Hello!

We took off ten days ago for a real vacation, hiking and touring in Italy. Beautiful place, nice people plus lots of history and fantastic streets in which to wander. Also food to die for. A simple breakfast here in Larchmont can set one back $50; in Montefalco we had an excellent light dinner — best lasagna I ever had — for much less.

I found out I could still hike at my age and had a blast on the trails, even though I didn’t sign up for the extra-challenging groups. My own moglie esperta speaks beautiful Italian and found that most everyone we met accepted her and was willing to converse openly. We rang at the door of a convent boarding house in Perugia where she lived while taking advanced Italian courses, long ago. A lonely but friendly nun invited us both in and graciously talked for half an hour. She let me take pictures to make matching ‘then and now’ comparisons with my wife’s faded older snapshots.

I did fall sick, and I’m lucky that it happened just as we were leaving. So the long flight home was pretty miserable. The relative disaster topping that was missing a flight at JFK. Delta had booked us a connection we couldn’t possibly make, going through customs and re-going through security. We had to spend a full night in the terminal — feeling pretty sick — before the next flight in the morning. Portal to Portal, we were awake hauling luggage and unable to lie down or sit comfortably for over 40 hours straight. But hey, adventure is where you find it.  All of this was all out of reach when I was younger, and the experience just confirms that I am in so many ways a genuine lucky dog.

The vacation was a big success — we found that we are physically up to some tough demands and we proved we could travel together under adverse conditions. Met a very nice couple, too. Now to get myself reoriented to reasonable California clock time…

CineSavant now has a pile of fine pictures to review, and Charlie Largent will be taking on some good titles too. In addition to what you see reviewed today, the plan is to try and cover  Jill Sprecher’s  Clockwatchers,  Norman Taurog’s  Words and Music (with the Slaughter on 10th Avenue ballet),  Kino’s  Film Noir the Dark Side of Cinema XXI:  Fritz Lang’s   Cloak and Dagger,  the campy  Shack Out on 101,  James Cagney’s  Short Cut to Hell,  John Mackenzie’s  The Long Good Friday 4K,  Todd Solondz’s wicked  Happiness 4K,  Alexander MacKendrick’s  The Ladykillers 4K,  Patricio Guzmán’s miraculous documentary  The Battle of Chile and  Kinji Fukasaku’s  The Threat.

October’s discs are due soon and the Halloween movies are great this year. I’ve already had a sample of Jacques Tourneur’s  I Walked with a Zombie 4K and  Mark Robson’s  The Seventh Victim 4K on TCM, and the Criterion 4K will look even better. Plus we’ve got G.W. Pabst’s remastered  Pandora’s Box, Masahiro Shinoda’s  Demon Pond 4K,  Columbia Horror: Behind the Mask, Black Moon, Air Hawks, Island of Doomed Men, Cry of the Werewolf, Soul of a Monster (Region B),  El Vampiro,
Two Bloodsucking Tales from Mexico (Region B),  Creature with the Blue Hand and  Web of the Spider, the delightfully sadistic and sexy  Circus of Horrors 4K, Karloff directed by Curtiz in  The Walking Dead, Bogie directed by Vincent Sherman in  The Return of Dr. X, and Peter Lorre directed by Robert Florey in  The Beast with Five Fingers.

Segue’ing into November we have a remastered  Godzilla ’54 4K, and a  NeverEnding Story 4K. So even if some of these don’t come in, we’ll be plenty busy.

I am recovering quickly — and can promise that, Harkonnens or no Harkonnens, the Reviews Must Flow!

Thanks for reading … Glenn Erickson

Once more we’re on semi-hiatus here at CineSavant. If there’s a new CineSavant / Charlie Largent article or review up today, it will again be listed atop the review queue at this link: The CineSavant Archives Review Log,  inside the TCM website. Please go and see — the Log looks nice, honest.

On the next posting day we hope to Be Back In Action, and if not I’ll be back with a story to tell and an updated review Log right here at CineSavant where it belongs. I hope everybody’s doing well !

Thanks for reading — Glenn Erickson

If there’s a new CineSavant / Charlie Largent article or review up today, it will be listed atop the review queue at this link:  The CineSavant Archives Review Log,  inside the TFH website. Please take a look …

CineSavant last went ‘lean’ for the month of May in 2023, but this is the first time I’ve simply been absent since the old days of ‘DVD Savant,’ when various issues put the Savant page in a coma for days at a time. That’s why we remain grateful for the offer of a new home, publishing reviews through Trailers from Hell. This is almost exactly the 9th anniversary of that very good deal.

If everything works out, we should be back with more new writing — or at least another skeleton Column Post — on our usual posting day, Saturday September 14.

Thanks for checking in — Glenn Erickson

A change of plans for a few days at CineSavant … Charlie Largent will be uploading a new CineSavant article or two — not necessarily reviews — that will appear normally at Trailers from Hell. I’m not present to monitor things or run a real CineSavant Column, but if new writing is uploaded to the site, the place to find will be TCM’s  CineSavant Archives Review Log,  inside the TCM website. Everything we publish immediately pops up there.

