Hello!

It’s time to circulate welcome good news for horror fans … Severin Films announced about three days back that their latest restoration will be in the spotlight at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals.

The first part of the news is that they’ve remastered, in 4K from original materials, Riccardo Freda’s follow-up to  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock,  1963’s  Lo spettro, aka The Ghost. It’s a haunted murder mystery again starring Barbara Steele, but decent copies were even harder to see … and we’ve never been impressed by the ‘remnant’ quality of discs such as Retromedia’s  old DVD.

Now maybe we’ll be able to appreciate why Lo spettro has such a high reputation. Severin says that the 4K remaster came from newly-located original film materials, with a few replacement shots taken from a print held in the collection of film producer Jon Davison.

Even more impressive, the restoration of Lo spettro will re-premiere in September at the Venice International Film Festival, where Severin Films honcho David Gregory will appear in person with Barbara Steele. Lo spettro will then proceed to Spain in October, to open the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia. These sound like major film events to us; I hope Severin covers the re-premiere on video.

Meanwhile, both The Criterion Collection and The Warner Archive Collection made impressive release announcements.

Criterion for October will give us a stack of impressive titles, some seemingly chosen for the Halloween season:

Altered States  4K : Ken Russell’s fantastic visual feast;
David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me  4K
Georges Franju’s incomparable Eyes Without a Face  4K
Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley  4K
Deep Crimson  4K by Arturo Ripstein;
And two by David Cronenberg — A History of Violence  4K
and Cronenberg’s newest, The Shrouds.

And just a few weeks away at the end of August, The Warner Archive has some special items too:

John Ford’s final film 7 Women starring Anne Bancroft;
Clarence Brown’s searing Intruder in the Dust with Juano Hernandez;
Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way by Vincent Sherman;
Mario Lanza in That Midnight Kiss, heaven protect us;
Hanna-Barbera’s The Huckleberry Hound Show
and Mike Hodges’ Get Carter in  4K, starring Michael Caine.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Contributed by Gary Teetzel is a nice thread from the  Classic Horror Film Board, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Willis O’Brien’s original silent feature  The Lost World, and quoting from some facebook posts by Greg Kulon :

An actual London pub called The Blue Posts is seen in the film, with a stop-motion Brontosaurus passing by and causing damage. A cute photo comparison post gives us the pub as seen in the film, and as it presently exists,  for a little fan reunion just a few days ago.

A very nice little item!

Meanwhile, I’m explaining the presence of just one review today with a trip to Indiana over the weekend, to confab with family and see the sights. As it turns out they’ve got a very nice little dinosaur museum in South Bend, which is conveniently right next door to a working chocolate factory that gives free tours, and samples. Can’t beat that.

There’s a short stack of new discs I haven’t even opened yet … so the reviews will flow right away. Shouldn’t have another interruption ’til September at the earliest. Thanks to Charlie Largent for coming to the rescue.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

The first item comes from Cuba. Charlie Chaplin fans that have Criterion’s old disc of  Modern Times may have seen it. It’s a little bit of wonderment from Cuba’s ICAIC state film company. Along with making moves to eliminate illiteracy, the Castro government invested in cultural opportunities for large sections of the country that were all but cut off from civilization.

Por Primera Vez translates as ‘For the First Time.’ It’s a simple movie, filmed in a day, showing a mobile movie theater arriving in the Baracoa area of Guant´namo. The show is only a little over ten minutes long, but the last three or four minutes record the faces of villagers, many of them children, watching a motion picture for the very first time. It’s 1967, not 1930.

The film has long been a favorite — I wish moviegoing could get back to being as basic and wonderful as this, once in a while.

Make sure to turn the closed captions on, for English subtitles. The ‘showtime’ sequence doesn’t need subs.

On July 26, UCLA will be presenting a rare 1960 TV show taken from an original story by Arch Oboler, first heard as a radio show in 1945. The two-hour show features Shepperd Studwick and James MacArthur, and stars William Shatner as ‘an extremely wealthy, egotistical industrialist who finances a pioneering space flight for the U.S. government,’ and whose ‘malignant narcissism emerges under the allure of the media spotlight, triggering horrific events.’

Oboler wrote about the nuclear threat many times. His best feature film is an apocalypic tale of the  last five people on Earth.

The photo above is from a stage production …

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Here’s a well-documented bit of film production history that might appeal: an in-detail web page explaining the creation of a practical radio-control prop for the horror comedy  Gremlins  —  Gizmo’s Pink Corvette,  for his madcap midnight ride through a department store in snowy Kingston Falls.

Here in Los Angeles, any celebrity in a pink Corvette brings back memories of spottings of the ubiquitous Angelyne. But that’s another story.

In the article, photos document the construction and the shooting, and the multiple cars and Gizmos needed to support the workings of the radio-control prop. RC fans will be interested to see how much equipment could be crammed into a ‘Barbie Corvette’ toy.

It’s an unexpected extra laugh in the movie, but we didn’t guess how much work and planning was involved. The little article from ‘Gremlins.com’ covers the scene’s inspiration, too. Director Joe Dante was thinking of a gag in a WB cartoon, naturally.

We’re now beginning the second half of 2025, and I don’t know whether I want time to slow down or speed up … but I was eager to put up this poster-show of notable discs reviewed in the first half of the year. I’ll look at this grid of disc covers and think, “I didn’t get to see all of that one,” and follow that thought with, “Now can I find it?”

Last New Years’ I decorated a grid for 2024 with a photo of a disc shelf here at CineSavant Central … it proved popular. I like rummaging through titles on shelves, too. The image here can be blown up much bigger. I couldn’t get rid of the reflections this time, so it’ll be a quiz game challenge to read them all.

It’s one shelf of about 8 dedicated to film noir. Note that they’re two discs deep. All the horizontal titles need to be incorporated into the (non-existent) filing system. What do I do with older DVD versions … sometimes I want them to compare, as I just did with Danger: Diabolik. Does Tim Lucas back in Cincinnati really have some amazing system that allows him to find anything?  His place must now be more of a museum than the Ackermansion was.

The ‘favored’ titles for the first half of 2025: I could watch any of these, any time. For the last one I’d better be careful who’s in the house.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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