5 things to watch this weekend – 4 to 6 October

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

What a year Mel Brooks had in 1974, all but inventing the modern movie spoof by lampooning first the western, with Blazing Saddles, and then the gothic horror film, with Young Frankenstein. Returning to cinemas this week for its 50th anniversary, the latter is Brooks’ glorious send-up of the Universal horror films of the 1930s, especially James Whale’s two Frankenstein pictures. Gene Wilder stars as the neurotic American physician Dr Frederick Frankenstein, grandson of the notorious Victor Frankenstein, who travels to Transylvania after inheriting the family castle. Using black and white, archaic transitions and a superb cast of larger-than-life eccentrics, Brooks tramples on the Universal style with equal parts affection and anarchic glee.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

This scalding documentary looks at a dark side of the international Osho communes set up by Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh that was ignored by Netflix’s acclaimed 2018 series Wild, Wild Country: the systemic cases of child sexual abuse that have been alleged by many former commune members. In Maroesja Perizonius and Alice McShane’s film, survivors of communes in the UK, the US and Europe give horrifying accounts of growing up in settings where the ‘free love’ ethos proved a magnet for sexual predators. The filmmakers land skin-crawling interviews with a couple of the perpetrators and, in one astonishing climactic scene, ambush a senior figure at his house. Righteous anger courses through this film.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Coming a year before American Beauty (1999), Todd Solondz’s Happiness makes that Oscar-winning depiction of the underside of middle-class American suburbia look tame indeed. Solondz’s blackest of comedies depicts the secret lives and urges of a cross-section of oddballs living in suburban New Jersey – most disturbingly a psychiatrist and father (played by Dylan Baker) who lusts after his son’s 11-year-old classmate. Baker is part of a superb ensemble cast which also includes Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara and Jane Adams. Criterion brings Happiness to Blu-ray and it’s lost none of its outrageous power to unsettle.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Czech director František Vláčil is most celebrated for his 1967 film Marketa Lazarova, a Brueghel-esque vision of a wintry medieval Europe. 1968’s The Valley of the Bees is cut from the same cloth – indeed, many of the same costumes were used – but is the more accessible of the pair. It’s the 13th-century story of a young Teutonic knight who rejects the Holy Order and abandons the Crusades but finds himself being doggedly pursued by one of his former comrades. Like Marketa Lazarova, it offers a bracingly bleak and atmospheric depiction of the brutal middle ages. Second Run’s new Blu-ray offers a welcome upgrade of their old DVD edition. 

Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday, 12.25pm

The events leading up to the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral are given suitably mythic treatment in this western masterpiece from John Ford – his first cowboy picture since 1939’s Stagecoach. Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, while Victor Mature is the hard-drinking Doc Holliday. Their shootout with the Clanton gang has been done many times on screen, before and since, but never with the grace that Ford delivers here in poetically shot black and white. All of Ford’s favourite dichotomies are here: wilderness and civilisation, law and lawlessness, the individual and society. More than anything, it’s an elegiac vision of a Wild West community coming into being.