Hello!

It seems odd that this was the week to commemorate the favorite actress June Lockhart, because as soon as we heard the news of her passing, we came across a nice interview with her in a new book — the subject of today’s column is a Book Review.

Through his publishers McFarland & Company, Tom Weaver has a new tome out called  Creature Feature Creators. It’s an interview book featuring a long list of actors, writers, directors and producers associated with fantasy, Sci-fi and horror films. Weaver’s talks with selected celebs let the conversations go where they will, with frequent surprises and colorful opinions.

We’ve read most of Weaver’s output. None of the interviews here are duplicates or repeats from his books. They are instead from magazines — Screem,  Video Watchdog,  Famous Monsters of Filmland,  Fangoria.  It is the first time any of these articles have been published in book form. I was unaware of John Landis’ brief but very surprising interview about directing Vincent Price in the Michael Jackson Thriller musical short subject. Jackson’s treatment of Price on that one was really shabby. (Now why hasn’t that video been released on 4K disc?)

There are nostalgic interviews, like the ones for June Lockhart, Noel Neill and Joan Taylor (look for her sometime in  On Dangerous Ground). We learn about the long and happy Richard Denning – Evelyn Ankers marriage from their daughter, Dee. Weaver salts the text with interesting stills — behind the scenes snaps, cheesecake photos that don’t really represent the movies, interesting posters.

A couple of interviews are with bigger names that began in genre pix (Gary Lockwood) but many are of the unheralded actors that make us fans curious: bit players in Z pix like  Monstrosity or Navy vs. The Night Monster. We maybe get too close to associates of Al Adamson, but in doing so also learn more about legends like John Carradine and J. Carrol Naish, old pros picking up a few bucks in retirement.

We also appreciate the inclusion of a long letter from writer Ted Sherdeman, on the history of his movie  Them! — a full rundown on its production, with studio politics included. The letter was written in answer to a high school student, who Weaver talks about as well.

We meet other ‘marginal’ writers and producers who are not marginal to fans, like ex-actor Jimmy Lydon, or a familiar actor from an Irwin Allen TV show who wrote a well-remembered TV movie with a horror theme.

A couple of intervews are special keepers. Tom gets more coherent information out of Bert I. Gordon on just  The Cyclops than Gordon said about his whole filmography, in his autobio. And Weaver’s uncut & candid Roger Corman interview about  Monster from the Ocean Floor retains full details on the filmmaker’s ‘iffy’ dealings with Hollywood Guild reps, and his even iffier relationship with the film’s official director.

I had fun because actresses like Judy Bamber, Jeanne Cooper and Joyce Holden don’t hold back on frank appraisals of what they were doing, and what they expected of their film careers. The 350 fat pages of text and images are a very good read.

This hasn’t happened with us before: the disc world has been waiting for the new Hammer  Frankenstein and  ‘Cheat Death’ 4K discs. We were equally keen to review Studiocanal’s new remastered disc of Ealing Studio’s 1945 ghost story omnibus  Dead of Night 4K release. But the review disc didn’t arrive … a mis-delivery or something.

The movie is the granddaddy of spooky horror tales. Several episodes are major masterpieces, and even the one comic story is good. The framing story to introduce the tales is truly macabre, and a paradoxical time puzzle, far more mind-bending than we’d expect.

The capper episode starring Michael Redgrave is an all-time classic of psychological possession. The big surprise is that its 15 minutes distill the entire premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s  Psycho.  No joke.

Dead of Night has twice the impact on a big screen. It ought to be great in 4K. Previous discs have all had poor audio, spoiling the presentation. Sooner than later, we’ll track it down for a review … until then, collectors looking for something powerful need to know that it’s available.

We wanted to resist this last item — being somewhat dismayed by A.I. right now — but it got the better of us.

It is a Joe Dante link for a post made just a couple of days ago … a parody of a certain 1950 Sci-fi horror hit, starring big stars resurrected to move and speak through immoral digital manipulation:  “I tell ya sheriff it was like red lightning melted into jelly. It swallowed a man right in front of me!”

I give it an A+ for Elvis and a C+ for Hepburn …. her voice is closer to Sandra Dee !

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Producer and all-round inspiration Michael Arick sent along this great link, to a new YouTube video feature by Mathieu Stern, produced with the Atlas Lens Company.

In beautiful video coverage, we see Monsieur Stern unpacking an original CinemaScope adaptor, loaned to him by a Disney Museum, from its original 1954 box. We get a quick history of how Walt Disney produced the sensational film  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in ‘Scope when Bausch & Lomb only had a handful of lenses, initial versions that had to be separately focused from the prime 35mm lens. The lens itself weighed 25 pounds, and it had to be adapted to an underwater rig.

Mathieu finds a way to mount the old C’Scope adapter to a modern video camera, and shows us some experimental images he filmed – at the 2:55 ratio — in the Paris aquarium. It’s a very nice thought-piece about the daring days of Disney filmmaking, with old film clips and handsome new shots.

Repeated thanks to the unsinkable Michael McQuarrie, who has sent along a brief but interesting ‘location comparison’ article for everyone favorite film about invading Gargons, Tom Graeff’s  Teenagers from Outer Space. It’s on a page by Showbiz Imagery and Forgotten History.

For us types living near Hollywood, the movie really throws us — all of the locations look very familiar. The page doesn’t show locations that are easier to spot: one scene uses the main building of Hollywood High School. I think some of these locations are around Whitley Terrace, the hill bisected by the Hollywood Freeway, right where Hollywood goes into the Cahuenga Pass. One shot of a tunnel is just above Franklin Avenue. I think it goes under the Hollywood Freeway … or had that section of the freeway even been completed by when Teenagers was filmed?

I’ve copied one of the comparison shots, just above. It’s a view looking South down Las Palmas from Hollywood Boulevard. The shuttered wall on the right is what’s left of the old open-air Las Palmas newsstand that I once thought would be there forever. I include it here because this exact same view shows up often in old movies. The most notable is the famed film noir  Gun Crazy. The first thing that armed robbers John Dall and Peggy Cummins do in Los Angeles, is to jump from the car to look at a newspaper. That iconic church building is prominent in the shot.

Just remember to beware of “thrill-crazed space kids blasting the flesh off humans.”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

This week marks the debut of what will surely be a promising new feature at Trailers from Hell — a ‘video column’ from director, sage and TFH uber-guru Allan Arkush.

Whether taking about film, music or TV, Arkush has always been a gotta-like raconteur; we’ve checked out all of his older TFH video blogs. Contributing more inside insight and wisdom, the first ‘episode’ of The Last Reel With Allan Arkush is a mini-essay on the old-fashioned moviegoing experience, with a tour of the theater offerings to be had in Hollywood back in the early 1970s, when Arkush first came to town.

Some of the video column was filmed on site … I think ace film editor Arkush may be creating it himself. Episode One’s title is, You Still Going to the Movies?

And correspondent “B” comes ups with a column item that we at first thought was a gag — a link to an article about an unsold pilot for a TV series based on the Billy Wilder movie  Some Like It Hot.

The article is by Mark Evanier on his ‘News From Me’ page. The pilot TV show was made in 1961, didn’t sell and then disappeared just like dozens of other failed pilots adapted from popular movies.

The weird thing here is that stars Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon help launch the pilot, playing their characters from the movie. After one scene, they are transformed into actors Vic Damone and Dick Patterson.

Sounds like a big mistake, or a rumor waiting to be disproven. But the pilot is real …. Mark Evanier’s article contains a link, so we can all see it for ourselves …

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We start off with something interesting courtesy of a circulated link from Joe Dante.

It’s a new Guardian article by Dalya Alberge about a film Charles Chaplin was actively working on when he died in 1977. Its screenplay is reportedly going to be published.

The biggest hint in the article is that the film is “a fantasy about “Sarapha, a beautiful creature with wings, a bird with a human body, which has the power to cure illness and bring peace to the world.”

I say bring it on for real.

Another un-filmed movie project associated with Charles Chaplin has already been published, in a book dealing with critic/screenwriter James Agee. It’s a full script for an ‘atom war’ idea that Agee hoped Chaplin would film. This was in the late 1940s, just before Chaplin went into exile.

The ‘lost screenplay’ is printed in Wrankovics’ book Chaplin and Agee. The balance of the book is about Agee’s efforts to rescue Chaplin from the cultural lynch mob that tarred him both a pervert and an anti-American Red.

