Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Originally made as a US TV movie of the week in 1968, The People Next Door – a study of addiction, the counterculture, and the generation gap – was remade for the big screen two years later. Returning for the movie version were the original writer and director, and Deborah Winters who reprised her role as the wayward Maxie Mason, the precocious and rebellious young woman whose drug-induced descent into severe mental illness is at the heart of this cautionary tale.

The Masons, a seemingly contented, middle-class American family, is beginning to strain at the seams. Patriarch Arthur (Eli Wallach) wishes that his brood could instead emulate the lifestyle of the people next door, and in particular the go-getter attitude of their son Sandy (Don Scardino). The older Mason son Artie (Stephen McHattie) and younger daughter Maxie, both teenagers, are attracted to the thrills and excitement of the underground hippy scene. While Artie, a talented musician, seeks recognition in a proto-prog rock band, Maxie is more interested in exploring recreational substance abuse and hanging out with bad boys. When Arthur discovers what Maxie is up to, he immediately blames Artie for bringing drugs into the house. With Artie banished, mother Gerrie (Julie Harris) is unable to make sense of her daughter’s alarming new behaviour. Events quickly spiral as Maxie becomes ever more manic and disconnected, and Arthur’s clumsy efforts to pull her back from the brink fail.

The original TV movie had attracted both controversy and accolades, including an Emmy. Although it picked up the property for the big-screen treatment, the studio did not offer up a huge budget for the remake. Director David Greene, a left-field filmmaker whose 1969 British flick I Start Counting was recently re-released, makes a virtue of this. Greene opts for a small-scale canvas, exploring the film’s themes through a tight focus on the two sets of family members – with some surprising results.

One of the things The People Next Door suggests very forcefully is that neither the bewildered parents nor the defiant children are able to hear one another, and that the old and the young are both capable of acting in appalling and selfish ways. Miller’s script does bring out the hypocrisy of the parent’s generation, whose members abuse alcohol, have affairs, and pop diet pills and sleeping tablets, whilst lamenting the lax morals and drug culture of the young.

The film boasts an impressive and, newcomers aside, an experienced cast. Wallach is superb as the incredulous father with a short fuse, while Harris puts in an excellent performance as Arthur’s pained but resilient wife. Aged just sixteen at the time of filming, Winters brings depth and believability to the role of Maxie. That’s all the more impressive because the film avoids taking a view on whether it’s the LSD and other substances that drive Maxie mad, or whether the young woman is predisposed to mental instability – a vulnerability that narcotics make worse.

The movie does lack context. The breadth of the counterculture, the impact of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the US, the range of social and political issues over which the young were in revolt, and the extent of New York’s economic decline as the 1960s ended: all of these are hinted at but not stitched into the fabric of the film. By the time The People Next Door reached the big screen, much of its original impact had dissipated. Suggesting that America’s mutually suspicious generations were out of sync, and acknowledging that some youngsters took drugs (and could suffer bad outcomes as a result) were no longer breakthrough ideas.

This new release offers a 4K restoration from the original camera negative, and a generous set of special features – the majority of which are talking-head features filmed by cast and crew members online during the Covid lockdown. A chatty and relaxed new audio commentary by Rutanya Alda and Lee Gambin helps locate the movie in its times. Tripping with Maxie sees Winters reflect on her life and career before and after the movie; editor Brian Smedley-Aston is full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes on Structured How to Feel; and musician John Sheldon, whose band Bead Game features on screen and across the soundtrack of the film, talks discographies and line-ups in My Life in Review. Film historian Vic Pratt also provides an informed, if somewhat stilted, retrospective on the directorial career of David Greene.

Far from being a censorious After-School Special on the dangers of meddling with drugs, The People Next Door attempts to snapshot a moment of conflict and transition in US social history. It is an intriguing effort, despite its blindspots, brought to life by its stellar cast.

It’s sobering to be reminded that within just a few years of the film’s release, the dimly-lit back alleys and grubby tenements of New York would become the fulcrum for a new youth counterculture even more determined than hippy had been to offend and outrage America’s middle-aged, middle-class establishment.

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is released on Limited Edition Blu-ray August 30th from Indicator

Broadcast in 1968 and wiped from the BBC Archive in one of its infamous ‘purges’ in the early 1970s, the classic six-part serial The Web of Fear, pitting second Doctor Patrick Troughton against the formless Great Intelligence and its robotic Yeti foot-soldiers in the depths of the London underground was for years presumed lost forever, only its first episode surviving the ill-advised cull. In 2013 the five remaining episodes (and all six episodes from another largely missing Troughton serial) were located in a remote TV relay station in Nigeria but unfortunately, the third episode went astray again before the tapes could be returned to the UK. The recovered serial was cleaned up and made available for fans digitally in time for Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013 and was released on a barebones DVD a few months later with the missing episode represented by screengrab photographic images. Years later and the BBC have now been embarking on an ambitious programme of animating many of the 97 missing episodes of the classic series – with sometimes mixed results – and Web of Fear‘s missing instalment – considered important in the series canon as it marked the first screen appearance of the legendary Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, as played by the late Nicholas Courtney – has now been brought back to life courtesy of a revolutionary motion-capture animation technique. So now the whole serial gets the ‘special edition’ treatment with the full complement of additional supporting material alongside the episodes themselves.

Let’s get the animated elephant in the room out of the way first. Episode three just looks… weird.  Attempts to give the animation a greater fluidity than the 2D techniques used on previous releases have resulted in an episode full of characters who resemble Captain Pugwash caricatures twitching and spasming irrationally, their unnaturally-long limbs waving like wet shirts on a washing line, their faces twisting and contorting as if they’ve been electrocuted. We’re not minded to come down too hard on this first attempt as clearly a lot of time and effort has been spent trying to do something a bit different so whilst watching Web of Fear part three is likely to be strictly a one-watch affair and we can only hope that any future attempts at this animation style will be better-funded to allow for a more fluid and less jarring and visually-unappealing experience.

The serial itself – the five live-action episodes look quite stunning on Blu-ray despite the SD nature of the original recordings – is supported by a forty-odd minute ‘making of’ documentary which sees actor Frazer Hines (Jamie) venture into an abandoned London Underground station to recount his memories of the serial with additional contributions from actors Tina Packer, John Levene, and Ralph Watson (who passed away only recently).  It’s a more traditional ‘talking heads’ piece than some of the more inventive features the Doctor Who releases have specialised in recently but it’s nicely paced and consistently interesting. Elsewhere we have the usual commentaries and photo gallery, the animated episode presented in colour, the episode 3 telesnap reconstruction, and a curious audio section in which actor Jack Woolgar (Sergeant Arnold) practices an array of vocal options for his performance in later episodes of the serial. Possibly the most niche special feature ever released on physical media? Discuss…

Despite the disappointing animation for the missing third episode, this special edition of The Web of Fear is another top-class release from the Doctor Who archive – the serial itself of course is a stone-cold classic of the Troughton era – and a reminder how lucky Who fans are that their show receives this level of care and attention at a time when the presentation of physical media in general is in a slow state of decline.

Here’s a rare treat for horror fans, as Indicator release Corruption on Blu-ray on August 30th. The casual viewer could be forgiven for writing this off as just another old Peter Cushing film, but this is a long-unseen film that has never before been released on ANY home video format in the UK. Not disc, nor tape. From that perspective, it might as well be considered a lost Peter Cushing classic. Its release is pretty significant for fans of the genre.

Produced in 1968, Corruption stars Peter Cushing as Sir John Rowan, a top surgeon whose photographic model girlfriend Lynn (Sue Lloyd) is badly scarred by an arc light in an accident at a swingin’ sixties party. Rowan turns to experimental surgery to restore her looks, but the procedure is only temporary. Rowan must turn to murder to get the parts he needs as Lynn grows more demanding and unstable.

Well, it all sounds pretty familiar and in line with Cushing’s typical body of work, so to speak, in the sixties. But this one is different. Cushing, although cold and calculating and chillingly precise in the role, never goes “full Frankenstein”. It’s this restraint and the film serving as both a boundary pusher for its time, as well as a curious time capsule of the era that elevates this one. At a time when Hammer and Amicus were churning out formulaic horror films many still with a gothic setting, this embraced the surgical horrors of the modern-day. Indicator have pulled out all the stops, with a gorgeous 2K restoration from the original negative.

