Hello!

Sorry, no reviews today … we’ve just gotten back from a quick trip East to hobnob with our fellow wizards attend to some forbidden personal family errands … We are a lot more refreshed than we would be if we tried to jam in a review laden with typos, awkward sentences and egregious mistakes for our esteemed correspondents to correct.

But we have some good disc announcements, none of them more than a week old!  First up is KL Studio Classics’ announcement of their August lineup. It has a number of very welcome surprises, starting with a stack of worthy genre pictures in 4K Ultra HD: Jean-Pierre Melville’s  Bob Le Flambeur and  Le Doulos (with Jean-Paul Belmondo), Michael Ritchie’s PC outrage Prime Cut and Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad … plus …

… plus … Jean-Luc Godard’s  Alphaville in 4K, which I’m hoping will be a bit of an improvement over the previous Blu-ray.

Blu-ray debuts or reissues include Phil Karlson’s 99 River Street with John Payne and Evelyn Keyes, Burt Reynolds in  Navajo Joe, with its screaming soundtrack of Ennio Morricone; Bert I. Gordon’s  Food of the Gods and  Empire of the Ants (never seen ’em, I’m sure they’re ‘special’), Ray Milland in  Frogs, Jeff Lieberman’s  Squirm, Philip Kaufman’s  The White Dawn and a Volume Twenty (XX) for the series  Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema.

Also to be very much welcomed by fans of Classic Eurohorror, from the always-reliable disc boutique Radiance, is the coming-soon announcement of the Riccardo Freda – Mario Bava horror opus I vampiri. The B&W CinemaScope thriller was the icebreaker for gothic horror in Italy. It preceded Hammer Film’s first all-out Technicolor horror release by one year.

After Radiance’s stunning remasters of  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock,  Planet of the Vampires, etc., this is big news. We loved the old Image disc from 23 years ago, but wondered if its odd jumble of scenes fairly represented the movie; perhaps the experts can straighten it out for us. At any rate, it will be illuminating to hear commentator Tim Lucas contrast I vampiri  with the U.S. recut version The Devil’s Commandment.

Radiance also has a special edition on the way of Benjamin Christensen’s ultra-creepy silent infotainment documentary  Häxan. Also listed as Coming Soon, it carries three alternate music scores, and a couple of additional re-cut versions.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson