Global Discoveries on DVD: Digital Releases I Don’t Want & A Few Others That I Do

From the Spring 2023 Cinema Scope.

Who could it be at Vinegar Syndrome Films in the U.S. and/or Powerhouse Films in the U.K. who decided I was an aficionado of Mexican and/or Canadian wrestling? I haven’t been able to discover if Vinegar Syndrome and Powerhouse are distantly or closely related to one another—or if, on the contrary, separate publicists at each company arrived independently at the notion that I was an actual or potential wrestling buff. But the fact remains that unrequested check discs of Santo vs. Evil Brain and Santo vs. Infernal Men (both 1961) along with two more unrequested check discs devoted to an Italian Western with an equally unidiomatic, pidgin-English title (The Big Gundown, 1966), all from Powerhouse, turned up in my mailbox early this year, and these were soon followed by a finished Blu-Ray wrapped in cellophane of the no less unrequested and undesired Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows, a 1998 Canadian documentary from Vinegar Syndrome.

Even if I accept the more probable and less paranoid explanation that much of our planet is currently undergoing a collective nervous breakdown over identity politics, leading to many mistaken surmises and false assumptions that each of us is making about the identities and interests of everyone else, I can’t fathom what might have inaugurated this trend in “restored” digital releases. Read more