CineSavant Column
Hello!
Maybe I’ll take a chance on the upcoming Scream Factory release of Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out — I never got into the Terence Fisher film as others have, and it’s a chance to find out if I was in a bad mood that day. I have been promised a screener of John Gilling’s The Reptile, which I’ve avoided only because the copies I had contact with looked bad. I’m predisposed to like that one — I was always impressed by the makeup, and I don’t mind if it only shows up for a minute at the finish.
Kino’s October schedule has some indifferent titles, but also some interesting side benefits, like the Pushkin-adapted quasi-horror picture The Queen of Spades with Anton Walbrook and Edith Evans, and Basil Dearden’s psychological sci-fi tale The Mind Benders. How I saw this ‘adult’ movie at age 12 I don’t know. At the time I thought that the sense deprivation chamber used by Dirk Bogarde was crazy, weird, impossible fantasy.
But in the next sixty days Kino this month has so much great stuff, I’ll be dipping into it every week — French crime classics and science-fiction and horror favorites. Bob Le Flambeur, Dead of Night, Alphaville, Death Takes a Holiday, La Professionel, Lost Highway, A Foreign Affair, Blackmail, Murder!, Day of the Outlaw, Dinosaurus and 4D Man. I already have a late June release, the Powell/Pressburger Gone to Earth / The Wild Heart, and am rushing on a review.
And I see that Turner Classic Movies is showing the George Pal The War of the Worlds early in July, on the 9th I think. There’s a chance that it might be the new Paramount restoration, which so far is a no-show on disc. I’ll be setting the DVR in the hopes of catching it.
So far I’ve only seen samples of the new restoration, and am looking forward to a Blu-ray, Paramount, hint hint. I like this NYC poster of the premiere engagement … they misspelled the author’s name (all these images can be enlarged).
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson