First off, a friendly reminder that the good folks at Severin Films will be releasing the Euro-horror classic Horror Express, starring the legendary duo of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, as a special edition Blu-ray / DVD combo pack on November 29th. Though much delayed this release is finally happening, and it sounds like it’s going to be a great piece of work.
From the press release: Severin Films is pleased to announce the Blu-Ray debut of 70s terror classic HORROR EXPRESS starring genre titans Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing with an unforgettable supporting turn from Telly ‘Kojak’ Savalas. Loved by fans and critics alike, with Dread Central declaring it “One Of Our Absolute Favorites”, this gory masterpiece has been transferred in hi-definition from the original camera negative and is packed with exclusive new special features as well as the first in-depth interview with Cushing ever to emerge on disc, unearthed from a British archive. The film will be released as a Blu-Ray/DVD 2-disc combo pack.
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing star as rival turn-of-the-century anthropologists transporting a frozen ‘missing link’ aboard the Trans-Siberian Express. But when the prehistoric creature thaws and escapes, it unleashes a brain-scarfing spree that turns its victims into the eye-bleeding undead. Can the crafty colleagues stop this two million year old monster, hordes of zombie passengers and a psychotic Cossack officer (Telly Savalas) before terror goes off the rails? Silvia Tortosa (WHEN THE SCREAMING STOPS) co-stars in this all-time fright favorite from director Eugenio Martín and the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters of PSYCHOMANIA.
Severin Films, founded in 2006 with offices in Los Angeles and London, has been called “well on its way to becoming the greatest indie label of all time” by BlogCritics.org. Their DVD and Blu-ray releases include Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, the unrated Director’s Cut of Just Jaeckin’s Gwendoline, Richard Stanley’s restored Hardware, Enzo Castellari’s original Inglorious Bastards, Oscar®-nominee Patrice Leconte’s The Hairdresser’s Husband, Don Sharp’s Psychomaniaand Roman Polanski’s What? Severin’s upcoming HD restorations include The Wild Geese, Ashanti and Zulu Dawn. The company’s theatrical releases include Birdemic – Shock & Terror, Devolved, and the forthcoming horror anthology The Theatre Bizarre.
Horror Express
1972 • 90 minutes • Color • 1.66:1, 16×9 • SRP $29.98 • 1 DVD, 1 Blu-Ray
EXTRAS:
• Murder On The Trans-Siberian Express: New Interview With Director Eugenio Martin
• Notes From The Blacklist: Producer Bernard Gordon Discusses The McCarthy Era
• 1973 Audio Interview With Peter Cushing
• Telly And Me: New Interview With Composer John Cacavas
• Introduction by Fangoria Editor Chris Alexander
• Theatrical Trailer
The Horror Express DVD / Blu-ray combo pack can currently be pre-ordered through Amazon.com at the considerably reduced price of $13.99. For the latest updates be sure check out Severin Films on Facebook and Twitter.
Next up, Shout! Factory have another fantastic box of DVD goodies on the way for fans of the cult television phenomenon Mystery Science Theater 3000. Wtf-Film already has its review copy in hand, and can say unequivocally that Volume XXII – which debuts on December 6th – is another winner. Expect a review shortly.
From the press release: Our long cultural nightmare is over. On December 6, Shout! Factory, in association with Best Brains, Inc., will release Mystery Science Theater 3000: XXII, a 4-DVD set that includes Time Of The Apes, Mighty Jack, The Violent Years, The Brute Man and a cornucopia of extras worthy of the holiday season. All four episodes are previously unreleased on DVD, and Time Of The Apes and Mighty Jack are two of the most beloved and most requested episodes of the comedy phenomenon!
Disc 1 of Mystery Science Theater 3000: XXII features Time Of The Apes, which enjoys a mythical cult status among MSTies. Adapted (i.e., shredded and stitched into incoherence) from the 1974 Japanese series Saru No Gundan, Time Of The Apes follows the travails of a scientist and two small children who are accidentally frozen and thaw into a future ruled by apes. The plot may sound familiar, but the riffs are absolutely unique.
Over on Disc 2 we have the long-awaited Mighty Jack, one of the funniest episodes of one of the funniest TV series ever made. The Japanese apparently had a license to kill television when they handed this prized Tsuburaya production to Sandy Frank. Long before “junk bond” joined the English lexicon, the 007-ish exploits of Mighty Jack — a government organization created to defeat the notorious crime syndicate known as “Q” — took everything that was bad about cool and thrilling espionage movies and threw the rest out. Fortunately for us, Joel and the ’bots had a license to riff. And fortunately for you, Shout! Factory has a license to release it on DVD.
Next up, The Violent Years is a tale from 1956 of girls gone wild. Mike and the ’bots take on this low-budget black-and-white potboiler about a neglected rich girl and her hardened gang of babes who, thanks to inside information from her unwitting father, always manage to stay one step ahead of the police. In this delirious episode, we find the Mads “softening to reach a wider audience,” which includes performing their new theme song, “Living In Deep 13.” The DVD also includes the 1952 short film A Young Man’s Fancy, wherein a visiting young man prefers the household electrical appliances to the teenage daughter.
Last but not least, Mystery Science Theater 3000 presents The Brute Man. Rondo Hatton plays a disfigured man, a/k/a “The Creeper,” who hunts down and kills the people responsible for his deformity. During his downtime, he falls for a blind woman and engages in some light felony by stealing to pay for an operation to restore her sight. She may regret that. The DVD includes the 1948 short film The Chicken Of Tomorrow. Remember the stylish sequence in Casino that takes us through the mechanics of the operation? It’s like that, except with chicken farming and without the style.
New Introduction By Mary Jo Pehl
Origin Of The Creeper: Birth Of A B-Movie Icon
Introductions By August Ragone, author of Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters
The Making Of MST3K (1997)
Mystery Science Theater Hour Wraps
Ed-ucation: Archival Interviews with Delores Fuller & Kathy Wood
The DVD Menus of MST3K
4 Exclusive Mini-Posters By Artist Steve Vance
Mystery Science Theater 3000 volume XXII is currently available for pre-order through Amazon.com at the reduced price of $37.99, or through Shout! Factory directly for $41.97 (ships with a free MST3K stress ball not available through other retail outlets). For the latest updates be sure to follow Shout! Factory on Facebook and Twitter.
Last, but certainly not least, newfound home video label Twilight Time will be releasing the Charles H. Schneer-produced Ray Harryhausen effects classic Mysterious Island, directed by the great Cy Endfield, on Blu-ray on November 8th (next Tuesday). Mastered from the latest Sony Pictures high definition restoration, Twilight Time’s limited edition of 3000 is not to be missed!
From Screen Archives: Mysterious Island (1961) opens with a spectacular clash of signature Bernard Herrmann brass; from then on, it’s a headlong rush from one thrill-packed set-piece to the next. This classic fantasy adventure tale, the best of many screen adaptations of Jules Verne’s sequel to his own Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, is the inspired collaboration of a superb action director—Cy Endfield, who would give us one of the greatest of all true-life epics, 1964’s Zulu—and an authentic Hollywood genius: Ray Harryhausen, inventor of the film’s “SuperDynaMation” stop-motion animation process and a “total” filmmaker, spearheading the story, art direction, and design of such masterworks as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
Legend has it that Harryhausen’s producing partner, Charles H. Schneer, hit upon Mysterious Island as the team’s next project after reading a public library survey indicating that the book was the “most looked-at” item on the shelves. But the film was also Columbia Pictures’ vigorous answer to two successful Disney movies: an earlier Verne adaptation, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and the more recent Swiss Family Robinson (1960). Mysterious Island would provide the best of both: the Verne fantasy element, featuring the return of the mad genius Captain Nemo (incarnated here by the impressively dignified Herbert Lom), intertwining with a tale of ship/balloon-wreck survival. The extra added attraction, of course, would be the mind-boggling creatures crafted by Ray Harryhausen.
Unlike some of the more fantastical wonders in Harryhausen’s arsenal—drawn from myth or legend, from a prehistoric past or an alien-invaded future—the “monsters” of Mysterious Island have a new kind of strangeness: they are, for the most part, eye-poppingly enlarged versions of everyday fauna, the products of Nemo’s experiments in what he calls “horticultural physics.” As usual, the Captain’s goal is as huge as his gigantic bees, crabs, sea snails, and fowl: where once he attempted to end war by perversely constructing its ultimate instrument, the death-wielding submarine, Nautilus (which makes a cameo appearance here), now he’s focused on conquering what he identifies as war’s causes—famine and economic competition—by guaranteeing “an inexhaustible food supply.”
It’s certainly a big food supply—and one that provides most of Mysterious Island’s most delightful chills and thrills. The castaways—a motley collection of Civil War-era POWs, a newspaperman, and a lone Rebel sentry who’ve all made an exciting escape from a Confederate prison in a storm-tossed balloon, plus two shipwrecked English gentlewomen who propitiously arrive to sew, keep the cave tidy, and provide a bit of pulchritude—not only have to battle nature in order to survive, but a gargantuan nature, transformed by Nemo (read: Harryhausen) to fascinating if terrifying proportions.
Video: 1080p High Definition / 1.66:1
Audio: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English Original Mono
Subtitles: English SDH
Special Features: Isolated Score Track (2.0 Stereo) / Original Theatrical Trailer / TV Trailer Spot #1
RT: 101 Minutes
NOT RATED
Region-Free
3,000 Unit Limited Edition
***
Note: Sony Pictures and Twilight Time will also be hosting a special 50th Anniversary screening of Mysterious Island on Sunday, November 13th at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, CA. Grover Crisp (VP of Sony Pictures Archive Restoration), Twilight Time’s own Nick Redman and award-winning effects artist Randall William Cook will be on-location for a post screening Q&A, and copies of Twilight Time’s Blu-ray of the title will be available for purchase as well.
The all-region Mysterious Island Blu-ray is available exclusively through Screen Archives, and available for pre-order now. Twilight Time have a host of other fantastic titles slated for Blu-ray and DVD release in the near future, so keep posted on the latest updates by following them on Facebook and Twitter.
Across ten years and nearly two hundred episodes, it is hard for me to imagine any partnership between man and material more monumental than that between the crew of the Satellite of Love and the unstoppable syndication megalith Sandy Frank. The masterminds of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 took aim at his package of English-dubbed import programs early and often, much to Frank’s chagrin, first discovering his handiwork in the available properties of Twin Cities area UHF station KTMA and subsequently re-discovering it during their years on Comedy Central. From Humanoid Woman to Mighty Jack to Fugitive Alien I and II, there were few features with Frank’s name on them that weren’t square in the SOL’s sights at one time or another, and with good reason.
Shout! Factory are at it again, with the latest in their continuing line of Roger Corman’s Cult Classics turning up the heat just in time for summer to hit its stride. The Women in Cages Collection brings together a course trio of Philippines-produced ‘women in prison’ exploitationers from the early years of Corman’s New World Pictures, all of which center around blaxploitation megastar Pam Grier (Foxy Brown) and her considerable assets, professional and otherwise. The Women in Cages collection offers just about everything fans of Corman productions could ever ask for – plenty of exposed flesh and wanton depravity balanced by a hefty dose of blistering woman-scorned revenge.
Trailers From Hell Volume 2
July 18th, 2011 | article by Kevin Pyrtle | No Comments »Tags: Commentaries, Joe Dante, Roger Corman, Shout! Factory, Trailers From Hell
Subtitles: None Disc: DVD9 Release Date: 07/05/2011 Reviewed from a screener provided by Shout! Factory LLC (Thanks Mitzye!) Available for purchase at Amazon.com
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