Extraterrestrial: Keep Watching the Lies

Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo’s Extraterrestrial is itself something of a foreign object from space: An ostensible sci-fi movie about an alien invasion that turns out to be, instead, a romantic comedy. Except that such a description does it no real justice. The sci-fi element is so incidental that even to mention it might set up unmet expectations. Vigalondo seems to specialize in this sort of bait and switch, though, as evidenced by his masterful previous film, Timecrimes. (For a fun chat with him, read my pal Simon Abrams’s interview here.) And Extraterrestrial, while very funny, is ultimately about a subject so deeply serious – the human capacity for love and deceit – that to call it a comedy doesn’t really feel right. It’s somewhere between a bedroom farce and a Biblical epic, with lies as its currency. Do I have your attention yet?

SEE THIS MOVIE: Reign of Terror (aka The Black Book) Now Available on DVD

Thanks to Glenn Kenny for alerting me (and the rest of the world) to the fact that one of Anthony Mann’s most neglected masterpieces, Reign of Terror, aka The Black Book, is now available in a nice new burn-on-demand DVD from Columbia Classics, which you can order through the fine folks at the Warner Archive. This is joyous news – the film has wallowed in some strange obscurity for years, not just because it was public domain (and hence available in a lot of crappy, fly-by-night editions but no good ones) but also because it’s a bit of an unclassifiable oddity.

Mann would, of course, eventually gain notoriety for his corrosive, psychological Westerns (The Man from Laramie, Man of the West, The Naked Spur, etc.) and darkly operatic historical epics (El Cid, Fall of the Roman Empire), but his early career took off thanks to a series of low-budget film noirs, many of them made with the great cinematographer John Alton. Reign of Terror was one of these, but it’s not just a noir; it’s also a period piece. It’s a stylized adventure set amid the chaos of the French Revolution as well as an over-the-top gangster movie where the chief baddie is Maximilian Robespierre, and where the plot is basically a hard-boiled re-imagining of his downfall.