Hello!

The helpful David J. Schow sent along a link to a video about an avant-garde electronic music pioneer named Delia Derbyshire, posted by Umberto Santos on YouTube. Ms. Derbyshire’s heyday was the 1960s, at the BBC.

BBC had something called the ‘Radiophonic Workshop,’ where she spent her time creating electronic music.

The featured item forwarded by David is a minimalist piece called ‘Falling’ from 1964, posted by one Umberto Santos. It’s …. unusual.

Miss Derbyshire 

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And, as circulated by Joe Dante, Kyle MacNeill of The Guardian lauds what David Allen repeatedly called a ‘Lost Art’: Stop-Motion Animation.  In 1973, when David was holding court on artistic opinions, Stop-Motion was becoming a Lost Art, ghetto-ized in Pillsbury Doughboy TV commercials. Nowadays it’s quite a busy racket for feature films, with descriptions of giant stop-motion farms with dozens of setups, often with scores of identical miniature sets. Some Stop-Motion features have been recorded on iPhones. An Aardman director might stay on-site to supervise, but we’ve heard of ‘hands on’ directors micromanaging material being filmed in London, as it is relayed to him on a beach on the other side of the world.

The article is

Skeleton warriors and Plasticine Chickens:
Why Stop-Motion Animation is still going strong a century on.
Just looking at the  King Kong photograph reminds me that I need to see that picture again soon — it must have been 10 years since the last spin. The same goes for  Jason and the Argonauts; I bet it will play better than ever. I must drag  The Valley of Gwangi out once a year, along with  The Golden Voyage of Sinbad — to at least see the Allosaurus roping round-up and the six-armed Kali battle.  The 7th Voyage of Sinbad I should give a break to — when I watch it these days I tend to free-associate, because it’s just too familiar. But maybe Ms. Kathryn Grant deserves an appreciative nod…

Isn’t it time all those pictures were remastered in 4K?   Just askin’.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

The Capone mob killed 7 in history’s most notorious gang massacre … a score dwarfed by today’s gun apocalypse.

Hello!

We’re on the mend from a bug picked up on vacation, but are gearing up to review the best of what’s on the CineSavant table. Around this time of year a vocal group of friends / readers / film fans beccomes either excited over or depressed by what’s in the offing for the Halloween season. Some even ask for a recommended buying list for collectors of horror / Sci-fi / the fantastic.

You know, if someone as astute and discriminating as Richard Harland Smith can get so excited about Halloween fun, why can’t the rest of us do the same?  This year Trick or Treat night is shaping up as a genuine video-enhanced holiday, with a number of desirable titles. We haven’t seen any of these, but the list is promising — it includes several titles in 4K Ultra HD, too.

Here’s the list, with links, of hot titles on our radar, not necessarily a list of what we’ll be able to review:

 

The Bat  1926 Undercrank Productions

The Beast with Five Fingers  The Warner Archive Collection

Burn, Witch Burn  KL Studio Classics

Circus of Horrors  4K  KL Studio Classics

Columbia Horror: Behind the Mask, Black Moon, Air Hawks, Island of Doomed Men, Cry of the Werewolf, Soul of a Monster  Powerhouse Indicator – Region B

Creature with the Blue Hand + Web of the Spider  Film Masters

Daiei Gothic: Japanese Ghost Stories  The Ghost of Yotsuya, The Snow Woman, The Bride from Hades  — Radiance

Demon Pond  4K  The Criterion Collection

I Walked with a Zombie – The Seventh Victim  4K  Double Feature  The Criterion Collection

J-Horror Rising:  Shikoku, Isola: Multiple Personality Girl, Inugami, St. John’s Wort, Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, Persona, Noroi: The Curse  — Radiance

The Return of Dr. X  The Warner Archive Collection

El Vampiro: Two Bloodsucking Tales from Mexico  Powerhouse Indicator – Region B

The Walking Dead  The Warner Archive Collection

… and, just missing Halloween:

Godzilla ’54  4K  The Criterion Collection

The NeverEnding Story  4K  [Imprint]

I Vampiri  Radiance

 

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And while we’re at it, why not a round-up of desirable fantastic titles released in the last couple of years. This is just a sampling, with links to reviews. And just below, a guessing game quilt of key images. They don’t link, but each does enlarge …

 

Cloverfield 4K ••• The Asphyx ••• Dragonslayer 4K ••• Wings of Desire 4K ••• Deep Impact 4K ••• The Boy with Green Hair ••• Castle of Blood 4K ••• The Night of the Hunter 4K ••• Time Bandits 4K ••• The Tale of Tsar Saltan ••• La fin du monde (1931) ••• Gorgo 4K ••• Robot Monster 3-D ••• Cocaine Bear 4K ••• The Giant Gila Monster + The Killer Shrews ••• Freaks, The Unknown, The Mystic ••• The Horrible Dr. Hichcock ••• The Devil-Doll ••• Beast from Haunted Cave ••• World of Giants: the Complete Series ••• The Criminal Acts of Tod Slaughter: Eight Blood-and-Thunder Entertainments, 1935-1940 ••• Messiah of Evil ••• Barbarella 4K ••• Horrors of the Black Museum ••• Our Town ••• Red Planet Mars ••• Devil’s Partner + Creature from the Haunted Sea ••• Contagion 4K ••• The Whip and the Body ••• The Playgirls and the Vampire ••• *batteries not included ••• Dune ’84 – Dual Version Edition ••• Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors 4K ••• The Mask of Fu Manchu ••• Peeping Tom 4K ••• Back from the Dead ••• Planet of the Vampires ••• Cemetery Man ••• When Worlds Collide ••• Invasion of the Body Snatchers ’56 4K ••• Revenge of the Blood Beast (The She-Beast) ••• Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet ••• Reptilicus 4K ••• Alphaville 4K

 

                        

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Wilde’s best movie, despite its justified realism, is now labeled PC-suspect for violence … directed against animals.

 

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…

 

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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

Watery vision, weak depth perception and low self-esteem, aggravated by a poor complexion and insurgent Navy frogmen.
Hello!

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

How to sell a movie about an airplane disaster — to women.
Hello!

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

One is married to Joan Crawford and the other is leaving his wife to be with her.  Maybe he markets quality clothes hangers?
Hello!

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

Recognize him?  It’s his first credited movie, directed by Michael Powell.

 

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…

 

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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.

— Eerie Indiana — the Full Series — 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson