Posts Tagged ‘Science Fiction’


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

More Blu-ray Screenshots:

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

Horror Express

November 5th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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a.k.a. Panico en el Transiberiano
Year: 1972  Company: Benmar Productions / Granada Films   Runtime: 87′
Director: Eugenio Martin   Writers: Arnaud d’Usseau, Julian Zimet   Music: John Cacavas
Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alberto de Mendoza, Silvia Tortosa, Julio Pena, Angel del Pozo, Telly Savalas, Helga Line, Alice Reinhart, Jose Jaspe, George Rigaud, Victor Israel, Faith Clift, Juan Olaguival
Disc company: Severin Films   Video: 1080p / 480p 1.66:1   Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 (English, Spanish)
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD25 / DVD9   Release Date: 11/29/2011
Reviewed from a screener provided by Severin Films (thanks Nicole!).
Available for purchase through Amazon.com

The last of a three picture deal between American producer Philip Yordan (Crack in the World, 55 Days in Peking) and Spanish director Eugenio Martin (The Ugly Ones), and conceived largely as a means of making use of the expensive passenger train sets devised for the epic Poncho Villa, 1972′s Horror Express is a compact and economical slice of Euro-cult mayhem that benefits from the recycled illusion of production value and a magnificent headline cast. The inimitable duo of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing join forces once more as a pair of catty, big-headed men of science who must contend with a supernatural sci-fi menace on the Trans-Siberian Express.

The story, penned by the men behind the devilish British actioner Psychomania, follows professor Sir Alexander Saxton’s (Lee) discovery of a 2 million year old ape-man frozen in the chilly north of Manchuria. Determined to provide the remains as proof-positive of the theory of evolution, Saxton loads the crated beast onto the next train towards Europe – a train populated not only with hundreds of disposable personalities, but Saxton’s professional rival Doctor Wells (Cushing) as well.  Soon after the train departs on its long snowbound journey the baggage man is found dead, his eyes a boiled to a ghastly white. Saxton’s empty crate provides ample evidence for the cause – his 2 million year old specimen was not so dead as had been presumed, and had awakened from its frosty slumbers and murdered the baggage man. With the creature at large a concerted, but quiet, effort to find and detain it is mounted, but it soon becomes obvious that there’s more to the monster than meets the eye.

Once the beast is tracked down and killed things take a turn for the decidedly silly. An impromptu dining room investigation of its eye fluid reveals a host of unlikely images suspended there – images of our planet’s biological past, including a brontosaurus and pterodactyl, and a mysterious view of Earth from space. Further autopsies on the creature’s victims, whose brains appear to have been scrubbed clean of all knowledge, leads to an astounding conclusion: The ape-man discovered by Saxton was not the monster, but merely a shell for some malignant alien force capable not only of absorbing the intelligence of others but of possessing their bodies as well.  With the truth of the matter revealed doctors Saxton and Wells are faced with a terrifying fact – not only is the extraterrestrial menace  quite comfortably alive, but it’s hiding in the guise of one of the Trans-Siberian’s passengers!


This film’s got stars, and dinosaurs, in its eyes…

Playing a bit like They Came From Beyond Space by way of Who Goes There by way of Murder on the Orient Express, Horror Express is an uneven genre pastiche that never really capitalizes on its own capacity for thrills, chills, mystery and paranoia. Rather than focus on the mechanics of the genre, writers d’Usseau and Zimet instead lead viewers on a string of oddball diversions that include a bit of international espionage and the ravings of a mad monk in the mold of Rasputin (coincidentally, a part played by star Christopher Lee in an earlier Hammer production). None of it ever amounts to much, but it does pass the time between the various monster attacks and ludicrous plot developments. To be fair, d’Usseau, Zimet, and indeed the whole cast and crew, seem perfectly aware of the absurd nature of the project, and an underlying sense of good humor on the part of all involved goes a long way towards keeping Horror Express from feeling so tired, pointless, and repetitive as it easily might have.

Indeed, stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing look to have had a wonderful time with the alternately strange and hilarious material, particularly when it offers them an opportunity to needle one another. The two also bring a wealth of genuine thespian ability to the production, largely occupied with overdubbed Spanish performers otherwise, and each is possessed of that unique talent for making even the dumbest of lines sound reasonable – a skill that’s indispensable to a film that so frequently asks its audience to believe the darnedest things. The supporting cast is largely disposable with the exception of Alberto de Mendoza, who all but steals the show as an insane monk who drops his godly ways and starts following the alien “devil” at the drop of a hat. Telly Savalas (TV’s Kojak) received high billing in the films advertising and is listed third on this video edition, but only appears briefly as the memorably crazy Cossack Captain Kazan. Savalas’ dialogue is perhaps the most ungainly of the whole script, and while none of it makes much sense on its own terms the actor’s unhinged delivery gives it plenty of oomph.

Horror Express will never be confused for great filmmaking, and is possessed of the same cold and languid quality that makes much of the Spanish exploitation of the time so unappealing to me, but its excellent casting and proclivity for the humorously bizarre make all the difference. As a film about an eye-boiling brain-stealing alien intelligence loosed upon long-distance rail travelers it remains the best, and only, of its kind, and genre aficionados should find it well worth checking out.


There’s something about that guy that just doesn’t look right to me…

Taking a cue from a good number of independent English video labels, Severin Films have chosen to present Horror Express as a combination Blu-ray and DVD package. While we’ll be covering the latter later in this section it is the former, with which the film makes its high definition debut, that rightfully commands the most attention. Severin present Horror Express on Blu-ray in full 1080p at its native theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1, sourced from a positive 35mm Spanish print of some dubious lineage (provided you believe the packaging, it was unearthed in a Mongolian film depot…). The print is in decent shape if far from pristine, though I don’t know that anyone was honestly expecting better.

In addition to some printed white damage and splice marks, the print also presents with a healthy assortment of darker debris, scratching, and even the odd tear here or there. This may distract some viewers, but I’d argue that it’s just part and parcel for this sort of low budget exploiter. The source also has its weaknesses with regards to color reproduction and contrast, the latter of which can vary quite a lot depending on the original photography. The image has obviously aged a good deal in the nearly 40 years since Horror Express was originally produced, with the color shifting, at times quite heavily, to the red. I’m not sure what the original photographic intentions were on the part of the director and cinematographer, but it’s impossible for me to believe the flat, over-warm appearance Horror Express currently exudes is accurate. An ounce of restorative attention – some color grading here, some tweaking of the contrast levels there - could well have helped to mitigate the issues with the color and contrast, but these film-based limitations are still far from fatal flaws.  Unfortunately that’s not the end of the story.

Limited though Horror Express‘ source materials may be Severin Films look to have managed a decent high definition transfer of them, particularly in terms of detail. It’s all the more a shame, then, that they’ve bungled things so badly with regards to its presentation on-disc. The numbers hint at the bad things to come – Horror Express limps onto Blu-ray at a total disc size of 21 GB, with a paltry 11.7 GB of that dedicated to the feature and its three accompanying audio tracks. The AVC encoded video averages out at a middling bitrate of just 17.2 Mbps, well less than half of the format’s potential, but even that low figure doesn’t  account for such dreadful results. This is one of the poorest high definition encodes I’ve seen in a while, and it presents with a laundry list of defects that distracted from my viewing at every turn. Most notable in motion are aliasing artifacts that are every bit as frequent as they are ugly. The hounds tooth patterning on Christopher Lee’s suit provides the most obvious examples, with the encoder failing time and again to properly resolve it.


A rough approximation of how this disc’s encode made me feel.

More frustrating on closer examination is the encode’s treatment of the transfer’s grain structure, and vicariously its fine detail. The long and short of it is that there just isn’t much grain or fine detail, as the majority of it has been obliterated by persistent blotchy digital artifacting. The final comparison set below demonstrates the problem most obviously, with the details of the wooden floor disappearing into blotchy artifacts and patches of digital noise, but it is evident to some degree in every shot in the film. There are even some chroma aberrations to be found, tucked away in the lines and patterning of people’s clothing. It’s a hell of a mess all told, and certainly not what I was expecting for a release so oft-delayed as this one – surely in all the months since Horror Express was officially announced someone could have been bothered to check the disc encode? It’s impossible not to feel as though Severin have dropped the ball here, and hard, leaving the video side of the Blu-ray’s feature presentation a very tough sell in spite of some modest improvements over the DVD.

The accompanying DVD is something of a technical improvement given the constraints of its format, but still far from ideal. The disc is sourced from the same hi-def transfer at the same aspect ratio (16:9 enhanced 1.66:1) and features the same inherent deficiencies with regards to color and contrast. Fortunately this disc is dual-layered, a step in the right direction, and while the image still looks substantially weaker than I’d have expected it to (things just aren’t as well resolved as they should be) at least it doesn’t show its artifacting to the same degree as the Blu-ray.  Unfortunately both editions showcase many of the same ugly digital pox marks, as evidenced by Christopher Lee’s suit in the first and next-to-last comparison sets. I’d say it’s a draw as to which is the better way to view the film – the better encoded but visually flat DVD, or the better-resolved but awfully encoded Blu-ray – with neither being particularly appealing in the long run. Amusingly (or distressingly, depending on your frame of mind) both the DVD and Blu-ray share the same menu designs to the point of failure – whoever authored the Blu-ray either forgot or purposefully neglected to include even the most rudimentary pop-up menu during feature playback. That alone is barely worth mentioning, but it is indicative of the breadth of shortcomings that hamper what had the promise of being a fine release.

Blu-ray screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  DVD screenshots were captured as uncompressed .png in VLC media player, and are provided here in both their native resolution (compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool) as well as upscaled 1920×1080 (scaled in GIMP, saved as .png, and converted per the rest to .jpg) to offer the best range of comparison.
DVD 480p | DVD 1080p | Blu-ray 1080p

While the Blu-ray video was impaired to the point of distraction, at least it got the bump to HD. No such luck is to be had with the audio. Horror Express is accompanied in each of its video iterations by lossy Dolby Digital tracks, either 2.0 monophonic English or 2.0 stereophonic Spanish, each at 192 kbps. John Cacavas’ interesting musical score is served best by the better-preserved 2.0 Spanish track, but both sound flat and unremarkable otherwise. I’m not sure that a lossless encoding could have improved much upon that in the Blu-ray edition, but as things stand now I’ll never know. Adding to the disappointment is Severin’s failure to include any subtitles whatsoever, making the secondary Spanish audio track more a vestigial feature than a legitimate viewing option for the majority of the release’s potential audience.

With the feature presentation a disappointment on practically every front, I’m very happy to report that the supplemental package is quite exceptional. Things begin with Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express, a 14 minute interview with director Eugenio Martin. Though Martin’s accent is thick and his handling of English at times lacking, the information he provides is all quite good. Next up is a wonderful half-hour archival interview with late screenwriter Bernard Gordon (The Day of the Triffids), who served as producer on Horror Express, in which he discusses the Hollywood blacklist, his involvement with producer Philip Yordan and his work on the Samual Bronston epics of the ’60s. There’s nothing whatever about Horror Express here, but I couldn’t be bothered by that – it’s a fantastic interview. Telly and Me grants composer John Cacavas a few minutes to talk about his friendship with actor and singer Telly Savalis and their work toghether on this film and elsewhere. The undisputed king of the supplements is an interview and question and answer session with the inimitable Peter Cushing, circa 1973, which runs for a whopping 80 minutes (!) and serves as a sort of commentary track for the feature presentation. I’ll not spoil any of the goods here, but Cushing fans will be over the moon – the disc may be worth picking up for this alone. An introduction to Horror Express by Fangoria editor Chris Alexander (6 minutes), a theatrical trailer, and three trailers for other Severin titles (Psychomania, The House That Dripped Blood and Nightmare Castle) round out the disc.

Horror Express is a fun little footnote in the annals of Euro-horror, and one that I remember seeing many, many times on discount video racks as a kid. I had exceedingly high hopes for this release from Severin Films, hopes that were effectively dashed as soon as the Blu-ray disc began to play.  The issues with the feature presentation are so distracting as to make a recommendation on its merits difficult, but the supplemental package certainly makes this release tempting.  Given the low asking price it currently commands (just $13.99) fans will likely want to indulge for that reason alone.

in conclusion
Film: Good silly fun  Video: Fair +  Audio: Fair   Supplements: Excellent
Harrumphs: You’d do better to ask what isn’t wrong here.  The wealth of supplements is the saving grace.
Packaging: Standard two-hub Blu-ray case.
Available for purchase through Amazon.com

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.

The Power

October 28th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1968  Runtime: 109′  Director: Byron Haskin
Writer: John Gay   Cinematography: Ellsworth Fredericks   Music: Miklos Rozsa
Cast: George Hamilton, Suzanne Pleshette, Michael Rennie, Nehemia Persoff,
Richard Carlson, Yvonne De Carlo, Aldo Ray

Professor Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) is the scientist in charge of a project researching pain to make NASA’s astronauts more durable. During a meeting that is supposed to introduce their new government contact, Arthur Nordlund (Michael Rennie), to the team, notorious crackpot Professor Hallson (Arthur O’Connell) gets a wee bit hysterical about the results of some intelligence tests he made with the members of the team. It looks like one of the scientists has climbed some additional steps on the evolutionary letter, and has an improbable IQ as well as the obvious perks that go with something like that, like mind control and telekinetic powers. The other scientists, including Tanner and his girlfriend Professor Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette), are more than just a little skeptical concerning their colleague’s ideas, but when Hallson convinces everyone to concentrate on rotating a piece of paper with the power of their minds, and the thing actually begins to rotate, they are proven wrong. Looks like one of them really must be the homo superior.

That very same night, the mysterious mutant kills Hallson with his or her mental powers. The scientist only leaves behind a note with the name “Adam Hart” on it, a name his wife (Yvonne De Carlo) will later remember to have something to do with her husband’s childhood. While he’s at it, the guy who definitely isn’t Professor X casts enough doubt on Tanner for the police to see the scientist as the main suspect for the Hallson’s murder. Hart, seemingly having a rather unhealthy sense of humour, then proceeds to turn Tanner’s very real academic credentials into fakes, which costs the Professor his job pretty quickly. Not satisfied with that, Hart then tries to kill Tanner (in what may very well be the film’s weirdest scene) with the help of a carousel.

Somehow, Tanner manages to survive the mutant’s attack. The events have made it quite clear to him that he can’t expect help from anyone, and that he certainly can’t trust his colleagues anymore, for one of them must be his hidden enemy. So the scientist sets upon the only course still open to him: trying to find Hart’s trace in Hallson’s hometown. Obviously, dangers to life and sanity, and Aldo Ray await him.

  
  
  

Byron Haskin’s George Pal-produced The Power is a surprisingly peculiar film that uses its SF thriller plot to create a film that unites elements of the pre-70s conspiracy thriller with scenes of a gleefully bizarre nature, and a generally pessimistic view of human nature, resulting in something halfway between Alfred Hitchcock and an acid trip.

Casting George Hamilton of all people as a scientist of some renown may sound more bizarre than clever, but his special brand of absent-minded vacuity works here as well as it would later do in Curtis Harrington’s The Dead Don’t Die, turning him into someone in whose shoes most every viewer would be able to feel comfortable, even if said viewer is less pretty and well-groomed. As we all know, this sort of thriller works well with an everyman character for audience identification in the lead role, and if Hitchcock could cast Cary Grant accordingly, Haskins could do the same with George Hamilton.

