For the week of October 28th, Scream/Shout Factory is bringing Nightbreed: The Director's Cut to Blu-ray. This fantasy-horror (and if this new Blu-ray matters in any capacity, it's in restoring that "fantasy" tag to the descriptor) suffered a long, torturous history before arriving on HD. Initially, author/filmmaker Clive Barker wanted to mount an ambitious adaptation of his own novella Cabal, which, in its story of a disturbed young man (played in the film by Craig Sheffer) who takes refuge with the creatures of Midian after a serial killer (the great David Cronenberg, who's definitely a better director than an actor) frames him for murder, plays like a twisted mix of The Lord of the Rings, Seven Samurai, and the Hellboy pictures. By all accounts, Barker got to make that movie, but Morgan Creek and Warner Bros. were uncomfortable with how to market Barker's monster-sympathetic version, and the studios took the film away from him, releasing a much shorter version in 1990 that downplayed Nightbreed's ghoulish protagonists and emphasized the more conventional villainy of Cronenberg's masked killer. Watching the studio's preferred cut (it's actually a special feature in the limited edition set) is a great "What If" experience; you can see fragments of the darker, emotionally richer vision throughout, but they never cohere into something more meaningful. Well, in 2009 producer Mark Millar found a 160-minute VHS workprint version that restored most of the cut footage, and in 2012 it began making the rounds at select screenings as "The Cabal Cut." This much longer beast (ha ha) was a blessing and a curse: much of the found footage was revelatory, but it was also a true workprint, with overly extended and redundant scenes and video quality that reflected its lo-fi origins whenever the film transitioned into the new material. But the fan support was so tremendous that Millar kept up his search and found the original camera negative with the workprint content, allowing Barker to re-edit Nightbreed into a true director's cut. Though only eighteen minutes longer than the theatrical iteration, this Nightbreed feels complete – Barker has incorporated over forty-five minutes of new material, trimming some takes and replacing them with alternate beats or adding whole subplots outright, particularly in the form of scenes involving Sheffer's character and his loyal girlfriend (Anne Bobby). This new Nightbreed feels more like a tragic romance, with the lovers torn asunder by time, space, and fatal circumstances, and for those viewers used to the two-hander between Sheffer and Cronenberg's mortal enemies, that shift in focus might come as a surprise. A more welcome surprise is the added screentime for the monsters – particularly Doug Bradley's Lylesburg, Hugh Ross' Narcisse, and Oliver Parker's Peloquin – all of whom give Nightbreed such a unique, grand scope. Alongside Danny Elfman's bombastic score, the film comes off even more like a big-budget horror epic à la The Shining. The new ending...that's a bit more controversial, but it's rare that you have a horror movie strive for too much rather than for not enough. Nightbreed has always been a unique piece of work, but now it's something else entirely: a satisfying horror entertainment.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "What's interesting about that central idea is how ahead of the curve Barker obviously was in 'humanizing' (for want of a better term) monsters. It would be another few to several years until series like The X-Files and whimsical feature films like Pixar's Monsters, Inc. started to traffic in some of the same concepts. It's become more de rigeur lately with outings like Grimm, but in 1990 it was really a bracing reinvention, one that obviously may have zinged right over the heads of the reigning powers of the day. Does this necessarily mean that Nightbreed is a neglected masterpiece? The case can certainly be made that the film, even in its butchered form, was probably better than it was credited as being at the time, and there's no denying that the Director's Cut absolutely smooths out some of the rough edges and provides better context for both Boone and Lori as well as the monsters in Midian. But performances are all over the place here (Mr. Cronenberg, don't quit your day job), and Barker doesn't quite have the directorial control that the subject requires, letting some other actors mug and leaving a few plot threads dangling precipitously. Still, in this latest iteration, Nightbreed certainly hits the mark more than ever before, and remains a consistently intriguing entry in the Barker filmography."
From Kino Video comes Mario Bava's 1965 chiller Planet of the Vampires. Planet of the Vampires's low-budget origins bely the influence it's had on the sci-fi-horror genre. For Bava fans, the film is a must-see - his use of color is even more psychedelic that in his great Kill, Baby...Kill, and the swirling, fog-soaked mystery of his alien worlds recalls the drifting menace of Robert Wise's The Haunting or Val Lewton's Cat People - but for those uninitiated into the cult of the Italian horror maestro, the film could prove to be a tough sit. While the film has a cool premise, which finds a group of astronauts beset by strange forces after they land on a mysterious planet, the execution is far less involving. Bava's actors (including Barry Sullivan, Norma Bengell, and Ángel Aranda) deliver stilted, often unconvincing performances, and the horror setpieces poke along with less impact than something from the Universal monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s - were it not for Bava's atmospherics, there'd be little worth recommending, and even his bravura handling of environment and tone (the fog, the shadows, the color) feels like a creative way of obscuring the cheapness of the sets and props. And yet, Bava's film endures, in part because of him but mostly because of what it has wrought. Put simply, it's hard to imagine Ridley Scott's landmark Alien without Planet of the Vampires. Just as in that 1979 classic, Bava's astronauts unwittingly head to their doom after investigating a strange distress signal, and both films share a scene where the protagonists find a strange ship with some massive alien corpses inside. But that's not all - Scott must have liked Planet of the Vampires a lot because it seems like he revisited it when he was making Prometheus. The residents of the alien planet in Planet of the Vampires force the astronauts to do terrible things to one another; ditto Prometheus. Scott even has his characters wear stylized, skin-tight spacesuits that look maybe one generation removed from Bava's spacesuits. Tracing the shared DNA between these three films is quite a bit of fun, and it helps to power through the lag-time in Planet of the Vampires.
Switching gears, we move to Lionsgate's release of the crime-comedy Life of Crime. In bringing Elmore Leonard's 1978 novel The Switch to screen, writer-director Daniel Schechter has provided viewers with a prequel of sorts. Life of Crime's criminal protagonists Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara (Yasiin Bey – formerly known as Mos Def – and Academy Award-nominee John Hawkes) are the younger versions of Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro's thugs from Jackie Brown, and part of the fun of Life of Crime is seeing these two men at a moment well before the events of that 1997 Quentin Tarantino classic. As the two men try to extort a ransom from a sleazy developer (Tim Robbins) by kidnapping his bored wife (Jennifer Aniston), we get subtle but clear hints of the men the two criminals would become. Gara is sweet but a little dopey (the latter quality would calcify as his defining trait during the De Niro Years), while the more charming Robbie always keeps his cool but evinces a casual sociopathy that would curdle into psychopathy by the time Jackson takes over. Plus, we even get the first appearance from Ordell's ditzy Girl Friday Melanie (Isla Fisher, taking over from Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown), who is far more pragmatic and calculating here than Fonda's pot-giggly beach bunny was. Now, the question still remains, is Life of Crime any good? Adaptations of Leonard's work tend to fall into one of two very discrete categories – the very good (TV's Justified, Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight) or the very bad (Be Cool, Killshot) - so it's achievement enough that Life of Crime fits comfortably between the two. It's more akin to the mid-range Leonard programmer 52 Pick-Up. That means that while Schechter gets good performances from his cast (particularly Hawkes, who's so charming and decent as the pre-burnout version of Robert De Niro's addled ex-con from Jackie Brown - he and Aniston have a lovely, understated chemistry with one another), he also never fully justifies the film's existence. It lacks both the crackerjack plotting and effortless cool of the best Leonard adaptations – Schechter is content to let his actors leisurely roll through some great dialogue without maintaining a strict hold over tone and character: why else do we have the go-nowhere subplots for Will Forte and Mark Boone Junior's characters? A better filmmaker would have pared things down to the essentials the same way Quentin Tarantino did in Jackie Brown. That film was deceptively high-stakes – its loping atmosphere and sideways approach to narrative masked a poignant examination of middle-age regret and failure – but Life of Crime has no such deeper ambitions. It's a pleasant time-waster: no more, no less.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "To reveal more would spoil some of the gentle but amusing surprises Life of Crime has up its sleeve. The film may not have the punch and drama of other Leonard filmic adaptations, but it is consistently spry and offers Aniston one of her better performance opportunities of the past few years. She brings both a charming vulnerabilty as well as ultimately a rather steely demeanor to Mickey and her predicament. Similarly, it's fun to finally see John Hawkes as something akin to a good guy, despite the fact that Louis is obviously a criminal and kidnapper. The supporting cast is largely flawless, with Fisher especially amusing as the machinating Melanie. Life of Crime ultimately boils down to a somewhat predictable punchline that plays on Leonard's original title, The Switch. That may be a cheap out for what is a mostly invigorating little character study wrapped inside a traditional caper gone wrong scenario, but it ultimately doesn't completely deflate this often droll soufflé."
Finally, Criterion is bringing The Complete Jacques Tati to Blu-ray. For most cinephiles, this set would be worth it simply because it bundles new HD versions of Tati feature films, including his three masterworks: Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), and Playtime (1967). In these, Tati detailed the adventures of Mr. Hulot, a comic creation on par with Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp and Buster Keaton's iconic "Stone-Face" persona. As played by Tati, Hulot definitely has a recognizable demeanor - well-to-do, slightly conservative, and wryly bemused - but what's remarkable about these three films is how they give what could be a one-dimensional comic figure an arc that grows subtly tragic. The first in this loose trilogy, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, is the gentlest and most sedate of the bunch, and as such, so is Mr. Hulot at his most unencumbered. What little plot there is finds Hulot on vacation at a seaside village; he goes kayaking, he tries to strike up a romance with a lonely blonde, but mostly he just sits back and regards the comings and goings of the other inhabitants. That might sound boring, but it's really not - Tati affords his characters such a generosity of spirit that we get a kick of out watching them behave. As Roger Ebert wrote, "When has a film so subtly and yet so completely captured nostalgia for past happiness? The movie is about the simplest of human pleasures: The desire to get away for a few days, to play instead of work, to breathe in the sea air, and maybe meet someone nice...And it is amused, too, that we go about our days so intently, while the sea and the sky go about theirs." It's that ease that makes Mon Oncle so striking. If Monsieur Hulot's Holiday showed us a solitary Hulot, Mon Oncle forces him into a deeper engagement with the world. It's Tati's The Kid, as Hulot becomes the mentor to his sister's lonely son, and in that regard, Mon Oncle is probably the sweetest and most affecting of Tati's work: he's able to construct such a full relationship between the two from sight gags and minimal dialogue. But Hulot's engagement goes both ways. The frame for this human bond is patently inhuman, with the nephew and his family living in an ultramodern house that's equal parts brutalist and Rube Goldberg, and one can sense the faintest bit of panic in Hulot's otherwise staid bemusement at the technology surrounding him.
But that's been Tati's game all along, and with Playtime, he makes that subtext text. In Playtime, Hulot is little more than a cog in Tati's looming urban machine, a vaguely recognizable element tooling around a hypermodern Paris. The machine overwhelms everything, and while Playtime is still amusing, there's a sterility, an impersonality (signified by Hulot's increasingly marginalized role at the surroundings) to the proceedings that drains the comedy of its warmth. Playtime is like Modern Times as directed by Stanley Kubrick. It's also Tati's crowning achievement, a visually dense, almost interactive experience that uses every inch of the 70mm frame for some gag or mini-narrative (this movie would look sumptuous in IMAX). Unfortunately, it's also one of the greatest examples of directorial folly every committed to celluloid, with Tati creating a giant scale set of Paris that nearly bankrupted him and cratered (during its initial run) at the box-office. That excess is part of the reason that his 1971 follow-up Trafic feels so unsatisfying. Tati was still in the doghouse for exceeding his means during Playtime, and he had to scale back a lot for this vehicular-based satire of communication. Perhaps unavoidably, Trafic doesn't have the same impact, but it's hard to not think that maybe he'd said everything he could have about humanity and culture in the three films that preceded it. The gags just aren't as fresh, and Hulot himself feels like an afterthought this time around - he's just a footnote to the development we saw before. Still, for Tati fans, this is essential viewing, as are Criterion's packaging of Tati's little-seen Jour de Fete and Parade. Released in 1949, Jour de Fete functions as a dry run for the Hulot character, with Tati playing a very Hulot-like mailman making his rounds through a small French town. It's charming, if slight, and that adjective could apply to Parade, too, which finds Tati following two children through a circus. Visually, Parade is the least of Tati's films (he shot it for television), but it's still filled with sweet moments, especially when one considers it as a love letter to Tati's own training as a mime.
What Svet Atanasov wrote about Monsieur Hulot's Holiday holds true for the best scenes from Tati's body of work: "Most of the scenes are unrelated. The many characters in the film come and go, and Hulot's actions are not always the focus of attention. In fact, often there is a chain reaction of events, and Hulot is nowhere to be seen. Then he would suddenly appear and cause chaos. Some of the scenes are hilarious, others not so much. Some are easy to deconstruct, others demand a second look. The film is charming, at times sentimental, but not simplistic. Most of the characters in it remain unnamed, but one does not need to know their names in order to understand what motivates them, what excites or angers them. The dialog is extremely limited. Hulot, for example, has only one line, which he utters when he registers in the hotel. Most of the communication is done through facial expressions and gestures. There are also various random sounds -- though there is absolutely nothing random about them as they reveal what is about to happen or when the camera isn't pointed in the right direction what has already happened."