New on DVD: [•Rec] / End of the Line

Now that brands such as After Dark’s “8 Films to Die For” and Magnolia/Magnum’s “Six-Shooter Series” have found ways to return indie and foreign horror films to theaters, it’s doubly shameful that two of the scariest, most intelligent shockers of recent years went straight to video in the U.S. But here they are, both arriving on DVD within weeks of each other. Even if you’ve seen its surprisingly strong Hollywood remake Quarantine, Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s Spanish-language [•REC] is a singularly unnerving zombie-apocalypse thriller that works its found-footage gimmick a lot more convincingly than Cloverfield. More concerned with shuddery satire than verisimilitude, Maurice Devereaux’s End of the Line evokes the bleak chills of Seventies classics such as Raw Meat and Rabid with its grisly tale of religious loonies engineering their own Rapture with cross-shaped daggers in the bowels of the Toronto subway system. Credit Devereaux for pulling off maybe the single most effective jump scare since the original Halloween. Also new in stores: Kino’s box-set tribute to the “Father of Anime,” The Astonishing Work of Tezuka Osamu; and Criterion’s new edition of one of the creepiest movies ever made, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.
Mondays-Sundays. Starts: July 28. Continues through Aug. 3, 2009