Also released this month...
Shining like a beacon in the depressing pre-Christmas landscape of mouldy old video collections and dodgy concert films is Jane's Addiction's Three Days SANCTUARY
Filmed by Carter Smith and Kevin Ford on the band's 1997 Relapse tour, it's a fully-realised piece of rock cinema that dramatically transcends the limitations of your average tour documentary.
Paul Schrader deals with intriguing, uncomfortable issues here, but with, for him, a slightly saddening conservatism. Telling the story of Bob Crane, the '50s star of Hogan's Heroes, whose career nosedived as he became increasingly addicted to filming his own sexploits, it's initially vibey and buzzing, with a terrific turn from Greg Kinnear, but later lapses into soggy moralising and mopey depression.
There are few bands, it seems, as disaster-prone as Shack. Ravaged by narcotics, crippled by debt (the sleevenotes to their third album HMS Fable infamously thanked Cash Converters) and nearly torpedoed by missing master tapes and missed opportunities, this Liverpool outfit clearly monopolise the anti-Midas touch. Matters were not helped three years ago when London Records pulled the contractual plug as well.
DIRECTED BY Ridley Scott
STARRING Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Hatry Dean Stanton
Opened October 31, Cert 15, 115 mins
Scott's franchise-launching 1979 future-shocker is one of those rare, pure, primal films that works as both highbrow modern myth and trouser-soiling midnight movie.