Hello!

Trailers from Hell’s very own Joe Dante will be front and center tonight with Ben Mankiewicz on TCM’s ‘Two For One’ show … which we won’t be missing.

The show is a special discussion setup with special guests. Joe will help introduce Charles Laughton’s  Night of the Hunter — a movie that can be talked about forever — and then an obscure oddity called  The Fool Killer. I stars a young Edward Albert, and Anthony Perkins as a ‘philosophical axe murderer.’

Joe clearly wasn’t asked to pick a title from a pre-chosen list. He’s a major booster for The Fool Killer:  In 2019 he and producer Jon Davison promoted it at an ‘alternative screening opportunity’ at the American Cinematheque, in a series he called Joe Dante’s 16mm Spotlight.  Another title Joe showed in the series was the then- hard to see  Ladybug Ladybug.

We reported on the screening at an old  CineSavant Column … so we’ll be primed and ready for The Fool Killer tonight.

Twenty years ago when friend Randall William Cook was in New Zealand directing second-unit for Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, the rumor flew about that Jackson was so ‘into’ the original Kong that he commissioned, in the middle of production, an in-house project to re-create the legendary lost ‘Spider Pit’ sequence, which was supposedly so gruesome that it was cut before the movie was publicly screened.

The ‘Jackson Spider Pit’ project was indeed finished. For most of us it premiered on Warners’ first 2005 DVD of King Kong. Jackson’s WETA crew even ‘resurrected’ the Styracosaurus that chased Carl Denham’s sailors at the log bridge.

The animation is purposely done to match the original film’s 1933 style, with (I think) WETA creative personnal playing the unhappy victims of spiders and lizards. They even included the background continuity detail of a lizard climbing up the cave wall, to match the lizard that almost grabs Jack Driscoll as he hides just below the giant ape.

This Youtube encoding isn’t the best, but it shows how Jackson’s animators matched the style — the animation models are pretty good, too.

C’mon Warners, where’s a fab 4K remaster for the original 1933 8th Wonder of the World?   (Can I be more of an ingrate?)

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello! …

Here’s a rare treat … an original promo to raise interest for the late ’70s stop-motion project Timegate, with input by Jim Danforth, John Morgan and Randall William Cook. They’ve accessed some film clips to emphasize that it’s ‘in production.’ Some of the best material is an animatic of storyboard art by Cook himself.

An article at a page called Fandom  describes the movie a little bit more, and offers some good artwork and photos. The film’s problems were well known to the ‘animation crowd’ at the time; the late Michael Hyatt was involved, and wrote a long letter about it to the magazine Cinefantastique.

The promo has been up just two weeks; it was posted by Matthew B. Lamont.

Also posted by Mr. Lamont is Hoyt Yeatman’s UCLA Film School animation project, from about 1975, not 1977.

Hoyt built his own 16mm projection setup to do Ray Harryhausen-type animation; he reworked a Texas Instruments calculator to serve as a one-button exposure and lights trigger. He made the model and did most everything technical for the show. The live-action part of the film was shot at Vasquez Rocks, all in one day.

The result got Hoyt work in TV with George Schlatter, and his stop-motion exposure setup got him a job with Douglas Trumbull helping with the  CE3K mothership setup for Dennis Muren. Two years later Hoyt was a founding partner of a new visual effects company.

It wasn’t made for money — Hoyt knew he could never clear the music — but it was one of the more successful ‘calling card’ student films I ever witnessed. Thanks to Matthew Lamont … !

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Deep in the lists of ‘Movies That Never Were’ rests the odd tale of the second sequel to Spielberg’s  Jaws. It ended up being a cookie-cutter franchise place-holder, but decked out in fancy 3-D … but only after another idea spent some time in pre-production. For a while the 2nd sequel was envisioned as a hot comedy take on the huge summer hit, a collaboration between Zanuck/Brown and National Lampoon.

Joey Paur’s website ‘geek tyrant’ gives us a rundown of the story, evidently lifted from a 2023 documentary called Sharksploitation. The nutty comedy project picked up some momentum before it was suddenly cancelled, a common fate for movies in development. Besides producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, the lineup of conspirators left on the beach included the Lampoon’s Matty Simmons, writers Tod Carroll & John Hughes, plus director Joe Dante.

I’d say more info is needed … was there ever a script?  Joe Dante could have made the show into a Mad Mad World of crazy comedy … but might he have become typed as an ‘auteur director of fish?’  Paur ends by saying Universal should dust off Matty Simmons’ gory R-rated version and produce it now … except they’d probably have to rough it up just to get a PG.

