Glenn Erickson's
Review Page and Column
Tea and Sympathy 04/04/26
The Warner Archive Collection
Blu-ray
Quick, adapt this hit Broadway play for the screen! But remember the guidelines — you can’t directly say what the play is about or use certain words to describe its subject. In fact, you’ll need to eliminate direct references to the play’s strongest statement. The ‘tamed’ film adaption of Robert Anderson’s play gets the glossy MGM treatment, retaining its stage stars Deborah Kerr, Leif Erickson and John Kerr. We were pleasantly surprised that the story still works, despite dated aspects and the inability to, you know, speak its own name. Edward Andrews is also very good, as is the unheralded young actress Norma Crane. So we’ve decided to ‘Be Kind.’ On Blu-ray from The Warner Archive Collection.
04/04/26
Dead Kids Aka Strange Behavior — 4K 04/04/26
PowerHouse Indicator
4K Ultra HD
A bizarre favorite returns in a crystal-clear 4K encoding. Michael Laughlin’s eccentric ‘Middle America’ horror item was actually filmed in New Zealand, yet eerily correct in every detail. Michael Murphy and Louise Fletcher top the cast list, but Dan Shor, Fiona Lewis and Dey Young all make strong impressions. In 1981 it was odd and audacious, helped mightily by some excellent makeup work and a wholly convincing, very disturbing hypodermic gag. Fiona Lewis will forever be the scary syringe lady! On 4K Ultra HD from Powerhouse Indicator.
04/04/26
CineSavant Column
Hello!
Just a couple of semi-personal notes at today’s Column. I was intrigued to listen to Nathaniel Thompson’s ideas about disc storage the other week, and have been corresponding with readers giving more advice. I am steadily progressing with my project to liberate the house from the tyranny of being overrun by discs.
I’m up to about 1700 discs repackaged in envelopes, and they’ve almost filled up a full dresser of drawers … one more drawer to go. I’m ‘enveloping’ far more DVDs than BDs, and trying not to discriminate — I have at least 3 copies of the movie Chinatown, including a 1998 DVD that’s not even 16×9 enhanced. I guess I’ll be able to help some student do a study on the progression of disc encodings? Not so sure about that, but I do know that I’ve sorely missed a disc or two that I lost track of — that excellent BD of Raw Deal must be behind a piece of furniture somewhere.
The sleeves and booklets are numbered and stacked in boxes, about a 1,000 titles to a box. We’ll see how well that effort works.
So far I have at least a dozen more big boxes of discs to ingest into this system, and after that I’ll go through the ten or so shelves and weed out discs that can be consigned to the envelope list. I’m hoping that thinning out what’s displayed on shelves will have a double benefit: we may finally be able to locate anything fairly quickly — and my shelves might better reflect my personal taste, too. Figuring out what to do with these discs is based on some hard decisions: 1) There must be 10,000 collectors with collections bigger than mine, so I won’t operate under the illusion that I’m safeguarding a precious treasure. 2) Nothing is permanent, especially not me. The idea is to arrange this stuff so it can be enjoyed, without being a problem for the future.
We may check in with more progress later. … ?
We’ve lived in Los Angeles for 56 years and have only seen maybe a quarter the city, even if there are dozens of district names I’d need to search for on a map. One place I’ve never been to is where Venice Blvd. meets the beach, the sand-adjacent walkway with its permanent circus atmosphere. I’ve not been a fan of crowded places — we’ve hung out between the Santa Monica Pier and Ocean Park a lot, but have only seen the Ground Zero of the Venice Beach walkway in movies.
Well, we had a need to seek out a recommended food stand on the Boardwalk, and ventured there last Sunday, just to try our luck. It was something of a miracle that we chanced on a parking spot just a 3 blocks away. Some film location expert I am … I thought that the iconic Venice ‘collonade’ streets were further north, and had been comepletely eradicated. I was looking in the wrong spot … at Venice Way and the beach there still exists a partial block of the buildings with the columns made immortal by the movies Touch of Evil and Dementia. Some Angeleno I am, reporting on something everyone here knows well, except me.
There are more remaining columned buildings than seen in the photo. They are spaced out a little, but are obviously Touch of Evil’s Los Robles, where two full blocks carry the same design. The movie gives the impression of a seedy border town that exists only at night. Hints of a sandy nothingness beyond peek through between the buildings, like a landscape in a Dalí painting.
Today it’s of course hemmed in by dense development. It makes sense that one angle at the end of the block just shows darkness — that’s the beach, with the waves maybe 90 yards away. A half-block inland is the long street-alley where Charlton Heston is driven at breakneck speed, in a daylight scene. We can see more of what there is to the South — oil derricks, a lot of them. There were once many more ersatz Venetian canals, with those quaint bridges like the one where Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles make different exits.
