13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats (Makoto Naito, 1975)

KARATE LADY RETURNS!

Amid the success of The Street Fighter and Sister Street Fighter series, Toei Company had found a new star in Etsuko Shihomi and had created its first female martial arts hero, one that was tough, virtuous, and courageous. In 1975, Shihomi found herself in possibly her sleaziest film: 13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats, a pinky violence genre mash-up that mixed girl gangs, women in prison, yakuza, and martial arts action into a single sensational movie. As Maki Hyuga, Shihomi is the leader of the Stray Cats girl gang, fighting for justice against evil gangsters and stuck up rich girls. Though her karate skills are unsurpassed, Maki is framed and thrown into a sadistic women’s prison. Will she escape and take her revenge?

Making its worldwide Blu-ray debut, 13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats is paired here with Norifumi Suzuki’s The Great Chase, an oddball action flick released the same year and starring Etsuko Shihomi as a race car driver moonlighting as a secret agent. Filled with unceasing action, outlandish situations, and plenty of female resistance to male domination, 13 Steps to Maki and The Great Chase reveal new shades to Etsuko Shihomi’s stardom and stand as spectacular examples of Japanese exploitation in the 1970s.

Special Edition Contents:

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation of 13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats and The Great Chase
• Original uncompressed Japanese mono audio on both films
• Optional newly translated English subtitles on both films
• New video interviews with actor Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba and director Makoto Naito
• Theatrical trailers for both films
• Stills and poster galleries for both films
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Kungfubob O’Brien

Straight Time (Ulu Grosbard, 1978)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Straight Time.

In this highly underrated classic of ’70s crime cinema, Dustin Hoffman shrewdly stars as Max Dembo, an ex-con just released from a six-year stretch in prison for armed robbery and struggling to go straight while under the oversight of his smug parole officer. Despite finding a job, a home, and even a girl of his own, Max remains trapped in an unrelenting criminal system until he breaks free with ruthless, criminal abandon and tragic consequences. Adapted from Edward Bunker’s No Beast So Fierce, featuring a score by David Shire, and boasting a terrific supporting cast including Theresa Russell, Harry Dean Stanton, Gary Busey, M. Emmet Walsh, and Kathy Bates, Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time is a lean and bitter portrait of inevitable recidivism.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

• New 4K digital master with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary from 2007 with director Ulu Grospard and actor Dustin Hoffman
• New interviews with actors Hoffman, Theresa Russell, and Kathy Bates
• Straight Time: He Wrote It For Criminals, a 1978 documentary on writer Edward Bunker and the making of the film
• Theatrical trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by novelist Jonathan Lethem

Bloody Hell (Alister Grierson, 2020)

ONE HELL OF A FAIRY TALE

When a bank heist goes awry, Rex Coen (Ben O’Toole) spends eight years in prison and is hounded by the media on his release. The unwanted attention forces Rex to flee his hometown of Boise, Idaho, in search of anonymity in Finland, but his arrival in Helsinki lands him in a new, fresh hell. Gassed during his taxi ride from the airport, Rex wakes up drugged, beaten, and bound in the basement of a twisted family hiding a dark secret. With only his personified conscience to help him, Rex is in a race against time to save himself and a beautiful young woman (Meg Fraser) from his terrifying captors and a fate worse than death.

An action-horror-comedy that merges Fight Club with Fargo, Alister Grierson’s Bloody Hell is a raucous midnight crowd pleaser ready for fans of Sam Raimi, John Wick, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

Special Edition Contents:

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and Uncompressed Stereo PCM
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Boi To Hel, new interviews with cast and crew
• Rex in an Ass-Kicking Contest, an interview with director Alister Grierson and lead actor Ben O’Toole on the film’s special effects
• Behind-the-scenes footage and outtakes
• Trailers
• Reversible sleeve featuring two artwork choices

The Man Who Stole the Sun (Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1979)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents The Man Who Stole the Sun.

