Macumba Sexual, from 1981, is your standard slice of Euro-arthouse
exploitation, which is to say it’s elliptical, graphic and shocking, in
generally equal parts, but at the same time not nearly as rich in
conversation-sparking subtext as some of its more literate advocates might have
you believe.

A fever dream sex saga of definite depravity, the movie
stars Lina Romay as Alice Brooks, a young, attractive real estate agent, and
Robert Foster as her writer boyfriend Antonio. While he slaves away on his
novel, Alice finds herself haunted
by the same dream, involving a tall African-American woman and two servile
beasts on leashes, which set upon her upon the woman’s orders. Antonio jokingly
advises Alice that this is indication that she’s sexually frustrated, but Alice
gets a jolt when she’s pulled out of her vacation and told to fly to nearby
island to close a deal with the mysterious Princess Obongo (the allegedly
transsexual Ajita Wilson, of Sadomania).
It turns out Princess Obongo is the woman of her dreams, and a dangerous game
of erotic hallucination, submissiveness and power transference ensues.

Franco ladles on the suggestive floral imagery (George
O’Keefe would be proud), and there’s plenty of directorial affectation (echo
aural touches, too-tight close-ups, sudden push-zooms) to go along with the
lesbian writhing and bisexual orgies, which are captured in actual and graphic,
if not quite pornographic, detail. The film looks
gorgeous (it was shot by Juan Soler), and there’s a bit of wry delight and
ominous menace in Franco’s own cameo as a shadowy hotel proprietor (“I read a
story about someone named Alice,”
he says. “Is that you?”), but the question remains: does Macumba Sexual really plumb any issues of psychological significance?
When Princess Obongo finally reveals herself as “an unspeakable dream,
everything forbidden and shameful,” it’s likely to produce as many eye rolls as
light bulbs of realization about the nature of animalistic sexuality.

Severin’s 2.35:1 widescreen release, enhanced for 16×9
televisions, looks great, and comes with English subtitles, naturally, to
complement the Spanish language Dolby digital 2.0 audio track. There’s also 22
minutes of interviews with Romay and Franco. The latter proves a quite
interesting figure, even in his accented English. He talks about the Canary
Islands being an inspiration for the movie, his early days as an
assistant to Luis Garcia Berlanga, and Wilson being “born to make horror
films.” He also gives a lot of insight into his production philosophy, and how
he almost always made pictures back-to-back, employing the same crew and many
of the same cast members, effectively “doubling down” with the invested
production money. C (Movie) B (Disc)

The Baxter was that it was
built around the romantic misadventures of the big screen nice guy who was always
politely shown the door so that the leading man could in the end get the dame. For
noted character actor Ralph Bellamy, this was a familiar feeling and outcome,
playing second fiddle as he often did to the likes of Cary Grant in movies like
The Awful Truth. Bellamy’s career longevity
would owe itself to his stage roots (he won a Tony Award for playing President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt), and he would reinvent himself in fare like Rosemary’s Baby as a slightly more sinister
presence. Paving the way for that, at least partially, would be his work in the
successful television series Follow That
Man.

Created by Lawrence Klee and launched in 1949, Follow That Man was actually broadcast
live for several years before settling into a heavy, sponsored rotation. A gritty, short-form, above-the-law series (it was also originally known as Man Against Crime), the show
stars Bellamy as tough-talking private eye Mike Barnett, and the sixth and
seventh grouped volumes of this DVD release from Alpha Home Entertainment each group together four episodes
of the beloved series. These are scattered collections, put together in somewhat
willy-nilly fashion. In “The Cube Root of Evil,” a drunken conventioneer
looking for a good time is lured to a private party for a game of craps, but
beaten up and fleeced instead. In “A Family Affair,” Barnett keys on a bank
employee after a robbery smelling of an inside job leaves two employees dead. “Day
Man,” meanwhile, centers around a clever thief who cases houses while
pretending to collect funds for charity. “Get Out of Town,” finally, finds an
old nemesis extracting revenge on Barnett, forcing him aboard a plane to Mexico.

The seventh volume culls episodes from the 1953 and ’54
seasons — a term more loosely defined then than now — and includes “Free Ride,”
the amusingly dated, pinko-baiting “Ferry Boat” — in which Barnett comes into
possession of a list of communist spies — plus “The Silken Touch,” in which
Barnett teams up with an FBI agent (Jack Warden) to investigate a series of
truck robberies. The best of the bunch, though, is probably “Cocoanut’s Eye,”
in which a professor suffering amnesia needs protection from gangsters who
think he knows where a clutch of stolen gemstones are hidden.

Housed in regular Amray plastic cases and presented in 1.33:1
full screen, the black-and-white transfers of Follow That Man honestly aren’t the best, as there is significant
grain and some problems with pixilation. Additionally, there’s not the sort of complementary
retrospective or academic commentary that would mark these as instructive discs
for a younger generation. This isn’t found entertainment, rather, but instead a few nice stocking stuffers for your
grandparents, to go along with that DVD player you bought them last year. For more information, visit Alpha Home Entertainment’s web site by clicking here. C+ (Series) D+
(Discs)

Bad Religion always sort of struck me as a quintessential Los Angeles band, even before I moved to the city of Angels. I’d heard of them, and heard their music, certainly, but never seen them live prior to moving west. Now that I’ve been out here almost a decade — and having caught them once or twice, and met up with some of their more rabid fans — I feel that way even more strongly.

With its own inimitable blend of spiky melody, in-your-face attitude, thrashing aptitude and thought-provoking lyrical content, the band has been stunning the music world for almost three decades (!) now, after being formed in the comfy suburbs of the San Fernando Valley in 1980. Growing up in Reagan’s America fed Bad Religion’s anti-establismentarianism and religious and sociopolitical questioning, fueling songs like “You Are the Government,” “Damned to be Free,” “Land of Competition,” “Politics,” “How Much is Enough” and “Voice of God is Government.” In an era where almost every major label refused to consider American punk rock groups, Brett Gurewitz formed Epitaph Records — which remains an independent spirit today — as a medium for the band’s broader message.

Those aforementioned songs and more get a workout on this hour-long special edition disc, which spotlights the group’s December 29, 1990 El Portal Theater performance — notable for the hulabaloo it spawned in North Hollywood when shut down for being overcrowded and not having adequate seating for its floor crowd. The video quality is so-so, but the music comes through loud and clear. Highlights include “Doin’ Time,” “Yesterday,” “Drastic Action,” “21st Century Digital Boy” and show opener “We’re Only Gonna Die.”

The extra footage is what makes this disc worthwhile, at least from an anthropological point-of-view, since it includes bonus material from a February 1991 make-up gig. The so-called “riot” footage, which clocks in at 12 minutes, is fairly tame stuff. There’s a lot of yelling and what not, but a Rodney King-type document this ain’t. Don’t tell director Zach Merck, though; he sits for a feature-length director’s commentary which dashes past solemn reverence and into hearty ass-licking. He recounts all the spurious coincidences that led to him being there on the evening in question, and talks nicely about the other bands — like Black Flag, The Descendents and The Adolescents — that he discovered during the dog days of his misspent youth at a Glendale skate park. It wouldn’t be quite so bad, actually, if the whole thing wasn’t read if an affected monotone.

There’s also 11 minutes of random backstage footage leading up to a photo shoot; most of this is a dead lay, with the cameraman’s roving eye flitting from guitar tuning to floor to the crafts table. Yawn… Finally, there’s 15 minutes of skateboarding footage, too, which may certainly appeal to the demographic at which this title is pitched, but seems a rather haphazard inclusion to the untrained eye. Taken piecemeal, this stuff can be boring. Strangely, though, in aggregate it seems to more firmly root the music in specific time and place. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, for fans or newcomers. B- (Concert) B- (Disc)

It’s always interesting to go back and watch or revisit debut
films and sophomore efforts of stalwart indie directors before they get plugged
into, if not absolutely studio-friendly fare, then at least bigger epics or more
clearly telegraphed tales. It’s this prism that makes the 1989 film Sweetie kind
of interesting.

Long before Peter
Jackson had made an entire generation of slack-jawed American teens care at
least a little bit about geography (if only to know where Orlando Bloom was
doing re-shoots at any given moment), New Zealand-born Jane Campion garnered international attention for her debut feature
film, Sweetie, the eccentric tale of
an Australian girl who stands by while her overweight, messy, delusional sister
moves into the apartment she shares with her boyfriend. A willfully quirky but intriguingly expressive tangle of characters and
wound-up situations ensues, with the two very different sisters — one by
nature solitary and withdrawn, the other dangerously extroverted, overweight and
unhinged — near constantly at odds.

