The Grandier High Witches!

We've got updates to yesterday's movie-nerd-rupturing news that Ken Russell's 1971 masterpiece The Devils has gotten a 4K restoration and it will premiere at Cannes later this month -- it's going to play in U.S. movie theaters too! It's getting a one week theatrical engagment on october 1th and there's the poster above -- the poster calls this "The Director's Cut" and they sent out more detail via their press release:

"Assembled from the original camera negative, this new 4K restoration presents Ken Russell's definitive vision of THE DEVILS by referencing the edit he privately constructed in 2004. KEN RUSSELL'S THE DEVILS is the uncut and unfiltered theatrical experience that Russell always envisioned - and the first time the film will be presented restored and in 4K... This new 4K restoration of Ken Russell's masterpiece was assembled from the original camera negative. The film's sound has been remastered from original English Composite 35mm Mag Film, transferred at 96kHz, plus other original film elements in selected spots as needed. "

Granted it's only been twenty-four hours but this news is still breaking my brain -- I can't believe the White Whale has been speared! While not confirming confirming a physical media release I hugely doubt we need to worry about that at this point -- now that it's not a one time Cannes thing I fully expect a 4K disc down the road. Hopefully in time for the holidays so every one of us sickos can gift our families The Devils in their stockings! Anyway they also sent along some images from the restored film and prepare to have your eyes blown back through your heads after the jump...

HOLY! F*CKING!! HELL!!!

Yes I realize that's the French poster for Ken Russell's The Devils there, but that's the poster I actually own and which hangs on my bedroom wall, so that's the one I'm using to share this incredible news I really wondered whether I'd ever be able to share in my entire life -- this movie, long banned and buried by the studio, has officially gotten a 4K restoration from Warnes Brothers and it will be premiering at Cannes this month. HELL HATH OFFICIALLY FROZEN OVER, Y'ALL. 

ME REACTING TO THIS 'THE DEVILS' NEWS

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) May 5, 2026 at 4:10 PM

There have actually been little whispers of this for the past several weeks so I'm not exactly crapping my pants here as I totally one hundred percent would have if this had come completely out of nowhere -- and to the people who were doing the whispering I can only say thank you, since nobody wants to crap their pants. Okay maybe our President does. But not me! I can safely say I am not a person who wants to crap my pants. Now do you see why you keep coming back here? You come for news about a notorious film classic that's been hidden away for literal decades and instead I go on a coprophilia tangent. Keepin' y'all on ya toes, baby! Just like Ken Russell did! 

For real though this is incredible fucking news. I have a DVD from the U.K. (or Germany?) of the movie, but obviously a 4K upgrade showcasing this film's tremendous beauty -- those Derek Jarman sets, my god! --  along with the fact that this is apparently trhe longest cut assembled since its release... well this is the movie news of the year, hands down. I know the version of the film I saw at MoMA ages ago before Russell died (he was there, I shared the air with Ken Russell, I am still not over that) was a longer version of the film than I'd seen before, but I'm terrible at keeping track of what cut's from what version et cetera. So how much of the "Rape of Christ" sequence has been dug up??? I'm agog y'all. AGOG. While I go on agogging below is a doc I uploaded onto YouTube thirteen years back that shows some of the "lost" footage (it's age-restricted cuz NSFW obviously):

Nightmares & Fire: Criterion's Month of Violence

Every year October always has my favorite releases from the Criterion Collection -- I think it's the meeting of them ramping up for the holidays plus lots of horror because of Halloween? Anyway they've just announced their October 2025 releases and once again -- my god it's the good shit. Kicking it off they've got Ken Russell's hallucinatory 1980 gem Altered States, which is one of my personal faves -- peak William Hurt turning into a neanderthal after dosing himself with too much psychology? What's not to love? It's Russell at his most bonkers... well okay it's hard to quanitfy "most bonkers" when it comes to Russell but this one's up there. Can't wait to take this in in 4K -- it lands on October 21st.

Next up Guillemo Del Toro's tremendous 2021 noir-carny vision Nightmare Alley is finally finally getting a physical media release (it's a Netflix joint so it hasn't before this) -- I know reactions to this were mixed but I loved it, it's one of my favorite of Del Toro's movies, and I am of the mind that Bradley Cooper gives his best performance to date in it. (aAnd given how much I soured on him otherwise over the past couple of years that's saying something.) Then there's the one title this month I'm unfamiliar with -- Mexican director Arturo Ripstein's 1996 melodrama Deep Crimson -- anyone know it?

Then there are the inevitable 4K upgrades of discs they've released before, but man oh man are these a wild duo of masterpieces -- David Lynch's Twin Peaks prequel Fire Walk With Me and  Georges Franju's 1960 horror classic Eyes Without a Face. You can't go wrong with either of those, which besides being perfect are both gorgeous to look at and will no doubt stun in 4K. Oh and then there's a double dose of David Cronenberg joints -- his most recent film The Shrouds (which hasn't gotten nearly enough love if you ask me) and his 2006 neo-noir A History of Violence. The latter has quite the surprising cover -- personally I love it but I feel as if it might be divisive? Thoughts?

The Monkey in 400 Words

Although it'd be neat if he wants to hang out sometime since he seems like a rad dude (just saying) I don't personally know Osgood Perkins, sometimes actor, son of Psycho star Anthony, and the quickly-becoming-his-own-brand horror director of The Blackcoat's Daughter, Longlegs, and my til-now-favorite Gretel & Hansel. And yet it's impossible to not think while watching his latest movie, the Stephen King adpatation The Monkey, that this feels like an extraordinarily personal movie for the man. 

Like I said -- I don't know him. And yet knowing what I do -- having watched him speak eloquently in Bryan Fuller's horror doc Queer For Fear about his closeted father's tumultuous relationship with the character of Norman Bates and his death from AIDS, and also knowing that Osgood's mother, the actress Berry Berenson, was killed in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11 -- the thematic threads of cursed familial chaos passed down patriarchally that thrum though The Monkey feel, you know, fairly pointed! Notable. Of note. Resonant. And then when planes on fire start falling out of the sky? Can you blame me? These thoughts are right there for the taking.

The Monkey also feels the closest Oz has gotten to date to his father's wild late career work -- the absurdly nasty black humor on display here is very close to the Tony-directed Psycho III, or to his father's oh let's say lurid performance in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion. This movie is bleak and pitch-black hearted and finds the absurd pointlessness of human existence to be a ribald punchline. It's of a piece with the Final Destination movies, but if they were less Rube Goldberg and more Albert Camus on acid. 

It also might be, all due apologies to Gretel, my new favorite movie of Oz's. It'll definitely take a second viewing to decide that because The Monkey is so tonally erratic and balls deep wackadoo that it's hard to decide from moment to moment if this shit's anarchic genius or gallumphing mess. Hell maybe it's both! But in a world of so much personality-free I.P.-driven "content", The Monkey feels so bloody particular, so preposterously gonzo, that I must slow-clap it for audacity alone. (If you liked last year's Cuckoo, which I've come to appreciate more and more with distance for how by-its-own-rules it flew, this should also be your cuppa.)

RIP Tina Turner

Two obits in one day here at MNPP is too many already, but having to say that Tina Turner is dead -- that's a hefty bag of bullshit right there. Tina was one of the first stars I knew anything about in this world because inexplicably my father was a huge fan of hers. And I only say that was "inexplicable" because my father is a racist and a wife-abuser -- there was nothing inexplicable about loving Tina; that was easy. And so I did, for my entire life. There was nobody like her and there never will be anybody like her again. Long live the Queen of Rock and Roll. Here is one of my favorite things she ever did, in Ken Russell's film Tommy:

Be-deviled and Be-nipped

The very first thing I saw on Twitter this morning was that nipped-up poster there for Paul Verhoeven's erotic lesbian nun romp Benedetta, which tickled me... but not too much, because I'd already seen that poster awhile back. People were pretending it was new but that beauty ain't new; I remember giggling about it last year, even. But then I realized the poster (and the half-nip) was just a tease and the real show was, cue angel choirs, the trailer! As expected it was announced the film is playing Cannes and so they've gifted us with the first footage, and y'all...