Roger Corman’s Wild Angels has daylight scenes around the canals and the oil wells. Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, Jacques Demy’s Model Shop and Jacques Deray’s The Outside Man give us a wider tour of what the area once looked like … back when a student could be reasonably poor and still live in L.A.. The biggest surprise, however, was seeing the area covered in Denis Sanders’ 1959 Crime and Punishment U.S.A.. The movie is no great shakes but the Venice locations are eye-opening. A view looking South from a rooftop reveals scrubland with an unending forest of oil derricks, like something from an Oil Boom western. No wonder rent down there was cheap, with all that industrial activity.
Hope this hasn’t been a waste, see you Tuesday.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson
Matador — 4K 03/31/26
Radiance Films
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
That crazy Pedro Almodóvar had no fear and no limits — following through on his theory that sexual desire is the engine driving everything human, this beautifully-filmed, disturbingly raw horror thriller gives us an amour fou between two crazy killers, plus others equally loco de amor. A young Antonio Banderas attempts a rape to escape an oppressive mother; Eva Cobo stays true to her lover even though he may kill her. The picture is an antidote to glossy, often empty Euro-slashers; we instead get a ferocious yet humanistic look at the confluence of sex, death worship, and violent obsession. As if that weren’t enough, it’s a sensationally vibrant & colorful experience in 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray, from Radiance Films.
03/31/26
The Puppetoon Movie The Director’s Cut 03/31/26
Puppetoon Productions
Blu-ray
The original Puppetoon movie is back! In 1987 Arnold Leibovit helped secure the legacy of producer George Pal with a feature-length tribute; 40 years later, his film has been remastered in 4K and enlarged into a new Director’s Cut. The extra gallery of additonal Puppetoons is icing on the cake: it’s an impressive introduction to the stop-motion replacement animation world of George Pal. On Blu-ray from Puppetoon Productions.
03/31/26
CineSavant Column
Hello!
After the webpage format stumble of the weekend, I haven’t had time to snoop for more Column Items, here in my Sydney Falco file.
But my want list has accrued a number of notably desirable upcoming discs.
Let’s try this in what I hope is chronological order. On April 27, in 4K Ultra HD, Joe Dante’s comedic winner Innerspace is due from Arrow Films. The dazzling ILM visual effects are pre-CGI, I believe, but the real appeal comes from Dante’s cast — Martin Short, Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid, Kevin McCarthy, Fiona Lewis — and Robert Picardo, William Schallert, Henry Gibson, Kathleen Freeman and Dick Miller.
Kino Lorber is promising us a remastered encoding of a 1934 Universal picture that nobody seems to remember, despite the fact that it stars Claude Rains, right after making The Invisible Man. It also features Lionel Atwill and Joan Bennett. It also may be the finest hour for Edward Ludwig, the director of The Black Scorpion.
Although not technically a horror film, a bare synopsis brings to mind the Sam Peckinpah film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. It’s due on April 28.
Two pictures due in July from Radiance Films caught our eye. The first on June 22 is by Shohei Imamura, the director of Black Rain and Vengeance is Mine: his lauded 1966 drama The Pornographers. The subject is corruption of all kinds in 1960s Japan; we’ve never seen a more relentlessly honest director than Imamura. It’s a Region B disc in 4K Ultra HD.
Of special interest is Radiance’s June 23 release of Georges Franju’s first feature film La Tête contre les murs, which translates as ‘Head against the Wall’. It takes place in an asylum and features the stars of Franju’s Eyes without a Face, Pierre Brasseur and Edith Scob, plus Anouk Aimée and Paul Meurisse. It also has the first credited feature film score by Maurice Jarre, whose melody is quite striking. There aren’t that many films directed by Franju — we want them all.
And here’s a favorite we’re willing to go far out of our way to get — we’ve reviewed it twice on DVD, in fact.
It takes a bit of foreknowledge to appreciate what was originally a musical by Joan Littlewood, that uses music to express the cosmic futility of warfare in World War One. It sank like a stone in the box office of 1969 — in the middle of the Vietnam war. The brilliant novelty is to show the reality of the war through songs sung by the troops — with mordant replacement lyrics. It has a long cast list of English stars doing their bit for pacifism, including a young Maggie Smith as a music hall entertainer. The director is Richard Attenborough, and it’s his first film.
England’s Eureka! has the disc slated for June 29. At the moment their sales page doesn’t say what Region coding it might have.
A Criterion ‘Eclipse’ DVD we loved for years is getting a very welcome HD redo for June 30: Spaniard Carlos Saura’s ‘Flamenco Trilogy’ starring top flamenco artist Antonio Gades: Bodas de Sangre plus the international hit Carmen with Laura Del Sol and Cristina Hoyos, and El Amor Brujo, Manuel de Falla’s full-on flamenco ballet musical. The three movies do for flamenco what The Red Shoes does for toe-shoe ballet. All three films were restored in 4K.
I don’t have a sales link for the next item, but I couldn’t resist because it’s science fiction. George Pal’s Destination Moon hasn’t fared well on disc because its rights got sidetracked by the Wade Williams Collection, and all that we’ve seen in a long time is a pretty sad DVD from 26 years ago. UA has the Technicolor elements but nobody’s coming forward to digitally restore the picture.
Enter Film Masters, which has been doing very good remasters of films from various sources; we hope Pal’s film will look as good as some clips we’ve seen on TV. The show is lauded as the first of the 1950s Sci-Fi boom, although a Lippert space movie beat it to screens by a month or so. The space ship ‘Luna One’ is slated to launch on July 14, with a number of extras, including the entire feature Flight to Mars … which until 2021 was also ‘tied up’ with collector Wade Williams.
I’m breaking form here to tout a pair of Kino Lorber discs from the previous month, March, that I’m still hoping to receive. They’re in 4K Ultra HD and each has a strong following.
Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic might really shine on 4K, with all of those shiny subterranean settings for a human cockroach monster to hang out. We’ve always liked the picture and admired its nicely-chosen cast — Mira Sorvino, Josh Brolin, Giancarlo Giannini and F. Murray Abraham. The release has two 4K discs with two cuts of the picture, and one Blu-ray. It’s due March 17.
And finally there’s Jeannot Szwarc’s 1980 Somewhere in Time, which I’ve never seen … I just remember some pan-scanned clips on TV, plus waiting to see a horror film one afternoon at the Cinematheque, while a horde of enraptured Somewhere in Time fans emerged from their screening. They seemed transformed, which only made me feel more cynical. Not very nice, true.
Anyway, I figure a 4K Ultra HD presentation may erase my doubts — who doesn’t like Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer? Plus, the title did great things for favorite author Richard Matheson.
That’s for the moment … a couple more desirable announcements have surfaced, but I don’t have links or art images for them yet.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson
Viridiana — 4K 03/29/26
The Criterion Collection
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Luis Buñuel’s top roost as a world-class filmmaker remains undisturbed: as an exile in Mexico, his commercial work continued at a high creative pitch, staying true to his surrealist principles. Invited back to fascist Spain to make a movie, he generated a masterpiece guaranteed to become an international scandal. The cinematic slap to Generalissimo Franco won top honors at Cannes, and had to be smuggled to Mexico after la dictadura ordered it destroyed. Silvia Pinal, Fernando Rey and Francisco Rabal star; what may be Spain’s greatest film is now remastered in 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
03/29/26
The Big Broadcast of 1938 03/29/26
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
Blu-ray
Gee, now what year was this film released? Paramount’s comic radio variety extravaganza is enlivened by big-scale W.C. Fields comedy scenes, crazy antics from Martha Raye and the film debut of Bob Hope. Not to mention the science fiction premise that holds it all together: a trans-Atlantic race between giant high-speed ocean liners. Mitchell Leisen gives the show a glossy art-deco look, while Hope and Shirley Ross make movie history with the song Thanks for the Memory. We’ve always loved it, even with some klunky musical interludes. On Blu-ray from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.
03/29/26
CineSavant Column
Hello!
We’re a day late due to some website issues — but Charlie Largent says it’s safe to publish … reviews, anyway
Mark Throop of the indispensable Movies ala Mark found this site, which has been around long enough to be familiar to lots of film fans (except uninformed me). It’s called Reel History and is run by Dr. Jared Frederick. He does a good job of analyzing movies about ‘true’ historical events, and comparing them to known historical reality.
It looks like most of the films discussed are about war or battles, at least the ones at the top of Reel History’s menu. We watched part of an illustrated video on John Wayne’s 1960 The Alamo and were impressed … the good doctor managed to relate the discrepancy between Wayne’s film and the historical record, without calling the picture an outright fraud.
I’m interested in a second video article because it’s about the Spielberg / Milius / Gale & Zemeckis “1941”. Dr. Frederick rightly calls the epic comedy a mess, yet he has many interesting observations regarding its re-creation of / exaggeration of the real event of 1941, in which some Angelenos seem even more stupid than the characters in the movie.
Actually, it’s hard to find an article with four consecutive words that discuss “1941” in any context other that its box office success or lack thereof. I liked it. Maybe I should write an unexpurgated ‘Making of 1941’ sometime. Maybe not. From witnessing much of the filming, I have a wonderful recall of second-hand gossip, and scores of skewed subjective personal observations.
Being reported from all sides is TCM’s schedule for April, which will set aside its Friday nights for a month-long tribute to producer-director Roger Corman. They’ll be showing numerous Corman films, the films of some of the famed directors he helped get started, and a biographical documentary or two.
The news can be glommed at leisure, at the pages for Warner Bros. Discovery, All Hallows Geek and Conskipper,
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson
Sunday post for CineSavant
We didn’t post reviews yesterday because Trailers from Hell has a formatting glitch that needs to be fixed up … we assume it will be straightened out shortly. So … nothing is wrong with CineSavant or the rest of us here in Los Angeles!
We’ll hopefully be posting again shortly.
Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel — 4K 03/24/26
Deaf Crocodile Films
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Yet again, Deaf Crocodile opens doors to cinematic fantasy once blocked by politics and the vagaries of international film markets. This Estonian film is all but unknown here, despite coming from the reknowned authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Detective Glebsky is trapped in a snowbound ski resort with a group of eccentrics that might have a good reason for being so weird — they may be aliens in disguise, stranded and having difficulty passing for human. Director Grigori Kromanov’s audio-visual treat features a remote mountaintop location and an impressive electronica / prog music score; the Sci-fi element remains 99% cerebral. Who knows who is human, alien, a robot, or a zombie? Somebody give that Saint Bernard dog a lie detector test! On 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray from Deaf Crocodile Films.
03/24/26
A Man and a Woman 03/24/26
The Criterion Collection
Blu-ray
Director Claude Lelouch used the French Art Film format to shape a story of an intimate romantic encounter, and captured a world-wide audience. Star Anouk Aimée is a radiant presence, and Jean-Louis Trintignant found his footing here as a top-rank leading man. The film’s loose photogenic look caught on, and not just for shampoo commercials. The film’s auto racing background didn’t hurt either — did Lelouch produce much of his show on the Ford Motor Company’s dime? The Francis Lai music holds everything together … and it still plays well. Criterion’s special disc extra is Lelouch’s legendary illicit car race movie … through downtown Paris at 120 mph. On Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
03/24/26
CineSavant Column
Hello!
This is a fun thing to see. I met the great Nathaniel Thompson almost 25 years ago, when I think he was wrangling publicity for Image Entertainment DVDs. His Mondo Digital page is a solid source for the wide range of fantasy and horror; Nathaniel has a knack for covering extreme horror cinema with an intelligence not seen too many other places. I worked with him off and on at TCM with people like Richard Harland Smith. It was also fun to follow his adventures working for the Academy.
This is a ‘Shelf Space’ web interview produced by Kino Lorber and starring Kino’s Frank Tarzi and Alicia Lu. The talk covers Nathaniel’s career but mostly about his audio commentary work. This is very interesting for someone who has tried a few commentaries — Nathaniel has an enviable ability to let his knowledge and ideas flow, creating coherent, entertaining tracks even on the fly.
Part of the fun is hearing the three discuss audio commentators we all know by name. Nathaniel also explains how he keeps track of his personal archive of over 30,000 discs. I was just happy to enjoy spending some more time with Mr. Thompson.
CineSavant is an independent review site but the discs have to come from somewhere. One distributor has been ‘berry berry good to me,’ so I have no compunction about helping them promote a sale. It’s for The Warner Archive Collection discs at the MovieZyng page. It reads like a good deal to me — the basic come-on is 4 titles for $54 dollars.
I hope I’m communicating the details correctly. One browses eligible Warner Archive titles at the MovieZyng page, and when your cart has 4 titles, you enter code ARCHIVE17 at the checkout.
MovieZyng has an inducement program for its reviewers, but CineSavant isn’t participating. I just don’t want to be an influencer, I guess. But we’re big fans of the WAC and want it to do well. The Warner Archive 17th Anniversary Sale is right up top at the
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson
The Verdict (1946) 03/21/26
The Warner Archive Collection
Blu-ray
Two of Warners favorite thriller actors worked together nine times in just a few years. This mystery tale is their last pairing, and also the first feature film directed by Don Siegel. Victorian sleuth Sydney Greenstreet gets an assist from his artist friend Peter Lorre when a murder victim is found in a room locked from the inside. How did the killer get away? Don Siegel’s work is sharp, making the most of the studio’s high production values. The tightly directed suspense tale also stars Joan Lorring, whose saucy nightclub entertainer teases Lorre’s character by calling him ‘Vicky.’ On Blu-ray from The Warner Archive Collection.
03/21/26
Salem’s Lot — 4K 03/21/26
Arrow Video
4K Ultra HD
Prime-era Stephen King never loses its appeal! Director Tobe Hooper delivers some strong visuals in this TV movie version of King’s All-American vampire tale. Reggie Nalder channels his inner Max Schreck, and James Mason provides a top class-act horror performance. Of the supporting cast we favor Bonnie Bedelia, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor over the blond male leads. The best news is that the deluxe edition also contains the tightly-edited Theatrical Version that was screened overseas, also in full 4K. Come to the town where bloodsuckers are Blue, and where No One Rests In Peace! On 4K Ultra HD from Arrow Video.
03/17/26