“I swore I would never watch this one again” – reviewing October’s Masters of Cinema releases from Eureka!: The Ambulance, The Island, and… Martyrs

“Oh, no”, I said as I tore open the envelope. “What is it?” my wife says, worried. I hold the first Blu-ray up. “Martyrs”, I quietly say. The look on my wife’s face says she remembers exactly how upsetting I found this particular New French Extreme film when I saw it at FrightFest way back in 2008. “I swore I would never watch this one again”, I mutter. “Do you have to?” she asks. “We’ll see”.

One of three horror films released on Blu-ray as part of Eureka!’s Masters of Cinema line this October, Martyrs makes its 4K UHD worldwide debut on the 17th, while The Ambulance and The Island are released on Blu-ray on the 13th.

Martyrs being a boogeyman film for me, and The Island being described as Japan’s answer to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, means I think it’s wise to start with The Ambulance and work my way up.

Being a big fan of Larry Cohen’s The Stuff and Maniac Cop, and having had a great time with Q – The Winged Serpent at the Bristol Megascreen last year, I was definitely up for The Ambulance, and it was a total blast.

Eric Roberts stars as Josh, a Marvel Comics illustrator (and they actually film in the NY Marvel office AND Stan Lee plays himself as Josh’s sympathetic boss). One lunchtime, Josh spots a pretty girl amongst the throngs on the New York streets and tries his patter. He has barely melted the ice when the woman of his dreams, Cheryl (Janine Turner) drops to the pavement gravely ill. Luckily, a vintage ambulance is soon on the scene and whisks Cheryl to hospital.

For the rest of the day, Josh futilely tries to find Cheryl to check on her well-being, but not a single hospital in the city has seen or heard of her. Suspecting she has been kidnapped by the on-recollection suspiciously old ambulance, Josh goes to the cops and meets James Earl Jones having a blast.

A Lieutenant amusingly named ‘Frank Spencer’, this is the kind of cop who has seen and heard it all and thinks everyone with a weird story, especially as bonkers (and accompanied by comic book illustrations) as Josh’s is full of it. Kicked out of the precinct, Josh returns home and resumes his search, but now he has stirred the pot, The Ambulance has its sights and sirens set on him…

Veering all over the road genre-wise, as The Ambulance careens through its snappy runtime, fuelled by even snappier dialogue, it covers off action-adventure, thriller, horror and comedy. Not knowing where the genre, let alone the plot, is going is a huge part of the fun, and every character is memorable thanks to a constant barrage of great lines.

The Blu-ray encode is really nicely done, keeping the grain that makes the film feel real and alive while beautifully accurately presenting the wet, neon reflections-covered, trashy, dangerous 1990 NY streets.

Featuring a host of extras including a Cohen commentary, unseen interviews, new video essays and new interviews, this is the whole package and feels like an underseen gem of a film getting its due. The Ambulance comes very highly recommended.

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Next, it was time for The Island. Directed by Po-Chih Leong (Hong Kong 1941), The Island is so clearly inspired by not just the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw, but also Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes, that seeing it was released in the mid-80s, not the end of the 70s, is an actual shock.

A slightly skeezy seeming Geography teacher takes a gaggle of his favourite students on an excursion to an off-the-map island with a shady past to try and make them like him more so that they’ll pass his class(?). It’s a bit weird, but the important part is the trap is now baited. The partying kids are on the cut-off island populated by a gross family of brothers that worship their dead mother and crave young brides to keep their clan going and the deceased matriarch happy.

The early scenes of the brothers creepily trying to get with the girls and intimidate the teacher are chilling and perfectly uncomfortable, with the visitors giving that See No Evil attitude of just ignoring it and pretending everything is okay.

Eventually Mr. Skeezy sort of unwittingly sells one of the girls down the river, half-maybe joking that she would marry one of the brothers and that’s when it all kicks off. There’s a vicious siege, a sense of real danger, unexpected heroics and maybe even a chance of redemption.

Frustratingly the act between these two sections is quite slow and has strange attempts at humour that may be lost in translation, but don’t work. This takes the wind out of the film’s sails and means act three is starting from 0 again instead of taking us into the red zone. Still, it’s an interesting watch with some good moments and not like any Hong Kong horror you may have seen before.

The encode looks great, with the colours popping and no amount of handheld camera, film grain, smoke and fire causing any visual artefacts. The extras aren’t as bountiful as on The Ambulance, two commentaries, an interview and a trailer, and neither commentary features any cast or crew.

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“Martyrs? Yeah, come on then. You’ve put it off for four hours. Make a tea and stick it on. It can’t still be that bad.” And it really wasn’t. I think I was so prepared for the extremity of the violence and torture, that without that first visceral shock of it all I could appreciate just how fucking good it is.

After escaping an initially unseen nightmare as a child, Lucie finds herself recuperating in an orphanage for troubled girls. Here she meets Anna, a girl who refuses to be scared off by Lucie’s feral behaviour and cares for her until she begins to think, feel and act like a little girl again.

When we flash forwards in time this appears to have continued into adulthood, but Anna is now the wheel man for the grown up Lucie, who is determined to hunt down her childhood captors and make them pay…

What happens next is an ultraviolet shock that I would hate to spoil, what happens after that is a Barbarian level twist on why you should never go into the basement, and what happened after that is a brutal and upsetting sequence that leads to a sad and horrifying stripping away, AND THEN a moment of horrific beauty on a transcendental level that you will never ever forget.

With seventeen years (jesus christ) distance and being prepared for the worst, Martyrs didn’t scar me this time. It is still a bloody hard watch but absolutely worth it. The strongest of the New French Extreme movement and a tearing down and twisting of the torture porn movement that was also prevalent in the 00s, Martyrs shocking and searing and essential cinema that should be absolutely seen if you think you can hack it. As you won’t see its like again. We certainly haven’t so far.

The video and audio presentation is absolutely perfect. We listened to the incredibly immersive French 5.1 feature audio, and the video is an immaculate encode of a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative.

Again, weirdly, the commentary features no one involved in the film, which always feels like even more of a missing piece for something so recent, but there are two new video essays, a video interview with the director, and a fantastic feature-length making of documentary that will keep you off the streets and out of trouble for a long, old time regardless.

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The Ambulance and The Island are released on Blu-ray on the 13th of October, and the dual format 4K and Blu-ray of Martyrs is released on the 27th of October.

All are available to buy here.