VHS Quest #13. Halloween Special: The Tempter (L'anticristo) (Alberto De Martino, 1974)

Ippolita (Carla Gravina) is bewitched by dark forces in The Tempter (L'anticristo)...

In the 1970's/80's horror, before a staple of the studio production line, evolved into the genre of the auteur, birthing everything from the grotesque Dalí-like abstractions of Argento's Suspiria (1977) to the cold spectral surfaces of Kubrick's The Shining (1980). During this time horror validated itself as an individual artform, capable of instilling beauty into the macabre (I recall the entire disco sequence from Carrie, De Palma, 1976). But many of the decade's biggest hits spawned a legion of less impressive copycats, and none more so than William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), a spew-laden drama about demonic possession, haunted by Mike Oldfield's classic Tubular Bells. But of all the Exorcist copycats I've seen none have quite the high-strung infernal power of L'anticristo, a possession horror hailing from Italy - the capital of genre sleaze. Indeed, everything that Friedkin's film restrains De Martino's takes to an extreme and vomits it in the face of the viewer. Dim your pumpkins horror hounds...

Ippolita (Carla Gravina), a young woman haunted by the death of her mother, is tormented by satanic visions while undergoing a crisis of faith. She's paralyzed, anxious, repressed and frustrated. Nobody seems to understand her, despite the best efforts of her comforting brother (perhaps a little too comforting) and strict father. When she seemingly loses mental control to dark forces a psychiatrist is hired to hypnotize the young woman, in the hope that some past trauma may be revealed. Ippolita travels back to a previous spirit; a life in which she was condemned for witchcraft and burnt at the stake. Doctors fail to cure her and eventually Father Mittner (George Coulouris) is called to perform a full exorcism. Will he be able to save the girl, or has she been forever lost to the devil?

Although lacking the intellectual rigor of The Exorcist, adapted by William Peter Blatty from his original source novel, L'anticristo does ramp up the intensity of the possession, working valiantly to gross us out every ten minutes. Character is much less of a concern here than set-pieces, but De Martino does provide his audience with a logical sequence of events which lead to Ippolita's demonic overtaking, as opposed to Friedkin's more ambiguous approach - Regan (Linda Blair) is just an ordinary girl, happy until she starts chucking up green sludge and breaking out in scars. L'anticristo's centerpiece is Ippolita's feverish nightmare recalling her past life as a witch, focusing on a surreal ceremony in which she licks a goats anus and makes love with (possibly) Satan himself, masked in theatrical animal getup. The young girl writhes on her bed as the colour and soundscapes shift in tone and intensity; the walls of her room seemingly give way to a different environment, and the effect is disorienting. De Martino frames the ceremony like a fairytale inauguration gone straight to hell; all spindly trees, cold marble and freakish orgiastic bodies rattling in the mist. He takes a distance from the action but allows for enough emphasis so that it feels explicit - indeed, the devilish induction will leave a disturbing mark on your mind.

Much of the atmosphere in this sequence (and the full-pelt exorcism which ends the film) is mustered though Ennio Morricone's incredible score, co-written with Bruno Nicolai (best known for his work on Caligula, Brass, 1979). A mixture of ghostly pipe organs and jolting strings, their accompaniment is as beautiful as it is terrifying, and will make subsequent visits to church uncomfortable for quite some time. The track which ends the film, 'The Light', is a masterpiece of crescendoing intensity, ranking among the composer's best work. De Martino is a competent director though, and not incapable of building atmosphere. His camerawork is often dynamic and exciting, especially in the sequences where Ippolita wreaks havoc in her bedroom, throwing paintings, drawers and wardrobes around with her mind. It's just that Morricone and Nicolai's score is so overwhelming that it hits every primary nerve the director also strives for.

Gravina is exceptional as Ippolita, throwing herself full-on into the film's most difficult sequences. The makeup does a lot of the work for her (pale, powdery complexion, dark rings around the eyes, foaming at the mouth) but the actress still dedicates herself to the idea of possession, moving specifically to the limitations of her character (she's in a wheelchair). The dubbing on this VHS is terrible but her physicality informs us of every demonic pang and thrust; every resentment bubbling under the surface of her now hell-wracked face. Some may find her over the top, but I think that's rather the point. Every other performance is somewhat underwhelming, although in fairness to the actors they're not really given much more than exposition to work with. Overall L'anticristo is a roaring success, and one of the most underrated horror films of the 1970's. "Your mother sucks cocks in hell"? Bah! This makes Friedkin's film look like a trip to Disneyland...

