THE LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE - FAST COMPANY

THE LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE: While director Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue contemporized the traditional Hammer Films approach to horror, his previous film (produced just the year before. 1973) took on the studio’s gothic horrors head to head. Although a bit more slow-paced than most of Carrerras and company’s output, Blood Castle is a much more mature retelling of the Elizabeth Bathory legend than Countess Dracula, Hammer’s Ingrid Pitt project filmed two years earlier. Grau’s script is surprisingly subtle, adding in layers of complexity to a story that very easily could have succumbed to pure blood and guts. Discovering that the blood of a virgin will restore her youth, Erzsebet Bathory (a descendent of the blood-bathing original) convinces her husband to fake his own death and return to stalk the villagers as a “vampire,” draining the victims and donating the proceeds to his eager wife. The image of Bathory showering herself in blood from a sacrificial “hole” in the ceiling is striking, disturbing and beautiful all at the same time. Yet Bathory herself isn’t the sole focus of the film; her husband seems to be committing these murders to fulfill his own masochistic desires which give the film and edge over Hammer’s typically one-track-min exploitations from the era. MYA’s DVD release restores several snippets cut from the international release over the years (at which point the English dubbing switches to subtitles) and the print is reasonably clean, yet frustratingly non-anamorphic. FAST COMPANY: Few directors epitomize the auteur theory better than David Cronenberg. His films and the themes contained therein are unmistakably his own, from his first feature (Shivers) to his last (Eastern Promises). That’s why Fast Company is such a mysterious anomaly in the career of a man who managed to bend even crass exploitation-fare into his own image. There’s doesn’t seem to be anything in this AIP-style story of a race team whose car is stolen out from under them thanks to the duplicitous business practices of their manager (John Saxon) that would appeal to the director...other than his well-documented love of motor vehicles. And in that respect, Fast Company is quite an accomplishment: it doesn’t look or feel anything like a Cronenberg film. While it’s obviously not his cup of tea – most of the comedy falls flat and the second act drags – the director proves he’s more than capable of cranking out something that can make a quick buck that doesn’t involve buckets of blood. The acting is way above average for a film of this sort and DP Mark Irwin’s photography works wonders with the Canadian Rockies backdrop and a tiny little airstrip that served as the film’s dragstrip. Blue Underground has made some strange choices in choosing which films to give the hi-def treatment and while I’m still not convinced Fast Company is a sure thing, it sure does look pretty. In fact, it’s as revelatory a transfer as anything I’ve seen yet on the Blu-ray format. Not to mention the extras: a Cronenberg commentary, several interviews and two of the director’s early films (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) which started him his path as the “Grand Old Man” of Canadian cinema.