I was just thinking recently about how, strangely enough, there’s a large amount of truly strange movies being released onto home video this year. We started off the year with a ton of films by Kenneth Anger out on on Fantoma and pretty soon we’re going to see the first legitimate US video release of Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Holy Mountain (and the first EVER release of his Severed Heads) then Criterion is going to release Lindsay Anderson’s If…, Melville’s Army of Shadows, Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie and WR – Mysteries of the Organism, Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (though the Criterion LD cover was cooler) along with a ton of other notable releases such as La Haine and the debut of little gems like Border Radio and Stuart Cooper’s Overlord on DVD. Tartan is already threatening to release a bunch of cool movies in the UK ( such as an Eisenstein Box Set and a PAL Jodorowsky Box Set with neat cover art) and I’m sure that Masters of Cinema, Kino, Facets and many other niche labels also have some interesting titles up their sleeves. Donald Cammell’s groundbreaking Performance also managed to slip out earlier this year on DVD from Warner Brothers. Amazing.
Along with these heavy-hitters we’ve got oddball stuff like FBN, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai and probably a dozen other weirdo titles. If you want to add the Blue Underground Argento re-releases and Anchor Bay’s Mario Bava collection along with Rabid Dogs (along with Darky Sky Film’s possibly-scrapped Kill Baby Kill DVD) then do that as well. So we’ve got major Jodorowsky, Anderson and Cammell releases already and the release of Lynch’s Inland Empire is waiting in the wings for possibly this year as well. Some of these release (such as the Anger collection) have been “in the making” for literally years so when you think about it all coming out within the same calender year it can seem quite astounding.
