TOD BROWNING’S SIDESHOW SHOCKERS TBC

1925-32 ★★★★★ OUT NOW BD

EXTRAS ★★★★★ Commentaries, Intros, Documentary, Featurettes, Short story, Video gallery, Essay

If a new restoration of Browning’s macabre masterpiece Freaks is the star attraction of this Criterion release, the two silent ‘shockers’ that accompany it prove no less enthralling. Never before available on home video, The Mystic features a phoney psychic, while The Unknown casts Lon Chaney (opposite a young Joan Crawford) as an amputee knife-thrower who isn’t quite as, ahem, ’armless as he first appears. Scholar David J. Skal provides insights across various extras.

HIGH TENSION 18

2003 ★★★★★ OUT 27 NOVEMBER BD, 4K UHD, DUAL FORMAT

EXTRAS ★★★★★ Commentary, Making of, Featurettes, Booklet, Art cards

Shocking violence is twinned with uncompromising storytelling in Alexandre Aja’s breakthrough horror (aka Switchblade Romance), back to turn heads anew with an extras-packed reissue. As student Marie (Cécile de France) pursues a relentless sadist who kidnapped her best friend (Maïwenn), the director-co-writer meshes slasher/exploitation tropes with avant-garde bravura. Its ruthless efficiency is overshadowed by the jarring final act, but this remains a pivotal work of extreme cinema. Dual-format edition comes with a 70-page booklet.

KING & COUNTRY 12

1964 ★★★★★ OUT NOW DVD, BD, DIGITAL

EXTRAS ★★★★★ Featurettes, Stills gallery

Released in a new 4K restoration, this powerful anti-war film saw the third collaboration between US director Joseph Losey and British star Dirk Bogarde. Amid the mud and misery of the World War One trenches, Bogarde’s Captain Hargreaves is brought in to defend Private Hamp (a terrific, BAFTAnominated Tom Courtenay), who’s been accused of desertion and faces the death penalty. But the real crime is that men like Hamp could be murdered, en masse, for a cause they repeat – ‘King and country!’ – but can’t really comprehend.

GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI 15

1999 ★★★★★ OUT NOW DVD, BD, 4K UHD, DIGITAL

EXTRAS ★★★★★ Featurette, Deleted scenes

‘I hope [it’s] the kind of film that you see and two days later some little things revisit your brain,’ says writer-director Jim Jarmusch of his cult hit, here making its UHD debut. Never mind two days; his tale of a Don Quixote-like hitman (Forest Whitaker) going to war with a dysfunctional Mob family has stuck in our brains for more than two decades, thanks to its effortlessly cool mix of richly drawn characters, hip-hop beats and deadpan humour. Some new extras would have been nice, though.

TARGETS 15

Horror gets real…

1968 ★★★★★ OUT NOW BD

EXTRAS ★★★★★ Commentaries, Documentary, Featurettes, Stills gallery, Booklet

No one’s afraid of a painted monster,’ sighs retiring horror icon Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself) as he views rushes of his latest Victorian horror film. Little does he realise that he’ll soon be confronting the modern terror of a young sniper whose random killing spree takes in the drive-in theatre where Orlok is making a personal appearance.

This excellent BFI Blu-ray features a gorgeous restoration overseen by director Peter Bogdanovich (who died in January 2022), docs, interviews, a Bogdanovich commentary and a brand-new chat track by film historian Peter Tonguette. The making-of story is repeated numerous times, but it’s a cracker: Karloff owed Roger Corman two days of filming, so the spendthrift producer asked Bogdanovich to capture 20 minutes’ worth of new Karloff material, then drop in scenes from 1963 Karloff pic The Terror and shoot filler footage with other actors. Mix it all together and you have a new Karloff picture!

From that brief, Bogdanovich (assisted at script stage, uncredited, by the great Sam Fuller) made an outstanding horror film that gifted Karloff a valedictory role. Made soon after the killings of ‘Texas Tower Sniper’ Charles Whitman, Targets trains its sights on bored youths existing in disassociated 60s America. Sadly, it feels even more relevant now than it was then.

THE VERDICT Like Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead, a key late-60s film that updated the horror genre.