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Congratulations to filmmaker and disc producer Bret Wood. His very good 2002 feature documentary Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films is getting a theatrical release on August 5 from Kino Cult.

The notorious docu is described as a ‘morbidly curious exploration of the near-mythical driver education films shown to American schoolchildren in the 1960s and ’70s. Produced in Mansfield, Ohio, films such as Signal 30 (1959) encouraged safety by force-feeding high school kids color footage of careless driving’s dark consequences: blood-stained wreckage, injured bodies, fresh corpses.’

It’s the kind of movie The Addams Family would watch to cheer themselves up. We reviewed it for DVD Savant,  back in 2003. It has reportedly been remastered and reconstructed, with new scans of the old Driver’s Safety pictures, and Wood’s 16mm interviews.

A Blu-ray will follow on September 8.

A new trailer has been prepared … the authentic live-action material always feels disturbing, like an invasion of privacy:

The dependable Michael McQuarrie has found us something cute — a prime example of a classic 16mm sales film, this one commissioned to sell a tract of houses in Arizona.

The reason we’re watching is that this one stars Buster Keaton. Mike says it’s from 1961. It’s in good color and the cinematographer is Hollywood’s Leo Tover; the director Joe Parker  worked in TV.

We can see Keaton checking that the money was good, showing up, and working directly with cameraman Tover when setting up his smooth gags. Buster gets distracted by an attractive woman (uncredited). He does terrific work for these real estate people!

I recognize the music under the title as a Fox cue from  The Gang’s All Here.

And this news just arrived in 187 languages along with their various dialects and sub-tongues … a deluxe 4K Ultra HD disc set of MGM’s Forbidden Planet is coming late in September. Content-wise it hews very close to the 2010 Warners Blu-ray, except that the new release is coming out under the Arrow Video label.

This promises to be something special. We’ll be keen to see what the ‘new’ colors look like, as we always suspected that the subdued pastels of the Blu-ray were the result of hard work on a faded negative. Just how do they decide what exact shade of green the sky is supposed to be?  In many ways, the show is a pinnacle of Sci-fi in 1950s Hollywood.

Promised new extras are a Perspecta Stereo audio option, and a new featurette on the ‘electronic tonalities’ creators Bebe & Louis Barron. As before, an encoding of The Invisible Boy will be included. As is Arrow’s modus operandi, 4K and Blu-ray editions will be separate.

This conjures nice hopes for fab 4K releases of more Warners-controlled fantasy, horror and Sci-fi.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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We had a good time reading and reviewing Joseph McBride’s latest book last month,  I Loved Movies, But… — but we also enjoyed this piece from FilmInt, an interview of the critic / author / educator conducted by Jonathan Monovich, from June 19.

Monovich gets quite efficiently to the center of Joe McBride’s main issues … his personal connection to film history through directors like Orson Welles and John Ford, his writing for the trades, for the AFI and for a major cult film. That’s capped by decades of experience teaching film.

The best thing about Joseph McBride is that his opinions don’t waffle — you always know where he stands. We can hear that in any of his audio commentaries. The best are as good as film history gets, as with his tracks for a set of John Huston’s  WWII informational films.

Are the movies dead?  Is film education dead?  Are new generations disconnecting from classic film appreciation?  The ever-opinionated Joe has sharp thoughts on several topics.

An in-progress Disc Organization Report.

Some readers are following the oh-so-important CineSavant project of making the horde of discs here more manageable. I’ve been doing it for maybe 6 hours a week since February or so, and so far it appears to be going okay. After being ill for a week I’m looking forward to getting going again on ‘enveloping’ more discs.

In the process of logging old CineSavant and DVD Savant Columns, I came across an article entry from DVD Savant in 2008. It’s funny — I’m whining about the exact same problem, apparently with the hope that a reader-correspondent will write in with the perfect solution. If my present project does work it will be by following the lead of friend Craig Reardon, who never let his disc collection overwhelm his house space or organizational capacity.

I have crossed the 3,000 mark in disc – filing, and have cleared 1.5 rooms of stacked boxes. I’m guessing I might be enveloping as many as 4 or 6 thousand more individual discs. Knowing what’s there and being able to Find Stuff will be an enormous benefit, besides not leaving an impossible mess for somebody else to straighten out / dispose of. It’s a worthy quest — I hope.

Here’s the link to the old 2008 article, with its reader responses, from David Martin, Jordan Benedict, Bill Shaffer, Dick Dinman, David Fletcher and Stuart Galbraith IV:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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For Sale: One Used Spaceship. Gary Teetzel found this ad, looking for a collector with deep pockets…

It’s said to be the original 20th Century Fox model for Klaatu’s intergalactic space ship, and it’s quite big.

I know, I know, it lacks the propulsion system that will take you to Paris at 4,000 miles an hour … ‘Holy Christmas!’

And the price tag is pretty hefty. You must wish you were like me, living next door to a Middle-Eastern Prince who likes to give out quaint gifts. I’ll send my neighbor a hint … you never know.

Full details at the link. It’s apparently from the estate – collection of my old boss Gregory Jein.

And also from Gary, a film clip from an outer space movie starring Buster Keaton … well, it’s a technically accurate description.

In 1946 Keaton took a role in a Spanish-language comedy,  El Moderno Barba Azul, a typically scattershot Mexican farce. Keaton’s career was of course at low ebb, but he kept working whenever possible, even when didn’t know the language.

The picture did get an English title and maybe a tiny U.S. release, as Boom in the Moon. No Kidding.

As a WW2 soldier, Buster’s plane crashes in Mexico, where he’s misidentified as a serial killer and arrested. As is standard practice with mad killers, he’s turned over to a scientist who shoots him into space in his new rocket. The rocket is a dud. It only flies as far as a remote area of Mexico. Buster and his fellow astronauts see a beekeeper in his suit and believe they’re looking at an alien.

I can’t stop laughing either. Gary forwards this clip with some rocket shots, and much more of the show can be found online. And good old SciFist has a  full review. He gives it his lowest rating. You’ll love it too.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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The new issue of Noir City has arrived … and it’s yet another quality film book in disguise as a special interest magazine. Editors Imogen Sara Smith and Danilo Castro enforce a high bar for quality.

The magazine is the academic outreach conduit for the Film Noir Foundation; the articles are at the forefront of thinking on the American style. This Issue 46 bursts with articles about American Noir Actors in Italy, peeping Tom movies, a newly-found noir called The Crimson Canary, and ‘pregnancy’ in noir … that’s a new one. Also an article on a Japanese noir trilogy by Imogen Sara Smith — plus regular articles and disc reviews by colleague Sean Axmaker.

Details on subscribing are to be found at the Film Noir foundation page:

The Bright Lights Film Journal has touched on a subject that hasn’t had much new thought in a spell, Sam Peckinpah’s  The Wild Bunch. Writer Daniel Gauss takes a psychological approach to the film, with a fresh investigation of motivations and rationalizations for crime and violence .. ‘micro-moralities.’

We like this kind of analysis, which reminds us of critical studies directions back with professor Howard Suber at UCLA. Mr. Gauss goes beyond generalities (the sin of reviewers like CineSavant) to nail down ‘fifty discrete moral incidents’ in The Wild Bunch for inspection. Sure, it’s academic, but its not dis-connected.

And intelligent criticism on Peckinpah is always welcome. The publication date for Daniel Gauss’ essay was March 12, 2026.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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We’re not feeling too well today and need a day to recover …  sorry to skip a Tuesday but hope I can be back with a review tomorrow. It’ll be a 4K of a Joe Dante classic ….

Thanks for your patience — Glenn Erickson

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Artificial Intelligence is insidious, isn’t it? . . . AI playtime videos are beginning to proliferate.  Joe Dante  circulated this link to a page called  CineNova Universe.  Its unnamed creator describes himself as an audio-visual artist, art director and music producer; he uses AI to ‘create things that come from the human brain.’

Making fake videos that look like vintage film has come a long way from superimposing scratches.

At the moment he specializes in retro comic book adventures, in the style of old movies … with ‘exclusive characters such as “The Impossible Man” “The Gentleman” and “Roaring Star.”‘  Each of these little bursts of creativity is just a few minutes long.

From his data page we get the idea that Mr. CineNova may be a Spaniard. Take a peek, it’s pretty cute.

The Warner Archive Collection has quite a treat waiting for us in July. We expect a nice handful of new Blu-ray releases each month, with perhaps one or two coveted vintage titles among them. But the WAC has just announced a big July-August disc crop, a bounty that will include a number of classic gems. They were all to land late in July, but on Wednesday it was announced that half would be delayed until August 4. All are remastered in 4K from original elements. In the realm of vintage pictures, there’s something for everyone here.

The biggest surprise and the one we’re most eager to see is the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the all-star Shakespeare comedy that captures a fine fairy tale magic. The older transfers hinted at how beautiful it might be, so we’re hoping that the 4K remaster will reproduce the glowing quality of all those original film stills.

We’re also partial to a trio of B&W mysteries, spread across three studios. They are the strained RKO noir Macao with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, Warners’ hardboiled Andre De Toth noir Crime Wave with Sterling Hayden, Phyllis Kirk and Charles Bronson, and MGM’s fantastic amnesia romance Random Harvest, with Ronald Colman and Greer Garson.

Colt .45 is a Technicolor Randolph Scott western. Say the name, no explanation needed.

The Keyhole and Lily Turner are pre-Code dramas directed by Michael Curtiz and William Wellman, starring Kay Francis and Ruth Chatterton.

Presenting Lily Mars is an MGM Judy Garland musical with Van Heflin and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

We’re curious to see how the Technicolor Captain Horatio Hornblower will fare, with Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo … we just read about designer Ken Adam’s work fixing up its real sailing ships.

The Sisters is a Bette Davis / Errol Flynn picture we haven’t seen, so it will be a curiosity.

Bonnie Scotland gives us Laurel & Hardy, a Hal Roach feature released by MGM … made with a lot of studio politics I’ll need to read more about.

And the rollout concludes with Fred Zinnemann’s The Seventh Cross, a wartime suspense thriller with Spencer Tracy that was one of the first films to contemplate the possibility of massive war crimes, an all-consuming Holocaust. The direction is brilliant, even if we think the Zinnemann picture from MGM that most merits the 4K upgrade is his The Search.

How can we review all of these?  We’ll find a way.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson