Getting the bugs out

Cronos

(1993)

Yes, I'm trying to deaccession DVDs this year, but this is one I've been wanting to own for some time, so even though I had to pay Criterion Edition prices when it was finally rereleased, I had to have it--notwithstanding that I now see it's available for streaming on Netflix.

This is how we met Guillermo del Toro, and elements of his signature are already in place: the child who can endure more shock than anyone at home in the real world ever could, the eerily beautiful visual style (including the museum-salon-style long rooms and hallways), the skewed-Catholic moral vision. And of course the fantasy universe that is partly from familiar myth but mostly from his own wonderfully weird imagination: here, vampirism enabled not by another vampire but by a machine invented by a 16th-century alchemist (did I hear someone's ears prick up there?).

Del Toro regular Federico Luppi plays the antique-shop owner who develops a taste for blood, and Hellboy-to-be Ron Perlman is the comical heavy. Oh, and Jabba the Hutt appears to have gotten a comeback gig as the larva that lives inside the machine and filters the blood.