We love Betty Boop … we loved her even when she had ears like a Basset Hound. Joe Dante forwarded this half-hour attempt to revive the famous character, in the form of an animated TV special.

Other Dave Fleischer characters are involved too, including Bosko and Koko the Clown. Experts would probably have more to say about shortcuts in the show’s animation, but all we saw was some hula dancing that looked to be rotoscoped from an original cartoon.

The show is a curiosity that apparently didn’t develop any further … it’s busy and noisy but the attempt to replicate the original style feels crude, and the laughs aren’t there, either. It reminds us that the original cartoons were made for adult audiences, not children. Randall Cyrenne at Animated Views had a little more information on the show, from 2003.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I think we’re all looking for some sane distractions. Joe Dante circulated this page with some interesting, well-chosen quotes by a short list of stars, accompanied by good images.

The page is by Dean Brierly, the editor of Black & White magazine. The newest entry seems to be from 2015, and shows us some interesting things Robert Ryan had to say. Other names listed include Jan Sterling, William Holden, Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine, just to name four. Light reading, maybe, but relaxing in these days of high blood pressure.

And Wayne Schmidt forwards this BfI featurette about the revival of an original 1977 35mm Technicolor print of Star Wars, the original version that wasn’t yet part of a longer series. You know, this is the real, suppressed picture where Han Solo shoots first.

It’s amusing that the English restoration people make so much of the ability to see an original print from 1977, in perfect condition … it doesn’t matter that it’s not in 70mm and may not even have a stereophonic soundtrack. An older generation of film fans that haunted repertory theaters, the Director’s Guild, museum screenings, etc., were routinely exposed to vintage studio prints, sometimes in nitrate, that blew away what we could see on TV. It was an addiction.

The featurette is a good little primer on archive activities … and it proves that the Star Wars that conquered the world and won the Oscars is technically a ‘lost’ movie, buried by its maker. The BfI was able to access a preserved opening title crawl for their screening, with the original not-episode-IV text.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Once again Michael McQuarrie comes up with a winner …the very first issue, fully readable, of Eric Losfeld’s Parisian publication Midi-Minuit Fantastique, from May-June of 1962.

Fully-readable comes with the caveat to brush up on one’s French. I remember when James Ursini loaned me a stack of these many a year ago, which saw me asking for quick translations from the missus. After a while you discover that film writing about horror films tends to reuse the same 300 words. Once you have a few of those down in a foreign language, you can at least get an idea what the writers are talking about.

It’s 1962 and the French critics are nuts about Hammer Films and Terence Fisher. The only Mario Bava being discussed is  Hercules in the Haunted World and they love him, too. The pages are packed with big B&W photos, plus credits and synopses. Modern readers no longer need those, as the web has full credits, and often encodings of the films themselves. Back in the day, specialty film magazines like this could be a valued resource. A plus, we learn when the titles played in Paris. I can’t imagine what attending “Le cauchemar de Dracula” would be like, in a Paris theater decked out like the one above.

Meanwhile, correspondent “E.” sends along a link that some readers might enjoy.

It’s to a web page dedicated to the artist Tom Chantrell, who is responsible for many classic movie poster artworks from 1938 forward.

The website is Hammer Horror Posters; follow the link and you’ll see a home page and a blog page by the site’s author ‘Dave.’ The blog is insubstantial and hasn’t been updated in years, but it has an eye-catching photo of Mr. Dave posing with 8 of Hammer’s brightest actresses, a pretty glorious portrait.

The Tom Chantrell Poster Artist page has a good interview with the artist and some more photos of Chantrell posing with his work, by Simon Greetham. The artist passed away in 2001, which makes us think that the website was originally put together in the 1990s. His  Wiki page names many of his poster commissions. This must be Old News to many, as Chantrell designed posters for the first Star Wars movie.

Other galleries give us big selections of Amicus posters, and two other categories. The Hammer posters link didn’t work for me. Don’t get your hopes up, as some of the posters are watermarked.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

The Nerve of Some People.

CineSavant is out of town for the second time in a week. That plus Jury duty drained away the time available for reviewing … but we’ll be back on Saturday with two new posts.

If you’ve never done it, check out the Review Index on the right …. which goes back 26 years and about 7200 reviews.

Thanks to the readers that drop by twice a week to see what’s new on the page. And thanks to the correspondents that offer encouragement and needed corrections. If I’m back and have my act together fast enough, the next review update may be Friday. Don’t worry about us, we’re getting a much-appreciated break.

¡Hasta el sábado!

See you then — Glenn Erickson