British label Second Run has announced that it will release on Blu-ray director Juraj Herz's film
The Cremator (1968), starring Rudolf Hrusínský, Vlasta Chramostová, and Jana Stehnová. The release will be available for purchase on December 11.
Synopsis: The Cremator has been described in many ways – as surrealist-inspired horror film, as an expressionistic political allegory, a pitch-black comic satire and as a dark and disturbing tale of terror.
This brilliantly chilling film, a unique mix of Psycho, Dr Strangelove and Repulsion, is set in Prague during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. It tells the story of one Karl Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský), a professional cremator, for whom the political climate allows free rein to his increasingly perverse and deranged impulses for the 'salvation of the world'.
Now more chillingly prescient than ever, The Cremator also contains another of master-composer Zdeněk Liška's brilliantly inventive film scores.
"In addition to the astonishing visual inventiveness there is also a ferocious sense of humour in the details... Disorientating, disquieting and darkly humorous, The Cremator remains one of the most richly resonant celluloid nightmares" Virginie Sélavy, Electric Sheep.
"The Cremator is one of the most memorable films of the 1960s Czechoslovak New Wave, though its macabre humour and lacquer-black .sensibility have tended to set it apart from the movement's gentler films" Sight & Sound.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- NEW transfer from original materials by the Czech National Film Archive
- Filmed introduction by the Quay Brothers
- Audio Commentary by writer and film historian Kat Ellinger
- Juraj Herz s short film The Junk Shop (Sb rné surovosti, 1965)
- The Projection Booth podcast with Mike White and Samm Deighan
- Booklet with an essay on Herz and the film by writer/producer Daniel Bird
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- Original soundtrack in Dual Mono 24-bit LPCM audio
- AND MORE...