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Greetings! A stack of reviews posted today to ramp up for the expected glut of dynamite May genre releases. Warners has a ton of Frank Sinatra movies, MGM and Fox are offering desirable westerns and Brit war pictures, and Legend Films is packaging choice nuggets from the Paramount vaults.

Onward to the news: Godzilla rears his radioactive noggin once again ... this time to announce to G-Fans in the vicinity of Topeka Kansas this year's GODZILLA & FRIENDS FESTIVAL III, now ongoing at Washburn University. Admission is Free. The festival kicked off last Saturday with a screening of a double feature on KTWU's Public TV station 11, but the campus screenings happen Friday and Saturday May 2 and 3. Washburn professors will introduce trailers for various giant monster movies, along with screenings of Gamera II: Attack of Legion, Godzilla Raids Again, Tarantula, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Godzilla 2000. Savant correspondent Bill Shaffer will introduce a selection of Godzilla Animated Cartoons. Several contests and giveaways of Godzilla-related merchandise will take place as well.

Some fun feedback on last Saturday's story about The Movie Orgy. Long-time Savant correspondent "B" remembers seeing it at college!:

"Hi Glenn. Many years ago I saw a later incarnation of this -- billed as The Schlitz Movie Orgy -- and I recall it having many of the details and attributes that you and Variety's Peter Debruge describe. I recall this version as being even longer than 4 1/2 hours, and including most of the narrative of Albert Zugsmith's priceless College Confidential, a perfect ingredient for a university screening. It's a thrill to learn that Dante and Davison were warping my mind years before I ever heard of them!"

Joe Dante verified that College Confidential had at one time indeed been part of The Movie Orgy's mix, when the touring movie marathon / collage was nearly eight hours long.

Meanwhile, over at the Trailers from Hell website, I recommend checking out the trailer for Fiend Without a Face, with commentary by Rick Baker. His on-camera introductory speech packs a big surprise.

Meanwhile, Gary Teetzel has forwarded a WHV press release announcing a number of westerns for August 28: Escape from Fort Bravo, Many Rivers to Cross, Cimarron (1960), The Law and Jake Wade, Saddle the Wind, The Stalking Moon, Montana, Rocky Mountain, San Antonio, Virginia City AND a special edition of How the West Was Won in both regular DVD and Blu-ray. The DVD will get a special Ultimate Edition, but the Blu-ray version will display the image in a format called SmileBox, which curves the film's original three conjoined panels to better replicate the original Cinerama experience. Now That will be something to see. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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Well, it's been a busy week. More work than usual, and a number of hotly desired discs coming in from all directions. But first we have to discuss the event of the week, Joe Dante and Jon Davison's The Movie Orgy, a wild show that resurrects the once-in-a-lifetime, blink-and-you'll-miss-it fun of cult moviegoing before the advent of home video. In college in 1968, rabid film collectors Joe and Jon began holding wild movie nights, mixing and matching 16mm feature films with gems from their own collection. Like audio-visual disc jockeys, they'd stop a feature when it showed signs of becoming boring and switch over to weird instructional films, TV commercials or bits of historical idiocy like the Nixon Checkers Speech. Student audiences went nuts over the anti-establishment irony of juxtaposing a gung-ho recruiting film with, say, a piece about training dogs, or a commercial with kids opening cereal boxes containing collector cards celebrating America's nuclear arsenal.

This free-form eclecticism smacks of the old saw about French surrealists, who supposedly ran from theater to theater, watching bits of movies. As soon as a show began to make narrative sense, they'd split for the show next door. Joe and John had hundreds of 16mm film prints in their collections, and could orchestrate their own personal phantasmagoria. Instead of killing themselves threading projectors all night, they soon began splicing bits of their prints together. The resulting Movie Orgy never had a final shape. It once lasted seven and a half hours; kids wandered in and out in a party atmosphere. At some point a Beer company stepped in to sponsor the 'movie happening', paying Joe and John to tour the one spliced print to various campuses, where students would grok the movie while chugging free beer (which Joe claims greatly improved the experience).

