Arrow Video has announced the December 2024 lineup for its subscription-based ARROW platform, and this month’s carefully cultivated curations feature plenty of ho-ho horror to help you ring in the holidays and leads with “The Last Video Store.” The debut genre film from Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford begins streaming on December 9 and is a love letter to video rental stores and the B-movie treasures that lined their walls.
The December lineup starts on December 6 with ARROW’s Seasons “Fear of the Dark.” As the year comes to a close and the days get shorter, this curated collection of Cult films finds that what’s hiding in the shadows is more terrifying than anything you could imagine. Titles in the collection include “The Monkey’s Paw,” “Legs,” and “BLEEP.”
December 6 also marks the arrival of “Nightmare.” When a homicidal mental patient flees an experimental drug program, he’ll leave a 5-day trail of psychosexual carnage from the peep shows of 42nd Street to the gore-soaked shores of Florida. Written and directed by Romano Scavolini, the film has been scanned from the internegative and various foreign print sources to create the most complete version ever assembled.
The rest of the December 6 lineup includes shorts and features, all centered around the animal kingdom.
- Froggy (Short): A teenage girl with a significant connection to nature is attacked by bullying classmates. A reckoning is unleashed to defend herself and the creatures she cherishes.
- Affentanz Hunter (Short): A hunter is on the prowl. He has his sights on a stag and his finger on the trigger. But then – a crack and a smack from a faceless hooded figure. A knockout and darkness. From that moment on, everything changes.
- Cocaine Crabs From Outer Space: When a couple of intergalactic space crabs land on Earth, they encounter the one thing they didn’t expect… A duo of dumb frat boys force-feeding them cocaine! As it turns out, cocaine gives space crabs an overbearing impulse to kill! Their string of peculiar homicides has Detective Charlie Reese thinking that something smells fishy… literally!
- Spider Labyrinth: For more than three decades, the remarkable debut feature by award-winning director Gianfranco Giagni has been one of the most elusive Italian horror titles in home video history…until now: When an American professor is sent to Budapest to complete a mysterious research project, he’ll become ensnared in a mind-bending web of sexual provocation, occult carnage, and arachnidian havoc.
On December 9, take a trip into the ARROW archives with the family foursome that created “The Deeper You Dig,” “Hellbender,” “Where the Devil Roams,” and “Hellhole” with “The Adams Family Selects.” Toby, John, Lulu, and Zelda have curated a collection of films that range from exploitation to coming of age; German new wave to video nasty; 70s sleaze and Austrian folk horror; modern punk middle finger fun to modern-retro-vaudevillian.
“We love Arrow’s wide range of films and had a lot of fun picking our own eclectic mix of styles, eras, and tones here,” shared the Adams. “We’ve got a bubbling cauldron of great picks here – including a number of films by women filmmakers to watch (Julia Marchese, Jill Gervargizian, Izzy Lee) or those who set the stage decades ago (21-year-old Fhiona-Louise).”
As mentioned previously, December 9 also marks the arrival of “The Last Video Store.” When her estranged father passes, twenty-something Nyla is tasked with the thing she hates the most – cleaning up his mess. Left behind are a collection of VHS tapes and, with them, the burden of returning them to “Blaster Video,” a time capsule to an era in which cover art and a catchy movie title were king, run by Kevin, a human encyclopedia of VHS history and a friend of her father. Amongst the returns is an unknown tape, a movie not even Kevin has heard of. Was this the last movie Nyla’s father watched before he died? The mystery is too much to resist. But when Kevin and Nyla press play, they unwittingly activate a long-dormant curse, and a series of classic cinematic villains are plucked from B-movie heaven and hell to be unleashed into the store itself!
Also joining the streamer on December 9 is “The Addiction.” Abel Ferrara reunites with his “King of New York” star Christopher Walken in this distinctly personal take on creatures of the night. Making its 4K premiere on ARROW, the film follows philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor, “The Conjuring”), who is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood…
Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with “Body Snatchers,” Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works – including “The Driller Killer,” “Ms. 45,” and “Bad Lieutenant” – and beautifully filmed in black and white, “The Addiction” sees the filmmaker on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, masterful.
On December 13, ARROW takes a trip back in time to 60s Cult. The collection features horror, sci-fi, and Westerns, featuring plenty of far-out thrills from this wild and creative decade in Cult cinema. Titles in the collection include “Two Thousand Maniacs, “The City Tramp,” and “Lady Morgan’s Vengeance.”
North American subscribers will also get a pair of blood-soaked creature features on December 13 with the arrival of “Alien From The Abyss” and “Beast From Haunted Cave.”
One of the final films of director Antonio Margheriti, “Alien From The Abyss,” tells of a group of environmental activists who attempt to expose an evil corporation dumping nuclear waste into a local volcano. But they instead discover graphic gore, exploding miniatures, and a rampaging full-scale kaiju-style creature.
“Screaming young girls sucked into a labyrinth of horror by a blood-starved ghoul from Hell.” So said the original advertising for “Beast from Haunted Cave.” Directed by Monte Hellman and filmed in the Black Hills of South Dakota, this feature is about a gang of crooks being terrorized by a nasty, spider-like creature.
On December 20, ARROW goes dark for their final Season of 2024 with “Monochrome Madness.” “Monochrome Madness” is a collection of Cult films that, while lacking in color, are not lacking in horror, imagination, and unforgettable thrills and imagery. Titles include “A Ghost Waits,” “At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul,” and “Laguna Ave.”
December 20 will also see the arrival of two very different cinematic battles on ARROW:
- Brothers James Retribution: This is the untold Nickel and Dime Story of how two ranch hands from Kansas became the most notorious duo of the Old West, Frank and Jesse James! When Frank and Jesse O’Kelley (Frank Powers and Justin Marmion) left their ranch to hunt down their father’s killer, Kurt Fowler (Robert Womack), it took one small lie in a big town to transform them from ranch hands into Outlaws and the rest is history!
- Enter The Drag Dragon: Get ready to go on a Drag-Fu odyssey filled with face-crunching action, corset-busting comedy, gut-munching horror, and soul-touching musical numbers! You’ve never experienced anything like “Enter the Drag Dragon!” This blast of true independent cinema will leave you wobbly in your heels as you try to recover from the non-stop thrill ride of adventure, laughs, screams, and romance.
ARROW says goodbye to 2024 with two cult classics from cinema history on December 27: “The Deadly Art Of Survival” and “Deputy Marshal.”
Before Charlie Ahearn shot his seminal hip-hop film “Wild Style” in 1982, he was directly exposed to the bourgeoning hip-hop, break-dancing, and graffiti movement while shooting his super-8 martial arts epic “The Deadly Art of Survival” around the projects (next door to his apartment) in the Lower East Side in 1979.
In “Deputy Marshal,” wrongly suspected of murder, a deputy marshal (Jon Hall) devises a plan to draw all the actual suspects out into the open and prove which one of them committed murder to profit off of the coming railroad line. Based on the best-selling western novel by Charles Heckelmann.
ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the U.K., and Ireland on Roku, Apple TV & iOS devices, Samsung TVs, Android TV and mobile devices, Amazon Fire devices, and all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.
Specially curated by members of the ARROW team, ARROW is home to an unparalleled roster of quality content from Westerns to Giallo to Asian cinema, trailers, Midnight Movies, filmmaker picks, and much more. Subscriptions are available for $6.99 monthly or $69.99 yearly. Title availability can vary by region.
