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Trailers from Hell promoted a fun ‘R’ rated trailer just yesterday for Allan Arkush & Joe Dante’s goofy-unbelievable Hollywood Blvd., which I remember seeing several years later at the New Beverly. The slightly beat-up print that Sherman Torgan showed captured the correct grindhouse feel perfectly. When is Criterion going to recognize this ‘Miracle Pictures’ monument to cinematic genius?  It’s got Dick Miller in it, what more do they want?  Producer Jon Davison provides the salutory/confessional TFH Trailer commentary, reminding us that the movie was literally made ‘on a bet’ with boss Roger Corman, a man that rarely lost a bet.

And I’m eager to see the extras on Kino’s new disc of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932  Love Me Tonight,  a still- hilarious, still- amazing musical romance that blends cinema and songs in at least four different, wholly innovative ways. I’m especially interested in finding out the content of (several) little dialogue trims to the movie, that were cut out and lost forever when Paramount had to clean up the show for reissue after the enforcement of the Production Code. On earlier copies of the film, whenever the minx-like Myrna Loy (not the lady above, that’s frisky Jeanette MacDonald) is about to say something outrageously naughty, a splice shows where the offending comment was yanked out. Perhaps someday the missing material will reappear. The Special Edition Blu-ray will be out in seventeen days, on September 29.

… and correspondent Louis Helman just wrote to say that Kino has also announced Billy Wilder’s 1945 The Lost Weekend for November 24. That will almost complete the Wilder filmography on Blu — all that’s missing will be The Spirit of St. Louis, Buddy Buddy, The Emperor Waltz and Mauvaise Graine.

At first it sounds ridiculous department: If you’re like most people, you’ve probably spent many a sleepless night tossing and turning, wondering to yourself: “How did good old Dick Jones climb through the ranks at OCP to become a top executive?”   Well, your troubles may soon be over, as MGM is working on a TV series about that very subject with original screenwriter Ed Neumier.

The title of this Moviehole article by Drew Turney says it all: MGM working on RoboCop series focusing on young Dick Jones. Think back 33 years — Dick Jones was the nasty corporate hatchet man memorably played by Ronny Cox in the first Robocop. He didn’t continue in the sequels due to an unfortunate business dispute ‘best resolved from a great height.’

Will ‘The Old Man’ appear — except as The Middle Aged Man, since it’s set in the past?  Will there be a gripping episode where Jones finally earns the key to the executive washroom, where he can eavesdrop on co-workers scheming against him?  Since MGM also owns the movie version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, why not combine the two properties, replacing J. Pierrepont Finch with Jones, and World Wide Wickets with OCP, but keeping all the musical numbers?

Actually, the new idea sounds like something that the sci-fi satirist Ed Neumeier might make VERY memorable — his venomous hatred for business corruption & political slime might result in yet another wicked takedown of the malevolent corporate ethos. What is RoboCop after all, if not Dilbert with machine guns?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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It’s a post- Labor Day CineSavant special! Um, if anything can be called special around here — . Maybe I’ve been seeing too many movies, but when correspondent ‘B’ sent me some Labor Day themed Ernie Bushmiller ‘Nancy’ cartoons, one stuck out for a screwy reason: it reminded me of Antonioni’s existential bear trap L’Eclisse, mainly the ending where the characters exit the scene for a frustrating / intriguing slow montage of landscape details around a certain Roman intersection, halfway out in the sticks. I’ve always loved Bushmiller’s style for Nancy, especially the backgrounds. Everything is just-so, tamed, in control. Those backgrounds now fascinate me, and in this little strip they’re suddenly front and center.

Just think of your favorite TV show that has recurring locations… and then imagine a spacey montage round-up of ’empty set’ images, with the characters you love missing, mysteriously absent. Georges Franju did something like that for his ultra-creepy trailer for Eyes Without a Face, using shots just as the actor is leaving the frame, etc.. That’s a great tagline idea: “We can’t show you the horrors… but we can show you where they just happened.”

