Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

When it comes to beloved genre figures, they don’t get much more beloved than Cassandra Peterson’s Elvira. And now, the prolific team at Arrow Video have put together a swanky new 4K release of 1988’s Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. With that in mind, then, let’s take a look to see whether this a devilish delight or simply a soulless cash-grab.

In terms of the plot, Mistress of the Dark finds Elvira in desperate need of some moolah. Having quit her TV hosting gig, Elvira decides to start her own Las Vegas show. The only hitch? Why, that’s stumping up the $50,000 needed to start such a show. As luck would have it though, Elvira is soon on the end of a hefty inheritance windfall which lands her with, amongst other others, a house that she can easily flip to raise the relevant funds. The problem here, however, is the local townspeople don’t take too well to her quirky charms and she can’t find a buyer for love nor money. Added to that, her Uncle Vinny (W. Morgan Sheppard) has his own agenda where Elvira’s inheritance is concerned. Stuck in a deadbeat town, no money to fulfil her Vegas dreams, and with everybody against her, whatever will Elvira do?

We guess the thing with Elvira is that she can often split opinion. Some grumble grumps see the character as pointless trash that is simply bad humour and excessive cleavage shots. Luckily, we’re on the other side of the fence, for here at Moonbase Alpha we can never get enough of Elvira and her antics. In Mistress of the Dark, we have a movie that is energetic, tongue-in-cheek fun that has some genuine laughs dotted throughout. From mild titters at Elvira’s brash, no-nonsense approach to proceedings, to legitimate belly laughs at some of the one-liners on display, this is a film that never takes itself too seriously. Added to that, there is a whole lot of heart and a deeper meaning to the picture; not least in how Elvira is shunted just for being a little different.

At the centre of happenings, of course, we have Cassandra Peterson. Marvelling in her feature film debut, Peterson is on absolutely perfect form as Elvira. But then again, the actress is always “on” when Elvira comes a-calling. Having been involved in the lengthy development of the movie and its screenplay, Peterson is hugely instrumental in giving audiences the ultimate Elvira experience. As alluded to earlier, if you enjoy the Elvira character, this is a picture that you will have an absolute blast with.

Where the bonus material on this new release is concerned, the standout attraction is the Too Macabre making-of. Actually longer than the main movie itself, this documentary is an utter treat for longtime fans of Elvira. Taking the previous version of this doc and sprucing it up with some new content, this is just as much fun as Mistress of the Dark, if not more so. And that says a lot, for Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is ridiculously entertaining. Elsewhere, the archived audio commentary featuring Cassandra Peterson, Edie McClurg, and John Paragon is another particular highlight, with the chat track being a brilliant accompaniment to this cult favourite. Finally, there’s the brand new 4K restoration for the film, which gives an extra crispness to the spooky shenanigans of Elvira, in particular adding an extra element of fun to the bonkers final third of the feature.

All in all, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is a fun romp of a film that never takes itself too seriously yet is cleverly constructed and deep down has a whole lot of heart throughout. So, pointless trash that is simply bad humour and excessive cleavage shots? To an extent, maybe, but Mistress of the Dark is well and truly in on the joke.

Special Features: Three audio commentaries / Introduction by director James Signorelli / Too Macabre – The Making of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark documentary / Recipe for Terror: The Creation of the Pot Monster featurette / Original storyboards / Trailers / Collector’s booklet

ELVIRA: MISTRESS OF THE DARK / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: JAMES SIGNORELLI / SCREENPLAY: SAM EGAN, JOHN PARAGON, CASSANDRA PETERSON / CAST: CASSANDRA PETERSON, W. MORGAN SHEPPARD, DANIEL GREENE, SUSAN KELLERMAN, EDIE McCLURG / RELEASE DATE: DECEMBER 10TH

There’s nothing remotely original about this low budget, girl vs. girl B-movie actioner, and the first third of it is admittedly something of a slog. But around about the halfway mark it suddenly slides into gear, and the filmmakers do at least make an attempt at springing a few surprises in the final act – the result of which is a rather more satisfying film than you might anticipate.

Rebecca (Johnston) is an ex-fight club champion who deserted her home, her boyfriend and her family after her father (Lundgren) was imprisoned for murder five years ago, and now works looking after abandoned dogs and dreams of running away to Africa. But when she gets a visit from her sister Kate (Palm), in debt to a local mobster and preparing to go back into the ring unprepared to try and absolve herself of it, Bex must swallow her pride in order to train up a willing but undistinguished group of female fighters or risk losing her family all over again.

