I can’t think of a single other ‘haunted map’ movie.

 

Hello!

One again I’m stealing a web link circulated by Joe Dante — this is a good one, of a movie-to-movie relationship we’ve definitely noticed before, but not with all of the parallels shown here.

We’ve often pointed out similarities between 1955’s Them! and Jim Cameron’s exciting 1986 space adventure Aliens. But this over-under comparison piece makes it seem like the first movie was raided by the second for 20 top suspense set pieces:

¿Referencias o coincidencias?
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Film restorer, art director, film collector Mike Hyatt.

 

Hello!

We’ve seen the long version of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and have always admired parts of it … The official UA cut-down release was a mess, that’s for sure. Ten years ago Steven Soderbergh uploaded a fan cutdown, that’s equally curious.

I’d never have dreamed that Soderbergh’s post would still be online, but it is. Joe Dante pointed to it again a few days ago, so I’m-a pointin’ to it too. It’s a fun exercise, even if we’d all chop it up differently. Beautiful as it is, I’m not sure that the Harvard prologue fits anywhere. We more often daydream about films that were chopped down before they were released, that we wish we could see un-butchered.

So here it is again, Mary Ann Bernard’s ‘Butcher’s Cut’ of Heaven’s Gate.

 

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Film fanaticism intersects with Super Bowl fever, when Martin Scorsese directs a million-dollar commercial for a website company.

The Super Bowl spot Hello Down There qualifies as Science Fiction. It uses clips from an imaginative Japanese space visitor movie that’s never seen much respect here, at least not until now.

This article by Umberto Gonzalez in The Wrap lets the deep-pockets website company explain their motivation, giving us a quote that sounds genuinely chilling:

“At Squarespace, we have always said that an idea isn’t real until you make a website for it.”

Yes, and “A day without a Wicket is a day without sunshine.”

 

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On a personal note, it’s been confirmed that friend and associate Mike Hyatt has passed away. We talked at length a couple of months back, and another friend talked with him even sooner than that.

Mike was a professional film restoration expert and had also worked as an art director. But he was also a big-time film collector known to the collecting community, and a frequent sight at repertory & revival screenings in Los Angeles. A chapter in the recent book A Thousand Cuts is devoted to his never-ending restoration of the 1963 movie The Day of the Triffids.

I have part of the inside story of why Triffids took so long, and why Mike’s work saw only a few scattered screenings at film get-togethers, such as the 2009 Academy Halloween party. That’s where I took a number of photos of a beaming Mike, that have been circulating on Facebook. This is Mike’s personal story, so I’m not in a rush to ‘explain’ him. Just know that the folks that came to know Mike, knew him a kind and generous friend.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

May the battle for screen credit commence.

 

Hello!

By the luck of the draw it’s an all-Kino review day, and coincidentally, most of Kino’s KL Studio Classics February titles arrived just before the rains came to Los Angeles on Sunday.

The selection is pretty self-explanatory, with remasters or reissues of some standard items, plus some new items like Blood on the Sun remastered in HD, plus 4K Ultra HD discs of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street and the horror picture The Boogens. The French movie The Road to Shame (Des femmes disparaissent) is an oversexed crime thriller with Robert Hossein and Magali Noël.

 

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We’ve been thinking about where CineSavant came from lately, and correspondent ‘Mark’ reminded me that the old DVD Journal page is still up, seventeen years after its erudite editor shut it down. The link takes one to the last ‘dimming the lights’ entry, an essay recapping disc concerns in 2007 — Blu-ray hadn’t yet taken hold — that included warring formats.

The DVD Journal is still an inspiration to read, as the articles and its main page are so intelligent. The proprietor believed that home video writing might amount to something, and he made what we do feel like journalism. It was a dispiriting day when a Warners attorney sent me an agreement she wanted me to sign, designating my role as an ‘influencer.’  Corporations insist on having control of every relationship.

Through the Journal I met the late writer Mark Bourne, who was likewise inspiring and encouraging of our efforts. These great early contacts sadly slipped away — Mark died in 2012. The publisher of the old DVD Resource page also did me a great service, by allowing me to reboot ‘MGM Video Savant’ into the first ‘DVD Savant’ page. He died even earlier, around 2005.

That’s a good reason to take a minute to boost some worthy pages, as I no longer maintain a links page. Few online praise their associates and plug pages they like. I don’t do it enough, but I spread the word when I can. You surely know some of these — a couple are much bigger than CineSavant.  In no particular order:

 

John McElwee’s Greenbriar Picture Shows is written in his inimitable style (adapted from trade paper-speak, I think). John’s focus is on distribution and exhibition, and he’s released two very good, very entertaining books on the subject.

 

Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings covers much the same genre and vintage titles we cover, often adding observations that would never occur to me. She  reported on American Cinematheque screenings of pictures not yet available on disc. She lately surprised us with an agreeably rational perspective on a movie I thought only I cared about.

 

I’ve been pals with Mark Throop for years — his page Movies ala Mark is fresh and funny, and I like his opinions so much, I swipe them whenever possible. He zeroes in on mainstream pictures and the marginal genre films that clog my synapses. His wit is never mean-spirited.

 

I’ve followed film critic & teacher David Cairns’ major blog Shadowplay since he generously contacted me who-knows how many years ago. David mixes academic analysis with a sharp sense of humor. I’m always curious to hear his take on things, his adventures at film festivals, etc..  He pulls off the magic trick of reporting on his commentary and essay work, without turning his page into an advertisement.

 

I can’t leave out Kyu Hyun Kim’s Q Branch Mirror Site, another blog with in-depth academic thought on film topics, but also articles that skew toward history projects. Kyu is a committed historian. He posts infrequently, and his writing helps me spread my thoughts beyond the subject of disc releases. For instance, way down on his first page is an extended interview with another academic, Kirsten Ziomek, on her book about Japanese colonial issues.

 

And, just to keep tabs on correspondent Kevin Pyrtle, I repeat his new page that so far toys with Kaiju concerns. The title is surely relevant to Kevin, even if I don’t get it:  Thrilling Tales of Weltraum★besty. I’m eager to see where Kevin takes this.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

“I don’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the world would end.”

 

Hello!

The Vinegar Syndrome disc boutique once again makes Eurohorror news. A few weeks back we reported on its upcoming restored and extended cut of the Saul Bass Sci-fi item Phase IV, and their 4K release of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock just shipped.

While we’re pondering the best way to review Hichcock a second time, the company has announced new a Blu-ray remaster, of the ‘exotic’ Italian horror offering L’ultima preda del vampiro, known to us in a dubbed and slightly censored U.S. version as The Playgirls and the Vampire.

This time out Vinegar Syndrome gives us an excellent little short subject about the care they take to revamp films like Playgirls for disc. My friends that deal with film give an approving thumbs-up to the promo. It’s well-produced, accurate and (cough) educational, with many close-up images of film elements as viewed on an editor’s workbench. VS’s archivist Oscar Becher is a good host, too. The link:

Winding through ‘The Playgirls and the Vampire.’ 

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This Variety news regarding Tim Burton and Gillian Flynn is fairly self-explanatory:

A New ‘Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman’ Remake In the Works.The first question is, is the monster success of Barbie the inspiration for this?  How can one put a feminist spin on the tale of Nancy Archer?  The culture long ago declared the original Attack to be some kind of schlock parody, although we cherish it as grass-roots drive-in exploitation. Making it into something idologically relevant — if that’s even the aim — will be a challenge.

And how soon do directors Jim Wynorski and Christopher Guest start squawking?  Both have already made direct Attack remakes, after all.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

A nifty present from Allan Peach — a 3-D replica of the CineSavant logo!

Hello!

Los Angeles photographer and close friend Allan Peach caught the 3-D printer bug a few years back. Just last week he gifted me with something special — a 3-D sign of our CineSavant Logo, in full relief and with the correct colors. Allan made it on his 3-D printer. No paint is involved; I’m guessing that three different-colored plastics (?) were used.

Charlie Largent designed our CineSavant logo soon after the move to Trailers from Hell in 2015; he kept the original layered photoshop files, which Allan slipped directly into his 3-D program.

The sign is 3 x 10 inches; it’s got some stick-tape on the back for when I figure out a proper place of honor for it. I think it needs to be placed behind me, to be visible on my computer’s camera, you know, for official business.

My previous 3-D printed item from Allan is this rather cool Gill Man figurine.  I put few knicknacks on display, but these are too special to hide.

 

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Explaining today’s ‘Reprint’ Review:   We try to keep the CineSavant Index of Reviews up to date… the idea is that older reviews remain a reading resource. Encouraging browsing is why new CineSavant reviews carry so many links to older reviews. Readers are quick to ask what’s wrong when a link doesn’t work. Last month we discovered that ten reviews from 2015 were dead — the site they were posted to ceased to exist.

In 2015 ‘DVD Savant’ had to go begging for a new host platform, because its host page DVDtalk could no longer work with an independent reviewer. At the beginning of August we had no place to post reviews, but then Joe Dante extended an invitation to be a guest reviewer at Trailers from Hell. The first review at TFH was Mad Max Fury Road.

But for a few weeks in August, our generous reviewing colleague Stuart Galbraith IV let us post at his page, then called World Cinema Paradise. The reviews that DVD Savant posted there have remained up all this time, even though WCP became inactive a few years ago. Then, late last year, the page disappeared along with its entire contents.

Since the links to the ‘World Cinema Paradise’ reviews no longer go anywhere, I’m going to be reprinting them here in the next few weeks. Old links in our reviews may be faulty but those in the CineSavant Index will still function!

All this makes me wonder if the old page DVDtalk will shut down someday sooner or later. If it does, I’ll have to figure out how to revive the 4800 DVD Savant reviews presently posted there, and nowhere else.

 

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What’s this photo all about?

With Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theater now newly renovated and up and running, we’re seeing more about it in print.  (I ought to snap a picture or two, as it’s on the way to my grocery store of choice.)

Those with an historical curiosity will love the entry for The Vista Theater at the Los Angeles Theaters page. It covers the long life of The Vista from its opening as the Bard Theater in 1923, through its life going forward, including a period in the 1960s when it was a porn house. There’s a million pictures on the page, including screen grabs of the Vista’s appearances in feature films, the most notable being True Romance.

But the photo I’m showing here was taken in 1916 only a few hundred yards from where The Vista sits now — it’s the crumbling Babylon set for D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson