Hello!

There was a regular announcement furor two days ago, with some fancy / pricey collectors’ boxes trumpeted online. I’ll just dig through the goodies without delay.

But first some news from Left Field: attention all Crawling Eyes!  Those in the know will be pleased to hear that Anolis Entertainment of Heibach Germany says that a Blu-ray of the uncut The Trollenberg Terror  is in the works. It’s of course the vintage alien invasion thriller from 1958, known here as The Crawling Eye. It stars Forrest Tucker and an excellent Janet Munro.

It’s under the German title Die Teufelswolke von Monteville or ‘The Devil’s Cloud of Monteville.’ Should we assume that ‘Monteville’ is the Alpine burg down the hill from the Trollenberg?  No answers here, but we do have the ancient ‘DVD Savant’ The Crawling Eye DVD review, from 22 years ago.

The other announcements are for discs with hard release dates. Viavision [Imprint] has announced its offerings for May, a list with a couple of surprises: the old Republic The Catman of Paris, Jules Dassin’s Up Tight, the John Ford / John Wayne classic The Long Voyage Home, Ann-Margret in Bus Riley’s Back in Town, Robert Mulligan’s The Spiral Road . . .

. . . and the home video debut of the long-missing 1949 Paramount version of The Great Gatsby starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field. It was never lost, just tied up in a nagging rights issue or two. Imprint’s full info is Here.

Then, Severin Films continues to ride its wave of innovative video restorations with an announcement of a deluxe horror boxed set. Danza Macabra Vol. One: The Italian Gothic Collection boasts four vintage corridor-wandering creepshows that are definitely off the beaten path: The Monster of the Opera (Il mostro dell’opera, 1964), The Seventh Grave (La settima tomba, 1965), Scream of the Demon Lover (Il castello dalle porte di fuoco, 1971) and Lady Frankenstein (La figlia di Frankenstein, 1971).

They’re said to be all newly scanned, and augmented with hours of extras. As usual, Severin’s box art is arresting in itself.

The capper is from Powerhouse Indicator, which checks in with two boxed sets primed for May. The grabber is Mexico Macabre: Four Sinister Tales from the Alameda Films Vault, 1959-1963. Making their Blu-ray premieres will be Black Pit of Dr. M (Misterios de ultratumba), The Witch’s Mirror (El espejo de la bruja), The Brainiac (El Barón del terror) and The Curse of the Crying Woman (La maldición de la Llorona).

Besides PI’s usual extras abundantes, a 100-page book will be included. I think we’ll be getting a lot more information than what we saw in Forry Ackerman’s old ‘Mexi-monsters’ articles.

Powerhouse Indicator’s second boxed set is more arcane — From Hollywood to Heaven: The Lost and Saved Films of the Ormond Family. I can’t say it any more clearly than PI’s own copy: “charts the extraordinary filmmaking careers of June, Ron and Tim Ormond, a Nashville mother-father-son trio that started out making wild drive-in movies — including Lash LaRue westerns and the stripper-gore-musical outrage The Exotic Ones — but who, after a near-death experience, turned their backs on secular show business to produce a series of shocking, surreal religious pictures.”

It’s accompanied by a hundred-page book, too . . . whatever it is, it sounds wild.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson