Gore, Psychedelic, Horror, Obscure, Rare, Cult, Cannibal; DVD - Ex Used condition From the title Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood, one might expect a Herschell Gordon Lewis style B-movie gore fest. Instead, one gets a creepy, atmospheric, low-budget cross between art and exploitation. A young woman and her parents discover strange goings-on at the run down carnival at which they recently began working, and they find themselves having to escape from a nightmarish situation. The plot is fairly minimal, with the movie feeling more like a creepy tone poem than a strictly narrative piece. The cast and crew use the run down carnival location to great effect. The amount of atmosphere they generate using found materials and a very limited budget is quite impressive. Filmed in 1973 and thought lost for almost 30 years, the film is not as widely known or seen as other films of that time. Its experimental and psychedelic atmosphere makes it an interesting artifact from its era and essential for fans.

Peter Greenaway, Experimental, Arthouse, Absurdist, Surreal, Short Film, Collection; DVD - Ex Used condition “He has other reputations as well—as an academic, as a maker of curious artifacts, as a cataloguer of the bizarre and as a librarian of the absurd.” Peter Greenaway might well have been describing himself in this thumbnail sketch of Canton Remodell, a character in an unmade project. Before his international arthouse hits like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Prospero’s Books, Greenaway made a series of highly inventive films that established all the obsessions that run through his later work. The content of the six playful shorts featured varies widely—from the condensed, wry history of 37 people who have fallen to their deaths from windows (Windows), to a sequence of 92 maps to guide a dead ornithologist on his way into the afterlife (A Walk Through H) set to a thrilling score by award-winning composer Michael Nyman (The Piano). All of these quirkily delightful works take great pleasure in outlandish detail, fake erudition and corkscrew narratives.  Contains the films: Intervals (1969, 6 mins), Windows (1974, 4 mins), Dear Phone (1976, 17 mins), H Is for House (1976, 9 mins), A Walk Through H (1978, 41 mins), and Water Wrackets (1978, 11 mins)

Poland, Punk, Oi, Skinhead, Arthouse, Foreign; DVD - Ex Used condition Cracow, a small group of punks make leather shoes in order to survive, but also to trample the surface of the streets in any way they deem fit. This film swifly plunges us in black and white into this little microcosm that makes its own rules while still remaining part of the system it rejects. Without any commentary, the film-maker Lech Kowalski follows the little artisanal company in its daily routine, given rhythm by the blows of hammers and the singing of anarchistic songs. Connections are spun, between workshop machines and electric guitars, between sewing needles and syringes. Little by little, manufacture improves, lives become organized, and the film recovers colour in a second part where various changes make themselves felt. The camera moves around, discreet but always totally immersed in the events. It moves into extreme close-up, without hesitating to show the roughness of the leather and the scars in the skins. The pictures are tactile, tangible, touchable. The Boot Factory confronts us directly with reality, in a relationship of proximity sometimes pushed to the extreme. The film translates the brutality of the situations by unexpected movements of the camera and sudden changes in shooting angles. The sounds are incisive, the music intrusive, the scenes gather and tumble together. Everything about this film makes it a raw product. Nevertheless, the apparent spontaneity of the pictures conceals a real mastery of cinematographic techniques. In a very intimate manner, Lech Kowalski observes what is done and undone before his eyes, while retaining the necessary distance. He skilfully films the steps of the protagonists, not forgetting that it is also important to film the tracks they leave behind them.