It goes without saying that there’s a fair bit of fighting in the film, but perhaps just a touch less than you’d expect (although Lundgren, in what amounts to an extended cameo, does get his own five minutes towards the climax; he’s actually pretty good in this). Director Miguel Ferrer, in his only feature to date, instead tries to concentrate on the relationship between his characters, and although they’re necessarily a bit obvious, they’re considerably less thin than they might have been. These do feel almost like real people, and that often isn’t the case at this level of movie-making.

And the fighting, when it does come, is fast and brutal and convincing, and those looking for visceral kicks will not be disappointed – there are plenty of ripped female muscle on display, which is surely the reason to watch this. Those expecting a Rocky-esque resolution to the story’s dilemmas though will find themselves confounded, as Ferrer and co-screenwriter Anastazja Davis evidently decided that would have been a cliché too far, and so provide us with something no less formulaic, but at least less predictable instead. The last shot of the film is nicely staged too.

It’s hard to single out any of the actors as particularly impressive, as despite everyone’s hard work there are very few moments of spontaneous authenticity; that said, Rey Goyos does make for an oddly charismatic and almost plausible villain, while Amy Johnston proves herself more than capable of holding the attention throughout what could have been a terribly slight film.

Those drawn in by the title will probably not be disappointed, but this might actually end up rewarding casual viewers a little more than they might predict, too.

Extras: Trailer

FEMALE FIGHT CLUB (AKA FEMALE FIGHT SQUAD) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: MIGUEL A. FERRER / SCREENPLAY: ANASTAZJA DAVIS, MIGUEL A. FERRER / STARRING: AMY JOHNSTON, CORTNEY PALM, SEAN FARIS, DOLPH LUNDGREN, REY GOYOS / RELEASE DATE: DECEMBER 8TH

How do you follow up one of the most well-received family films of the 21^st Century? How do you even try to succeed something so abundantly rich in heart, humour and humanity – not to mention respect for its source material – and something so unexpectedly perfect in almost every way, the mere fact of its existence feels like a miracle of impossible-to-replicate aligning stars?

You make something even better.

If you missed Paddington 2 during its theatrical run and are feeling a little sceptical of how much acclaim it received, well here’s the home media release to hammer the point home with another glut of glowing reviews. Quite simply, director and co-writer Paul King has looked into every individual aspect of the original and asked just a single question: ‘Could this be improved upon?’ If the answer was ‘yes’, then the improvement has been made – and it has been an improvement in every instance. Nicole Kidman’s villainess from the first film just a little too frightening for the kids? Get Hugh Grant in instead, and cast him as a foppish, larger than life self-parody that will entertain both the smaller and the longer in the tooth audience members to equal and extensive degrees.

If, on the other hand, no enhancement was possible, then King has found an even more magical substitute to enthral you with instead. So where the prologue from the first film was unimprovable, here’s a shortened variant with a bit you didn’t know you needed to see, and here’s an extra glimpse of Aunt Lucy in a sequence so extraordinary and so audacious it’s astonishing that it feels so natural and works so spectacularly well.

But that’s what Paddington 2 does, in every sequence and with every beat and performance. It’s joyous and impossibly satisfying – and even when you think you’ve been charmed as far as is humanly possible, it saves one last improbable but entirely logical surprise for the very end. You’ll melt.

King’s plot – Paddington chooses a present for Aunt Lucy’s forthcoming 100th birthday, but has to take a job in order to afford it, and then is framed for its theft when Grant’s over-the-hill actor realises it’s a treasure map and steals it – serves almost as a metaphor for the original film’s success, the sequel casting even the better imitators into the shadows and the bear’s incarceration proving how the least likely of potential admirers have fallen just as much in love with this new version of the character. King sets so many plates spinning you stop spotting them – until he catches every one in the spectacular final act.

This is a StudioCanal film, so it doesn’t come with the wide-ranging and child-friendly plethora of extra features you’d get with a Pixar release. What’s here is more than interesting enough for curious parents though, and certainly worth investigating.

If there’s even a smidgen of wonder in your soul, no matter how young or old you are, this is a film you need to own. It’s a genuine triumph and delight.

Extras: director’s commentary, Hugh Grant musical video, BAFTA Q&A, The Challenges of Making the Film

PADDINGTON 2 / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: PAUL KING / SCREENPLAY: PAUL KING, SIMON FARNABY / STARRING: BEN WISHAW, HUGH GRANT, BRENDAN GLEESON, HUGH BONNEVILLE, SALLY HAWKINS, JULIE WALTERS, JIM BROADBENT / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Much as we delight in the Daleks and covet the Cybermen, the most memorable adversaries faced by the timeless Time Lord in the classic Doctor Who series were often those of a more human disposition. The real bad guys, the humanoid horrors driven by tireless ambition and an unquenchable thirst for power or else possessed by some more manipulative creature lurking in the shadows. Koch’s latest two-disc collection of archive interviews celebrates six of the very best two-legged terrors encountered by the Doctor across the original series’ 26-year run and, as ever with these releases, it’s a bit of a mixed bag from a production perspective but the content is rarely less than interesting even if it tends not to offer up much new material for long-time fans of the classic iteration of the show.

Disc One remembers the much-missed Roger Delgado, the first (and best) incarnation of the Master, the Doctor’s most implacable enemy and very much a fixture of the series during Jon Pertwee’s era in the early 1970s. Delgado was killed in a road accident in Turkey in 1973 before his character could be formally written out of the series (Delgado had already suggested to the show’s production team that it was time to move on from Doctor Who after three years of regular appearances, which he felt were losing him work opportunities elsewhere) and the hour-long tribute here contains memories and anecdotes from those who worked with him on the series and who recall a quiet, gentle man, a consummate professional whose real-world persona could hardly have been more different from the urbane, devious if generally incompetent rival Time Lord he portrayed from 1971-73. The late Ian Collier, who passed away only recently, is best-known to fans of the series from his appearances in 1972’s The Time Monster and as arch villain Omega in the anniversary serial The Three Doctors, although, as always with the character actors who appeared in the show, their careers amounted to so much more than their Doctor Who roles even if they never became household names. Collier’s interview is rather wistful but he seems quietly at peace with both himself and his career. The first disc finishes off with an archive chat with the late Bernard Archard (from 1966’s Power of the Daleks and 1975’s classic Pyramids of Mars).

Disc Two presents a recently-filmed conversation with actor David Gooderson who took over the mantle of the diabolical Davros in three episodes of Destiny of the Daleks in 1979; interviewed in his home Gooderson, now in his 70s but with a pin-sharp memory and still professionally active, recalls his role in the show vividly but his career is actually far more distinguished than a trio of episodes hidden inside a rotting rubber mask might otherwise suggest. The set is rounded-off with a lengthy archive chat with Peter Miles, who passed away in February, who discusses his long and distinguished TV and theatre career alongside his Doctor Who roles which included the oily Nyder in 1975’s Genesis of the Daleks, and Julian Glover, one of the country’s best and hardest working character actors who appeared in Doctor Who in 1965’s The Crusade and in 1979’s City of Death, often regarded as one of the finest serials from the original run. The quality of the videotaped material is variable, of course. Many of these interviews are years old and include footage filmed at convention panels and never intended for commercial release and the cutaway inserts of the questions being asked in a completely different location becomes as wearing as it’s irritating. But as usual with these Koch Media releases, the historical nature of the material, and the chance to hear behind-the-scenes tales from the Doctor Who studio, however familiar, from the people who brought these legendary baddies to life – especially when many of them are no longer with us – is one that fans who yearn for the simpler days of Doctor Who will find entirely irresistible.

THE DOCTORS: VILLAINS! / CERT: E / DIRECTOR: KEITH BARNFATHER  / STARRING: BERNARD ARCHARD, DAVID GOODERSON, JULIAN GLOVER, PETER MILES / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

In January 1976, the then-57 year old Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman was arrested in Stockholm on charges – later dropped, as being without foundation – of tax evasion. The effect on Bergman was so traumatic, he left his home country and vowed never to work there again, relocating to Munich. The Serpent’s Egg was his first production following the incident, and as it turned out his last created for theatrical exhibition (Fanny and Alexander, like all of his subsequent pictures, was made for television initially). Perhaps most curiously of all, The Serpent’s Egg was a collaboration between Bergman, the director of The Seventh Seal, and Dino De Laurentiis, producer of Barbarella and Death Wish.

It’s set in Berlin (recreated in Munich) in November 1923, simultaneous with the Beer Hall Putsch that brought Hitler to the world’s attention, and stars David Carradine as Abel Rosenberg, an unemployed Jewish circus performer adrift in a city whose language he doesn’t speak and with only a bottle to keep him company. The film begins with him finding the body of his brother Max, who has committed suicide, and subsequently re-establishing an at first platonic relationship with Max’s estranged wife Manuela (Ullmann), before coming under police suspicion following a string of other mysterious deaths in the quarter – all seemingly connected with the cabaret at which Ullmann works in one of her two part-time jobs.

All of this is merely a metaphor for Berlin at the height of its post-Great War depression, of course, Bergman’s film following five years on the heels of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and taking place eight years ahead of it – thus effectively working as a kind of de facto prequel. The lighting isn’t always great and Bergman doesn’t seem to have as much control over his zooms and close-ups as he might have liked, although the lovely print on this fantastic Blu-ray edition does bring clarity to the presentation. Despite a bit of loose camerawork, Bergman tries his best to create a sort of reverse film noir, transposing the European-influenced genre back into its native territory in a way that gives it a kind of post factum relevance.

It’s actually tonally something like an early Scorsese picture, at least at first – Boxcar Bertha meets Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; a story about lost souls cut loose in an impermanent, alien and changing environment, never quite marrying their priorities or meeting emotionally. Ullmann is terrific as the film’s emotional centre, Carradine mostly so as its taciturn pivot. As the third act drives the slightly ineffective paranoia Bergman has been building down a Boys from Brazil-shaped tunnel, even the inconsistencies turn out to have been logically employed.

It’s a great set from Arrow, despite not being Bergman’s most focused production, with around an hour’s worth of interesting archival retrospective extra features. Well worth forking out for if you are a Bergman aficionado, or even just if you’re interested in seeing the factors that led to World War II represented in a crime theatre scenario.

Extras: trailer, commentary with David Carradine, Bergman’s Egg, Away From Home, German Expressionism

THE SERPENT’S EGG / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN / SCREENPLAY: INGMAR BERGMAN / STARRING: DAVID CARRADINE, LIV ULLMANN, GERT FRÖBE, HEINZ BENNENT / RELEASE DATE: 3RD DECEMBER

Whatever cinematic spells Dario Argento mislaid after 1987, he casts them in this, his last truly definitive work of horror. Today, Opera plays out like a valedictory curtain-call that deliberately revisits and burnishes many key themes (voyeurism, naivety awakened, mother issues) and motifs (classic masked killer, eye close-ups, blood as art) that the boggle-eyed Italian auteur had been ramping up over a 17-year glory-run around the giallo sandbox. He pretty much blows it to smithereens here, but that didn’t stop him coming back for more to ever-diminishing returns.

Fortune may favour the brave, but it seriously passes on plucky young opera understudy Betty (Cristina Marsillach) who thinks her big chance has finally come when she’s called upon to step into the lead soprano role in a technically audacious production of Verdi’s Macbeth, directed by the overbearing Marco (the late Ian Charleson, channelling Argento himself). All goes well at first, but hiding in the rafters is a hooded figure ready to rain on her parade. After murdering a stage hand by means of a coat hook, the killer breaks into Betty’s apartment and snuffs out her deeply irritating English boyfriend, forcing her – and us – to witnesses every second of it by taping rows of needles beneath her eyelids. Nasty indeed, and rather familiar to young Betty who has a strange feeling this might be the same fiend who murdered her mother many years earlier…

Opera is an exercise in extremity, always strongest when shunting things into overdrive. In this respect Argento chose his subject well: the unnerving intensity of focus that characterised his 1970s films and seemed to be blurring somewhat in Phenomena (1984) comes raging back, driving the story along and – until the rather strange ending – never letting up. It’s there in the exquisite photography and stunningly choreographed camerawork that looks amazing in this re-graded 2K restoration from Cult Films. It’s there in the cacophonous soundtrack that comes fully alive in this edition, taking full advantage of the original THX-certified mix that pummels our ears to submission during macabre killings that scale new heights of sadism for Argento. Most of all, it’s there in the recurring centrepiece of the film, the cursed stage production of Macbeth that must rank as Argento’s greatest technical accomplishment. If you’ve never been to the opera, the POV shots of demonic ravens swooping down over a packed auditorium to pluck out terrified eyeballs while a storm-lashed apocalypse rages on stage will ensure you never do.

The ending has always been divisive: it feels not so much tacked-on as cut in from another film entirely, but it doesn’t undo Argento’s grandiose goodbye to the commercial and critical good times. The man himself pops up in typically dour current form in a new interview, but the real highlight of the extras package is a 40-minute 1987 making-of that puts us right in the eye of the storm.

Magnifico.

Special Features: Aria of Fear (interview with Dario Argento), Opera Backstage (behind the scenes documentary), Restoration featurette

OPERA / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: DARIO ARGENTO / SCREENPLAY: DARIO ARGENTO, FRANCO FERRINI / STARRING: CRISTINA MARSILLACH, IAN CHARLESON, URBANO BERBERINI / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW