Celebrating the Singular

My review copy of The Wild Robot having been delayed in shipping - which, if you've seen the film, is actually on-brand – I'll be giving a little more space to The Dead Don’t Hurt this week. Which is also on-brand, weirdly enough, since Viggo Mortensen’s second feature is a gentle, mournful ramble through the modern Western. It lays claim to its space.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is a little long for the story it tells, and maybe a little too relaxed to satisfy people expecting the artist formerly known as Aragorn to make a Western. But the thing is, Viggo Mortensen is an artist, and he’s going to come at his subject from a place of personal interest, and now that he’s older his personal interest lies with the secondary characters who populate the most memorable Westerns – the ones trying to avoid adventure and live decent lives while the cowpokes tear up the saloon.

Mortensen's second feature as a writer-director (after 2020’s promising Falling) traces the lines of the doomed romance between Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Mortensen) and his strong-willed Quebecois bride Vivienne (Vicky Krieps). The pair meet in San Francisco in the early 1860s, as the nation slides towards civil war, and when they marry Vivienne travels back with Holger to his home in Nevada. They will be happy together for a time. But only for a time, because the film opens as a still-youthful Vivienne draws her last breath, in the bed she and Holger share.

Mortensen’s story is exquisitely drawn, his characters arriving fully formed and – in some cases, at least – carrying decades of unspoken baggage. The actor’s chemistry with Krieps is mature and warm, and in crosscutting between their relationship and Holger’s widowed present we get to observe the actors progress from amused flirtation to consuming passion to something more settled and unspoken, becoming the more serious, adult versions of their characters.

There’s a throwaway scene where Holger and Vivienne argue about her decision to get a job that’s one of the best-written and -acted things in a good long while, capturing the frustration of people who fully love but don’t fully understand why they need the things they need. The movie is about the relationships that define us for the rest of our lives; it just happens to be a Western.

The supporting players get less attention, but that's okay because Mortensen casts character actors who we can recognize as a certain type of dude the moment they show up: Danny Huston as a swaggering mayor, W. Earl Brown as a sympathetic barkeep, Garrett Dillahunt as a wealthy asshole called Jeffries. (Yes, Brown and Dillahunt played the quintessential versions of those characters in David Milch's brilliant Deadwood, and Mortensen can't clear that bar, but I don’t know that anyone could.)

The present-day story finds a grieving Holger – who’s grudgingly become the sheriff of his little town – on a collision course with Jeffries’ adult son Weston (Solly McLeod), who’s introduced in the middle of a drunken rampage. Exactly where that fits into the timeline will become clear as the film goes on, but the pull of the past is more important, explaining why all these people have ended up where they have – and making us wonder what Holger has left to live for without his beloved. That’s a new wrinkle for this sort of picture, and I was pretty happy for it.

Shout! Studios isn’t selling its Blu-ray of The Dead Don’t Hurt as a special edition, but that’s what we get: The “making-of featurette” runs over an hour, and turns out to be a comprehensive production documentary, while the conversation between Mortensen and Jane Campion – who cast him in The Portrait of a Lady almost thirty years ago – is a comfortable 45-minute chat about art and ideas between two old friends that takes them down all sorts of unexpected avenues. (My favorite digression is Mortensen explaining that he researched the genre by going into a video store in a Queensland mall and buying all their Western DVDs “except for the repeats”).

A few brief deleted scenes are also included, but only one – which complicates the character of Weston by showing him sober, and acting downright decently to Vivienne – feels essential. I can see why Mortensen cut it, but I can also see why he wrote it in the first place.

The other new release I want to cover this week is Severin’s elaborate special edition of Scala!!!, which comes with the unwieldy subtitle Or, The Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How it Influenced a Mixed-Up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits.

Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s delightful documentary is, as the phrase goes, exactly what it says on the tin – a tribute to the London repertory cinema that ran from 1978 to 1993, when the repressive scolds of the Thatcher government provoked a wild outpouring of art from every direction. Nestled in seedy Kings Cross, the Scala served as a nexus point for cineastes seeking something transgressive and extraordinary, and a launching pad for future filmmakers. Co-director Giles was the programme manager for a time, and she and journalist Catterall aren’t chasing nostalgia so much as trying to demonstrate the value of rep houses as essential community services. I may be somewhat biased here, but I think they’re onto something.

Scala!!! packs a universe of counterculture inspiration into its 96 minutes, catching up with such former patrons and current well-wishers as John Waters, Ben Wheatley, Mary Harron, Isaac Julien, Peter Strickland, Thurston Moore, Ralph Brown, Kim Newman and Nick Kent, who attest to the venue’s legendary status with stories of discovery, connection and celebration. The Scala had been famously disreputable long before this incarnation – it had been a full-on X-certificate grindhouse just a few years earlier – but its tatty décor and faded glory were perfectly suited to the punk aesthetic that Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren had just unleashed on the world.

