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Children, are you ready for Mother’s Day?

Gary Teetzel reports on a new docu about the revered Sci-fi illustrator Chesley Bonestell, Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with The Future that just premiered at the Newport Film Festival. The commentators tell us that Bonestell began as an architect and contributed to the designs for New York’s Chrysler Building as well as the Golden Gate Bridge. The home page for the film is here, and a trailer is viewable here. And I even learned how to pronounce ‘Bonestell.’

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When I caught this Italian poster for Godzilla Raids Again I first noted that it uses the ‘King of the Monsters’ title that found its way onto the Americanization of Honda’s original Godzilla. I suppose this Italo version could actually be a re-dub of the U.S. derivative Gigantis The Fire Monster because of the style of the two monsters in the artwork. I also like the hype tagline across the top: “All the World is At Arms Against the Diabolical Nuclear Monsters in the Very Brilliant Film of Science Fantasy.”

I asked Gary Teetzel what he made of the single anglicized name ‘Jack Wallace’ in the list of actors, not to mention ‘Fred’ Kasay and ‘Susy’ Setsuko. Actually, all of the names appear to have been made up or scrambled from the Japanese originals. And since when did a Japanese monster movie need to billboard a list of actors?

Gary doesn’t think that there was an Italian variant of the film, with additional actors added. His guess is that the Italian distributor was just pulling a fast one, trying to fool patrons into thinking it was a western-made film. He also reminded me that, for no understandable reason, the German distributors would put the word ‘Frankenstein’ in the titles of most Japanese monster movies.

Gary also reminded me that Bill Warren’s researches found that an abandoned project was for the short lived AB-PT film company to build a new English-language movie around the Godzilla Raids Again effects footage, called The Volcano Monsters. As reported by Bob Skotak, Ib Melchoir worked on a screenplay for it.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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CineSavant’s new reviews today are:

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It’s been found! Last weekend I mistakenly remembered the theme music for Los Angeles KHJ Television’s ’60s movie show Strange Tales of Science Fiction as being Henry Mancini’s ‘Experiment in Terror.’ But it wasn’t, it’s this unusual piece entitled Out of This World by the Creed Taylor Orchestra. I don’t even remember if Channel 11’s ‘Chiller Theater’ had a music theme, as the TV reception for that channel was so poor, I rarely got to see it. Happy listening.

And what’s coming up at CineSavant? Discs are in for Jacques Demy’s The Model Shop, the Vaughn Monroe western Singing Guns, the Cher movie Mermaids, the silent The Holy Mountain, Paul Schrader’s Mishima and Hepburn and O’Toole in The Lion in Winter. Just seen and awfully good is Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, four of the best hours I’ve spent lately.

For the balance of May we’re expecting new Blus of Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, Brownlow’s restoration of Birth of a Nation, Mazursky’s Next Stop Greenwich Village and Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. I’m also awaiting VCI’s improved encoding of City of the Dead.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Happy Cinco de Mayo!  CineSavant’s new reviews today are:

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Olive Films has announced three Blu-ray releases for May 29 — Norman Lear’s Cold Turkey (which I’ve never seen but is recommended), Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (which I’ve seen many times and has been needing a Blu-ray release forever) and a DVD of Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood (which is sublime but we wish it was a Blu, too).

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I used up all my good disc news last time out, so it’s time for a CineSavant creepy culture break.

Signs in Cusco, Peru: These three street signs were within a block of our hotel in Cusco, just off the main square in the old part of town. The signs give the place a . . . contemplative feeling, especially when one is walking back down the cobbled streets at 1am.

Note that the little pedestrian streets (Via peatonal) have cars running through them, with maybe two feet of clearance on either side. They’re all within shouting distance of a cathedral, which makes the name of the first sound appropriate, if a little harsh.

The second is about two blocks away from the church, and ought to have a story associated with it. Anyway, it’s intriguing. ‘Siete culebras’ translates as ‘Seven snakes, or vipers.’ Would make a nice movie title.

