Magic, Myth & Mutilation: The Micro-Budget Cinema of Michael J. Murphy, 1967–2015

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This new commentary by media historian Johnny Walter is almost the flipside of the above, playing more like a slightly staccato TED talk on the film and its place in the independent horror cinema of the day.

The first script in this collection set out the standard movie rather than stage play format is spread over 131 pages. Winner of a Movie Maker Ten Best Competition Gold Star Award, this is probably Murphy's most narratively straightforward film yet.Two versions of the film have been supplied for your edification here, the original 109 minute version and an 88 minute recut by Murphy himself that removes twenty minutes of footage to create a tighter version. Murphy is so entertaining and so full of life here that is seems inconceivable that he had fewer than four weeks to live when this was filmed. Good-looking 21-year-old Paul (Russell Hall) hires a holiday apartment in Greece and starts a friendship with his older married landlady Gill (Carol Aston), one that quickly develops into something more.

While his earliest works were shot on an 8mm home movie camera, he quickly moved up to 16mm film, and later to mini-DV video and eventually HD.Although this means the majority of the film has been lost, the surviving 16mm reversal film elements have been scanned in 2K and are presented here unedited and mute (the soundtrack was to be added later) to at least give an idea how the original Skare would have looked, making for a fascinating comparison with the later video-shot version. Personally, I'm aching to see the film that Murphy was planning to make next, which was to star Patrick Olliver as an ageing John Holmes style porn star who wanted to become a serious actor, and was set to be titled Pornophobia. We then get onto the credits for every single film in this set, a section that proved invaluable to me when writing this monstrous review.

Includes a snippet of a discussion between a group of crew members in which the sort of middle-class xenophobe who would nowadays be parroting Tory anti-refugee propaganda tries to tell his more humanist colleague that not being racist is actually racist. This will see me swim against the prevailing tide a little, as while Murphy's minor cult status is built around his horror works, for me, there are far more interesting films in his oeuvre. I should note that it's one that the interview material in this set tends to suggest that Murphy shared.

Another rather nifty trailer, this time selling Invitation to Hell and The Last Night as a 25 Year Anniversary double-bill but using the sort of digital effects unavailable when the films were made to combine and animate clips and add some neat graphics.