Also these guys had just been there in 1972, when it was the Kings Cross Theatre, and that energy clearly lingered.

The result was a unique moment of cultural intersection, with all sorts of people gathering to see all sorts of pictures. From Powell and Pressburger revivals to legendary all-night horror festivals, with a constant churn of arty shorts and edgy genre works in between, the Scala was a haven for the odd – and, as Giles and Catterall demonstrate, an incubator for the next generation of artists. Even the means of its demise, an unlicensed screening of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, was an exhortation to champion art whatever the cost. God bless everyone who ever worked there.

Apparently not exhausted after last month’s incredible second volume of All the Haunts Be Ours, Severin has prepared another deeply researched and beautifully curated special edition for Scala!!! – a three-disc monster that expands the frame of the documentary by looking deeper into its world.

Disc One is devoted to the feature, supplementing it with commentary from Giles and Catterall, footage of its premiere at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival and extended interviews with Waters, Harron, Moore and Kent; other goodies include two shorter documentaries about the Scala (from 1990 and 1992), a tour of the cinema’s archive and a selection of animated material.

Disc Two assembles a representative Scala shorts program, with newsreels, comedies and outré experiments from 1968 to 1991 – all of which actually did screen at the cinema. I had no idea Viv Albertine of The Slits made a sci-fi comedy called Coping with Cupid at the BFI, and now I have it on my shelf. That’s a very pleasant surprise.

Disc Three feels like a very Severin production, digging into the Scala’s reputation as a bloody great time. It’s anchored by two new documentaries from Kier-La Janisse and Jasper Sharp. Janisse’s The Art of the Calendar is a celebration of the nuts and bolts of rep-cinema programming, where idiosyncratic choices can make or break a venue, while Sharp’s Splatterfest Exhumed expands on the stories of the 1990 horror festival that put the Scala at the forefront of the global horror boom, and flew in the face of the UK’s “video nasty” restrictions.

And if that’s not enough, this platter throws in more shorts – Buddy Giovinazzo’s Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie, Paul Hart-Wilden’s Horrorshow, Stéphane Ambiel’s Mongolitos and two cuts of Josh Becker’s Cleveland Smith: Bounty Hunter, all with audio commentary – and a recording of splatter legend H.G. Lewis’ 1989 appearance at the cinema. The package even includes a souvenir ticket stub; short of including a bag of sweet and salty popcorn, Severin thought of everything. I am so, so happy to live in a world where releases like this are still possible. You should be too.

I have one more title to tackle this week, and if it didn’t play the Scala at some point I’ll be shocked. Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Werner Herzog’s fevered 1972 biopic of the 16^th century Spanish conquistador who declared himself a deity and set out to claim all of South America for himself (starting with Peru, as one does) is a midnight movie in every sense of the term, a thrilling, brutal work of art resting on the squared shoulders of an utterly committed Klaus Kinski.

It’s one of the actor’s most intense performances, which is really saying something … and given the stories Herzog shares in his documentary My Best Fiend, it’s even more amazing that both the director and his star survived the shoot. Have you seen My Best Fiend? You should see My Best Fiend.

You should also see Aguirre, which is among Herzog’s finest work. It’s a gripping, almost nauseatingly compelling study of charismatic leadership and manic delusion, and half a century later it also feels like Herzog’s prediction of his entire career. Ends and means, and all that.

Mastered from a new scan of the original camera negative, Shout’s 4K edition offers a vastly improved presentation of the feature without overcorrecting for the expectations of the digital age; the odd blemish or scratch is left intact, as is natural film grain. HDR and Dolby Vision expand the color gamut but don’t drift into an exaggerated version of the film’s palette. (It’s like watching a fresh print, which is not an experience any of us would have had on the rep circuit.)

The soundtrack is similarly un-prettified, using the same 5.1 and 2.0 German mixes (and the 2.0 English dub) that appeared on Shout’s previous Blu-ray release. And while I can see the appeal of an Atmos remix for this movie – imagine the soundstage a jungle can offer! – I’m glad they didn’t do it. Herzog would consider it a distraction.

There are no new extras on this disc, but the two Herzog audio commentaries from the earlier Blu – one recorded in English with critic Norman Hill for Anchor Bay’s 2000 DVD, the other in German with distributor Laurens Straub for Kinowelt’s 2007 disc – are included on both the 4K and (remastered) Blu-ray. I know I say this a lot but if you love this movie, you’re going to want this. Sorry.

The Dead Don't Hurt and Scala!!! are now available on Blu-ray from Shout! Studios and Severin Films, respectively; Aguirre, The Wrath of God is available in a 4K/BD combo from Shout! Studios.

Coming soon: The Ramones, P.J. Soles, Lili Taylor and Christopher Walken in 4K. So, more stuff you’re going to want.