Echoes of Fear - BLU-RAY

Anna, a young female student living in Athens, returns to her family's large farm in the remote Greek countryside. She starts to feel the tensions that lie, repressed, under the apparently tranquil rural setting. Her father and mother are trapped in a loveless marriage and her half-brother, Anestis, seems even more of a brooding and dangerous figure than ever before. Anna's only real friend is the mute servant girl, Hrysa, who many of the local villagers see as some kind of saint due to her alleged sightings of the Virgin Mary in the lonely corn fields that surround the farm. Hrysa disappears and is reported missing. Anna soon suspects her half-brother is responsible and has probably killed the girl. She starts to follow him, trying to trick him into a confession. Realizing that she might become his next victim, Anna starts to fear for her life. Confused and scared she accepts a marriage proposal from a local man. It's at the wedding ceremony, with the whole village watching, that the truth finally emerges and the terrifying last act of this rural psycho drama is played out. THE FEAR was the third, and final, film made by director Kostas Manoussakis. It was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and was widely sold around the world. However, due to a series of problems, Manoussakis never completed another feature. Now acclaimed as a classic and one of the best Greek films of it's era, THE FEAR has lost none of it's power to grip the viewer with it's striking imagery and pulsing, avant garde soundtrack. This is a world premiere on home video, restored from the original negative.

The story takes place in Italy towards the end of World War Two, in a run-down hotel by the shores of a large lake. A strange assortment of guests are staying there. They seem to be either suffering from mental illness, involved in scams of one sort or another, or hiding from something in their past. Rosa, a teenage girl played by Leonora Fani, works with her mother, Marta, trying to keep the hotel functioning. Due to the war and the frequent bombing raids that take place, the hotel is on it's last legs and even finding food for the guests is a major problem. Rosa writes letters to send to her father who is off fighting in the war. Rosa's mother dies unexpectedly, and suddenly the girl finds herself at the mercy of the sexually rapacious and insane hotel guests. After a vicious rape, Rosa despairs. She calls on her absent father to avenge her. And it seems her call is answered when the guests die violently at the hands of a masked, gloved killer. But who really is this mystery assassin? And is Rosa losing her grip on reality? This was director Francesco Barilli's second feature film, after the highly regarded PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK. Due to distribution problems the film has been hard to see. It has never been released in the US before and this is it's world premier on Blu-ray.

Taking a Catskills cabin to write in isolation, wannabe fright filmmaker Fred Banks (Josh Ruben, who wrote and directed) delightedly discovered that his neighbor was the popular horror novelist Fanny Addie (Aya Cash). With the advent of a power outage, the two challenged one another to swap elaborate scary stories-but as insecurities, jealousies and betrayals start to surface, perhaps more than time will be killed. Clever dark comedy also stars Chris Redd, Rebecca Drysdale. 104 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack English.