Tag: Arrow Video

Title card for Silent Running, with a beaming sun visible just over the top of a spiked geodesic dome floating through space

Everyone Has a Job: The Future of Silent Running (1972)

By Orrin Grey • December 13th, 2022

Anyone who complains that modern movies are too didactic probably shouldn’t watch Silent Running, which puts all its theses into the mouth of Bruce Dern’s space-bound ecologist.

A stoic cop in a suit and sunglasses is walking stoically through some stoic traffic

Lunatic Meets Lunatic: Two Good-Natured Caper Films from Hong Kong Director Johnnie To

By Orrin Grey • August 17th, 2022

A pair of surprisingly lightweight and amiable caper flicks in the vein of more recent thriller confections such as 2013’s Now You See Me.

Keifer Sutherland is sidding criss-cross-apple-sauce in a room with high arched windows and afternoon yellow light with a lone lamp for company

Today’s a Good Day to Die: Reliving the Past with Flatliners (1990)

By Orrin Grey • August 9th, 2022

It’s no surprise that Schumacher made the campiest of Batman movies, because there’s an extravagance to the production design here that would have been right at home in Burton’s Gotham City.

A still from the trailer of The 8-Diagram Pole Fighter, featuring the lead monk standing with a bloodied lip next to his praying companion and a fellow fighter

Carnage and Blood: Two Kung Fu Movies from Opposite Ends of the Genre’s Heyday, Both with Numbers in the Titles

By Orrin Grey • June 2nd, 2022

One is a bloody Saturday morning cartoon that barely bothers to connect its interminable fight scenes with any kind of story, the other an elegiac lament about the inadequacy of heroism in the face of death.

A still from the trailer for Red Angel, where a spooked and unclothed nurse has a tense conversation with a doctor in a warzone

Hell Couldn’t Be Much Worse: The Grim Anti-War Message of Red Angel (1966)

By Orrin Grey • April 28th, 2022

“If people at home saw me, they’d realize how terrible war was and hate it.”

A still from the movie 5 Shaolin Masters showing a bare chested man foisting off a man in a martial arts pose.

Good Kung Fu Part One: Shawscope Volume One from Arrow Video

By Orrin Grey • March 2nd, 2022

Monsters are better than kung fu, kung fu is a whole lot better than nothing.

A Japanese woman with her head in her hands and two miscolored eyes sitting at a table in front of a wall of sculptural eyes.

A Dark, Dank Death: Blind Beast (1969) on Blu-ray at Last

By Orrin Grey • October 28th, 2021

Blind Beast is a film that I had been meaning to watch for decades, ever since I worked in a video store.

An asian woman with her arms outstretched and her mouth open as if in a cry.

Tough Business: Giants and Toys (1958) and the Tragedy of Modernization

By Orrin Grey • September 16th, 2021

Every figure in Giants and Toys is ultimately a tragic one, caught up in a web that is eating them all alive.

A Japanese woman with an extensive back tattoo, her shoulder exposed so that a man can look at it.

A Born Man-Eater: Irezumi (1966) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • August 12th, 2021

One of the things that makes Irezumi work as brilliantly as it does is the way these moments of violence are handled,

an Asian man whose body is invisible except for his head and his hand, which is holding a banana.

Evil Washes Out Evil: A Daiei Invisible Man Double-Feature

By Orrin Grey • May 20th, 2021

It’s something of a homecoming to be tackling The Invisible Man Appears and The Invisible Man vs. the Human Fly on Arrow Video Blu here

I Got Myself a Plan: Tremors (1990) on a Very Fancy New Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • January 22nd, 2021

When I was a kid, I had a short list of favorite monster movies that had come out during my lifetime, and Tremors was right at the top.

Your Future is Metal: The Industrial Nightmares of Shinya Tsukamoto

By Orrin Grey • August 25th, 2020

It’s all happening at ten thousand miles per hour.

Awkward Brotherly Love: White Fire (1984) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • July 30th, 2020

What’s a little radioactive diamond between siblings?

No Faith Without Blood: The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • March 20th, 2020

It’s barely a spoiler to say that this all ends, as it inevitably must, with a literally burning bed and a homicidally crazed Brendan Fraser, painted red and wearing a barbed wire shirt.

A Very Special Human Being: Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • November 27th, 2019

Despite an elder James Cagney being miscast, latex masks and plenty of melodrama, the Lon Chaney biopic still has some of that old Hollywood magic.

Consumed in the Fire of His Own Making: Apprentice to Murder (1988) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • November 27th, 2019

“Apprentice to Murder isn’t an undiscovered classic…but it’s better than its two-and-a-half-star average on Letterboxd would suggest.”

I Want to Tell You a Curious Story: The Prey (1984) on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • October 15th, 2019

Despite ample opportunity, The Prey is a slasher that features neither Bigfoot nor Smokey Bear as the villain.

Female Problems: The Sister Street Fighter Collection on Blu-ray

By Orrin Grey • April 25th, 2019

Orrin Grey steeps in the Etsuko Shihomi’s Sister Street Fighter trilogy-plus-one.