During the early years of the VHS boom movie lovers were suddenly able to access hundreds of films they had always wanted to see but weren’t available on TV or had never played movie houses in their town. Many were titles they had only read or heard about from fellow movie buffs. So it is no wonder that VHS became the dominant format in the home entertainment industry for awhile. I certainly credit VHS with introducing me to countless B-movies, forgotten Hollywood pictures and genre films but also introducing me to movies from outside the U.S., especially those from Canada. Among some of my favorites are Circle of Power aka Brainwash aka Naked Weekend (1981), a disturbing drama about a corporate retreat weekend for employees led by a dominatrix-like motivator (Yvette Mimieux); Siege aka Self Defense (1983), in which a small group of people are trapped in an apartment and attacked by crazed vigilantes; Family Viewing (1987), Atom Egoyan’s hypnotic drama about alienation; and Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Guy Maddin’s bizarre debut feature. These were all surprising revelations to me but the one that still haunts me is Pin aka Pin: A Plastic Nightmare (1988).
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Beauty and the Sea Devil

Science fiction and fantasy films have always been a popular staple of Russian cinema but, during the first half of the 20th century, very few of these genre films found theatrical distribution in the U.S. Among the handful that did make to American screens are Yakow Protazanov’s Aelita, the Queen of Mars (1924), Vasily Zhuravlyou’s Cosmic Journey (1936), Planeta Bur aka Planet of Storms (1962), which producer/director Roger Corman raided twice, using footage from it for Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), and Ilya Muromets (1956), an epic fairy tale adventure from director Aleksandr Ptushko that was released in an edited, English-dubbed version entitled The Sword and the Dragon. Some Russian fantasy titles later popped up on American television and second-run houses in poor quality English language dubs like Sampo aka The Day the Earth Froze (1959) but my all-time favorite from this period is Chelovek-Ambibiya (English title: Amphibian Man, 1961), co-directed by Vladimir Chebotaryov and Gennadiy Kazqanskiy.
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