Savant's new reviews today are
Wild, wild news from Universal broke two days ago: On September 6 they're going to release two more incredibly affordable horror collections.
The Bela Lugosi Collection will have Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat (prime Ulmer!), The Raven, The Invisible Ray, and Black Friday .
The Hammer Horror Collection will have even more titles: The Brides of Dracula, The Curse of the Werewolf, Nightmare,Paranoiac, Kiss of the Vampire, Phantom of the Opera, Night Creatures, and The Evil of Frankenstein.
Each set will be only 19.99 retail; with the usual discounts the second pack will probably come down to $2 a title! We only hope that the encoding and formatting will be good - Universal has been doing well with these multi-title sets jammed onto a minimum number of discs, but many of those films were in B&W and on the short side.
Also, there is a rumor going around that may be a real revelation for King Kong fanatics. I call this a *rumor* because I haven't even read it personally, but it is supposed to come from genre authority Tom Weaver, and I checked with another genre authority yesterday and he seemed to think it was real as well. Remember the legendary 'spider pit' sequence in the original Kong, reportedly cut after a preview? If my source is correct with this *rumor*, Weaver says that at least a part of it has been located, in a French print that was used as a new restoration source for the other more standard excised Kong scenes - the gnashing of natives in Kong's mouth, the dropping of the brunette over 5th Avenue, Kong's amorous monkeying with Ann Darrow's perfumed dress. In the cut Spider Pit scene, the barely-alive sailors tossed from the log by Kong are attacked by giant spider monsters. The horrible detail has been seen only in a single surviving still image that first saw the light in Famous Monsters magazine, back when we were gum-chewing kids.
Again, this is still in the category of *rumor*, but some rumors are too hot to keep quiet about, as long as one stresses their proper status. --- Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at June 10, 2005 11:08 AM