Arrow Video's American Horror Project: Volume One - February 23, 2016

[cakefactory]

Here's some info on the three films. It's excerpts from Nightmare USA, by Stephen Thrower.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea

Trailer:

YouTube

Here's an even better trailer, but be aware it is very NSFW:

https://vimeo.com/100066780

...one of the strangest and most perversely beautiful horror films of the seventies. It's a beguiling fantasy with a unique texture well beyond the more workaday levels of the genre, the sort of movie you can watch several times and still remain unsure of the exact contents. Not because it's bad, or boring, but because the hazy, downbeat style twists your mind out of focus. Cimber saturates his tale with an off-season seaside ambience, which, blended with the lead character's dreamy psychopathy, produces something extraordinary...
...
Millie Perkin's performance as Molly achieves a clarity that reaches into your mind and seriously creeps you out. She's amazing - I would put her performance on a par with Susannah York in "Images" and Carol Kane in "The Mafu Cage." Her strained, gaunt face conveys Molly's dual life perfectly. We can see that the tide of her fantasies will never wash away her trauma.
...
[It] feels hewn from late night conversations, private reminiscences; it drifts and sways like seaweed, like thoughts in a cannabis fugue. The structural timber of the horror genre is cast adrift. Horror, overt horror at least, is concentrated in the early part of the film, and what follows is a sad, sleepy tidal shift into psychological portraiture. Imagery and allusion are uppermost in the latter half, and a first late-night viewing of the film may yield nothing the morning after except a few images and a morbid afterglow. The movie changes the metabolism of its genre; the scares are oblique, the overall tone languid....The Witch Who Came from the sea is...a genre masterpiece deserving of a much higher profile.

Malatesta's Carnival of Blood

Trailer:
The trailer is terrible, watch this short clip of one of the wildest scenes instead:

YouTube

Beautifully photographed, imaginatively designed, far-out in conception and successfully bonkers at least half the time, [it] is unlike anything you've seen before. Its closest neighbors in outer-space are maybe Jack Hill's "Spider Baby (1964)," Jack Cardiff's "The Mutations (1973)," and Ray Dennis Steckler's "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!? (1963)" - the latter purely on the basis of the carny setting and the photography.

...it's really a showcase for the director and his art designers to go berserk with acid-tinged visuals. The design team...pull off tableau after tableau of stylish disorientation: a car suspended upside down from a ceiling with an interior dressed to resemble a huge red mouth; a room half-filled with what seems to be an enormous, partially deflated racing balloon; and many more marvels best left for your first viewing.

Christopher Spaeth [the director] should be proud to have made such an unconventional, defiantly stylish and dreamlike film, in a country where the horror genre often falls into predictable pigeonholes. (Not content with having a bunch of cannibal ghouls living beneath a rollercoaster, Speeth makes them silent movie addicts, gathering transfixed before battered prints of The Phantom of the Opera, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Several sequences are like nothing else in the genre (a night-time ride on the roller-coaster is particularly breathtaking)...

The Premonition

Trailer:

Couldn't find one!

This bold and imaginative movie comes out of left field, with a tone and ambition that sets it apart from the norm. The story of an unbalanced mother trying to take back her daughter from the couple who adopted her is hardly a hackneyed plot for a horror tale, and to make things even stranger, Robert Allen Schnitzer - who wrote as well as directed - gleefully adds telepathy and precognition to a topic one would normally encounter in a rationalist context. The acting is strong and assured, especially from Barber and Lynch, and Schnitzer's directing builds up some powerful suspense, dotted with genuinely startling shock moments.
The tale is told in a non-linear way, with information patched together piece by piece, and not always in a way that makes immediate sense. The viewer has to work to understand what's going on, and certain ambiguities are left to float for a while as other strands of the story dominate. All of which adds up to a highly individual effort from Schnitzer, the quality of which makes you sorry that he never returned to the genre. If his ambition had outstripped his ability, this would have been something of a mess, but he brings skill and sensitivity to the storytelling, a firm hand to the technical aspects, and a clear aptitude for working with actors. Whatever your feelings about the parapsychological concepts Schnitzer raises, there's no doubting his sincerity and his genuine imaginative involvement.
....
In the name of surprise, it's best to draw a veil over the latter stages of the film - suffice to say there's a commitment to the poetic and illogical that would scarcely disgrace Dario Argento in his prime. That's not to suggest there's a motherlode of violence in the final reel, far from it, but there is a similarly heroic disregard for narrative plausibility. ...there's a great deal to admire in his impressively unformulaic sleeper. It has ambition, imagination, and the power to linger in your thoughts, and like Thom Eberhardt's "Sole Survivor" or Willard Huyck's "Messiah of Evil," deserves a far greater genre profile.