Hello!

An odd link courtesy of correspondent Lee Kaplan: It’s an embryonic film from director David Bradley, filmed when he was a teenager. To us UCLA film students Bradley was a classic cinema lecturer who brought in rare prints from his personal film collection, which was said to be enormous.

The outspoken Bradley had a peculiar film career. He self-produced two ‘cine-club’ features in the 1940s, both of which starred a very young Charlton Heston; he hung out in New York author and critic with James Agee. She somehow maneuvered himself into directing an MGM feature, an impressive feat. But his Hollywood legacy ended up hanging mostly on a trio of exploitation pictures, a juvenile delinquency tale, a lower-case Sci-fi, and the core crazoid Psychotronic effort  Madmen of Mandoras, later reconfigured as They Saved Hitler’s Brain.

This link goes to an excellent encoding of an amateur home movie epic Bradley made when he was 17 … he’s clearly trying to be professional, what with the neatly crafted intertitles — it’s his homemade version of a Mad Doctor movie.

After a  welcome announcement last month Severin Films and its top man David Gregory are making more news…

… the director’s Theatre of Horrors: The Sordid Story of Paris’ Grand Guignol will be given a grand premiere in Paris on September 6th. Narrated by Barbara Steele, the documentary charts the history and influence of the theater beyond its own macabre shows of cruelty and mutilation.

Barbara Steele is going to appear in person with Gregory at the premiere. It sounds like an epochal night in the history of horror — a feature devoted to the untold story of the weird, yet very mainstream theater, with an opportunity for Ms. Steele to bask in some well earned, much deserved adolation and accolades.

There’s more to the story … a full accounting of the event and Severin’s other recent surprises is at their website news page:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson