vigil the addiction

Furthering their trip down the New Zealand filmmaking rabbit hole, Arrow Films have released Vigil (1984) the debut narrative film from director Vincent Ward whose follow-up, The Navigator (1988), would point him toward a Hollywood career that never fully materialized. But here we see the visionary look that attracted so much attention in its nascent form, set against the almost otherworldly New Zealand landscape.

Dealing with sex, death and magic, all intermingled in the mind of a 10-year-old girl on the edge of puberty, Vigil is both a family drama and a dark fantasy. After the death of her father, Toss (Fiona Kay) and her mother struggle to run the family farm with the help of her eccentric grandfather. But the arrival of mysterious handyman, who also was also present at her father's death, sends Toss' already vivid imagination into overdrive. Both attracted and repelled by the stranger, her reality becomes skewed by the domestic disturbance, clinging to promises of nature and magic while undergoing a subtle physical transformation all her own.

If nothing else, Vigil is a feast for the senses, with imagery to rival the lonely human landscapes of Bergman and Herzog, full of mud, blood and a sea of unending green. Ward puts the audience squarely in the mind of his young protagonist, warping our perspectives to inspire passion, fear and dread. The sum total of all this pre-pubescent angst might not add up, but the film's presentation of the emotional symptoms is brilliant.

The first New Zealand film to ever screen in competition at Cannes, Vigil looks every bit as impressive here on Blu-ray with a new appreciation by critic Nick Roddick, Making Of excerpts from New Zealand TV shows and an illustrated collector's booklet.

Part of a wave of indie vampire films that crashed the goth party during the Tarantino era, director Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995) is the guest no one will admit to inviting...but everyone remembers. Set within a Woody Allen-esque world of pretentious philosophy majors, timid Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is attacked on the way back to her apartment. The bite transforms her almost overnight into an overconfident, doctrine-spouting, bad-ass with a taste for human blood. After being humbled by a far more experienced vampire (Christopher Walken, in a cameo that's worth every penny spent on his salary), she moves beyond good and evil towards a state of being that embraces the savage within us all.

The logline might sound overly pretentious, but The Addiction is never less than entertaining. Shot in beautiful black and white - the streets may be gritty but the image certainly is not - Ferrara overtly equates vampirism with heroin addiction as Kathleen begins her bloodsucking career politely using needles instead of teeth (a la George Romero's underappreciated Martin from 1978). But the script wildly swings for the fences, culminating is an all-out orgy of death as its heroine transforms from a streetwise punk (complete with Ramones' sunglasses) to a highly qualified PhD that swims in the highest academic circles...and feeds there too.

Produced by hip-hip impresario Russell Simmons, and set to a rap soundtrack that works surprisingly well, it's fun to watch Ferrara have free reign. As flexible as the vampire genre is, there's really nothing else out there like The Addiction. So it's great to see Arrow Film's new 4K scan of the original camera negative preserve this cinematic oddity on Blu-ray with a great slate of extras to boot, including an audio commentary, new documentary and interviews with full participation from the principal talent involved.