Me watching that BENEDETTA trailer pic.twitter.com/8OvIOwfzDU

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 5, 2021

It's no big surprise that this movie's giving us The Devils vibes -- as much was expect the second it was first rumored. I posted first about this film at the beginning of 2018 when Charlotte Rampling was cast and when it was still called Blessed Virgin -- it's totally living up to the three years of hype based on the trailer right? Even if I did like the original title better. Watch:

This hits Cannes and the entire country of France on the same day, July 9th -- us poor American SOBs will have to wait until who knows. I knew I should've applied for press to Cannes this year. (Dare to dream.) Anyway I find it kind of funny that this trailer has dropped on the same day that my beloved favorite podcasters the Gaylords of Darkness are talking Ken Russell's The Devils -- there's horny nun juice spraying everywhere, yall!

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

To the person who recommended I watch Julian Sands in the 1989 flick Warlock during quarantine I would just like to say... uhh, thanks I guess? I mean it was fine, it has its moments, but like most things I watched while in actual lockdown last spring / summer (before I was going back into my office) it's a bit of a blur now, I have to admit. Of course this scene here at least certainly stands the test of pandemic distraction. But I'm now ahead of myself. The rest of this scene here is right on after the jump...

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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This scene from Psycho III -- which was directed by Norman Bates himself, Mr. Anthony Perkins -- has the feel of an inside joke between Perkins and Alfred Hitchcock being played out. You might recall that it was a huge deal that the original Psycho showed a toilet being flushed...

... supposedly for the very first time on film. Scandal! And so here for his gaudy and 80s Slasher influenced tri-quel Perkins, now in the director's chair, went and one-upped (number two upped?) his ol' pal Hitch -- Tony transplanted the shower murder of the original a couple steps right on over onto the commode itself! That said this one, in that same 80s tradition, is pretty bloody, so I'll take the rest of it after the jump...

Which Is Hotter?

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Ken Russell's film Women in Love starring Alan Bates and Oliver Reed and Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling naked and oh some women too... award winning ones at that... 

... came out in the United States fifty years ago today! That was about four months after it premiered in England, and I imagine it caused quite the scandal here like it did in the UK, given all the famous peen flopping around for the very first time on a mainstream screen. That said I know, I know, basically every single time I post about this movie I post about its naked wrestling scene...

... even though there's plenty else to recommend it -- but one, I am me, (speaking of recommendations I really recommend you scroll through our Bates / Reed archives) and two, I did some checking and I actually have somehow never asked the most basic question of all?

bike tracks

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The film's been given the glorious Criterion treatment and I just went ahead and bought myself a copy today as a treat to me as I sit holed up here at home -- I recommend you, providing you've got rent and food and all of that covered, do the same. The DVD that I have now is pretty shitty, comparatively, and I can't wait to watch it all, top to bottom, in that grand 4K restoration...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Devils (1971)

Grandier: Don't look at me! Look at your city! If your city is destroyed, your freedom is destroyed also... If you would remain free men, fight. Fight them or become their slaves.

Every time Criterion hints at their slate of upcoming releases, like especially with their News Years cryptic puzzle drawings, my mind goes straight to Ken Russell's The Devils. Every time. Will this be the year we finally get the full and uncut 117-minute version of The Devils on blu-ray? It seems like buffoonery, chicanery, yes the both, that in the year 2020 the film as originally intended is still practically impossible to see.

There's a 109-minute version on Shudder now, but I think the infamous so-called "Rape of Christ" sequence remains edited out. I've posted this before (I'm the one who uploaded it onto YouTube) but the documentary Hell on Earth, which talks the movie and has some clips from that sequence, is right here if you're curious:

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Anyway I really should do the man a favor and bring up one of his other movies whenever it's Oliver Reed's birthday -- he was born on this day in 1938 and we do love him so, in everything he did...

... but until I get my uncut Criterion blu-ray of The Devils it's just gonna haunt and nag at me every single time Reed or Ken Russell comes up. And this movie feels especially on point in the mad mad mad mad mad world that we live in today. Nobody got where we were headed better than Ken Russell.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Boy Friend (1971)

Max: Do what Ruby Keeler would do!

Well that is actually terrible advice, since Ruby Keeler was a clomp-footed charlatan. But it is the model turned thinspiration turned actress turned America's Next Top Model judge Twiggy's 70th birthday today and so we're quoting Ken Russell's Busby-homage The Boy Friend to honor her -- it's one of her few movies roles so whatcha gonna do? Twiggy, by my recollection -- I haven't seen this movie in a bit -- was about as good a dancer as Keeler was though, so I guess the conflation's apt. That said we have always liked Twiggy way more than we've ever liked Keeler -- maybe it's that Twigs didn't push the acting thing too hard. What are your thoughts on Twiggy the actress? Here's some footage from this movie to cheer us all up:

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Women in Love (1969)

Gudrun: You don't think one needs
the experience of having been married?
Ursula: Gudrun, do you really think
it need be an experience?
Gudrun: It's bound to be possibly undesirable,
but still an experience of some sort.
Ursula: Not really.
More likely to be the end of experience.
Gudrun: Yes, of course, there is that to consider.

Even though it fights against everything in my nature I'm going to try to post about this movie without posting anything from the naked wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Ollie Reed, because it's the legend Glenda Jackson's 83rd birthday today and she deserves the goddamned attention for once. She is Glenda fucking Jackson, after all! Respect is synonymous. And in serendipitous news I'm actually going to see her on Broadway in King Lear this very weekend thanks to the generosity of a good friend of MNPP. (Thank you, beloved friend.) I'll try not to stop the show in the middle of her performance to ask her about the naked wrestling scene. I'll try. I can't make any promises. It won't be her birthday then.

Great Moments in Movie Shelves #143

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In my review yesterday of this weekend's horror smash A Quiet Place I bemoaned the lack of real honest-to-goodness risk-taking in Hollywood in reference to its not-really-silent soundtrack, but that subject was on my mind anyway after seeing a movie at a Tribeca press screening this past weekend that tackles the very same subject that Ken Russell's Gothic did back in 1986 -- the infamous 1816 meeting between the writers Percy & Mary Shelley and Lord Byron in Geneva -- and does so with... well I can't review it just yet but let's just say I sure do wish we had somebody as nuts as Ken Russell making movies today.

Perhaps I want too much. Even when Ken Russell was alive making movies nobody seemed to know what to do with him then, either. And Gothic particularly has a mixed reputation... which it might deserve? As with anything Ken did he always swung hard, and not every swing landed. But he knew that in the swinging...

... came the fun.

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I Am Link

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--- Sasha's Fierce - I was just thinking about American Honey actress Sasha Lane earlier today (for a post you're all going to enjoy tomorrow morning, wink wink) and wondering when the heck she was going to show up in something since she was tremendous in that movie, and he we are! I have conjured greatness from the ether with my thoughts once again. Sasha is in the process of signing on to the Hellboy reboot! The one that we're excited about despite its immediate Del Toro history because of director Neil Marshall and an amazing cast that already includes David Harbour, Ian McShane, and Milla Jovovich.

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--- Vroom Vroom - This almost became a "Quote of the Day" post but then Edgar Wright kept talking and talking and the good quotes kept coming and I realized I'd have to quote the entire thing for that so instead here I will just send you over to Vulture where the Baby Driver director got asked about the movie crossing the 100 million dollar mark this week, his biggest hit ever by a whole lot, and he used the occasion to smartly celebrate original screenplays. Lord knows I wasn't a fan of Baby Driver - an anomaly among Wright's work for sure - but I'm happy for its success all the same for all the reasons he elucidates here.

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--- Scarlet Spider - Tom Holland needs to dust off his "That's a spicy meat-ahh-ball"'s because he's about to play the real-life Italian teenager Pino Lella (you have no idea how hard I am wishing his last name was "Grigio") who was forced into the German Army during WWII and used his time there saving Jews by ferrying them through the Alps. Kind of Schindler's Mountain, then. It's called Beneath a Scarlet Sky and it's based on the book by Mark Sullivan - anybody read it?

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--- Peak Peaks - I could spend all day sharing links about Twin Peaks with you because some of the best writing on the internet is happening right now thanks to David Lynch's triumphant cacophony of sound and image aka That TV Show, and because I am currently reading two books about the world (this one and this one, and I can't believe I never knew that second book has existed for 25 years until this week).

But here's just a pair -- I wish they'd formatted this better (the embedded tweets are pretty sloppy) but Birth Movies Death did an amazing round-up of the overlap between images we have seen on the new batch of episodes with images from Lynch's artwork. He's been playing with some of these his entire career. 

And second I loved this piece at the Ringer praising Kyle MacLachlan's brilliantly fractured performance as Dougie Jones and Evil Coop, and what it all means, and I just have to share the article's conclusion (slightly spoilery obviously) because this is super on-point about the entire show's purpose, i think:

"With every tic and affectation — every burst of violence from Evil Coop, every slurred pronouncement from Dougie Jones — MacLachlan further delineates the differences between the first Twin Peaks and the follow-up. At first, the tensions in this season simply seemed like a result of Lynch and Frost making the story they wanted to make, regardless of nostalgia. But heading into The Return’s final stretch, frustrated nostalgia almost seems to be the point. It’s even written into the text: The typically catatonic Dougie comes alive whenever he makes contact with iconic motifs from the original show, like coffee or cherry pie. These aren’t meta references for meta’s sake. Instead, they’re part of The Return’s larger meditation on how much or how little people, places, and things can shift over, well, almost 30 years. We see it in the diminished state of Catherine Coulson, who was dying of cancer when she filmed her last scenes as the Log Lady; we see it in Amanda Seyfried’s Becky Burnett (née Briggs) following in her mother Shelly’s footsteps by getting trapped in an abusive relationship. Most of all, though, we see it in everything MacLachlan is doing, and how well he’s doing it."

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--- Never Halt - The second best show on TV isn't quite on TV yet but it will be in a few days - Halt and Catch Fire returns for its fourth and final (sigh) season on Saturday night (smartly side-stepping the clotted Sunday night landscape) and Vulture chatted a very fine chat indeed with its breakout bleached wunderkind Mackenzie Davis, mi amor. A big chunk of the conversation is about how her character in Ridley Scott's The Martian was Korean in the book, and she has some really interesting stuff to say about the position she found herself in with that whitewashing controversy. God I love her. I can't wait to see her in Blade Runner - she (and Villenueve) are the things I'm most excited about there by leaps and bounds.

--- Gang Bang - It's the 50th anniversary of Arthur Penn's film (although just calling it a "film" seems too small a word in this instance) Bonnie & Clyde (perhaps you have heard of it) and over at The Film Experience Eric wrote up a very fine little ode to the movie and its long, deep legacy, and oh yeah its incredible white-hot movie-star pairing with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. I mean they're so hot they burned the Oscars fifty years later!

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--- Gone West - Despite all the beefcakey trailers I still haven't gotten out to see Ingrid Goes West yet (it's been a busy dang week) but there are a good pair of interviews with its cast going around - our pal Jose got to chat with Aubrey Plaza about it over at The Film Stage and the talk turned to how fucking great Bette Midler is, of all things, but why not? Aubrey says she's dying to put together a movie where they play mother and daughter and what a coincidence I am dying to see that movie. Make it happen! And second over at BuzzFeed our pal Jarett got to talk to Ingrid co-star and resident slab of hunk Billy Magnussen and Billy calls himself "a piece of ass" and my life will never be the same. I don't know how Jarett didn't just fall out of his seat. Stronger than me!

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--- Chinny Chin Chin - Bruce Campbell's second memoir came out yesterday - it's called Hail to the Chin and it shares his exploits of the past fifteen years ever since he wrote and released his first memoir, the eminently enjoyable If Chins Could Kill. I think he's a little rough on his chin. It's not that crazy a chin, Bruce. Anyway he chatted with BD about the book and says he's got a third one already in the works but we shouldn't plan on seeing that for another fifteen years. No word on what the "Chin" title will be. He also talks about Ash vs Evil Dead's upcoming third season there, I guess but I skipped that part because I didn't want spoilers. Oh and there are also a couple promo videos (for the book) starring the man right here. (thanks Mac)

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--- Twilight of the God - As if I needed more reason to fall harder head over dick for Robert Pattinson after his great streak of acting roles culminated in this month's tour de force in Good Time (here is my review) he went and talked to the LA Times (thanks Mac) about his stiff case of cinephilia, and he said he's currently been binging the movies of Ken Russell, including The Devils. I want to watch The Devils with Robert Pattinson! He calls Oliver Reed's performance therein "unreal." Oh, Rob.

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---  And Finally some TV casting news to thrill about - Barbara Hershey, whose career is lots and lots more than starring in Beaches but who will always be Hillary Whitney to me all the same, has joined the new season of The X-Files! She's playing "a powerful figure who represents a mysterious organization" and given where the last little run of episodes ended (with a kind of apocalypse breaking out) I imagine that'll be something to see. Just like Beaches!