I picked up the Severin UHD releases of these from the US over the last couple of years to upgrade my aging VHS tapes, so I guess that I can probably pass on these UK editions, though this set looks excellent. Accion Mutante is an utterly bonkers sci-fi film that both pre-dates Luc Besson's The Fifth Element and makes it look tame in comparison, as a group of militant disability rights campaigners perform a terrorist attack on a wedding (which doesn't go entirely to plan) and kidnap a heiress before hauling her across the galaxy whilst trying to both stay alive from attacks from outside and infighting within their own ranks long enough to obtain a ransom for her. Whilst the heiress herself, despite getting her lips stapled together for much of the film, ends up doing a Patty Hearst by using her kidnapping as an oportunity to liberate herself from her otherwise stifling previous existence. Even if it means losing a few limbs along the way. (Its the kind of film that would work well in a double bill with Christopher McQuarrie's similarly blackly-comic toned The Way of the Gun)
The Day of the Beast (in which a Priest discovers the Antichrist is about to be born in the run up to the new Millennium and tries to avert it but in order to get close enough has to go on a spree of bad deeds! And ends up forming an 'unholy Trinity' of un-Wise Men together with a Heavy Metal music shop owner and a cynical 'real life psychic' reality TV host investigating a spate of tramps being burnt alive) is my favourite of these three films, with a lot of great sight gags from
pre-opening credits scene on! While Alex Angulo appeared in Accion Mutante (in a great physical comedy role as the one surviving member of a pair of Siamese twins, having to drag his brother's taxidermied corpse around with him for the majority of the film!), this is the one in which he proved he could carry a lead role and make the audience somehow identify with his hapless Priest getting caught up in all manner of slapstick situations even whilst he is trying to do
all sorts of nefarious things, such as trying to acquire some virgin blood for a desperately important invocation ritual! And there is able support from Santiago Segura as one of the other "un-Wise men", who would later get somewhat adopted by Guillermo del Toro and appears in small roles in Blade II (as in at the very end of the film before it cuts to credits!), Hellboy and Pacific Rim.
Perdita Durango will probably be the big draw for most audiences as it is the Barry Gifford scripted film that puts more focus onto the titular character who was played by Isabella Rossellini in Lynch's Wild At Heart, here played by Rosie Perez heading up a surprisingly starry cast with Javier Bardem, James Gandolfini, and a decade or so pre-US fame Demián Bichir. Plus Alex Cox in an acting role (Cox would go on to appear in the director's later film The Oxford Murders, in which his character also goes through some rough times!). Be warned though that the intentionally amoral plot involves the (surprisingly standard for the mid-1990s as the exact same situation occurs in both From Dusk Till Dawn and Natural Born Killers. Accion Mutante itself is based around the same kind of situation, played for comedy) pemise of kidnapping a couple of naive American tourists and holding them captive for ransom, with the female hostage being repeatedly assaulted before doing a turn into Stockholm Syndrome style falling for her captor. Which causes a jealous rift between our anti-hero criminal couple. It's 'iffy' in its portrayal of sexual assault in that sense, and indeed the journalist Aminatta Forna made this particular film the subject of her "Don't Look Now" piece about the need for censorship shown on Channel 4 in 1999, where she elevated it into 'dangerous art that glamorises events', comparing it to Birth of a Nation and Romper Stomper! Although Forna was particularly upset about the moment in which a buxom bank teller during an early robbery scene is forced to bare her breasts and then has the muzzle of the robber's gun caressed over her nipple, as being the "first in a series of thrills" for an audience. Which I do not particularly agree with, but thought it would be worth mentioning here to show that the film may prove to be rather strong meat for some viewers.
