Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, we’ve entered December, yet the top pick happens to be a horror documentary. Yes, today features Chain Reactions coming to Blu-ray, which celebrates The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What else is hitting shelves, including a real classic joining the Criterion Collection in His Girl Friday? Read on to find out…
Joey’s Top Pick
Chain Reactions
I developed a whole new appreciation for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre through watching Chain Reactions. The doc filters the impact of the classic horror film through a handful of creatives in the entertainment world, though in many ways, their experience is our experience. You’ll never look at Leatherface the same way again. My review here from back in September began like so:
Some movies just get under your skin. For many, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the big ones. The way it was made, the look it had, and what it was suggesting, if not outright showing, unsettled audiences upon release. Hell, it still terrifies people to this day. That lasting impact and relevance is the focus of the documentary Chain Reactions, which gives the film its long overdue flowers, bloody as they may be.
Chain Reactions looks at the legacy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre through the impact it left on several notable creatives in the world of entertainment. You certainly don’t have to be a fan of the horror film to appreciate what’s being done here, though it goes without saying that anyone who loves the movie like the talking heads here will have even more to chew on.
Also Available This Week
Dirty Work (Blu-ray)
Five Nights at Freddy’s (4K SteelBook)
Mannequin (Blu-ray)
The People Under the Stairs (4K SteelBook)
Pulp Fiction (4K SteelBook)
Ted Lasso: The Richmond Way (TV)
Tom and Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology (TV)
Wicked (4K SteelBook)
Zapped! (Blu-ray)
Criterion Corner
His Girl Friday
From The Criterion Collection: “One of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made, His Girl Friday stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema’s powerful women. Hildy is matched in force only by her conniving but charismatic editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (played by the peerless Cary Grant), who dangles the chance for her to scoop her fellow news writers with the story of an impending execution in order to keep her from hopping the train that’s supposed to take her to Albany and a new life as a housewife. When adapting Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s smash-hit play The Front Page, director Howard Hawks had the inspired idea of turning star reporter Hildy Johnson into a woman, and the result is an immortal mix of hard-boiled newsroom setting with ebullient remarriage comedy. Also presented here is a restoration of the 1931 film The Front Page, Lewis Milestone’s famous pre-Code adaptation of the same material.”
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Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray
From The Criterion Collection: “The swirling surrealist dreams of Man Ray are high-water marks of 1920s avant-garde cinema, a nexus of cryptic themes, dark eroticism, and playful abstraction. Seemingly plucked from an unconscious realm, these four shorts—Le retour à la raison, Emak bakia, L’étoile de mer, and Les mystères du château du dé—find the visionary artist experimenting with the limitless possibilities of montage, superimposition, distortion, and even the application of objects directly onto celluloid. Set here to an ethereal score by the Jim Jarmusch–Carter Logan collaboration SQÜRL, these cine-poems are optical carnival rides that surprise, delight, and unsettle with each tantalizing frame.”
Stay tuned for more next week!
