DVD Review: Seven Samurai (1954, Shichinin no samurai)

BFI Announces It's DVD & Blu Ray Releases For Remaining Part of 2013

This autumn the BFI will make available on DVD a superb collection of rare and previously unseen ghost and horror titles from the BBC archives. Released as part of the BFI’s GOTHIC: THE DARK HEART OF FILM blockbuster project (www.bfi.org.uk/gothic), these long-unseen gems will delight many fans of British horror and classic TV drama.

Highlights in October include:

• The legendary Play for Today drama Robin Redbreast (1970) – an unsettling tale of ‘folk horror’ that’s considered a precursor to 1973’s The Wicker Man (DVD)
• The three surviving, terrifying episodes of the long-unseen 1972 ghost story anthology Dead of Night (DVD)
• Classic Ghost Stories (1986), five spine-tingling tales from the pen of MR James, presented by Robert Powell (DVD)
• An extended six-disc repackage of the best-selling BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas (DVD)

Highlights in November include:

• A BFI Flipside Dual Format Edition presentation of the BBC’s Schalcken the Painter (1979). This highpoint of BBC arts filmmaking will be presented in High Definition from a rare 16mm source recently discovered in the BFI National Archive
• The 1977 BBC gothic horror anthology Supernatural starring a host of British acting legends including Billie Whitelaw, Robert Hardy, Denholm Elliot and Jeremy Brett (DVD)

Other Gothic releases include:

• Scary Stories – a collection of creepy films from The Children’s Film Foundation featuring The Man From Nowhere (1976), Haunters of the Deep (1984) and Out of the Darkness (1985) (September 2013, DVD)
• A three-disc Dual Format special edition of Rupert Julian / Lon Chaney’s original The Phantom of the Opera (1925) (November 2013)
• The BFI National Archive digital re-mastering of Thorold Dickinson’s dark psychological drama Gaslight (1940) (November 2013, Dual Format Edition)

October also sees the long-awaited Blu-ray premiere of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) – presented as a steelbook exclusively at www.zavvi.com .

Rescheduled releases for December include the previously announced Dual Format Editions of Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) and Journey to Italy (1954), and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ Express (1967) and Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974).

Click here to see a picture gallery of packshots along with the news: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/announcements/bfi-dvdblu-ray-releases-announced-autumn-2013

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