Arrow Video is an APPRENTICE TO MURDER with their Blu-ray release of the New World Pictures 1980s obscurity.

Deep in Pennsylvania Dutch Country during the 1920s, sixteen-year-old Billy (Chad Lowe) works at a tanning factory, his dreams of starting a life for himself in the city as an artist quashed by his worry for his mother (Rutanya Alda, AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION) who deals daily with her husband (Eddie Jones) who is kind when sober but abusive when drunk. After a confrontation when his father hits him so hard he fractures his cheekbone, Billy takes the advice of co-worker Alice (Mia Sara, LEGEND) to visit Dr. John Reese (Donald Sutherland, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS), a practitioner of powwow magic who rooms in her aunt's boarding house. Billy asks for help not for himself but to stop his father from drinking, and Reese gives him a potion to put in his father's food that will make him violently ill at first but is guaranteed to get rid of the "poison" in his body, and Billy in turn makes a gift to Reese of one of his drawings. Seeing his talent, Reese surmises that God has sent Billy to be his assistant and offers in turn to teach him his healing arts as well as how to read (which Billy has kept from Alice out of embarrassment). With his father seemingly cured of alcoholism, Billy becomes more sure of himself under Reese's tutelage even when Reese is arrested for unlawful practice of medicine. Alice, on the other hand, has grown suspicious of Reese who once spent four years in an asylum (which he explains to Billy as being the work of Satan), and she begs Billy to go with her to Philadelphia to find work. Billy is caught between loyalty to Reese and his love for Alice until Reese suffers an attack and believes he has been cursed for taking on the devil in all his forms; whereupon Reese travels with them to the city in search of another powwow to cure him. When Reese is told that they must return to the countryside in search of Mama Isobel (Minnie Gentry, BLACK CAESAR) whose tries to help him see the face of the one who cursed him and may also be responsible for a plague that has decimated the livestock of a farm belonging to Billy's family friends the Myers. Billy believes from the vague description Reese offered that the evil one is recluse Lars Hoeglin (Knut Husebø, THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE) who has had longstanding conflicts with the Myers family and his own. Reese and Billy are armed with the knowledge of how to put an end to the evil afflicting the town, but are they doing the Lord's work or has Reese's fanaticism infected Billy as well?

A Canadian/US/Norwegian production set in Pennsylvania but shot in Norway, APPRENTICE TO MURDER is inspired by a true crime case known as the "Pennsylvania Hex Murder" but the film story itself is quite different in how it gets to the crime. Marketed by New World as a horror film with poster art suggesting Satanism rather than paganism or shamanism, the film is a slow-burn drama with sympathetic turns from Lowe and Sara (who sadly has less to do than her two co-stars) while Sutherland's tendency to go over-the-top is ideally suited here to a character whose fits of religious mania may or may not be supernaturally-motivated. The Norwegian landscapes stand in well for rural Pennsylvania, and they are rendered in painterly compositions by cinematographer Kelvin Pike (A DRY WHITE SEASON) who was usually an operator under cinematographers like Gil Taylor (on THE EXORCIST's Iraq unit), Geoffrey Unsworth on 2001, John Alcott on THE SHINING among others, while the scoring of Charles Gross (BLUE SUNSHINE) is wonderfully experimental, ranging from folksy strings suited to the period and setting to some interjections of synthesizer and electric guitar. Although THE TEACHER and LONG LOST FRIEND are listed as alternate titles, the scrolling portion of the end credits crawl ends with the single credit COSMOSIS which might have been another title for the film. There is also an added credit for "New World Post Production" with an editor and assistant editor listed that suggests that the film might have had some additional tinkering by the distributor.

Released theatrically and on VHS and laserdisc by New World, APPRENTICE TO MURDER languished on the video shelves and was often mistaken for a TV movie (especially with the wrapped up ending) and a video transfer that looked rather flat. The old video master appeared on DVD as part of the extremely cheap budget bin Top Ten Media line from Lakeshore that came just before Anchor Bay's deal for the library. The film went unreleased by both Anchor Bay and Image Entertainment, but Arrow Video's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray transfer from the 35mm interpositive goes a long way towards rehabilitating the film's reputation in terms of content and cinematographic polish. The painterly compositions now have a sense of depth where once they looked pretty but flat, and the Norwegian locations also have a more rustic texture. The LPCM 2.0 mono track is clean and boldly renders the scoring and the piercing quality of Sutherland's outbursts.

The film is accompanied by Audio Commentary by author and critic Bryan Reesman who not only sheds light on the true crime behind the film – and the ways the film departs from it – but also notes that the Norwegian location used to substitute for Pennsylvania would soon spawn many death metal bands and a spate of church desecrations shortly after the film's production. He also provides some background on director Ralph Thomas, his documentaries on rural Canadian life, and his previous feature film A TICKET TO HEAVEN about a young boy in a rural religious cult. "Original Sin" (15:28) is an interview with Kat Ellinger, author and editor-in-chief of Diabolique Magazine, focusing on religious horror cinema, including its origins in not only the European gothic but also the American gothic which introduced the themes of pagan religion and religious mania with James Hogg's "The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" and Charles Brockden Brown's "Weiland" and "Arthur Mervyn." "Color Me Kelvin" (9:07) is an interview with cinematographer Pike who speaks mainly of working in Canada before the production, being allowed to bring along his own British camera crew and promoting his KRULL focus puller Jamie Harcourt to camera operator, working with the local crew as well how the poor decision to have American camera equipment shipped to Norway.