Hello!

First up, horrible wonder wonderful horror news:

This big surprise announcement makes my day, and might make for a great Halloween too: according to Blu-ray.com the BFI will be releasing John Parker’s genuine cult marvel Dementia aka Daughter of Horror on October 12. They’ve affixed a price to the release but no additional info, although it’s likely to be restricted to Region B. If someone has performed a digital restoration on the original 1955 film and its slight-revision version Daughter of Horror with the amazing voice of Ed McMahon, this will be a highly special item. The old Kino disc was miraculous enough, thanks to an excellent research extra by Bret Wood. But to see the show in better video quality would be just … dementedly good. Do you still enjoy old-fashioned spooky-wooky haunted house thrills?  This weird near-silent thriller delivers. You’ll never believe how far beyond haunted-house creepy Ed McMahon’s voice sounds:

“Yes, I am here. The DEMON that possesses your soul. Wait a bit. I have so much to SHOW you. So much that you are afraid to see… For this is a place where there is NO love, NO hope in the pulsing, throbbing, world of the INSANE MIND where only nightmares are real.”

Also just in the door here at CineSavant headquarters and drawing my attention is a simply beautifully-designed collector’s box for Severin Films’ The Complete Umberto Lenzi Carroll Baker Giallo Collection. Severin has been getting a lot of attention for massive, pricey and highly ‘collectable’ collections of maudit filmmakers lately, with one particular producer-director in mind.

All the features star Carroll Baker, seemingly took a three year vacation in Italo horror — did she think the movies would never reach the U.S.?  The mysterious contents beckon: So Sweet… So Perverse (Cosí dolce… cosí perversa), A Quiet Place to Kill (Paranoia), Knife of Ice (Il coltello di ghiaccio). I remember the fourth title Orgasmo attracting my attention in a movie listing somewhere long, long ago… now I’ll find out what it’s all about. I don’t want to read too much about Orgasmo before seeing it. All I know is that it was also titled Paranoia in some places and that it’s a proto-giallo, or perhaps more accurately an ‘erotic thriller,’ co-starring Lou Castel.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Frivolous things first … Gary Teetzel forwards this YouTube link to a French variety show with a Star Wars French Disco Ballet, clearly from 1977 when every miserable TV show on the planet was looking for a Star Wars tie-in gimmick. The non-choreography looks like something a harried troupe threw together in an afternoon, and gave to the video editors to composite. I’d laugh, except that it’s halfway interesting compared to much of the variety show dreck from that decade… I had to sit through a Brady Bunch musical special or two.

Bob Furmanek forwards this video pitch for the 3-D Film Archive’s latest 3-D restoration. Their Kickstarter campaigns have resulted in some great work, such as the recent (flat) Africa Screams disc. Now Bob makes a good case, on-camera, for a new project: Help Restore the 1977 Martial-Arts Classic DYNASTY in 3-D!

These last two items involve things I worked on. Thirty years later, I’ve been contacted by Randal Viscovich, the writer of the 1989 horror film Night Visitor, which I edited for producer Alain Silver on the Culver Studios lot back in (cough) 1988. He tells me that the new Blu-ray is out now from Scorpion Films, so I’ll have to go check it out. Last December I was taped talking about the film for some of the extras; Randal’s already corrected one piece of my faulty memory. I may even get a chance to review the disc. Sitting above so cozy is the teenager-hating devil worshipper Allen Garfield, with his demonology-challenged brother Michael J. Pollard.

And Alan K. Rode’s Facebook announcement is true; last week we braved the raging Coronavirus in Cahuenga Pass to record a full commentary for a movie that gets altogether too much attention around here, Major Dundee. Unlike my solo commentary last year for Explosive Media out of Germany, this commentary is a free-ranging conversation-discussion. The pairing seemed to go well — Alan added historical details of the Old West that placed some of the film’s action in a greater context.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Congrats to Savant reviewer Lee Broughton, whose review for the Spaghetti Western The Specialists has persisted on the Trailers from Hell Top Six Popular Articles list for several weeks. An invaluable asset to CineSavant, Lee has been writing for us for more than twenty years… amassing a considerable volume of reviews. I hereby offer this link to Lee’s own page, Current Thinking on the Western.

Today’s fun continues with a musical link from trusted cohort Craig Reardon, a cue from the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, doing a spot-on in-concert rendition of the main theme from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Boy, the record of this soundtrack album was a real thrill back at Christmas of 1969…

And Gary Teetzel reports that Scream Factory’s Blu-ray presentations of the old A.I.P. thrillers How to Make a Monster and War of the Colossal Beast have been delayed again, this time to November. This is the third or fourth push-back, we think for How to Make a Monster. I guess we have to admit that we were looking forward to those vintage Sam Arkoff titles. Are these two turning into the ‘Flying Dutchmen’ of Blu-ray releases, doomed to forever wander the calendar in search of a release date?

Being Blu-ray fans, our impatience knows no bounds. With these booted from Scream Factory’s October schedule, Warner Archives darn well better come up with something good for Halloween…

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello! This is a special fun day, both for reviews and CineSavant Column links!

Sharp-eyed correspondent Mark Forer has spotted and documented something very interesting on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel… a little PC polishing of the corporate image. One of TCM’s beautifully crafted feature intro videos is a ‘Pop-Up Book’ in which various movie still photos fold up and out as in a children’s book. TCM’s graphic design and editiorial is so sophisticated, I can’t tell if someone actually created a book, or if it’s all a digital effect.

The four images above get bigger when opened in a new window. The top two snapshots were taken on April 8 — lots of us have old TCM cablecasts languishing on our cable DVRs or Tivos. It’s a scene still from John Ford’s She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, that I think represents the funeral of a cavalry officer who had fought for the South in the Civil War. ( ↓ ) John Wayne of course presides, and Trooper Tyreen (Ben Johnson) holds a confederate battle flag, in honor of the officer’s failed cause.

Ah, but the cold hand of the Ministry of Truth at TCM has deemed the confederate flag to be a hot potato. The bottom two images show that the flag has been erased, as undesirable.

Very interesting… cancel culture and overzealous PC policing is dangerous, as it can make us liberals look like Commissars enforcing a conformist viewpoint. As Mark pointed out, almost all the older movies on TCM are going to have issues with Political Correctness. He asks, what will be the next movie or image to be run through a political filter and found wanting?

Note that my review of Gone With the Wind, like almost all readings of the film for the last thirty years, makes note of its essential rancid racism. I don’t know if the show is presently on furlough from TCM screenings. But I don’t for minute think that TCM will start vetting old movies and performing censor cuts. That would wipe out most of the Turner library!  Remember the companies that offered to cleanse movies to make them palatable for conservative families, editing out bad language and inconvenient progressive ideas?

TCM likely views those interstitial videos as a display of their corporate identity, and thus the rebel flag had to go. By the way, we still love the old TCM intros. My favorite is still “Look for the Silver Lining.” Bring that back in some form or another. Put any flag in it you like.

Forgive me, for both of today’s blurbs for upcoming discs are illustrated with completely unnecessary salacious & sordid images, which I know I haven’t included enough of lately!

Universal’s newly-promoted The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray promises marvelous new encodings of four great Hitch Pix that I’d love to revisit in 4K: Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds. But the extra-special good news is that Universal has remastered Psycho with a longer cut (for standalone Blu-ray as well). The announced release date is September 8.

Wa-ay back in 1998 I wrote a short article for the old DVD Savant that reported something that friend Douglas Haise had found hiding in plain sight. The famous Hitchock-Truffaut interview book documented the famous Janet Leigh Shower Scene shot by shot — and one frame grab showed a more revealing view that didn’t appear in the prints we saw (over and over and over…). My old article is still up — it’s called An Interesting Bit Of Info On The Censored PSYCHO Shower Scene.

A number of years ago we learned that foreign copies of Psycho had retained the shot, but I didn’t know that other short bits and scene extensions had been censored as well. The full set is documented in an excellent entry of the Movie-Censorship.com site. The text is amusing: of course Janet Leigh was never naked during the filming — her body double was!

Now, will the new version include just the extra shot or two from the pre-shower scene, or everything mentioned at the Movie-Censorship page?  I really need to see more seconds of Anthony Perkins with blood on his hands!

For the second announcement we step back thirty years or so to the marvelous days of pre-Code permissiveness. On July 29) the disc company The Film Detective will release a new Blu-ray of 1933’s The Sin of Nora Moran. A convicted murderer (Zita Johann) relates her story from the Death House. The show ‘utilizes flashbacks, dreams and hallucinations to tell her tale of fateful doom,’ all of which sounds peachy-keen to devotees of similar pre-Code sizzlers like Baby Face, The Story of Temple Drake and Safe In Hell. Zita Johann was the star of Karloff’s The Mummy and played opposite Edward G. Robinson in Howard Hawks’ Tiger Shark.

Most of us only know this ‘Majestic Pictures’ release from its racy original poster (pictured) which was painted by the famed Alberto Vargas. The Film Detective is holding a contest for a giveaway of a quality framed reproduction of the poster.

Another curious note — the disc will be released in collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and also Sam Sherman and Independent-International Pictures. Does that mean that The Sin of Nora Moran shared vault shelf space with Al Adamson’s Blood of Ghastly Horror?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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I’d like to take a few moments to remember a real character who passed away a few days ago, a genuine ‘monster kid’ who made his mark in Horror and Sci-fi fandom. We knew that Ted Newsom wasn’t in the best of health, as he had part of a lung removed several years ago. But I wasn’t aware of his failing condition, especially because his disc commentaries have kept coming, one after another. I knew Ted through both Stuart Galbraith IV and Wayne Schmidt, and would see him from time to time. He’s the kind of guy that odd stories collected around; he seemed to encourage them. Quite a while ago, Ted produced a Hammer Horror video documentary with some good interviews. He reunited Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in an interview session; it was all covered in loving detail in Video Watchdog. His series of horror docs continued, along with a video docu about Ed Wood. He contributed to the magazine Little Shoppe of Horrors and made his own sci-fi comedy, The Naked Monster.

I first met Ted twenty years ago, at a 35mm screening of some Revenge of Frankenstein outtakes that had surfaced. He amazed me by lip-synching most of the dialogue in the silent outtakes, on first sight — he had apparently internalized the dialogue of his favorite Hammer films. Of course, he wanted the little outtakes reel for a re-cut of his Hammer documentary, and wasn’t happy when it simply couldn’t be ‘slipped under the counter’ to him.

When Stuart Galbraith moved Ted Newsom spent a day trying to sell parts of a collection Stuart had left behind. That was when I talked with Ted the longest, and learned about his Spider-Man lawsuit, and his time in the Army. I also found out that he was a heavy smoker. In one-on-one talk Ted was quite friendly and fun — and unpredictable. For a while he had a job with Hustler magazine. That was weird enough, but on one Christmas he sent his friends some R-rated photos from the office party!

There were also times when Ted could be a handful. When the Hammer film Cloudburst was released on DVD in 2011, none of us had seen it or knew much about it, not even Ted. I invited him over to watch it with some friends and give us the benefit of his Hammer wisdom. That’s when I found out how argumentative Ted could be when he thought his opinion should prevail — usually on some tiny detail.

But Ted was always sociable, always working some angle and always enthusiastic. His wild sense of humor surfaced frequently on web boards and Facebook (along with some equally wild opinions). I have good memories of the Hammer audio commentaries he recorded for Anchor Bay DVDs back in the day. One of today’s CineSavant reviews features a vintage Ted Newsom commentary, with director Val Guest.

If you can tap into Stuart Galbraith IV’s Facebook page, he has up a candid but fair assessment of Ted — one of those ‘creative & complicated’ people full of unexpected surprises. Ted was always busy — performing a well-done colorization job on a classic monster photo, or Photoshopping a clever movie-related joke like the one pictured here. Some of them were Safe For Work!

Congratulations to Dennis Doros, film producer, co-owner of Milestone Film and the President of the AMIA, The Association of Moving Image Archivists. On July 21 the Turner Classic Movies cable channel will broadcast an AMIA show called Archival Screening Night. The collection of ‘incredible, strange, astonishing, hilarious and curious treasures from the world’s moving image archives’ will screen along with three other features as a tribute to Milestone films. So check your TCM logs. Full information is here. Mr. Doros was exceedingly kind to me ten years ago, when he invited me to see some of the archival screenings at AMIA’s ‘The Reel Thing’ festivals.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson