Skinheads — Skinheads( Blu Ray)

Skinheads ( aka Teste Rasate) is an early 90’s racist drama directed by Claudio Fragasso (Hell Of The Living Dead, Troll 2 , Rats: Night Of Terror). The Rome-set film charts the steady brainwashing and troubling radicalising of a twenty-something biker by a group of white extremists. It features a believable central performance, a good support cast, and a pacy/ well-written script. Here from Severin is a recent Blu-ray release of the picture, taking in a 4k scan, and a exllent feature-length documentary about the film's making.

Target — Target(Blu Ray)

Target is a mid-80s globetrotting thriller/adventure, featuring Gene Hackman & Matt Dillon as estranged father and son, who have to team up when Dona, the pair's wife/ mother, is kidnapped while on holiday in Paris. The twist is that the Hackman character isn’t who he seems, a typical middle-aged guy working in Texas; instead, he’s a Ex CIA who knows how to handle himself. Here from Australia’s Imprint is a recent Blu-ray release of the film- it takes in a new scan of the film, a new commentary track, and a few archive extras.

Mancunian low-budget Movie Mogul

Cliff Twemlow On Severin

One of last year’s real big surprises in the world of Blu-ray box sets was Bloody Legend: The Complete Twemlow Collection, as it was a wholly entertaining, fascinating, and at times heart-warming set. The Severin released boxset brought together the work of one of the UK’s unlikeliest movie moguls- Cliff Twemlow, a Mancunian bouncer/ body builder, who went on to write/star in/produce a series of low-budget/ largely SOV films in the early 80s to early 90s- these moved between action, thriller, sci-fi, and horror. His most notable/notorious film was 1983’s G.B.H., which landed on the video nasty list, though he was connected to other ten feature films, many of which got their first real full/proper release on the boxset. Opening up the set was the excellent 2023 documentary Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow, which really pulls you into the set. I caught up with Severn’s David Gregory and Jake West, director of Mancunian Man, to discuss the boxset and all things cliff.

Repetitious History - A Quick Trip Into The World Of The Fall

The Fall

MES( Mark E Smith- The Falls main creator) possessed the ability to cram phrases into impossible spaces - “I’m hunting and I’m trying to find” delivered as “hut’na tryna find”; the eight-syllable “mere pseud mag editor’s father” hastily squeezed into a manipulation of time and space, heralded by the prior line “twice each at least”, the latter naturally repeated thrice.