For the week of August 5th, Twentieth Century Fox is bringing Oculus to Blu-ray. An expansion of director Mike Flanagan's short film "Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man with the Plan," Oculus follows Tim (Brenton Thwaites), a disturbed young man who embarks on a most unwelcome reunion with his estranged sister Kaylie (Doctor Who's Karen Gillan); Tim has just been discharged from a mental institution for supposedly having a hand in the deaths of their parents (Rory Cochrane and Katee Sackhoff, who does heartbreakingly good work in an underwritten part) eleven years prior, but Kaylie insists that a) Tim is innocent because b) their parents were driven to violence and murder through the influence of an antique mirror, a mirror that c) she is planning on destroying once and for all. This is a lot of potentially leaden backstory, but Flanagan juggles it so well for about an hour, expertly cutting between the adult versions of the siblings arguing over the roots of their childhood trauma and the increasingly brutal trials foisted upon their younger selves (Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan). It isn't just that past and present begin to blur – reality itself becomes an unstable element, with Flanagan mining genuine paranoia from the suggestion that the mirror's "power" is nothing more that a perilous psychological cocktail of Tim's psychosis and Kaylie's fierce need to repress the horrors of an abusive childhood. In fact, even after Flanagan gives up the ghost (pun intended), he keeps the tension going for a long time because he keeps the reality-hallucination line so porous. Flanagan eschews blood and gore for a hazy, ever-shifting dramatic space that throws into question everything the protagonists see and do. The last third of Oculus suffers when compared to the expertly wrought terror of the first hour – Gillian and Thwaites' characters become frustratingly passive and spend the climax mostly watching Basso and Ryan relieve the past, and while I'm all for ambiguity, Flanagan keeps too much of the mirror's backstory withheld from viewers – but at least the film remains scary even when its focus grows slack. Flanagan has announced that his next picture will be an adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald's Game, and if Oculus is any indication, he's the right man for the job: that novel shares Oculus' sense of psychological unrest and extreme spatial claustrophobia.
In the realm of cult horror-movie fans, there are two kinds of people: those who love The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and those who prefer Phantom of the Paradise, which is getting a Shout Factory-backed release on Tuesday. One can't be blamed for drawing comaprisons between the two. Released around the same time by the same studio (Fox released Phantom of the Paradise in 1974 and then put out The Rocky Horror Picture Show a year later), both pictures are gonzo horror spoofs (The Rocky Horror Picture Show satirizes the mad-scientist subgenre while Phantom of the Paradise turns to The Phantom of the Opera and the Faust legend for inspiration) that also function as full-scale musicals - Phantom of the Paradise features a musical soundtrack written and composed by The Muppet Movie's Paul Williams, and Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror songs are already the stuff of Midnight Movie legend. Here's the thing, though: whereas Rocky Horror excels as a live, interactive experience, Phantom of the Paradise is undoubtedly a finer film. Without sacrificing any of its campy pleasures – chief among them Jack Fisk's gaudy 1970s production design and Gerrit Graham's OTT performance as metrosexual rock-god Beef – the film also works as a showcase for director Brian De Palma's technical virtuosity. In many ways, this film acts as a transition between De Palma's funky early comedies (think Hi, Mom and Get to Know Your Rabbit) and his breathtaking Hitchcockian riffs (Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and many more), with a histrionic skewering of the record industry unfolding in breathtaking setpieces. That means we get a hapless Wrong Man (the late, great William Finley, playing idealistic songwriter Winslow Leach), whose literally crushing defeat at the hands of Satanic musical impresario Swan (Paul Williams, equal parts comic and disturbing) turns him into a psychotic Avenging Angel, hell-bent on destroying Swan and kickstarting the career of Jessica Harper's virginal singer Phoenix. The whole thing plays like some breathless pop confection – think of it like the comic-book version of a Classics Illustrated – with De Palma tossing in sinuous camera movies (including some very choice split-screen work), lightning-edited musical sequences, and enough genuine pathos to ensure that we take seriously what little downtime there is. The damnedest thing is that we care about poor Winslow (Finley does wonders at making a grotesque human), and in securing our sympathies, De Palma elevates his madcap parody into the realm of something resembling grand opera. A modern cult classic.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Phantom of the Paradise might seem like an unlikely effort from the likes of Brian De Palma, but the film actually traffics in many of the same ideas that have informed some of his more commercially successful films like Carrie. Once again there's a lonely outcast who's specially 'gifted,' and once again carnage explodes when the outsider isn't given his or her due. While there's no religious subtext here à la Carrie (unless one subscribes to the opinion that rock is religion), there's a sinister melancholy that creeps through the film that seems to suggest that poor Leach has been abandoned not just by his fellow man, but by whatever Divine presence there may (or may not) be in the world. Finley delivers an amazing performance in this film, all the more remarkable in that virtually his entire face is hidden behind a helmet, and really only his mouth and one eye are visible. But the anguish and rage of this character are virtually palpable almost all of the time. The film is a visual phantasmagoria, one of De Palma's most hallucinogenically outrageous achievements in production and costume design. The finale of the film is like a rock concert being run by and attended by a pack of wild, peyote intoxicated, wolves. Through it all, Williams' music (and even his voice - he serves as the singing voice of Leach) wends its way through innumerable genres as The Juicy Fruits change both their band name and their look (repeatedly). Williams was something of a 'staff writer' at A&M Records, arriving at the label just as Carpenters were taking off to be the biggest act of the early seventies. While Williams disparages many of his tunes as mere 'easy listening' fodder, his oeuvre during this period is really rather impressively diverse. This proved to be Williams' second Oscar nomination (the first was for the prior year's 'Nice to be Around' from Cinderella Liberty, which Williams co-wrote with another Williams, John), and while he didn't take home the trophy that year (Nelson Riddle received what was probably a 'career Oscar' for The Great Gatsby), it's probably Williams' score that is one of Phantom of the Paradise's most enduring achievements. You might even say the song score is devilishly good."
Also from Fox is the highly acclaimed comedy The Full Monty. This film was so successful in its day – in 1997, it received four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, which put it right alongside movies like Titanic, L.A. Confidential, Good Will Hunting, and As Good as It Gets - that revisiting it is a bit of a shock: how did something this quaint make such a big noise? In retrospect, there's very little on the surface to distinguish The Full Monty from the other films in the mid-to-late-90s rush of "Dramedies Centering on English Factory Towns" (think Brassed Off or Billy Elliot) besides its risqué hook that finds a group of unemployed steel workers (Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy, Tom Wilkinson, Steve Huison, Paul Barber, and Hugo Speer) willing to strip naked in order to solve their financial problems. That said, The Full Monty is more Local Hero than it is Boogie Nights (the on-screen nudity here is brief and not terribly explicit), with director Peter Cattaneo and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy emphasizing the gently whimsical personalities of the core sextet and their dying mill town. It's a feel-good story through and through, and fundamentally manipulative, but it's a testament to all concerned that the movie works even as it's working you – the entertainment value here is off-the-charts. Beaufoy's script accounts for a big part of that success (he keeps things punchy and light while staying just on the right side of sitcom glibness), but even more important are the three lead performances from Carlyle, Addy, and Wilkinson. Addy's weight-conscious, effortlessly sympathetic Everyman is a far cry from his boorish, decadent Robert Baratheon in Game of Thrones, and Wilkinson is just as good as the group's conservative authority figure. But it's Carlyle who's the big revelation. His amiable, shiftless Gaz is the heart of The Full Monty and is all the more surprising for 90s viewers who only knew him as the sadistic Begbie from Trainspotting.
Finally, Warner is giving a Blu-ray upgrade to one of its catalog titles, the goofy comedy The Man Who Knew Too Little. Like Johnny English or In Like Flint, this farce sends up the spy genre, though The Man Who Knew Too Little does have one key distinction. Here, the hero (Bill Murray) isn't a secret agent, but rather bumbling American tourist Wallace Ritchie, who stumbles into an international conspiracy without knowing it: he's convinced all the intrigue and mayhem surrounding him is part of an elaborate live theater experience. As such, Murray's character wanders into certain death with wide-eyed enthusiasm, never figuring out that the "show" is anything but (and, of course, further impressing rival agents and assassins with his calm under pressure), and that's the film's lone joke, repeated over and over again. Were this setup contained to a comic short of some sort (think Messers Magoo and Bean in their prime), it might have proved more entertaining, but at ninety minutes long, the proceedings get very repetitive, very fast. Perhaps most disappointing is Murray's approach to the material. He's one of the funniest people on the planet, and one can imagine a version of The Man Who Knew Too Little that works like gangbusters, with Murray firing off sideways glances and sarcastic quips as the spy plot thickens (heck, that's the approach that he and Man Who Knew Too Little co-writer Howard Franklin took in their underrated 1990 comedy Quick Change, which plopped Murray's traditional wiseass persona into a hostage drama à la Dog Day Afternoon). But that's not what he does – Ritchie is more a wide-eyed naïf than a sardonic know-it-all, and Murray simply doesn't play guileless well. It's a misfire, although not a catastrophic one (at the end of the day, the film is too inconsequential).
Michael Reuben's Blu-ray review noted that "for its entire running time, The Man Who Knew Too Little always seems on the verge of taking off, and then always throttles back into idle mode...Wallace Ritchie wins everyone over. His brother embraces him, Lori falls for him, the intelligence community celebrates him (although they're still not quite sure who he is) and at the end . . . well, I'll skip the specifics, but let's just say that no one discovers their mistake (and Amiel confirms in the commentary that he deliberately chose to end the film that way). So much of Murray's deadpan brilliance occurs in reaction to people who have been driven to distraction by his unflappable certainty that his own misbehavior is justified. Maybe it was a mistake to set him loose among the British. Most of them are just too polite to serve as a proper foil to a classic Bill Murray character. Even the mugger who takes his wallet (Eddie Marsan, in his first film) is unnerved by Wallace Ritchie's failure to respect the established protocol for being a victim. What Murray really needed to bring out the best in his performance was to encounter someone equally self-absorbed - John Cleese's Basil Fawlty, for example. Now he would have been a proper British adversary."