Out to own on Double Play: January 30th, 2012

A revered revenge classic co-written by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) and acknowledged by Quentin Tarantino as one of his favourite movies when he named his video company after the 70s revenge classic - “Most movies let you down, but this is ass-kicking nirvana!”

Starring William Devane in a stoic performance as Major Charles Rane, a man who has been pushed beyond his limits during an eight year incarceration in the Hanoi Hilton. He returns to his Texas hometown with his friend Sergeant Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones), just a vague shadow of the man he used to be. Finding himself a local celebrity and awarded with a briefcase of silver dollars- one for every day he was a POW, he tries to adapt to civilian life with his wife (Linda Haynes), who is now engaged to another man, and his son, who doesn’t remember him.

But any chance at healing is destroyed when a gang of thugs show up at his house to steal the silver. Tragedy thus descends on Major Rane a second time, stealing whatever shred of humanity was in him, and sending him on a one-way mission: vengeance at any cost.

Extras:

Audio Commentary with Co-Writer Heywood Gould, Moderated by Roy Frumkes

Theatrical Trailer with Eli Roth Introduction and Commentary

Exclusive Interview with Linda Haynes

Original TV Spot

Now check out Hostel director and grindhouse movie lover Eli Roth as he introduces the trailer to Rolling Thunder…

Eli Roth on ROLLING THUNDER - YouTube

The remarkable story of Hollywood’s most prolific and influential writer-director-producer, the legendary Roger Corman, is the subject of director Alex Stapleton’s affectionate, witty and hugely entertaining documentary, Corman’s World: Exploits Of A Hollywood Rebel, which charts the Oscar winning filmmaker’s career from his early days working in the mail room at 20th Century Fox to the set of one of his most recently produced “creature features”, “Dinoshark”.

Essential viewing for every cineaste, Corman’s World is “a delightful tribute” (Variety) to a true Hollywood great and one that proves to be thrilling, fun, informative and frequently touching (witness a rare and genuinely emotional scene featuring Jack Nicholson that, alone, makes this an unmissable documentary).

Leaving no doubt as to Corman’s seminal influence on modern-day cinema, the film features enlightening interviews with an incredible cavalcade of Hollywood icons, luminaries and A-listers (many of whom began their own careers working under Corman), including Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, Quentin Tarantino, John Sayles, Jonathan Demme, Eli Roth, Peter Fonda, Peter Bogdanovich, William Shatner and countless others.

Combining archival footage with contemporary clips and interviews, Corman’s World chronicles how one man created an empire, cultivating undiscovered talent and pushing the boundaries of what independent filmmakers could achieve when working outside the studio system. From Corman’s original genre-defining works such as “The Fast And The Furious”, “The Little Shop Of Horrors” and his classic film adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories, to his distribution of the art house films of Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini and Truffaut and his continuing work as one of the world’s leading independent film producers, Stapleton’s superb documentary recounts a career that has spanned an astonishing six decades.

Corman’s World: Exploits Of A Hollywood Rebel (cert. tbc) will be a Picturehouse Culture Shock Presentation on Tuesday 21st February and will be available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from 26th March 2012.

Trailer, background blogs, stills and clips on the official UK site: http://www.totalfanhub.com/cormans-world/

Now that we’ve moved to a new forum please do not think the old one is lost. It’s still there and can be browsed at your leisure, you just can’t add any new comments to it.

Here it is:

Old forum, same topic

We continue here as usual. Please note that I plan to re-post all the photos people submitted in the previous forum anyway (only fair, considering the effort you all put in in the past), but that might have to wait ehm… until I’ve figured out how to do this. 

Anyone heard anything about TGTBTW?

So Twitchers, are there any other editions out there you’ve come across that’s perhaps a little more catalogue model-ish? A little more neon pink mistral fontly? Let me know!

Previous Forum Link:  http://twitchfilm.net/forum/index.php?topic=5.0

Tokyo Desire, Mamoru Watanabe
Female, omnibus featuring short films by Ryuichi Hiroki, Suzuki Matsuo, Miwa Nishikawa, Tetsuo Shinohara, and Shinya Tsukamoto
The Brutal Hopelessness of Love, Takashi Ishii (flawed story, sensational cinematography)
Star of David: Beautiful Girl Hunter, Norifumi Suzuki
Marquis de Sade’s Prosperities of Vice, Akio Jissoji (deliriously beautiful lensing)
Gate of Flesh, Suzuki Seijun (much better than the critically acclaimed Story of a Prostitute)
Dirty Maria, Takahisa Zeze
Raigyo, Takahisa Zeze (one of the most gut-wrenchingly powerful films I’ve seen, and superbly photographed)
The Lost Virgin, Toshiki Sato
Empty Room, Toshiki Sato
Bitter Sweet, Mitsuru Meike
Lunch Box, Shinji Imaoka
Ambiguous, Toshiya Ueno
Snake of June, Shinya Tsukamoto (can’t add much to what’s already been said)
Love-Zero=Infinity, Hisayasu Sato (if Godard had made a pink film, it might have looked something like this)
Angel Guts: Red Classroom, Chusei Sone (my very favorite roman porno)
Rampo Noir, omnibus (esp. Hisayasu Sato’s Caterpillar, but Akio Jissoji’s is worth seeing for the exquisite visuals alone)
School of the Holy Beast, Norifumi Suzuki (nunsploitation at its best)
New Tokyo Decadence: The Slave, Ryu Murakami
Under the Carp Banner (to the best of my knowledge, the only of Kazuhiro Sano’s films to be released on subtitled DVD)
Assault! Jack the Ripper, Yasuharu Hasebe

Additions:
The Japanese Wife Next Door, Part 1, Yutaka Ikejima
Le doux parfum d’eros, Toshiya Fujita (French subtitles only)

Additions (October 2011)
A Night in Nude: Salvation, Takashi Ishii. Superb cinematography. (no subtitles)
Alone in the Night, Takashi Ishii. Probably Ishii’s best film, with virtuoso camerawork. (no subtitles)

SUNDAY MIRROR.

One of the biggest hits with audiences at this year’s Film4 Frightfest and a major critical success during its subsequent UK theatrical release in September 2011, which saw it earning Four Star reviews in Empire (“spectacular fun”), Total Film (“ a true one off… it will quite simply blow you away”) and Time Out (“shot through with an unexpected, often unsettling, humour”), the horror-comedy Troll Hunter bursts its way on to DVD and Blu-ray on 9th January 2012.

The debut feature from Norwegian director Andre Ovredal, this “original and highly assured fusion of B-movie lore and fairytale terror” (The Hollywood Reporter) combines the vision of “Where The Wild Things Are” with the faux-documentary, found-footage stylings of “Cloverfield”, “REC” and “The Blair Witch Project” to produce an “enormously entertaining” (Variety) and suspense-filled creature feature that the Daily Star rated as ‘one of the finest monster movies ever” and Total Film described as being “like David Attenborough taking a stroll into Roald Dahl’s brain.”

Following the deaths of a couple of tourists and a spate of livestock mutilations in the mountains and forests of Norway, the government’s official line is that rogue bears are responsible. But the local hunters don’t agree and neither does a trio of college students who have been stalking an alleged poacher, Hans, with the intention of making a documentary film about him. Their persistence in pursuing Hans finally pays off when the filmmakers become victims of a night-time attack by something that is obviously much larger than a bear. In the aftermath, Hans agrees to an interview in which he reveals the truth regarding his occupation – he is actually a government employed troll hunter. Sceptical, the students volunteer to assist this unlikely hero in his work on the understanding that they will be allowed to document the proceedings and publicly reveal the heavily guarded secrets of a race of creatures thought only to exist in fairly tales.

A “clever and engaging mock documentary” (The New York Times) that is “fun, funny and fearless” (Little White Lies), Troll Hunter is “an instant cult classic” (IGN).

Troll Hunter (cert. 15) will be released on DVD (£17.99) and Blu-ray (£19.99) by Momentum Pictures on 9th January 2011.

Special Features include: Trailer; deleted scenes; improvs and bloopers; extended scenes; visual effects; behind the scenes; HDNet: A Look at Troll Hunter; photo galleries.

Coinciding with its 40th anniversary and with the forthcoming theatrical release (on 4th November 2011) of the remake directed by Rod Lurie and starring James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard and James Woods, director Sam Peckinpah’s notorious thriller Straw Dogs has been carefully restored and remastered for release on two-disc DVD and for the first time ever as a features-packed Special Edition Blu-ray on 24th October 2011.

Based on Gordon M. Williams’s novel The Siege Of Trencher’s Farm, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, Straw Dogs marked Peckinpah’s first directorial step outside the Western genre and into a contemporary (and uniquely British) setting. The result is an unflinching and uncompromising study of primal, barbaric brutality that is generally regarded as one of the strongest statements about violence ever put on screen.

Bluray comparison shot

Official UK Site: http://www.totalfanhub.com/straw-dogs/

Quiet American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his British-born wife Amy (Susan George) relocate to Amy’s rural English hometown in an attempt to flee the violent social unrest brewing in the US. When David hires some locals, including a former boyfriend of Amy’s, to repair his barn, the couple find themselves being subtly harassed and bullied by the workmen. The more the pacifist David ignores the problem, the more the harassment intensifies, leading to terrifying consequences as he ultimately finds himself forced to defend his home and his life, discovering a frighteningly vicious side to himself as events escalate towards a bloody climax.

Boasting outstanding performances from the two leads (particularly Hoffman), a brilliant support cast, and Jerry Fielding’s superb Oscar-nominated score, Straw Dogs, in the 40 years since its original release, has lost none of its intense, visceral power to thrill and shock in equal measure. Undisputedly a director ahead of his time, Sam Peckinpah’s uncompromising approach often saw him being reviled and vilified in some quarters while being hailed in others. Nonetheless, in Straw Dogs he displays a cinematic artistry very few filmmakers have touched upon before or since.

Straw Dogs (cert. 18) will be released on Blu-ray (£17.99) and two-disc DVD (£15.99) by FremantleMedia Enterprises on 24th October 2011.

Loosely based on Charles Kaufman’s 1980 Troma classic, Mother’s Day sees Rebecca De Mornay (Wedding Crashers; Lords Of Dogtown) heading a killer cast in a role that makes her psychotic character from “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” look like Mother Theresa.

Produced by Brett Ratner (the Rush Hour trilogy; X-Men: The Last Stand; Red Dragon), directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III and IV) and starring De Mornay, Jaime King (My Bloody Valentine; The Spirit), Deborah Ann Woll (True Blood), Briana Evigan (Burning Bright; Sorority Row; Step Up 2: The Streets) and Shawn Ashmore (Frozen; Hatchet II; the X-Men trilogy), this nail-biting thriller has been described as “intense” (Dread Central) and “relentlessly efficient… a cracking film” (Eye For Film).

Following a disastrous bank robbery attempt that leaves one of their number critically wounded, three brothers head for their childhood home to take refuge until the dust settles. What they don’t know is their mother (De Mornay) recently lost possession of the house in a foreclosure and no longer lives there. Instead, they stumble across the new owners, a young couple, and their guests who are in the middle of birthday celebration. Seeing no alternative, the brothers take the partygoers hostage before contacting their mother to explain their dilemma. Willing to do anything to protect her offspring, mother arrives at the scene, along with her only daughter (Woll), and immediately takes control of the situation while masterminding a plan to help her family escape across the border from the US into Canada. Unfortunately for the hostages, mother’s plot requires some serious funding and she’s determined to get hold of it any way she can. So begins a long night of psychological terror in which loyalties are tested, secrets are revealed and sins are punished by a deeply disturbed woman with maternal instincts that can only be described as murderous.

Co-starring Lyriq Bent (Saw II, III and IV), Kandyse McClure (Battlestar Galactica), Patrick John Flueger (The 4400), Warren Kole (24) and Matt O’Leary (Sorority Row; Die Hard 4), Mother’s Day is both “an intense, horrifying experience” (Alan Jones, Radio Times) and “a gruesome pleasure” (The Sun).

Mother’s Day (cert. 18) will be released on DVD (£15.99), Blu-ray (£19.99) and iTunes (£9.99) by Studiocanal on 24th October 2011.

Special Features include: interviews with stars Rebecca De Mornay, Jaime King, Patrick Flueger, Warren Kole, Briana Evigan, Matt O’Leary, Shawn Ashmore and Lyriq Bent, producer Richard Saperstein, executive producers Lloyd Kaufman and Charles Kaufman and stunt coordinator Bobby King; B roll footage; trailer; 2.0 Stereo and 5.1 Dolby Digital audio options; optional English subtitles for the hard of hearing.