The big-ticket repertory title this Halloween season was, undoubtedly, the theatrical re-release of Ken Russell’s 1971 classic The Devils, finally restored to its full blasphemous glory in 4k HD detail. What was supposed to be a one-week limited run for that holy-grail cult title gradually snowballed into a month-long celebration, lingering in theaters long past the expected end of its stay. I appreciated finally seeing The Devils projected on the big screen just as much as anyone and, if nothing else, that larger canvas inspired an even deeper respect for Derek Jarman’s work on its production design than I’ve ever felt before. The movie’s heavily marketed re-release was a largely corporate effort, though, as handled by the new Warner Bros sub-label Clockwork. And so, there were other, smaller cult-cinema restoration projects last month that The Devils inevitably overshadowed, since they didn’t have the same Major Studio muscle behind their marketing campaigns. They came and they went, largely unnoticed. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a couple of them here before they’re forgotten entirely.
The recent 4k restoration of 1989’s Begotten was just as much a labor of love as Mark Kermode’s decades-long campaign to fully restore The Devils. You just might not instantly recognize that effort by looking at the picture, since it presents such a deliberately ugly, degraded image. Much like The Devils, Begotten enjoys some cult-cinema notoriety as an extremely violent, highly offensive work of intricate visual craft. The difference is that, unlike Russell & Jarman, director E. Elias Merhige (later of Shadow of the Vampire notoriety) sought to apply that craft to exclusively hideous images, drowning his audience in blood, mud, shit, and cum until we collectively gurgle our last breath. Every image in Begotten is a “Wait, what am I looking at?” situation as the audience squints at its intentionally degraded black & white film stock, and the answer is always disgusting. It’s impressively relentless in that way, following one vaguely defined divine figure after the next as they’re disemboweled, defiled, and pummeled into the earth to an ambient noise soundtrack. Even when all of that death & destruction seemingly gives birth to new life in time-elapse plant growth, the cycle of life they’re participating in is too depressingly dingy to find the least bit beautiful. The only clue Merhige affords his audience that we’re being subjected to a cruelly cyclical creation myth is the end credits’ indication that its actors are playing characters like “God killing himself,” “Mother Earth,” and “Flesh on bone.” Otherwise, we’re just dragged through the muck of the world’s gloomiest experimental art film, now presented in even more harrowing detail.
It’s easy to imagine why Begotten might’ve fallen into distribution limbo, given that it starts with God’s suicide and only gets more gratuitously blasphemous from there. The prolonged effort to restore and re-release 1988’s Fright Night Part 2 is more surprising, given that it’s no more risqué nor uncommercial than the original, widely beloved Fright Night. This direct sequel picks up only a few months after the slaying of Chris Sarandon’s vampire hottie at the end of the first Fright Night, transforming reluctant hero Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale) from sexually confused high school dweeb to sexually confused college dweeb. He’s successfully undergone intensive therapy that has erased the trauma of his initial run-in with the undead, but then he’s once again distracted by an invading vampire coven at the exact moment that he’s supposed to be losing his virginity to his girlfriend. So, instead of getting hot & heavy with his current sweetheart, he disappears into the night to hang around vampire-hunter horror host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), starting the whole cycle over again. The main difference is that the head vampire in this second outing is a bodacious babe (Julie Camden) instead of a handsome hunk (Sarandon). The suppressed queer themes of the original still carry over, though, since the new vampire coven is styled to resemble the kind of gender-ambiguous bisexuals you’d expect to see on every college campus, or at least in the background of every 80s Prince music video. Fright Night Part 2 drops the retro Hammer Horror homages from the first Fright Night, but it does bring back all of the 80s gross-out gore effects in its own go-for-broke climax, credibly living up to the original’s legacy. Most audiences wouldn’t know that, though, given that it’s been allowed to fall into distribution limbo due to corporate “regrouping”. It just fell through the cracks, like loose change abandoned in a movie studio’s couch.
Kino Lorber is handling the re-release of Begotten, while Synapse is working on getting Fright Night Part 2 back in circulation as well. I was lucky to catch both movies as a Halloween Weekend double feature at my local downtown shopping mall, where they were met with a much more muted reception than Clockwork’s re-release of The Devils in other parts of town. Maybe it says something about the constant spoil of riches that genre film nerds are currently being pampered with that two 80s cult objects that have been missing from official distribution channels for over 20 years have returned to such quiet fanfare. More likely, it’s just another indication that robust marketing goes a long way in finding niche moviegoing audiences, since The Devils was so successfully propped up as a must-see event by the Warner Bros promotional muscle. All you can really do as a fan is to help spread the word. Either dare your movie-nerd buddies to subject themselves to the grimy horrors of Begotten or suggest they lighten things up with another goofball episode of Fright Night that hasn’t been as thoroughly re-run into the ground as the first. It’s never been easier to access them, and they’ve never looked better, but most people wouldn’t know that without hearing word of mouth.
-Brandon Ledet
