Video Dispatches: ANNA, VAMPIRES & A BUCKET OF BLOOD

Video Dispatches is a regular column covering recent home video releases.

Anna (2019) – Lionsgate

Though Luc Besson’s Anna is readymade for grouping with recent action films like the John Wick franchise, Red Sparrow and Atomic Blonde (especially the female-led latter two), Besson’s film is distinct in its levity. It’s an aggressively silly film — a masterpiece of sorts in just how bonkers it is — that’s incredibly self-indulgent, but it never bares the self-seriousness of something like John Wick Chapter 3 or the other two dreadful European espionage thrillers.

Maybe even more important is that it avoids the dreadfulness of those three films. Anna, a film about a KGB assassin undercover as a supermodel following a life of poverty and abuse, constantly turns itself over on itself, creating a narrative Russian doll that will get much tinier than you think it can.

Along with sharing the same bozo energy Besson brought to his 2014 film, Lucy, but with some top-shelf action sequences that best anything in the aforementioned John Wick installment. One of the four supplemental features on the disc is dedicated solely to the best of these sequences: a restaurant fight sequence in which Anna enters without a gun and has to dismantle the entire joint. The feature details the scene’s seven days of shooting and four months of rehearsal, and Besson talks about the various fighting styles and film research he based it on.

All of the four bonus segments are cut from the same press-junket interviews. The one on the film’s costume design is disposable, while “Unmasking a Russian Doll: Making Anna” feature is alright. It’s less based on production and more on the film’s narrative structure and style and the character of Anna, whom Besson describes as Joan of Arc, Lucy and an alien. This 13-minute feature is pretty substantial for a new release supplement, although it certainly dips into hyperbolic sound bites for the sake of making alleged-sex-criminal Besson sound like a genius.

A Bucket of Blood (1959) – Olive

The latest addition to Olive’s Signature Series label, their prestige collection, is Roger Corman’s late-50s, Dick Miller-starring black comedy A Bucket of Blood, a modest horror film about a waiter at a beat bar who turns art scene flavor du jour after he turns his victims into clay casts, unbeknownst to the public.

Though one of Corman’s most popular films, this was my first exposure to A Bucket of Blood, which breezes by at just over an hour with unaffected wit and intelligence. As a friend stated on Letterboxd, this film does for art-targeted satire what Lars von Trier’s recent The House That Jack Built failed miserably to do, and in under half its runtime.

The disc, which boasts a nice new 4k remaster, has some great new interviews with Corman and Miller. Corman conveys that he had total control on this picture, and this was his first attempt at making an intentionally black comedy, or horror comedy. He chocks up a lot of the film’s success to Miller, who was able to let people both laugh at him and identify with “the loser.”

Miller is predictably funny and affable, and said that around the time he was “making close to zero” dollars. He talks about his filmography, especially with Corman, and much of the discussion is guided by his wife, who has the seemingly clearer memory.

There’s also a detailed video essay comparing the film and its script that will satisfy the real heads, and an enjoyable booklet essay that is oddly reproduced on the disc’s menu.

John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998) – Scream Factory

For Mill Creek’s Blu-ray release of John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars earlier this year, I mentioned the film’s resemblance to the western genre, but his previous film, Vampires (or John Carpenter’s Vampires for the purists), though also cosmetically a horror film, is a straight up western.

On the filmmaker’s commentary for the film, he calls it “Once Upon a Time in Vampire Land” in homage to Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western. Carpenter also talks in detail about which particular shots he lifts from the film, as well as admitting to using the bare bones of The Wild Bunch and its editing patterns — though Sam Peckinpah was a director he hadn’t previously thought of as an influence.

Carpenter is also quite fond of New Mexico vistas, which give it a more distinct western feel than Ghosts of Mars, as does the rejuvenation of a set originally used for an Italian western TV show. The director’s score, which he describes as “roadhouse blues” is also a key ingredient here, and it’s lovely, surely due in part for showcasing Carpenter’s composing repertoire. Vampires is admittedly bottom-to-mid-drawer Carpenter, but all of its trimmings keep it from being a dud. And it has a certain tangible, analog quality that is gone from Ghosts of Mars.

Of course, much of the film’s enjoyment also has James Woods to thanks. There’s plenty of Woods content on Scream Factory’s supplemental features to be found, including when refers to himself as Henry Ford-esque (also an homage to Leone), which he says wasn’t in vogue at the time, which favored the brawny Stallone types.

The disc also has a detailed archival making of feature, which is helpfully chaptered by topic. During Carpenter’s interview, he returns to the topic of the Western, saying “they don’t hire me to do Westerns, they hire me to do movies about zombies eating each other and throwing intestines around.”