Hello!

 

We’re getting to that time where readers are asking for Halloween disc suggestions. That’s of course exactly our present concentration, what with these discs in house and being written up, expected shortly, or already reviewed:

Tombs of the Blind Dead,  Beast from Haunted Cave &  Ski Troop Attack,  Don’t Look Now 4K,  Salem’s Lot,  Tod Browning’s Freaks,  The Unknown,  The Mystic,  Paramount Scares 4K: Rosemary’s Baby,  Pet Sematary,  Crawl,  Smile,  ‘mystery feature’,  The Others,  Giant Gila Monster &  The Killer Shrews,  The Devil-Doll,  World of Giants,  Cujo 4K,  Black Sabbath,  It! The Terror from Beyond Space,  The Quatermass Xperiment.

But for fun, and to see all the box tops lined up again, we put together this  stack of horror-fantasy discs we reviewed since September 2021 . . . you can’t keep up with them all. They link to CineSavant reviews.

Wow, all those desirable titles constitute just two years’ worth of horror & sci-fi disc releases. Devotees of the fantastic can’t complain, as it’s an incredible wealth of matinee wonder and Halloween malarkey.

 

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Correspondent Chuck Shillingford send in this odd Youtube encoding of an entire feature, a not-bad re-evocation of old Universal horror pix. It was filmed in 2009 and has been up a year, but it certainly feels connected to the Halloween theme.

The show is called The House of the Wolf Man, and the visuals and music score are really impressive — they got a lot of the look and the sound right. The makeup is certainly professional, and so is the action climax. I liked very much the scenes I checked out.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Go Mario Adorf ! — in his breakthrough role, directed by Robert Siodmak.

 

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Aren’t you lucky today . . . here’s an oversized graphic, forwarded by the helpful Michael McQuarrie. In last Tuesday’s review of Tombs of the Blind Dead, I could hardly believe the report that some American distributor had retitled the movie and added a dumb prologue, to pass it off as part of the Planet of the Apes series. How could a distributor stoop so low?  Correspondent ‘Cadavra’ even left a comment, saying that, as a film booker back in the day, he had walked out of a sales screening after discovering the substitution.

Could the distributor have been Hallmark Releasing, in 1973?

Well, as Orson Welles once said, It’s All True: this (Texan?) newspaper ad proves that the bait & switch did actually take place.

 

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Yesterday having been Friday the 13th, Severin Films let loose their big announcment of a
Danza Macabra Volume Two: The Italian Gothic Collection.

We reviewed Volume One back in April of this year, sizing the set up as ‘an oddity, a rarity and a garish pair of titles imported for U.S. drive-ins.’

With a ship date of December 12, Volume Two is now up for pre-order. The three Blu-ray offerings in the box are the ‘vampires-go-corporate’ thriller They Have Changed Their Face (1971), a four-part RAI-TV saga called Jekyll, and a 1972 gothic in which Rosalba Neri reportedly becomes The Devil’s Lover.

But the main feature to attract the fan buzz is what might be a definitive — or maybe better than definitive — presentation of Antonion Margheriti’s Danza Macabra, known under its English language title Castle of Blood. Critic Raymond Durgnat first turned us on to Gothic EuroHorror — and Barbara Steele — by discussing it in his 1967 book Films and Feelings.

Severin’s presentation includes Castle of Blood and the Italian original Danza Macabra in both Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD, accompanied by a selected scene commentary with Barbara Steele. A third disc dedicated to the title contains more extras, including a locations featurette and several interview documentaries.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Ready to investigate heavy-duty Roger Corman?  This is the place to begin.

 

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Correspondent Michael McQuarrie sends along a welcome link to something I definitely remember from the past, a full 56 years ago, as a matter of fact.

This must be the first movie tie-in ‘special preview’ TV show I ever watched — at 15 years I was totally gone on James Bond 007, and lost to having a reasonable interest in worthy cultural events. I remember the show strongly because I opted out of attending a school club party that night, where there were going to be GIRLS. Life is life and one makes mistakes, but I have to say it was a long time before I realized that Real Things with Real People are more important than my petty movie obsessions.

The show is “Welcome to Japan, Mr. Bond!”  I believe it played on ABC and was a huge ratings hit, scoring at the level attainable only by 007 and the Beatles. The IMDB says that the show aired on June 2, 1967 … which was a Friday, and I think our fancy club party was on a Friday.

The special was an expensive promotion for the Sean Connery Bond movie You Only Live Twice, and it promised to take us ‘inside’ the world of 007. But most of the show simply strung together scenes from the first four movies, and teased film clips of major set-piece scenes from the new movie, which became massive spoilers. An interesting bit at the end hints that the next Ian Fleming book in line for adaptation will be On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — but when Danjaq didn’t know Sean Connery would jump ship.

Like an obedient fan I saw the movie in its first weekend, but the fun was diminished by already being familiar with so much on screen. Frankly, the expensive set-piece action scenes weren’t assembled very well, either. We still love YOLT but have to pick and choose the things in it that are actually good.

Hopefully more Halloween horror is on the way — Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Billy Wilder sidesteps ordinary WW2 propaganda for brilliant spy thrills and honest sentiment.

 

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With Halloween coming up, a number of anticpated discs haven’t quite reached the hungry mailbox at CineSavant Central:

Don’t Look Now,  The Others,  Videodrome,  The Tod Browning Silents,  The Giant Gila Monster / The Killer Shrews,  The Devil-Doll,  It! The Terror from Beyond Space,  World of Giants, and  Beast from Haunted Cave / Ski Troop Attack.

It’s an unbearable injustice, but we at CineSavant won’t just sit here and take it — we ordered a notable older disc to review. Yes, yes, everyone in creation except this reviewer has seen Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV miniseries Salem’s Lot. It was fun to catch up. We thank you for your indulgence.

 

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Correspondent Nicholas Krisfalusy is enthusiastic about the new 4K releases of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space, which we’re sure look splendid; we’re still too caught up in our 3-D versions to jump at them. We totally understand what’s going on — since 2017 or so, who has been able to even buy a good passive 3-D monitor?  Honestly, the industry needs to think of the market and bring those back.

CineSavant’s 2018 3-D Creature from the Black Lagoon review; CineSavant’s 2016 3-D It Came from Outer Space review.

As noted above, Kino Lorber has two Blu-ray reissues on the way: a new disc of It! The Terror from Beyond Space lands on October 24, and the genre game-changer The Quatermass Xperiment will arrive later, on December 12.

There’s quite a bit of online buzz about the extras that have been announced. It! The Terror has a new transfer plus three new commentaries, including one by Tom Weaver. I’m told that the first It! disc had some funky encoding here and there, described by a friend as an ‘interference pattern.’ So a replacement sounds like a not-bad idea.

But a few people are complaining about the Quatermass Xperiment reissue, for reasons we don’t quite understand. The obvious one is that the transfer is the same, only the encoding will be beefed up a bit. Technically that’s a plus — but can we assume that high-end users with big screens will be able to tell the difference?

The most vocal fans are up at arms because Kino isn’t including a separate transfer of the slightly different American cut of Quatermass Xperiment, re-titled The Creeping Unknown. That’s the 1956 poster that makes the extraterrestrial threat look like ‘Beeg Dog from Basker Veele’ (apologies to Clive Revill).

Back in the laserdisc days, we were present at MGM/UA when VP George Feltenstein made hardcore Sci-fi fans happy by NOT simply throwing UA’s domestic cut of The Creeping Unknown onto disc. He instead tracked down Hammer Films’ original printing elements in England, and went through the slow process of obtaining a dupe negative through the BFI. That’s how we ended up with a brillant, accurate rendering of the authentic Val Guest movie, as opposed to an edited U.S. cut.

Back in 2003 or so, after I was long gone from MGM Home Video, I edited a pair of featurettes for the first Blu-ray release; I think they’ll be retained for this second Special Edition. They show the various U.S.edits inflicted on Xperiment, that shortened the ‘zoo’ sequence and removed several shots of the icky alien protoplasm. The variant main title cards are there as well, for The Creeping Unknown and Hammer’s export version, The Quatermass Experiment without the ‘X’ title gimmick. We lifted them from gray-market Sinister Cinema tapes.

Why anybody would need the bowdlerized U.S. cut is beyond me, the same way the mangled finale to Kiss Me Deadly is now a back-shelf curiosity. A U.K. company put out a fancy disc of Jacques Tourneur’s Night/Curse of the Demon with four separate cuts that were really just two cuts with different title cards. MGM and Kino have nailed Quatermass Xperiment; rather than see them spin their wheels, we’d rather they go forward with rescues of other United Artists’ pictures at risk.

Hey, hope to have more spooky reviews up soon, before Halloween — Thanks for reading. — Glenn Erickson

Colossal moneymaker, fancy cutting-edge digital filmmaking … so why were we not thrilled?

 

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Deep into his retirement years, the marvelous Ray Harryhausen got to take a well-deserved victory lap or two, soaking up the adulation of his fans. That makes it doubly good that everyone’s favorite independent filmmaking legend Roger Corman is getting the same kind of recognition, earning well-deserved accolades.

Reporting on the producer-director’s appearance at a Beyond Fest special screening, Variety reporter J. Kim Murphy describes an overwhelming fan response. Roger Corman spoke before a sell-out crowd, in a post-screening talk with six of his most accomplished acolyte directors and producers:

Roger Corman Gets a Hero’s WelcomeAt 97 years of age, the man looks almost unreasonably healthy and hearty . . . more power to him, we say.

 

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And here’s another happy announcement for fans of mystery films noted for ‘falling between the cracks’ …

Milestone Film and Video’s new newsletter announces that they’ve located and 4K-restored Nancy Savoca’s long-missing mini-masterpiece Household Saints.

After re-premiere theatrical bookings it’s slated for disc release by Kino Lorber. As Milestone says,

“Nancy Savoca’s magical and mysterious 1993 feature film has been unavailable for many years — it has never been released on videodisc. So we were thrilled to be able to help create this glowing new 4K restoration, which debuts October 7 and 11 at the 61st New York Film Festival.”

The fascinating little drama stars Vincent D’Onofrio, Tracey Ullman and ‘the luminous’ Lili Taylor as Teresa. We saw it just once on a not-so-hot cablecast, were enchanted, and can’t wait to see it ‘for real.’  As we’re fond of saying, Milestone Film and Video comes through once again.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Talk talk talk — yet most of it works extremely well. Don’t tell the animal rights people, though.