By Todd Garbarini

Dead & Buried is one of the those oddball horror films that came out when I was twelve; I recall seeing the television trailers and movie poster artwork in the local theater lobby and didn’t catch up with the film until nearly 20 years later on a lackluster import DVD. 

Gary A. Sherman, who also directed the excellent and in-dire-need-of-royal-DVD-treatment Death Line (released as Raw Meat in the United States) in 1972, as well as Vice Squad (1982) and Poltergeist III (1988), shot Dead & Buried in Mendocino, CA.  The town may look familiar to fans of Daniel Haller’s The Dunwich Horror (1970), Herb Freed’s Haunts (1977), Barbara Peeters’s Humanoids from the Deep (1980). Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981), and Lewis Teague’s Cujo (1983) as they were all filmed there. 

James Farentino (Me, Natalie and The Final Countdown) is a town sheriff whose Potter’s Bluff is plagued by a rash of murders by the townspeople.  Hoping to get to the bottom of the reasons behind the murders, he enlists the help of the local mortician, Dobbs (Jack Albertson of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory).  The sheriff’s wife (Melody Anderson of Flash Gordon) engages in some suspicious behavior, and what may have seemed original and fresh in 1981 is predictable and formulaic today.  However, that much aside, this is a good little horror film, with good performances and great location shooting.  The incomparable Blue Underground Blu-ray looks wonderful, blowing previous home video versions out of the water.  The ample supplements consist of: 

• Commentary with director Gary Sherman and David Gregory (Blue Underground)

• Commentary with co-writer/co-producer Ron Shusett and actress Linda Turley

• Commentary with cinematographer Steve Poster

• Stan Winston's Dead & Buried EFX featurette
• Robert Englund: An Early Work of Horror featurette
• Dan O'Bannon: Crafting Fear featurette
• Two Trailers  

The subtitles are easy to read and correspond to the action on the screen.  If you haven’t seen the film, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.

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By Todd Garbarini

Dennis Donnelly directed this film that was made as a result of the success of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and hoped to cash in on its success.  Predating the slasher film cycle that came about following John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), which itself was originally planned as a sequel to Bob Clark’s Black Christmas made four years earlier, The Toolbox Murders (1978) was one of the earliest titles available on home video in the early 1980s.  A schematically-paced thriller, The Toolbox Murders takes places in a Los Angeles apartment building wherein a toolbox-carrying killer who dons a ski-mask offs several of the residents, among them then-porn actress Kelly Nichols, who was featured prominently in her birthday suit in the film’s advertising art and is dispatched by a nail gun (puns abound). 

Cameron Mitchell gives a very good performance as the creep who keeps a young woman, played by Pamelyn Ferdin, tied up in his bedroom.  The rest of the cast is rounded out by the director’s brother, Tony Donnelly, as a detective and Nicholas Beauvy and Wesley Eure (from TV’s Land of the Lost) playing sleuths.   

The Blu-ray extras on the Blue Underground release include:

• Audio Commentary by actress Pamela Ferdin, cinematographer Gary Graver, and producer

Tony Didio

• I Got Nailed in: THE TOOLBOX MURDERS - interview with actress Marianne Walter, aka Kelly Nichols

• Theatrical Trailer

• TV Spots

• Radio Spots

• Improved audio and video.  The audio is available in the standard monaural mix, 7.1 DTS-HD, and 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround EX.

Missing from the Blu-ray are the poster/stills gallery and Cameron Mitchell biography that was included on the standard DVD in 2003. 

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Novelist and Cinema Retro columnist Raymond Benson knows a thing or two about action/adventure stories, having penned numerous official James Bond books. His latest venture is a novel introduces the character of a mysterious, legendary female crime-fighter who mesmerized the nation in the 1950s and 1960s before vanishing into thin air. Click here to view a promotional "newscast" about the character and to pre-order copies of The Black Stiletto.

Festival Director Daniel Fitzpatrick (L) with Kevin Brownlow.

By John Exshaw

A mere twelve days after introducing Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at the National Concert Hall, Kevin Brownlow, silent cinema’s resident saint and scholar, returned to Ireland for the recently concluded third Killruddery Film Festival, held at the eponymous House and Gardens outside Bray in County Wicklow. The event, which proved as popular as its predecessor last year, saw Brownlow, with his customary boyish enthusiasm, present no less than seven films over a three-day period, as well as delivering a highly diverting history of Irish involvement in the development of early Hollywood.

The festival, masterminded once again by director Daniel Fitzpatrick, kicked off on Thursday night with a meet-and-greet, followed by a selection of films made by the Kalem Company in Ireland around 100 years ago, along with an accompanying documentary. On Friday, and with a mixture of both curiosity and foreboding, I pitched up for the first film to be presented by Kevin, Abel Gance’s four-and-a-half hour La Roue (The Wheel, 1922). Famed for its stylistic innovations, in particular the use of rapid cutting, La Roue tells the story of Sisif, a train driver who saves an orphaned child from a wreck and decides to rear her as his own daughter. Complications set in when Sisif (Séverin-Mars) later falls in love with the fifteen-year-old Norma (played by director Ronald Neame’s mother, Ivy Close), who is also loved by his son Elie (Gabriel de Gravone), who of course believes that Norma is his sister. After that, everyone does a great deal of suffering, as the story moves from the train yards to the French Alps, where Sisif has been sent in disgrace after deliberately crashing his train.

Mind-boggling though Gance’s mastery of technique is, the film is definitely something of an endurance test, and at one point, when Elie cries out, “Rails, wheels, smoke! How gloomy it all is!” I found myself nodding in fervent agreement. Afterwards, Kevin asked me what I thought of it. “Well,” I said, “obviously, from a technical point of view, it’s an astonishing achievement. On the other hand, it’s rather like being beaten over the head with a Victor Hugo novel for four-and-a-half hours.”  “That could be a good thing,” suggested Kevin, whose idea of fun clearly deviates rather drastically from mine after a certain point. With the festival unfortunately coming at a particularly busy time for me, I felt I had done my duty for the day and duly wheeled off, leaving Kevin and his merry band of enthusiasts to the joys of White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) and Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven (1927).

Previous engagements, not least with the Wales vs. Ireland Six Nations match from Cardiff, kept me occupied on Saturday, which began with the annual visit of Sunniva O’Flynn, Curator of the Irish Film Institute, with her can of goodies from the IFI archive, this time containing three children’s films dating from the 1940s and 1950s. These were followed by three “Early Masterpieces of the Avant Garde”, including a 1928 version of The Fall of the House of Usher, presented by Daniel Fitzpatrick. Later on, Kevin presented Lewis Milestone’s The Garden of Eden (1928), starring Corinne Griffith, and the day finished with a screening of Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes (1992), which really didn’t sound like my kind of thing.

By John Exshaw

Earlier this week, I figured it was about time to catch up with the Coen Brothers’ version of True Grit before it rode off the big screen and into the DVD sunset. And what with it failing to win any Oscars – not even for Best Beards in a Motion Picture – I reckoned the time was just about right. You see, I never paid much heed to all that “cinema as shared experience” bull. I generally prefer to bide my time until the opening week claim-jumpers and second-week popcorn-guzzlers have moved on to something else, and there’s just me and the janitor’s cat ridin’ that lonesome trail in the dark . . .

Like everybody else, I reckon, my first reaction on hearing that Les Frères Cohen – as I believe they’re known down N’Awleans way – were remaking True Grit was what in the hell for? Which is pretty much what I said when I heard they were gussying up 3:10 to Yuma a few years back. But that, as they say, is a steer of a different brand. . . .  Still, I can’t truthfully claim that True Grit ever figured on any wanted list of movies-that-need-remaking that I’ve ever posted, anymore than 3:10 did. What’s more, I always had the idea that pretty much everybody was happy with the job Big John and Henry Hathaway done back there in ʼ69. So what did these boys think they were doing? Just because one of ʼem is named after Joel McCrea and t’other after Ethan Edwards don’t mean they got any business doggin’ the Duke’s tracks. As Randy Scott would’ve said, “Man needs a reason to ride this country. You got a reason?”

Well, turns out, according to Joel in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, that the boys “didn’t read Charles Portis when we were young; we discovered him only as adults. But when I read True Grit to my son, I thought that it would be a fun film to make.” Mighty touching, you might think, mighty touching. Hell, maybe even John Ford would’ve gone for that scene with Pappy Coen reading out loud to his towheaded kid on the porch, but as reasons go I just can’t see it carrying much weight with Randy. To quote Lucky Ned Pepper himself, it’s just “Too thin, Rooster! Too thin!”

Anyhow, then I started in on reading the reviews, which is not something a man should ever do sober, and sure enough, most of them critics were drooling over this new version and jabbering on about how the Coens had gone back to the original 1968 novel by Charles Portis, and wasn’t it just great? Trouble is, of course, the critics always say any new film by the Coen boys is great, much like they used to say every hold-up pulled by the James boys was the most daring and dastardly ever seen - which weren’t hardly the case back then and sure as hell ain’t the case now, not by a long shot. 

By John Exshaw

Saturday, 26 February, saw the triumphant return of director Rex Ingram – or at any rate, his most celebrated film – to the city of his birth, as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse thundered once more across the big screen at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. Last seen at the same venue in 1993 (the centenary of Ingram’s birth), the film was showing as part of the recently-concluded Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, and, as on that previous occasion, the score was again performed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, this time under the direction of David Brophy.

Ingram’s masterpiece not only propelled Rudolph Valentino and Alice Terry to international stardom but made Ingram himself the leading director of his day, with complete power over all future projects and his own studio in the south of France. But while Valentino has retained his iconic status – albeit of a somewhat dubious and necrophiliac character – Ingram’s reputation (along with that of scriptwriter June Mathis, the driving force behind The Four Horsemen), has been allowed to slide into undeserved obscurity. Even this showing, in his native city, was billed as a 90^th. anniversary of the film itself, rather than as a tribute to Ingram; had it been screened here last year, as it was in July at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in L.A., it could at least have been promoted as commemorating the 60^th. anniversary of Ingram’s death in 1950.

Be that as it may, The Four Horsemen proceeded to play to a gratifyingly full house at the NCH – and on an evening when people might otherwise have been expected – at least by self-regarding politicians – to show some passing interest in the results of the general election, held the day before. Then again, perhaps Ingram’s film, itself allegorical, struck a chord in a country recently devastated by its own version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Greed, Cronyism, Clerical Criminality, and the IMF. With tickets ranging from a not-inconsiderable €25-€35, the screening also proved something of a recession-buster, attracting an audience comprised largely of the well-heeled, together with a sprinkling of the self-consciously “orty”, all hoping not to be noticed in their look-at-me outfits and silly hats.