It’s a big week for horror and sci-fi home media releases, as we have some stellar collections coming our way this Tuesday. Scream Factory is set to thrill fans with their Collector’s Edition of Night of the Creeps, and as if that wasn’t enough, Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno is also getting the Collector’s Edition treatment, and they’ve put together a Blu for Monster on the Campus as well.
Arrow Video has compiled the second installment of their American Horror Project box set series that cult film fans will undoubtedly want to add to their collections, Blue Underground is celebrating The New York Ripper with a 3-Disc Limited Edition set, and Severin Films is resurrecting The Beast in Heat on both Blu and DVD, too.
Other releases for June 25th include The Believers, Night Killer, CTRL, The Dark Side of the Moon and Isabelle.
American Horror Project: Volume 2 (Arrow Video, Blu-ray)
Continuing its mission to unearth the very best in weird and wonderful horror obscura from the golden age of US independent genre moviemaking, Arrow Video is proud to present the long-awaited second volume in its American Horror Project series co-curated by author Stephen Thrower (Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents).
Starting off with a little-seen 1970 offering from underrated cult auteur John Hayes (Grave of the Vampire, Garden of the Dead), Dream No Evil is a haunting, moving tale of a young woman’s desperate quest to be reunited with her long-lost father only to find herself drawn into a fantasyland of homicidal madness. Meanwhile, 1976’s Dark August stars Academy Award-winner Kim Hunter (A Streetcar Named Desire) in a story of a man pursued by a terrifying and deadly curse in the wake of a hit-and-run accident. Lastly, 1977’s Harry Novak-produced The Child is a gloriously delirious slice of horror mayhem in which a young girl raises an army of the dead against the people she holds responsible for her mother’s death.
With all three films having been newly remastered from the best surviving film elements and appearing here for the first time ever on Blu-ray, alongside a wealth of supplementary material, American Horror Project Volume Two offers up yet another fascinating and blood-chilling foray into the deepest, darkest corners of stars-and-stripes terror.
LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS:
DREAM NO EVIL
DARK AUGUST
THE CHILD
The Beast in Heat (Severin Films, Blu-ray & DVD)
More than four decades after the subgenre first shocked the world, the most depraved Nazisploitation sickie of them all must still be seen to be believed. Writer/director Luigi Batzella (THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT, NUDE FOR SATAN) combines footage from two earlier WWII action movies with a newly-shot plot featuring a sadistic female Nazi officer (Macha Magall of Bruno Mattei's SS GIRLS), a perpetually aroused caged ogre (Salvatore Baccaro aka 'Boris Lugosi' of FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS), and a cavalcade of sexual atrocities that Horror-Extreme.com calls "Tasteless and glorious… it gathers all the ethos of the genre and smashes it into a wonderfully hellish mix." Never released in America and banned as a 'Video Nasty' in the UK, this notorious feast of smut-schnitzel is now scanned from 35mm negative elements with a blitzkrieg of all-new Special Features.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Fascism On A Thread: The Strange Story of Nazisploitation Cinema - A new feature length documentary featuring interviews with Dyanne Thorne, Malissa Longo, Filmmakers Sergio Garrone, Mariano Caiano, Rino Di Silvestro, Liliana Cavani, Bruno Mattei and many more
- Nazi Nasty - Interview with Stephen Thrower, Author of 'MURDEROUS PASSIONS'
- Trailer
The Believers (Olive Films, Blu-ray)
The Believers, director John Schlesinger’s (Marathon Man) finely crafted, modern-day supernatural thriller, stars Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now), Helen Shaver (Desert Hearts) and Robert Loggia (Scarface).
Following the tragic death of his wife, psychologist Cal Jamison (Sheen) and his young son Chris (Harley Cross, Someone to Watch Over Me) relocate from Minneapolis to New York City to start a new life. Enlisted by Lt. McTaggert (Loggia) to help solve a baffling suicide case involving voodoo, Cal soon finds himself in the middle of an investigation with ties to a Caribbean religious cult and a series of ritualistic murders that will place him and those he loves in grave danger.
The Believers, based on the Nicholas Conde novel The Religion, is written for the screen by Mark Frost (co-creator of Twin Peaks), photographed by Robby Müller (Paris, Texas) and co-stars Jimmy Smits (TV’s NYPD Blue), Harris Yulin (Another Woman), Richard Masur (The Thing), and Elizabeth Wilson (9 to 5).
The Green Inferno: Collector’s Edition (Scream Factory, Blu-ray)
In The Green Inferno, a group of student activists fly to Peru determined to protect the Amazon rainforest, only to crash-land deep in the jungle. Captured by a pack of bloodthirsty cannibals, the survivors suffer unspeakable acts of butchery at the hands of the very tribe they were trying to save. A non-stop barrage of carnage and chills, The Green Inferno is an unhinged blast!
Special Features:
Monster on the Campus (Scream Factory, Blu-ray)
Fear stalks the seemingly tranquil halls of Dunsfield University with the arrival of a prehistoric fish, the coelacanth. The terror begins when a student's dog laps up water that has been contaminated by the fish and turns into a savage wolf attacking Madeline Howard (Joanna Moore, Touch Of Evil). The school's paleontology professor, Donald Blake (Arthur Franz, The Caine Mutiny), is accidentally bitten by the coelacanth and blacks out, only to find that a hulking beast has killed one of his friends. Somehow, contact with this fish's prehistoric blood causes a total collapse of evolution, turning animals and humans into mindless, murderous monsters!
The New York Ripper: 3-Disc Limited Edition (Blue Underground, Blu-ray)
A blade-wielding psychopath is on the loose, turning The Big Apple bright red with the blood of beautiful young women. As NYPD detective Fred Williams (Jack Hedley, ''For Your Eyes Only'') follows the trail of butchery from the decks of the Staten Island Ferry to the sex shows of Times Square, each brutal murder becomes a sadistic taunt. In the city that never sleeps, the hunt is on for the killer that can t be stopped!
Co-written and directed by acclaimed horror maestro Lucio Fulci (''Zombie'', ''City of the Living Dead'') and filmed on location in the mean streets of New York City, this is one of Fulci's most savage and controversial thrillers. Now Blue Underground is proud to present THE NEW YORK RIPPER in a new 4K restoration from its original camera negative, completely uncut and uncensored, and fully loaded with exclusive new Extras!
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Night Killer (Severin Films, Blu-ray)
Somewhere between ZOMBIE 4 and TROLL 2, writer/director Claudio Fragasso , here under the name 'Clyde Anderson', set out to direct a suspense thriller about a suicidal beauty, an unstable sleazebag and a masked killer with a razor-fingered glove. But when the producers received Fragasso's cut, they hired his former partner Bruno Mattei (THE OTHER HELL, ROBOWAR) to shoot additional scenes of graphic gore and released it in Italy as TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 3. The result is part sicko giallo, part depraved slasher and 100% batsh*t insanity that Euro Fever calls "Disturbing, nasty and more inspired than most Italian horror of the early '90s." Peter Hooten (INGLORIOUS BASTARDS) and Tara Buckman (SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT) star in this glorious slice of ItaloSleaze, co-written by Rossella Drudi (SHOCKING DARK), now scanned in 4k from the original negative.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- The Virginia Claw Massacre - Interview with Director Claudio Fragasso
- Mindf**k - Interview with Screenwriter Rossella Drudi
Night of the Creeps: Collector’s Edition (Scream Factory, Blu-ray)
Thrill me! When an alien experiment goes awry, it crashes to Earth in 1959 and infects a young college student. Twenty-seven years later, his cryogenically frozen body is thawed out by fraternity pledges ... and the campus is quickly overrun by alien creatures whose victims turn into zombies! Fred Dekker’s thoroughly enjoyable throwback chiller deftly mixes all sorts of genres while simultaneously having fun with them (the college and all the leading characters are named after famous horror movie directors).
Special Features:
DISC ONE:
Theatrical Version
DISC TWO:
Director’s Cut
ALSO AVAILABLE THIS WEEK:
13 Graves (Monarch Home Video, DVD)
CTRL (Gravitas Ventures, Blu-ray & DVD)
The Dark Side of the Moon (Unearthed Films, Blu-ray)
Demon Squad (Wild Eye Releasing, DVD)
Isabelle (Lionsgate, DVD)
Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.
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