Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are
The Mask of Fu Manchu, Doctor X, Mad Love,
Mark of the Vampire, The Devil-Doll, The Return of Doctor X
Hello again ... just one review today, or depending on how you look at it, six. I know how I look at it, with eyestrain. Fans of classic era horror are going to be happy.
Various news to report, some bits fresher than others. Both Gary Teetzel and Michael Bjortvedt clued me into a pair of strange new DVD releases of the 1935 She and Things to Come.
Ray Harryhausen's name is attached to both as 'personally supervising' the coloration process, something I wouldn't have expected from him. We are assured that both titles will also be encoded in B&W, an alternative that makes some Legend discs like The Little Shop of Horrors quite desirable. Both films are also rumored to be restored versions, which is a further enticement. According to Gary, She needs the reinstatement of an eight-minute chunk right in the middle, while I've written quite a bit about missing scenes from Things to Come.
The old Image/Wade Williams disc is a passable copy of the short 96-minute American cut, but the Amazon listing says 100 minutes. There is said to be a slightly longer variant with only a couple of scenes restored: The Boss' banquet during Rowena's interview with John Cabal in the dungeon. Maybe that's what we'll get. Savant will try to find out as much as he can; perhaps a publicist will contact me. We aren't reassured by the Amazon notice, which also says the film is in Wide Screen!
Other not-yet-tepid news is that Dark Sky will be bringing out the once-lost imitation Hammer film Blood of the Vampire, from the English Baker-Berman team. Their pictures were notorious for having spicer continental versions, as we saw with Image's disc of Flesh and the Fiends five years ago. Blood is on a double bill with The Hellfire Club; hopefully Jack the Ripper won't be far behind.
In January Criterion is bringing out its remaining four Richard Gordon acquisitions in a pair of double bills: The cheesy Sci-Fi pictures First Man into Space and The Atomic Submarine will be followed by the Boris Karloff chillers The Haunted Strangler and Corridors of Blood. We're sure they'll look good and be as complete as possible; Corridors has suffered bewildering censor cuts since time began. Criterion stumbled with its disc of Gordon's Fiend without a Face (that's six years ago) by making a half-hearted attempt to claim that the film was an 'important Sci-Fi classic', as if it had to be to come out on the Criterion label. I'm sure they'll do better this time ... the two Karloff movies have some of the actor's best late-career work.
Stefan Anderson wrote to tell me that Robert Gitt at UCLA has restored the Joseph H. Lewis noir gem The Big Combo, which is good news; Savant's old review of the Image disc is here. It's only a film restoration at the moment and we've seen no DVD announcements.
Finally, I got a look at the big Casino Royale issue of Cinema Retro, the large format film fan magazine specializing in 60s and 70s attractions. They've got a rundown of cut and missing scenes from the spy spoof, together with photos that sometimes add to the mystery. In that final shot of Peter Sellers in a Scottish kilt outfit, he's actually wearing scuba swim fins. Cinema Retro's website is here.
That's it! Thanks for reading, Glenn
Posted by DVD Savant at October 09, 2006 12:02 PM