And long-time correspondent Lee Kaplan contributes something very pleasing, a clip to a terrific animated short subject that will get us in a good mood for El dí de los muertos. Without words, it defines the meaning of a Day of the Dead holiday altar.

It’s a brief man & dog story by … Victoria México?  An early title card that appears on the video is Xolo, defined as a breed of Mexican dog. It was a sacred animal for the Aztecs, full name Xoloitzcuintle.

The film is very touching, and very much in keeping with the sentimental, positive meaning of the holiday. Dog lovers uninterested in the feline epic Flow may be charmed.

And you .. Who is waiting for you? … take me to the river…

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s that time of year again. Here are three desirable Halloween discs worthy of special note . . . one comes out today.

Radiance Films is promising, on October 25, a newly remastered Blu-ray of Malpertius, from director Harry Kümel of  Daughters of Darkness. It’s a wholly weird picture with a special performance by Orson Welles. A sailor returns home (sort of) to find a strange group of people living his uncle’s house, apparently waiting for the bedridden man to die. The identity of the ‘visitors’ turns out to be something utterly fantastic. Radiance’s extras promise to be something special.

It will arrive a tad after Halloween, but Arrow Video USA has our curiosity up with a 4K remaster of Peter Hyams’ Outland, a futuristic drama with Sean Connery and Peter Boyle. Something’s gone wrong at a mining colony on a moon of Jupiter, and ‘space marshal’ Connery is dispatched to sort it out. Back in the day, we were interested in Outland because it used a ‘new process’ involving miniatures and front projection. We’ve only seen it on cable TV so will be interested to see what it looks like in 4K.

And The Warner Archive Collection has clearly been watching what Hammer Films is up to with their fancy giant boxed sets of vintage Hammer titles. This initial Technicolor Hammer hit The Curse of Frankenstein was remastered by the WAC back in 2020, but we’re about to behold a full-on new restoration, with two 4K discs and one Blu-ray, with multiple aspect ratios and an enormous roster of video extras.

It’s a favorite that few will pass up … could Horror of Dracula be next?  If the WAC mirrors Hammer’s presumed release for that one, it could conceivably give American viewers a good look at the extended Japanese cut of the film.

We normally link to MovieZyng for WAC releases, but I didn’t find a page there for this disc.

From correspondent and advisor Gary Teetzel comes a quick lesson on the Persistence of Unadulterated BS in vintage Hollywood promotions. It’s one of Gary’s articles made from strings of old Trade Paper notices. Gary:

If you’ve seen posters or lobby cards for Bert I. Gordon’s THE BOY AND THE PIRATES, you may have noticed that the film was promoted as being in “Perceptovision”:

Unsurprisingly, “Perceptovision” was nothing but a name Gordon decided to slap onto his own familiar brand of special effects. One can imagine Gordon seeing Columbia’s exciting announcements declaring Ray Harryhausen’s films as being in “Dynamation” and “SuperDynamation.” B.I. Gordon must have decided to hype his own visual effects in a similar way.

From the February 29, 1960 FILM BULLETIN, here’s some United Artists hype promising that Perceptovision was a “new concept in special effects”:

From Mel Konecoff’s “The New York Scene” column in the March 2 issue of MOTION PICTURE EXHIBITOR, here’s Gordon promising that Perceptovision had been “perfected”:

The FILM BULLETIN review claims Perceptovision to be a patented process (or, as the typo puts it, a “pantentel” process):

Sadly, as far as I can tell, Gordon never went on to invent and perfect “SuperPerceptiovision.” — Gary

‘Perceptovision’ my a–!   It is indeed a very ‘special’ process — if you can perceive it, you’re having visions!

Frankly, we’re Shocked! Shocked! to discover that advertising baloney was an important factor in promoting motion pictures!  We promo editors never fudged the truth back at Cannon Films … (cough). Our only takeaway from Gary’s exposé is to wonder how producer-director William Castle reacted when he got wind of Bert I. Gordon’s special process. Just the year before, Castle promoted his very successful thriller The Tingler with a genuine special presentation gimmick, called simply, ‘Percepto.’

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson