He Who Must Die (Blu-ray) by Stuart Galbraith IV I'm not sure what I expected of He Who Must Die (Celui qui doit mourir, 1957), a French film directed by Connecticut-born Jules Dassin. Something like Dassin's other signature films, movies like Rififi (1955) or Topkapi (1965), perhaps? Or maybe I was expecting a plot along the lines of Stanley Kramer's later The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), about a remote village in Nazi-occupied Italy hiding its valuable cache of wine. The hardly apt plot synopsis on Wikipedia describes He Who Must Die in similar terms, as being about a post-World War I Turkish-occupied Greek village staging a Passion Play, inspiring a rebellion, which misses entirely what the movie is really about. Instead, the picture is one of the best explorations of Christian hypocrisy and corruption I've ever encountered. The opposite is also true: far better than Christian epics like T...Read the entire review »

The Oblong Box (reissue) (Blu-ray) by Ian Jane The Movieirected by Gordon Hessler, who re-wrote portions of the script with Christopher Wicking when he took over after Michael Reeves (originally intended to direct) passed away, 1969's The Oblong Box was yet another adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's work made for American International Pictures starring Vincent Price.The film begins in Africa where Sir Edward Markham (Alistair Williamson), a plantation owner, is abducted and mutilated by a tribe of natives in a voodoo ceremony. When he returns to his native England, his brother Julian (Vincent Price) decides it would be best to keep him out of view, and so he has him shackled in the basement of the massive family home. This allows Julian to spend more time with his pretty fiancé, Elizabeth (Hilary Dwyer), and less time worrying about his disfigured brother who is quite quickly losing his mind down below.