Of the many studio sins that led to the t WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike, one of the most egregious—at least from a preservation standpoint—is the practice of pulling entire completed series from a streaming platform. It shouldn’t be shocking, but it’s still painful to see the people in charge stating through their actions that, as far as they’re concerned, creativity only matters insofar as it produces capital. Beyond that, it means nothing to them. That’s how you get situations like Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies getting two Emmy nominations, but only being available to watch in the form of YouTube clips because Paramount+ yanked it for a tax write-off at the end of June.

Streaming series are outside of Shelf Life’s purview (for now). But, just as the WGA taking a stand against AI is a bellwether for similar fights in other industries, the abrupt erasure of shows like Rise of the Pink Ladies is a sign of more to come. The working people of Hollywood are standing together to protect themselves from empty suits who make $20 kajillion a second while insisting that others labor for scraps. I’ve been a WGA member since 2018, and while digital-media are not currently on strike, I my striking film and television colleagues one hundred percent.

Neither SAG nor the WGA are calling for viewers to boycott cinemas or streaming services, so there’s no need to curb your consumption—especially of work that was completed long before the strikes began—just yet. We’ve got the answers for many of your most pertinent questions in our Strike FAQ. One way you can show your for striking writers and actors is by helping them survive months without a paycheck—donations can be made through SAG, the WGA or the Entertainment Community Fund.

Oldboy

4K restoration in US theaters August 16 from NEON.

Twenty years on, NEON—the company that released Parasite in the US, and whose co-founder Tim League credits Park and Oldboy for inspiring the creation of Fantastic Fest—is re-releasing Oldboy in theaters in a new 4K restoration. The film’s purple-and-green color grade really pops in the restored version, as does the aforementioned dinginess. Choi’s feral performance, meanwhile, needs no digital upgrade—although that live squid does look especially slimy in 4K.

Video Diary of a Lost Girl

On Blu-ray now from American Genre Film Archive, via Vinegar Syndrome.

The first home-video release of Video Diary of a Lost Girl was on VHS tapes that were hand-dubbed and decorated by its co-writer/​director/​editor/​production designer/​effects artist. That tells you a lot about what kind of filmmaker Lindsay Denniberg is.

Lindsay and I met sorting through waist-high piles of VHS tapes in the back room of Odd Obsession Video in Chicago, a space overflowing with the bounty of video-store-going-out-of-business sales. There was no heat, so at the time in December you could only stay back there for a couple of hours at a time. In between, we’d stand in the heated retail space and talk about horror movies. Lindsay’s Video Diary of a Lost Girl had just screened at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and she had a screening coming up in New York. She was obsessed with menstrual motifs and Vincent Price. She was the coolest person I had ever met.

Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a bloody, bonkers hybrid of a slacker rom-com about a girl who works at an adult video store and a horror movie about that same girl’s life as an immortal daughter of Lillith who must consume the soul of a man through sex once a month or she’ll bleed to death. Robyn describes it as a “deeply cute little weirdo video-girl experiment full of femme feels—essentially, imagine if Liquid Sky was a rom-com.” Axm elaborates: “DIY sleazy neon punk vaporwave horror-fantasy-romance about having to f—k rapists to death or else your period makes you bleed out. That’s my sh–t.”

Now that Video Diary has screened at Alamo Drafthouse theaters through Weird Wednesday and Fantastic Fest, everybody’s got their own mash-up of adjectives and references to describe the vibe: “DIY video-store horror nerd electroclash green-screen lesbian-separatist student-film stoner-trip.” “Equal parts silent melodrama rental tapes, Dr. Caligari (1989), Flaming Ears, and a more blacklight-inflected Pink Narcissus.” “If Cecelia Condit made a Ginger Snaps sequel.” It was influenced equally by German Expressionism and shot-on-video trash, and was constructed with scraps scrounged from the empty studios of art students on summer break.

This is a very special piece of work, and it makes me so happy that it’s finally getting a commercial release on Blu-ray from AGFA after ten years in the distribution wilderness. Lindsay and her co-writer (and Video Diary star) Chris Shields have been working on a follow-up, Killer Makeover, since 2015—hopefully it won’t take ten more years to get that one out into the world.

David Robert Mitchell’s sophomore feature has proven to be one of the richer horror texts of the 21st century—and not just because its central metaphor is more effective than any health-class lecture about STDs. There’s a vocal contingent that likes to pick apart the logical inconsistencies in Mitchell’s premise, which is a backwards compliment; these theorizers wouldn’t care about what happens if “It” boards a plane if the movie was forgettable trash.

The closer you look at It Follows—as is the mission of Second Sight’s new deluxe 4K UHD—the less logic matters. Little details deliberately place the story out of time, in an unsettling alternate dimension constructed from vague memories of horror films from the ’70s and ’80s. Most of the weird touches are explained by either dream logic (the red heels) or atemporal sleight of hand (the famous clamshell e-reader that so intrigues Letterboxd reviewers)—but again, trying to justify these details and not just experience them is missing the point.

What is the point, then? A feeling of unbearable dread. Incomprehensible, inescapable evil, like Michael Myers in the original Halloween (to which this is often compared). As Todd writes: “It’s out there. It will find you. It doesn’t have to run or jog. It walks at a steady pace. It might change the way it looks. It’s relentless. It’s brutal. It will follow you, until it f—kin’ kills you.”

I have an essay in the booklet for the Second Sight release, which is a real honor. (Anne Billson, Martyn Conterio, Kat Ellinger, Eugenio Ercolani, Matt Glasby, Kat Hughes and Jennie Kermode also contributed.) The film comes upgraded in a new 4K master, which isn’t a “restoration” exactly—it’s been less than a decade since release, after all—but does come approved by the director.

Chameleon Street

On Blu-ray August 8 from Arbelos Films.

Joshua puts it well, saying Chameleon Street is, “very funny, even as it exudes a strong, disconcerting undercurrent of darkness and anger throughout. Wendell B. Harris Jr. plays a narcissistic, terrible, charming, handsome cad; an infiltrator of higher, whiter spaces; a revolutionary laying claim to his own reparations; a societal troll; possibly even a high-functioning sociopath.” The filmmaking, full of stylish diversions and eloquent, self-aware riffing, feels ahead of its time as well. Jerry sums it all up: “Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s one and only directing credit to date is an incredibly sharp, boldly exploratory work… puts things like Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can to shame.”

Primetime Panic 2

Blu-ray collection available August 15 from Fun City Editions.

“Issue of the week” made-for-TV movies are a phenomenon that’s just a little bit older than myself, and therefore something I learned about primarily through parodies. According to comedy bits, these movies are over-the-top and hysterical, the kind of thing where kids light themselves on fire after taking one toke of a t. So imagine my surprise watching three of them—in a set called Primetime Panic 2, no less!—and finding them compelling and only a little bit snort-worthy.

The titles in the Blu-ray set, which comes from Shelf Life stalwarts Fun City Editions, are held together by the participation of executive producer Michael Jaffe, a specialist in primetime TV movies-of-the-week. That genre is currently endangered (except on Lifetime, but that’s a whole other column), but The Seduction of Gina (pictured above), The Death of Richie and Incident at Crestridge all come from its heyday in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

A sympathetic, pro-therapy thread runs through all three: Gina (Valerie Bertinelli) becomes a gambling addict because she has so little control over her life, while troubled teen Richie (Robby Benson) is a product of his repressive home environment. Incident at Crestridge deviates from the cautionary-tale format, telling the story of a woman taking on the old boys’ club in a small Wyoming town.

Letterboxd seem as taken aback as I was at the maturity and nuance in these films, calling them “a couple steps above a typical TV movie”, “genuinely decent” and “a very different experience than I was anticipating, and I mean that mostly in a good way”. If that sounds like faint praise, it is. But that’s what happens when you go in expecting to mock something, and find yourself genuinely engaging with it.