This review is part of VHS Quest.

P.S. I now learn that The Tempter is available on DVD under the title The Antichrist. It has so many monikers that I struggled to find it initially. I'll still include this review in VHS Quest however, because it counts as a Halloween Special.

Saint (Dick Maas, 2010) DVD Review

He knows when you've been naughty, and he has a killer zombie army... Saint (2010)

'This Christmas, Santa's Coming To Slay...'

So reads the tagline for Saint, Dick Mass' blackly comic yuletide horror about a "murderous renegade bishop" who kidnaps children on the dark, blizzard-swept eve of December 5th, the traditional date of celebration for Sinterklass. Legend dictates that when this night bears a full moon St. Nick will return, raising his festive spear to the throats of little'uns whose only wish is to find a puppy or scalextric set burrowed under their tree. Mounted upon his demonic steed, this vengeful Santa is an evil tyrant who once pillaged villages and stole their young - that is until a rag-tag troop of parents gathered their torches and pitchforks to wreak revenge (pictured above). Horror fans will instantly recognize the nod toward Freddy Krueger's backstory, and on a first glance this festal slasher might draw comparison with Silent Night, Deadly Night (E. Sellier, Jr, 1984), but Saint is undeniably a horror from the Low Country...

Maas' most famed work is probably 1988's Amsterdamned, a Dutch giallo about a scuba-diving killer who scales the city's canals for fresh female meat. I once described the film as "a remake of Jaws, but with a psychopath instead of a shark" and by this logic Saint is basically a retelling of your traditional Nöel fairytale, but with a spindly disfigured butcher instead of a jolly plump present bearer. Clocking in at a lean 78 minutes, the film is an action-packed ride through a snowy suburb in the Netherlands, populated by various horror movie clichés. Actually, Maas' does show an odd level of contempt for his stereotypes (cliquey bitches, crass jocks, drunken ex-cops), especially the young tech-savvy protagonists who exist at the whim of their IPhones - in fact, one group of broadly etched friends have their limbs lopped off for the failure of their GPS system. Maas' might be having a poke at contemporary culture here, and in some scenes he does so pretty scathingly, but it never stops the film from being fun. The screenplay is actually very witty and, despite being caricatures, the characters do develop into people we can care about and get behind - especially Goert (Bert Luppes), our ex-cop.

What really sells the film are its set-pieces, and they're an absolute riot. Believe me when I say that you won't see a more original chase sequence this year - a cops vs. santa rooftop pursuit! St. Nick darts across houses as the police pursue below, speeding down tight one-way streets and crowded estates, firing off rounds at the red-caped baddie. Eventually they land a blow and... well, I won't spoil the outcome, but it's a smashing finale. It's also worth commenting on the quality of the SFX here - Maas can't have been working from a huge budget, but his monsters are astonishingly well rendered, and the action scenes are state-of-the-art. The final set-piece, despite amounting to a huge anti-climax, also looks terrific, handling beheadings and firefights on a pretty impressive scale. Maas', who is now 60, directs the action with energy and confidence; indeed, Saint has all the technical vigor and extreme gore of an eager debut.

It's not perfect, but Saint is definitely a Halloween release I can recommend, and actually it's disappointing to find the flick landing straight onto DVD. Some may be uncomfortable with the en masse kiddie slaughter (it happens offscreen, but Santa does burn a children's ward to the ground), and I can imagine the stock character types getting on people's nerves, but Mass' latest has enough dark wit, brooding atmosphere and blood spurting decapitations to satisfy any horror hound looking for something a bit different this October 31st. One of the genre's most undervalued auteurs has struck gold again with a wonderfully crafted snow-steeped slashfest - it's a blast!

The Disc/Extras

Excellent quality release; the image is crisp and clear. I'm surprised it hasn't been made available on Blu-Ray. The lack of extras is also very disappointing - it's really unforgivable these days to release a DVD package that doesn't even contain the original theatrical trailer.

Saint pops down the chimney and onto DVD shelves on Monday 31st October.

Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, 2011) Review

"More tea Sir?" Emily Browning stars in Sleeping Beauty (2011)

"Your vagina is a temple" asserts Clara (Rachel Blake), the chic femme bitch of Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty. "My vagina is not a temple" replies Lucy (Emily Browning), the protagonist of this perverse, Haneke-esque anti-fairytale. Actually, there are hints of Buñuel here too, and not just in the obvious Belle de Jour (1967) - glibly affected dinner table scenes appear to repress the middle-class satire of The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972), a trick Leigh woefully (if intentionally) misses. Instead she crafts a portrait of the doe-eyed Lucy, our titular sleeping beauty, who offers herself as an ornamental plaything for the self-destructive old men who endeavor to relive their youth through her doll-like comatose form.

It's an interesting setup, but Leigh's rigid sexual drama is too austere to engage, ultimately ending up as a series of cold, loosely connected set-pieces which never feel sure of their purpose; do they aim to titillate or disgust? The film attempts to illustrate the ethical dilemmas of paying and being paid for sex, highlighting the psychological implications and dangers of both, but Sleeping Beauty never dares to delve beneath its own pristine surface, undermining any attempt at moralising with its frequent and explicit nudity. Surely Leigh doesn't require that many full-frontal shots to make her point, if indeed she even has one?

What's worse is that I never really felt for Lucy or understood her as a human being, the reasons for which are twofold. The screenplay is woefully underdeveloped, preferring direction to dialogue, and it never presents the audience with a believable normality that Lucy can then shatter. We're privy to her enigmatic relationship with a sickly hermit named Birdman (Ewen Leslie), but their conversations never go anywhere or feel substantial. They are one of the film's more interesting elements though, because they at least feel somewhat real. The main arc never strikes a single believable note. But this is also down to Browning's laughably one-note performance (her reaction to a bedside companion during the final scenes is uncomfortably bad) which is so wooden that she may as well be a part of the furniture.

I was initially shocked to learn that Sleeping Beauty has been produced by Jane Campion, a director well regarded for 1993's mute period drama The Piano. But then I remembered her own atrocious erotica, 2003's dud Meg Ryan thriller In The Cut, and everything suddenly fell into place. Indeed, the more of its hand it reveals (do we even need to enter the sleeping chamber?) the less interesting Sleeping Beauty becomes. Ultimately Leigh's Fabergé fantasy is one of the year's worst films; adolescent, pompous and unforgivably boring. My final word? Belle de Shit.

Sleeping Beauty was released in UK cinemas on October 14th.

LFF 2011: The Awakening (Nick Murphy, 2011) Review

Things might not be what they seem for Rebecca Hall in The Awakening (2011)...

A cold manor house surrounded by dense woodland provides the backdrop for Nick Murphy's nuts n' bolts ghost story The Awakening, and it's one of several elements you've undoubtedly seen before. Following in the classic tradition of The Innocents (Clayton, 1961) and The Others (Amenábar, 2001), this is a film sorely lacking in originality and identity, instead acting as an efficient skim through your current DVD library; a reminder that you should probably re-watch The Orphanage (Antonio Bayona, 2007). The floorboards here are sufficiently creaky, and the house unnerving, but you'll struggle to find anything new within its walls, or indeed anything worth remembering.

The story picks up in 1921 London. The country is recovering from war and struggling to develop in the ashes of conflict. Thousands of soldiers have fallen, leaving behind widows and orphaned children. Perhaps this is a time where people have need for ghosts. Professional hoax exposer Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is dedicated to logic and science, yet secretly longs to be visited by the spirit of her loved one, who was stolen by the ravages of WWI. Schoolmaster Robert Mallory (Dominic West), a troubled ex-solider, calls her to Rockwood, a boys' boarding school seemingly haunted by the ghost of an ex-student. To nobody's surprise Florence finds it hard to debunk the rumoured sightings and instead gets wrapped up in the mystery. There are some head-slappingly obvious twists along the way (including some full-on Scooby Doo red herrings), but the fun lies in their execution.

DP Eduard Grau (who won acclaim with 2009's A Single Man, Tom Ford) shoots the landscape through a drab, grey lens, capturing a genuine bleakness through an aged aesthetic. He musters a tangible atmosphere around the spiraling staircases and foreboding corridors, but The Awakening really calls out to be shot in black and white, which would lend it the feeling of a monochrome wartime photograph. Every frame is drained of colour, and Grau is obviously striving to vary around one tone, so why not just go the whole way? I suspect it comes down to marketing, and the age of the target audience.

But black and white photography would have served another important purpose. There's something wonderfully old fashioned about Murphy's film, which creaks and groans across a heightened soundscape (courtesy of Daniel Pemberton), but it also showcases a peculiar penchant for modernism - the ghost itself, for example, defined by a CGI stretchy-mouth straight out of Asian horrors such as Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) and Ju-On (Takashi Shimizu, 2002). Then there's our heroine, who is frequently referred to in dialogue as "educated", presumably to point out how ahead of her time this feisty protagonist is. It quickly becomes tiresome, and when her dress code also moves anachronistically toward GAP one wonders why this tale requires 1921 as its setting. My point is that black and white photography could have lent the film a definite period feeling, and further heightened the atmosphere.

There are some effective jump scares (Florence's first night in the house, a protracted set-piece of mounting dread, is exceptional), but the film's other big hangup is its lack of psychological impact. Here we are in the wake of war and economic devastation, and Florence's own battle against the spirit world she's now confronted with, and the film never raises an emotional pulse. It never got inside my head or under my skin. Character drama is foregrounded, but for what purpose if every plot strand is going to be abandoned for formulaic score-orientated scares? This is a classier horror picture than we're used to, but its ultimate ambition is no different to your average Insidious (Wan, 2010), which is to get popcorn flying in front of the screen.

That said, they just don't make 'em like this anymore, and it's nice to find a traditional English-feeling horror in cinemas once again. Hammer are releasing The Woman In Black (James Watkins) next February, so perhaps we're about to witness a resurgence? I couldn't be more excited by the prospect, especially if it's going to attract talent like Hall and West, who are terrific here, making the most of risible material. Neither are at their best, but actually the film is worth seeing for their performances. You believe their fear at every turn, even if Murphy never allows you to feel it for yourself.

The Awakening is playing at the London Film Festival on Wednesday 26th October. Its official UK release date is November 11th. This review can originally be found at Flickfeast.

Red Psalm (Még kér a nép) (Miklós Jancsó, 1972) DVD Review

A mighty wind blows through the peasants' revolt... Red Psalm (1972)

Composed of just 28 sequence shots, Miklós Jancsó's Red Psalm (Még kér a nép) is one of cinema's greatest political parables, a film Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly described as "an awesome fusion of form with content and politics with poetry." Set in 1898, the film elliptically floats through several days in a socialist revolt, charting the epic struggle by the working class against their bureaucrat oppressors. Jancsó denies the audience any association with a specific character, instead taking the Hungarian workers as a collective, united by linked arms and folkish rhapsodies. Musicians ramble freely around the rings of revolutionaries, singing songs of peace and freedom. "The land belongs to those who cultivate it" declares one character, a plain woman who sows seeds in the hope that life will be born from them. Jancsó's film is empathetic and objective, a vision for which he won 1972's Best Director prize at Cannes.

But those without a working knowledge of Hungarian history or politics (this bracket includes me) needn't be intimidated by Red Psalm's subject, for Jancsó's tale is a bold cinematic adventure which, with its graceful camerawork and ethereal landscapes, strikes a deep and resonant emotional chord. Much like Zoltán Huszárik's Szindbád (1971), released by Second Run earlier this year, Red Psalm presents a perfect marriage of form with content, expressing much of its story with striking visual patterns. Written by Gyula Hernádi, the film employs dialogue sparingly (much of it feels improvised), preferring to let the landscape speak for itself. The camera glides past characters - incidental and critical - with no particular rhythm, and reading the essay which accompanies this release I learn that Jancsó didn't plan or choreograph any of his shots before arriving on set. There's a freedom to his camerawork which perfectly complements the action it observes, wherein characters often break into dance and address the camera directly. It's a film constantly in motion, and this helps engage the viewer through the disconnected narrative.

DP János Kende captures the fields of revolt beautifully, and there's one particularly striking sequence where the protestors set a church on fire. The flames tremble and roar around this holy architecture; it is a formidable beauty. Jancsó switches between intimate close-ups (sometimes too close, and the effect is choking) and huge landscape shots with ease, and his eye is highly developed. There's another impressive sequence where the protesters unify in dance, only to be surrounded by armed soldiers. Horses gallop around the site, denying them any chance of escape. Their fate was perhaps inevitable, but the ringing gunshots still strike a devastating blow, and Jancsó's distance from the event makes it all the more chilling. His understanding of framing and colour is impeccable, and the use of red, at first on a bleeding hand and then across waves of ribbons, has scarcely been used more effectively in cinema.

Even without an understanding of its wider aims, Red Psalm still impresses in its scope and feeling. This was my first experience of Jancsó's work, and I can't wait to explore more - turns out there's no better time either, as Second Run are releasing a collection on November 21st.

The Disc/Extras

The brand new 16:9 digital transfer has been approved by Jancsó himself, and it looks wonderfully crisp and clean. As usual with Second Run there's an accompanying booklet, this time authored by Peter Hames, providing context for the film and its director's body of work. Hames' is perhaps a little too academic, but his 20-page entry is still highly readable and informative. The sole extra on the disc is Message Of Stones - Hegyalja (1994), the third in Jancsó's Message Of Stones documentary series. I haven't managed to watch this yet due to my tight LFF schedule, but I promise I'll update this review with my thoughts sometime over the weekend. Overall, Red Psalm is another essential purchase from Second Run, who miraculously haven't released a bad title this year.

LFF 2011: Curling King (Ole Endresen, 2011) Review

The half-wit curlers of Ole Endresen's slapdash Curling King (2011)

Dodgeball (2004). Blades Of Glory (2007). Semi-Pro (2008). Sports comedies have been doing pretty big business in Hollywood over the past decade, due in no small part to the presence of Frat Packer's Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell. Largely revolving around the underdog/slacker-done-good arc, these conventional comedies have scored with audiences by portraying their sports with a blend of broad slapstick and in-jokes, and the same formula applies to Norway's Curling King, an efficient little farce which is too predictable to become the international show-stopper it's hoping for. Norwegian cinema has definitely secured an audience in the UK this year, and its presence at the festival (be sure to check out Morten Tyldum's Headhunters, 2011) is encouraging, but sadly this isn't a release I can get behind.

The story revolves around a middle-aged curling team who fall apart when their leader, Truls Paulsen (Atle Antonsen), is diagnosed with OCD and banned from the sport. Heavily medicated and under surveillance from his trophy wife Sigrid (Linn Skâber), Truls soon decides to come back to curling when his mentor Gordon falls ill. He requires an expensive life saving operation, but coincidentally the cash prize from the curling championship will meet his medical bills. The rest of the plot could be (and probably was) mapped out on a handkerchief, and all of your primary presumptions are probably correct (breakups, setbacks, reunions etc).

An example of Curling King's predictability. Early in the film it is revealed that one character's estranged father is a Rod Stewart impersonator. It's only a matter of time before we're treated to the hi-larious sight of a monotone codger in a tiger-skin jacket giving his half-arsed rendition of 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?' My audience howled with laugher, but I can't imagine why. Even worse is my suspicion that, had an American film pulled that gag, we'd all be rolling our eyes and calling it predictable. Well guess what? It's no different here. Same goes for a boring dance-off sequence to MC Hammer's 'U Can't Touch This', which is sure to get a round-of-applause. It was funnier when Little Miss Sunshine (2006) did it.

In all honesty I wasn't really prepared for the sort of film Curling King was when I walked into the press screening. Despite the festival programme using terms such as "pastel-bright comedy" and "growing old disgracefully" I was expecting something more along the lines of Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit (2007), a dry Egyptian comedy about a police band lost in translation. The broad, knockabout stylings of Curling King actually have more in common with those blockbusting Frat Pack outings, abandoning subtlety and character at the calling of a good chubby-chaser gag. That said, Endresen's film isn't without charm, and that's largely down to some terrifically offbeat performances...

Each member of the curling team is undergoing some kind of midlife crisis (the funniest, involving a pillow and a milk truck, gets an unsatisfying payoff), and their concerns are all somewhat relatable. Beneath the vibrant colour scheme and broad sight gags (plentiful pelvic thrusting from Paulsen's arch nemesis) there's actually an affectingly deadpan sadness, which the actors exploit well. They don't entirely gel as a team, and it's annoying that the plot becomes so centralized on Paulsen that it forgets about his teammates during the middle third, but the brisk pace means that it never becomes too much of a problem. Antonsen's comic timing is particularly spot-on, but the setups just aren't good enough to support him.

It's very hard to get 600 words out of Curling King. I've managed, but this review has been stretched to its limits. At times it was like getting blood from a stone, and in that sense I have something in common with the film's screenwriters; finding enough jokes in the premise of Curling King to sustain a 75-minute feature is a task I wouldn't have envied them...

This review can originally be found at Flickfeast.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Ôshima, 1983) Blu-Ray Review

David Bowie plays a prisoner of war in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983)

Nagisa Ôshima's vision of war-torn 1942 Java was met with middling critical reviews upon its release in 1983, but the film has grown in stature over the years and it now arrives on Blu-Ray as something of a cult curio, largely for the assembly of its three leading players - David Bowie, Tom Conti and Takeshi Kitano. Based upon Sir Laurens van Der Post's 1963 prison diary 'The Seed And The Sower', the film chronicles life in a Japanese POW camp for two pairs of soldiers. The British, Col. Lawrence (Conti) and Capt. Hicksley (Jack Thompson), are stiff-upper-lipped, deflated and, in the case of the former man, bewildered by the culture he is now charged with translating. The Japanese, Sgt. Hara (Takeshi) and Capt. Yonoi (Ryûichi Sakamoto), are warriors and leaders, but different in their approach to the British. They represent, respectively, sadism and empathy. Through these characters the film, as well as being a compelling study of the consequences of war, also becomes about culture shock and tradition. We view these themes through Lawrence's sad eyes; eyes which challenge Japan's moral authority.

Ôshima's films have always expressed criticism of his home country, and here Lawrence exposes and grapples with some of its hypocrisies and elderly modes. One scene finds Lawrence confronting Hara about shame, which for the Japanese is a feeling worse than death. They would commit harakiri (ritual suicide) rather than experience it. What the mannered Brit expresses is that shame presents itself differently to every man. In fact, he regards suicide as an act of shame - a cowards way out of life's challenges. The two men understand each other, but could never imagine living by the other's values. For me their conflict is the most engaging element of Mr. Lawrence, but the film is captivatingly odd from its opening minutes, which showcase Sakamoto's classic score - a blend of wind instruments and anachronistic synthesizers which look to both classical Japan and 80's America for its influence. His music actually musters much of the atmosphere that Ôshima's confused direction can't, as it often feels like the director is lost in translation between the Japanese and British styles.

On this note, I have to say that the actors are the film's biggest weakness. Not necessarily because they're bad, but more down to the fact that Japanese and British acting styles are so different, and the two are awkwardly married. Conti and Bowie aim for a kind of damaged realism, underplaying every line and expressing the majority of emotion through their eyes and subtle physical gestures. Kitano and Sakamoto are much more theatrical, expressing everything on the surface in grand sweeping movements. Their lines are shouted, and Sakamoto in particular seems to be struggling with the English dialogue, at his very loudest sounding like a bad Fozzy Bear impersonator. Ôshima implies a latent homosexual attraction between Yonoi and prisoner Celliers (Bowie), but the actor's performances are so aggressively incompatible that it's hard to read anything between them. That said, their relationship has struck a chord with certain audiences, and there's even fan art dedicated to the subtext.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is an oddity in Ôshima's body of work, but by no means its weakest link. Individual scenes impress in their daring, such as Lawrence's conversation with Yonoi where he learns of his sentencing to death. No crime must go unpunished in Japan, even if the guilty party is uncertain. Lawrence laughs the matter off before acknowledging a deep frustration with his captors way of life; a great pain, too. Scenes like these elevate the film to a soaring level, but there are also entire sequences which prove sluggish and unnecessary, such as Celliers' flashback to his youth and the troubled relationship he shared with his hunchback brother. Mr Lawrence is a hodgepodge collection of performances, ideas and styles, and far from a perfect film. But it is one of the most interesting I've ever seen, and am ever likely to see...

The Disc/Extras

A good, clean transfer, but a bit of a disappointment coming from Optimum Entertainment, whose remasters of In The Realm Of The Senses (1976) and Empire Of Passion (1978) are far superior. Still, this is the best version of the film available in the UK, largely because of the expansive extras. There's an interesting 30-minute making-of documentary called 'The Oshima Gang', interviews with Jeremy Thomas (producer) and Ryûichi Sakamoto (actor/composer), the original theatrical trailer, and a 3-minute excerpt from Scenes By The Sea (Louis Heaton, 2000), a documentary about Takeshi Kitano. There's perhaps nothing new for fans here, but it's a solid package nonetheless.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is out on Blu-Ray from Monday 24th October. This review can originally be found at Flickfeast.