Screenpicks

The week in independent film, TV and video.

by Sam Adams

George Romero

(Tue., Oct. 24, 7 p.m. at Emilie K. Asplundh Concert Hall, Philips Memorial Building, West Chester University, 610-436-2266. $10)

What he’s doing at West Chester University, we don’t know, but when Pittsburgh’s greatest filmmaker (take that, Andy Warhol!) comes to town, it’s time to start making travel plans. Best known for Night of the Living Dead and its sequel Dawn of the Dead, he recently returned from a seven-year hiatus with the little-seen Bruiser, and is currently at work on an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (his second King film, after 1993’s The Dark Half). Perhaps because of the genre’s seedy reputation, horror film directors rarely get the chance to speak about their word outside of Fangoria, so take the chance while you’ve got it.

Italian Gore Night

(Fri., Oct. 20, 9:30, Hoyt’s Cinemas, Rt. 38 & Rt. 70, Pennsauken, 856-910-2340 or www.exhumedfilms.com, $10)

Speaking of horrors, we were horrified to learn that we screwed up the date last week for Exhumed Films’ ode to Italian splatter. The correct date is this Friday, and the bill includes Jungle Holocaust, The Beyond, The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, Zeder and Burial Ground.

Sisters

($29.95 DVD, $19.95 VHS)

I never bought the rap that Brian De Palma was just a Hitchcock imitator. Sure, his movies quote liberally from Hitchcock as well as from scores of other sources — like the faux "Odessa Steps" sequence in The Untouchables stolen from Battleship Potemkin. Sisters, though, is pushing it. The 1973 film that first broke De Palma through to a commercial audience stars a Quebecois-accented Margot Kidder as a fashion model traumatized by her separation from her Siamese twin. It sometimes seems like no more than an amalgam of Hitchcock’s greatest hits, with liberal lifts from Psycho, Vertigo and most notably Strangers on a Train. But it’s unlikely Hitchcock would have killed off his victim by stabbing to the crotch, or deliberately needled viewers by having a black man win "Dinner for two at the African Room." Attractively remastered for its rerelease (the DVD adds a print interview with the reclusive director and a De Palma essay on the score by noted Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann), Sisters is a film student’s dream, full of clever camera moves, split screens and other references to doubleness and even De Palma’s characteristic references to voyeurism, cinematic and otherwise. (The subject’s addressed more nakedly here than in any De Palma movie outside of Body Double, although that’s not necessarily a good thing.) You can’t help but wish that whoever owns the rights to Blow Out would give that more deserving film the same treatment, but Sisters is still fascinating in spots, and a road map of sorts to De Palma’s more mature work.

Pusher

($29.98 DVD/$24.95 VHS)

More than three years after it played the PFWC, Nicolas Winding Refn’s debut feature finally makes its way to video. (The DVD is out now, and the video is due for release at the end of November.) Refn, whose father Anders edited Breaking the Waves, was 24 when he directed this tale of a hapless Copenhagen heroin dealer (Kim Bodnia) who spirals rapidly into hell when a major deal goes horribly awry. Not the most original story, for sure, but Pusher’s hand-held urgency and improvised dialogue, not to mention Bodnia’s shell-shocked performance, lend the film a searing veracity. DVD extras include a rather useless featurette from Danish TV and an audio commentary with Refn and Maniac Cop director William Lustig, who’s apparently become Refn’s compadre while he scripts his first English-language film in Los Angeles. Like a lot of gangster films by young directors, Pusher has its unconvincing sections, but the moment when Bodnia and his drunken running buddy stage a play fight with real knives in a bar — each makes like they’ll stab the other, then flips the knife around at the last minute so only the handle makes contact — has enough coiled violence in it to give you the chills. (Fans of Danish film and Bodnia, take note: After wresting the rights from Miramax, who produced a hideously bad remake, Anchor Bay will finally reissue the Danish version of Nightwatch, which made Bodnia a box office star in his home country, early next year.)