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Godzilla

January 28th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Ishiro Honda
1954 / Toho Co. ltd / 96′
written by Shigeru Kayama, Ishiro Honda and Takeo Murata
 director of photography Masao Tamai
music by Akira Ifukube
director of special effects Eiji Tsuburaya
starring Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura, Sachio Sakai, Katsumi Tezuka and Haruo Nakajima
Godzilla, along with Godzilla King of the Monsters!, is now available in a deluxe Blu-ray edition from the Criterion Collection

Unleashed upon an unsuspecting Japan to massive popular success in late fall of 1954, the original Godzilla was one of those rare perfect storms of cinema, a picture so tremendous in its impact that it ushered in not only a distinct new genre of Japanese film, but a bona fide pop culture revolution as well. It also touched a chord with a post-war Japan fresh from years of occupation, and finally allowed to openly discuss the full sum of its wartime experiences. Godzilla‘s considerable box office take all but ensured the long run of increasingly silly sequels that followed, and those familiar with those alone might be forgiven for expecting the same here, but the father of them all is an intelligent and at times downright cerebral affair, possessed of a raw power not seen in the genre since. Much more than just another monster movie, Godzilla is a spectacular public exorcism of the specters of World War II, and the tumultuous, emotional expression of a nation’s struggle to come to terms with its history as both a perpetrator and victim of incalculable wartime devastation.

The story, for those unfamiliar, begins with a series of dreadful shipping accidents off the coast of Japan, an investigation into which leads reporters and government officials to remote Odo Island, a sparsely populated speck of land near where the accidents occurred. There they find no answers beyond the superstitious ramblings of one of the island’s elders, who is convinced that the mythical Godzilla – a mysterious sea beast the Odo Islanders once sated with human sacrifice – is responsible for the maritime troubles. No one believes a word of it until something comes ashore one storm-torn evening, leveling several of the island’s residences and leaving a set of impossibly huge footprints in its wake.

A scientific expedition headed by noted zoologist Dr. Yamane (the great Takashi Shimura) is swiftly mounted to survey the destruction and investigate its cause. Once the scientists are on the island they make a series of surprising discoveries. The footprints left behind are intensely radioactive, and the area around them dangerously contaminated. What’s more, they’re littered with ancient sediments and the remnants of primitive life long thought extinct, leading Dr. Yamane and his team to the conclude that the impressions were made by something straight out of prehistory. It isn’t long before more conclusive evidence arrives in the form of a mountainous Jurassic-age monster, the Godzilla of legend, who has his sights set on Japan’s thriving metropolitan heart – Tokyo.

Co-written by director Ishiro Honda and Takeo Murata (Rodan) from an original story by Shigeru Kayama (which he also novelized), the basics of Godzilla‘s narrative development are pretty traditional, writ large, the origins for the monster having been freely adapted from elements of the classic King Kong (an island, a legend, talk of human sacrifice) and the contemporary The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (about a prehistoric monster roused from its icy slumbers by an atomic test in the Arctic). Indeed, the idea of a dinosaur wreaking havoc on modern civilization was nothing new in 1954, having been seen previously in the silent The Lost World, Max Fleischer’s Superman short The Arctic Giant, as well as in Godzilla‘s most direct inspiration, the aforementioned Beast. The difference, as ever, is in the details.

Under the creative auspices of Honda, Kayama, Murata, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, effects director Eiji Tsuburaya and even composer Akira Ifukube1, Godzilla‘s eponymous monster becomes one of the most singularly loaded metaphors in cinema history. Through references, both overt and subliminal, to such events as the irradiation of the fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru by the Castle Bravo H-bomb test, the fall of radioactive rain resulting from Soviet atomic tests, the firebombing of Tokyo and the A-bombing of Nagasaki, Godzilla becomes a fearsome and direct manifestation both of the horrors of World War II and the new and frightening realities of the Atomic Age. The monster’s steady, methodical destruction of modern Tokyo is a sequence unlike anything before it. Godzilla advances with the unrelenting force of an atomic blast, sending whole blocks crumbling into smoldering rubble and engulfing the city’s skyline in a curtain of nuclear flame. Dialogue clarifies whatever doubts may be lingering as to the rampage’s symbolic significance - “Godzilla’s no different from the H-bomb still hanging over Japan’s head…“

In Godzilla’s wake millions lie dead or dying, both of physical injuries and radioactive contamination, while countless traumatized survivors wonder what terrors are yet to come. The imagery here – endless corridors filled with the wounded and an entire city reduced to wasteland – is potent, and evocative not only of the haunting aftermaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but of the wartime razing of Tokyo as well. Even Godzilla himself is granted a history of victimization, with Dr. Yamane insinuating that, much like Japan’s A-bomb survivors, the creature is traumatized by its recent brush with American nuclear might. “Don’t shine searchlights on Godzilla!” he gravely begs of a military officer, fearful that they might remind of the blinding flash that tore him from his deep sea niche and send the monster into a deeper rage. Of course Godzilla is not just a victim, but an aggressor as well, and the vision of a dragon rising from the Pacific alludes strongly to the ugly flip side of Japan’s wartime misfortune – the fact that through their own militant nationalism, and the brutal campaign of conquest that resulted from it, they had brought that misfortune upon themselves.

To that end the central dramatic conflict of the film might be viewed as an allusion to the position of the Allied forces during the war. Godzilla, awakened by the H-bomb and impervious to all modern munitions, seems unstoppable, but a brilliant young scientist – Dr. Serizawa (a convincing young Akihiko Hirata) – may have found an answer. The problem? His discovery has such immense destructive potential that any use of it, however good the cause, could prove catastrophic. It’s a narrative development that dramatically echoes the creation and eventual use of the Atom bomb in the final days of World War II, and that implies a certain understanding by Honda and his crew of the position of the Allied forces at the time. With a marauding force like the Imperial Japanese at large, do you set aside your most powerful weapon for fear of the horrific consequences of its use, or do you use it in spite of them? What the Allies decided is history, and their decision is paralleled by that of Dr. Serizawa – the result is that Godzilla is stopped, though at a tremendous cost. Another elemental force, as horrifying as the H-bomb, has been let loose in the world, and the film concludes with a grave Dr. Yamane wondering what other Godzillas might be unleashed as a result.

In terms of drama Godzilla has certainly aged in the decades since it was made, and a forgettable love triangle between Toho’s brightest young stars (top-billed Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi and Akihiko Hirata) will be of minimal interest to modern viewers, but the complex substance of the thing remains, its power undiminished over the near-60 years since it was fresh. Godzilla is perhaps the best of its kind ever made, the ultimate, indelible atomic monster experience and the birthplace of an unlikely pop-culture icon. It’s must-see material, folks, and that’s all there is too it.

1 Some of Ifukube’s cues for the film, both the elegiac pieces set to Godzilla’s aftermath and demise and the descending motif that accompanies the earlier ship disasters, are highly evocative (and in the latter case a direct adaptation) of his past work on Kaneto Shindo’s Children of Hiroshima (a somber, thoughtful film about the human toll of the Hiroshima bombing), an allusion that only further cements Godzilla‘s connection to World War II and the burgeoning Atomic Age.

disc details:
released January 24, 2012 by the Criterion Collection
disc: dual layer BD-50
video: 1080p | AVC | 1.37:1
audio: LPCM 1.0 Japanese
subtitles: English
supplements: commentary track with David Kalat, interviews (star Akira Takarada, suit actor Haruo Nakajima, effects men Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai, composer Akira Ifukube, critic Tadao Sato), composite test footage, The Unluckiest Dragon illustrated audio essay, theatrical trailer and Godzilla King of the Monsters! (also featuring a David Kalat commentary and theatrical trailer)
retail price: $39.95
Available now from Amazon.com, and also available on 2-disc DVD

The Criterion Collection has certainly started the year off right, getting one of their most anticipated releases of 2012 onto store shelves right from the start. A few niggling video issues may keep their high definition presentation of Godzilla from being the end-all be-all of the format, but compared to what’s come before (an awful edition from Classic Media and a dull, over-processed alternative from Toho itself) it’s a revelation. Those simply wondering as to whether or not their Blu-ray is worth the price of admission need read no further – of course it is, so get out there and buy it you fools!

The thorn in Godzilla‘s side is just a case of Criterion cramming too much stuff (and there’s a lot!) onto one disc – this really should have been a 2-disc Blu-ray, a la the simultaneously released 2-disc Criterion dvd, and the video presentation suffers a bit for it in the form of artifacting. The AVC-encoded video for Godzilla, running a modest average bitrate of 23.5 Mbps, does well by the majority of the show, but moments of flatter contrast and more ambiguous detail (like the underwater finale) present with notable, if not exactly damning, grain artifacts.

Otherwise I’ve nothing to complain about with this 1080p presentation, which Criterion have sourced fresh from a fine-grain 35mm master positive (the original negative for Godzilla is long gone) with excellent results. Detail improves handily over past editions, finally appearing at a level in keeping with the show’s 35mm photography, and contrast is dead-on. The usual limitations associated with Godzilla are all here, including some flicker and an assortment of damage, but Criterion’s work to clean up the material will be obvious to anyone familiar with past iterations. There’s a lot of obtrusive, large-scale damage I’m used to seeing that just isn’t here, and Criterion have struck their usual attractive balance between cleanliness and source authenticity. It may not be pristine (given the state of surviving elements it was never going to be – the first three Godzilla films are all in rather dire condition, with King Kong vs. Godzilla evidently having no usable 35mm elements at all for some scenes), but for the first time ever the film looks as good as it rightly should. This gave me the most satisfying viewing of Godzilla I’ve had to date, enough so that my boundless devotion to the 2006 BFI dvd has finally been broken, and those with realistic expectations for the title should be thrilled.

Screenshots were taken as full 1920×1080 resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, then compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool. See our complementary review of Godzilla King of the Monsters! for screenshots from that version of the film.

Strong as the image can be, my minor quibbles aside, the audio is tremendous. Criterion present Godzilla in its original Japanese courtesy of a robust uncompressed 24-bit LPCM 1.0 track that restores the film’s sound mix to its original luster. I usually complement the score with regards to these uncompressed jobs, and Ifukube’s work sounds better than ever here, but it’s Godzilla’s roar that really hooked me on this track. There’s a visceral depth to it that I had never caught onto before, in my many viewings of the film, and at times it can be downright chilling. Complementing the audio is a wonderfully translated new set of subtitles that are more complete than those on the BFI edition.

Supplements are stacked, beginning with the full 80 minute American edition of the film, newly transferred in 1080p from a fine-grain 35mm master positive and a 16mm dupe negative, which comes with its own commentary track and trailer (see our review of Godzilla King of the Monsters! for more details). Otherwise there’s a fine commentary with critic David Kalat, as well as a solid slate of interviews, most newly-produced, and a substantial piece on the Daigo Fukuryu Maru. The standout for me is a retrospective interview with late composer Akira Ifukube, recorded in 2000, that runs a whopping 50 minutes. Everything here appears to be rendered in HD (though a couple of pieces are upscaled from SD), and the menu is conveniently accessible disc-wide. Bill Sienkiewicz’s packaging design is earning no end of fan ire, and I can confirm that which has so many in an uproar - that is, in fact, one of the Millennium-series Godzilla designs illustrated on the interior pop-up (itself a bit of an oddity, but kudos for thinking outside the box). Having finally seen it in person I can’t say that I mind – the art has terrific impact, particularly the front cover image, and those for whom the offending bits are an honest distraction will find them easily enough avoided in the Blu-ray edition (you have to fully unfold the two-fold digipak-style interior to see the pop-up, and the disc can be accessed without doing so). A booklet featuring a nice essay by J. Hoberman rounds out the package.

There’s some lost potential here with regards the encode (spreading the content over two discs instead of just one would have readily solved that problem, which is much more pronounced in Godzilla King of the Monsters than it is here), but overall the Criterion Collection’s Godzilla is as strong as fans might have hoped. The film has never looked, sounded, or read better than it does here, and that alone makes this Blu-ray more than worth the price of admission. Recommended!

Continue to Godzilla King of the Monsters!


Godzilla King of the Monsters!

January 28th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Terry O. Morse
1956 / Jewell Enterprises / Trans World / 80′
written by Al C. Ward
 director of photography Guy Roe
edited by Terry Morse
starring Raymond Burr, Frank Iwanaga and Mikel Conrad
Godzilla King of the Monsters! is now available, along with Godzilla, in a deluxe Blu-ray edition from the Criterion Collection

“This is Tokyo, once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which up until a few days ago was entirely beyond the scope of man’s imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown – an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could, at any time, lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world. There were once many people here who could have told of what they saw. Now, there are only a few.”

Though a phenomenal success in its native Japan, garnering nearly 10 million admissions during release, Godzilla remained relatively unknown abroad – unknown, that is, until the international distribution rights were secured by Jewell Enterprises (otherwise best, and seemingly only, known for the Mara Corday crime picture Girls on the Loose and the shabby cavegirl adventure Untamed Women, one in a long line of shows that repurposed the creature effects from Hal Roach’s One Million B.C.). The firm would would go on to hire Terry O. Morse, an experienced film editor with limited directing experience, to oversee their American adaptation of Godzilla, and cast recognizable talent Raymond Burr, here just before his rise to fame on television’s Perry Mason, as their new star. The resulting film would eventually be seen world wide, even in Japan (where it was retrofitted for ‘Scope projection for a 1957 release), and bestow upon its eponymous attraction a title still familiar to this day – King of the Monsters.

Though drastically restructured for its Stateside adaptation, the meat of Godzilla King of the Monsters!’ narrative remains familiar. Ships are disappearing off the Japanese coast, their survivors recounting stories of boiling seas and brilliant light. Officials are at a loss for why until an expedition to an isolated island near to the disappearances reveals the terrifying truth: Godzilla, a monster right out of prehistory, has been torn from its undersea niche by Pacific H-bomb testing and is making a bee-line for the Japanese capital. Impervious to all known armaments, Godzilla seems unstoppable until a young inventor reveals his own horrifying discovery – a new elemental power with more deadly potential than the atom.

The difference lies in the framing, accomplished through new footage starring Raymond Burr as American press correspondent Steve Martin, who recounts the majority of Godzilla‘s events in flashback. On layover in Tokyo, Martin takes to investigating the shipping disappearances out of a natural journalistic instinct, but soon finds himself witness to the utter destruction of Tokyo.

Though filmed in a matter of days, the footage that serves as Godzilla King of the Monsters!’ backbone is remarkably ambitious for its type, with a good deal of effort made to match locations and even actors (with doubles only seen from behind) so that the new story line fits properly with the old. One can question just how Martin so insinuates himself into some of the film’s lesser drama, like an underlying romantic triangle, but writ large the material works quite well, and no future attempt at the same would ever be so successful. A lot of that success is undoubtedly linked to the casting of Burr, who could deliver a stereo manual with thrilling authority, but the script by seasoned television writer Al C. Ward is no slouch either. Martin’s narration remains sensible and intelligent throughout, even when he’s privy to unlikely plot details, and the few new dramatic scenes – largely between Burr and Frank Iwanaga, playing a Japanese official – are well drawn and plot-driven. It’s much more than could be said of the comparable Half Human, the American adaptation of Ishiro Honda’s second monster feature Ju Jin Yuki Otoko, which has John Carradine ponderously spilling the full details of its foreign action from the comfort of an office chair.

Despite being shorn of some of its original drama (including all overt references to World War II) and re-structured with a distinct focus on action, Morse’s Godzilla King of the Monsters manages to retain much of the feel of the original. Morse shows a notable respect for his material throughout, something lost on the purveyors of many of these fantasy and science fiction imports, remaining true to the Japanese source during the occasional dubbed scenes (much of the dialogue is retained in Japanese) and leaving Akira Ifukube’s phenomenal score untouched. He even gets away with some critical commentary on the H-bomb, courtesy of Dr. Yamane’s dubbed remarks, an intellectual thread dismissed by critics at the time. “We assure you that the quality of the picture and the childishness of the whole idea do not indicate such calculation,” notes a condescending Bosley Crowther, writing for the New York Times in May of 1956. “Godzilla was simply meant to scare people.”

Regardless of contemporary critical opinions Godzilla King of the Monsters! was immensely successful upon release, and helped to pave the way for the colorful kaiju boom of the 1960s, as well as for the original Godzilla‘s more recent rediscovery. Indeed, with memories of the unvarnished Godzilla so fresh in mind I was a little surprised to find that this still works as well as it does, fifty-six years after it first stomped onto domestic screens. That’s not to say that Godzilla King of the Monsters! is a perfect film, not by a long shot, but it’s better than it really should be and a bona fide piece of film history besides, and worthy of the care and attention it has finally received.

disc details:
released January 24, 2012 by the Criterion Collection
disc: dual layer BD-50
video: 1080p | AVC | 1.37:1
audio: 24-bit LPCM 1.0 English
subtitles: English 
supplements: commentary by David Kalat, theatrical trailer, plus the original Godzilla (featuring its own commentary, interviews, documentary subjects and more)
retail price: $39.95
Available now from Amazon.com, and also available on 2-disc DVD

When the Criterion Collection’s Godzilla arrived I actually watched Godzilla King of the Monsters! first, and with some reservations I was duly impressed. Those familiar with the history of the film know that Toho has no elements of their own for the title, and as such no new transfer from quality material has been minted for decades. The 2002 Classic Media DVD and their later 2-disc edition, as well as earlier VHS releases from Simitar, Paramount and others have all been sourced from the same transfer, but change (for the better) is finally afoot courtesy of Criterion, who tracked down privately owned 35mm and 16mm elements from which to mint their new HD transfer.

Sourced from a combination of fine-grain 35mm master positive and 16mm dupe negative at the original aspect ratio of 1.37:1, Criterion’s new 1080p transfer of Godzilla King of the Monsters! represents the best that can be expected of the title at this point in time. There is damage, of course, plenty of which was inherent in the materials from the start, but don’t let that dissuade you. Godzilla King of the Monsters!, like its Japanese counterpart, finally exports a level of detail consistent with its 35mm photography, with excellent contrast to match. Guy Roe’s photography shines in close-up, even if lighting is flat compared to the Japanese footage. It all looks quite good overall, though there are issues worth noting for those wishing to give the transfer a closer look. Godzilla King of the Monsters! suffers most from Criterion’s efforts to stuff everything onto a single BD-50, and its modest 17.6 Mbps AVC encode just isn’t healthy enough to support the finer points of the transfer. Grain artifacts are evident throughout and the image just doesn’t hold up consistently to really close scrutiny, but it’s important not to overstate the issue (this is nowhere close to being an encoding disaster on the order of Horror Express). In motion I must admit that this looks very good, and ultimately I’d rather have the film available, even in a slightly insufficient encode, than not have it at all.

Screenshots were taken as full 1920×1080 resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, then compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool. Comparison shots were taken from the 2002 Classic Media DVD of Godzilla King of the Monsters! in VLC in .png format, and compressed to .jpg using the same method as above. Frame matches in comparisons are exact. See our review of Godzilla for screenshots from the original version of the film.

More Blu-ray Screenshots:

Audio is again presented in uncompressed 24-bit LPCM, and the limitations of Godzilla King of the Monsters!‘ low budget mix are readily apparent. The track is clear enough (Criterion’s restoration has worked wonders on some of the crackle and damage) but sounds quite flat, and both the sound effects and score lack the dynamism evident in the original Japanese. That said, it also sounds perfectly accurate to the source, and I wouldn’t ask for more. Criterion have even provided optional English subtitles, leaving me no room to complain on that front. Supplements are limited for this cut of the film, unsurprising given that it’s a supplement itself, and include another commentary from critic David Kalat and the original theatrical trailer (featuring some of my favorite film ad phrasing – “A cyclonic cavalcade of electrifying horror!”).

Godzilla King of the Monsters! may not be enough to recommend this Criterion Blu-ray outright, but its inclusion certainly helps, improving upon an already strong release. Like plenty of others I know this is the Godzilla film I grew up with, watching it on TV or renting it from the video store at every opportunity before some enterprising adult finally decided I deserved a copy all my own. Seeing it looking as good as it does here was a real treat, and fans should be very pleased.


The Roots of Heaven

January 23rd, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. John Huston
1958 / 20th Century Fox / 126′
written by Romain Gary and Patrick Leigh-Fremor
from the novel “Les Racines du ciel” by Romain Gary
director of photography Oswald Morris
music by Malcolm Arnold
starring Trevor Howard, Juliette Greco, Errol Flynn, Friedrich Ledeber, Edric Conner, Herbert Lom and Orson Welles
The Roots of Heaven is reviewed here from a screener provided by Twilight Time, and is available on Blu-ray exclusively through ScreenArchives (and ScreenArchives by way of Amazon)

“My duty is to protect all the species, all the living roots that heaven planted into the earth. I’ve been fighting all my life for their preservation. [...] The oceans, forests, the races of animal, mankind are the roots of heaven. Poison heaven at its roots and the tree will wither and die, the stars will go out, and heaven will be destroyed…”

Playing as a sort of thematically-reversed companion piece to Huston’s earlier epic Moby Dick 1958′s The Roots of Heaven is a film perfectly in keeping with the director’s usual disposition towards eccentric characters and the obsessions that drive them. Based upon the bestselling Prix du Goncourt-winning novel by Romain Gary, Roots counters Melville’s Ahab with a man consumed by a passion not to destroy the great things of the Earth, but to save them. While the film’s focus on the issue of environmental conservation puts it in league with cinematic brethren more than a decade yet to come, films like Silent Running, the bizarre No Blade of Grass and so on, an A-list cast of players and a penchant for sprawling CinemaScope adventure elevate it to another class entirely. What’s that, Mr. Flynn – you say the elephants need saving? Where do I sign!?

Roots follows the Sisyphean efforts of expat Englishman Morel (a terrific Trevor Howard), whose imaginings of the free-roaming herds of Africa helped to see him through his stint in a Nazi POW camp, to abolish the wholesale slaughter of elephants by the ivory trade as well as their trapping by the callous providers of zoo specimens and circus attractions. When his early attempts at beating up freelance hunters and pushing petitions across all French Equatorial Africa fall on deaf ears Morel abruptly changes tact, becoming one of film’s first ever eco-terrorists (albeit of a strictly non-lethal variety – “You can never teach a man anything by killing him,” he quite logically notes).

When a bit of violent activism against a boisterous American television personality (Orson Welles) unexpectedly lands Morel the respect of the same his hopeless task is given wings, and oddball sorts looking to lend their support for their own ideological reasons join the fold. Most dangerous among them is wannabe revolutionary leader Waitari, who seeks to use Morel’s elephants as a rallying point for a popular uprising. Others, like a Dutch naturalist looking to save the “roots of heaven” and a learned Baron who refuses to speak until mankind has civilized its violent tendencies, are merely devoted, if a bit strange, while the cheerfully alcoholic Forsythe (Errol Flynn!), who turned informant after being captured during the war, is just looking to do a good deed to ease his conscience. Together they distribute printed materials and crash the party of an aristocratic huntress, achieving popular success among those reading of their exploits abroad while the French colonial government tries, in vain, to derail their operations.

Throughout The Roots of Heaven peripheral players attach various personal justifications to Morel’s impassioned quest for pachyderm rights, a trend that leads to some of the film’s most thought-provoking elements. Forsythe lends the narrative a Cold War timeliness, casting Morel as a man out to better his fellow man, rather than just trying to save elephants, at a time when the threat of “Sputniks” and atomic obliteration are dangling overhead. It’s a thought reverberated frequently in the screenplay (penned by Patrick Leigh-Fremor and later revised by Romain Gary1 himself) as well as in one particularly obvious visual flourish, a close-up of a magazine page declaring “Nuclear scientists predict ‘End of Mankind’ unless Atomic Race Halted”. Then there’s Waitari, who sees parallels between Morel’s quest to free elephants and his fellow Africans’ desire to free themselves from colonial rule.

For his part Morel’s motivations seem quite simple, but wonderfully personal. After the elephants helped him to maintain an internal freedom while imprisoned during the war he simply wishes to return the favor, though on a scale tremendously greater. He finds a kindred spirit in Minna (Juliette Greco), a bar hostess with a past – she found herself forced into prostitution by the Nazis only to later be “liberated” again and again by the Allied forces at war’s end. Minna seems to understand Morel’s humanity more so than his quest, and supports him all the more for that reason, trekking deep into no-man’s land (with Forsythe along for the ride) to deliver much-needed supplies and medicine to his rag-tag gang of activists. She also offers the most concise, and perhaps accurate, variation on his motivations. When berated by reporters as to just why Morel is doing what he’s doing, she glibly responds,  “Did it ever occur to you that he just might be fond of elephants?”

Shot largely on location in Chad (as well as at Studios de Boulogne in France), The Roots of Heaven was, by all accounts, a nightmare to film, with the production constantly hampered by debilitating heat and illness. In retrospect it may be a minor miracle that it was accomplished at all, and as such I find its occasional weaknesses easier to forgive than I might otherwise. Much maligned by critics at the time of release was the film’s chaotic third act, and not without justification. The final half hour or so sees Morel and his company astray in the African wilderness, battling a literal army of ivory hunters and playing the willing subjects to the neurotic advances of an American news photographer (a wonderfully absurd Eddie Albert, who literally crashes into the picture). A climactic elephant stampede featuring some legitimately impressive second unit footage of hundreds of the creatures in the wild provides some nice grounding action (and some of Trevor Howard’s finest moments), but is overshadowed by a couple of grim narrative developments that just feel nasty rather than necessary.

But The Roots of Heaven shuffles right along, to a conclusion that’s concerned more with inspiring hope than really resolving anything. Huston musters some classic Hollywood-style movie magic for the build-up to the emotionally charged finale, the defeated Morel gradually realizing that all’s not lost for mankind as a few, then tens and eventually hundreds of locals gather just to catch a glimpse of the man who’s become a folk legend. However artificial it can feel in context it’s a moment that works as pure cinema, bolstered by Malcolm Arnold’s triumphant themes and beautifully captured by Oswald Morris’ (The Guns of Navarone, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) DeLuxe ‘Scope photography.

In a way it’s a moment evocative of the film as a whole. Despite its fair share (and more) of issues The Roots of Heaven still works, writ large, and has enough meat on its bones besides to inspire conversation about any number of issues still perfectly relevant today. It’s also a hell of a production, and may be worth seeking out for the cast alone, which is a still-impressive lot of name talent (even if many are relegated to minor roles). Where else might you find Herbert Lom stinking up a bar as a slimy aristocrat, Orson Welles livening up the airwaves, Errol Flynn talking to his pet jumping bean, and Friedrich Ledeber – Queequeg himself – waxing philosophical about creation, all in one film?

1 According to Hedda Hopper (writing Feb. 27, 1958 in the Los Angeles Times – Trevor Howard has Lead in ‘Roots’), Gary completed those revisions in just nine days. Huston would later lament that there hadn’t been more time to spend on the screenplay.

disc details:
released January 17, 2012 by Twilight Time
disc: dual layer BD-50
video: 1080p | 2.35:1
audio: DTS-HD MA 2.0 English
subtitles: none
supplements: isolated score track
retail price: $29.95
available exclusively through ScreenArchives.com (and ScreenArchives by way of Amazon)

If I’m not mistaken this Twilight Time Blu-ray edition marks the domestic home video debut (on any format) of The Roots of Heaven - a cause for minor celebration in and of itself. The latest restoration of the film provided by 20th Century Fox isn’t quite so pristine an affair as the simultaneously released Picnic, a product of Sony’s inimitable preservation department and one of the best classic film transfers I’ve ever seen, but I’m hard pressed to find anything demonstrably wrong with it. If there’s a quibble to be had it’s with the damage that crops up from time to time, mostly minor specs and blemishes but occasionally in the form of noticeable scratching and (very) infrequent negative damage. There’s nothing here that struck me as excessive for a film now fifty-four years old, and while Fox certainly could have put more time, money and effort into sprucing things up the results of their work are still pretty keen.

Twilight Time present The Roots of Heaven in an excellent 1080p transfer at the intended 2.35:1 CinemaScope ratio. Texture is again a key factor here, and a big part of the show’s appeal – this is another of those transfers that feels like film. The well-saturated DeLuxe color is dominated by the subdued hues of the scorching African shooting locations, with abundant shades of brown and tan, but can have some pop when given the chance (interiors, foliage, clothing and so on). Contrast and detail are at healthy, natural levels, and in motion the sum experience of it all is quite impressive. In terms of technical specifications this is nigh identical to Picnic - the two-hour feature is spread comfortably over a dual layer BD-50, with the video robustly encoded in AVC at an average bitrate of 33.2 Mbps. The grain in evidence throughout (heavier in some of the second unit photography and predictably coarser during the infrequent opticals – fades, credits, etc.) is deliciously rendered and free of artifacts, and the image is bereft of any undue digital manipulation.

The Roots of Heaven may not have quite the same wow factor as some of the other CinemaScope epics of its day, but it does have a rough-and-tumble grandeur all its own. Fox have captured the sense of it perfectly with their high definition transfer, and Twilight Time’s ace presentation supports it beautifully. Fans should be very pleased.

Screenshots were taken as full 1920×1080 resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, then compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Complementing the fine video presentation is a DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo track in the original English. It’s worth noting that The Roots of Heaven was originally a 4-track stereo presentation, something that no doubt benefited the climactic elephant stampede, and while it’s a shame that original mix hasn’t been restored here this track certainly gets the job done. Malcolm Arnold’s tremendous score is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the lossless encode, displaying some decent dynamic range and depth despite the lack of LFE oomph. Otherwise the vintage sound effects and dialogue come across perfectly clearly, and I’ve got no complaints. Less fortunate is the fact that Fox, again, seem to have snubbed viewers on the subtitle front, as no options have been made available in that regard.

Supplements are, again, light – the only on-disc extra is the isolated Malcolm Arnold score, presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. This is another fully functional Blu-ray disc complete with pop-up menu and non-generic chapter stops (sixteen of them). Twilight Time’s packaging is solid work once again, topped off by a booklet of liner notes from the ever-informative Julie Kirgo (here quoting quite a bit from Huston himself). I’ve found myself reaching for the booklets first with these Twilight Time releases as of late, rather than my usual knee-jerk habit of hurling discs towards players in a flurry of shredded cellophane. High praise, I assure you.

The Roots of Heaven is an undeniably peculiar film, an eccentric character drama by way of a sprawling conservation adventure, but it remains suprisingly timely. Indeed, that so many of the issues the film raises still plague us today, from endangered species to pollution to nuclear proliferation, makes it as relevant now as it ever was. Fans should be pleased that Twilight Time have served this Huston curio up right with their new Blu-ray edition, and it gets another easy recommendation from me.


Picnic

January 19th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Joshua Logan
1955 / Columbia Pictures / 115′
written by Daniel Taradash
from the play by William Inge
 cinematography by James Wong Howe
music by George Duning
starring William Holden, Kim Novak, Susan Strasberg, Betty Field, Cliff Robertson, Arthur O’Connell and Rosalind Russell
Picnic is reviewed here from a screener provided by Twilight Time, and is available on Blu-ray exclusively through ScreenArchives.com

A star-studded big-studio production with oodles of old-Hollywood appeal, Joshua Logan’s Picnic, from Columbia Pictures in 1955, is a terrific film that still holds up more than a half century on. Adapted with some alteration from the award-winning play of the same name, which Logan had also directed on Broadway, Picnic expands well beyond its theatrical origins, resisting any temptation to be just a play-on-screen and becoming an indelible cinematic experience in its own right. Superb Technicolor production design and ace CinemaScope photography from veteran James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) infuse William Inge’s (by way of screenwriter Daniel Taradash) small-town drama with an unexpectedly epic quality. Logan took his production on location in Kansas to secure the necessary middle-American atmosphere, and his effort pays off wonderfully – there’s a distinct believability to Picnic‘s fictional heartland community, despite all the big-name talent occupied there.

Taking place over the course of a single 24-hour period and dominated by the Labor Day event alluded to in the title, Picnic concerns itself with the passions and jealousies that boil up from under an anonymous small-town veneer when a rugged drifter arrives with the morning freight. Hal Carter (Holden) is that rugged drifter, a boisterous but good-natured bum who conceals a lifetime worth of insecurity beneath an extroverted All-American facade. With nothing to his name but the clothes on his back and a pair of his father’s oversize boots, Hal takes to doing odd-jobs for room and board and soon becomes acquainted with the Owens family, a single mother and daughters Millie (Strasberg) and Madge (Novak) – the latter of whom is attached to the son of the local grain tycoon and Hal’s former fraternity brother, Alan (Robertson).

Hal finds himself invited along for the holiday’s festivities as Millie’s date, and his hearty personality proves well-suited to a day of pie-eating contests, three-legged races and amateur talent shows. Alan, excited to see the return of an old friend, even offers Hal a job shoveling grain in one of his father’s plants. For a moment Hal clings to the hope of starting over, but as the sun sets passions rise and a night of dancing devolves into an explosive public exposé of frustrated desires, anger and jealousy…

Though originated by the underrated Ralph Meeker (Kiss Me Deadly, Paths of Glory) on Broadway, in retrospect it’s difficult to imagine that any actor other than Holden could have played the part of Hal Carter on the big screen. Years of heavy drinking had already taken a toll on Holden (Sunset Boulevard, The Wild Bunch) by the mid-50s, and by the time Picnic rolled around his golden boy image had given way to a more ragged, tortured handsomeness. His appearance alone speaks volumes for the character – an aging college football star steadily slipping past his prime – with his athletic build and potent sex appeal balanced by a human vulnerability that’s very much the actor’s own. It’s a mix that might have worked for the material even if Holden hadn’t had the acting chops to back it up, but it’s good fortune that he did. As his shirtless torso is ogled by Picnic‘s female players (a boundless mix of middle-aged spinster schoolteachers, divorcees, and younger women just entering their sexual prime) Hal’s unease is palpable – whatever his boisterous personality and compensatory bragging might imply he’s clearly not comfortable being the center of attention.

Neither, for that matter, is Madge, the pretty girl in town and Hal’s feminine equivalent. Taking over for the Broadway production’s Janice Rule is the ever capable Kim Novak (Vertigo, Strangers When We Meet), who slips effortlessly into the role of a woman who’s fed up with just being “the pretty one”, but distressed at not having the talent to be much else. Though she lords her physical superiority over her younger sister Millie, a brilliant young Susan Strasberg (Psych Out, Rollercoaster), Madge is actually deeply jealous of her intelligence – and the four year college scholarship that comes with it. It’s an opportunity that a beauty queen working the counter at the five-and-dime could never hope for. Meanwhile Millie is similarly resentful of being forever cast as “the smart one”, a designation that’s inspired a rebellious tomboy streak that’s only further removed her from the attentions of the men she, at age seventeen, has begun to take a keen physical interest in.

And thus we arrive at the crux of the picture. To quote from Julie Kirgo’s liner notes, “Sex [...] seems to be at the root of Picnic‘s every discontent,” and indeed, from the moment Hal’s kindly old landlady insists that he remove his shirt (so that she can wash it, of course!) right through to the end Picnic and its players have sex on the brain. Perhaps I’m just not watching the right big Hollywood movies, but the discussion on the topic heard here struck me as being remarkably frank for a major release in 1955, particularly when Madge’s mother suggests that she should grin and bear an unsatisfying sex life for the sake of achieving greater social status, stopping just short of demanding that her daughter give in to Alan’s desires at that night’s picnic. Other instances are far less disturbing, as when Millie calls her big sis’ a “slut” or tries to sneak a peak at Hal in the raw – “Hey, kid. You better get away from this wall or you’re liable to get educated!” It’s this up-front approach to the sexuality of its characters that, in part, helps keep Picnic from feeling so old-hat. Some things never change.

Given its proclivities I suppose it’s no surprise to that Picnic‘s most memorable moments are also it’s most sexually charged. Hal and Madge’s impromptu riverside courtship dance still sizzles, illuminated by the soft glow of Chinese lanterns and set to a sublime marriage of George Duning’s wistfully romantic theme and a sumptuous arrangement of the ’30s standby “Moonglow” – it’s one of cinema’s indelible romantic moments. What follows is less than enchanting but no less enthralling, as the passions of boozed-up middle-aged high school teacher Rosemary (Rosalind Russel, His Girl Friday) get the better of her and tensions erupt in an ugly public confrontation. Hal finds himself in the literal spotlight, every bit as vulnerable as when he first arrived, but his frenzied flight to somewhere, anywhere, instead lands him by the river with Madge at his side…

Picnic was a popular and critical success upon release, garnering six nominations and two wins (for best color art-and-set design and best film editing) at the 1956 Academy Awards, and it’s easy to see why. Loaded with rich performances (including one from the delightful Arthur O’Connell, of Anatomy of a Murder fame) and beautifully produced besides, this is powerful stuff that hooks you in a way that only classic Hollywood can. Highly recommended!

disc details:
released January 17, 2012 by Twilight Time
disc: dual layer BD-50
video: 1080p | 2.55:1
audio: DTS-HD MA 5.1 / 2.0 English
subtitles: English SDH
supplements: theatrical trailer, isolated score track
retail price: $34.95
available exclusively through ScreenArchives.com

I found myself unexpectedly wowed by Picnic as presented on Blu-ray from Twilight Time, here working once again from an ace restoration by Sony Pictures’ archive team. Indeed, wowed may actually be an understatement. I don’t bring up words like “perfect” or “reference quality” very often in my reviews, but here they certainly apply. Yes, Picnic‘s Blu-ray debut is that good.

Picnic has undergone extensive restoration over the past two decades and the end result is a film that looks practically new, as though it had aged not a day in the 57 years since it was made. Presented in all its vintage Technicolor glory at the intended extra-wide CinemaScope ratio of 2.55:1 and bolstered by a rock-solid encode spread comfortably over a dual layer BD-50, this easily ranks as one of the most satisfying Blu-ray experiences I’ve had to date. Detail (healthy as it is) doesn’t impress so much as the overall texture of the thing, and the image is lush, positively alive with that elusive filmic allure. A fine grain is evident throughout, and all the character of James Wong Howe’s color ‘Scope photography is deliciously preserved. The aesthetic at work here is so strong that you can practically feel it, and it’s easy to forget that you’re watching a film from disc at all.

In terms of drab, technical assessment Picnic is still a tremendous affair. The feature and accompanying audio occupy the better part of a dual layer BD-50, with the AVC video encode trucking along at a high average bitrate of 33.2 Mbps. Picnic is not just free of distracting digital artifacts, but of digital artifacts all together, and the image holds up under the closest of scrutiny. Physical defects have been seen to as well – Sony’s restoration team must have worked overtime picking out all those decades of grit. Even the infrequent opticals (fades, credits) appear virtually pristine, noticeable only by a shift in film density and the degraded source resolution and coarser grain that comes along with it. Projected in a theatrical setting I doubt there’d be anything to give this edition of Picnic away other than just how good it looks, and you can’t ask for much better than that.

Screenshots were taken as full 1920×1080 resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, then compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Originally released in 4-track stereo, Picnic arrives on Blu-ray with a new DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround mix that’s as restrained as it is effective. Though punctuated with some louder effects – like the opening bellow of a train horn – this is a mostly sedate affair, and the new surround mix admirably supports the original intentions. As with Twilight Time’s earlier Mysterious Island it’s really the score, backed with some occasional LFE punch, that benefits the most here. Duning’s work sounds terrific throughout, and its more dynamic moments have real impact. Twilight Time have also included a robust DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo option, and the feature is complemented by a set of optional English SDH subtitles.

Supplements are limited, as expected, but Picnic is hardly a barren affair. Fans of the film’s tremendous score will find plenty to love by way of an isolated DTS-HD MA 2.0 music track that appears to encompass pretty much everything, including the various Labor Day picnic “Talent Show” vocals. Otherwise the disc offers only the original theatrical trailer, presented in lovely 1080p AVC with DTS-HD MA 1.0 audio. Those who have found Twilight Time’s previous Blu-rays lacking in functionality will be pleased to find that Picnic comes with both a pop-up menu and a set of 12 non-generic chapter stops (as opposed to the ten minute breaks seen in past efforts). The disc’s packaging even becomes a selling point courtesy of Julie Kirgo, the indispensable print-voice of Twilight Time, who contributes another fine set of liner notes on the production.

There’s very little else to say here. Picnic is a terrific film, one of the best I’ve seen in a while, and its Blu-ray edition from Twilight Time is, for all intents and purposes, flawless. Needless to say, we recommend.


Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan

January 17th, 2012 | article by | 1 Comment »
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dir. Nobuo Nakagawa
1959 / Shintoho Co. / 76′
written by Masayoshi Onuki and Yoshihiro Ishikawa
from the play by Nanboku Tsuruya IV
director of phogoraphy Tadashi Nishimoto
music by Michiaki Watanabe
starring Shigeru Amachi, Noriko Kitazawa, Katsuko Wakasugi, Shuntaro Emi and Ryuzaburo Nakamura
Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is available for online streaming through the Criterion Collection channel on Huluplus

Before he shocked audience sensibilities with the bizarre and inimitably grotesque Jigoku in 1960 veteran Japanese director Nobuo Nakagawa sent shivers down their spines with this stylish tale of ghostly revenge. Early on a director of everything from comedies to war-time documentaries, Nakagawa is most remembered for a number of supernatural horrors directed for Shintoho Co. in the latter half of the ’50s. Among those films 1959′s Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan may well be the best. Adapted from the famed (and oft-filmed) 19th century kabuki by playwright Nanboku Tsuruya IV, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan tells the classic story of innocence tormented, only to rise up from beyond the grave to grant evil its just deserts.

The first half of Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan operates as a catalogue of atrocities perpetuated against a woman and her family from without and within. Central to the drama is ronin Tamiya Iemon (Shigeru Amachi), a samurai of ill-repute whose intentions of marrying Iwa (Katsuko Wakasugi), daughter of the Yotsuya family, are thwarted by his would-be father-in-law Samon. One dreary evening, enraged by the elder’s insults, Iemon slaughters both Yotsuya Samon as well as the father of Sato Yomoshichi (Ryuzaburo Nakamura), a talented young swordsman betrothed to Iwa’s sister Sode (Noriko Kitazawa). Witnessed by ne’er-do-well Naosuke (Shintaro Emi), who is himself obsessed with Sode, Iemon finds himself in an alliance of convenience, and following a plan by Naosuke to blame the deaths of fathers Yotsuya and Sato on a local rough who had troubled the families in the past. Yomoshichi quickly joins up with the two schemers, believing that they wish to help avenge the families by hunting down those responsible, only to find himself at the edge of their swords as well.

Some time later, all obstacles to their success seemingly overcome, Iemon and Naosuke each take up residence in Edo with their respective sister. While Sode refuses to marry Naosuke, demanding that her family be avenged before such can come to pass, Iemon settles uncomfortably into a married life with Iwa and has a son. It doesn’t take long for Iemon to grow tired of his pedestrian lifestyle, doing unsatisfying work to support his wife and child and losing most of his earnings to gambling. When a chance encounter finds him in the good graces of the wealthy Ito’s, and their beautiful daughter Ume, he sees a chance for escape. Soon Iemon, the Ito’s, Naosuke and even a local masseuse are scheming to absolve Iemon of his familial obligations, but when Iwa proves too devoted to her husband he takes drastic, irreversible action.

Convincing masseuse Takuetsu to seduce his wife so that he might have proper grounds to divorce her, Iemon secretly plots to kill the pair as adulterers – his right, by law. Knowing that Iwa will never willingly accept Takuetsu’s advances, Iemon instead guarantees her demise by feeding her a deadly, disfiguring poison. Iwa discovers too late her husband’s treachery, and the depth of his crimes against her family, but before throwing both herself and her child on a blade curses his name, vowing to avenge her misfortunes with nothing less than the eradication of the Tamiya family line. Takuetsu becomes collateral damage, killed to support the facade of adultery, and is dumped along with Iwa into a canal. Convinced that all obstacles have again been overcome Iemon commences with his marriage to Ume, blind to the possibility that his late wife’s spirit might seek revenge…

  
  
  

Adapted in a streamlined fashion by Masayoshi Onuki and Yoshihiro Ishikawa to fit the fiscal and temporal constraints of Shintoho Co.’s typically low-budget fare, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan nevertheless crams a lot of complex character-driven drama into its first few acts. Those unprepared for director Nakagawa’s brisk pacing may find themselves a bit lost in it all, as schemes build upon schemes and ever more outwardly upstanding citizens conspire against young Iwa. It can feel quite chaotic at times, though I dare say that was likely the point. As quickly as things develop it seems improbable, if not impossible, that Iwa could ever have understood the awful depth of human cruelty amassing against her until it was too late, something that makes her plight all the more sympathetic and her eventual revenge all the more satisfying. Katsuko Wakasugi (Ghost of the Girl Diver) lends the role a necessary frailty, seeming a truly helpless victim until the truth of things is revealed to her. From that moment her characterization changes into that of a driven monstrosity, the inhumanity pitted against her giving rise to a suitably inhuman instrument of vengeance.

The versatile and underrated Shigeru Amachi (Black Line, Jigoku), here appearing as the scheming Iemon, plays in pitch-perfect contrast to both iterations of the Iwa character. In the film’s early acts, when Iemon has the upper hand, Amachi is positively psychopathic, utterly remorseless in his actions and forever distant, cold, dangerous. In his day-to-day torments of Iwa he is wantonly despicable, but in his scheme to poison her, playing the dutiful and loving husband all the while, he disturbs, becoming nothing but a murderous beast masquerading as a man. Even the pretense of humanity is dropped once the tables ultimately turn, and the cornered Iemon reverts to a state of frightened, caged animalism.  Only at death’s door does a glimmer of genuine humanity shine from within him, the damned Iemon praying too late for his slaughtered wife’s forgiveness.

Director Nobuo Nakagawa skillfully manages the film’s breezy but complex drama, complementing it with a variety of interesting visual motifs (like a recurrence of vertically striped imagery and a notable emphasis on the color red) and otherworldly compositions that often feel like paintings-in-motion. By contrast the latter half of Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is positively alive with indelible fantasy imagery – a corpse carried across a field of yellow flowers, a body rising from a pool of murky red, Iemon lost on a sea of shutters, a man falling, slowly, onto the flooded floor of an impossible room-turned-marshland. At its height Nakagawa’s work here is absolutely haunting, glimpses of half-remembered nightmares obscured by shadow and punctuated with rich primary color. The style here is highly reflective of that seen in Jigoku and elsewhere throughout Nakagawa’s career, and this flair for the fantastic served the director well as he transitioned to the Toei Co. payroll following Shintoho Co.’s bankruptcy in 1961.

As could be said of so much of the great genre cinema, it would have been easy for Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan to be a mundane outing, another in a long line of adaptations of a story all too familiar, but a favorable confluence of just the right elements have conspired to make it something far greater than that. While Jigoku, with its abstract proclivities and abundant gore (a real rarity in 1960), remains the best known of his films in the West the more substantively accessible Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan may well be Nakagawa’s masterpiece, a classic tale retold in a manner that’s thrilling and unique and oh so spooky. This is vintage Japanese genre cinema at its absolute best, and a must-see for anyone keen on the same.

Though currently unavailable on domestic home video, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is available for online streaming through the Criterion channel on Huluplus


Production and Decay of Strange Particles

January 12th, 2012 | article by | 1 Comment »
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dir. Leslie Stevens
1964 / United Artists Television / 51′
written by Leslie Stevens
director of phogoraphy Kenneth Peach
music by Dominique Frontiere
starring George Macready, Signe Hasso, Allyson Aimes, Rudy Solari and Leonard Nimoy
available on DVD from MGM, or for free viewing on Hulu and Youtube

Executive producer and sometimes writer and director Leslie Stevens (Incubus) was in something of a fix towards the end production on the first season of The Outer Limits, and in desperate need of a show to please the bean counters – an episode that would come in on time and under budget, and put the books back in order. Every bit as ridiculous as its bloated title would suggest, Production and Decay of Strange Particles was Stevens’ answer, a stripped down bottle episode that covers its budgetary shortcomings with lots of (literal) flash and reams of impenetrable pseudo-scientific exposition. Particles never really makes much sense, even by the suitably bizarre standards set forth by earlier episodes, but the tremendous pace and unremitting oddity of the thing help to make it one of my favorites just the same.

Limited almost exclusively in setting to the various corridors and chambers of the Broadridge nuclear plant, a fictional isolated desert reactor site in which atomic research is ongoing, Production and Decay of Strange Particles begins with the creation of an intensely radioactive and nigh uncontrollable new isotope in the plant’s cyclotron. As plant workers strive desperately to prevent a potentially devastating chain reaction elder on-site scientist Dr. Marshall ponders the isotope’s significance. Created from the smashing together of a known isotope and heavy cosmic particles gathered from a quasi-stellar radio source (quasar for you hip young’uns) the resulting substance is ferociously active, defeating all attempts by the plant staff to contain them. But there’s more…

As workers protective gear comes into contact with the isotope its particles seep inside, destroying the human structure within and replacing it with a fiendish, electrified malignence. Soon the furnace room is overrun by a horde of devilish atomic zombies, who work slowly and steadily in unison to expand their territory and numbers. Dr. Marshall theorizes that the isotope is the Earthly manifestation of some dreadful intelligence pouring forth from another dimension of time and space. Unless the gateway through which it is entering our own dimension is closed it’s only a matter of time before the entire planet, and more, is engulfed.

Unlike The Children of Spider County, an episode whose various ambitions were squashed by excessive rewrites and a complicated production, Production and Decay of Strange Particles began its life with the express purpose of being as swift and cheap to produce as possible. It fares all the better for the difference. Stevens’ narrative is appropriately slim, with monsters at one end of a plant doing god-knows-what and men at the other end trying to stop them. His script is loaded for bare with technical gibberish and allusions to actual science (cyclotrons, quasars, chain reactions, etc.) but offers very little in the way of story development beyond this, that, or the other running into the energy monsters and being summarily absorbed into the collective.

 
 

Thankfully, Stevens proves better than most at scripting such ungainly mouthfuls of science-ese, and better yet, he knows how to direct it as well. It’s impossible to really understand what’s being said here even if you can parse out the legitimate science in the rough, but Stevens’ direction ensures that it all at least sounds important. An early bit of conversation from plant worker Griffin (Rudy Solari, who would co-star in the second season’s The Invisible Enemy) is indicative of the rest, but is delivered with such immediacy that you can’t help but believe it. When asked the suspicious isotope’s atomic weight he glibly explains, “Somewhere over two-five-six. It’s a freak reaction. Marshall said some cosmic particles penetrated the shield, the gold foil disappeared and the lambda process set in.” It’s impossible for me to believe that Solari knew any better than anyone else what he was saying, but, like the rest of the cast, he manages to get away with it all the same.

Just as the drama is constrained in scope, the special effects budget for Production and Decay of Strange Particles is kept to a bare minimum, not that it really shows now nearly fifty years after the fact. The majority of it seems to have been spent on some simple composite work, as the Broadridge nuclear plant becomes increasingly alive with arcs of electricity. Otherwise it’s all smoke and mirrors (and one briefly-glimpsed disco ball), with brilliant white blooming out of reactor windows and what looks to be a clump of plastic wrap with a few lights stuck inside substituting for the mysterious isotope at the heart of the mess. It’s a no-budget mix that’s astonishingly effective in context, with even the blatant stock footage (a montage of atomic test films, negative printed and run both forward and in reverse) feeling less offensive than it really should.

And then there are the monsters, a uniform collective of crackling energy-stuffed radiation suits who rank among my favorite threats of the entire series. The oddball concept is put into practice with the same no-frills simplicity that marks the rest of the show. In far shots the creatures are just men in suits with brilliant lights shoved into their helmets (barring that, they just walk with their backs turned!), while a handful of close-ups are expanded with a bit of flickering The Man With the Power-esque composite work. Stevens imbues the rabble with a palpable sense of purpose (dubiously explained though that purpose may be) as they creep steadily from one corridor to the next, nuking leaden doorways with glowing flasks of atomic whatsit. There’s just something creepy about them, a creepiness bolstered by the decidedly darker tone of the episode as a whole. Contrary to the norm for the series Production and Decay of Strange Particles is quite brutal at times (in so much as 60s television could be), with the energy-men burning hapless plant workers with their radioactive gazes or smashing them outright under sheets of lead shielding.

Production and Decay of Strange Particles will never be confused for the sort of substance-rich gothic science fiction that most people rightly associate with the series, but it is a suitably diverting hour of television that manages to be more than the sum of its admittedly silly parts. The most noteworthy aspect of the production may be its fine cast, headed by veteran actor George Macready. Recognizable from classics like Paths of Glory and The Big Clock and the earlier series episode The Invisibles, Macready takes to the material with admirable conviction, even if he’s obviously at a loss for how to deliver some of the show’s more ludicrous lines. Signe Hasso (The House on 92nd Street) fits neatly into the role of Macready’s wife and conscience, while Leonard Nimoy (just two years from his iconic turn in Star Trek) makes the most he can of a bit part as an ill-fated plant technician.


The Duplicate Man

January 10th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Gerd Oswald
1964 / United Artists Television / 51′
written by Robert C. Dennies
from the story by Clifford D. Simak
 director of phogoraphy Kenneth Peach
original music by Harry Lubin
starring Ron Randall, Constance Towers, Mike Lane, Steven Geray and Konstantin Shayne
available on DVD from MGM, or for free viewing on Hulu and Youtube

There is no shortage of promise to be found in the truncated and too often disappointing second season of The Outer Limits, but Gerd Oswald’s late-run effort The Duplicate Man offers more in the way of it than most. Adapted from the Clifford D. Simak story Goodnight, Mr. James (published in the March 1951 issue of Galaxy for those interested – it’s an excellent read!) and ambitiously set in the future of 2011 The Duplicate Man never really transcends its limitations of time and budget, each of which was in ever shorter supply at this point in the series’ history (the episode was produced shortly before ABC let it known that the show was to be cancelled all together), but at least it tries.

The story concerns one Henderson James (Ron Randell), a noted astrobiologist who, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, has been secretly studying a deathly dangerous space creature known as the Megasoid in his estate. Fearful of their superior intelligence, telepathic abilities and murderous inclinations, the governments of Earth outlawed the importation of Megasoids in 1986, leaving James in quite a pickle when his own smuggled specimen escapes. Too much a coward to hunt down the creature himself, James turns to a drunken has-been with connections to the Federal Duplication Bureau, an institution that clones human beings in an extensively regulated manner, for help.

Shortly thereafter Henderson James awakens near a natural history museum, and finds himself armed with a handgun and driven by a singular purpose – kill the Megasoid, which has taken to hiding in one of the museum’s displays. The intervention of a museum security guard leads James to suddenly remember more about himself, his address, his job, and so on, facts that confuse his purpose and lead him to explore more about who exactly he is. When James eventually encounters the Megasoid things become even more complicated. The creature reveals that James is not James at all, but an exact duplicate of the real James manufactured for the express purpose of doing his dirty work. Though wounded in their encounter the Megasoid escapes, putting James mark II on the hunt for both the creature and existential enlightenment.

Robert C. Dennies’ penultimate contribution to The Outer Limits complicates the more straight-forward Simak source story in any number of ways, as in its focus on both James instead of just the clone and in the addition of a troubled marriage to the mix, but is most destructive in its expansion of the story’s relatively minor kill-the-alien opener into a full-fledged subplot (a move made to sate ABC’s demand for monsters). The more interesting human drama of The Duplicate Man is interrupted early and often, either by the appearance of the Megasoid itself or by the constant need to include it in the considerable conversation (like many of the second season episodes The Duplicate Man is talky stuff).

It’s a shortcoming that would be easier to overlook were the monster not such a dire creation, an ungainly gorilla-sloth-thing that adds to Second Chance‘s convincing Empyrian mask a ridiculously overstated forehead and a beak of hysterical proportion. Director Gerd Oswald is forced to cut the critter far too often, as it stalks endlessly about James’ property to fulfill its bloated narrative obligations, and unfortunate gaffs (like the appearance of actor Mike Lane’s shirt between the neck and body of the suit in some shots) only result in further embarrassment.

Otherwise The Duplicate Man‘s greatest failing is to be found in its two central performances. Co-stars Constance Towers (Shock Corridor), Steven Geray (Spellbound) and Sean McClory (appearing from beneath a ludicrous and ill-fitting leather head piece meant to cover unseen scars from a Megasoid attack) all do well enough in their respective, but relatively minor, roles. Star of the show Ron Randell (The She-Creature), as both Henderson James and James mark II, doesn’t fair nearly so well. Randell’s performance is leaden throughout, and serves only to detract from what should be the episode’s most appealing moments – like James mark II’s discovery of the simple pleasures of water fountains and greenery or Henderson’s eventual reconciliation with his wife. I’ve only seen Randall otherwise in the dreadful 40s sci-fi throwback The Most Dangerous Man Alive from 1961, and he made no better impression there.

On the brighter side of things The Duplicate Man‘s ambitious aesthetic often belies the paucity of its budget, and Oswald and his crew manage some creative futuristic flourishes through intelligible location scouting and the modification of everyday objects. The Chemosphere house in Los Angeles adeptly doubles for the residence of Sean McClory’s scarred smuggler, while James encounters plenty of familiar items with a modern twist (a public water fountain activated by a beam of light, a touch tone telephone decked out with a video display). My favorite touches have to do with the clothing, which is delightfully strange. The upscale suits the two James spend their time in are lacking any kind of lapels, while their collared button-up undershirts are punctuated with slim knotless ties. Nevermind that these changes could have been accomplished by any costume designer with a couple of minutes and a pair of scissors to spare, as the minimal effort pays off wonderfully in expanding the episode’s future setting.

It’s undeniable that there’s a lot wrong with The Duplicate Man, which too often undermines its big-idea aspirations (a rare enough thing in a second season episode) with silly pulp trappings – that monster is nigh unforgivable. But it certainly strives to be better than it is, with even the capably mundane director of photography Kenneth Peach putting in extra effort to give the show some much-needed visual oomph. All in all The Duplicate Man is one of the last really interesting things to come out of The Outer Limits before ABC kicked it off the air in favor of a low-cost variety show, and worth a watch if for that reason alone.


The Children of Spider County

January 9th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Leonard Horn
1964 / United Artists Television / 51′
written by Anthony Lawrence
 director of phogoraphy Kenneth Peach
original music by Dominic Frontiere
starring Lee Kinsolving, Kent Smith, John Milford, Crahan Denton, Bennye Gatteys and Dabs Greer
available on DVD from MGM, or for free viewing on Hulu and Youtube

A set of mysterious disappearances has the United States Space Agency worried. Four of the nation’s top minds have vanished into thin air, and all on the same day. More curious still, an investigation into the four men’s backgrounds reveals that all were born, prematurely, within a month of one another in rural Spider County, and that each share the same strange middle name – Eros. While the Pentagon is content to believe that the Soviets are responsible, snatching up our brilliant minds as part of a Cold War power grab, the US Space Agency is convinced something more troubling is afoot, something extraterrestrial. With a fifth super-human imprisoned in Spider County on a bogus murder charge the Agency sees an opportunity to solve the mystery once and for all, and sends one of its agents in to investigate.

Dubbed a ‘witch-boy’ and a ‘no-good dreamer’ by the superstitious locals, young Ethan Wechsler (Lee Kinsolving) is that fifth super-human, a fatherless mind-reading oddity for whom Spider County’s ire has finally reached a tipping point. The victim of a modern-day witch hunt, Ethan finds himself framed for a murder he didn’t commit and destined to die for being different, but a stranger in town has other plans for him. Quietly sinister and decked out in a snazzy business suit, the strange Aabel (Kent Smith) arrives on the scene and aids Ethan in escaping. It is soon revealed that Aabel, who hides a ghoulish insectine face and a set of death-ray eyes beneath his proper, human facade, is Ethan’s long-lost father, one of several emissaries from the dying civilization of the planet Eros who fathered children on Earth in hopes of securing the future of their race. Aabel wants to take Ethan home, away from vengeful humanity, but when his own cold and inhuman shortcomings (like a penchant for obliterating townsfolk) are revealed Ethan begins to have second thoughts…

By virtue of those involved alone The Children of Spider County should have been a classic of the generally fantastic first season of The Outer Limits. Writer Anthony Lawrence had previously contributed the terrific teleplay for the episode The Man Who Was Never Born, while director Leonard Horn had proven himself through his work on both that episode and the indelible The Zanti Misfits. Veteran performer Kent Smith, perhaps best known for his roles in Cat People and Curse of the Cat People and co-star of series episode It Crawled Out of the Woodwork, was on board, as was up-and-coming young actor Lee Kinsolving (The Explosive Generation). Unfortunately the pedigree of the talent involved wasn’t enough to overcome the difficulties that plagued the episode’s production, resulting in The Children of Spider County becoming one the series’ first and most lamentable failures.

The problems with Children‘s production were many, as enumerated in David J. Schow and Jeffrey Frentzen’s official companion guide, not the least of them being that producer Joseph Stefano, along with ace cinematographer Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood) and the KTTV soundstages where the series was usually filmed, were pre-occupied with the production of the pilot for The Unknown - eventually to become The Outer Limits episode The Form of Things Unknown. The Children of Spider County was left to fend for itself with a single day of scheduled studio time at Samual Goldwyn Studio, and time wasted with confusion over drafts on the part of assistant director Wilson Shyer (in his only series outing) left director Leonard Horn with no recourse but to repurpose much of the episode’s material for exterior photography on-the-fly. Worse yet was the state of Anthony Lawrence’s teleplay itself, which had suffered greatly through a lengthy series of re-writes.

The end product is a potentially promising concept lost in fifty-one minutes of dense and clumsy exposition and shoddy monster-on-the-loose action. For a series that so regularly excelled beyond its shoe-string production values the limitations here are far too obvious, from the rough-and-tumble camera setups to the blatant re-use of episode footage and a few outright gaffs. Director of photography Kenneth Peach, tasked with photographing every series episode from this point forward, was rarely so inspired as fellow DP’s Conrad Hall and John Nickolaus, but he was still a more than capable industry veteran. His work here is uncharacteristically rough, and rife with issues of focusing and stability – further evidence of the oppressive time constraints under which The Children of Spider County was produced. Even Wah Chang’s creature design seems rushed and bland, little more than a generic bug-eyed alien (played by The Galaxy Being himself William Douglas), memorable though the sight of that monstrous head poking out of a smart business suit may be.

All of that is lamentable, but the most unfortunate victim of all is the storytelling itself, long a strong point of the series, which here takes a backseat to just getting as much of the script as possible on film. As with so much of The Outer Limits there’s a germ of greatness lurking within The Children of Spider County - a grand, tragic story of an alien race that, having lost itself at home, is searching for the better part of itself beyond; a warning against allowing the cold and the cruel to overtake imagination in our own world. More’s the pity, then, that circumstance so prevented its development. As such The Children of Spider County is all shaky images and death-ray eyes, with very little to show for itself beyond a B-monster in a suit.


A Scent of New-Mown Hay

January 6th, 2012 | article by | 2 Comments »
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I had never heard of John Blackburn until a very few days ago. Given his status as a prolific English genre author who emerged just on the heels of the two better-known Johns – Wyndham and Christopher – I couldn’t begin to think of why I’d never encountered any of his work in the past, aside from the bothersome inconvenience that comes with so much of it being out of print. Originally published in 1958 and intermittently re-printed from there, Blackburn’s freshman work A Scent of New-Mown Hay is a science fiction thriller with overtones of apocalyptic horror and in principle just the sort of book I should love. And though I devoured it in scarcely an afternoon, I found the expected love rather difficult to come by.

The basics of the premise are promising enough. Word emerges from the Soviet Union that the Russians have cordoned off a vast swath of their northern territory, hastily evacuating the sparse population and moving huge numbers of troops into defensive positions around it. Suspicions swirl in official circles as to what the Soviets are up to, and fears steadily mount that they’re using the forbidden area as a testing ground for some new space-age super weapon. But when an English cargo vessel is accidentally sunk by Soviet warships the men behind the iron curtain come clean to avoid an international incident. Rather than preparing for a global conquest the Soviet Union is actually under attack, from a confounding contagion that threatens to decimate the total female population of Earth. Their restricted zone expanding with each passing moment the Soviets admit that they are powerless to stop the plague, and look to the outside world for assistance.

Enter talented biologist Tony Heath, whose former ties to one of the government’s scientific think-tanks give him an in at the British Foreign Office. Put to work investigating the contagion, Tony soon discovers that the cause is not a disease, but a bizarre fungal mutation that takes over the biological functions of its female hosts and transforms them into inhuman spore-spouting monsters. With nothing like it to be found in evolutionary history Tony begins to wonder whether the mutation may have a more human origin…

There’s the potential for a great deal of existential dread in Blackburn’s A Scent of New-Mown Hay, and the civilization-crushing ramifications of its woman-hating fungal menace are indeed terrifying to contemplate. It’s all the more unfortunate, then, that Blackburn squanders that potential so completely, ignoring the larger potentialities of his concoction in favor of a decidedly small-scale hunt-for-the-bastards-responsible that plays like a poor precursor to Alistair MacLean’s The Satan Bug, a tale of super-germ thievery published four years later. In a series of contrived yet all too predictable developments Tony and his friends in the Foreign Office discover that the fungal aberration is actually the end result of an insidious Nazi plot (when aren’t they insidious?) set in motion by a goose-stepping savant near the end of the War. With said savant still at large, presumably with a cure to the problem in hand, the narrative quickly becomes encumbered with the frequently dim-witted quest to find them.

With the shift in focus towards finding the folks responsible any and all of A Scent of New-Mown Hay‘s apocalyptic potential is effectively dashed, and the horror of the situation greatly diminished. Blackburn’s specifics with regard to the subject do nothing to help matters. So long as the danger of the mutated spores is left relatively ambiguous it can work quite well, appearing a blight upon the fairer sex with the power to wipe out mankind in a single generation, but once the details of its effects are revealed it becomes little more than a catalyst for stock ’50s monsters, and silly ones at that. Blackburn avoids being too descriptive in terms of his creatures, but what we do get is pretty bland, indicating puffy amorphous things that smell of – well, you’ve no doubt already guessed. For being advertised as “a novel of action, horror and emotion” there’s precious little of the former and latter and a sad lack of the middle. Once Blackburn reveals what’s going on in the frozen Soviet north he mostly lets his fungus be, allowing only one infection and exactly one victim outside the iron curtain.

All of these things I could likely forgive in so short a read as this were the writing not so bad on its own terms. The following brief excerpt is indicative of the clunky, awkward qualities that mar Blackburn’s work here:

She didn’t just die. There was no time for dying. Her end had nothing to do with the conventional idea of death. She was just there one moment and then not there. There was simply nothing of her there. Nothing left of her. Nothing that could even be called a part of her there. There was just stuff on the floor and the walls, and that was all there was.

I was a bit shocked, to be quite honest. This is the sort of asinine stuff I expect from low-rung potboilers like The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles or The Second Atlantis, but from a novel of some genuine reputation (Hammer Films evidently once considered a film adaptation) I was expecting more. All that said I didn’t hate Blackburn’s first novel, but it was definitely a disappointment. Perhaps the best things about it are the enigmatic first-edition cover design from Frank Pagnato and the title, splayed as boldly as possible across the front. All the more’s the pity, then, that what’s beneath couldn’t have been more satisfying.

A Scent of New-Mown Hay is at present out of print, but used copies remain readily available.


No Blade of Grass

January 4th, 2012 | article by | 2 Comments »
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dir. Cornel Wilde
1970 / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / 97′
written by Sean Forestal and Cornel Wilde
from the novel by John Christopher
director of phogoraphy H.A.R. Thomson
music arranged and conducted by Burnell Whibley
starring Nigel Davenport, Lynne Frederick, Jean Wallace, John Hamill, Patrick Holt and Anthony May
now available on dvd-r through the Warner Archive Collection and Amazon.com

How would so-called civilized men react were the first world to find itself in the midst of devastating famine? This is the question posed by No Blade of Grass, the penultimate directorial effort of eccentric talent Cornel Wilde, here adapting John Christopher’s monumentally successful freshman novel The Death of Grass (which had been re-titled for its Stateside publication). One of the first films of its kind, Wilde’s No Blade of Grass is a tale of social collapse in a time of ecological catastrophe – a virus has crippled worldwide grain production, plunging the developed nations into third-world anarchy.

Caught in the resulting upheaval are well-to-do architect John Custance (Nigel Davenport), his wife (Wilde’s then wife Jean Wallace), his teenaged daughter (Lynne Frederick in her film debut) and younger son. Working with advance information from a lab-tech friend (John Hamill) the family escape a nightmarish London, patrolled by machine gun-toting bobbies and barricaded by trigger-happy military forces, just as chaos descends upon it. The plan from there is simple enough – seek the safety of brother David Custance’s isolated, easily defended farm in Westmoreland – but with every individual in England suddenly fighting to survive the veneer of civility soon wears thin, and the Custances find themselves adopting unexpectedly vicious practices to preserve themselves.

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Ninja Warriors

December 31st, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. John Lloyd
1985 / Silver Star Film Company / ~90′
written by Ron Marchini, Romano Kristoff and Paul Vance
music by Pat Wales, director of photography Bob Aaron
starring Ron Marchini, Romano Kristoff, Paul Vance,
Ken Watanabe, Mike Cohen and Mike Monty
Ninja Warriors is available on VHS via Amazon.com, or in your nightmares

The holidays are winding down here in Wtf-Film-land, the jollity of days past reduced to little more than a slowly deteriorating refrigerated turkey and a few uncollected scraps of wrapping paper scattered about the floor. But much as I (and my waistline) would like to look forward to the year ahead there’s just one more bit of holiday business to attend to: the first annual M.O.S.S. Secret Santa assignment, my contribution to which has already been covered by the wonderful Fist of B-List. Thanks are due to Keith, of Teleport-City fame, for sending along this fetid slice of cinematic merriment, a US-Filipino martial arts fiasco from the bygone heyday of the under-produced action in-epic. It seems that, like myself, Keith had bad-white-actors-pretending-to-be-ninjas on the brain this holiday season, and the biggest surprise of his offering is that neither Joseph Lai, Thomas Tang, or even the inimitable Godfrey Ho are to be found in its credits. Don’t let that fool you, though, as 1985′s Ninja Warriors is at least as dreadful as anything that jolly band of schlock-shop entrepreneurs ever cobbled together.

Even though Ho and co. aren’t involved you’d never guess from the story line, which reads like those for any number of their efforts. Ninja Warriors concerns an evil band of ninja baddies (and one outrageously bearded goon) who are working feverishly to acquire a top secret and ambiguously described formula with which they hope to take over the world. Somehow. The police become involved after a bit of ninja espionage leaves a mountain of dead security guards in its wake. The bumbling lieutenant in charge of the case wastes no time in contacting his ninjutsu-expert pal Steve, who fights against the ninjas’ scheming with his two greatest weapons – bland, quizzical facial expressions and sweat pants.

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Fright Night

December 13th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1985  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 106′
Director: Tom Holland   Writer: Tom Holland
Music: Brad Fieder   Cinematography: John Kiesser
Cast: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse, Roddy McDowall, Stephen Geoffreys, Jonathan Stark, Dorothy Fielding, Art Evans, Stewart Stern, Nick Savage, Ernie Holmes, Heidi Sorenson, Irina Irvine
Disc company: Twilight Time   Video: 1080p 2.41:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 English
Subtitles: English SDH   Disc: BD25 (All Region)   Release Date: 12/13/2011
Fright Night is now officially SOLD OUT
Reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight TIme

“What would you do if you accidentally discovered the house next door was occupied by something not human… something horrifying… something unspeakably evil? No one believes you – not your mom, not your girlfriend, not even the police. It knows that you know. You’ll do anything to protect yourself, but it’ll do anything to protect it’s secret…”

It’s not often that one can rely on a theatrical trailer to give an honest description of the film it represents, but in the case of Tom Holland’s 1985 horror opus Fright Night the advertising makes such excellent work of it that I feel no remorse in letting it do that part of my job for me. With inspirations ranging from Hammer to Hitchcock, a smart script, and a superb cast of players, Fright Night ranks as one of the very best of the ’80s genre revivals and a damn fine film in its own right. In theme it recalls the distinct brand of sci-fi terrors Universal’s B-picture department specialized in some thirty years before (epitomized by 1955′s Tarantula!), in which all manner of fantastic horrors were visited upon small-town America, though in practice it’s a different beast all together. Standing in for the Cold War paranoia of then is a sexual anxiety fitting of Fright Night‘s teen leads, while the usual atom-born menace is lost in favor of one of the oldest fantasy threats of all – the vampire.

Taking place in an anonymous slice of Reagan-era suburbia, Fright Night follows the exploits of veritable every-teen Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), a high school kid with a beer light in his room, porno mags shoved between his encyclopedias, a doting single mother, and a girlfriend named Amy (Amanda Bearse) who loves him to bits even if she’s horrified to go “all the way“. Charley idolizes his local horror icon Peter Vincent, washed-up host of the late-night schlock marathons from which the film takes its name, stumbles through his trigonometry homework, and oh yeah – he has a vampire living next door who knows Charley knows about him and wants to kill him for his troubles. With no one believing his story, not even Vincent, Charley rightfully fears for his life, but things get even more personal when the suave bloodsucker next door takes a shine to his virginal girlfriend…

It is with that last point that Fright Night, a terrific horror film on its surface merits alone, reveals what’s really on its mind – sex. Some (including Julie Kirgo, who contributes the excellent liner notes for this release) have read homosexual undertones into the vampire Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon as the ultimate in sensual and be-sweatered yuppie menace) and his relationships with troubled young outsider “Evil” Ed (Stephen Geoffreys, who made a career of gay porn in the ’90s) and his live-in familiar Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark), but the most overt of the film’s sexual substance is of the straight variety. Indeed, Holland pushes the subject from the very start, opening with a bit of intercourse that is not to be between Charley and his beloved. The vampire attack witnessed by Charley that starts all the trouble is an overtly sexualized affair and a later encounter between Dandridge and Amy (the spitting image of Jerry’s long-dead lover) is even more so, with Amy cooing in orgasmic bliss as blood trickles down her back. In this context the growing conflict between Charley and the dastardly Dandridge becomes less about survival than about who will collect the sexy spoils, and control the fate of Amy’s freshly-awakened sexuality.

Fright Night may have sex on the brain, but it’s still out for thrills and chills, first and foremost. Holland and company don’t disappoint. Though bolstered by terrific practical effects and creature design from Randall William Cook and Richard Edlund (Oscar-winning alumni of such productions as Ghostbusters and Raiders of the Lost Ark), Fright Night‘s most effective moments remain its simplest, like Charley investigating suspicious noises in the night, Dandridge suddenly appearing in the corner of a darkened bedroom, or “Evil” Ed running into the stalking menace in a misty alleyway. Holland shows a keen understanding for the genre throughout, both in his taught direction (this, his debut as director, remains his best work in that regard) and in the intelligence of his screenwriting, and never neglects the horror of the situation. Much more importantly, he never neglects the characters who make that horror tick.

To that end it’s impossible not to discuss Fright Night without also discussing its cast, perhaps the best in practice of any of the decade’s revival horrors. Roddy McDowall gives the performance of his later career (one he would reprise in Fright Night Part 2 three years later) as down on his luck horror icon Peter Vincent, whose career as cinema’s preeminent vampire killer has collapsed into a low-pay hosting gig on a late night television film show. Initially paid to help cure Charley of his vampire delusions, Vincent soon finds himself the unlikely ally of the child, and forced to summon the courage of a role he’d played so many times before to combat an evil all too real. McDowall balances Vincent’s tremendous charm and ego (his reaction to discovering Charley and his friends don’t want his autograph is priceless) with underlying insecurity and, ultimately, courage, and practically owns the picture in the process.

At the more malignant end of the spectrum lies Chris Sarandon as the devilish Jerry Dandridge, who, along with Kinski, Schreck, Lugosi, and Lee, exists as one of film’s most memorable vampires. Dandridge – who eschews the traditional cape for snazzy cable knit sweaters and has a taste for fresh fruit (fruit bat?) just as strong as his taste for the supple necks of prostitutes – is every bit a product of the decade in which the film was made, an upper crust yuppie bloodsucker with a penchant for remodeling homes and antiquing. He keeps up with the pop music scene, looks perfectly adept in the neon haze of a discotheque, and keeps a dark, wry sense of humor about himself that makes him seem all the more dangerous (“What’s the matter Charley? Afraid I’d never come over without being invited first?”). But Dandridge is more than just yuppie trappings and a handsome smirk, whistling “Strangers in the Night” as he stalks his prey. Sarandon’s ace performance lends the character an attractive outsider mystique and a feral magnetism that’s difficult to ignore. He’s a perfect villain, made all the more effective by just how tempting he makes the evil he represents appear.

Like Dandridge, Fright Night itself is very much a product of its time, though it’s no less successful a picture today for the polka dotted linoleum on its floors or the Ian Hunter on its soundtrack. It remains the best film of writer and director Tom Holland’s career (is that really The Langoliers I see in your filmography? Oy.), and easily makes my short list for most satisfying genre efforts of the ’80s. Among its often lamentable brethren Fright Night manages to be something different, something special, and for those keen on horror it’s an absolute must-see.

Fright Night proved a surprise success upon its release, becoming the second highest grossing horror film of 1985 (behind A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge), but times have clearly changed. Though still a popular cult item Fright Night has become just another among many victims of waning big-studio confidence in deeper library titles, however successful they may have been initially, and the lackluster returns of the recent remake (also to be released on Blu-ray today) have sealed its fate as far as owners Columbia / Sony are concerned. With no interest on the part of the owners to release the film to Blu-ray themselves, niche label Twilight Time have stepped in to take up their slack. While many may find the arrangement less than ideal, with Fright Night released as a limited edition of 3000 at a price point higher than might be expected of a wider issue, you’ll hear no complaints from me. If this is the future of library titles on Blu-ray then I’m in full support of it, and those wishing to see more marginal big-studio properties available on the format would do well to do the same.

But what of the disc, eh? Fright Night arrives on Blu-ray with an honest 1080p transfer in the original Panavision ratio that serves the intended aesthetics of its modest production quite dutifully. From the neon-drenched interiors of the discotheque and a beer-light illuminated teenage bedroom to the starker, more natural exteriors, the latest Sony-produced master of the title looks very good throughout. Damage is minimal, limited to some baked-in white marks and a bit of minor dust and debris, and while the level of detail can vary greatly from scene to scene the end results never appear unfaithful to the original photography. There’s a lovely layer of natural grain in evidence throughout, and though the modest encode (single layer AVC at an average video bitrate of 21.5 Mbps) results in some (very) minor artifacts there’s nothing here that’s so dramatic as to distract from viewing. This is another strong showing from Twilight Time, and fans of Fright Night should be very pleased.

Blu-ray screenshots were taken as uncompressed .png at full resolution in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Originally a Dolby Stereo show, Fright Night‘s visuals are served well by a new lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix. Those expecting directional effects to be bouncing about like ping-pong balls will be out of luck – what you get is occasional LFE umph and some minor separation, but a track that remains faithful to the overall aesthetics of the original recording. The moody synth score, dialogue and effects all sounded excellent to these ears, and appropriately vintage for a film now in its 26th year. I dig it. The most robust addition to the contractually-limited supplemental package (which otherwise includes only a pair of theatrical trailers, both in HD with lossless audio) is the isolated Brad Fieder score in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo which, though lacking the notable pop songs included in the film (I assume they were omitted due to the lofty expense of licensing them), sounds quite robust. Twilight Time leave very little to complain about here, and even include a set of optional English SDH subtitles in the mix.

In the short period Twilight Time have been active in the Blu-ray market expectations have already grown quite high for them, and Fright Night does not disappoint. Another excellent set of liner notes (remember when these were included with practically everything?) from Julie Kirgo round out the package, and even include the URL for a pair of Fright Night ’pirate’ audio commentaries (available from Icons of Fright) featuring much of the cast and crew. Awesome stuff! Whatever your thoughts on these limited edition niche releases, the bottom line is that you won’t find Fright Night looking or sounding better than it does here, and isn’t that what really matters? Fans and genre junkies are heartily encouraged to indulge.

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Excellent –  Audio: Excellent
Supplements: Isolated Brad Fieder score track. two theatrical trailers in HD, liner notes by Julie Kirgo.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case with booklet.
Fright Night is now officially SOLD OUT

Rapture

December 12th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1965  Company: 20th Century Fox / Panoramic Productions   Runtime: 104′
Director: John Guillermin   Writers: Ennio Flaiano, Stanley Mann, Phyllis Hastings
Music: Georges Delerue   Cinematography: Marcel Grignon
Cast: Patricia Gozzi, Dean Stockwell, Melvyn Douglas, Gunnel Lindblom
Disc company: Twilight Time   Video: 1080p 2.35:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 1.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD25 (All Region)   Release Date: 12/13/2011
Rapture is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com
Reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight TIme.

Young Agnes, an adolescent malcontent struggling to reconcile her childish nature with her budding desires, lives in isolation in her widowed father’s modest seaside estate. One day, after her father (himself obsessed with ruminations on “compassionate justice”) dashes her favorite doll on the coastal rocks in a fit of misplaced rage (“You’re not a child!” he screams), Agnes decides to construct a new companion for herself – a scarecrow made from one of her father’s old suits. A few days later Agnes, her father and their housekeeper witness the violent escape of a jailed man. When one stormy night that same man arrives in the family shed, having stolen the clothes from the scarecrow to hide himself from the authorities, Agnes becomes convinced that her manufactured companion has come to life.

The stranger-on-the-run is welcomed into the presumed safety of the home by the father, the housekeeper, and especially Agnes, though each for very different reasons. The promiscuous housekeeper takes him on as a lover, while the father uses him as a testing ground for his legal theories. Agnes, meanwhile, remains convinced that he is hers alone, and after throwing off his plans for escape (both from the police and the home) develops a more intimate relationship with him.

It’s rare anymore that I see a film so uniquely its own that it leaves me with no starting point from which to discuss it, but such a film is Rapture, director John Guillermin’s bleak yet sumptuous adaptation of Phyllis Hastings’ novel Rapture in my Rags. Transposed from the novel’s English countryside to the Brittany Coast to sate 20th Century Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck’s taste for young French talent Patricia Gozzi, who would soon disappear from the film business all together, and produced by a largely French crew with American actors Melvyn Douglas and Dean Stockwell and Swede Gunnel Lindblom filling out the leading roles, Rapture is a film of strange international pedigree. That it was directed by a man (fittingly an Englishman of French lineage) best known for his contributions to the super-productions of mega-producers Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno) and Dino De Laurentiis (King Kong and the much maligned King Kong Lives) only makes it stranger still.

Of course it’s not just the cultural diversity of the production that makes this film so unique, as good an initial indicator of such as that might be, but its substance and artifice as well. Ostensibly a coming-of-age drama about a confused young woman and the father whose misplaced anger threatens to obliterate their tenuous family ties, but with darkly fantastic overtones, a penchant for forbidden romance and art-house panache to spare, Rapture never comes across as being the usual cinema fare. Indeed, from the opening shots of a giggling bride on the way to her wedding ceremony to the final closing fade, I’m still not at all sure what to make of it, though it’s certainly a film I’ll never forget.

Portrayed magnificently by Patricia Gozzi, who was just fifteen at the time, Rapture‘s Agnes is the very embodiment of bewildered adolescence, and struggles to find herself under the domineering auspices of a father who at once demands she behave as a woman while treating her as though she were a child. Having spent most of her life out of school and in social isolation, with the threat of a nearby loony-bin forever looming, Agnes is predictably unprepared for the outside world. Her brief encounters with modern France, both during an early wedding and a later elopement, are claustrophobic, nightmarish affairs, with the trappings of metropolitan life (buzzing neon, busy streets, and dense, impenetrable crowds) skewed into horrific sights and sounds by her maladjusted perspective. By contrast her life on the depopulated French coast is appropriately rapturous, dysfunctional family dynamics aside, and spent splashing in the waves and reaching out for the greater freedom of the gulls fluttering above. Still the specter of her father (a troubled turn by the veteran Melvyn Douglas) lurks, omnipresent, waiting to lash out at her for any petty grievance.

With a torrent of lightning and rain (and a bit of overt Christian symbolism) the escaped prisoner Joseph (an enigmatic Dean Stockwell, who plays his cards close) arrives, signalling change for the conflicted family whether it’s prepared for it or not. Though he compells the father to contemplate that which torments him, and the roots of his revulsion for his youngest daughter, it is with Agnes herself that the change becomes most obvious – and disquieting. Joseph’s tryst with the housekeeper (Gunnel Lindblom in a hefty supporting role) inspires a fit of jealous rage in the teenager, who takes to her presumed competition with a shovel in hand and a homicidal gleam in her eye. The housekeeper survives, but wastes no time in seeing herself out of her job, and it is with her exit that things take a turn for the uncomfortable.

Agnes becomes romantically entangled with Joseph, a man twice her age (literally in the case of Stockwell), and takes up the outward trappings of womanhood (curling her hair, and dressing up and so on). While the sexual aspect of the relationship, however tastefully restrained in its conveyance, is undeniably disturbing, I found Agnes’ sudden transformation into a homemaker to be even more so. Though clearly unprepared for such a development, Agnes runs away with Joseph to an oppressive one-room downtown hovel in which she dutifully takes up her domestic responsibilities. It’s a depressing development made none the less so by its transience, and as Joseph piles more and more relationship burdens on Agnes (like handling the couple’s finances) it becomes quite horrifying. Guillermin and director of photography Marcel Grignon capture the experience with uncomfortable, inorganic angles and aggressive montage that makes us long for the wide-open seclusion of the seaside every bit as much as Agnes, even though we know as well as her that, after all that’s transpired, things can never be the same as before.

Meticulously photographed in black and white CinemaScope and related in an intense, personal manner, Rapture is about as far removed from Guillermin’s big-money spectacles as I’d imagine possible. It also speaks more for the director’s not inconsiderable talents than any of his better known films. Rapture practically oozes art-house appeal, and with that in mind it’s difficult for me to believe that the film, largely ignored upon its initial release, hasn’t garnered more of a reputation in the 46 years since. Far be it from me to say whether it’s great film making or not – coming-of-age dramas, however strange, aren’t exactly my area of expertise, and I’m still scratching my head over this one – but it’s certainly something different, and a beautiful something at that. Given the present era of over-hyped mediocrity that’s more than enough for me.

The second of Twilight Time’s limited edition Blu-ray series to be culled from the archives of 20th Century Fox, Rapture has finally received the quality home video presentation that has so long eluded it. Before I get into the technical details it’s worth noting that Rapture, like the rest of the Twilight Time catalogue, has been released as a limited pressing of 3000 and is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com.

Once again I’m left with very little room to complain. Rapture makes its high definition debut in a glorious 1080p transfer at the original CinemaScope aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and though only single layered I can’t say that things suffer much for it. Marcel Grignon’s ace photography is wonderfully replicated here, with all its lush 35mm texture blessedly intact. There’s a wide variety of imagery to take in, from the most expansive of landscapes to the closest of faces and everything in between, and all of it is delivered in that true-to-film fashion I crave. Yes, there is some damage, unobtrusive printed white marks and a bit of dirt here and there, and even a smattering of very minor encoding artifacts, there’s a lot of grain for an encoder to digest here and with some rare exception the AVC video encode at 24.5 Mbps average handles it quite well, but all things considered this disc looks very, very good. I’ll let the screenshots do the rest of the talking for this one. Bravo, Twilight Time!

Blu-ray screenshots were taken as uncompressed .png at full resolution in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Audio for the Rapture is presented in English via a simple and effective DTS-HD MA 1.0 track that perfectly replicates the film’s original monophonic recording. The sound design for Rapture is as memorable as the imagery in my mind, with crescendos in sound effects – not music – building up to its most impacting moments. Georges Delerue’s rich, oddly romantic score sounds quite good throughout, given the limitations of the original mix, but the accompanying isolated DTS-HD MA 2.0 score track – the disc’s sole supplement – is a revelation. If there’s a complaint to be made then its with Rapture‘s lack of a subtitle track, SDH or otherwise. Both Mysterious Island and Fright Night (review coming soon, I promise!) have subtitles, and I can only assume that none were provided by 20th Century Fox for this release.

Rapture is the sort of release that really drives home the importance of independent labels like Twilight Time, which are finally allowing some of the real surprises of the big studio libraries to see the light of day on home video. This Blu-ray is another quality package from the company, with a fine transfer, a great isolated score, and a superb set of liner notes from Julie Kirgo (some perspective on Rapture is really a must, and Kirgo does an admirable job providing it), and another easy endorsement from me.

in conclusion
Film: One of a kind  Video: Very Good +  Audio: Excellent
Supplements: Isolated Georges Delerue score track
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case with booklet of liner notes.
Rapture is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com

Shadow of the Colossus

December 1st, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 2005  Company: Sony Computer Entertainment Japan Studios, Team ICO
Designer: Fumito Ueda   Writers: Junichiro Hosono, Takashi Izutani, Masahi Kudo
Music: Kow Otani   Cast: Kenji Nojima, Kazuhiro Nakata, Kyoko Hikami, Naoki Bando, Hitomi Nabatame
Reviewed from the Ico / Shadow of the Colossus Collection, released September of this year for Playstation 3, and available for purchase through Amazon.com. The original Playstation 2 edition is also still available.

While I’ve toyed with reviewing books, comics and even a bit of music here at Wtf-Film, the one medium I’ve always wanted to cover, but never have, remains video games. I play quite a lot of them, after all, and unlike any number of naysayers I don’t see the medium as being any less a legitimate art form than the others I mentioned above. That’s not to say I think that all art is good art, and personal taste certainly enters into things, but the potential is there for video games to rattle off complex symbolism, big ideas and the just plain aesthetically beautiful every bit as well as the rest of the more lauded forms. What’s more they can do so in collaboration, while at the same time offering a brand of personal interaction with the material that’s unique unto themselves.

But I digress. I’m really not here to argue how the video game should be considered a valid artistic medium – really - you’ll find plenty of that elsewhere, and just as many dissenting opinions. Instead I present for your consideration a game that I certainly consider to be “good art”, the epic Shadow of the Colossus (or Wander and the Colossus / Wanda to Kyozou) from Japanese designer Fumito Ueda and Sony Computer Entertainment’s Japan Studio in 2005. As is too often the case I took a good long while catching up to Shadow, having never owned a Playstation 2, but its recent remastering for the Playstation 3 (along with Ueda’s freshman effort ICO) gave me all the excuse I needed to finally check it out.

Taking place in a nameless expanse at the “edge of the world”, Shadow posits the player as the boy Wander, who travels to the forbidden land with his faithful horse, Agro, and the body of the dead girl Mono in hopes that a mythical demon said to reside there can return her to life. The demon, little but a few wayward shadows and a disembodied voice echoing about an immense shrine, agrees to help, provided that Wander destroys the sixteen Colossi – the vessels for the demon’s divided evil – that roam throughout the territory. As each Colossus is defeated the evil essence within is absorbed by Wander, whose mortal form grows more corrupted and diseased with each conquest…

The simple narrative of Shadow of the Colossus is a familiar one, but is refreshingly free of the heroic ego that so often comes with the territory. Wander proves himself uniquely selfless as video game protagonists go, flinging himself out into the abyss and confronting certain annihilation with unflinching determination, but his singular devotion is to the point of fault. He is driven to sacrifice himself, agonizingly, to save a fellow mortal unjustly struck down (the scant dialogue suggests only that she was sacrificed for being “cursed”), but is so obsessed as to be blind to the consequences of unleashing the greatest evil known to his civilization. In his singular, destructive drive he reminds of Captain Ahab, neither villain nor hero, just a man slowly destroyed by his own obsession. It’s an allusion that becomes all the more fitting once the nature of the game’s action is taken into consideration.

With rare exception the Colossi Wander is fated to extinguish are appropriately massive in scale, and often appear as though they are built from bits of the landscapes from which they emerge. Alternately magnificent and horrifying, the Colossi are the fantasy equivalent of the sea-beasts of old, which a dwarfed humanity once sought to conquer at its own peril, though the odds against Wander, armed only with a sword, a bow, and his wits, seem even more heavily stacked. Each Colossi is a lumbering level unto itself, either to be tricked into allowing Wander passage on it or to be scaled outright so that its vital points, glowing sigils revealed by the sword, can be reached. The gameplay here is harrowing stuff, and quite unlike anything I’ve encountered before. Appropriately, it becomes as much a test of will for the player as for Wander, as you’re dangle perilously from the shaggy, debris-strewn bodies of skyscraper-sized humanoid giants and bizarre, impossibly proportioned animals with your stamina running out all the while.

Even so, success against them is rarely satisfying on its own terms. Much of that is to do with the context for the Colossi themselves, awe-inspiring titans tucked away in some forbidden corner of the world as guardians against the evil banished there. They aren’t the villains of the piece, even if Wander must approach them as such. Each is individual, unique, from a proportional pseudo-mechanical bull (one of the rare small Colossi) and a tremendous electric eel to the earth-shaking bludgeon-wielding humanoid bear that graces the cover art, and each is never to be seen again. For every ounce of awe their appearances inspire there’s just as much poignancy to their defeat, the Colossi crumpling tragically to the ground with venomous black mist spewing from their wounds. Wander’s reward for killing them is to have himself slowly destroyed, with no way of knowing whether or not the demon with whom he has bargained will keep its promise in the end.

Shadow of the Colossus balances its intense action set pieces and grimmer subject matter with an environmental design ethic that’s breathtaking. The forbidden terrain Wander must traverse to reach each Colossi is a vast, seemingly boundless affair, winding from darkened mountain passes through arid deserts and verdant hills to secluded wooded oases, imposing canyons and hot springs. It’s a world unto itself, separated from the outside by a towering, endless bridge and devoid of any living distractions beyond a few lizards, tortoises and birds. Though obviously once inhabited – a monolithic central shrine and other edifices of civilization past, including Asiatic temples, European castles and a massive buried Greco-Roman amphitheatre, are all testament to this – Wander is the only human life to be seen. It’s a place unencumbered by endless hack-and-slash antics, load screens, or droning soundtrack loops, a wide-open expanse both somber and beautiful, ripe for contemplation and all but demanding of the hours it takes to explore it all. I found myself wholly immersed in it, enchanted even, and after a work week worth of play I’ve yet to tire of it – something few of anything, much less games, can claim.

In lesser hands it would have been easy for Shadow of the Colossus, basically a series of boss fights scattered by lengthy violence-free trekking, to feel tired and insubstantial, but Fumito Ueda and his devoted creative team have made it into something truly special. The simplicity of its premise belies the supreme artistry with which it is related, and the sum experience of it all is quite unlike anything else. I’ll not open the can of worms that is the “best game ever” designation, but it’s certainly one of the best I’ve ever played, a potent mix of thrilling action, aesthetic wonder and quiet humanity that really is second to none. This is must-play material, through and through, and one of the easiest recommendations I’ve had in years.

Reviewed from the Ico / Shadow of the Colossus Collection, released September of this year for Playstation 3, and available for purchase through Amazon.com. The original Playstation 2 edition is also still available.

Mysterious Island

November 15th, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Year: 1961  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 101′
Director: Cy Endfield   Writers: John Prebble, Daniel B. Ullman, Crane Wilbur
Music: Bernard Herrmann   Cinematography: Wilkie Cooper
Cast: Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill,
Herbert Lom, Beth Rogan, Percy Herbert, Dan Jackson
Disc company: Twilight Time   Video: 1080p 1.66:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 and 1.0 English
Subtitles: English SDH   Disc: BD50 (All Region)   Release Date: 11/08/2011
Mysterious Island is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com
The Wtf-Film Guide to Essential Blu-ray is the record of one man’s eclectic journey to uncover the very best of the weird and wonderful that Blu-ray has to offer. The special effects of Ray Harryhausen had to make it onto our list sooner or later, and we’re pleased as punch that it’s the former.

1961′s Mysterious Island begins with one of the great scenes of fantasy-adventure cinema. Imprisoned by Confederate forces in the midst of the Siege of Richmond near the end of the Civil War, Union Captain Cyrus Harding and his underlings, freed slave Corporal Neb and the cowardly Herbert Brown, decide to make a daring escape by the unlikely means of an observation balloon. With Union war correspondent Gideon Spillet and Confederate operator Pencroft in tow the men escape their cell and commandeer the balloon, only to launch themselves into the midst of ‘the greatest storm in American history’. Aloft for days and trapped on a steady course Westward, the escapees are savaged by weather and circumstance until the balloon itself finally gives way, ripping under the pressure of gale-force winds and plunging its crew towards the tumultuous Pacific and a mysterious, uncharted speck of land.

Buoyed by the descending bass and percussive clash of one of Bernard Herrmann’s finest fantasy scores, I remember thinking that this sequence was the most suspenseful, thrilling thing I had ever seen when I first chanced upon the film as a young child. The idea of these men, casting themselves out into the elements toward some unknown, foreboding locale, was harrowing stuff, and as their epic adventure unfolded I was filled with dread excitement. As they dangled from the balloon’s rigging over a seething sea I wondered with fatal curiosity, how would they survive, and who among them? And what if they did make it to that strange island. What then?

Of course Captain Harding and his rag-tag band of castaways do make it to the island, and what follows is a potent mix of survival adventure, science fiction and fantasy that thrills me just as much today as it ever has. Mysterious Island may follow the Vernian adventure on which it is based with only a middling accuracy, condensing and consolidating its events in an economical fashion and taking some pretty judicious liberties with it along the way, but it’s tough to complain when such diversions include the lovely Beth Rogan and her abbreviated lace-up goatskin dress (the height of Victorian fashion, I’m told). Oddly enough it’s one of the film’s many deviations from source that has gone on to make the film so beloved as it is – a sci-fi plot thread that could almost be of Bert I. Gordon’s invention, but which is elevated to the level of pulp genius under the creative auspices of effects wizard Ray Harryhausen – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Though with some obvious variation, Mysterious Island actually follows the basic circumstances of Verne’s story quite faithfully. Captain Harding and his fellows find themselves castaways on an uninhabited volcanic island, and are forced to allay those philosophical differences that plagued them in the civilized world so that they might join forces to survive. Through human ingenuity the five manage to scrounge together a rather satisfying existence, feasting on the island’s often bizarre fauna and taking up permanent residence in a comfortable cliff-side cave they call ‘Granite House’. Along the way they are aided by unlikely coincidences, like the discovery of a trunk loaded with supplies – tools, weapons, and even a copy of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. After a brief tangle with cutthroat pirates ends in the inexplicable destruction of the pirate vessel the source of the coincidences is revealed. The island is the home port of none other than Captain Nemo, who was thought lost in a maelstrom some years before. With his submarine Nautilus inoperable Nemo was forced to continue his mission for global peace from the confines of the island and its surrounding waters, stalling his terrorist action against the world’s military fleets in favor of eradicating of the root causes of human strife through scientific invention.

Though ostensibly escapist adventure, there are some underlying themes in Mysterious Island that, though largely ignored today, must have held broad appeal in a time of Cold War and civil rights unrest. Nary half a decade after Rosa Parks and Brown v. Board of Education Mysterious Island prominently features an African American (a freed slave fighting for the Union, no less) with the same rights and privileges as his white peers – a fixture of Verne’s novel granted a newfound timeliness in the film adaptation. Indeed, the screenplay by John Prebble, Daniel B. Ullman and Crane Wilbur also simplifies the politics of the Civil War, purposefully conflating its noble struggle to free men with the contemporary Civil Rights Movement. In the context of an ongoing Cold War, Mysterious Island offers the hope of reconciliation among political ideologies by virtue of the relationship between Captain Harding and Confederate soldier Pencroft, each of whom begin the film as a prisoner of the other side only to set aside their philosophical differences for a greater good. So, too, does the character of Nemo offer hope, in converting a destructive weapon (the submarine Nautilus) into a tool for peace – if contemporary science could create the atomic and hydrogen bombs that threatened the world, then perhaps it had the power to save the world from them as well.

All that said, Mysterious Island is still ostensibly an escapist adventure with overtones of fantasy and science fiction, and that which lends it thematic weight also serves as a catalyst for some of its most exciting moments. Captain Nemo’s efforts to eradicate human suffering through science have left his island teeming with an assortment of gigantic flora and fauna, from harmless overgrown plants and oysters to the giant crabs, honeybees and flightless birds that threaten the existence of Harding and his castaways. It’s a plot thread concocted purely to take advantage of the talents of effects artisan Harryhausen, who had pretty perfected his stop motion process (now touted as Dynamation) with the color spectacle The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. By 1961 Harryhausen was at the top of his game, precisely blending live-action back and foreground plates with his meticulously crafted stop motion armatures to create spectacular special effects scenes that even the more obscenely budgeted epics of the time couldn’t match.

In Mysterious Island his work feels like a response to the big bug pictures that had been so popular in the years just prior, with Harryhausen answering the poor travelling matte grasshoppers of Beginning of the End and the monolithic composited arachnid of Tarantula! with a few gigantic creepy crawlies of his own. In the film’s most famous sequence, stills of which populate no end of children’s monster books, Harding and his crew are forced to do battle with an enormous land crab – a scene which concludes with the castaways dining on the beast after it falls into a hot spring. Truer to the giant bug pedigree are a host of car-sized honeybees, which trap young heartthrob Michael Callan and hottie Beth Rogan in the mother of all honeycombs. Later on Harryhausen takes a moment to reference both Verne’s giant squid and his own past work, as a walk on the sea floor leads into a life-and-death struggle with a colossal chambered nautilus. More than just an homage to the sensational squid attack from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, itself entering film history in Disney’s spectacular adaptation, the creature design closely resembles that of one of Harryhausen’s own creations – the city-smashing cepholapod of 1955′s It Came From Beneath the Sea.

Aside from Harryhausen’s considerable talents, Mysterious Island also serves as a colorful showcase for all manner of practical visual effects techniques. Filmed partly on gorgeous coastal Spanish locations and partly on the sound stages of England’s Shepperton Studios, Mysterious Island bridges the considerable gaps between A and B and expands its fictional locale with exceptional matte paintings, composite and miniature work. Indeed, the epic balloon escape that so thrilled me as a child is accomplished through a succession of opticals and process shots, the transparency of which do nothing to impede the experience. With modern expectations in mind there is the temptation to label such vintage effects methods as crude or unrealistic, but as I grow older I become more acutely aware of just how overrated realism is in cinema – especially with regards to such overtly fictional stuff as this. While there’s a concerted effort by the technicians to ensure that the various mattes and miniatures match to the scale sets and locations the effects themselves are more suggestive than literal, the cinematic equivalent of the illustrated plates published in the stories and novels that came before. As such I’d suggest that those tempted to question the methods by which human conflicts with gigantic arthropods and impossible transcontinental balloon trips are related are perhaps missing the point of the experience, and would do well to occupy their time elsewhere.

For my money Mysterious Island is fantastic, beautiful stuff, and a pitch-perfect example of the lost art of fantasy filmmaking as it once was. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a full fifty years since it originally premiered, but the taught direction of Cy Endfield (Sands of the Kalahari, Zulu) and a screenplay that’s both wittier and more substantial than I remember have certainly helped it to age more gracefully than it might have otherwise. Much as the novel from which it was (freely) adapted has become a classic of literature, Mysterious Island deserves its place as classic of cinema escapism. For those keen on the rousing genre excursions of old it’s an absolute must-see.

Just in time to celebrate the film’s fiftieth anniversary, Mysterious Island makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of independent collector’s label Twilight Time (in conjunction with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) in a limited run of only 3000. This arrangement won’t be to everyone’s taste, particularly in that it means a high retail price point, a contractually limited slate of extras, and venue exclusivity (it can only be officially had through Screen Archives Entertainment), but the plain fact of that matter is that licensor Sony, after the marginal enthusiasm their previous Harryhausen Blu-rays inspired, had no great interest in releasing this film to Blu-ray themselves. While I’m sure their agreement leaves Sony open to releasing the film in the future, if they should so desire, those wanting Mysterious Island on Blu-ray now (and I’m among them) will find this Twilight Time release to be their only option. Fortunately it’s a good one!

There are those who may worry that Twilight Time have been left to their own devices with regards to the transfers they’re working from, but that’s happily not the case. They’ve instead been granted access to the latest studio masters of the titles they’ve licensed. In the case of Mysterious Island that means a comprehensive 50th anniversary restoration courtesy of Sony’s second-to-none archive restoration team. There is always talk of restorations bringing films back to their original luster, but effort here really goes beyond the call of duty. I can state unequivocally that Mysterious Island has never looked so good as it does on this disc, ever, and that fans of these colorful Harryhausen effects vehicles are in for a downright exhilarating experience.

Past editions of Mysterious Island have all suffered from a variety of damage, from flicker and general aging of the elements to the specks, flecks, dust and scratches that were baked right into the film’s extensive optical printing effects from the start. I know my comparison below is not ideal – I’m forced to rely on a compressed archival copy of the 2002 DVD, having seemingly lost my original – but it does reveal the obsessive extent to which the restorers have gone to remedy the issue of print damage. The third comparison set shows one of the film’s many optical effects, one which, like the rest, was possessed of a good deal of blemishes and imperfections from the start. You’ll note that in the new restoration practically every hint of damage has been successfully removed. Such is the case even with the classic Dynamation stop motion sequences, as evidenced by the final comparison set. Specks and blemishes present in the original back projection and rephotographed during the Dynamation process have been carefully removed, leaving the footage looking even crisper and cleaner than it was when originally produced. That isn’t to say that there’s absolutely no damage to be found in this new restoration of Mysterious Island, which does present with some minor white speckling at times, but the improvements in this regard are striking.

More impressive still is the attention paid to the film’s rich and at times eccentric color design, from the white sands and pure blue skies of the coastal Spanish locations to the fantastical studio interiors, punctuated with unreal shades of yellow, red, blue and green. Whether the result of the telecine process or of fading of the elements themselves, the 2002 DVD edition had some color shifting that resulted in an overly yellow appearance. Comparison set two shows perhaps the most obvious and widest breadth of improvement. Everything from Spillet’s light white undershirt to background rock, foliage, and water has lost its yellow tinge, resulting in purer shades of white, grey, green, and so on, while flesh tones have shifted from the overly orange hues of the DVD into more natural territory. Contrast is similarly improved, with what had before been a comparatively flat image alive with rich, deep blacks and more pronounced highlights (see the third comparison set again). The sum experience of the color restoration here is utterly breathtaking, with ace cinematographer Wilkie Cooper’s dynamic photography more vividly represented than ever. Other aspects of the restoration improve in a manner more typical to these comparisons between standard and high definition. Detail takes a healthy bump upwards, bolstered by the healthier contrast and increased resolution, and the at times considerable grain inherent to the original production is blessedly retained.

Beyond the source restoration, Twilight Time’s Blu-ray is a robust technical specimen as well. The 1.66:1 1080p image is spread comfortably over a dual layer BD50, with the feature plus audio taking up more than 30 GB of space on disc. The image is AVC-encoded with a strong average bitrate of 33.2 Mbps, and the encode frequently lazes about in the upper 30s. You’ll have to look long and hard to find any technical deficiencies in the image, as Twilight Time have ensured that the film receives a very strong presentation. Thanks to its meticulous restoration and beefy technical specs Mysterious Island may well be the strongest a Harryhausen film has appeared yet on Blu-ray.

HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool at a quality setting of 95%. The three DVD screenshots are sourced from my compressed archive copy of Columbia Tristar’s DVD from 2002 (my original disc is somehow missing in action – sorry!), and were captured in .png format in VLC, upconverted to 1920×1080 and saved as .png in GIMP, then compressed to .jpg using the same method as for the HD screenshots.
DVD | Blu-ray

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While it may be the best looking, Mysterious Island is inarguably the best sounding of the Harryhausen films currently available on the format. The primary track for the feature is a new, restored 5.1 surround mix presented in lossless DTS-HD MA at an average bitrate of around 3 and half Mbps. I’m generally not much a fan of these 5.1 remixes, but this track is a stunner, with more breadth and depth of auditory potential than anything that’s come before – none of that even comes close! The foley work remains consistent with the original monophonic recording, never sounding out of place for a film of this vintage, and all of the dialogue and effects come across crisply and cleanly. The biggest beneficiary of the bump to 5.1 DTS-HD MA, however, is Bernard Herrmann’s tremendous score – for my money the best of the four he composed for Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen. The opening theme, repeated throughout with some variation, blew my mind when I first saw Mysterious Island as a child, and no other viewing of the film has touched that nostalgic experience until now. As Herrmann’s score clashed forth over the classic Columbia logo I felt a chill run down my spine – terrific stuff. With purists in mind Twilight Time have also preserved the originally monophonic recording courtesy a lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0 track. Though it obviously loses the LFE of its 5.1 counterpart, which is particularly notable in the music department, this restored track still sounds very good, and is well in advance of the 2002 DVD. Whether you’re fond of original recordings or surround remixes, Twilight Time has you covered. They’ve even included a set of optional English SDH subtitles, leaving me no room to complain.

As noted earlier, Twilight Time are contractually obligated with regards to the supplements they can provide, so Mysterious Island is predictably limited in that department. In terms of complementing video the disc presents both the original theatrical trailer and an imaginatively bizarre 1-minute television spot, each of which are presented in native 1080p AVC encodes (at 1.66:1 and pillarboxed 4:3 respectively) with lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0 audio. The only other extra is a big one, an isolated original score track (in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo!) that accompanies the feature. There’s an interesting mix here, with some cues accompanied by sound effects (a la the old Laserdisc edition) and others not. For its part the music here sounds terrific, and those who don’t already own the soundtrack will find much to love here. My one complaint is that the isolated score only appears to be accessible from the disc’s main menu (there is no pop-up that I could find), and plays as a separate timeline from which the audio for the film is likewise inaccessible. Small potatoes, but some may find it bothersome. The package is accompanied by a lovely booklet of film stills and liner notes (all too rare a thing these days) by Julie Kirgo, and my order arrived with a Mysterious Island refrigerator magnet (which replicates the attractive cover art for this release) as well.

There has been some grumbling about the rise of short run ’boutique’ labels like Twilight Time and Olive Films in the home video market, much of it arising from the perceived high price of their releases. In my mind that’s just the cost of doing this sort of business, and if Warner can charge $20 a pop for burned DVD-R of their own catalogue titles then $34.95 for an independently produced limited run Blu-ray of a big-studio title like Mysterious Island seems fair enough. I’ve put my money where my mouth is in this case, happily shelling out the nearly $40 it cost to put a copy on my shelf even though I knew I had a screener en route. It’s a matter of principle. I want to support those companies that release the movies I love, especially when they’re doing it well, and so long as Twilight Time continues to release them so proficiently as they have here I’ll have their back all the way. Now, if they can just find their way to The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and The First Men in the Moon…

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Excellent  Audio: Excellent
Supplements: Isolated Bernard Herrmann score track, Theatrical Trailer, Television Spot
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case with booklet of liner notes.
Mysterious Island is available for purchase exclusively through ScreenArchives.com

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