develops. This collection has many of his most-watched films.
The last collection for the month, Hong Kong Ghost Stories, unifies horror and Hong Kong. The Mr. Vampire movies are really goofy and the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy is evocative and spooky. I wouldn’t call any of them scary per se. Worth dipping into, though.
Hm. No New England Haunted Houses collection? Criterion Channel still hates Boston.
OK, what do we have among the individual movies? Three more horror movies — the great cave flick The Descent, from when Neil Marshall was still directing taut horror; the best vampire movie ever, Ganja & Hess; and the very interesting Eurosleaze Daughters of Darkness, which is fun for the Marlene Dietrich/Louise Brooks homage if nothing else.
My Winnipeg is absolutely wild and if you can get onto Maddin’s wavelength, this is a superb movie that’s about how we think of our home towns as much as it’s about Winnipeg. Pierrot le Fou was the Godard that really clicked with me — I love the pop culture vibe and the way French colonialism is woven in and of course Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. I wanna see Christiane F. for a look at 70s German culture that isn’t Fassbinder.
Great, great month that plays to my personal obsessions almost as well as possible.
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