Button-downed, superstitious Kay (Karen Colston) is a serial killjoy whose reliance on fate informs
her stony social demeanor. An outcast at her workplace, she begins to eye a
coworker’s fiancé, Louis (Tom Lycos), after visiting a fortune teller and
becoming preoccupied with her prophecy. Louis and Kay hook up and enjoy a good stretch
together, but things eventually sour. They one day return from an excursion to discover
that Kay’s titular, tubby sister (Geneviève Lemon) has broken into their house
and made herself at home.

Petulant and self-centered, Sweetie is apparently a little
mentally imbalanced — there are hints of her condition’s genetic quality, along
with possible incest — and has gone off her meds. Running roughshod over Kay, she
instantly takes over the place, destroying her sister’s room with her boyfriend
Bob (Michael Lake), who she says is a producer helping her with her music career. Childhood frustrations and recrimination come
rushing back to the fore, along with some of the same sort of symbology and
preoccupation with New Age spiritualism that would later inform Campion’s 1999
film Holy Smoke.

The lazy point of comparison would be the dystopian work of
director David Lynch, but Sweetie
seems much more of a piece with the films of surrealist master Luis Buñuel — Campion is smitten with interpretive imagery
over linear functionality, like Kay digging up a tree in the middle of the
night — and also in some ways a strange precursor to Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, which similarly delved into sisterly
sibling rivalry, sexual awakening and familial discord. The essence of what’s
under the microscope is interesting, but the
framing and pitch of the movie, though, frequently seem to work against it.

Sweetie’s
restored, high-definition transfer — supervised directly by director of
photography Sally Bongers and approved by Campion — comes presented in a 1.85:1
aspect ratio, preserving the integrity of its theatrical exhibition. A new
Dolby digital 5.1 soundtrack with optional English subtitles makes fine use of atmospherics
and composer Martin Armiger’s score. Supplemental
extras include a candid audio commentary track with Campion, Bongers and
screenwriter Gerard Lee, the self-admitted grump of the group.

Lemon and Colston sit for a nice tandem interview, which also makes use of old Super 8
footage from the set. Campion, too, sits
for a 20-minute conversation from the year of the film’s release with
critic Peter Thompson. The best
inclusion, though, comes in the form of three experimental shorts from Campion’s
film school days — 1982’s An Exercise
in Discipline: Peel, the following year’s Passionless Moments and 1984’s A
Girl’s Own Story. They show a
markedly different filmmaker than the one that still-birthed the inert In the Cut. A gallery of
behind-the-scenes photos and production stills rounds things out, alongside the
original theatrical trailer. C+ (Movie) A- (Disc)

If you’re still in the market for some good, old-fashioned gore for
Halloween and you’ve already cycled through all the usual genre
suspects, a pair of recent DVD releases from Anchor Bay might provide just
the blood-soaked mayhem for which you’re looking.

the daughter of Satan is returning for a rampage of revenge, and if so, if she can be stopped.

The success of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead helped Superstition secure a wider release several years after its completion, and it’s not — artistically, or execution-wise — on par with that film or many of its other genre forebears. The acting in particular is uneven, all over the map. That said, the sheer flamboyance and volume of its gory effects, particularly for its time, will likely sate most of the Fangoria set.

Available fully restored for the first time in the United States, 1989’s Baby Blood, written and directed by Alain Robak, finds bucktoothed circus performer Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou) infected by a voracious alien parasite that compells her to consume gallons of fresh blood. As the in-utero creature grows stronger and stronger, Yanka’s cross-country killing spree results in even more bloodshed and carnage. Again, this is an entry for more purebred gorehounds, not those looking for mannered, stalking thrills. Though similar in story to the ultra-cheap, mid-’80s, cult American indie The Devil’s Hour, this French flick wins points for some its unique staging, and the fact that it dares to try to delve into dialogue between Yanka and her intestinal hijacker, who asks questions of her in… an effort to understand humanity. Seriously!

Though, at least partially owing to the source material, the transfers aren’t the best (Robak’s film is beset with some grain), both Baby Blood and Superstition are at least presented uncut in 1.85:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions. Included as the only supplemental bonus material are their respective theatrical trailers. From a value standpoint, that’s a bummer, but then again, you’ll likely be providing your own audio commentary tracks. C (Movies) C+ (Discs)