Joe decided to screen his Movie Orgy as the final offering (April 22) in his string of double bills as this month's guest programmer at Los Angeles' New Beverly Cinema . As 80% of what's been butchered to produce the Orgy is under copyright, no admission was charged. The night was something of a tribal event. All the regulars were there along with some noted cult celebs to juice up the general feeling of excitement. Like the minister of a church, Joe greeted his audience one by one at the door, and introduced the Orgy by telling us that it was 4.5 hours long. Sane people were encouraged to walk out when they couldn't take any more.

Hardly anybody left ... we were all there until after midnight. The Orgy unfolded in slow motion like an unending gag reel; one could never tell what a sudden splice would bring. 'The good parts' of at least three movies were 'serialized' throughout the evening, along with nostalgic glimpses of dozens of 50s TV shows. Those things have an eerie significance to us early baby boomers. Bushels of twisted TV commercials featured disgusting delights, like the use of animated plumbing to represent one's bowels in action. Glimpses of army training films collided with political coverage of the late 1960s, sex hygiene movies and ancient stag pictures. When reduced to their highlights, bad movies become irresistibly funny. One serialized feature about a psychotic teen repeats variations on his snarl, "I don't like people crowding me!" twenty times, and Dante exploits it as a killer running gag.

The result creates a psychological profile of Dante and Davison, proving that their wicked sense of humor and sarcastic outlook began long before their association with Roger Corman: this explains where Airplane! came from. The orgy also seems a mirror of our own minds, our collective past. Here are Ozzie and Harriet, Sky King, Commando Cody, Groucho Marx, Art Linkletter and Wyatt Earp; most TV shows are represented by a full title sequence, complete with songs we haven't heard for 50 years but can still sing by heart. Show content is reduced to a single outrageous moment, as when the sensitive Mom on Lassie comforts the distraught Timmy. The next moment she calls Timmy's chubby friend 'Porky', as if the kid were one of the livestock.

Associative cuts have W.C. Fields doing double takes at movie monsters, and little kids peering curiously at belly dancers or nude bathers -- we never know when the screen will be hijacked by some totally weird clip from left field. Some of the best material in The Movie Orgy is in the worst taste, but we were strongly impacted by its cumulative image: the collage displays the twisted, often hypocritical roots of our TV & movie-driven consumer culture. In Westerns, every issue seems to be solved by clubbing someone over the head or decking them with a punch to the jaw. TV personalities are so pleasantly bland that they appear to be on drugs. Science Fiction movies dissolve into an endless treadmill of explosions, burning monsters and crashing spaceships.

Finally, one can't forget the power of the shared audience experience. It's hard to express the lunacy of the TV show Andy's Gang, where the demented host Andy Devine ("Hi, Kids!") reads Bible stories. His captive pets (a cat and a rodent) play Jesus Loves Me on drum and organ while a thousand kids sing along. They just don't make 'em like that any more, and we shudder to realize that we TV kids were raised on a steady diet of this stuff -- breakfast cereal pumped full of nutritious sugar!

The New Beverly Cinema plans to continue with its guest programmers; next up is screenwriter Diablo Cody. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson.

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Greetings from sunny Hollywood (well, from three blocks south of official Hollywood). A pair of Savant's friends are amused by some news found in the Japan Times, and I'm purloining their correspondence for this column entry: Toho Sues Subway Sandwiches for Unauthorized Godzilla Ads. I'm not using my friends' names, at least not until I've been granted permission.

The suit seems really ridiculous after viewing the Subway ad in question. The green monster seen in about four seconds' worth of footage is indeed walking through a Japanese city, but he only resembles Godzilla in generic terms. Toho has the right to defend its copyrighted properties, but this seems a bit too much. A big monster attacking a city isn't automatically Toho's private property -- or is it? Is Toho saying that another film company cannot make a movie about a giant monster stomping Tokyo?

A second close associate chimed in with this clip from the third Austin Powers film, where two men fleeing a giant monster argue whether it is or isn't Godzilla. Toho's litigious attitude toward Big G is worthy of its own joke. Maybe they should sue United Artists' Billy Wilder movie Kiss Me, Stupid, where a henpecked husband calls his wife 'Godzilla.' The nerve of that Billy Wilder, infringing on a copyrighted character that way.

Since King Kong once appeared with Godzilla, my first friend asks why Toho hasn't gone after unauthorized uses of that monster, too. Offered as food for thought is David Allen's famous King Kong Volkswagen commercial.

And, while we're dancing the YouTube dance, it had to happen eventually ... George Pal's The War of the Worlds re-enacted by Bunnies. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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Hi again! Very interesting news from Criterion: on July 22, they're releasing a disc of one of the most artistic horror films of all time, Carl T. Dreyer's Vampyr. The early talkie has until this time existed only in heavily compromised versions. Until the last twenty years or so the only prints available were grossly incomplete collages of mismatched footage from various prints, some of which had burned-in subtitles. An almost complete version that appeared on laserdisc in the late 1990s was of variable quality, and marred by many large subs, that to present an English version had to be obscured by large black boxes. We're hoping that Criterion comes up with something much better.

The film itself is one of the few horror pictures that can genuinely be called 'uncanny'. Vampyr may not have been as influential as Murnau's Nosferatu but even in the marred versions we can tell that it's a film of great beauty and subtle psychological effect. Enigmatic actress Sybille Schmitz is the strangest victim ever, sitting in bad giving the hero a weird, terrifying smile. Can't wait to see what Criterion has for us in this one.

The 2008 Savant Wish List is growing with more announcements ... take a quick look. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson.

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Greetings! Savant correspondent and helpful friend Dick Dinman of the DVD Classics Corner wrote to tell me that his web radio four-show DVD Classics Corner On the Air tribute to composer Franz Waxman (pictured) is now done. In addition to being accessible in the archive section of the WMPG Radio Site, it's also on the home page of the official Franz Waxman website. Dick interviews Waxman's son producer John Waxman, about subjects ranging from The Blue Angel to The Bride of Frankenstein.

I'm getting plenty of feedback on my review of the upcoming The Fall of the Roman Empire disk. If I find the extra time, I'll stack all the letters in an addition to the bottom of the review, the way I used to when the site was young.

My review of Cloverfield is also attracting some potshots over at the often entertaining and informative Classic Horror Film Board. Always fun to read.

The informative part of the CHFB is nothing to sniff at, if you can separate the informed posters from the guessers. For instance, I watched a web version of an early color Japanese Sci-Fi film called Warning from Space, and wondered about certain scenes. The majority of the movie was obviously flat, standard 1.33:1, but whenever they cut to the interior of the space ship where dwell these star-shaped alien creatures, the scenes are clearly pan-scanned, with optical printer moves ping-ponging across static, wide scenes. It certainly baffled me; I thought that perhaps the movie was begun in 'scope but then scaled back. Several of the 'guessers' at the CHFB came up with even lamer explanations.

Then a post by David Schecter cleared up the whole thing. In the original Japanese version, the aliens spoke among themselves in an alien language, translated for us puny earthlings in burned-in Japanese subtitles. Instead of being placed at the bottom of the frame, these subs ran up the sides of the shot. When a 'star creature' on the left spoke, the dialogue spelled out vertically on the left, and vice-versa for the right. To make an American print, the distributors enlarged the frame and then panned left and right to avoid the Japanese writing. A brilliant, simple explanation to a real puzzle. This kind of information sharing makes it easy to overlook some of the petty squabbles and opinion-thuggery that bulletin boards can't help but attract.

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

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Hello again. Friendly correspondent Ted Haycraft points us to an amusing YouTube link: a concert of the theme to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, performed on Ukeleles: Ukelele Orchestra of GB.

DVDTalk's newsletter-sending apparatus hit a snag on Thursday, skipping this week's notice and instead sending out a duplicate of last week's. Yes, I know that last week's reviews all needed to be rewritten anyway, but that's not what happened. All it means is that next week's newsletter will have twice as many entries, making Savant look all the more prolific. If you're reading this you don't need a newsletter, so what's the point of this announcement?