Junior high school teacher Makoto Kido attacks a nuclear power plant to steal a plutonium capsule and then succeeds in building an atomic bomb by himself in his apartment. Calling himself “Number 9” and claiming to be a new nuclear power of his own, Kido extorts the government with demands for uninterrupted baseball games and a concert by the then-banned Rolling Stones, even going so far as to appoint his own negotiating partner, hardened police inspector Yamashita. Pitting rock icon Kenji Sawada with legendary tough guy Bunta Sugawara, Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s celebrated Japanese cult film explores the nation’s growing generation gap and the proliferation of nuclear power with black comedy, stylistic invention, and a heavy, controversial premise.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

• New high-definition digital restoration with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• The Legend is Lebon Video Testimony, an 84-minute documentary on the making of the film, with interviews and on-set footage
• Walking With the Movie, a tour of the film’s locations with Japanese singer Masaki Ueda
• Enthusiasm, Talk, Talk, My “Man Who Stole the Sun,” a 35-minute interview of director Kazuhiko Hasegawa by actor Masatoshi Nagase and special effects director Shinji Higuchi
• 11 p.m. “Wonderful!! Is Julie a Strong Guy Like Genbaku?!,” a 20-minute edited version shown prior to the film’s theatrical released on September 20, 1979
• Trailer
• English subtitle translation supervised by screenwriter Leonard Schrader
• PLUS: A new essay by Japanese film scholar Tony Rayns

Negativipeg (Matthew Rankin, 2010)

Welcome to 2020!

MMC! kicks off a new year of imagined releases of favourite movies (and various other miscellany) with one of 2019’s favourite short film discoveries — Matthew Rankin’s Negativipeg (2010). Rankin’s The Twentieth Century (2019) was a favourite of the 2019 Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival and MMC! happily gorged itself on Rankin’s various short works as well. Both the shorts and Rankin’s first feature are typified with DIY inventiveness, satirical humour, and spectacular visuals that easily inherits the prairie postmodern tradition of filmmakers like Guy Maddin and John Paizs, however this post celebrates an outlier in Rankin’s filmography.

Negativipeg is a fascinating documentary on Rory Lepine’s 1985 encounter in a 7-Eleven with Winnipeg rock legend, Burton Cummings of The Guess Who. Lepine, who was 19 when he put the boots to Burt in that North End Sev’, served 4 months in prison for the beating given to Cummings and the incident became emblematic of the longstanding tension between the musician and his former hometown, neither of whom felt loved enough in the eyes of the other. While lacking the visual wonder of Rankin’s later work, the short is captivating and easily stands as the most Winnipeg-like thing I’ve ever seen on screen – the shuttered homes, the bleakness of winter, Lepine’s particular accent and his code for life in the North End, the love-hate relationship toward Cummings and the ongoing question of his local credentials after getting big, and the Pizza Pops. Rankin dresses Negativipeg in droll Errol Morris-like eccentricity and incisiveness, creating something that is equal parts hilarious, tragic, and perplexing and all conveyed in an exceptionally local vernacular. As wonderful as Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007) may be, Rankin’s Negativipeg may cut even closer to the bone in revealing the city’s essence.

The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents The Limey.

Terence Stamp is Wilson, a English ex-con who arrives in Los Angeles to hunt down the man responsible for his daughter’s “accidental” death, a record producer named Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda). Propelled along an increasingly brutal search for the truth, Wilson’s singleminded desire for revenge splinters into a meditation on cultural dislocation, an elegy on fatherhood, and a radical, fragmentary investigation of memory. Conceiving of the film as “Alain Resnais making Get Carter” and featuring throwback casting with Stamp, Fonda, Barry Newman, and Joe Dallesandro, Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey is a modern tough guy classic and a seminal work of American independent cinema.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• Restored 4K digital transfer, approved by director Steven Soderbergh and cinematographer Edward Lachman, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary with Soderbergh and writer Lem Dobbs
• Audio commentary with Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann Warren, Barry Newman, Joe Dallesandro, Soderbergh, and Dobbs
• New introduction by Soderbergh
• New conversation with Soderbergh, editor Sarah Flack, cinematographer Edward Lachman, and actors Luis Guzmán and Lesley Ann Warren
• Deleted scene featuring Ann-Margret
• Isolated music score
• Trailers and TV Spots
• PLUS: A new essay by critic Ashley Clark