I went up this street and didn’t find an undertaker’s shop. But the name felt like someplace where Eddie Poe or Vinny Price might hang out. There’s not going to be a children’s show called ‘Calle Ataud’ — ‘Ataúd’ means coffin, or crypt. An elaborate, decorative ironwork sign, I thought. When a place is 500 years old, you wonder what kind of secrets are in the basements.

That’s the culture corner offering for the day, completely esoteric . . . Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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CineSavant’s new reviews today (two days late!) are:

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Quite a while ago Gary Teetzel forwarded a good link to clips from the film library of the late special effects artist Wah Chang. A new clip has shown up, of Chang and Gene Warren photographing effects shots of the submarine the Hydronaut cruising and diving for the Ivan Tors movie Around the World Under the Sea. I guess the blue background must not be a blue screen for matting purposes, because the submarine itself is partly painted blue — it’s just a dry-for-wet underwater sub shot. Other views of the Project Unlimited effects shop reveal the Albatross from Master of the World sitting abandoned on a shelf. As one might suspect, the miniature is not very big, at least not this particular model.

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Joe Dante circulated a nice link to Ron Hutchinson’s Vitaphone article about Warners’ notorious ‘lost’ 1933 pre-Code comedy Convention City, Where is Convention City Hiding?  The article has some nice photos, and comes to the conclusion that a print of one kind or another is likely out there somewhere, ready to be discovered. Hutchinson also reminds us that, despite its reputation as an un-see-able item, the movie is almost certainly no more racy than other WB pre-Codes of the day. But with that look in Joan Blondell’s eye, we can dream, can’t we?

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↑  Gary again scores with more research from trade magazines. Here he uncovers a vintage Spanish language ad for Warners’ Boris Karloff thriller The Walking Dead (1936). Gary’s not sure the picture was ever released with this title ‘De mis verdugos me vengue’, because ad art does exist for the Spanish title Los Muertos Andan (‘The Dead Walk’). But sometimes the foreign titles differed between markets in Mexico, Spain and South America. To me ‘De mis verdugos me vengue’ (‘I took vengeance on my executioners’) sounds like a classy sell for Buenos Aires or Madrid.

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Just in from the web: Indicator has announced for July 23 their boxed set Hammer Volume 3 Blood and Terror: The Camp On Blood Island, Yesterday’s Enemy, The Stranglers of Bombay, and The Terror of the Tongs. It looks like they’ve put all their potentially PC offensive and racially insensitive titles in one basket. Stranglers is a definite favorite, and the rarely-seen Yesterday’s Enemy is one of the most honest pictures about real warfare that I’ve seen.

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↓  Here’s something my broker and I found during the long attic search for vintage movie poster paper — a four-sheet for one of my favorites, the 1952 Sci-fi propaganda head-scratcher Red Planet Mars. I think it’s a four-sheet, because it’s in four pieces, meant to be pasted on a wall by a professional paperhanger. If there is another like this in existence, I’d be surprised, as it’s a rare item indeed. Now to find a wall big enough to hold it a buyer more nuts about the movie than I am.

Also rejected by my broker is the bottom half of an original Woodstock two-sheet. The missing top two thirds was just a big blurry image of a crowd, and this bottom half has plenty of the same graphic, plus a big representation of the credit block and famous logo. Anyone interested?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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I wasn’t kidding about being late last Saturday: CineSavant has no new reviews today. We’ve been doing a mass inventory of the old movie posters from up in my attic. Many have been there for forty years. I’ve compiled a list with the aim of selling a bunch of them a little later on. I’ll report on them here, if that comes to pass. Part of starting up CineSavant as my own page was to make evil mercenary profitable ideas like this possible — I might be able to sell them directly through the page. My unwritten contract with disc providers is that I don’t re-sell review discs, but I’ve been collecting other stuff since the 1970s.

I do have a couple of reviews done but I think I’ll delay them at least another day. Hence this collector’s photo of the chaos, inventory-wise, at CineSavant Central.

Thanks for reading! Glenn