Sometimes murder is just a way to pass the time Compulsion is a compelling stylish thriller that sees two callous law students murder a young boy in cold blood to improve their intellectual superiority.
An epic fantasy of peace and magic - featuring the voice of Mark Hamil (Star Wars) One of the most ambitious and inventive films from legendary animator Ralph Bakshi Wizards is a dazzling fantasy adventure. Set on a post-apocalyptic Earth where technology has been outlawed after nuclear disaster the film follows the story of Avatar the kindly eccentric sorcerer-ruler of Montagar a rainbow paradise inhabited by elves and fairies. Avatar's evil brother Blackwolf dominates Scortch a bleak land of goblins and wraiths. When the power-hungry Blackwolf attacks Montagar Avatar accompanied only by a spirited young woman and a courageous elf must enter the darkness of Scortch to save his world. Stunningly designed and thrillingly dramatised this unforgettable cult classic is presented in a breathtaking new high-definition transfer released on DVD and Blu-ray on 24 May 2010
Shot in 1938 Too Much Johnson was Welles’ first feature the film that helped him hone his craft and led him to create to the masterpiece that is Citizen Kane. The footage was presumed destroyed in a fire in Welles’ home in 1971 but was recently rediscovered in Italy and the restored 66 mins version makes its UK DVD debut. Too Much Johnson is an elaborate 1890s farce of mistaken identity. Cuckolded husband Dathis (Edgar Barrier) is on the tale of a man named Billings (Joseph Cotten) who has been having an affair with Dathis’s wife (Arlene Francis). Billings flees by ship to Cuba where now also hiding from his own wife (Ruth Ford) and mother-in-law (Mary) he adopts the identity of a plantation owner named Johnson who is expecting a mail-order bride. Orson Welles plays a Keystone Kop.
Reality and artifice truths and lies the means and the ends - these are the poles traversed by Orson Welles in his landmark examination of the nature of authenticity and artistic essence: F For Fake. Described by Welles as ""a new kind of film"" F For Fake is a prism of a movie a kaleidoscope in which fiction documentary and the poetic essay interlock fragment and recombine to form one of the most entertaining and profound works in all of cinema. How to describe a film so unlike any other ever made? In a nutshell F For Fake opens with a couple of magic tricks segues as though by sleight-of-hand into the story of master art-forger Elmyr de Hory and his relationship with biographer Clifford Irving (a sequence ""remixed"" by Welles with extant footage from Franois Reichenbach's documentary work-in-progress Elmyr) then hones in on Irving when word gets out that his purported biography of recluse-mogul Howard Hughes is a first-class hoax in its own right. Here the film erupts in all directions as Welles contrasts the sprawl of 1970s Hollywood with the halcyon Tinseltown that produced Citizen Kane; contemplates the continent that provided him with an artistic refuge some 800 years after the anonymous construction of the cathedral at Chartres; and lastly recounts a meeting between that most un-anonymous of artists - Pablo Picasso - and Welles' companion Oja Kodar which took place in her youth and during which......the nutshell here clamps shut; the film itself however opens up onto infinite space. Exhilarating hilarious and marvellously idiosyncratic F For Fake comes to us from that late period of Orson Welles' cinema which although perhaps less widely known than his Hollywood years nevertheless found one of the movies' greatest masters at the top of his powers.
Two psychic researchers hypnotize a streetwalker in an attempt to record her past life experiences as a condemned witch in the dark ages. When they learn of the fate that awaits her in her past life the doctors try to save the girl from her own execution.....
Conceived by the legendary Italian producer Alfredo Bini, the multi-director portmanteau film Let's Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG (Laviamoci il cervello: RoGoPaG) brought together four giants of European cinema to contribute comic episodes reflective of the swinging post-boom era. The resulting omnibus collectively examines social anxieties around sex, nuclear war, religion, urbanisation - and the promise of a modern cinema.Roberto Rossellini's Illibatezza [Virginity] follows an airline stewardess plagued by an obsessed American tourist whose 8mm camera enables the indulgence of a personal, and solipsistic, vision of the Ideal. Jean-Luc Godard's Il nuovo mondo [The New World] takes place in an Italian-dubbed Paris beset by nuclear fallout, and wittily chronicles the changes that take place in the lives - and medicine cabinet - of a handsome young couple. Pier Paolo Pasolini's scandalous La ricotta [Ricotta, as in the curded cheese] presents the goings-on around a film shoot devoted to the Crucifixion and presided over by none other than Orson Welles (playing a kind of stand-in for Pasolini himself); it is this episode that landed Pasolini with a suspended four-month prison sentence. Lastly, Ugo Gregoretti's Il pollo ruspante [Free-Range Chicken] depicts a middle-class Milanese family flirting with the purchase of real-estate and engaging catastrophically with an antagonistic consumeristinfrastructure.
A celebrated British noir charting post-war European malaise Carol Reed's The Third Man was previously voted the greatest British film of all time. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten Citizen Kane) a naïve writer of pulp westerns arrives in Vienna to meet his old friend Harry Lime (the incomparable Orson Welles) but finds that Lime has apparently been killed in a suspicious accident. Martins too curious for his own good hears contradictory stories about the circumstances of Lime's death and as witnesses disappear he finds himself chased by unknown assailants. Complicating matters are the sardonic Major Calloway (Trevor Howard Brief Encounter) head of the British forces and Lime's stage actress mistress Anna (Alida Valli). Will Martin's curiosity lead him to discover things about his old friend that he'd rather not know? Brilliantly scripted by Graham Greene and set to Anton Karas' evocative zither score this justly celebrated classic is further enhanced by Robert Krasker's Academy Award winning cinematography and Welles in one of his most iconic screen roles.
Welles' second-to-last feature, The Immortal Story is an adaptation of a book by Danish author Isak Dinesen and stars Jeanne Moreau. The year is 1860 in the Portuguese colony of Macao, Mr. Clay (Welles) is an aging, rich merchant, who is the subject of town gossip. He likes his clerk Levinsky (Roger Coggio), to read to him to help him relax in the evenings and one night he recounts a tale about a rich man who paid a poor sailor five guineas to father a child with his beautiful young wife. Mr. Clay has no wife and no heir to his fortune and resolves to make the story true...Levinsky approaches Virginie Ducrot (Moreau), another clerk's mistress, and strikes a bargain for 300 guineas. Now to find the sailor... Cast and Crew: Orson Welles / Jeanne Moreau / Roger Coggio / Norman Eshley. Director Orson Welles Awards and Reviews: Berlin International Film Festival 1968, Nominated Golden Bear, Orson Welles. A sumptuous experience' - Time Out The ending of is amongst the most beautiful and self-contained in all of Welles' cinema' - Senses of Cinema
With gadgets, gaming and girls galore, this camp classic celebrates 40 fabulous years as not only the coolest of the spy films, but also as a brilliant parody of - itself! Will the real James Bond please stand up? When secret agency chief M (John Huston) is killed, Sir James Bond (David Niven) is thrust out of spy retirement to help smash SMERSH, the band of hitmen who are likely responsible. And to protect his real identity, Bond's name is given to numerous other agents, including Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers) and Bond's neurotic nephew, Jimmy (Woody Allen). With five directors, a cast of Hollywood icons that also includes Ursula Andress, Charles Boyer, Peter O'Toole, Jacqueline Bisset and Orson Welles, a soundtrack by Burt Bacharach, and a frisky, farcical script, Casino Royale is Bond. Psychedelic Bond.
Mike Nichols' superbly directed cinematic adaptation of Joseph Heller's scathing black comedy. 'Catch 22' is the tale of a small group of flyers in the Mediterranean in 1944. There are winners and losers opportunists and survivors. Separately and together they are frightened nervous often profane and sometimes pathetic. Almost all are a little crazy. 'Catch 22' is an anti-war satire of epic proportions!
A strange and sinister man Mr Cato (Orson Welles) wields extraordinary power in the small town of Lilith. Almost supernatural power. The townsfolk indulge in weird ritual in their pursuit of necromancy... bringing the dead back to life. Against this disturbing background it is a young beautiful girl Lori (Pamela Franklin) who becomes the human catalyst between life and death...
Shot in 1938 Too Much Johnson was Welles’ first feature the film that helped him hone his craft and led him to create to the masterpiece that is Citizen Kane. The footage was presumed destroyed in a fire in Welles’ home in 1971 but was recently rediscovered in Italy and the restored 66 mins version makes its UK DVD debut. Too Much Johnson is an elaborate 1890s farce of mistaken identity. Cuckolded husband Dathis (Edgar Barrier) is on the tale of a man named Billings (Joseph Cotten) who has been having an affair with Dathis’s wife (Arlene Francis). Billings flees by ship to Cuba where now also hiding from his own wife (Ruth Ford) and mother-in-law (Mary) he adopts the identity of a plantation owner named Johnson who is expecting a mail-order bride. Orson Welles plays a Keystone Kop.
