CineSavant Column

Saturday April 8, 2023

 

Hello!

We couldn’t resist friend Craig Reardon’s link to a brief clip from a 1987 talk show (The Tonight Show?) with a guest-hosting Joan Rivers — who we very much miss.

Rivers’ special guest is none other than a very cordial Vincent Price, who is cajoled into peforming a bit of his vocal performance from the Thriller music video: Vincent Price teases the Thriller Rap. It’s of course a real treat — in less than a minute Vincent’s ominous oratory evokes every fun moment we’ve had with him. We’re grateful to see it on YouTube, yet are amused by its ‘Enhanced HD’ — which is simply defocused video wings applied to a flat image.

Is there a fantastic-quality remaster of the Michael Jackson – John Landis Thriller around somewhere?  Wiki says that a restored 3D version was shown at festivals and had a limited engagement in 2018. I would think that the crowd so obsessed about all things 1980s would have insisted that it be available in some fab home video format, long ago.

 


 

In his ongoing researches, Gary Teetzel has uncovered a new mini-find: The Media History Digital Library has a selection of Warner Bros. original Pressbooks digitized online.

Gary notes that Warner Bros. was so confused with its release of 1932’s  Doctor X  that the word went out not to sell it as a horror film. That may account for the cover of the Pressbook bearing a display more appropriate for one of the company’s pre-Code comedies with scantily-clad starlets.

The all-sex no-horror theme continues inside this scan of an obviously much-deteriorated Pressbook. Would exhibitors not realize that the show features Preston Foster as a fiend who covers his entire head in Synthetic Flesh?

Here’s the link to the Full Doctor X Pressbook.

This is the link (thanks Gary!) to the Full Selection of Warner Pressbooks. They presently only go up to around 1949.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson