Posts Tagged ‘Fantasy’


Journey to the Center of the Earth

May 4th, 2012 | article by | 1 Comment »
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dir. Henry Levin
1959 / 20th Century Fox / 129′
written by Walter Reisch and Charles Brackett
from the novel by Jules Verne
director of photography Leo Tover
original music by Bernard Herrmann
 starring Pat Boone, James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Peter Ronson, Thayer David, Diane Baker, Alan Napier, Alan Caillou, and Gertrude the Duck
reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight Time
Journey to the Center of the Earth is out on limited edition Blu-ray from Twilight Time, and is available exclusively through ScreenArchives.com.

Jules Verne’s classic science fiction adventure novel Voyage au Centre de la Terre has been adapted many times for screens both large and small, most often quite badly, but despite some considerable liberties taken with the source material this big-budget adaptation from 20th Century Fox remains the best of the bunch. The (very) big brother to Irwin Allen’s lamentable yet lovable sci-fi fiasco The Lost World, Fox’s 1959 production of Journey to the Center of the Earth fills the CinemaScope screen with vivid color spectacle and A-list talent while one of Bernard Herrmann’s best fantasy scores rumbles forth in 4-track stereo. It remains a damn fine show more than half a century on, bolstered by an intelligent, often playful screenplay (from Charles The Lost Weekend Brackett and Walter Gaslight Reisch) that still holds up – it’s no surprise the film made a small mint upon release, and continues to generate royalty checks for its then-young star Pat Boone.

Though substantially altered in its details the narrative here is familiar enough: When the recently-knighted Professor Lindenbrook (James Mason, displaying the same charismatic misanthropy that would mark his performance in Kubrick’s Lolita) receives a celebratory paperweight – an unusually heavy chunk of igneous rock – from his star pupil Alec (Pat Boone, whose heart-throb appeal is plundered early and often), he suspects there’s more to the thing than meets the eye. A chance encounter with an overfed laboratory furnace reveals the suspicious rock’s secret – within lies a plumb-bob upon which is etched the last words of explorer Arne Saknussem, who therein claims to have reached the center of the Earth!

Thus is launched the Lindenbrook expedition, an effort by the Professor and his loyal underling (Boone is, amusingly, billed above Mason) to follow in Saknussem’s footsteps and reach the furthest recesses of the inner Earth. After joining forces with Madame Carla Göteborg (the lovely Arlene Dahl as the freshly widowed wife of a rival scientist), Icelandic strongman Hans (legitimate Icelander Peter Ronson), and his devoted duck Gertrude, the expedition makes its way down into an extinct volcanic crater and through the cavernous interior of the Earth, threatened all the while by hazardous geology, dinosaurs, and a devious heir to the Saknussem legacy who wishes to claim the center of the Earth as his own…

Journey to the Center of the Earth is a matinee-style programmer done in atypically grand style, and one of the few honestly BIG science fiction spectacles of its day (along with Forbidden Planet and the productions of George Pal). While some of the set design is suspect (director Henry Levin and director of photography Leo Tover keep those early cavern interiors dark with good reason) the overall scale of the thing, particularly when the ruins of Atlantis and the expansive mushroom forest make their appearances, and the caliber of the talent involved more than make up for it. Boone no doubt set his young idolaters’ hearts a-twitter, both with his early crooning and later clothing-impaired antics, but for me this has always been Mason’s show. The actor was arguably at the height of his potential here, with Hitchcock’s North By Northwest under his belt and Kubrick’s Lolita within sight, and had already proven his Verneian mettle as the quintessential Captain Nemo in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea just a few years earlier. Perhaps more important than Mason alone is the convincing tit-for-tat relationship that develops between him and his co-star Arlene Dahl (one of Minneapolis’ own, for those of you locals reading) – this drama has always worked for me, even as a kid who was accustomed to patiently waiting out the “boring parts” to get to the sensational trappings.

Of course Journey to the Center of the Earth has sensational trappings in spades, including such suspense staples as the ledge walk (soon to be appropriated by Irwin Allen, who evidently thought it the epitome of screen thrills), the giant rolling boulder, and the collapsing rock bridge – this was one of the earlier big-budget efforts to co-opt such B-grade cliffhanger devices, before Lucas and Star Wars made the practice an industry standard. The special effects production is top-notch throughout, with the matte artist(s) proving especially deserving of commendation (the early vistas of Icelandic mountains and later revelation of a vast underground sea are both breathtaking stuff), though, as ever, there is at least one point of contention. Like One Million B.C. and the Flash Gordon serials before it, Journey to the Center of the Earth relied on the deservedly criticized slurpasaur technique to bring its various dinosaurs to life. In this case its a gaggle of rhinoceros iguanas and one rather irate tegu pulling monster duty, though at least the former are cast as morphologically similar Dimetrodons – in the annals of slurpasaur history they are easily some of the most convincing. Fox obviously deemed the monster efforts of Emil Kosa Jr., James B. Gordon and L. B. Abbott to be “good enough” in this respect, as the trio were tasked with the process again just a year later, for Irwin Allen’s The Lost World.

Slurpasaurs or no, Journey to the Center of the Earth‘s tremendous entertainment potential remains (there’s a reason the ScreenArchives servers crashed the day this film went up for pre-order, and it wasn’t just the promise of Pat Boone’s autograph!), and with a host of wonderful performances, a taught script, and superb production design on its side it stands firmly as one of the best of its genre. This is a film that’s captivated me since before I can rightly remember, and is more than worthy of recommendation if for that reason alone. See it!

I’ve owned Journey to the Center of the Earth on VHS, Laserdisc and DVD over the years, and as such I’ve looked forward the title’s debut in high definition with the utmost anticipation. I was not disappointed.

If I’m not mistaken, Journey‘s negative was in too ragged a condition to be sourced for either DVD or Blu-ray, and as such the film had to be reconstituted from 35mm separations (essentially three individual black and white prints, each of which represents one color of the three-strip color process) for its more recent video transfers. Given the quality of the results, I’m glad 20th Century Fox went to all the trouble. It seems pertinent to get the worst out of the way first. Journey isn’t a spotless presentation by any means, and minor flecks and speckling are in evidence throughout. More bothersome is faint but notable vertical scratching to the right of frame center that persists for what appears to be an entire reel, from roughly 00:35:00 to 00:48:00 (see the first screenshot below, just above Alec’s shoulder). The anomaly is present in the 2003 Fox DVD of the film as well, but has become more noticeable with the increased resolution (it’s easy to miss unless hunted for on the DVD).

The issue of damage aside, it’s difficult to fault Journey‘s HD presentation for much of anything else – in 1080p this film can be quite stunning, and the improvement in-motion is substantial (gone forever is the modestly ghosty, video quality of the DVD). As I find myself saying so often of these older CinemaScope productions, detail doesn’t improve so much as the texture of the thing. This is another film that has thankfully been allowed to retain the physicality of that medium on Blu-ray, even if the grain isn’t so well rendered here as on The Egyptian or Picnic. Color reproduction is vivid and natural (this is perhaps the greatest benefit of working from separations), with robust saturation and sharp contrast that really puts past editions to shame. In purely technical terms this is another good showing for Twilight Time - Journey receives a typically strong Mpeg-4 AVC encode at an average video bitrate of 33.2 Mbps. The feature is spread comfortably over a dual layer BD50, and artifacting, if any, is negligible. Fans of the film should be very pleased.

Journey to the Center of the Earth receives a considerable bump in the audio department courtesy of a lovely lossless DTS-HD MA encode of the original 4-track stereo mix, and it should come as no surprise that Bernard Herrmann’s bass-heavy score, often muddled in past editions, sees the most benefit from it. The organs underlying the opening title theme are thunderous here, and as a former bass (and contrabass) clarinetist I was thrilled to finally be able to distinguish that instrument’s role in things as well. As is the norm for Twilight Time’s Fox-licensed titles, there are no subtitles available. Supplements offer Herrmann’s score as an isolated lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 track, as well as the original American and Spanish trailers for the film (both SD). Packaging is of the company’s typically high standards, spearheaded by another wonderful essay from Julie Kirgo, and the disc is, again, fully functional, with non-generic chapter stops, pop-up menu and so on.

What else can I say? I love this film, and Twilight Time’s limited edition Blu-ray soundly bests what’s come before. This gets another easy recommendation from me.

Screenshots were captured as native resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, then compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the ImageMagick command line tool.


Darna! Ang Pagbabalik

May 4th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Darna: The Return
directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes
1994 / Viva Films / 104‘
written by Floy Quintos, from characters by Mars Ravelo
cinematography by Marissa Floirendo
music by Archie Castillo
starring Anjanette Abayari, Edu Manzano, Cherie Gil, Pility Corrales, Rustom Padilla, Bong Alvarez, and Lester Llansang

If you want to know more about Mars Ravelo’s Wonder Woman inspired yet supremely Filipino superheroine Darna and her different on-screen incarnations, head on over to my buddy and fellow agent of M.O.S.S. Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill, who has spent a lot more time watching and thinking about Darna movies than I have.

The home province of everyone’s favourite rural superheroine Darna (Anjanette Abayari) is flooded in a villain-caused (yet not exactly explained by the film) catastrophe. Worse, a large woman clad in green and wearing a turban accosts our heroine in her non-superheroic form as country girl Narda while she’s distracted by a snake and clobbers her from behind. The villainess then proceeds to steal the stone Narda needs to swallow to transform into Darna, leaving our heroine for dead and in the rather undignified position of having to be rescued from the rising flood by her Grandma and her little brother Ding (Lester Llansang).

Either the clobbering, the loss of the stone, or the trauma of the natural catastrophe leaves Nards rather addled in the brain, and she spends the following escape of her family to Manila – as well as her first days there – as a happy, mute, loon, though somewhat threatened by various unpleasant males who find her mental state all too inviting. Still, it’s like a super hero vacation.

Once arrived in Manila, the family takes shelter in the hovel of Pol (Rustom Padilla), who may or may not be a distant relative, but who in any case once left their country home for the big city.

 
 
 

After various adventures – among them a meeting with local gangster chief Magnum (Bong Alvarez) – a sort of plot develops. It turns out that Darna’s arch nemesis, the snake-haired Valentina (Pilita Corrales), is responsible for the loss of Darna’s stone. She needs it to keep herself from turning into an – probably ill smelling – heap of goo, it seems.

Apart from that Valentina has bigger plans too. Her – also snake-haired – daughter Valentine aka Dr. Aden (Cherie Gil) has founded a millennial cult playing on the fears of the poor parts of society, promising her followers that Manila will rise into the skies to save them all from the coming destruction of the Philippines by floods, if they just pray hard enough. Valentine’s crazy preacher TV programme (she has interpretative background dancers) puts the mind-whammy on Grandma, who soon spends all her time praying and furnishing Pol’s hovel with plants. Which is actually an improvement, but hey – evil!

Anyway, while he’s out and about sniffing around the cult’s lair (why? you got me there), Ding manages to steal Darna’s stone back, and soon enough, our heroine is fighting evil-doers again, getting into a romantic triangle with Pol and a cop named Max (Edu Manzano), and saving the Philippines from the snake family’s evil plans.

Well, say what you will against the at times plodding pace of this outing of the ever-popular Filipino heroine Darna, but it’s still packed full of stuff, some of it interesting, some puzzling, some just plain weird. My plot synopsis has left out various side plots, “comic” distractions and characters – like Ding’s female friend Pia (Jemanine Campanilla) – the movie decides to forget halfway through, but really, this is not the kind of film that’s interested in a finely crafted dramatic arc. The film’s structure is – like in most other films meant for a more rural Filipino audience I’ve seen – episodic and distractible, and often reminded me of the way 70s Bollywood tried and succeeded to be everything to every viewer. Despite the absence of musical numbers, Darna! Ang Pagbabaliktruly squeezes everything and the kitchen sink into its 100 minutes of running time: cute children, low-brow humour, superheroic throw-downs, romance, a bit of horror, some excellent South-East Asian weirdness like freaky snake person transformation effects and an exploding villainess, a bit of social melodrama, and even a bit of religion (not surprising in a Filipino movie, really).

 
 
 

This kind of approach does of course threaten a film’s coherence and always risks to annoy a given viewer by spending too much time on the elements she isn’t interested in. As a German viewer, I’m certainly not part of the film’s core audience, seeing as it is clearly produced with a Filipino audience of the early 90s in mind, playing with and against the anxieties – poverty, religious mania, natural catastrophes – of its time and place. If you look at a film like this as an outsider, you need to bring a bit of patience and a willingness to accept a slightly different view of the world than you’re used to; in this regard, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik is just like a Ramsay Brothers movie or the body of work of Sompote Sands, though certainly more good-natured than the works of the former, and far less painful than those of the latter.

Fortunately, the film – co-directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes – does have more than a few elements that make getting into it quite easy for somebody of my tastes, and, I suspect, the discerning tastes of the typical reader of this column. If there’s one thing that speaks a true international language, after all, then it’s scenes of a statuesque and likeable beauty in a skimpy yet curiously not sleazy outfit flying around punching evil-doers and monsters. Abayari may not be the greatest of actresses (especially when playing trauma clown Narda), but she’s likeable (you seldom see a US superhero grin this much, as if it were an actual joy being a hero, flying and saving people, instead of a pain in the ass), has the right physique for her role and manages to wear a skimpy costume with a degree of dignity that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

But even when it isn’t clobbering time, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik has more than enough enjoyable, or at least interesting moments. Some of the scenes surrounding the snake women’s cult are actually somewhat disturbing in their portrayal of religious mania – those that aren’t pretty goofy, that is – and the whole plot line of Grandma turning into one of the cult members is not exactly realistically handled, but quite effective as a play on the fear of losing a lost one to malevolent influences without having the power to do anything about it.

These scenes are pretty dark for what is at its core a family movie, and would be quite unthinkable in a Hollywood family movie (just as the semi-realistic portrayal of poverty and desperation), which is, of course something I do approve of.

And even though Darna! (you gotta love that exclamation mark there) Ang Pagbabalik isn’t meant for me, it still made me glad to have watched it.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


A Trip to the Moon – in color

March 29th, 2012 | article by | 4 Comments »
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The color restoration of A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) is available as a limited edition 2-disc (Blu-ray/DVD) Steelbook from Flicker Alley, and can also be purchased through Amazon.com.

Note (4/2/2012): In addition to the missing narration It has been noted by one person (both at the Blu-ray.com forums and in a comment to this article) that the Robert Israel score is out of sync on the black and white version of the film, but this is most certainly not the case on my Blu-ray. The sync is just fine in my copy, including the punctuation of the gun firing, the landing on the moon, and so on. The same has reported sync issues with The Astronomer’s Dream, a problem my disc is free from as well.

As a film, A Trip to the Moon should need no introduction. Arguably the best of the longer form stories to emerge from pioneer Georges Méliès’ prolific turn-of-the-century dream factory, A Trip to the Moon is both one of the earliest of literary adaptations for the screen (freely skimmed from Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, as well as a contemporary stage production of the same, and H.G. Well’s The First Men in the Moon from 1901) and a proving ground for early on-screen special effects. Starring Méliès himself as a bearded professor, the 13 minute adventure concerns a group of astronomers and the fantastic things they encounter after being shot to the Moon in a massive shell. Told with thrilling momentum and boundless imagination, A Trip to the Moon still enchants as pure cinema even as it celebrates its one hundred and tenth year.

It’s impossible to overstate the amount of time and effort that went into restoring this color edition of A Trip to the Moon (the film was one of many that was made available both in original black and white and elaborate hand-colored editions), a process that stretched from 1999 to the premiere of the finished restoration at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. A labor of love elaborated upon at length in the 2011 documentary The Extraordinary Voyage (which is included in this dual format release), this hand-colored edition was painstakingly pieced together from a badly decomposed Spanish print (the reel was essentially a solidified puck when it arrived at the facilities of France’s Lobster Films) with its missing pieces compiled from the complete sections of various black and white prints. Even for such a brief film, no more than a few handfuls of shots all told, it was a truly monumental undertaking.

As exemplified by the comparison above, taken from The Extraordinary Voyage, the end result is impressive indeed – particularly when the extreme age and impossibly corrupted quality of the only available hand-colored source are taken into account. A Trip to the Moon has been given life anew, and the brazenly artificial color plays well into the similarly unbelievable design of the film itself.

Previously noted for their releases of such silent classics as Abel Gance’s La Roue and their DVD collections of Méliès’ short films, niche label Flicker Alley have now made the color restoration of A Trip to the Moon available for home consumption by way of an elegant limited edition Steelbook containing both Blu-ray and DVD presentations of the film and The Extraordinary Voyage.

Of all the classic cinema to make its way to Blu-ray thus far this may well be of the most historical importance, and Flicker Alley have done well by it in the video department. A Trip to the Moon is presented in both restored color and black and white here (1080p for each), and looks quite good in both instances. The color version flickers, shakes, and worse at times, but likely represents the best that could ever be expected from the materials at hand (that a near-solid chunk of century-old celluloid could be made watchable at all is, for lack of better words, miraculous). The black and white is similarly imperfect but improves upon the color version in terms of contrast and clarity. As with the color version I find it impossible to complain. A Trip to the Moon looks better in both editions than I’ve ever seen it look, allowing me to spot some details I’d never noticed before (like the outlandish faces made at points by the cast), and the texture of the more precise black and white edition is tremendous.

Both versions of A Trip to the Moon, The Extraordinary Voyage, and all of the disc’s supplements are housed on a single layer BD25 with reasonable success. The Mpeg-4 AVC-encoded video is set to an average bitrate of 17.6 Mbps throughout, but the image goes generally unperturbed by the digital artifacts expected from such a low figure. Zooming in revealed some minor blocking in the film texture, but nothing that distracted from my viewing. While I’d have appreciated higher average bitrates and a push to dual layer, what Flicker Alley have provided is perfectly satisfactory.

Blu-ray screenshots were taken as full resolution .png in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 97% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

The one downfall of the presentation, strictly with regards to the color restoration, is the audio selection. As was no doubt contractually stipulated when Flicker Alley licensed the restoration for distribution, the only audio option for this version of the film is a new soundtrack composed by the French duo Air (presented in lossless DTS-HD 5.1). Derivative of a variety of popular artists and rarely, if ever, appropriate for the material in question, Air’s music is distracting at best and downright awful at worst.

The black and white version of A Trip to the Moon has its own audio troubles, though they’re blessedly of a more temporary nature. Due to a production error, the primary audio selection for the black and white feature – the original orchestral score by Roger Israel accompanied by the original English narration written by Méliès – does not actually include the narration. Flicker Alley have have been quick to address the issue and will be mastering new Blu-ray discs to resolve it (the DVD is unaffected). These discs will be sent out by request to customers who have purchased the package. You’ll find the “Disc Replacement Form” linked in towards the bottom of the company’s A Trip to the Moon page. Two other audio options are also included for the black and white feature – a ‘troupe of actors’ voicing various characters to piano accompaniment by Frederick Hodges, and lone Frederick Hodges piano accompaniment. The latter two options are presented in 16-bit LPCM 2.0, while the defective primary track is Dolby Digital 2.0 – each sounded just fine to these ears, missing narration notwithstanding. There are no subtitles.

Addendum 05/07/2012: Flicker Alley’s replacement Blu-ray disc arrived earlier today, and a quick look shows the narration is now present for the Black and White version (though some have complained that the Robert Israel score is out of sync, neither of my now two Blu-ray copies have that issue). In terms of overall specs the new disc appears identical to the original, and our with regards to the rest of the presentation still stand.

The supplemental package for the release is quite strong, though the primary supplement is arguably more a co-feature. The Extraordinary Voyage, a 66-minute documentary that tracks the ups and downs of George Méliès’ brief cinematic career and relates the details of the restoration of A Trip to the Moon, premiered alongside Méliès’ film at Cannes 2011 and it’s lovely to have here for home viewing. The documentary was produced in HD and is presented as such on this Blu-ray, with audio presented in DTS-HD 5.1. Far less interesting is a 10-minute interview with Air (HD, 16-bit LPCM 2.0) on their dubious contribution, in French with English subtitles.

Flicker Alley have also included two thematically appropriate films from Méliès. The first, and best, is The Astronomer’s Dream, a delightfully eccentric 3-minute piece that has a bearded astronomer tormented by both a devil and a gigantic carnivorous moon. Originally produced in 1898, The Astronomer’s Dream may be the oldest thing yet to hit Blu-ray. The second film, 1907′s The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon, is indicative of Méliès in his waning years. Longer at 10 minutes, but not to any good purpose, the film has a professor and his students observing the eponymous Eclipse and other celestial phenomena. Both films are presented in 1080p HD, but are upscaled from standard definition transfers and present with the expected video artifacts (ghosting, aliasing). Despite this The Astronomer’s Dream looks perfectly presentable, while The Eclipse shows more of its SD video roots. Audio for each (musical accompaniment only) is presented in 16-bit LPCM 2.0.

The Astronomer's Dream

The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon

Though the Steelbook phenomenon has never really caught on in the US, even those who dislike the format will have a hard time decrying Flicker Alley’s beautiful work. The G2 (standard Blu-ray packaging height) Steelbook comfortably houses both the Blu-ray and DVD as well as a booklet of film stills and notes excerpted from Gilles Duval and Séverine Wemaere’s book A Trip to the Moon Back in Color. The wonderful cover is based upon an illustration by Méliès himself, and ranks as one of the more attractive packaging designs I’ve ever encountered.

Flicker Alley’s Blu-ray / DVD issue of A Trip to the Moon isn’t perfect, but its many positives more than make up for its few shortcomings (the biggest of which – the missing narration on the black and white version – is in the process of being resolved). I’ve had the release pre-ordered since I first learned of it in mid-January, and even after two and a half months of anticipation I wasn’t disappointed. Méliès in HD may not be a necessary fixture on the average home video shelf (though it should be!), but if you have even a passing interest in cinema history then you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. Recommended.

The color restoration of A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) is available as a limited edition 2-disc (Blu-ray/DVD) Steelbook from Flicker Alley, and can also be purchased through Amazon.com.


Étoile

January 13th, 2012 | article by | 2 Comments »
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dir. Peter Del Monte
1989 / Gruppo Bema / Reteitalia / 101′
written by Peter Del Monte, Franco Ferrini and Sandro Petraglia
cinematography by Acácio de Almeida
original music by Jürgen Knieper
starring Jennifer Connelly, Gary McCleery, Laurent Terzieff, Charles Durning and Olimpia Carlisi

American ballerina Claire (Jennifer Connelly) travels to Budapest for an audition for either a role in “Swan Lake” or a place in a ballet academy (as about other things, Étoile is decidedly unclear about it, but it really doesn’t matter in the long run). When her time to audition comes, though, Claire has a sudden case of nerves and flees, getting lost in the belly of the theatre the audition takes place in, until she comes to a stage where she, of course, begins to dance.

Claire is witnessed by the ballet troupe’s director (Laurent Terzieff), who for some reason that will become clear later on calls her by the name of Nathalie. Which, of course, again drives Claire to flight.

Later, our heroine, in an understandably bad mood about her own behaviour, tries to distract herself by talking a walk through Budapest. She meets fellow American Jason (Gary McCleery) – with whom she had already met-cute before – and proceeds to do some of that earnest falling in love in minutes young people in movies are so fond of; though it has to be said that Jason seems much more smitten with Claire than she is with him, for Claire has after all already found the love of her life in form of dancing, as she explains to him. Not one to be discouraged by that sort of thing, Jason promises to return to the theatre with Claire the next day to try and get her a second chance for her audition.

That very night, though, Claire is so disturbed by a nightmare about characters from “Swan Lake” the audience also already knows as part of the dance troupe she decides to just pack her things and fly back to the USA at once. Before she can escape whatever she’s fleeing from, though, Claire’s identity (and probably her reality, too) begins to shift. She signs a form with the name “Nathalie Horvath”, and follows a call for a person of that name to the airport’s information booth, from where she is directed to a car waiting for Nathalie/her. Not surprisingly, the car is driven by the dance troupe’s factotum who brings Claire/Nathalie to a rather dilapidated mansion she had already entered once while cavorting with Jason.

From that point on, Claire becomes Nathalie, the prima ballerina of the dance troupe, and spends her time staring at swans in the park, rehearsing for “Swan Lake”, and looking pretty zoned out.

On one of her outings to the park, Nathalie is observed by Jason, who had been pretty frustrated by her supposed return to the USA. When he tries to talk to her, Nathalie doesn’t recognize him. Jason is understandably confused by the whole affair, and begins obsessing about Claire/Nathalie, follows her, sneaks around, succeeds in a Library Use roll, and eventually stumbles on a peculiar and rather horrible truth about his beloved’s coming appearance in “Swan Lake”. If Jason can’t rescue Claire, a past tragedy will repeat itself.

  
  
  

To get the obvious question out of the way first, yes, there are clear parallels between Italian director Peter Del Monte’s Étoile and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, but even though both films share certain thematic interests (loss or fluidity of identity of a young woman), and – obviously – “Swan Lake” (a ballet made to explore shifting identities if ever there was one), both directors have very different approaches to their material that can’t all be explained by the different eras their films were made in. Where Aronofsky’s idea of the irrational is grounded in very traditional psychological models (bringing the dreaded bane of “realism” even into a film about somebody losing touch with reality), Del Monte goes a more European way. The Italian is not very interested in realistic psychology, and instead aims for the archetypes found in fairy tales and myths, where symbols and the things symbols are supposed to signify are often one and the same.

It’s difficult to ignore the influence Hitchcock – especially Vertigo - seems to have had on Del Monte’s movie. Watching the film, I was frequently reminded of a less hysterical twin to Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock-influenced (some people would argue ripping off Hitchcock; these people are wrong) phase, an impression that certainly did not decrease through the themes and visual cues these films share. The clear parallels to Hitchcock and De Palma are a bit of a problem for Étoile from time to time, pushing me to comparisons that make it look worse than it deserves. To use an easy example, Gary McCleery sure is no James Stewart (not even a Cliff Robertson).

It would probably have been better to cast the leads five to ten years older, which probably would have made them too old for the fairy tale parallels, but could have improved one of the film’s weak spots to no end. Don’t misunderstand me, McCleery isn’t bad, and young Jennifer Connelly does dreamy, dream-like and beautiful very well indeed, but he is lacking the edge his more obsessive scenes need, and she is not at all convincing in the scenes when she takes on the role of the black swan, both things somewhat more experienced actors could have sold better.

These problems on the acting side aren’t what will make or break Étoile for most viewers though, I think. Basically, the potential audience of Étoile will encounter (or enjoy) the same problems-that-aren’t-actually-problems-but-parts-of-the-general-aesthetic many of my favourite European films of the fantastic show: the languid pacing and ambiguous working of space and time that have more to do with the structure of a dream than that of a textbook narrative; the characters that don’t pretend to function like real people; the emphasis on mood possibly to the detriment of believability and clearly to the detriment of realism. Of course, all these things belong in a movie with no interest in picturing reality, or being “believable” as a depiction of consensus reality.

Generally, Del Monte seems to have control over his film (not something I’d say about all movies in this style) until we come to the climax, that is, when trouble rears its head. Let’s just say that the scene of Jason fighting a giant black swan clearly oversteps the line between the dream-like and symbolic and the painfully ridiculous, and that a dramatic highpoint should probably not be a film’s worst scene.

For most of its running time, though, Étoile plays out like a dream, with all the symbolism and all the ambiguity of symbols that implies. I suspect most of the film’s viewers will either adore – like me – or hate that dream-like mood dominating it; I don’t feel neutrality to be an option.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Magic of the Universe

December 9th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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a.k.a.: The Magician / Salamangkero
Year: 1986  Runtime: 84′  Director: Tata Esteban
Writer: Grace Hill Serrano   Cinematography: Joe Tutanes   Music: Rey Ramos
Cast: Michael De Mesa, Sunshine Dizon, Tom Tom, Gina Alajar, Tanya Gomez, Armida Siguion-Reyna

Stage magician Professor – we never learn Professor of what, though I do suspect trundling through the jungle to be his main area of expertise – Jamir (Michael De Mesa) loses his little daughter Freza (Sunshine Dizon) when he’s doing a standard disappearing act. The little girl disappears well enough but she doesn’t reappear again when she should. Looking not quite as worried as the situation would suggest, Jamir, his wife and his fat little boy assistant (Tom Tom) go off to visit a friendly black magician, hoping he can explain what happened to Freza. Alas, despite some tasteful licking of raw monkey brains (I don’t think no animals were harmed in the making of this movie), there’s not much concrete to be gotten from the magician, except some mutterings about Jamir being in terrible danger and some vague hints pointing the family in the direction of another jungle village.

Once arrived there, the family has nothing better to do than to stage another show (that is the sort of thing you do to find your disappeared daughter, right?), during which Mum disappears too. While Jamir and the fat boy start to get a bit depressed now, Mum finds herself reunited with Freza – as captives of an evil witch named Mikula (Armida Siguion-Reyna) who lives with a horde of child prisoners, some horned pig people and a cross between a gremlin, a toad, your worst nightmares and a TV in a palace in the jungle. Mikula finally deigns to do some exposition, so we learn that she has kidnapped the Jamir women to avenge herself on Jamir’s dead great grandfather, who was her teacher at magic but cursed her with a big, pulsating head once he realized how evil she was.

Jamir hears about the same story from the ghost of said great grandfather the very same night, because now it’s exposition time, the film just can’t stop itself anymore. Gramps also adds that Jamir needs to find some magical doodad to be able to fight Mikula, else he and his family will die and Mikula will rule the world.

The rest of the film sees Jamir and the fat boy wander aimlessly through the jungle, getting saved from the attentions of a guy with a very big sword by the Guardian of the Woods (whose power is shooting cartoon laser beams from her eyes, if you need to ask) and impress a tribe of feral little people with the old pigeon trick. Then the boy is kidnapped too and the film spends most of its time with everyone not Jamir escaping from Mikula, meeting strange things and people and getting kidnapped again, until it is time for Jamir to become undeservedly powerful and win the day with his own new cartoon lightning beams. What a hero!

  
  
  

I suspect Filipino Magic of the Universe to be one of those at least part-time disturbing kids movies all Asian countries seem to excel at, though its combination of naive and round-about plotting, bad rubber masks, cruelty to adorable little monkeys, freakish creatures making even more freakish noises, and little children (sort of) saving the day might just as well be explained by everyone involved in the production being batshit insane or hopped up on snorting crystallized EC comics; actually, now having thought about it for a few seconds longer, it’s probably all three.

Connoisseurs of this sort of movie – the little sister genre to my beloved weird fu genre – will pretty much know what to expect from Magic: awkward and somewhat dull direction (by Tata Esteban); a primitive – possibly borrowed from somewhere – synth soundtrack that fluctuates between the trite and the disquieting (the latter is especially awesome here in the fight scene between Tom Tom and a demonic kung fu kid, or whatever he/she/it is supposed to be); editing of the rough and tumble kind; ideas and concepts so disturbing most Western movies for grown-ups wouldn’t dare use them (that poor monkey at the beginning or the Guardian of Forest’s head being eaten to give Mikula more magic power, anyone?) presented with shoulder-shrugging nonchalance; a lack of explanation for a lot of things (whatis Mikula doing with all these children?); an English dub job so atrocious one can’t help but think it was done by random tourists who were kidnapped and locked up in the cellar of the film’s producers as a cheap alternative to professional voice actors.

All that and more is there and accounted for in a film that does its best to sabotage its rather mind-blowing effects with somewhat ponderous pacing and a hero of utmost incompetence (he’s really just wandering around until he points a stick at his nemesis), but that just can’t be anything less than entertaining as long as it is adding one weird and wondrous thing to the next. When the film’s not actively disturbing you with Mikula’s increasingly pulsating head, it’s weirding you out with a sudden monster synth rock party (Mikula has her own band, just like a Bollywood villain, although the film lacks a scene where Jamir pretends to be part of a dance troupe), or throwing in a random easily depressed swamp monster and a woman turned to stone for good measure.

I don’t really like ending a write-up on a “you’ll like this thing if you like this sort of thing” note, but what can a boy do when confronted with a movie whose main achievement apart from being oh so very strange is that nobody making it does seem to have just stopped for a moment and said “what are we doing here, guys?”?

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

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.

Heavy Metal

October 30th, 2011 | article by | 3 Comments »
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Year: 1981  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 90′
Director: Gerald Potterton   Writers: Daniel Goldberg, Len Blum, Dan O’Bannon,
Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Angus McKie, Jean Giraud
Music: Elmer Bernstein, Riggs, Blue Oyster Cult, Donald Fagen, Stevie Nicks, Journey,
Cheap Trick, Nazareth, Don Felder, Sammy Hagar, Trust, Black Sabbath, Devo
Cast: Rodger Bumpass, John Candy, Jackie Burroughs, Joe Flaherty, Don Francks, Martin Lavut,
Marilyn Lightstone, Eugene Levy, Alice Playten, Harold Ramis, Susan Roman, August Schellenberg,
Richard Romanus, John Vernon, Caroline Semple, Al Waxman, Harvey Atkin, Glenis Wootton Gross
Disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment   Video: 1080p 1.85:1
Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 English, DTS HD-MA 5.1 French   Subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish, French
Disc: BD50 (All Region)   Release Date: 06/14/2011   Available for purchase through Amazon.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.  This edition is also our contribution to the Skeletons in the Closet roundtable, the inaugural group-think event of online pop culture consortium M.O.S.S.

A fleet of bombers slice through occupied airspace in the last Great War, ack-ack blooming about them and fighter fire riddling them, and their unfortunate crews, with holes.  The bomb bay doors open, the payload is dropped, and the bombers – crippled and leaden with the dead-weight of expended flesh – creep back towards the safety of Allied territory.  We focus in on one bomber in particular, in which all but the pilot and co-pilot have been killed.  As the co-pilot inspects the damage a strange, green-glowing sphere approaches and enters the plane, bathing the dead crewmen in its unnatural, unholy radiation.  We see one of the dead men’s hands in close-up – it boils and bursts, oozing fluids and dissolved flesh until only a menacing skeletal claw remains.  As the co-pilot makes his way back to the cockpit he realizes that the bodies of his comrades have vanished, leaving no trace of themselves behind.  Where could they possibly have gone, and how?

When he hears a rustling in the bomber’s central ball turret his curiosity gets the better of him.  He opens the hatch, expecting one of his fellow men to emerge.  Instead he is grappled by a pair of monstrous arms, and his body splattered lifeless about the turret’s walls.  The pilot, suspecting too late that something is wrong, opens the cockpit door to see what has become of his fellow soldiers – on the other side he is greeted by a gang of inhuman things, piles of bones and organs stuffed into bomber jackets and creeping with grim determination towards his position.  The pilot slams the door to isolate himself from the horror and fires his side arm into the approaching horde, but it’s no use.  The creatures pummel the door to pieces, and as it falls from its hinges a mass of zombified flesh-hungry ghouls spill into the cockpit.  The pilot survives only barely, escaping the doomed bomber by parachute in the nick of time.  As the plane plummets into the Pacific he lands safely on the shores of a tropical atoll – but the safety is only illusory.  Awaiting him is a graveyard of aircraft of all generations, as well as the damnable creatures their passengers have become.  The pilot screams, but it’s too late.  The beasts surround him, leaving no possibility for escape…

These images, etched indelibly into my brain during my impressionable youth, were my first encounter with the alternative animated 1981 vignette-epic Heavy Metal - as they filtered out of my family’s seemingly monolithic tube set (a 32″ Sharp in an oversized black plastic box – huge to me at the time, but soon replaced with a 54″ monstrosity) into my unsuspecting, unprepared mind, I was horrified.  I’d never seen anything like it before, and nor had I expected to, particularly not from a cartoon.  As the scene’s nihilistic conclusion loomed I slammed my prepubescent fist into the power button, thus saving myself from what promised to be more such terror.  Even at that young age I knew I had seen something strange and different, and something I knew darn well I shouldn’t have.  One thing I could hardly have fathomed was that, had I only left the television running, I’d have likely seen a few other things that would have blown my growing male mind1…

It is only with the above experience related that one should judge the unflappable adoration the present I holds for Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel’s alternately crude, juvenile, prurient, and fantastic production – itself modeled on Mogel’s magazine of the same name, the domestic answer to the French publication Metal Hurlant.  Reitman and Mogel’s Heavy Metal was hardly the first alternative animation to burst forth into the American social consciousness (I can only imagine what things might have replaced the writings on these pages had I chanced first upon Ralph Bakshi’s Felix the Cat or Coonskin instead) but it remains one of the most accessible and popular, likely a result of its sidestepping of the sharp satire  and cultural observations of Bakshi’s work in favor of knock-down drag-out pulp madness.  More than once have I earned perplexed glares from Disney fans after they discover that my favorite of the studio’s work is the grim live action fantasy DragonSlayer - how much more disgusted those reactions might have been had those same people only known that my favorite animated film was Heavy Metal!


So beautiful and so dangerous. Who could ever say no to a face like that?

Comprised of a series of stand-alone vignettes, some original and some adapted from stories which had appeared in the magazine, Heavy Metal flirts with a variety of styles and genres – science fiction, film noir, western, fantasy, horror – with little but an overriding sense of adolescent glee holding it all together.  The individual segments – each farmed out to its own team of talented independent animators – are never quite in harmony with one another, even though a framing device in which an evil green orb relates the film’s six stories certainly tries, but the incongruousness of it all quickly becomes part of the film’s charm.  Heavy Metal shifts willfully and wildly in tone and style from one segment to the next, from the eroticized Burroughs-ian universe of Den to the futuristic scum-metropolis of Harry Canyon to the vast, inhospitable fantasy wastes of Taarna, and yet it works, both as an oddball assortment of self-contained narratives and as a jubilant celebration of genre excesses.  The sum experience is the cinematic equivalent of thumbing through the magazine from which the film takes its name – no more and no less than what Reitman and Mogel had always intended – and, much like the ancient Loc-Nar, the magnitude of its appeal and influence should not be underestimated.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the future-noir Harry Canyon.  Set in the rundown sprawl of New York, New York circa 2031, the story follows a world-weary street-smart cabbie who runs afoul of the Venusian mob after saving a red-headed show stopper from a shootout on the front steps of the Museum of Natural History.  The mobsters want the ancient Loc-Nar, the red-head wants to sell it, and Canyon just wants her.  The story by Daniel Goldberg (Cannibal Girls) and Len Blum (Stripes) is a 10-15 minute reduction of the narrative sensibilities of Taxi Driver and the MacGuffin-fueled drama of The Maltese Falcon with plenty of fantastic violence, raunchy cartoon sex and contemporary rock tracks thrown in for good measure.  If the story – a cab driver and a red-head on the run from unseemly elements on the hunt for an ancient artifact in future New York – sounds familiar, it should.  Whether credited or not, Harry Canyon plays like a step-by-step blueprint for much of Luc Besson’s later pop sci-fi epic The Fifth Element - a film which also prominently features a talking orb that is the embodiment evil.  Recently Heavy Metal ‘s influence has been glimpsed in other high-profile projects, notably in the bleak and over-contrived SuckerPunch (whose writer and director, among others, has been mentioned in association with a new Heavy Metal feature) and, more directly, in the 12th season South Park parody Major Boobage.

To that latter end, Heavy Metal is often negatively criticized for its decidedly adolescent sensibilities, including its grade school attention span and subject matter that seems culled straight from the doodlings of a 14 year old boy.  While I can hardly argue with the point – this is, after all, an exceedingly adolescent film - I’m similarly hard pressed to see it as a burden to the production.  Heavy Metal is a film in which cars drive home from outer space, cheeky alien robots have sexual affairs with Earth secretaries, and a pair of intergalactic hippies take a stoned-out trip around the Universe in a giant flying smiley face.  It’s an out and out celebration of whooshing rockets, spurting blood, and bouncing bare breasts – the very staples of the young male imagination brought to life in vivid, living color.  I certainly can’t fault anyone for not liking it, but to hold Heavy Metal‘s juvenile proclivities against it, when they are the very thing it exists to serve, seems more than a little silly2.

Every bit as senseless as you could possibly imagine but more intelligently conceived than you likely thought, this one makes about as good an argument as can be made for smart people making dumb entertainment.  The fun factor here is through the roof even twenty years on, and I’m sure that producers Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel are plenty pleased with their crass animated legacy.  The late Dan O’Bannon’s short horror segment B-17 still appeals to me most here, if only for the childhood memories it recalls, but there are more than enough fantastic developments along the way to appeal to genre fanatics of all kinds.  One could go on interminably about how Heavy Metal isn’t for all tastes, but that’s really the point of it all.  I say give it a try – the worst you can do is hate it.

1 Live and learn, I suppose, but the thin static haze separating family fun from outright pornography in old-school satellite programming would expose me to that other forbidden world soon enough…
2 Yes, I know. I’m sure I’ve made similar arguments against other films.  Then again, I never said I wasn’t silly.

Boo!

Heavy Metal was actually the first DVD I ever purchased, and to be perfectly honest that 1999 Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment edition has held up pretty well over the years with its decent anamorphic image, healthy encode, and substantial slate of supplemental content.  While I’ll be keeping that disc on the shelf for nostalgia’s sake it’s safe to say that it’s not going to be getting much play in the future – this Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Blu-ray blows it right out of the water.  Originally released as a Best Buy exclusive, the disc is now out in wide release and well worth picking up.

Given the highly variable nature of its animation, all of which was produced outside of any major film animation outlets, I had very grounded expectations going into Heavy Metal‘s Blu-ray debut, but I needn’t have worried.  Presented in 1080p at its original theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio, this new HD transfer is a modern marvel as far as I’m concerned.  Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the upgrade is the color reproduction, with both saturation and the depth of hues taking some huge steps forward – the 1999 DVD can look quite faded and yellow in comparison.  The colors here really have some pop (just look at the sky in the first comparison or Taarna’s lips in the final one below), and are backed by a richer, darker contrast and a substantial uptick in clarity and detail.  Each segment is a revelation, from the trash-noir Harry Canyon to the brilliantly bizarre Den to the all-too-brief B-17, and while the crudeness of some sequences is all the more obvious the more awesome moments shine all the brighter.

The overall quality of the film elements seems to have improved a bit as well, and while there is still some damage to contend with (mostly speckling and dust, much of it a product of the original animation and effects process, still more the result of age) the image here is considerably cleaner than on the DVD edition.  The delicious texture of the original photography is also maintained, much to my delight, with variable levels of legitimate film grain present throughout.  It’s refreshing to see that Sony haven’t skimped on the technical front, either.  The AVC-encoded image receives substantial bitrate support at an average of 34.2 Mbps, and the feature spreads comfortably into dual-layer territory.  I noted nothing in the way of artifacting or other encode troubles, and the image retains its lovely film-like aesthetic even under close examination.  The bottom line is that Heavy Metal looks better here than I’d have ever thought it could, and I doubt most theatrical screenings could touch it.

For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  After comparing to the original .png files the results appeared quite transparent to these eyes, even when zooming in 2-3x.  DVD screenshots were captured in .png format in VLC from the 1999 Columbia Tristar Home Video edition (I don’t own the Superbit edition to compare), upconverted to 1920×1080 in GIMP and compressed to .jpg format at a quality setting of 95%.  In the five comparisons below DVD screen shots appear first, followed by the Blu-ray.  The rest should be self-explanatory.

More Blu-ray screenshots:

The all-important audio receives a healthy bump to DTS HD-MA 5.1 in the original English (a second DTS HD-MA 5.1 track in dubbed French is also included), and I’ve never heard Heavy Metal sound better.  The crude sound effects have a wonderful vintage about them, and sound very much of their time, as does the voice recording.  The HD track offers considerably more breathing room than on past editions, sounding neither so muffled as the Dolby Surround 2.0 stereo track or as frail as the Dolby Digital 5.1 included on the 1999 DVD, and feels considerably more substantial for the trouble.  The vintage rock tracks have great punch, with Felder’s Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride) and Hagar’s Heavy Metal both sounding hilariously awesome in their lossless iterations.  Benefiting even more so from the bump is Elmer Bernstein’s tremendous score, which offers some of the best genre work of its kind in segments Den and Taarna.  Heavy Metal finally sounds as big as it should on home video, and while I’d have loved a lossless track in the original stereo for posterity’s sake I’m hard-pressed to complain.  The disc comes with a decent array of subtitling options – English, English SDH, French and Spanish – and, according to the back of the case, should be playable in all Blu-ray regions.

The only area in which the disc seems to be lacking is in the supplemental department, and those who already own the Collector’s Series edition from 1999 won’t find anything new here.  Included is the original feature-length rough cut of Heavy Metal, which runs 90 minutes in 480p and is available both with or without commentary from Carl Macek, a small selection of deleted scenes – the unfinished Neverwhere Land sequence (3 minutes, 480p) and the alternate carousel framing story (2:38, 480p, and with or without Carl Macek commentary) – and the excellent documentary featurette Imagining Heavy Metal (36 minutes, 480p).  While all this is retained, a large selection of material was also left behind.  Lost, but available on the 1999 DVD, are a host of image galleries, including portfolios of pencil art, cell animation, production photos, and a massive gallery of Heavy Metal magazine covers spanning from 1977 to 1999, as well as an audio recording of Carl Macek reading from his book The Art of Heavy Metal: Animation for the Eighties that originally accompanied the feature presentation.

While Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have clearly skimped on the supplements, which is a real shame with regards to the art galleries (these would have looked fantastic bumped to HD), they have spared no expense with regards to the feature presentation, and given the low price this release currently commands that’s more than enough for me.  If I had my way this disc would be sitting on a shelf in every home in America, but finding myself in the absence of godly powers of influence I’ve added it to our shortlist of Blu-ray essentials instead.  So there you have it.  Heavy Metal on Blu-ray is an essential.  That means you have to buy it, right?

in conclusion
Film: Awesome  Video: Excellent  Audio: Excellent   Supplements: Good +
Harrumphs: Limited supplemental weight.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

Krysar

July 22nd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Year: 1986    Runtime: 53′  Director: Jiri Barta
Writer: Kamil Pixa  Cinematography: Vladimir Malik, Ivan Vit   Music: Michael Kocab

The people living in the medieval town of Hamelin are full of perverse industriousness, greed in all of its forms, and narrow-minded cruelty. It’s probably not an accident that the town is hit by a plague of rats who seem hell-bent on taking away the only things the people of Hamelin love – food, money and jewels. There seems to be no way to stop the hairy plague once it has begun, so it looks as if it will be only a question of time until Hamelin’s inhabitants will either all go mad (or rather even more mad than they already were in the beginning) or will have to leave their once prosperous town.

Until a stranger arrives in town. The man pulls out a pipe, and once he begins playing his instrument, the rats are compelled to follow him. He leads the animals onto the city walls from where they jump down into the surrounding moat to drown.

Continue Reading »


Shingeki no Kyojin – Attack on Titan

June 1st, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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publisher: Kodansha,
Shonen Magazine Comics
year: 2009 – 2011 (continuing)
author: Hajime Isayama
Order this book from Amazon.co.jp

From the city stomping of Godzilla and friends to the flatly apocalyptic scenarios of The Last War, Vampire Gokemidoro and Virus, and beyond, the Japanese appetite for fictitious destruction on a near cosmic scale is insatiable.  It’s a fact that’s unsurprising given that disasters of untold magnitude (from the aftermath of WWII to the omnipresent threat of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis) are as much a part of the country’s national identity as cherry blossoms and kimonos.  I suppose that it’s likewise unsurprising to find, in the shadow of nuclear crisis and one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history, that Hajime Isayama’s bleak manga debut Shingeki no Kyojin (literally Advance of the Giants, and subtitled Attack on Titan) has become a smash success.

I have to admit that, while I’ve certainly been aware of the medium, I’d never actually read a manga, nor had I wanted to, until word of Isayama’s bestseller came my way, and the reasons for my interest are as transparent as can be.  Shingeki no Kyojin, which concerns the last remnants of humanity and their fight for survival against an army of man-eating giants, just sounded neat, and the series’ status as a bestseller (its four volumes have sold more than 4.5 million copies to date) certainly helped its case.  I never imagined that the story, or the format in which it was presented, could ever be so engrossing, but so it was that I blazed through the first two volumes in a single pulse-pounding evening.  Color me hooked.

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The Black Cat

March 31st, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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a.k.a.: il gatto nero / Demons 6: de Profundis / Demons 6: Armageddon / Dead Eyes
Year: 1989    Runtime: 89′   Director: Luigi Cozzi
Writer: Luigi Cozzi  Cinematography: Pasquale Rachini  Music: Vince Tempera
Cast: Florence Guerin, Urbano Barberini, Caroline Munro, Brett Halsey, Luisa Maneri

Not to be confused with all those other films about black cats, which comes especially easy in this case, because the black cat isn’t important here at all.

Plot? Oh right, there was something kinda-sorta plot-like hidden away in here somewhere. Ah, there it is: Director Marc Ravenna (Urbano Barberini) is trying to re-ignite his faltering career by making a semi-sequel to Argento’s Suspiria (wouldn’t that actually be a semi-sequel toInferno at this point in time?), based on a witch named Levana from an essay in De Quincey’s Suspiria De Profundis. If you just ignore that Levana isn’t actually a witch but a goddess and wasn’t invented by De Quincey, you’ll be as surprised as I was by the realization that someone working on the script for this one might have read the book the film’s talking about (and, going by the inclusion of an actual quote from Poe, even more than just a single book; Italy sure ain’t Hollywood). You can also be sure someone had seen Suspiria, what with parts of that movie’s theme playing on the soundtrack whenever someone mentions it or De Quincey’s book.

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Mystery Science Theater 3000 XX

March 3rd, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Experiments: Project Moonbase, Master Ninja I, Master Ninja II, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad
Disc company: Shout! Factory   Video: NTSC 4:3 / 16:9   Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 English
Subtitles: none   Discs: DVD5 (3) DVD9 (1)   Release Date: 03/08/2011   Product link: ShoutFactory.com
MST3K XX is reviewed here from a screener provided by Shout! Factory.

I’ve not counted myself among the MST3K faithful for years now, having been recently possessed by a more analytical appreciation of “bad” cinema.  That said, I’ve always had a soft spot for original host and series creator Joel Hodgson, and this latest 4-episode DVD boxed set from Shout! Factory acts as an all-in-one history of his half-decade turn as space-bound test subject Joel Robinson.  This is classic MST3K through and through, and enough to tempt this reviewer back into the fray.

MST3K XX‘s four episodes span three seasons: Project Moonbase from season 1, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad from season 5, and Master Ninja I and Master Ninja II from season 3.  Project Moonbase has its own historic significance, being from the first official season, and The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, featuring the American bastardization of a Russian fantasy film, is an undisputed classic of the series, the real gems of the collection lie right in between.  For my money season 3, with its focus on Sandy Frank, Bert I. Gordon, and the mighty Miles O’Keeffe, is the best the show ever had, and Master Ninja I and II are just more evidence for my case.

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Phenomena

March 2nd, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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a.k.a.: Creepers
Year: 1985   Company: Dacfilm   Runtime: 115′
Director: Dario Argento   Writers: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini   Cinematography: Romano Albani
Music: Goblin, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Simon Boswell, Andi Sex Gang, Fabio Pignatelli
Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Daria Nicolodi, Donald Pleasance, Patrick Bauchau, Tanga the Chimpanzee
Disc company: Arrow Video   Video: 1080p 1.66:1    Audio: LPCM 2.0 English, LPCM 2.0 Italian
Subtitles: English x 2   Disc: BD50 (All Region)   Release Date: 03/07/2011   Product link: Amazon.co.uk
The Beyond is part of the Arrow Video collection, and is reviewed here from a screener provided by Arrow Films. Be sure to visit the Cult-Labs forums to have your say on this and future Arrow Video releases.

Young Jennifer (Connelly) is sent to a prestigious Swiss boarding school by her single father, a famous American actor unaware that the surrounding Swiss countryside is being tormented by a beastly psychopath with a taste for adolescent girls.  Jennifer has a tough time fitting in amongst the brats of the academy and earns the ire of the headmistress there, but a bout of sleepwalking leads her into a friendship with handicapped Scottish entomologist McGregor (Pleasance) and his nursemaid, a trained female chimpanzee named Inga.

Here it is revealed that Jennifer has a strange, ambiguous power over insects, which seem to see her as one of their own.  With her odd abilities suddenly at his disposal, McGregor sends Jennifer out to find the girl killer, whom he suspects is responsible for the disappearance of an associate some time in the past…

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Godzilla’s Revenge

December 23rd, 2010 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Origintal Title: Gojira, Minira, Gabara: Oru Kaiju Daishingeki Alt.: All Monsters Attack
Year: 1969   Company: Toho Co. Ltd.   Runtime: 69′   Director: Ishiro Honda
Writer: Shinichi Sekizawa   Cinematography: Sokei Tomioka   Music: Kuniyo Miyauchi
SPFX Director: Ishiro Honda   Assistant SPFX Director: Teruyoshi Nakano
Cast: Tomonori Yazaki, Eisei Amamoto, Sachio Sakai, Kazuo Suzuki, Kenji Sahara,
Machiko Naka, Shigeki Ishida, Yoshifumi Tajima, Chotaro Tagin,  Ikio Sawamura,
Godzilla: Haruo Nakajima   Minya: “Little Man” Machan,   Gabara: Yu Sekida
Order this film on DVD (Japanese and English versions) from Amazon.com

When it comes to the King of the Monster’s 10th screen adventure I can honestly say that my memories are fond.  It aired on television constantly as I was growing up (being one of the U.P.A. Productions of America properties that TNT broadcast on a regular basis) and, thanks to a grandmother sympathetic to my monster obsession, it was also one of the first Godzilla films I ever owned.  Produced at a fraction of the cost of the previous year’s big budget box office disappointment Destroy All Monsters, Godzilla’s Revenge would be the first entry in the series to be aimed squarely at children – something that has earned it the ire of many a tokusatsu fan in the years since its release.

Godzilla’s Revenge (or All Monters Attack, as Toho would prefer it be called) is easily the most compact of all the mosnter’s outings, focusing not on prehistoric behemoths laying waste to modern civilization but on a child who, in his day-dreaming, visits Monster Island as a means of coping with the problems in his life.  You’ll be forgiven for thinking that sounds a little strange – it is.  But it also makes the film one of the most narratively intriguing of the lot, for Godzilla’s Revenge takes place in a Japan unlike any other in Godzilla history; one in which the eponymous monster is entirely fictional.

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Godzilla vs. Megalon

December 20th, 2010 | article by | 3 Comments »
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Origintal Title: Gojira tai Megaro Year: 1973   Company: Toho Co. Ltd.   Runtime: 81′
Director: Jun Fukuda   Screenplay: Jun Fukuda   Story: Takeshi Kimura, Shinichi Sekizawa
Cinematography: Yuzuru Aizawa   Music: Riichiro Manabe   SPFX Director: Teruyoshi Nakano
Cast: Katsuhiko Sasaki, Hiroyuki Kawase, Yutaka Hayashi, Robert Dunham, Kotaro Tomita,
Wolf Otsuki, Shinji Tatagi, Hideto Odachi, Tsugutoshi Komada, Kenpachiro Satsuma

I’ve never been known for having my finger on the pulse of good taste, so I suppose it’s only to be expected that one of the (and perhaps the) most universally reviled of all Toho Company’s beloved Godzilla franchise would also happen to be one of my personal favorites.  The first of the series to be released domestically through Cinema Shares and the only of them to retain its original Toho-given English title*, Godzilla vs. Megalon was a staple of UHF television programming in my youth – I can at least claim to have come by my bias naturally.

It seems important to note that Godzilla vs. Megalon initially had nothing to do with Godzilla at all.  Toho had conceived the project as the solo debut of the robot Jet Jaguar (the result of a creative children’s contest held by the company the year before), a concept they abandoned out of fear that the new character would be unable to carry a feature all his own.  The shooting schedule was eventually slashed to a mere three weeks and the screenplay altered to include both Godzilla (in his first new suit since 1968) and his previous foe Gigan.  Whether or not Toho’s scheming worked is difficult to assess, but one thing is for certain – Godzilla fought Megalon to the lowest audience turnout ever seen for the franchise up to that point**.

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Avatar

December 2nd, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 2009   Company: 20th Century Fox   Runtime: 162′ / 171′ / 178′
Director: James Cameron   Writer: James Cameron   Cinematography: Mauro Fiore
Music: James Horner  Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver,
Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel Moore, Wes Studi
Disc company: 20th Century Fox   Video: 1080p 1.78:1    Audio: DTS-HD Master 5.1 English,
Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish), Dolby Digital 2.0 English
(descriptive audio)    Subtitles: English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Disc: Dual Layer BD50   Release Date: 04/22/2010   Product link: Amazon.com

To say that I didn’t see Avatar when it was in its original theatrical run (or its more recent re-release) is an understatement – I’ve avoided it outright until today.  Of the billions upon billions of dollars it has reaped in ticket receipts and home video sales not a single penny is mine, something of which I remain quite pleased.  It’s not that I harbor a particular hatred for James Cameron, repulsed as I may have been by the melodrama of his Titanic.  It’s not that the idea of an epic special effects extravaganza didn’t appeal to me – it does.  It’s the cultural phenomenon of Avatar, the millions of people flocking to see it around the world and the hundreds of critics singing its praises, from which I wish to remain distant.

I imagine that, had I seen Avatar in the midst of that sensation, my opinion of it would have been contrarian by principle alone.  So I’ve waited.  Now, almost a year after its initial run began and with two home video releases behind it, it’s safe to say that whatever unjustified negativity the film’s success fostered within me has subsided, and I can finally be unbiased – or as unbiased as one can be about something so saturated as Avatar.  At least the cell phone cross-promotions seem to be over…

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