winking admission of his complic- ity in a subplot about a staff doc- tor (Eric Falk) who films the tortures for profit; and a grim fi- nale that combines elements of Tod Browning’s FREAKS (1932) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Tennessee Williams’ SUD- DENLY, LAST SUMMER (1959) while also predicting the canni- bal craze just over the horizon of the next decade.
The 1080p from-the-cam- era-negative transfer is out- standing, with only one brief exception where a few seconds of footage (51:39-41) had to be recovered from a lesser source. The original aspect ratio of 1.66:1 is modestly cropped to fill widescreen playback at 1.78:1, and audio is provided in English 5.1, German 5.1, Ital- ian 5.1 and French mono, with optional subtitles in English or Japanese. The German track is best, complemented with the well-done subtitles, though nei- ther Thorne nor Franco provide their own voices on any of the
tracks; the English track is a misery and also something of a patchwork, with many Spanish expressions left untranslated, which makes the absence of a Spanish track all the more curious.
MALIGNANT
2013, MVD Visual, 84m 39s, $14.95, DVD-1 By Chris Herzog
After losing his wife to can- cer, Allex (Gary Cairns) descends into an alcoholic depression, grimly drinking his dinner and blacking out each night until a mysterious black-clad stranger (Brad Dourif) begins to flit around the fringes of his life, urging him gently to change his ways. When the blackouts grow longer and Allex finds a freshly stitched inci- sion on his chest, he realizes that the stranger is much more than a concerned Samaritan. Long- time master of quirk and quiet menace Dourif gets top billing, but Cairns carries most of the weight in this tale of surgical
horror and mind control as an es- calating series of gruesome dis- coveries leads Allex to the lair of his tormentor.
A low-key atmosphere and naturalistic tone help MALIG- NANT avoid the melodramatics and campiness that other film- makers might have applied to the same story. Writer-director Brian Avenet-Bradley keeps things quiet, relying on Cairns’ tortured facial expressions, rather than histrionics, to convey the bulk of the character’s mounting para- noia and panic. He also keeps a tight rein on Dourif, who mostly avoids the scenery-chewing other genre stalwarts might bring to the role of a mad surgeon. Instead, Dourif presents his character as a calmly self-assured profes- sional, as convinced as any other medical specialist that he is pursuing the proper course of treatment for his patient. MALIGNANT’s small cast means that the twist at the end of the film probably won’t come as a great surprise to experienced
Gary Cairns discovers that someone is taking surgical liberties with his body in MALIGNANT.
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