Horror in Your House is back this week with a look at the upcoming releases scheduled Tuesday. Image Entertainment is unleashing the much lauded Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre in both Blu-Ray and DVD. But the biggest releases of the week come from the Criterion Collection as both Guilerrmo del Toro’s Cronos and David Cronnenberg’s Videodrome are receiving the Criterion treatment. Heck yes! Check out the rest of the releases below.
Horror In Your House
December 6th, 2010

APPARITIONS – BFS Entertainment

In this six-part miniseries, Martin Shaw (Judge John Deed) is Father Jacob, a Roman Catholic priest who examines evidence of miracles to promote candidates for sainthood. He is drawn into the domain of exorcism when he is approached for help by a young girl who believes her father is possessed. Besieged by ghastly visions, vicious murders and demonic attacks, Father Jacob wages war against evil with the only weapons he has – faith, ritual and prayer.

CRONOS (Criterion) (Blu-ray/DVD) – Criterion Collection

Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) made an auspicious, audacious feature debut with Cronos, a highly unorthodox tale about the seductiveness of the idea of immortality. Kindly antiques dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) happens upon an ancient golden device in the shape of a scarab, and soon finds himself possessor and victim of its sinister, addictive powers, as well as the target of a mysterious, crude American named Angel (a delightfully deranged Ron Perlman (Hellboy). Featuring marvelous special makeup effects and the unforgettably haunting imagery for which del Toro has become world-renowned, Cronos is a visually rich and emotionally captivating dark fantasy.

THE DEEP (Blu-ray/DVD) – Image Entertainment

This lavish, suspense-filled film was made from Peter (Jaws) Benchley’s best-selling novel. Gail Berke (Jacqueline Bisset) and David Sanders (Nick Nolte) are on a romantic holiday in Bermuda when they come upon the sunken wreck of a WWII freighter. Near it, they find an ampoule of morphine, one of tens of thousands still aboard the wrecked ship. Their discovery leads them to a Haitian drug dealer, Cloche (Louis Gossett), and an old treasure hunter, Romer Treece (Robert Shaw). With Cloche in pursuit, Gail, David and Treece try to recover the sunken treasure.

HARPOON: WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE (Blu-ray/DVD) – Image Entertainment

When a bloody freak accident takes out their captain, a boatload of international tourists on a whale-watching expedition must fight for their lives while stranded in the middle of the ocean. Help seems to arrive in the form of a helpful whaler who offers to take them back to shore, but instead he strands them on a rusty, terrifying barge of death with his insane family who are determined to hunt down and kill the trespassers one by one! Featuring an appearance by horror legend Gunnar Hansen (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), this shocking, blood-spattered trip on the high seas unleashes a night of terror only a lucky few will survive.

MICAH SAYS: A lot of comparisons to Evil Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are being thrown around. I, for one, can’t wait to see this flick. If it even lives up to half the goodness of the aforementioned, it would be a pleasant surprise.

THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES – Redemption Films

The Shiver of the Vampires is one of director Jean Rollin’s most acclaimed and sought after vampire films. Featuring gorgeous lesbian vampires, Gallic vampire hippies, weird vampires and lashings of weird hippie lesbian sex, The Shiver of the Vampires is like no other vampire film you’ve seen. Beautifully macabre with eerie medieval castles, coffins and a strange woman who emerges from a clock, Jean Rollin manages to mix eroticism with a fairy-tale quality that is truly magical.

VIDEODROME (Criterion) (Blu-ray) – Criterion Collection

When Max Renn goes looking for edgy new shows for his sleazy cable TV station, he stumbles across the pirate broadcast of a hyper-violent torture show called Videodrome. As he unearths the origins of the program, he embarks on a hallucinatory journey into a shadow world of right-wing conspiracies, sadomasochistic sex games, and bodily transformation. Renn’s ordinary life dissolves around him, and he finds himself at the center of a conflict between opposing factions in the struggle to control the truth behind the radical human future of “the New Flesh.” Starring James Woods and Deborah Harry in one of her first film roles, Videodrome is one of writer/director David Cronenberg’s most original and provocative works, fusing social commentary with shocking elements of sex and violence. With groundbreaking special effects makeup by Academy Award-winner Rick Baker, Videodrome has come to be regarded as one of the most influential and mind-bending science fiction films of the 1980s, and The Criterion Collection is proud to present it in its full-length unrated edition.

MICAH SAYS: No brainer for pick of the week. Long live the new flesh!