Then, correspondent Bill Migicovsky forwards this article from a few months back that I’m ashamed to say confirms my suspicions about a famous actor. It’s pretty funny: Rex Harrison – His Greatest Hits by Graham McCann. It’s the man that even nice people want to punch out!  How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People!

Last week Joe Dante amused his audience by pointing out an errant crewman in the middle of of a shot in the Universal programmer Horror Island, a revelation which rhymes with the discovery by correspondent Gary Teetzel of a similar surprise crew-person cameo in the new Blu-ray of the Hammer The Kiss of the Vampire:

“In Kiss of the Vampire no one is supposedly staying at the hotel other than the newlyweds. So off on the far left, at what appears to be the edge of the set… whose arm is that with the suspiciously modern wristwatch?

My other thought while seeing this is that I’d like to see a version of Kiss of the Vampire that stars John Cleese as Basil Fawlty. The innkeeper can be forever losing his temper because vampires have ruined his business. — Gary

Thanks Gary, and thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Shades of Matinee — the photo above is a 1957 souvenir of a ‘big bug’ Terrorama Saturday at a ‘nabe theater in Florida, five years before that unforgettably cheesy chiller Mant! breezed through town and caused a scandal.  The adventurous Gary Teetzel was free-range web researching the other day and found this nifty news blurb image of kids excited about the scary-scary double bill down at the Coral Theater, wherever that was. This is the kind of ballyhoo nostalgia we expect to see from John McElwee or maybe Bill Shaffer. Did Not of This Earth get bigger billing because it was the more important picture, or because it had a shorter title?

I’ll bet that the monster car was a pre-existing gimmick-mobile to promote the exterminator business, but it seems to have done the trick. As we hunker down with doors locked against the nefarious COVID, we can still remember the thrill of a popcorn matinee crowed together with 200 exited, smelly, likely contagious kids getting ready to see something totally new and unknown. How many of those Florida brats darlings were traumatized by the creepy eyeball-guy in Not of This Earth?  Were they scared or did they laugh their heads off?  I was a bit too young to make this super-cool scene — 1957 was the first year I understood that years were numbered.

On the incoming disc front, CineSavant has some 4K reviews on the way. Arrow Video’s two-disc set of Flash Gordon with a million extras will over-stimulate your retinal sensors with color and deafen you with Queen’s soundtrack: “Go Flash Go!”

Universal’s highly anticipated Ultra-HD disc set of The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection has arrived as well, containing 4k and Blu-ray encodings of Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds. The big surprise ought to be a new restoration of Psycho, reinstating a few short bits taken out by the censors at the last minute… a stab here, a peep-show moment there. That naughty Hitch would approve.

We haven’t seen any of those four titles around here in years, and they’re all incredibly good. I also haven’t written about them for a lot longer, so we’ll see if anything I have to say is older or wiser. Don’t worry, if I run out of legit, appropriate comment and criticism, I’ll fill in with refreshingly tiresome personal memories.

And finally, Kino Lorber has let loose a list of their October Blu-ray releases, which has some real gems that this collector will be eager to review — many will be new views for me.

We start with a clutch of George Peppard pictures, of which I’ve not seen P.J. and Newman’s Law. I’ve also not seen Universal’s horror western Curse of the Undead, even though it stars favorite actor Sierra Charriba Michael Pate. That’s followed by a couple of Michael J. Fox vehicles. For oddball horror we can look to the vintage Tod Slaughter barnstormer The Face at the Window, and the marginal Monogram ‘shocker’ The Ape, in which our kindly medical researcher Boris Karloff cuts corners ‘warp speed’ to find a vaccine for polio. Do you think anything will go wrong?  Did you read the title?

I know a couple of readers eager to get their mitts on a good transfer of Ronald Neame’s The Chalk Garden with Hayley Mills and Deborah Kerr… and fans of Clint Eastwood will get their fill with a trio of dusty cheroot-chewing post-Spaghetti oaters Two Mules for Sister Sara (Don Siegel), Joe Kidd (John Sturges) and High Plains Drifter (Clint himself). We’ll also find out if the Phil Karlson/Richard Widmark Cold War thriller The Secret Ways is a winner… it does co-star a young Teresa Santiago Geltner Senta Berger!

Other titles included for October are a Bert I. Gordon murder thriller, what look like a few TV movies and an undersea monster romp with a rude crustacean, Deep Star Six. One recommended item is S.O.S. Titanic. The all-star TV movie came out on DVD only in truncated form, as a feature cut-down. Kino’s new Blu will include that but also the original uncut 145-minute version that was shown in 1979. I remember liking it a lot — it’s not quite the classic that is  A Night to Remember, but it’s still better than the huge 1997 hit. If I get a review copy I’ll do a round-up of ‘Iceberg Dead Ahead’ retellings, including the notorious Nazi version.

I list the best last: a new Blu of the first Harry Palmer spy saga The Ipcress File. It ought to be considered a classic by now, especially with John Barry’s peerless music score. As with most of the KL Studio Classics offerings, the disc is loaded with extras. Now all three Michael Caine Harry Palmer films will be available to Region A fans.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Dick Dinman’s radio show confronts the heat rays and disintegrator beams this week, with his DVD Classics Corner on the Air look at the new Criterion disc of The War of the Worlds. The featured guest interviewee is Andrea Kalas, Senior VP of Asset Management and Paramount Archives Head. Will they Survive The War of the Worlds?  The discussion gets into issues about restoring Technicolor films, things like registration of the 3 color images. A selection of Dick’s older Classics Corner on the Air shows are available at this WMPG Website.

The images are now all over Facebook but can be sourced back to the Classic Horror Film Board, where a member named ‘Rakshasha’ gave fans an early peek at the restoration of Michael Curtiz’s 2-Color Technicolor horror thriller Doctor X from 1932. That’s Fay Wray pictured, with ‘important but suspicious researcher’ Lionel Atwill and ‘irrepressible reporter’ Lee Tracy, he of comic relief fame. Rakshasha says the the refurbishing of this scary-comic classic is being performed by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and promises that more details are coming soon.

Earlier this year we were blown away by the restoration job on Michael Curtiz’ classic Mystery of the Wax Museum, as was released on a great Warner Archive disc. The news then was that COVID might have stopped work on other projects. So we hope it’s continuing apace, and we’ll be receiving another happy surprise next Spring. As the Full Moon Killer says, “Long Live the Synthetic Flesh!”

In watching the extras on his new disc of the Hammer Phantom of the Opera, the all-knowing, all-wise advisor and contributor Gary Teetzel heard something that sent him on yet another web search:

“In the disc’s featurette on Edwin Astley’s music score, it is mentioned that a ‘Liberace-like’ arrangement of the main aria written for the film’s ‘Joan of Arc’ opera had been released as a single by Coral Records. Of course, I had to seek it out. It’s mentioned that it was arranged by a guy named Stanley Paul. Well, it turns out that Paul Stanley of KISS appeared in a production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom, so a search of ‘Stanley Paul Phantom of the Opera’ yielded a large number of links about that. But eventually I was able to find the Astley recording. Thanks to collector Kirk Henderson, we can hear it”:

“I’m pretty sure that this is the first record tie-in with the release of a new Hammer film; I’m not sure there were any others until Lust for a Vampire’s infamous “Strange Love” appeared on the B-side of a single in 1971. I’m not aware of “Black Leather Rock” or the songs from Lost Continent, The Vengeance of She or Moon Zero Two getting released as commercial singles. A cursory search of the Discogs database turned up nothing, but I suppose it’s possible that 45’s of other Hammer songs exist.”

“But my research did turn up what is apparently a private pressing by Hammer’s Phillip Martell, fascinating disc with music from Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire, These are The Damned and She. Did Martell create it just as a keepsake to give to James Bernard?  Were they trying to interest a record label in releasing some of their scores? We may never know”:

Thank you Gary… and thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson