griggs's - Rented List

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Pasolini's final and most controversial film has been banned censored and reviled the world over since it's first release. The film is based on the Marquis de Sade's novel '120 Days of Sodom', with the setting transposed to Mussolini's miniature Fascist Republic of Salo, Italy in 1944.

The film's content and imagery is extreme, and it retains the power to shock, repel and distress a quarter of a century on. 'Salo' remains a cinematic milestone - culturally significant, politically vital and visually stunning.

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In the dusty heat of the American southwest, innocent country boy Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) is seduced by a beautiful girl (Jenny Wright) into joining a roving pack of vicious drifters, lead by the enigmatic Jesse (Lance Henriksen). But this is no ordinary band of outlaws.

Caleb is now trapped in a nightmare of soulless evil that waits in the shadows, hellish mayhem that thrives on blood; the horror that begins Near Dark.

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When Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) decide to go to a party with their friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel), they are totally unaware that their world is about to be torn apart in the most unimaginably brutal way possible.

Plunged headlong into a nightmarish world of darkness, where an act of extreme sexual and physical violence will serve as the spark for yet more violence, Marcus and Pierre soon discover what they themselves are capable of.

Research scientist Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) believes other states of consciousness are as real as everyday reality. Using sensory deprivation, then adding powerful, hallucinogenic drugs, he explores these altered states...and endures experiences that make madness seem a blessing.

"They're Here", playful at first...but not for long. A storm erupts, a tree attacks and little Carol Anne Freeling (Heather O'Rourke) is whisked onto a spectral void. As her family confronts horrors galore, something else is here too: a new benchmark in Hollywood ghost stories.

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From the mind behind 'Evangelion' comes a hit larger than life. When a massive, gilled monster emerges from the deep and tears through the city, the government scrambles to save its citizens.

A rag-tag team of volunteers cuts through a web of red tape to uncover the monster's weakness and its mysterious ties to a foreign superpower. But time is not on their side - the greatest catastrophe to ever befall the world is about to evolve right before their very eyes.

In modern-day London, a sex criminal known as 'The Necktie Murderer' has the police on alert, and in typical Hitchcok fashion, the trail is leading to an innocent man, who must know now elude the law and prove his innocence by finding the real murderer.

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Brian De Palma's inspired rock 'n' roll fusion of Faust, The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray boasts an Oscar-nominated score by Paul Williams, who also stars as an evil record producer who not only steals the work of composer/performer Winslow Leach (William Finley) but gets him

locked up in Sing Sing - and that's not the worst that happens to him along the way.
Few revenge scenarios have ever been so amply justified, but the film is also constantly aware of the satirical possibilities offered by the 1970s music industry, exemplified by Gerrit Graham's hilariously camp glam-rock star. Jessica Harper (Suspiria) appears in her first major role as the naive but ambitious singer, on whom Winslow secretly dotes.
Prodigiously inventive both musically and visually, this is one of De Palma's most entertaining romps, not least because it was so clearly a labour of love.

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Deborah Kerr (in the performance of her career) plays the emotionally repressed vicar's daughter who takes up a job as a governess to two seemingly angelic orphans.

Gradually coming to believe that the children are possessed by the perverse spirits of their former governess and her sadistic lover, she begins to see manifestations of the ghosts prowling the huge gothic mansion of Bly House. Director Jack Clayton sustains a superbly haunting atmosphere throughout the film, and like James' original work, cleverly retains the ambiguity of wether the ghosts are real or the products of the governess's fevered imagination. Aided by Freddie Francis's exquisitely inventive and atmospheric CinemaScope photography, we, like the governess, are never quite sure what unspoken horrors are lurking beyond the edge of the frame and are kept guessing until the film's tragic conclusion.

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An apartment with an unhappy past, in a building filled with faintly sinister residents, sets the stage for filmmaker Roman Polanski's riveting thriller 'The Tenant'.

Polanski plays Trelkovsky, a quiet, timid file clerk whose unremarkable life becomes Increasingly overshadowed with dread and fear after he moves into his new home. Adding to his paranoia are the building's other occupants, who do nothing to alleviate his growing obsession with the untimely, tragic fate of the apartment's previous tenant. Is Trelkovsky's dread truly justified - or is it simply the result of his seemingly disintegrating mental state?

Haunted by past tragedies, a brilliant plastic surgeon sets out to create the perfect synthetic skin and to do so he needs the perfect living guinea pig. It is their wildly volatile, surreal and sensual relationship that fashions this "ravishing must-see movie with a must-keep-secret twist"

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Gaspar Noe, director of the hugely controversial 'Irreversible', 'Enter the Void' and 'Love', makes a triumphant return with 'Climax' - a visually dazzling feast of music and mayhem, and perhaps his most critically acclaimed work to date.

Following a successful rehearsal, a dance troupe set about celebrating with a party. But when it becomes apparent that someone has spiked the sangria, the joyous atmosphere soon transforms into a nightmarish hellscape of violence and twisted carnality as the dancers begin to turn on each other in an orgiastic frenzy. Inspired equally by the worlds of modern dance and esoteric arthouse-horror (chief among them, Dario Argento's Suspiria and Andrzej Zutawski's Possession), 'Climax' - which pulses towards its astonishing conclusion with a thumping score by the likes of Daft Punk, Aphex Twin and Gary Numan - illustrates a director at the height of his hallucinatory filmmaking powers.

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Twenty-five years after a streak of brutal murders shocked the quiet town of Woodsboro, a terrifying new killer resurrects the Ghostface mask. As the deaths mount, Woodsboro's new targets must seek help from the survivors of the original Ghostface attacks.

Now, only Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), former sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette), and reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) can find a way to stop the filler when everyone is a suspect.

Still scarred by the trauma he endured as a child at the Overlook Hotel, Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) faces the ghosts of the past when he meets Abra (Kyliegh Curran), a courageous teen who desperately needs his help - and who possesses a powerful extrasensory ability called the "shine".

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When some very creepy things start happening around school, the kids at Herrington High make a chilling discovery that confirms their worst suspicions: their teachers really are from another planet! As mind-controlling parasites rapidly begin spreading from the faculty to the students' bodies, it's

ultimately up to the few who are left - an unlikely collection of loners, leaders, nerds and jocks - to save the world from alien domination!