FT 235

First up, two silent genre classics: FW Murnau’s 1922 German expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror (Eureka £19.99) gets what must rank as its definitive release as part of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series. This two-disc set features the 2007 restor­ation complete with the original Hans Erdmann score and boasts an hour-long German document­ary on the film’s creation and an excellent, scholarly 80-page book.

Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (Tartan £19.99) is also available with its original score (rather than the sonic water-tort­ure of the recent ‘KTL Edition’) and the bonus of fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman’s penultimate work, the 2000 TV-film The Image Makers, in which Sjöström screens his film for The Phantom Carriage’s imperious author.

Moving to Italy, and from the sublime to the potentially ridiculous, with films from the golden age of exploitation. Gianfranco Mingozzi’s Flavia the Heretic (Shameless, £12.99) must be one of the most notorious of nunsploitation titles (here uncut for the first time in the UK), but it’s also one of the best – an often beautifully shot period-piece which uses a 15th-century backdrop to present its heroine as a proto-feminist rebelling against Church, family and men. Florinda Bolkan is a splendidly angry nun-turned-avenger and Mingozzi’s reliance on visuals rather than dialogue keeps dubbing disasters to a minimum. Manhattan Baby (Shameless, £12.99), on the other hand, must be one of Lucio Fulci’s daftest films, a bizarre mish-mash of cod-Egyptology and pop-parapsychology that defies understanding and blithely borr­ows from everything from The Exorcist to The Awakening. It does boast a unique death by stuffed birds that lingers in the memory.

A more recent European film is Ole Borenedal’s Danish psycho-thriller Nightwatch (Metrodome, £17.99), the story of Martin, a young law student who takes a job as the night watchman in his local morgue and finds that the exist­ential games he embarks on with his dodgy friend Jens are leading him into dangerous territory. A tightly plotted, well-acted and thoroughly Hitchcockian tale of brutal murders and identities doubled and confused, this is at times genuinely unsettling; it’s only as the dénouement approaches that you realise how contrived (if enjoyable) the whole thing is.

More doubles in KM31 (Yume Pictures, £12.99), a genuinely original film from Mexico’s Rigo­berto Castañeda about a pair of identical twin sisters whose lives are shattered when one is left comatose after a mysterious car accident and the other starts hearing disembodied voices from the sewers. Without giving too much away, let me say that the film ventures into some unusual – and prime fortean – territory, as the protagonists investigate a stretch of ghost road that seems to be Mexico’s equivalent of the A229 at Bluebell Hill. What makes KM31 stand out, though, is its intelligent script, believable characters and the sense that its ghosts – supernatural, psychological and historical – are born out of real pain. It’s that rare thing, a modern horror movie with an emotional as well as a visceral dimension.

Finally, two disappointments from the East. Takashi Miike turns in a sub-par slice of bog-standard J-Horror with One Missed Call (Premier Asia, £12.99), in which a group of youngsters start gett­ing mobile phone messages from themselves sent from the future and presaging their violent deaths. It’s yet another viral nightmare in which technology is both source of terror and conduit for supernatural powers; the only surprise is how little the maverick director puts any sort of stamp on this increasingly tired material.

And then there’s Ghost Game (Showbox, £12.99), which mixes Thai superstition and modern technology in a way that should have been interesting, but isn’t. A bunch of hapless wannabes enter a Thai reality game-show (Survivor meets Big Brother) in which they must stay in a reputedly haunted Khmer Rouge prison camp and try and work out if the numerous scares are real or faked by the manipulative TV producers. A great premise, but somehow the film contrives to be both anodyne and offensive – to even hint at the deeds of the Pol Pot regime and then deliver such a gutless piece of film-making is unforgivable; no wonder Cambodia banned it!