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Product Description
High melodrama, creeping insanity and barely contained delirium abound in this dizzying tribute to the high tension thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock from director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface, Dressed to Kill)
Michael Courtland is a Southern gentleman who seems to have everything - A successful business, a beautiful wife and an adoring young daughter until a botched kidnapping tears his world apart leaving him widowed, bereaved and bereft. Years later on a trip to Italy, he meets a woman with an uncanny resemblance to his late wife but all is not how it appears as a twisted conspiracy threatens to unhinge his mental shackles, sending him to the knife edge of MADNESS!
A master class in mounting unease and clammy palmed claustrophobia, Obsession is a classic 70s thriller with an evil twist that will leave you speechless.
ARROWDROME IS A FLEAPIT SELECTED LIBRARY OF CULT FILMS; VIOLENT, HORRIFIC, SLEAZY, EXPLOITATIVE. TO EXPLORE STEP IN TO THE CULT ARENA! EVERY ARROWDROME RELEASE INCLUDES A REVERSIBLE SLEEVE OF ORIGINAL ARTWORK AND A COLLECTOR S BOOKLET!
ALSO INCLUDES INTERVIEWS WITH DIRECTOR BRIAN DE PALMA, STARS CLIFF ROBERTSON AND GENEVIEVE BUJOLD AND MORE, ORIGINAL TRAILER + A NEW BOOKLET BY AUTHOR BRAD STEVENS!
Review
The Guardian
Best label 2011
Arrow
"It's often the smaller-funded labels that do the best work. Arrow has released marvellous discs of many of cinema's classics, such as Bicycle Thieves, Rififi and Les Diaboliques, but it's for their horror releases that they truly excel. The more respectable directors like George A Romero and Dario Argento get their due here, but Arrow also pull out all the stops for such (unfairly) lesser regarded Gore-teurs as Lucio Fulci and Frank Henenlotter. Blu-rays of Fulci classics The Beyond and City Of The Living Dead show that the films are far more atmospheric and better made than they ever appeared before, and for Henenlotter (with the imminent Frankenhooker disc) you get extensive extras that cover the rarely examined scene of low-budget New York film-makers and the lost grindhouses of Times Square and 42nd Street."
--The Guardian
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Cliff Robertson's Obsession is for Genevieve Bujold's exact double of his kidnapped and murdered wife of twenty years earlier, but the title could just as easily stand for director Brian De Palma's over-fondness for Hitchcock and Paul Schrader's penchant for remaking The Searchers (complete with "Will he kill her/Will he kiss her?" ending). It's great fun as long as you haven't seen Vertigo - and when this was released in 1976, Hitchcock's masterpiece had been out of distribution for nearly two decades - but the similarities in both style and content become very apparent of you have. At one point they were even more pronounced with an unfilmed `fourth act' that saw Robertson descending further into further madness.
Nonetheless, the director's visual flourishes and audacious love of the purely cinematic in his camera movements, all the more sumptuous in this 2.35:1 widescreen DVD transfer, and Bernard Herrmann's brilliant penultimate score, with its magnificent final waltz theme, carry you along despite the air of familiarity. Anchor Bay's original release includes a featurette on the film and the original trailer.
Nonetheless, the director's visual flourishes and audacious love of the purely cinematic in his camera movements, all the more sumptuous in this 2.35:1 widescreen DVD transfer, and Bernard Herrmann's brilliant penultimate score, with its magnificent final waltz theme, carry you along despite the air of familiarity. Anchor Bay's original release includes a featurette on the film and the original trailer.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Convoluted, obsessive and intriguing movie. Obsession takes some of the sickness inherent in Hitchcock's Vertigo and deepens it. Cliff Robertson's wife and daughter are killed in a botched kidnapping, years later he meets and becomes obsessed with her double, Genevieve Bujold. The solution to the mystery is obvious, but shocking.
Paul Schrader wrote a very long and detailed script, but fell out with Depalma when the the director truncated it. Really this film is driven by the visuals and Bernard Herrmann's magnificent score. It's not a writers movie. I love the way DePalma uses music in place of dialogue and ambient sound. It may even suite his gliding visual pyrotechnics better than it matched Hitchcock's tighter technique. It becomes the story rather than the means of creating tension. Personally, even though it is in some ways a rip off, I prefer Obsession to Vertigo, because the ending isn't as concrete and also because Depalma benefited from a better understanding of how to use colour. Aside from Rope, I firmly believe that Hitchcock's cinematic brilliance was at its best in Black and White (Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Psycho and Rebbecca for me are the real masterpieces).
Arrow have done a great job with this release.
Paul Schrader wrote a very long and detailed script, but fell out with Depalma when the the director truncated it. Really this film is driven by the visuals and Bernard Herrmann's magnificent score. It's not a writers movie. I love the way DePalma uses music in place of dialogue and ambient sound. It may even suite his gliding visual pyrotechnics better than it matched Hitchcock's tighter technique. It becomes the story rather than the means of creating tension. Personally, even though it is in some ways a rip off, I prefer Obsession to Vertigo, because the ending isn't as concrete and also because Depalma benefited from a better understanding of how to use colour. Aside from Rope, I firmly believe that Hitchcock's cinematic brilliance was at its best in Black and White (Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Psycho and Rebbecca for me are the real masterpieces).
Arrow have done a great job with this release.
13 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Based on a very smart screenplay directly written for the screen by Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma, OBSESSION is, in my opinion, the masterpiece of the director of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. The movie can be read at several different levels but is primarily an excellent thriller treating of the guiltiness felt by a man who failed to rescue his wife and his daughter when kidnapped in New Orleans.
The key of OBSESSION lies in the scene of the first encounter between Courtland and Sandra, in the medieval church in which the hero married his first wife. Sandra is trying to restore old paintings that happen to have been themselves painted over older paintings. Asked by Courtland if the new paintings will be erased, Sandra answers that it's not useful to destroy them in order to bring into light the original ones.
So OBSESSION is clearly an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO but is also a movie of its own who deserves credit. I remember that the sumptuous travellings of De Palma's camera were, in the seventies, rather unusual in the american production and generated numerous critics. One can only observe, 25 years later, that De Palma new aesthetics has inspired a whole generation of american filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg for instance, who has understood that a camera movement could produce emotions in the viewer's heart.
A DVD zone your library.
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