Haskin’s direction is interesting, but also a bit all over the place. The Power‘s main draft is the Hitchcockian thriller – some scenes seem to directly and deliberately echo The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest, especially, and a many of the film’s techniques for creating suspense are taken directly from Hitchcock’s playbook - yet Haskin also has a tendency to include moments of broadest-stroke satire that always threaten to turn into melodramatic horror, and scenes that are mock-surrealist enough to belong into an Italian film from the 70s (see especially Hart’s fun fair attempt at killing our hero or the very strange final confrontation between hero and villain). However, there are also moments of truly disquieting nuance to be found here, like the moment when Yvonne De Carlo’s “funny”-drunk and oversexed middle-aged woman begins to show the cracks that Hart’s powers have left in her mind, or the emotionless, matter-of-fact way Aldo Ray’s character discusses that he’s been on the lookout for people asking for Hart so that he can kill them for these last ten years. These moments also go a long way to demonstrate how important a good supporting cast is to a) make a film better and b) help someone like Hamilton look good. These performances and what they stand for are also where the film’s rather pessimistic and paranoid stance regarding human nature can be seen most clearly. InThe Power‘s world, every character has mental breaking points and cracks that make it easy for them to be dominated by someone like Hart; everyone is corruptible and nobody is save from harm from the people surrounding him. This is not a position the film ever states outright, yet it is hidden in plain sight in every scene right until the end when a big question mark half-heartedly pretends to be a happy ending.

Less good than the supporting cast are the film’s special effects, or rather, their execution is more ropy than you’d expect from a film made in 1968. Unfortunately, the effects in the film’s grand finale are its weakest, with some very cartoony animation, a rotating skeleton and George Hamilton’s floating head standing in for a mental duel that would have worked better if the actors had just stared at each other while Miklós Rózsa’s dramatic music played. In The Power‘s case, we call them “special” effects for a reason.

Fortunately, a handful of badly executed special effects in conceptually interesting scenes is not enough to drag down a film as interesting and peculiar as The Power is. As a matter of fact, this is exactly the sort of imperfection that makes a film even more itself by revealing a humanity you don’t usually encounter in things that are perfect.

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.

Heroic Trio

October 21st, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1993  Runtime: 84′  Director: Johnnie To
Writer: Sandy Shaw Lai-King   Cinematography: Tom Lau Moon-Tong, Poon Hang-Sang
Music: William Hu Wei-Li   Cast: Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, Damian Lau, Anthony Wong

An invisible villain is stealing babies from their cribs and out of hospitals! The evildoer even mocks the police by announcing jis or her victims beforehand. Not even the son of Hong Kong’s chief of police is safe, as hard as the policeman responsible for the case, Inspector Lau (Damian Lau), is trying. Eventually, the local superheroine (Anita Mui) – depending on the version of your subtitles either called the copyright-endangered “The Wonder Woman” or the incredibly boring “Super Heroine” – takes an interest in the case, which might or might not have something to do with her being Lau’s wife Tung when she’s not fighting evil while wearing a mask. But alone, not even she is able to catch the invisible fiend.

Said fiend is a woman named Ching (Michelle Yeoh), using an experimental invisibility that is still in development created by a scientist she’s shacking up with. Ching is in the service of someone only known as Evil Master or Old Bastard (Yen Shi-Kwan). Evil Master is a person of dubious gender (so probably supposed to be a eunuch) with a most excellent plan: make one of the stolen babies – all of whom are astrologically destined to greatness – the emperor of China and turn the rest of them into his cannibal assassins. It’s quite obvious that Ching is conflicted about the whole baby stealing business, but years of brainwashing are difficult to get rid of.

Once the police chief’s baby has been stolen, another costumed heroine appears. Chat aka The Thief Catcher aka Seventh Chan is more of a bounty hunter than Wonder Woman is, preferably – though not exclusively – working for money. Chat is also an escapee of the Old Bastard’s assassin program, and an old friend of Ching’s, who once let her friend live when Evil Master told her to kill Chat.

As a heroine, Chat is of the rather reckless sort, prepared to pull stupid stunts like kidnapping a baby herself to provoke the invisible baby stealer into action. That’s the sort of plan that in a Hong Kong movie has a good chance to end with a dead baby, which it does. However, this does at least bring Chat into contact with Tung and lets the bounty hunter realize who is stealing all the babies and why. Eventually – but not before it is revealed that Tung and Ching have a common past too – the three women will throw their lots in with each other and give the Old Bastard what he’s got coming.

  
  
  

Before Johnnie To had his own production house, he was working as a director for hire like just about anyone else in Hong Kong’s industry. Most of his films of this period don’t show as much of the hand of their auteur as we are accustomed from him now, and are instead realized in the directorial style of the minute in Hong Kong, making them decidedly professional and strangely impersonal affairs.

Nonetheless, some of To’s movies of that time period are pretty great movies, or are even, as is the case with Heroic Trio, minor classics of their kind. Heroic Trio might be an impersonal effort by the standards of its director, but it is also action directed by the great Ching Siu-Tung, and perfectly adapts nearly everything that is great about early 90s wire fu movies to the superhero genre that wasn’t exactly filled with great movies at a point in time when Tim Burton’s Batman movies seemed to be as good as superheroes could get on film.

The wire fu film’s combination of the insane, the bizarrely violent, the poesy of bodies in motion, the slapstick-y and the melodramatic always had clear parallels to what’s great about the superhero genre (one could even argue that wuxia heroes are old-timey superheroes with swords), so making a wire fu superhero movie seems like an obvious direction to take the genre in.

Of course, obvious directions don’t always lead to watchable films. In Heroic Trio‘s case, though, they do. Even though you can criticize To’s direction as being strictly inside the parameters of early 90s wire fu, with all the Dutch angles, wobbly zooms and dramatic slow motion shots that implies, one would have to be a soulless monster not to enjoy this style of filmmaking, especially when the action sequences between the scenes of melodramatic slo-mo crying are choreographed by someone like Ching who knows how to let non-martial artists like Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung look more or less convincing in a fight, or at least as convincing as is necessary in this sort of film. Michelle Yeoh for her part doesn’t need anyone to let her look good in an action scene.

It’s also a true joy to watch a movie featuring three female superheroes where the heroines’ competence is never questioned by anyone. “But you’re a girl” is just not a sentence that belongs in a film coming from the wuxia tradition that is so rich in female heroes, so nobody ever utters it. On a slightly more superficial level, and one slightly less feminism-compatible one, seeing our competent heroines played by Mui, Yeoh and Cheung is the sort of experience that can distract a guy from a movie’s flaws quite well.

Truth be told, I’m not even sure I should even call Heroic Trio‘s problems flaws at all. Perhaps, interpreting them as simple markers of their place and time would be much fairer, especially given how much more enjoyable they make the movie at hand. How, after all, can I resist a script that turns a decidedly simple basic plot into a more or less labyrinthine construction of flashbacks, side plots and contrived connections between characters? And how could I not approve of a superhero movie actually willing to kill a baby, even if it’s only to give Mui the opportunity to cry some very decorative tears? And how could I not enjoy Heroic Trio‘s sudden, generous, bursts of ridiculous, awesome nonsense like Anthony Wong (playing the original cannibal assassin) munching on his own cut off finger, or the great moment in the film’s finale when the Big Bad has been reduced to a skeleton and decides to ride Yeoh’s body like a bony puppeteer? How not to love a film morally dubious enough to throw in a scene of one of its heroines mercy-killing a bunch of cannibal toddlers for no good reason at all?

If Heroic Trio is one thing, it truly is the embodiment of the whole of Hong Kong wire fu filmmaking 1993.

 

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.

Things to Come

October 18th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Year: 1936  Company: London Films   Runtime: 92′
Director: William Cameron Menzies   Writers: H. G. Wells   Cinematography: Georges Perinal
Music: Arthur Bliss   Cast: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Sir Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott,
Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Maurice Braddell, Sophie Stewart, Derrick De Marney, Ann Todd, Pearl Argyle
Disc company: Legend Films   Video: 1080p 1.33:1   Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD50 (Region A)   Release Date: 09/27/2011   Released as part of the oddly titled Ray Harryhausen Double Feature Blu-ray collection, featuring Things to Come, SHE, and a bonus DVD of The Most Dangerous Game, and available for purchase through Amazon.com

Penned by H. G. Wells from his novel The Shape of Things to Come and directed by feature newcomer William Cameron Menzies, who had already garnered acclaim for his accomplished production design, the lavish 1936 Alexander Korda production of Things to Come never quite amounts to the sum of its parts.  A masterwork of design and ideas hamstrung by cold human drama and a penchant for speechifying, Things to Come is perhaps best described as an unforgettable failure – a sprawling epic of speculative fiction and philosophical propaganda that’s no less a classic for all of its faults.

Things to Come‘s ambitious narrative follows the 100 year history of the English metropolis of Everytown, from its destruction in war-time in Christmas of 1936 to it’s glittering future rebirth.  The yarn is constructed around two generations of the family Cabal (both played by Raymond Massey, Arsenic and Old Lace), who are rarely so much characters as they are mouthpieces for Wells’ selfsame political-scientific philosophy.  In 1936 John Cabal volunteers for the war effort, taking to the air as a fighter pilot.  As the global conflict drags on for decade after decade, reducing Everytown to a pre-industrial autocracy, Cabal secretly organizes a new society of scientific fascists – a technologically unchallenged and black-suited army for peace.  His Wings Over the World fills the skies of 1970, putting an end to all warmongers with the ‘gas of peace’, setting humanity on a track towards miraculous scientific progress and transforming Everytown into a glittering underground utopia.

In 2036 John Cabal’s great grandson Oswald Cabal, leader of the future governing council, must face a new threat to progress – an uprising among the citizens of Everytown who seek to halt mankind’s first trip around the moon.  As hordes of rioters surround the enormous Space Gun that is to launch the rocket, Cabal orders it fired, preserving man’s quest for knowledge and sending the protesters into oblivion.  The conclusion sees Cabal standing before an enormous telescopic lens, contemplating whether mankind is doomed to be Earthbound or fated to expand its conquest to the rest of the Universe.  ”Which shall it be?” he asks, words that are repeated again in the rapturous chorus that closes the film.

Propelled by the shear magnitude of its production alone, Things to Come is dramatically inert for the most part.  Sir Ralph Richardson (Dragonslayer, The Bed Sitting Room) takes a memorable turn as a mid-century despot of Everytown known only as the “Boss”, while Sir Cedric Hardwicke (George Pal’s War of the Worlds) does much the same as the doomed revolutionary Theotocopulos in the future Everytown of 2036.  Unfortunately the “Boss” and Theotocopulos are little more than straw men, existing solely to be put down by righteous Cabal (either of them) and lost to the unstoppable march of progress.  For his part Raymond Massey does well by a role that’s less forgiving than any of the rest, and effectively ties the multi-generational drama together even though he’s given little to do but strike a pose (often in one of two ridiculous costumes) and espouse interminable tracts of Wells’ philosophy.


Bombed-out Everytown, circa 1966

While Wells himself can be blamed for the deficiencies in Things to Come‘s drama, having penned the script himself (with updates by Korda associate Lajos Biro, The Thief of Bagdad), it was the power-struggle between producer Korda and Wells, who had been granted unprecedented access to and influence over the production, that would lead to the film’s steady decline.  Wells proved difficult and inflexible with regards to the production, while Korda often reacted to what he disliked about the picture (like Wells’ interminable exposition) by simply removing it.  By the time the film first reached American shores Korda and its distributors had already excised half an hour of its original 130 minutes, compromising its continuity and whatever narrative flow there had been in favor of the spectacle alone.  Further release variations would be even shorter, with some running barely more than an hour.

Director William Cameron Menzies, along with photographer Georges Perinal, designer Vincent Korda and effects director Ned Man, assured that Things to Come would at least have a cohesive visual style, from the opening moments in pre-war Everytown to the closing starscape, and no matter how cold and turgid its dramatics may be the technical achievements of the thing are difficult to overstate.  The futuristic rebuilding of Everytown, in which massive excavators hollow out a cavernous expanse that swiftly develops into a vast antiseptic city of porcelain and glass (complete with moving sidewalks and glass-tube elevators) with the booming themes of Arthur Bliss taking precedence over any sort of sound effects, is perhaps the mother of all science fiction montages.  Even the substantively embarrassing Space Gun, the film’s one absolute piece of scientific bunk (it even has a sight!), is of impressive construction and imposing scale.

But the spectacle is hardly limited to the future of 2036.  The air raid sequence that begins the picture is one of most successful undertakings of its kind, with swift and lyrical cross-cutting between a panicked population and defensive military operations culminating in a terrifying tour-de-force of urban destruction and human misfortune.  Mann’s complex miniature and composite effects are certainly more transparent a full seventy five years after the fact, but the brilliantly realized imagery (explosive anti-aircraft barrages, buildings reduced to rubble, survivors struggling among the wreckage, and the body of a child half-buried in debris) has lost none of its visceral potency.  The montages that follow, detailing a horrific futility of a decades-long war between nations through the power of image alone, are pure Menzies, a mix of the literal and the symbolic that drives the story more effectively than any of Wells’ truncated drama.  The plague-ravaged and despotic future of 1970, complete with a massive exterior set of bombed-out Everytown, invites one of science fictions great visuals – a fleet of improbably gigantic aircraft flown by the peace-dealing soldiers of Wings Over the World emerging from the clouds to put an end to the warmongers once and for all.  That’s the image that so captivated a much-younger me, viewing Things to Come on television for the first time in one of its many confounding broadcast versions, and though the ideas behind it don’t settle so easily with me anymore the scene has lost none of its grandeur.

While its difficult for me to believe that the potential with Things to Come was not greater than what eventually came to pass, the final product still ranks as the unparalleled science fiction achievement of its generation.  The ravages of time, battles with overzealous editors and a dubious public domain status may have conspired to eradicate much of this top-tier production’s original luster, but it’s still a hell of a thing, brimming with big ideas and some of the most classic of classic sci-fi conceptions.  Regardless of whatever problems it may have Things to Come is still must-see genre material, and gets an easy recommendation from me.


The Space Gun.

I wish I had better things to report for this Legend Films Blu-ray edition of Things to Come, which packages colorized and black and white versions of this film and the Merian C. Cooper epic She on a single dual-layer Blu-ray disc, but with a retail price under $17 I can’t say that I was expecting much either.  The case lists that the film has been “lavishly and painstakingly restored in high definition from the original 35mm elements” – an overstatement, to be sure.  While She was indeed restored a few years ago by Legend Films in association with Kino International, Things to Come looks a lot like it always has in its domestic variants – bad.

Though this disc certainly has its technical faults, which will be enumerated later, the majority of Things to Come‘s problems can be blamed squarely on the nature of the source materials utilized.  A concerted effort was made by Network and Granada several years ago to restore Things to Come to its original US release length of 96 minutes (all footage relating to longer release and pre-release versions is unfortunately lost), an effort that resulted in a lavish, if imperfect, 2-disc special edition DVD of the film in 2007.  Even with the added benefit of 1080p resolution this latest Legend Films edition can’t touch that region 2 PAL-format disc, having been sourced from positive elements of the more common 92 minute cut of the film that are just too far removed from the source to even benefit from the HD upgrade.