Three versions of the film are included – the censored original British, the uncensored American, and an altered continental release which featured a different victim in one sequence. Also included are a Guardian interview with Cushing himself toward the end of his life, commentaries, a look at the surgical horror sub-genre called The Unkindest Cuts, publicity material, and an eighty-page book. But you’ll need to move quickly to add this gem to your collection – it’s a limited edition of 5000!

CORRUPTION is released on Blu-ray on August 30th

Although billed as a ‘creature feature’, Prophecy is really the story of two mothers. One is the character played by Talia Shire who, we find out at the start of the film, is pregnant. The other is nature.

A dispute about land between Native Americans and a logging company (sacred to some, profitable to others) see’s environmentalist Rob (Robert Foxworth) and his musician wife Maggie (Shire) head to the forests of Maine to provide a report on the area’s ecology. There, he discovers that chemicals used by the logging company’s paper mill have been mutating the river’s fish. But the fish have been eaten by all manner of creatures, and they’ve mutated too…

Prophecy was released at the very end of the 1970s, a decade in which the horror genre had become somewhat more respected, and profitable than it had previously been. There’d been The Exorcist, Dawn of the Dead, and The Omen, written by this film’s author, David Seltzer. As both a horror film and a commercial product, Prophecy was an undoubted failure, its fate sealed by the opening of Alien just before the film’s release. Contemporary reviews often made unflattering comparisons. Even this film’s poster tried to emulate that of the Ridley Scott masterpiece.

And yet, with the benefit of distance, it’s easy to see how underrated Prophecy is.

Sure, it’s not a great horror film and the monster is pretty hokey. But as a well-acted eco-thriller, Prophecy is very good indeed. It gracefully weaves the corruption of big business and its impact on indigenous people and the environment into a compelling narrative that sometimes feels very modern (you forget that the word ‘biodegradable’ isn’t new).

Director John Frankenheimer was an unusual choice but generally handles the material with respect, his interest in creating suspense over horror evident throughout (the great scene in the underground tunnel with no dialogue and shots of the character’s terrified eyes is a case in point).

And the film’s message remains hugely pertinent. As mentioned at the start of this review, the film is about two mothers. Shire (often referred to as ‘the wife’ but the fantastic Oscar-nominated actor is actually the film’s star and gets top billing over Foxworth), knows she’s pregnant but hasn’t told her idealistic husband who doesn’t want children, only revealing the truth once she realises that she may be carrying a monster thanks to the polluted fish she’s been eating. Nature, bountiful and generous as described by the native community, is a mother who should not be messed with, as her mangled and vengeful offspring shows.

That we mess with Mother Nature at our peril and it’s our own children who will pay the price seems more relevant now than ever.

This crisp Blu-ray edition features two wonderful commentaries, unusually not from the filmmakers but from essayists who talk fascinatingly about cinema in general and the film’s context. There are a couple of interviews and the usual stills and trailers, making Prophecy a disc worth a look.

Prophecy is released on Blu-ray on August 16th.

In one of the many extras that feature on this Blu-ray release director Ryan Nicholson is asked who Hanger is for. His response tells you all you need to know:

‘…geared for a certain niche market.’

In that moment of clarity, if that one line of insight was on the cover, or shown prior to the film starting, a great number of people would be spared this troublesome piece of cinema. Because that’s what Hanger is. Whichever way you cut it, Nicholson – who sadly passed away at only 47-years of age – created a truly distasteful and provocative film.

The basic premise revolves around a pregnant prostitute whose pimp carries out an abortion using a metal hanger. Thinking he has killed the child along with the mother the baby is disposed of only to be found, raised and ‘mentored’ by all manner of deformed and depraved individuals. Horribly disfigured by the abortion, and now going by the name of Hanger, revenge against the pimp becomes an obsession.

There is barely a scene in the film that would not cause offence on some level. The list of atrocities is almost endless but rape, abuse, and a tampon fetish are prevalent themes.

If you are part of the ‘niche market’ – and if you are then a quiet word with yourself in a dark room might be in order – there is an abundance of extras to keep you occupied once the film has reached its overdue conclusion. And that is the only reason this Blu-ray receives any score at all. There is no doubt that Hanger is one of the most unpleasant viewing experiences you can subject yourself to. But you do get your money’s worth!