I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses
Dramas ‘I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses’ and ‘The Dogs,’ and the Spanish Erotic Film ‘Sex Is Crazy’ Due on Blu-ray Feb. 28 From MVD and Severin
February 17, 2023
The dramas I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses and The Dogs and the Spanish erotic film Sex Is Crazy are due on Blu-ray Disc Feb. 28 from Severin Films and MVD Entertainment Group.
From writer-director Murray Markowitz, the shocking drama I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses is inspired by one of Canada’s most infamous homicides. In the film, when a former model (Elke Sommer, Baron Blood) is brutally murdered, her wealthy husband (Donald Pilon, The Uncanny) is arrested for the slaying. But the trial that follows will uncover a lurid saga of illicit lovers, escaped serial killers, and enough graphic mayhem to merit its condemnation as a “Video Nasty.” Chuck Shamata (The House by the Lake), Cindy Girling (Meatballs) and five-time Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo co-star in this 1978 Canuxploitation rarity — also known as Left for Dead and Drop Dead, Dearest — featuring the first score by three-time Oscar winner Howard Shore (“The Lord of the Rings”), now scanned in 2K from the National Archive’s only known 35mm print. Extras include audio commentary with filmmaker and historian Stephen Broomer; an interview with Markowitz; an interview with Pilon; “Crimes of Dispassion,” film programmer Eric Peretti on the Demeter case and I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses; and a trailer.
Five years after his Shock Treatment stunned European audiences, cult fantastique writer/director Alain Jessua delivered the startling French thriller The Dogs. In the film, in a corporate suburb outside Paris, the community’s new doctor discovers its leading citizens all get their dogs from a wealthy, charismatic trainer (Oscar nominee Gérard Depardieu) — dogs that have a ferocious appetite for immigrants, rowdy youths, people of color and anyone who challenges the status quo. Victor Lanoux (Cousin, Cousine), Nicole Calfan (The Burglars) and Fanny Ardant (Confidentially Yours) co-star in the film, now scanned in 2K from the interpositive for the first time in America. Special features include “Hounds and Music,” an interview with composer René Koering; “Jessua Lives,” an interview with Culturopoing Film Critic Emmanuel Le Gagne; and the trailer.
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In Spain in 1981 with the dictatorship over and censorship gone, writer/director Jess Franco (Diamonds of Kilimandjaro) returned to his native country to make a series of increasingly brazen films for Tritón that included Sinfonia Erotica, Two Female Spies With Flowered Panties and Sex Is Crazy. In the crazy comedy Sex Is Crazy — now scanned in 2K from the original negative recently discovered in a Bilbao seminary — an actress (Lina Romay, Female Vampire) is performing an outrageous stage show depicting aliens kidnapping Earth women and making them pregnant so that they can give birth to 600 babies an hour. However, when some real aliens actually see the show, they decide that it’s all a very good idea. Special features include “Jess Is Crazy,” an interview with Franco expert Dr. Álex Mendíbil; “Franco/Godard,” an interview with Stephen Thrower, author of Flowers of Perversion: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco; and “In the Land of Franco Part 7.”