As the screenshots below will attest, Things to Come appears soft throughout and lacks anything in the way of fine detail in its hi-def debut.  Menzies and Perinal’s expressive, highly stylized close-ups are void of skin texture, clothing appears flat and uninteresting, and any sense of higher definition is effectively diffused in the gritty mush of an image duped a few times too often.  Contrast likewise suffers, with what were once balanced highlights and intense shadows now reduced to uninteresting shades of dull, milky grey.  Damage is abundant in varying degrees, with much of it undoubtedly baked right into the print itself.  Expect plenty of dust, dirt and speckles, as well as some persistent emulsion scratches and lines.  But perhaps the most egregious fault with the transfer can be lay squarely at the feet of Legend Films themselves, who have granted Things to Come an AVC encode at an intolerably low average video bitrate of just 9.57 Mbps (the colorized version improves by half, at 15.8 Mbps) – less than a quarter of what the format is capable of.  The considerable grain in the image is supported in lackluster fashion, with plenty of artifacting to be found on close inspection, though the inherent softness of the image does a good job of concealing any more fatally distracting digital nastiness.

In all fairness this is far from the worst Things to Come has looked on home video, and I have a perfectly unwatchable Madacy Home Video VHS edition to prove it.  Still, better sources for this film do exist, and their availability on the market renders this HD offering essentially useless however low the price may be.

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.  The sample DVD snapshots in comparison sets one and two were captured in .png format in VLC, upscaled to 1080 resolution from the native PAL resolution and composited into a 1920×1080 frame for ease of comparison in GiMP, then exported as .jpg at a quality setting of 95%.
In the first two sets of captures the upscaled Network DVD is represented first, followed by the Legend Films black and white and colorized versions respectively.  The rest should be self-explanatory.

More Blu-ray Screenshots:

Audio is additionally disappointing, with only a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic track in the original English to be had.  Things to Come has never sounded good on home video, to the point that some editions are outright unintelligible, and while the dialogue in this case improves over that of many (I didn’t have trouble discerning any lines this go around) it’s difficult for me to believe that even this flat-sounding recording couldn’t have improved a bit with a lossless encode.  Funnily enough, the audio on this Legend Films edition actually bests that of the Network R2 DVD, whose zealously over-processed audio “restoration” resulted in shrill high end and some nasty phasing problems (much of the dialogue on that edition sounds as though it were recorded from within a soup can).  Still, this is no better than you’ll find on the Legend Films DVD.

Supplements are as lackluster as the rest, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, and pertain to Ray Harryhausen’s (who had no part in the production, being just 16 at the time of its release) memories of the film and, mostly, to his association with Legend Films and their dubious colorization process.  You get Interview with Ray Harryhausen (3 minutes) and Colorization Process with Ray Harryhausen (8 minutes), both in up-converted 1080i.  After all the fantastic things Harryhausen has done in his life this it’s a sad development that he’s become the chief talking head for this sort of thing.  (She also features a pair of Harryhausen interviews in 1080i HD, as well as an audio commentary with Harryhausen and Mark Vaz. A Harryhausen bio and filmography and a 9 minute collection of vintage toy commercials in 1080i rounds out the disc. A bonus DVD of The Most Dangerous Game is also included.)

Harryhausen’s name looms as large as that of Things to Come on Legend Film’s packaging for this release, a regrettable strategy given that the man had nothing directly to do with the films contained in it, and the ballyhoo about the colorization’s latest revival certainly left a bad taste in my mouth.  Regardless of what you make of any of that, the presentation of Things to Come leaves a hell of a lot to be desired, leaving this half of the Legend Films double feature woefully lacking anything in the least bit recommendable.  Skip it.

in conclusion
Film: Very Good +  Video: Fair  Audio: Fair   Supplements: Poor
Harrumphs: Everything.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

The Thing

October 15th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Year: 2011   Company: Universal Pictures   Runtime: 103′
Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.   Writer: Eric Heisserer    Cinematography: Michel Abramowicz
Music: Marco Beltrami   Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Eric Christian Olsen
Out Now in wide release.
In the interest of fair play, blah blah blah SPOILERS blah blah.

It’s heading towards 12:30 in the morning here as I start to write this, and it’s been roughly half an hour since the credits rolled on my late night screening of The Thing - the new Universal production based upon events hinted at, but never fully revealed, in the 1982 John Carpenter film of the same name.  Living in the city I have no car, and thus enjoyed a leisurely walk back from the theater with two friends, sharing a few social cigarettes and taking measure of what we had just witnessed as we went.  We had all been bright-eyed and hopeful as we shuffled into the theater, but we had emerged beaten, heart broken.  As I said my goodbyes and entered my apartment lobby I knew I had to start writing, and soon.  What’s more, I knew this was to be no ordinary review piece.  It was to be an exorcism.

John C. Campbell’s serialized 1938 novella Who Goes There?, a frightfully original tale of alien paranoia in the cold wastes of Antarctica, has led a charmed life with regards to its cinematic legacy – one that rivals that of Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, itself adapted successfully, and numerous times to boot.  Famed Hollywood producer and director Howard Hawks did his friend and sometimes editor Christopher Nyby a favor in granting him the role of director on Who Goes There?‘s first screen adaptation, 1951′s The Thing From Another World.  One of the most successful genre productions of its time in terms of craftsmanship and entertainment value, The Thing From Another World nevertheless altered much of the substance of the source story and, frankly, bares little direct relation Universal’s newest iteration.  It’s still a fantastic film, and anyone reading this article owes it to themselves to track it down.

Tenuous as its relationship to the 2011 film may be, The Thing From Another World cements its place in the paternal heritage of it by virtue of its influence on one man – John Carpenter, who for his first major Hollywood production was given the green light to craft Who Goes There?‘s second cinematic interpretation.  Rather than source from the 1951 screenplay, though several of its points are homaged, Carpenter’s screenwriter Bill Lancaster sought inspiration directly from the Campbell novella.  The results were phenomenal in their own right, a gruesome exercise in paranoia and body horror whose disgustingly imaginative creature effects put Rob Bottin on the map.  Carpenter’s The Thing replicates Campbell’s original shape-shifting alien menace with genuinely disturbing results, horrifying its audience through a palpable sense of isolation and by concealing its terrors beneath ordinary human skin.  Who can the audience trust when the cast of the film can’t trust itself, and anyone might be a “thing”?

It may seem strange to spend such a goodly part of an article purportedly devoted to a new release by praising its predecessors, but this new The Thing positively demands such comparison by virtue of its existence alone.  Directed by feature newcomer Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and penned by Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 and Final Destination 5) this new The Thing foregoes any attempts at further adapting the Campbell story (though it is credited) and instead takes the Carpenter film as its jumping off point, choosing to relate events that occurred prior to that film’s narrative start but whose aftermath is shown therein.  As such The Thing 2011 exists as a willful companion piece to the 1982 film, even going so far as to repeat some of the footage from that film in its final reel, and doesn’t so much invite as necessitate comparisons between itself and its selfsame predecessor / successor.

Things become more complicated when one tries to classify just what this The Thing actually is.  In terms of its timeline it is clearly a prequel, a film that takes place before the narrative of an earlier film.  Simple enough, right?  Unfortunately screenwriter Heisserer lacked the imagination necessary to craft any sort of original story from the key points of the 1982 The Thing - a creepy cremated inhuman corpse, a helicopter chasing a dog, an unearthed spaceship and a shack full of dead Norwegians – that it insists upon following.  The result is a prequel that repurposes so much of the narrative arc of the film that it purportedly precedes, going so far as to replicate not just events but whole groups of characters,  that it actually becomes a remake of it as well.  And so this The Thing comes full circle, becoming an allegory for itself – a hollow cinematic monstrosity that tries very hard to convince audiences it’s something that it isn’t.

To anyone at all familiar with the 1982 The Thing a relation of the plot here is mostly pointless, as only the trappings are different.  Paleontologist Mary Elizabeth Winstead and her disposable mop-haired associate are contracted by a Norwegian scientist to travel to an isolated Antarctic geological research site and dig up the thing of the title.  Along the way they meet up with two American helicopter pilots – one channeling Keith David, the other Kurt Russel.  Once there the thing, the survivor of a gigantic crashed flying saucer, is quickly dug out of the ice and moved to a Norwegian camp full of disposable bearded men of dubious purpose.  A bit of brazen stupidity on the part of the team’s resident baddie, an egotistical scientist of something or other who wants to ride his discovery all the way to a Nobel prize, results in the thing getting loose, leading to the expected monster antics but little else.  Winstead eventually discovers the thing’s devilish shape-shifting secret and quickly sets about checking the fillings in everyone’s teeth (the thing is evidently incapable of growing and too stupid to fake inorganic features), though she needn’t have bothered – it takes every opportunity to spoil the fun and pop out of its warm and people-y hiding places.

On that note let’s talk special effects, and why the “anything is possible” promise of computer animation has let this particular vehicle down so badly.  Contrary to what many unflinching adherents to the old ways may think, my problem here is not one of methods, and as such I’ll not argue that Rob Bottin’s traditional latex and karo syrup techniques are any more acceptable than the CGI that gluts the market today.  The problem here is with frequency, and the “anything is possible” tendency to whip up any batshit idea that comes to mind regardless of whether or not it serves the story.  Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing is a certifiable gross-out affair, but a sparing one, and its limited number of outrageous effects set-pieces are both appropriate for the titular menace (which only emerges in defense of itself or in secret) and allow the film to build and at times subvert audience expectations.  In one famous bit the head of a human impostor, in a show of mad self preservation, creeps off a medical table and propels itself about a room by its tongue before sprouting a set of slender insectine legs and skittering towards freedom.  It’s an effect that still prompts an ick reaction from this jaded viewer.

There are attempts at similar occurrences in The Thing 2011, with a multitude of people’s arms sloughing off (I’m honestly not sure where all the arms come from) and becoming skittery lobster monsters, but the film insists upon repeating them until they are devoid of even the minimal impact they had to start with.  The joy of the 1982 The Thing is that the creature’s form is all together unpredictable – each appearance is different from the last, with the beast’s true nature, if any, remaining obscure.  What’s more, the creature’s more monstrous forms are granted a purpose - self preservation in the face of certain annihilation.  The Thing 2011 can’t be bothered with such silliness as that and instead shows its monsters early and often and with little rhyme or reason.  Muscular and be-tentacled torsos and heads careen from one end of the Norwegian camp to the other with much growling and gnashing of teeth, but it’s all so obvious.  Of what possible evolutionary benefit is shape-shifting if the creature keeps exposing itself to that from which it is attempting to hide?  Don’t ask The Thing 2011, as it doesn’t have a clue.

Similarly clueless are The Thing 2011′s multitude of under-developed sub-characters, who wander off alone and in pairs even after the alien’s penchant for hiding in people skins is made abundantly clear (if you know a shape-shifting alien is afoot and someone asks you to wander off with them for some dubious purpose, don’t do it – you will be killed).  Heisserer’s scripting seems mostly to blame, though one might well ask how such bunk was ever green lit in the first place.  It’s difficult to gauge the level of proficiency of the cast, as even Winstead is given little to do but state the obvious and look stern.  The various Norwegians grumble a lot and shout a bit, but mostly just die.   Of some note is Heisserer’s odd fixation on birth-related horrors, which is reflected in the special effects production – an autopsy of an alien creature reveals a “womb”, and man after man is engulfed by toothy vaginal whatsits.  It’s the sort of thing that might make for an interesting article if The Thing 2011 could be bothered to make the viewer care.  As such it’s just so much trapping.

The Thing 2011 eventually devolves into a standard chase scenario, with Winstead pursuing the last inhuman holdout across the ice and into the alien ship for an action sequence of inept proportions.  I was hoping for one last gasp of originality, perhaps a whole ship-load of anomolous alien monstrosities, but no dice.  As the credits cranked up the beginning of the 1982 film began to roll, complete with Ennio Morricone’s sparse and haunting score – their tarnished memories were a final insult.  For Heijningen, Heisserer, and all of the producers who had a say in this The Thing coming to pass I had but a single parting thought:


Miami Golem

October 14th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1985  Runtime: 85′  Director: Alberto De Martino
Writers: Gianfranco Clerici, Alberto De Martino, Vincenzo Mannino
Cinematography: Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Paolo D’Ottavi   Music: Detto Mariano
Cast: David Warbeck, Laura Trotter, John Ireland, Loris Loddi, Giorgio Favretto, Giorgio Bonora

War correspondent turned local TV reporter in Florida Craig Milford (David Warbeck) is sent to film the newest experiment of scientist Dr. Schweiker (Sergio Rossi), whom everyone calls – smiling as if it were the best of jokes – “that filthy Nazi”. Schweiker has cloned and somehow genetically manipulated cells that were found inside of a meteorite. Schweiker’s goal is to, um, you got me there.

A malfunction during Craig’s highly scientific looking attempt at filming the alien cells nearly ends the film early by killing the poor dears. Fortunately, the cells miraculously revive and Craig is distracted from that particular strangeness by vague looking projections swirling around the lab, talking to him in a language he doesn’t understand.

Our hero’s not too fazed by stuff like this, shrugs the David Warbeck shrug, and goes home. Shortly after he’s gone, Schweiker and his whole team are assassinated by the henchmen of evil rich guy Anderson (John Ireland), and the cells are stolen. Anderson has a fiendish and absolutely sensible plan: to grow the cells into a monstrous creature completely under his control he will then use to blackmail governments into doing whatever he wants them to do, like giving him contractual work. I think bribery would be an easier way to achieve that goal, but then I’m not an evil capitalist. For some reason, Anderson thinks Craig – and not sanity – is a threat to these plans and commands further henchmen to kill the reporter too.

But Craig, once he’s heard of the murders, gets himself a gun and demonstrates that shooting down helicopters with a revolver and being an all-around action hero are among the skills you learn as a war reporter.

When Craig’s not involved in chases and shoot-outs, he tries to find out what the strange swirling things were trying to tell him. Fortunately, he meets Joanna Fitzgerald (Laura Trotter), a very helpful woman who recognizes the message as being in the language of sunken Atlantis. Or aliens. Or both.

In fact, Joanna is secretly working for a group of benevolent aliens who give her fantastic psychic abilities (none of them protecting her from a gratuitous shower scene, alas). The aliens have decided that Craig is The Chosen One™, destined to destroy the cells which of course belong to the most horrible and destructive creature ever to live. It’s all in a day’s work for David Warbeck, I suppose.

  
  
  

Quite at the end of his career, Italian director Alberto De Martino had to work from confusing scripts bizarrely unfit for someone who was always at his best when directing straight action material. Miami Golem‘s confusing and generally random mix of Science Fiction, horror, action, and all kinds of 70s crackpottery (in the mid 80s to boot) isn’t as drugged up as that of De Martino’s Pumaman was – but what is? – yet it’s still pretty darn weird.

The film’s first fifty minutes or so consist of cheap and silly but also pleasantly tightly realized action scenes, which are regularly broken up by long sequences of characters talking reams of ridiculous poppycock at each other. There’s bad science, Atlantis, telepathy, telekinesis and people talking in that lovely Italian dub job manner that makes everyone sound as if they had learned cursing by watching Ed Wood movies. It’s enough to let anyone who has a heart and a brain cry tears of laughter and delight.

