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David’s Quick Take for the Tl;Dr Media Consumer:

Genocide is the fourth and final title included in Eclipse Series 37: When Horror Came to Shochiku, a box set containing the sum total of a short lived experiment that the fabled Japanese studio conducted in the late 1960s. For a movie that doesn’t feature any giant monsters stomping on buildings or blasting victims with exploding laser beams, it otherwise manages to tick off just about every other item associated with Japanese post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror disaster cliches of its era:

a solemn moralistic condemnation of militarized atomic weaponry that both opens and closes the film in a book-ending framework the valiant effort of a few ordinary heroes who bravely put their lives at risk in order to save humanity from its self-inflicted demise involvement of hostile aliens who determine that humans are unworthy to survive after squandering the opportunity...

David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

The Living Skeleton is an enjoyably eerie tale of ghostly revenge, a film that mainly exists to generate the sense of weirdness that affects viewers who allow themselves to get caught up in a creepy tale of inevitable doom without necessarily thinking too much about its central premise. Through a combination of gloomy atmospheric elements, the dissociative dead-eye gaze of a strikingly beautiful female protagonist and bizarre, occasionally arbitrary plot twists, we lurch from amusement at the cheesy sentiments and visual effects to a more disturbing contemplation of the human capacity for cruelty and deception. I can recommend it without reservation to anyone who might feel intrigued to take in a swiftly moving 80 minute excursion featuring seductive monochromatic widescreen compositions, the allure of the “ghost ship” narrative archetype and a fun variation on that whole Japanese realm of twisted semi-disembodied...

David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

Head is a 90 minute psychedelic film festival, an anthology of trippy surrealistic sketches featuring the Monkees in what was anticipated to be a career-ending blaze of whimsical, anarchic glory. Their TV show had just been canceled, the boys in the band were ready to move on to other things, and the programmers behind the group put all their chips on the table in pulling this movie together. Director Bob Rafelson wasn’t sure what, if anything, he would do again in showbiz, so he went for broke, concocting a frenetic, seemingly random romp through a half-century’s worth of Hollywood cliches, loaded up with wacky cameos, narrative non-sequiturs aimed at amusing an audience of culturally hip stoners and a generous sampling of catchy tunes that nicely cover the pop music spectrum of its time.

Some first-time viewers will instantly love it,...

In my most recent post to this column (of Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses), I mentioned that I would skip the next film on my chronological list, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell, because I had already podcasted about it not that long ago. But I changed my mind. That decision was partially driven by a mistaken assumption on my part that the next title on my list, namely Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story, was about to get a new release from Criterion the following Tuesday. Actually, that disc won’t hit the market for another couple of weeks, not until August 30, which is too long for me to just let this column sit idle. The reason that I thought that The Immortal Story‘s Blu-ray debut was imminent was because I’ve seen pictures of review copies in circulation and Criterion started yapping about Orson Welles in The Current earlier this month,...

DVD Release Date: Nov. 20 , 2012

Price: DVD $59.95

Studio: Criterion

It's the end of the world as we know it in 1968's Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell.

Eclipse Series 37: When Horror Came to Shochiku from Criterion contains a quartet of colorful horror and monster movies from the late 1960s produced by Japan’s Shochiku Studios.

Following years of Godzilla’s domination of the box office, many Japanese studios tried to replicate the formula with their own brands of monster movies. One of the most fascinating attempts was the short-lived one from Shochiku, a studio better known for its elegant dramas by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. In 1967 and 1968, the company created four certifiably batty, low-budget fantasies, tales haunted by watery ghosts, plagued by angry insects, and stalked by aliens—including one in the form of a giant chicken-lizard. It’s all outrageous, oozy and wacky stuff!

All the...