Arrow Video and Arrow Academy have announced six new titles to join their collection on Blu-Ray this July: Zombie For Sale (2019), Black Rainbow (1989), Inferno Of Torture (1969), Hiroshima (1953), Bloodstone (1988) and Life Is A Long Quiet River (1988). These represent a Korean zombie comedy, a supernatural British thriller, an Indian-American action-adventure and more! Details on these films can be found below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhWOfQjqgXA]
Zombie For Sale
Street Date: July 7, 2020
Synopsis: An infectiously funny slice of modern Korean cinema where Train to Busan, The Quiet Family and Warm Bodies collide to create a memorable rom-zom-com from first time director Lee Min-jae. When the illegal human experiments of Korea’s biggest Pharmaceutical company go wrong, one of their “undead” test subjects escapes and ends up in a shabby gas station owned by the Park family – a band of misfits spanning three generations who hustle passers-by to make ends meet. When the Park family uncover their undead visitor, he bites the head of their household, who instead of transforming into an undead ghoul becomes revitalised and full of life! The family then hatch a plan to exploit this unexpected fountain of youth, allowing locals to pay to be bitten too, until things go wrong… With a cabbage-munching zombie who prefers ketchup over blood, and a dysfunctional family that gives the Kim family of Parasite a run for their money, Zombie for Sale will warm the deadest of hearts and breathe some new life into the zombie genre.
- High-Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
- Original uncompressed Stereo and 5.1 DTS-HD MA options
- Newly-translated English subtitles
- Brand new audio commentary with filmmakers and critics Sam Ashurst and Dan Martin
- Q&A with director Lee Min-jae from a 2019 screening at Asian Pop-Up Cinema in Chicago, moderated by film critic and author Darcy Paquet
- Eat Together, Kill Together: The Family-in-Peril Comedy – brand new video essay by critic and producer Pierce Conran exploring Korea’s unique social satires
- Making-Of Featurette
- Behind-the-Scenes footage
- Original Trailer
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly-commissioned artwork by Mike Lee-Graham
- FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Josh Hurtado
Black Rainbow
Street Date: July 7, 2020
Synopsis: Mike Hodges (Flash Gordon, Get Carter) wrote and directed this supernatural chiller as a meditation on the human race’s ability to destroy the world, a gothic tale of suspense and the occult, guaranteed to send shivers down your spine. Martha Travis (Rosanna Arquette, Pulp Fiction, Crash) is a travelling clairvoyant on the road with her sceptic father (Jason Robards, Once Upon a Time in the West, Magnolia). During a séance Martha communicates a message from a dead man to his wife in the audience. Shocked the wife insists her husband is still alive. Later that evening the husband is killed by a ruthless assassin. As Martha foresees more and more tragic events journalist Gary Wallace (Tom Hulce, Amadeus, Animal House) follows the pair in pursuit of a hot story… with catastrophically eerie results. Sent direct to cable by its struggling distributor on initial release, Black Rainbow unfairly never got the exposure it deserved, newly restored from the original negative audiences can now discover the darkness at the end of the rainbow, as never before.
- Brand new restoration from the original negative approved by writer-director Mike Hodges
- Original stereo 2.0 PCM uncompressed audio and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio Surround Sound options
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- New audio commentary by film historians Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan
- Archival audio commentary by Mike Hodges
- Message in a Bottle: Archival ‘Making of’ documentary
- Archival featurettes ‘8 Minutes’; ‘Disasters’; ‘Seeing the Future’; ‘Behind the Rainbow’ featuring interviews with Hodges, Arquette, Robards, producer John Quested including behind-the-scenes imagery
- Trailer
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Nathanael Marsh
- FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Booklet featuring new writing on the film by author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Mike Hodges and more illustrated with stills
Street Date: July 7, 2020
Synopsis: Exploitation legend Teruo Ishii (Horrors of Malformed Men, Orgies of Edo) delivers one of his most extreme visions of violent eroticism in this, the sixth in his abnormal love series. Tattoos and torture await women forced into servitude in Ishii’s Inferno of Torture. Unable to repay a local lender, Yumi (Yumika Katayama) takes up an offer to serve as a geisha for two years with a promise of freedom once her debt is repaid. She quickly realizes that this is less a house of geishas than an extremely cruel brothel specializing in supplying western visitors with tattooed playthings. Taken under the wing of one of the leading tattoo artists vying for a coveted spot in the Shogun’s good graces through his work, Yumi’s body becomes a battleground as a rival artist becomes determined not to lose his spot at the top. When the madam, Otatsu (Mieko Fujimoto) trains her eye on the blossoming relationship between the benevolent artist Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and his model, she makes sure than her stay is less than hospitable, inspiring the torturous inferno of the title. Following Ishii’s legendary Shogun’s Joy of Torture and Orgies of Edo, the prolific filmmaker still manages to turn up the heat in this incredibly violent and salacious entry in a filmography unlike any other. From the film’s opening scene depicting some of the most perverse violence ever captured on screen, through to the shock ending that will leave the audience’s mouths agape, there’s nothing quite like Inferno of Torture. Tender romance clashes with vile sadism as a sea of tattooed female flesh floods nearly every frame of this film depicting Japan’s Edo period as only Ishii could.
- High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
- Original uncompressed mono audio
- Optional English subtitles
- Audio Commentary by Japanese cinema expert Tom Mes
- Erotic Grotesque Nonsense & the Foundations of Japan’s Cult Counterculture – a condensed version of Jasper Sharp’s Miskatonic Institute lecture
- Trailer
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly-commissioned artwork by Jacob Phillips
- FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Chris D.
Hiroshima
Street Date: July 14, 2020
Synopsis: Hiroshima (1953) is a powerful evocation of the devastation wrought by the world’s first deployment of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, based on the written eye-witness accounts of its child survivors compiled by Dr. Arata Osada for the 1951 book Children Of The A Bomb: Testament Of The Boys And Girls Of Hiroshima. Adapted for the screen by independent director Hideo Sekigawa (Listen to the Voices of the Sea, Tokyo Untouchable) and screenwriter Yasutaro Yagi (Theatre of Life, Rice), Hiroshima combines a harrowing documentary realism with moving human drama, in a tale of the suffering, endurance and survival of a group of teachers, their students and their families. It boasts a rousing score composed by Akira Ifukube (Godzilla) and an all-star cast including Yumeji Tsukioka (Late Spring, The Eternal Breasts), Isuzu Yamada (Throne of Blood, Yojimbo) and Eiji Okada (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Woman in the Dunes), appearing alongside an estimated 90,000 residents from the city as extras, including many survivors from that fateful day on 6th August 1945. Hiroshima was produced and distributed outside of the studio system by the Japan Teachers’ Union following the mixed critical reception to Children of Hiroshima (1952), directed by Kaneto Shindo the previous year, the first dramatic feature to deal directly with the atomic bombing. Although sequences from the film were used in Alain Resnais’ classic of French New Wave cinema, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), it has been effectively out of circulation in Japan and the rest of the world since its original release in 1953 due to the force and political sensitivity of its message. This new High Definition presentation is the complete version, restoring the footage from the international edit that was released in the United States in 1955.
- High Definition Blu-ray™ (1080p) presentation
- Original uncompressed audio
- Archive interview with actress Yumeji Tsukioka
- Hiroshima Nagasaki Download (2011), 73-minute documentary featuring interviews with survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings now residing in the United States, with an introduction by the director Shinpei Takeda
- New video essay by Jasper Sharp
- Newly commissioned artwork by Scott Saslow
- FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Mick Broderick
Bloodstone
Street Date: July 21, 2020
Synopsis: A man of action who can fight with the best of them and a cab driver who would give the Transporter a run for his money, pair up to save a young girl from the clutches of an evil criminal magnate in the exciting adventure thrill-ride Bloodstone! The Bloodstone, a priceless stolen ruby, accidentally ends up in the possession of American newlyweds Sandy (Brett Stimely, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death) and Stephanie (Anna Nicholas, Remington Steele). Now, their honeymoon in India is interrupted as they become the target of international fence Van Hoeven (Christopher Neame, The Prestige) and his evil henchmen. When Van Hoeven kidnaps Stephanie and ransoms her for the jewel, Sandy joins forces with cabby and dormant stunt-driver Shyam Sabu (Rajinikanth, 2.0) to rescue his young bride. Co-written and produced by genre film luminary Nico Mastorakis (Island of Death, The Wind) and featuring a stellar performance by legendary Tamil megastar Rajinikanth in his first English-language role, Bloodstone is an action-packed romp full of thrills, kick-ass one liners and venomous cobras!
- High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
- Original 2.0 Stereo PCM Uncompressed audio and 5.1 Surround audio options
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Optional Greek subtitles
- Brand new audio commentary by Bryan Reesman
- Keeping it to Myself – brand new interview with producer and co-writer Nico Mastorakis
- Brand new video essay on Bloodstone’s star Rajinikanth by Indian cinema expert Josh Hurtado
- Trailers
- Image gallery
- Original screenplay [BD-ROM content]
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly-commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys
- FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Mark Cunliffe
Life Is A Long Quiet River
Street Date: July 21, 2020
Synopsis: An outrageously wicked comedy about two families from award winning debut filmmaker Étienne Chatiliez, this fast-paced satire became the most popular French comedy of the decade. The radiantly bourgeois Le Quesnoys with their immaculate children and perfect manners and the grubby, disreputable Groseilles are thrown together in absurd chaos by an act of revenge as they discover that twelve years prior their babies were switched at birth. A witty send up of class relations and family ties, Life Is a Long Quiet River was celebrated with a host of trophies at France’s César Awards ceremony winning for best screenplay, best debut work and acting prizes for Héléne Vincent and Catherine Jacob.
- High Definition digital transfer
- High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
- Original Mono audio
- Newly translated optional English subtitles
- Archival interviews with director Étienne Chatiliez, actor André Wilms, co-writer/co-producer Florence Quentin and producer Charles Gassot
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Scott Saslow
- FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Jonathan Romney
Dillon is most comfortable sitting around in a theatre all day watching both big budget and independent movies.