After those first fifty minutes are over, though, Miami Golem gets really weird. De Martino still shakes things up with decent action sequences, but most of the rest of the film is dedicated to melting its audience’s brains with as much dead-pan ridiculousness as it can possibly offer.

Among the film’s greatest moments belong a scene where an alien explains Craig’s role as The Chosen One™ by stopping time and drawing our hero into a mirror dimension (or something) where it can take on Craig’s appearance to talk to him, making the film’s main expository scene one of (an obviously pretty amused) David Warbeck discussing THE END OF ALL CREATION with himself. No no no, I’m sure he’s completely sane. Other high points of this phase of the film are many, many, many shots of actors and the embryo rubber doll in a jar that is the titular Miami Golem using mental powers at each other – leading to some lovely facial expressions and much VERY HARD STARING. And a blinking rubber embryo.

Even better are probably the scenes where the Golem/rubber embryo attacks Craig and Joanna with telekinesis, which is of course mostly demonstrated by the actors jumping around in the style of mildly excited St. Vitus’s dance sufferers and stunt doubles looking nothing like the actors catapulting themselves against walls. This, dear friends and readers, is exactly what movies were invented for.

Miami Golem‘s air of heart-warming wonder is further strengthened by an acting ensemble willing and able to say the most ridiculous things with the straightest of faces and what looks like real enthusiasm to me. His enthusiasm is of course what made David Warbeck such a likeable leading man in most films of the Italian phase of his career. He clearly realized that he was usually acting in ridiculous nonsense, but didn’t let that hinder him from putting as much energy into what he did on screen as possible, seemingly always having fun with his lot. If there’s an ability ideally suited to letting a grown man upstage a rubber embryo in a jar, as Warbeck does here so beautifully, it is the man’s gift of throwing himself into the job of having serious fun on screen.

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.

The Colossus of New York

October 7th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1958   Runtime: 70′  Director: Eugene Lourie
Writers: Thelma Schnee, Willis Goldbeck   Cinematography: John F. Warren   Music: Van Cleave
Cast: John Baragrey, Mala Powers, Otto Kruger, Robert Hutton, Ross Martin, Charles Herbert, Ed Wolff

When altruistic scientific genius Jeremy Spensser (Ross Martin) is run over by a truck – which is the sort of thing that can happen when you’re running onto a street chasing your son’s toy plane – his father, genius brain surgeon William (Otto Kruger) takes the personal loss and the loss to humanity extremely badly. Once I had spent some on-screen time with his surviving son, the semi-genius electronics scientist Henry (John Baragrey), I could understand the old man’s feelings quite well, for his father’s very pronounced preference for Jeremy has turned Henry into a giant prick.

So disturbed by Jeremy’s loss is William that he uses his own scientific talents to steal and save his son’s brain. It’s all for the best of humanity, you see, and certainly hasn’t anything at all to do with William’s inability to face the death of his son. After some SCIENCE(!) using water tanks, electrodes and other very scientific implements, the brain is as good as new. Now it’s time to build a new body for Jeremy’s brain, and who better to help out there than Henry? Henry has spent the months in between trying to take his brother’s place with Jeremy’s wife Anne (Mala Powers) and son Billy (Charles Herbert), but has been met with a polite indifference he has been unable to parse or wear down; Anne is drawn to the (comparatively) least prickish man in the film, Jeremy’s former partner in science John Carrington (Robert Hutton), but that’s not something Henry realizes. Do I even need to mention the Spenssers don’t find it necessary to tell Anne they’re playing with her dead husband’s brain?

So William and Henry build a huge, lumbering robot body with a face like an expressionist sculpture for Jeremy, because we couldn’t have the man look into a mirror and not have a breakdown, right?

Given how his brand new body looks, and that his dear family tells him his wife and son are dead, the newly mechanized Jeremy takes quite well to the whole situation. Sure, he has a complete breakdown and asks his father to destroy him until the old arse convinces him otherwise, but afterwards he starts on his new experiments that are supposed to make the poles usable for food growth, or something of that sort. Science(!), I dare say. All this does obviously take place in William’s lab right in the cellar of the house Anne and Billy live in, too, but hey, when Anne hears something like the horrible screams of her husband when he first sees what he’s been turned into, the charming Spenssers can just tell her she’s hallucinating because of the strain she has been under, right?

But then, in a development nobody could have seen coming, Robo-Jerry develops fantastic ESP powers, like random precognition, hypnosis and later on the ability to shoot death rays out of his eyes, as you do. I’m sure he won’t put the mind whammy on his father to be able to visit his own grave on the first anniversary of his death where he surely won’t repeat a scene from a Frankenstein movie with his son.

And surely, the knowledge that his father and brother not only haven’t bothered to build him a decent robot body but have also lied to him about his wife and kid won’t turn our Jerry a wee bit mad! Man, this transplanting brains into robot bodies business really is pretty difficult.

  
  
  

As you know, Jim, art director and production designer Eugene Lourie did occasionally – and quite successfully – dabble in the direction of 50s giant monster movies. The “monster” in The Colossus of New York is, despite what the film’s title and marketing tagline (“Towering above the skyline – an indestructible creature whose eyes rain death and destruction!”) might suggest, not one of the giant kind trampling New York into tiny pieces, but rather a brother to the misunderstood creature Frankenstein created. Interestingly, Jeremy, with his ability to speak and think coherently and his planned acts of destruction late in the film is closer to the creature of Mary Shelley’s novel than the more childlike creature of the Universal movies, something that I have difficulty seeing as an accident in a script as clearly literary as that Thelma Schnee delivered for the movie.

Schnee’s script is a very interesting effort, managing to surround the silly parts and the plot holes you’d expect (and demand) of a film like The Colossus with more complex characters than you’d generally find in a 50s SF/horror film and some pretty poignant scenes concerning the most dysfunctional family I’ve seen in a genre movie from the 50s. Quite contrary to the traditions of the time, where acting the dick usually makes you the hero of the piece, The Colossus actually seems to realize how dysfunctional and horrific its characters actually are, and makes their flaws the true reason for the minor catastrophe the film’s plot culminates in. Sure, there’s a short discussion (acted with great gusto by Kruger, who seems to have quite a bit of fun with his mad scientist role throughout the film) about the soul early on in the film, and some of the mandatory “tampering in god’s domain” speechifying at its end, but it’s also clear that the film’s heart isn’t in these explanations. Everything bad that happens here comes from the characters’ inability to treat each other like actual, complete human beings.

Of course, a complex, yet heavily flawed (and a bit too short), script like this could be easily ruined by the wrong direction style. I’m pretty happy to report that the script at hand wasn’t adapted by a poverty row point and shoot director like – say – William Beaudine, but the clearly more art conscious Lourie, who had no problem recognizing a Freudianized version of Frankenstein when he saw it and used the opportunity to turn his film into as much of a visual homage to early Universal horror movies as a film set in the New York of the 50s (not that we get to see much of it – most of the film takes place in three rooms and a graveyard) can be. For my tastes, Lourie is very successful at it too – at least so successful that most of his film’s theoretical silliness turned out to not feel silly at all while I was watching, because the film’s finely developed atmosphere turned most of what it surrounded into something serious and riveting.

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.

Asesinos De Otros Mundos

August 5th, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Year: 1971    Runtime: 87′  Director: Rubén Galindo
Writers: Rubén Galindo, Ramón Obón  Cinematography: Raúl Martínez Solares   Music: Chucho Zarzosa
Cast: El Santo, Juan Gallardo, Sasha Montenegro, Carlos Agosti, Marco Antonio Campos, Carlos Suárez

A horrible monstrosity that looks a lot like a bunch of people crawling around under a tarp kills important leaders of Mexico’s industry. It’s so very very sad. The tarpster serves a certain Malkosh (Carlos Agosti) who uses his awesome ability to appear on a television in police chief O’Connor’s (Marco Antonio Campos) meeting room to try and blackmail Mexico into paying him a lot of money, or else, more “important” people will die.

Fortunately, the police has a not-so-secret weapon: El Santo (El Santo!), the idol of the masses, greatest man on Earth, Blue Demon’s secret nemesis (etc.) is on the case before you can even cry out in excitement. One might doubt the great man’s technique – getting himself overrun by Malkosh’s car after he has already gotten rid of the bad guy’s henchmen, and then caught – but his results are great.

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Damnation Alley Blu-ray

June 20th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Seeing as my wedding is less than five full days away, and that I’m necessarily pre-occupied with finalizing all the fineries of that, I had absolutely no intention of posting an article to Wtf-Film this week.  None.  But thanks to the enterprising folks at Shout! Factory I’ve been dragged up from the depths of my personal life to cover something really special – the gala Blu-ray premiere of Jack Smight’s cult sensation Damnation Alley.  Talk has been circulating for ages about possible DVD editions of this film, from Anchor Bay and others, but when Shout! announced their intentions to release it earlier this year I knew that I and other fans were in for something special.

For those as yet uninitiated, Damnation Alley is a loftily budgeted science fiction adventure film based (loosely) upon the novel of the same name by Roger Zelazny.  World War III has left the Earth tilted off its axis and beset by a constant meteorological holocaust, its bleak landscape brimming with menacing mutant wildlife.  After an accident leaves their quarters unlivable, a handful of surviving Air Force Missiliers set out across the wasteland in the mother of all all-terrain vehicles – the Landmaster – to find a new home.

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The Omega Man

June 6th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Year: 1971   Company: Warner Brothers   Runtime: 98′
Director: Boris Sagal   Writers: John William Corringtom, Joyce Hooper Corringtom
Cinematography: Russell Metty   Music: Ron Grainer   Cast: Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash,
Paul Koslo, Eeric Laneuville, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Jill Giraldi, Brian Tochi, DeVeren Bookwalter, John Dierkes
Disc company: Warner Brothers   Video: 1080p 2.39:1    Audio: Dolby Digital 1.0 English, Dolby Digital 1.0 French, Dolby Digital 1.0 Spanish, Dolby Digital 1.0 German, Dolby Digital 1.0 Italian, Dolby Digital 1.0 Castellano
Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, German, German SDH, Italian, Italian SDH, Castellano, Dutch, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norsk, Swedish   Disc: BD25 (All Region)
Release Date: 12/18/2007   Available for order this disc now through Amazon.com

There have been no small number of film adaptations, legitimate and otherwise, of Richard Matheson’s 1954 science fiction horror novel I Am Legend, from the stark Italian-American co-production The Last Man on Earth in 1964 to the dreadful Will Smith vehicle of a few years past, but this Walter Seltzer (Soylent Green) production from 1971 may be my favorite even as it takes considerable liberties with the source.  Charlton Heston is as big as ever as the requisite last man, the survivor of a modern plague that has decimated the world’s population and left civilization in ruin, but as the tagline is quick to point out, “The last man alive… is not alone!”

Set in the (then) near future of the late ’70s, The Omega Man follows doctor and colonel Robert Neville as he fights for survival in Los Angeles after biological warfare between the Soviet Union and China brings a swift conclusion to most human life.  Immune to the lethal biological agent thanks to the chance success of an experimental vaccine, Neville spends his evenings fending off the nightly sieges of the Family – a cult of plague survivors led by former news anchor Matthias (Anthony Zerbe, Papillon) who were forced into a life of darkness after their disease rendered them hypersensitive to light. Neville dedicates himself to exterminating The Family until he happens upon fellow survivor Lisa (Rosalind Cash, Cornbread, Earl and Me), and with her a hope for saving humankind…

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Contamination .7

May 23rd, 2011 | article by | 3 Comments »
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a.k.a. Creepers / The Crawlers / Troll III
Year: 1990   Company: Filmirage   Runtime: 91′
Director: Joe D’Amato, Fabrizio Laurenti   Writers: Daniele Stoppa, Fabrizio Laurenti, Albert Lawrence, Rosella Drudi   Cinematography: Francisco J. Madurga   Music: Carlo Maria Cordio   Cast: Mary Sellers, Jason Saucier, Bubba Reeves, Chelsi Stahr, Vince O’Neil, Billy Buttler, Lord Chester, Patrick Collins, Edy Eby
Available on OOP VHS from Epic Home Video, or as streaming video vis Netflix Instant Viewing.

It’s never a good sign when a film is most popularly known for being a member of the dubious Troll franchise, particularly when the film in question has nothing to do with tiny mythical monsters or their wily ways.  Such is the case with Contamination .7, a cheapo Filmirage sci-fi horror whose only connection to the Troll empire are a few crew members and a penchant for being immeasurably dreadful.  Never mind that I could find no corroborating evidence for Contamination .7 ever actually being released as Troll III (a title also bestowed upon D’Amato’s confoundedly inept Ator sequel Quest for the Mighty Sword) - the name has stuck with the online community and, for this film, that’s good enough.

A tasteless mix of inert drama, The China Syndrom-style conspiracy claptrap, and limp mutant monster mayhem, Contamination .7 (or whatever you want to call it) concerns an ill-defined and unnamed small town in the American West whose very existence is threatened when illegal toxic waste dumping by a nuclear plant causes local trees to sprout evil carnivorous roots.  That’s right. Evil… carnivorous… roots.

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The Alien Encounters

May 20th, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Year: 1979    Runtime: 92′  Director: James T. Flocker
Writers: James T. Flocker  Cinematography: Holger Kasper   Music: William Loose
Cast: Augie Tribach, Matthew Boston, Patricia Hunt, Phil Catalli, Bonnie Henry

Astronomer Alan Reed (Augie Tribach) is up in Alaska with his family, manning a telescope in the search for life in outer space. One day, Reed seems to be on the verge of a major breakthrough observing radio signals coming from Barnard’s Star, but he gets a bit distracted from that – as well as a potential UFO sighting – by the house his wife and little son are in going up in flames in a gas explosion.

With his family dead, Reed crawls into a bottle until the sudden realization hits him that the last signals he got from Barnard’s Star seem to have contained an actual voice saying something in an alien language (note: the audience never gets to hear it that way). Reed stops drinking at once and turns into one of those holy crusaders roaming the American highways in search of the Truth, researching alien encounters, ghost sightings and so on everywhere.

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The Abominable Snowman

May 6th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Year: 1957    Runtime: 86′   Director: Val Guest
Writers: Nigel Kneale  Cinematography: Arthur Grant   Music: Humphrey Searle
Cast: Peter Cushing, Forrest Tucker, Maureen Connell, Richard Wattis, Arnold Marlé, Robert Brown, Michael Brill

Botanist Dr. John Rollason (Peter Cushing), his wife and colleague Helen Rollason (Maureen Connell), and his friend and colleague Peter Fox (Richard Wattis) are spending time in a monastery in the Himalayas to catalogue the local plant life. That the whole botanical business isn’t the only reason for Rollason’s stay becomes clear when another small expedition, led by the very American Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker), arrives.

John has been hiding from his wife that he’s been in contact with Friend to help him in an expedition to the least explored parts of the mountain to find one of John’s hobby horses there – the Yeti. Helen is less than amused by her husband keeping this dangerous climbing trip a secret from her until there’s no way to keep it secret anymore, especially because the last large scale climbing John took part in nearly killed him and caused him to swear off mountaineering completely. It doesn’t help John’s case that Helen doesn’t believe in the Yeti at all.

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