That link’s single column is also a good to scan through the procession of older reviews and their attendant artwork. If plan is to post on the usual days, so if you wish to see what’s next, check in on Tuesday, September 10.

All is fine; CineSavant ree-vyoos and CineSavant bizz-ness will ree-zoom soon enough.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We don’t yet have any specs or a release date, but the word is out that Mario Bava’s unmatched comic-book supervillain thriller  Danger: Diabolik is coming to 4K Ultra HD. The last round of releases for this title was in 2020, with Shout! Factory and [Imprint] giving us excellent remastered editions that got everything right — the correct dialogue, good color, properly mixed music. We were very happy. Hopefully the people who remaster this new 4K package won’t encounter any problems.

If it’s a winner, all that will be left for us fans of John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell is to find out how different the original Italian version might have been. Also, Kino announced back in February of ’23 that they had also acquired the  three recent Diabolik features made in Italy.  We wonder if those are still in the works…

Having been gainfully employed through the 1990s (those were the days…), a lot of TV shows I shoulda saw slipped by, including this one from 1991- 1992 … that I later learned employed directors Joe Dante and Bob Balaban.

It’s a Sci-fi horror show about creepy phenomena afoot in a neighborhood, and only two young friends have the ‘vision’ to see what’s a-happenin’. One fan described it as ‘The Outer Limits for kids.’  Dante directed five out of 19 episodes, including the opener; I see that actor John Astin participates, and Belinda Belaski and a 16-year-old Tobey Maguire do an episode or two as well. The leading player is Omri Katz, who we love in Joe Dante’s  Matinee, produced not long afterward.

The point is that the whole season of shows is now viewable online for free on Tubi … until some super remastered disc comes along, the quality looks pretty good to us.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

The Australian outfit [Imprint] has announced four new 4K + Blu-ray discs, two of which are tagged on CineSavant’s disc radar. I reviewed Richard Attenborough’s  A Bridge Too Far twenty years ago but only remember its enormous scale; a deluxe edition might be really special. Wolfgang Petersen’s  The Neverending Story should look sensational in 4K Ultra HD … it was one of my most successful ‘parenting’ outings with my 5 year-old daughter.

A Bridge Too Far is newly scanned 4K disc + two Blu-ray set of the all-star epic war movie.

The Never Ending Story is a 40th Anniversary Limited Edition four-disc set in leatherette book packaging … in addition to other extras, it carries the original German Extended Cut, also on 4K and Blu-ray — it’s a full ten minutes longer.

Both discs are due on November 11. Being offered at the same time are 4K / Blu-ray sets of  The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Sam Peckinpah’s  Convoy. Imprint’s website has full details.

And good Halloween news just arrived from The Warner Archive Collection:

The label’s October Blu-ray releases start with the musical  Sweethearts with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, the 1965 TV series  A Man Called Shenandoah with Robert Horton; and Christopher Guest’s  For Your Consideration with Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer and Parker Posey.

What with the Val Lewton double bill coming from Criterion, their new Halloween-themed releases all but clean out the bag of WAC horror titles from the 1940s: the classic Michael Curtiz / Boris Karloff zombie picture  The Walking Dead (1936); the odd Humphrey Bogart mad doctor picture  The Return of Dr. X, and Robert Florey’s  The Beast with Five Fingers, with Peter Lorre.

It actually might be a belated Halloween treat — street date isn’t until October 29.

Gary Teetzel wonders if next year the WAC will move on to chillers from the ’50s and ’60s, like  Macabre,  The Disembodied,  Black Zoo,  The Frozen Dead, etcetera.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Wartime motivational inspiration is the subject of a link sent by advisor Gary Teetzel. World War II saw lots of morale-building entertainment; this short subject reminds the hundreds of thousands of defense plant workers that they’re soldiers too, with a duty is to stay fit to keep those assembly lines moving. The 8-minute film is called Keeping Fit. It’s in the form of a lecture to 4,000 aircraft workers … gee, the company president is talking about workers wasting time, but his tirade has shut down the entire plant.

The Universal picture has an all-name cast: Robert Stack, Broderick Crawford, Lon Chaney Jr., Andy Devine, Anne Gwynne, Dick Foran, Louise Albritton, Don Porter, Ralph Morgan, Mary Wickes. Handsome Stack is the star of the day, and shirtless for part of his 90-second appearance. Universal’s stock company Adonis faints on the assembly line, and is scolded by the factory doctor to get in shape. Nobody’s about to suggest that the men at the plant might be being overworked. As Gary noted, the movie blames wives for not serving nutritious meals. That can’t have been easy when everything desirable is rationed.

Gary sent the link because it’s yet another rare and unusual appearance by a horror star. ‘Fat ‘n’ Lazy’ Andy Devine licks a giant lollypop at work; neighbor Lon Chaney Jr. talks him into taking up bowling or playing horseshoes. Chaney appeared to age 15 years between 1945 and 1950, so maybe Andy should have been coaching Lon … in real life, Devine outlived Chaney by a few years.

Too bad Broderick Crawford and Lon Chaney Jr. had no scenes together — they could have kicked each other in the shins!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson