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There are plenty of bad movies out there.  But  Southland Tales  is a truly WTF viewing experience so incomprehensibly convoluted you're not quite sure what to think.  Director Richard Kelly's debut feature,  Donnie Darko  (2001) made him the darling of the indie circuit, gathering a cult of likeminded Lynchian followers who adored the film's esoteric aesthetic involving time-travel, teen angst and the apocalypse.  But it was six years before he got another shot to prove his first success was no fluke.  Unfortunately, it turns out, it was.  Ostensibly a black comedy skewering the concepts of celebrity, politics and terrorism,  Southland Tales  features one of those IMDB cast lists that defies all probability, including Dwayne Johnson, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Geller and a handful of second tier SNL comedians.  There's a plot involving kidnapping, political subterfuge, porn stars an...

While Akira Kurosawa may be the only Japanese director with much name recognition in the U.S., Shoehei Imamura earned his share of international praise by winning the Palme d'Or at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival with  The Ballad of Narayama , an earthy slice-of-life period piece that detailed the lives of villagers eking out a meager physical and spiritual existence in an isolated mountain valley.     But Imamura was no one trick pony.  After working under the Japanese studio system throughout the '50 and '60s, he staged a comeback in the '80s with more creative control that produced a string of notable films, including another Palme d'Or winner,  The Eel , in 1997. While the latter isn't part of Arrow Video's new Blu-ray box set,  Survivor Ballads:  Three Films by Shohei Imamura , it still delivers a trio of charming, poetic, insightful, funny and sobering stories set against a wide background of Japan's complicated cultural history. ...

At the time of release,  Versus  (2000) felt like the hyperkinetic homemade culmination of Japanese samurai films, American horror, and ridiculous action tropes drenched in buckets of gore.  And that's exactly what it was.  Only time - and cinema in general - has caught up to director Ryuhei Kitamura's over-the-top antics, making his cult classic debut seem less like a feature-length trailer and more like de rigueur filmmaking in the 2K era. Escaped prisoner KSC2-303 (Kitarmura's film dispenses with character names entirely) runs afoul of a gang of hired yakuza thugs who, along with a kidnapped girl, await the arrival of their boss.  However, their meeting place happens to be in The Forest of Resurrection, and once the bodies start piling up they don't stay dead long.  Fighting their way through zombies, bullets and blades, our semi-heroic boy and girl duo are unknowingly headed for a rendezvous with destiny, doomed to replay a bloody co...

Slightly late to the genre party, director William Lustig's  Vigilante  (1982) followed the urban crime-cum-revenge fantasy precedent set by  Death Wish  all the way back in 1974.  And while the expiration date on this sort of material was closing in, Lustig's film looks  better  and tries  harder  than most of its cinematic inspirations, lifting the style and attitude of Italian  poliziotteschi  from the '70s to creative a fast moving piece of exploitation propaganda. Eddie Marino (Robert Forster) is a law-abiding, blue-collar family man who reaches his breaking point after his wife is attacked and son brutally murdered by a street gang.  When the judge suspends the perpetrator's sentence, Eddie  himself  is sent to prison for contempt of court, surviving with the help of a sympathetic experienced con (Woody Strode).  But upon release, Eddie joins up with a neighborhood vigilante squad led by his ...

With six official follow-ups and a short-lived TV series, one would expect  Tremors  to have the pop culture impact of a sci-fi franchise like  Jurassic Park .  Instead, it became a direct-to-video cash cow for Universal who milked the fanbase with prequels and sequels sets in various exotic locals with survivalist Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) fighting off evolutionary upgrades of the original Graboids.  Despite creative involvement by creators S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, nothing can top the charm of the 1990 original, which is just as much fun as it was 30 years ago.  Ne'er do wells Earl and Valentine (Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon) are just about ready to ditch their backwater hometown of Perfection, Nevada (population: 14).  But instead they're called upon to  defend  it from underground monsters that treat the valley like one long smorgasbord.  Eyeless and insatiable, these "Graboids" aren't quite as dumb as they fi...

Horror and exploitation fans are blessed with a massive library of genre titles to choose from in just about every decade.  So much so that regional filmmakers like William Grefe, whose mostly Florida shot shockers were relegated to the drive-in circuit during the '60s and '70s, went unnoticed if not completely unappreciated by most home video distributors.  But Arrow Video picks up the baton dropped by niche outfit Something Weird Video and collects seven of Grefe's eclectic features, plus an extended cut of the definitive documentary about his career packaged up in  He Came from the Swamp: The William Grefe Collection. Make no mistake, most of Grefe's work is seat-of-your-pants filmmaking that builds upon whatever trend was popular at the time.   Sting of Death  (1966) is a hilariously entertaining take on the beach party monster movie, pitting bikini-clad teens and heroic scientists against a bubble-headed were-jellyfish that stalks the Florida...

The lurid history of Elizabeth Bathory seems ready-made for cinematic exploitation artists looking to add a little class to their sex and violence.  And  Daughters of Darkness  (1971) pulls off the trick better than almost any other film before or since, picking up with the nocturnal activities of the Countess (Dephine Seyring) and her sexy secretary, Ilona (Andrea Rau), in the nearly abandoned seaside town of Ostend, Belgium, where a pair of newlyweds fall under their spell.  Director Harry Kumel's film is gorgeous from top to bottom, with a flair for the fantastic and a kinky sexual subtext that exemplifies Euro-horror at its finest. Married for only three days after a whirlwind courtship, Stefan and Valerie are already struggling to sort out their relationship.  Stefan seems afraid of introducing her to his family and instead suggests they spend time at a nearly empty resort.  But the delay proves deadly when Countess Bathory and Ilon...