Vinegar Syndrome et al.

[yoloswegmaster]

A redditor was kind enough to make a spreadsheet of the inventory counts for the VS and Partner Label titles.

[Rayon Vert]

Thanks all.

[Mr Sausage]

Ode to Nothing is wonderful, a sad grotesque movie about loss and entrapment. Very much recommended.

Thanks for the rec - though is it something you'd revisit? I say that as someone who loves revisiting certain sad movies, while others are clearly repelling yet impressive one-offs

Definitely one I’d revisit. I wouldn’t call it a repelling movie. I found it moving.

[SeizureMilk]

Looks like it's setting up some sort of trilogy release from their Labs program per their Twitter page. Most likely the Apocalypse Trilogy but could be something else.

[therewillbeblus]

Ode to Nothing is wonderful, a sad grotesque movie about loss and entrapment. Very much recommended.

Thanks for the rec - though is it something you'd revisit? I say that as someone who loves revisiting certain sad movies, while others are clearly repelling yet impressive one-offs

Definitely one I’d revisit. I wouldn’t call it a repelling movie. I found it moving.

Sold, thanks!

[Glowingwabbit]

Looks like it's setting up some sort of trilogy release from their Labs program per their Twitter page. Most likely the Apocalypse Trilogy but could be something else.

They said it will be a four film set so possibly that with Golem

[Mr Sausage]

Managed to find my capsule reviews of the two films (for some reason the search function turns up nothing for "Ode to Nothing" or the individual words).

Ode to Nothing (Dwein Ruedas Baltazar)

Easily and without question my favourite film of the festival. An aging, single woman who’s run into debt with a loan shark in trying to keep her ailing funeral home from going under receives the dead body of an unidentified old woman. She keeps it hoping it’ll be identified, only for a sudden upturn in luck to accompany the body. The movie has the same flat, unsaturated digital look as Mysteries of the Night, the other Filipino movie I saw at the festival, but here the look is appropriate, and supported by a stronger grasp of craft. The movie’s triumph is that brings you so far inside the emotional world of its characters that you come to accept as normal and understandable certain realities they set for themselves, even when those realities are gross or illogical. You find yourself implicitly accepting for example that the dead body is in fact holding up its side of the conversation, so engrossing is the emotional reality of these scenes. As affecting and moving a portrait of loneliness and poverty as I’ve seen, one whose ambiguities deepen on reflection. It does seem at the end that the woman is ruined in monkey-paw fashion, and yet there is a sense that the end may not be so desperate, that these crushing ordeals have brought ultimate loss, yes, but also freedom. A key is in the formal elements: the aspect ratio is boxy (maybe 1.33:1) and constricting, the setting confined to the mortuary, and the photography careful to avoid showing us anything outside of the building. The main character often stands just outside the main gates, but the camera either remains within the mortuary, framing her in long shot through the door against the blank wall of the opposite building, or frames her in closeup with the mortuary in the background. And tho’ the camera often looks in at people through various windows, it’s careful never to give an unimpeded shot looking out of one. There are always branches, trees, and buildings obscuring the shot to no more than a sliver of the road. The lead character often stares out of windows, but evidently she cannot see much from them. On a formal level, the wider world does not exist. The characters are cramped, caught, trapped, both narratively and at the level of form. I think these formal elements are the proper context in which to interpret the ambiguous ending, which is not as hopeless and disturbed (nor indeed as prosaic in its explanation) as it initially comes across. A beautiful and sad movie that I hope at least someone else here watches.

The Iceman Cometh (Clarence Fok, 1989)