All the recent disc announcements means a lot of action at the 2008 Savant Wish List. I can barely keep up with the new titles but I check it over at least twice a week, adding reader requests as well. I've also tried to re-format the list a bit to distinguish between upcoming discs and ones that have already been released. What with Warners and Legend working overtime, there's a lot of interesting product coming our way.

And finally, although I know it only concerns a fraction of the Savant readership, I've amended the review of Abel Gance's 1931 apocalyptic Sci-Fi film La fin du monde (The End of the World). Kevin Pyrtle has seen the mercilessly chopped-up 1934 American recut, and offers his remarks in a new footnote. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson.

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Greetings once again. Savant's happy to say that he originally saw Cloverfield in a screening situation and was able to appreciate its effect on the audience, even if I often had a hard time concentrating on its frenetic visuals. So my essay-review on the hit film isn't entirely based on a quiet DVD screening.

What's new out there? Gary Teetzel sent me some more YouTube links worth checking out. They're three clips from a 1959 Mexican monster movie called La Nave de los Monstruos (Monster Ship) and they immediately grabbed my attention. One of my very first issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland had an article on "Mexi-Monsters" right when I was taking Spanish in the 4th grade -- I ran immediately to the English-Spanish dictionary. The stills of Monster Ship looked crazy but these film clips are a hoot. The show is a combo Space Movie, Ranchero musical and silly comedy that bears a strong resemblance to the Grade ZZZ American-International movie Invasion of the Star Creatures, the one with Tanga and Poona, the burlesque girls from beyond the stars. The Mexican movie is much better in production, laughs and outright surrealism -- it has three or four elaborate monsters patterned on Yankee originals, silly special effects and great dialogue. Are you a Spanish student who wishes he were watching a ridiculous monster comedy instead of studying? This is for you.

The show ends in a romantic ballad. Everyone gets a girl, even the robot Tor, who has been compared to Bender from Futurama. Here are the links:

La Nave de los Monstruos, Clip 1       La Nave de los Monstruos, Clip 2       La Nave de los Monstruos, Clip 3.

¡Hasta luego, Compañeros! -- Glenn Erickson

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Hello! I have a bunch of announcements today, passed on by dependable correspondent Gary Teetzel:

Sony consultant Michael Schlesinger, the man behind last year's Sam Katzman boxed set of Columbia horror and Sci-Fi films, has spelled out the contents of the upcoming Hammer Films Icons of Adventure DVD set: The Terror of the Tongs, The Devil Ship Pirates, The Pirates of Blood River and The Stranglers of Bombay. We're not sure what the "Icon" in "Icons of Adventure" refers to but all of the films have their devotées.

Savant's personally gaga over the prematurely gory and sadistic The Stranglers of Bombay for its political and historical implications, which I've partially addressed in an earlier review on the Pierce Brosnan thriller The Deceivers. Interestingly, Schlesinger also let slip that Stranglers will carry an audio commentary with screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. This is great news, as Goodman is to be joined by two historical experts. I hope they address the controversy over whether the historical Thuggee cult was real, or a hype engineered by the East India Tea Company to cover up corruption in its operations.

Gary also tells us that MGM has put Mario Bava's Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, the whole movie on Hulu, at this address on the new NBC Universal and News Corp. website. It's free, plays out at the correct widescreen aspect ratio, and of course features Vincent Price. So if anyone is dying to see Bava's worst film and doesn't want to wait for a DVD, Hulu is for Youloo. The opening looks a little rough because it's made of duped clips from the first film, optically adjusted from 'scope to flat 1.85:1; once you get to the new footage the quality improves. Another not-on-DVD MGM genre title also available on Hulu is Daughters of Satan.

One last hot tip from the web is a William Cameron Menzies-designed 1930 short subject version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Not only is it a terrific film with great special effects, it really looks as if Walt Disney did a bit of 'borrowing' for Fantasia, as he seemed to have done with Alexandre Alexieff and Claire Parker's experimental short subject version of The Night on Bald Mountain. You can view Menzies' version of Sorcerer's on Youtube, Here. --- Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson