Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a terrific subscription streamer for genre film fans.
The subscription streaming service Arrow has its roots in a boutique physical media distributor much beloved by cinephiles: Arrow Video, established in England in 2009 as an offshoot of the theatrical distributor Arrow Films. The company quickly established itself as a favorite among genre film fans, offering painstaking restorations of long-neglected horror and cult titles on discs packed with copious bonus features; they were one of the reasons so many American collectors invested in all-region disc players, before the company expanded to the U.S. market in 2015.
Arrow was one of several companies to enter the subscription streaming space during Covid lockdown, with their platform launching in October 2020. Their initial offerings numbered around 400 titles; they’ve since doubled that number, bolstering their library with short films, documentaries and curated “Selects” collections from name-brand directors like Roger Avary, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright.
Horror is unsurprisingly well-represented on Arrow, which makes it an ideal spooky season addition to your streaming menu; the scary movie offerings are so plentiful that one can even deep-dive into subgenres like slashers, giallo, J-horror, zombie movies and once-banned “video nasties.” But there’s more than mere horror in the catalog, which also features offbeat Westerns, science fiction, yakuza crime epics, martial arts movies galore and cult movies of all stripes and decades. Acclaimed directors such as George A. Romero, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci get well-deserved spotlights, along with lesser-known (to the general public, at least) auteurs like William Grefé and Seijun Suzuki.
Arrow’s interface is smooth and easy to use, and the pricing is agreeably reasonable: $6.99 per month or $69.99 for the year, with a current promotion (code: SHOCKTOBER24) cutting 50 percent of the price for the first month. Its offerings are certainly specialized; this is not a Netflix replacement. But viewers with a fondness for the esoteric (and we know you’re out there) will be hard-pressed to find more quality bang for their streaming buck.
Here are a few highlights from the current library:
‘Messiah of Evil’: Those who only know the husband-and-wife filmmaking team of William Huyck and Gloria Katz from their collaborations with George Lucas (the three wrote the script for “American Graffiti”) might be surprised to see their names attached to this mean, lean 1973 chiller, which they both wrote and Huyck directed. Marianna Hill stars as a young woman searching for her estranged father, who has gone missing; she tracks him to a remote coastal town, where the residents’ bizarre behavior gives way to full-on bloodthirsty attacks. Huyck and Katz’s spare screenplay and atmospheric direction are so effective that the picture’s low budget barely matters; it deserves favorable comparison with the likes of “Night of the Living Dead” and “Carnival of Souls.”
‘The Addiction’: As New York City became safer (or at least more gentrified) in the 1990s, the city’s independent filmmakers reacted with increasingly grimy genre efforts, including such low-budget Gotham-set vampire flicks as “Night Owl,” “Nadja,” “Habit” and this 1995 chiller from the great Abel Ferrara. Many critics saw these films as metaphors for the AIDS epidemic or drug addiction, though it’s also possible to read them as stories of fringe figures reacting to the invasion of their neighborhoods by yuppies, gentrifiers and Wall Streeters. Lili Taylor is characteristically terrific as the lead, Annabella Sciorra and Edie Falco shine in support, and Christopher Walken is delightfully odd in a brief but effective appearance.
‘Dead or Alive’: The iconoclastic and prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike opens this 1999 action flick with an absolutely jaw-dropping montage sequence, a five-and-a-half minute orgy of sex, drugs and violence that plays less like a scene-setter than a highlight reel for an entire prequel film that he never made (but I’d love to see). What follows is not far from the hyper-cool cops-and-robbers films of John Woo and other stylists of the ’90s Asian action cinema, but it’s all infused with Miike’s distinctive, gonzo punk energy and unapologetic grisliness. He de-glams the entire enterprise, depicting the Yakuza underworld as grubby and unpleasant, while portraying the police as mostly corrupt, so there are no real good guy-bad guy binaries to latch on to. The shootouts are kinetic and the storytelling is wildly unpredictable, right up to the bonkers finale, which goes for broke and keeps on going. (If you like what you see here, Arrow also has Miike’s follow-ups, “Dead or Alive 2: Tobosha” and “Dead or Alive: Final.”)
‘Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion’: One of the many clear influences on “Dead or Alive” (and Miike’s filmography in general) is this sensational 1972 revenge thriller, in which the director Shunya Ito filters the ’70s exploitation standby of the women-in-prison picture through a prism of semi-surrealistic style and breathtaking cool. Meiko Kaji appears in the title role, as a woman wronged by a dirty police detective and sent to prison for attempting to exact her revenge; there, she orchestrates a stunning prison riot to escape and resume her rampage. The violence is extreme and often upsetting, but Ito (making, incredibly, his feature directorial debut) stages the action with sly wit and fierce energy. (It would beget three follow-ups, all of which are also on Arrow.)
‘Sleeping Dogs’: The director Roger Donaldson (“No Way Out”) and the actor Sam Neill (“Jurassic Park”) burst onto the international film scene, and all but launched the New Zealand new wave, with this 1977 action thriller. Neill stars as a recently divorced father who withdraws into a life of solitude, but his fascist government targets him as a revolutionary — leading, ironically enough, to his violent radicalization. The picture is a potent stew of social commentary, Kafka-esque storytelling and rough-and-tumble action, mounted with a jittery, you-are-there immediacy that recalls late-’60s outsider cinema like “Medium Cool.” Grim but visceral, featuring a tip-top cameo by exploitation legend Warren Oates and plenty of opportunities for Neill to show off his considerable slow-burn skills.
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