About Johnny Logan

Unfortunately, the last in Tartan’s Ozu collection, set number 4 comprises of two delicate, humorous films that marked the last years of his work.

THE CARD, as inferred from the title, is a 1952 English film about a chancer. Alec Guiness plays Henry Machin, a working class boys who dreams of becoming rich.

Not being the greatest lover of Spanish films, bar those by Luis Bunuel, Alex de la Iglesia and occasionally Pedro Almodovar, this Jess Franco double bill released under Tartan’s new Grindhouse classification.

Believe it or not Hungary has a rich, if limited, influence on film history. Most recently, well the 1960’s onwards, highly influential films by Miklos Jansco such as his masterful film THE RED AND THE WHITE.

From the outset you know you are in for one of the most pointless, redundant, pitiful, pathetic, mundane, poorly written, directed and executed pieces of garbage that you may have the bad fortune to ever watch.

Rarely are films about serial killers as graphic or shocking as the publicity claims they are. In fact, only HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and 10 RILLINGTON PLACE stand out as truly shocking due to their matter of factness.

Very rarely does an Australian film turn out to be anything other than a disappointment. With PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, the more recent CHOPPER, and the always interesting films of Rolf De Heer.

Until recently, New Zealand hadn’t really been put on the film making map until the rise of Peter Jackson began with his New Zealand Film Commission funded BAD TASTE in 1989.

This Tartan release on its ‘Asia Extreme’ label is a collection of three short films, coming from Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, directed by Fruit Chan, the man of the day Park Chan-Wook and the unstoppable Takashi Miike respectively.

At the heart of KISSED is a young woman who loves having sex with corpses. She is not obsessed, it is just that she feels compelled to do it. This film caused quite a stir when it came out in 1997 and by today’s standards seems tame enough to watch.

This slick German thriller released by Tartan has a lot to recommend it. Apart from its technical and visual competence, it also has a great performance at its core, as provided by Andre Hennicke who plays the captured serial killer Gabriel Engel.

Apart from the fact that the disc I reviewed would only enter the film at the start of the last scene and that it involved me jumping backwards in sections to get to the film’s start, THE MAN IN GREY has much to recommend it.

This is Kim Ki Duk’s 10th film and one for which he won the Silver Berlin Bear for best director. Made in 2004, the same year he also released and won a host of prizes for film number 11, 3 IRON (including the special director award at the Venice film festival).

Another South Korean horror film blessed (or cursed) by the fact that the female director was a film school graduate when she took on the final installment of this ‘The Ghost School Trilogy’ (MEMENTO MORI and WHISPERING CORRIDORS being the other two). This one focuses on a set of steps that lead up to a girl’s high school dormitory. If you climb the 28 steps and a 29th step appears then...

Directed by the best filmmaker from South Korea, Kim Ki Duk, ADDRESS UNKNOWN refuses the film school aesthetics of the bulk of current Korean films and delivers a disturbing and compassionate tale of Koreans living around a US military base. Full of characters with surprising depth, Ki Duk moulds a drama aimed squarely at the US military presence in his own country. In the introduction...

A tale of corporate corruption and the role of the individual within post war Japan is both the theme and setting of Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 film THE BAD SLEEP WELL. Usually renowned for his Samurai films, but coined a genius because of his combined output of which Samurai films were just a small part, this is another collaboration between the director and his most favoured actor Toshiro Mifune....

This is another truly moving and thought provoking documentary from one of the widely uncovered masters of modern filmmaking about an American grizzly bear expert who lived wild with bears for 13 consecutive summers. The point of interest in regards to making a documentary about him is the fact that for his last 5 summers he was using a DV camera to record his encounters and ultimately....

TIRESIA, directed by Bertrand Bonello, is another installment of Tartan’s Cine Lumiere collection that “is a series of contemporary films from France, the spiritual home of Cinema…that share the French cinematic values of innovation and provocation”. Although not the most comprehensible film on a mythic level, as it uses a couple of narrative devices that may make you want to seek out....

With more extras than you could possible expect, this DVD of Lars Von Trier’s ‘E-Trilogy’ is epic DVD viewing at its best. We have a previously unreleased film in the UK - EPIDEMIC, one of the world’s most remarkable visual achievements – ELEMENTS OF CRIME, and an acknowledged classic of style and story – EUROPA. Also included is an extras disc that has so many documentaries and interviews...

During the making of documentary that accompanies this Spanish film TORREMOLINOS 73, the best part of the cast and crew are all doing their best to state that this film is based on actual events. Not convincing enough for this viewer, it is done in a way that attempts to mythologise the films central character. The film concerns Alfredo Lopez, a down on his luck early 1970’s Encyclopaedia....