News

The year’s shortest month gets the biggest bang as Severin Films today announced their February 27th releases featuring uncensored 4K restorations of the infamous 1960’s western ‘roughies’ from the depraved minds of exploitation legends Bob Cresse and Lee Frost, Hot Spur and Scavengers.

‘“The Kings of esoteric boutique companies” (Video WatchBlog) are also proud to release – because Severin co-founder/president David Gregory considers it one of the best films he saw as a jury member at the FrightFest and Sitges Film Festivals – the North American disc premiere of director/co-writer Andrew Legge’s time-travel mind-bender, Lola.

Previous limited edition title Spider Labyrinth also enters wide release.

Here’s everything you need to know about Severin’s February 2024 lineup…

Hot Spur

Having struck gold with shockumentaries like Ecco and Mondo Bizarro, producer Bob Cresse and writer/director Lee Frost applied their distinctive sleaze aesthetic to a revenge western they advertised as “91 minutes of Freudian fury!

One of the great things about the slasher sub-genre is the fact that it provides movies to watch for pretty much any holiday that comes along. For New Year’s Eve we have films like the original Terror Train, Bloody New Year, and the film we’re covering with the latest episode of the Real Slashers video series: 1980’s New Year’s Evil (watch it Here). To hear all about it, check out the video embedded above!

Directed by Emmett Alston, who crafted the story with screenwriter Leonard Neubauer, New Year’s Evil has the following synopsis: On New Year’s Eve, a famous TV punk-rock lady icon hosts a late hour countdown celebration of music and partying. All goes well, until she receives a strange sounding phone call. Lonely women wanting to celebrate the holiday become easy prey for a maniacal murdering misogynist whose New Year’s resolution is to...

It seems only appropriate that one of the fiercest protesters against the abuses of the Catholic Church in Ireland would make her voice heard from beyond. Only a few months after her death at 56, Sinead O’Connor’s unreleased “The Magdalene Song” premiered on the series finale of the six-part BBC mystery drama The Woman in the Wall.

The series, which aired its finale on Sep 25, starred Ruth Wilson as a woman who suffers from trauma that stretches back to her time spent in Ireland’s controversial Magdalene Laundries, church-run homes...

MGM's show is a surprising powerhouse musical bio about the personality clash between an ambitious singer and the powerful enabler who wants her in his bed. Doris Day and James Cagney are at their best in an only slightly compromised telling of the real-life showbiz relationship of 'twenties star Ruth Etting and the domineering mobster Martin Snyder. Love Me or Leave Me Blu-ray Warner Archive Collection 1955 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 122 min. / Street Date September 13, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Doris Day, James Cagney, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Keith, Tom Tully, Harry Bellaver, Richard Gaines, Peter Leeds, Claude Stroud, Audrey Wilder, John Harding. Cinematography Arthur E. Arling Art Direction Urie McCleary, Cedric Gibbons Film Editor Ralph Winters Original Music Nicholas Brodszky, Percy Faith, George E. Stoll Written by Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart Produced by Joe Pasternak Directed by Charles Vidor

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

MGM's early CinemaScope musical bio holds up extremely well,...

Matt Turck has been named publisher of Slate, the online news magazine said Monday. He will begin his new duties on Sept. 10, said Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group. Turck has served as vice president of advertising sales and marketing for Slate since 2009. He takes over the site owned by the Washington Post Company from John Alderman, who will step down as publisher to become COO of social marketing company SocialCode. SocialCode is also owned by the Post. "There's no one better suited than Matt Turck to serve as...

With remakes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941) on the way, it seems that Hollywood is once again intent on plundering the iconic director’s filmography.

Purists will cry foul but maybe it is not such a bad idea to revisit some of Hitch’s back catalogue, if done right. However, as history has shown, Hollywood tends to get Hitch wrong. Among the bad Hitchcock remakes are Gus Van Sant’s pointless carbon copy of Psycho (1998) and the critically maligned Dial M for Murder (1954) remake, A Perfect Murder (1998). Not to mention the films that are directly influenced by Hitchcock, or in most cases just rip him off. To this list you can add Charade (1963), Basic Instinct (1992), Disturbia (2007) and almost all of Brian De Palma’s early psychological thrillers.

Nonetheless there is a case for remakes in general. After all, a bad movie will be bad no matter if it...