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‘The Criterion of shit movies’: Arrow Video’s lionization of lowbrow
04.22.2016
10:25 am
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“Take a little piece of my heart”—Still from “Bride of Reanimator”
 
My primary job here at Dangerous Minds is to essentially say “Here, look at this cool thing”—a job I’m well-suited for because it’s something I generally find myself doing anyway. Lately, I find that when I’m telling friends about whatever cool new thing that’s fascinating me at the moment, more and more often it’s some cool new thing that came down the pike from Arrow Films.

The U.K.‘s Arrow Films has been making a name for itself the past few years with their tricked-out DVD and Blu-Ray issues of cult horror films, westerns, science fiction, sex comedies, yakuza epics and neo-noirs.  Arrow sits alongside Grindhouse Releasing and Mondo Macabro as the holy trinity of digital video companies specializing in genre films. All three companies go above and beyond the call of duty with attention to detail in their transfers and bonus materials. Arrow has very quickly become my favorite, though, and I recently described them in conversation as “The Criterion of Shit Movies.”

To be perfectly honest, some of their packages put Criterion’s fine work to shame.

I wrote here recently about one of my favorite ‘80s slasher movies, The Mutilator, which just got the deluxe treatment from Arrow. For a relatively unknown (outside of cult horror-fan circles) low-budget splatter film, Arrow went totally balls-out on the double-disc release with a beautiful 2K restoration of the unrated version of the film (from the only surviving intact print that they managed to track down at the Library of Congress) and a slew of extras, including a feature-length documentary on the making of the film. The amount of love poured into this single release is remarkable when you consider that fans of the film (which had been previously unreleased on a digital format) would have bought the thing whether or not they had produced a documentary or recorded audio commentaries, or loaded it up with behind-the-scenes footage. They didn’t have to go the extra-mile, but they DID.
 
Much more on Arrow Films after the jump…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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04.22.2016
10:25 am
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Crappy Bootleg DVD Covers
11.08.2009
08:15 pm
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image
 
image
 
Here’s an amusing Flickr pool dedicated to crappy bootleg DVD covers.
 
(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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11.08.2009
08:15 pm
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