Even by Roger Corman's thrifty standards, The Little Shop of Horrors was a masterpiece of micro-budget movie-making. Scripted in a week and shot, according to Corman, in two days and one night, it made use of a pre-existing store-front set that serves as the florist's shop where most of the action takes place. Our hero is shambling loser Seymour Krelboined, sad-sack assistant at Mushnick's skid-row flower shop and who is hopelessly in love with Audrey, his fellow worker. Threatened with the sack by Mushnick, Seymour brings in a strange plant he's been breeding at home, hoping it'll attract the customers. It does, and the store starts to prosper, but Seymour is horrified to discover that the only thing the plant will thrive on is blood, fresh, human blood at that. The sets are pasteboard, the acting is way over the top, and altogether Little Shop is an unabashed high-camp spoof, not to be taken seriously for a second. Even so, Corman notes that this was the movie "that established me as an underground legend". Charles Griffith, the film's screenwriter, plays the voice of the insatiable plant ("FEED ME!"), and billed way down the cast list is a very young Jack Nicholson in a bizarre, giggling cameo as Wilbur Force, a masochistic dental patient demanding ever more pain. The film's cult status got it turned into an off-Broadway hit musical in the 1980s, with a great pastiche doo-wop score by Alan Menken, which was subsequently filmed in 1986. The musical remake is a lot of fun, but it misses the ramshackle charm of the original. On the DVD: Little Shop of Horrors on disc does not even boast a trailer, just some minimal onscreen background info about the production. The clean transfer, 4:3 ratio, and digitally remastered mono sound faithfully recapture Corman's bargain-basement production values. --Philip Kemp
Roots Of Heaven
The Stranger, according to Orson Welles, "is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture. I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else." True, set beside Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, or even The Trial, The Stranger is as close to production-line stuff as the great Orson ever came. But even on autopilot Welles still leaves most filmmakers standing. The shadow of the Second World War hangs heavy over the plot. A war crimes investigator, played by Edward G Robinson, tracks down a senior Nazi, Franz Kindler, to a sleepy New England town where he's living in concealment as a respected college professor. The script, credited to Anthony Veiller but with uncredited input from Welles and John Huston, is riddled with implausibilities: we're asked to believe, for a start, that there'd be no extant photos of a top Nazi leader. The casting's badly skewed, too. Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead as the investigator and Robinson as Kindler, but his producer, Sam Spiegel, wouldn't wear it. So Welles himself plays the supposedly cautious and self-effacing fugitive--and if there was one thing Welles could never play, it was unobtrusive. What's more, Spiegel chopped out most of the two opening reels set in South America, in Welles' view, "the best stuff in the picture". Still, the film's far from a write-off. Welles' eye for stunning visuals rarely deserted him and, aided by Russell Metty's skewed, shadowy photography, The Stranger builds to a doomy grand guignol climax in a clock tower that Hitchcock must surely have recalled when he made Vertigo. And Robinson, dogged in pursuit, is as quietly excellent as ever. On the DVD: not much in the way of extras, except a waffly full-length commentary from Russell Cawthorne that tells us about the history of clock-making and where Edward G was buried, but precious little about the making of the film. Print and sound are acceptable, but though remastering is claimed, there's little evidence of it. --Philip Kemp
Joseph Cotten stars in Orson Welles' gripping RKO spy thriller as a US engineer in Turkey targeted for death by the Nazis. Fleeing the country by steamer he soon realises that any one of the ship's passengers could be a Nazi assassin. Orson Welles and Delores del Rio co-star.
Little Shop Of Horrors: The original movie of this classic black comedy/horror about a rather dim-witted young man Seymour (Jonathan Haze) working for $10 a week in Mushnick's flower shop on skid row who develops an intelligent bloodthirsty plant. He names the plant ""Audrey Jr"" and as it grows it demands human meat for sustenance and Seymour is forced to kill in order to feed it. Jack Nicholson has a notable cameo part as an undertaker Wilbur Force who is a masochistic d
Guy Van Stratten a convicted American smuggler leaves an Italian prison term with one asset a dying man's words about the wealthy mysterious and elusive Gregory Arkadin. Guy sets out in search of the enigmatic Arkadin and starts to scrutinize him through his lovely daughter Raina. To thwart Van Stratten's investigation Arkadin claims amnesia about his early life and sends Guy off to investigate his unknown past. Guy's quest spans many continents and unearths eccentric characters who contribute information about the shadowy Arkadin. But the real purpose of Guy's assignment proves deadly - can he survive it? Orson Welles wrote directed and co-starred in this stylish serpentine mystery that carries echoes of his masterpiece 'Citizen Kane'.
Disc 1: Puppetmaster OneAlex Whitaker and three other gifted psychics are investigating rumours that the secret of life has been discovered by master puppeteer Andre Toulon. But the psychics quickly discover Toulon's secret of death in the form of five killer puppets - each one uniquely qualified for murder and mayhem. Together they're an army of skilled assassins diabolically programmed to guard the deadly secrets of the Puppet Master. Disc 2: Puppetmaster TwoYou can't keep a good man down or a Puppet Master buried as the puppets return to exhume their beloved creator in Puppet Master II. This time the little devils are after the special fluid that keeps them alive which is only found in...you guessed it... human brains! The puppets - led by a new member the flamethrowing Torch - are happy to shed some light on the (brain) matter as they tunnel burn strangle and hook to survive. Disc 3: Puppetmaster ThreeAfter hearing that Andre Toulon's puppets have no strings but rather seem to have a life of their own Dr. Hess a Gestapo henchman during WWII sends the Gestapo to the theatre to kidnap them. During the melee Toulon's wife Elsa is killed and Toulon is whisked away by the Nazis. However on the way to headquarters the puppets attack the Gestapo and escape with Toulon. Now Toulon begins to plan his revenge. He creates a new puppet Six-Shooter models Blade after a pasty-faced Nazi and uses Elsa's essence to create Leech Woman. Now Toulon's army is ready to take revenge...
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