Demolition Man I guess lifted its plot from this one: two Ming Dynasty warriors fall into a crevasse while battling to the death, are frozen, then revived in modern Hong Kong. I say Ming Dynasty, but they’re really wuxia fantasy heroes and villains. This is a clash of genres, wuxia fantasy and the modern thriller, as much as historical periods. Good lord this movie is in bad taste. It introduces Maggie Cheung with triad members threatening her into enacting some rich guy’s rape and bondage fantasy in a limo. When the scientists defrost the combatants and find them frozen mid grapple, one intones, “it shows there was homosexuality in ancient times”, to which his colleague quips, “that means there was AIDS in ancient times, too.” One of the comic bits has Yuen Biao drinking water from a toilet bowl and complaining that it’s salty. There are some nice conceits amid the gross humour, like Yuen Biao learning of the fall of the Ming Dynasty from watching a historical drama on tv, but the comedy is just so hard to take, even if Maggie Cheung gives it her all. To be more positive, everything’s done with great energy and style, and the stunt work is sometimes so extreme the film will show certain stunts several times from multiple angles so there’s no mistaking it for trickery. Yuen Wah legitimately jumps across the roofs of moving cars with no safety harness, as you can see with his increasingly desperate attempts to keep his balance. Like Tiger on Beat I enjoyed the action tremendously when it came, but mostly endured the rest.

[SeizureMilk]

Does anyone think that the Olsen and Johnson comedy Ghost Catchers could fit the Labs label, it's a horror comedy distributed by Universal directed by Edward Cline, one of the prolific comedy film directors, and while it's not as good as Hellzapoppin' (what is), it drips with atmosphere and has a little bit of the titular duo's charm, if it could come off as odd but after watching this after Crazy House, I'd say this one's a bit better.

[SeizureMilk]

Titles Are Up:
Vinegar Syndrome Secret Titles:
Night Screams
Undefeatable
VSAs:
Ninja in the Claws of the CIA
Boggy Creek 2
VSL Box:
Piotr Sulkin Set
Legacy Slips:
Battle for the Lost Planet
Hell Comes to Frogtown
Buddies
Fanny Hill/The Phantom Gunslinger

[domino harvey]

My write up from the Horror List

Night Screams (Allen Pione 1987) This is a bad, cheaply made film that's just weird enough to not be boring. A steady reminder that slasher films in the 80s were the prevalent indie cinema, this is a collection of unphotogenic nobodies from Kansas gathered together to make a slasher/escaped convict (?) flick. The film starts with an unidentified couple watching Graduation Day, the carnage from the TV that intercut with their own attack, an act of violence which is then wrapped up by the unseen killer's bloody hands playing "Chopsticks" on the piano, and this brief display of novelty amidst shameless exploitation (and appropriation) sets the tone. This is a film that features early on, for no particular reason, a violent police shootout wherein a redneck thug with a new wave haircut shoots a cop engulfed in flames in the stomach with a shotgun while loudly proclaiming "Party time!" There's also a dance number featuring the "Sweetheart Dancers" and this choice line: "You're a horny bitch and everyone knows it." The prevailing tone of the film is one of confusion of intent, and the producers seemed uncomfortable with the basic requirements of the genre. When the ugly teens start eating it, the filmmakers were so sheepish about any of these people appearing nude that they actually have one of the randy dudes watch a porno, which the film then intercuts in with the fully-clothed sex scenes! This is an awful movie, but I had a great deal of fun trying to picture its creation.

[MichaelB]

I've posted three capsule reviews of Piotr Szulkin films in the Radiance thread, but here's a longer piece on War of the Worlds: Next Century what I wroted after seeing the restored version at the Gdynia Film Festival in 2018.

Aside from one-offs like Andrzej Żuławski’s unfinished epic On the Silver Globe (1977/88), for many decades Polish dystopian sci-fi cinema was practically a one-man genre, courtesy of Piotr Szulkin (1950-2018). What’s even more remarkable is that the bulk of his work was made in the 1980s, a time when Poland was itself well along the way to becoming a dystopia in its own right – the remarkable bit being that these films were not only greenlit but released (albeit two years late in the case of this particular opus), despite there being all manner of sly allegorical nods to what was going on in Poland at the time. If even I can spot them, they must have been even more glaringly obvious to the Ministry of Culture.

It’s 28 December 2000, and Iron Idem (David Warbeck lookalike Roman Wilhemi) is the front man of a news programme that has a certain reputation for independence of spirit and therefore potential honesty. Whether this is actually the case is called into question right from the start, when Idem is given a replacement script seconds before going on air and finds himself becoming a propagandist for the pro-Martian cause. Because, as the film’s sly double dedication to H.G. and Orson Well(e)s establishes, Earth has been visited by Martians, who appear superficially intelligent and friendly, but unsurprisingly turn out to have rather more sinister designs on their fellow planet’s populace, especially when they establish blood as the only acceptable transactional currency.

Made in 1981, a time when relative creative freedom was combined with bargain-basement budgets, the film’s production values are more Play for Today than a contemporary American sci-fi film (the Martians in particular look like silver-painted Oompa-Loompas, and their appearances are wisely kept to a minimum), and Szulkin sensibly favours an Alphaville approach to locations – namely, pre-existing ones that look vaguely futuristic. The production era is further betrayed by some decidedly pre-PC sexual politics, with the great Krystyna Janda wasted in a role that could just as easily have gone to a model with film-career ambitions. But the film is fizzing with ideas and startling set-pieces, from the moment when two chainsaws emerge through the double doors of Idem’s luxury pad in order to chop off the lock before he has time to react, let alone flee.

Although completed before martial law was declared in December 1981, Szulkin’s film retrospectively looks like an authentic dispatch from the barricades, as the populace is subjugated to all manner of petty indignities (random inspections, curfews, the compulsory application of metal tags in their earlobes to denote coerced friendliness towards Martians) that would soon have real-life counterparts. Above all, the satirical target is television as the opiate of the masses – indeed, the term “reality TV” presciently pops up, and not just in the subtitles courtesy of a nudge-nudge modern revamp of the translation: that very phrase appears onscreen in English. “Fake news” doesn’t feature, but it could easily have done given a recurring subplot about the cynical manufacture of precisely that – at one point, Idem is shown concocted footage of his own execution, the better to persuade him to cooperate with the authorities.

Incidentally, in exploring the film in far more detail when prepping the commentary, I take back what I said about Krystyna Janda - I'd completely failed to register that she also plays the protagonist's wife (understandably, as we only briefly glimpse her before she's bundled into a body-bag by Martians), which of course gives her scenes far more resonance. And I suspect a Polish viewer would have recognised her immediately from the start, as she was a proper local megastar by then.

[ianthemovie]

I'm excited for the retro analog T-shirt, personally

Will the partner labels be announcing new releases on the 1st of the month like usual?

[SeizureMilk]

Will the partner labels be announcing new releases on the 1st of the month like usual?

Yes, in fact it's only gonna be partner labels next month

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah they do that twice a year for the month after their big sales - Dec and June

[Cash Flagg]

I'm excited for the retro analog T-shirt, personally

Wow, already sold out. Even their T-shirts are limited editions ?!

[SeizureMilk]

I'm excited for the retro analog T-shirt, personally

Wow, already sold out. Even their T-shirts are limited editions ?!

Can't make them forever.

[yoloswegmaster]

Incredible how Undefeatable has already sold 70% of its total unit despite it not even being out for a full day. I wouldn't be surprised if it were to be sold out by the end of the weekend. I guess people are fiending for that Godfrey Ho trash.

[therewillbeblus]

It's the 4K factor - VS could release anything in 4K and it would sell well

[Peacock]

Praying they announce a UHD for The Blair Witch Project soon.

[yoloswegmaster]

It's the 4K factor - VS could release anything in 4K and it would sell well

I was more commenting on how fast it was selling in comparison to a more popular title like Road House. However, I just realized that Undefeatable is included in both the subscription and the "Flash Preorder Everything" package while Road House wasn't included in any subscription, so that probably explains the fast selling rate.

[swo17]

Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds from Umbrella looks interesting!

This release includes a bonus short film as an Easter egg, Eyeball aka In Your Eye made for MTV. You can access it by navigating left from the interview with Michael Lake

[therewillbeblus]

Is it worth picking up, either for the feature or the short?

[swo17]

I'd say yes if you like what Gilliam or Raimi were doing around this time

[Grand Wazoo]

Anyone have a strong rec for Zerograd? It looks like it could either be fascinating or pitched at an irritating level.

[SeizureMilk]

Anyone have a strong rec for Zerograd? It looks like it could either be fascinating or pitched at an irritating level.

I had a fun time with it, plays like a comedic Kafka satire of the decline of the Soviet empire. It’s filled with absurd set pieces (most notable being the famous head cake scene), good characters, and a good sense of warmth despite what the story may describe. Though I recommend watching it on the Mosfilm channel before trying to buy it, as I did, in order to truly determine if it’s good to buy or not.