Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are
Flower Drum Song Universal
Forgotten Noir 3:
Shadow Man, Shoot to Kill
VCI / Kit Parker and
Angry Harvest Home Vision / Image
Had a terrific time last Wednesday night at the Egyptian theater, for Warner Home Video's premiere promotion for its new DVD (and HD DVD) of Forbidden Planet. DVD Talk's generous Geoffrey Kleinman secured the invite, and we gathered dutifully in the foyer with a retinue of WHV suits and their guests and the invited celebrities. The host for the screening was robot restorer Fred Barton and his talking Robby the Robot duplicate; Robby provided the actual intro speech for the screening.
I took a seat next to some dedicated fans that had come from out of town to see the screening; one had a rather good-looking FP blaster replica and a stack of magazines to be signed. The kicker was that these weren't kids but marginal senior citizens only a little older than myself. Being only four years old when the movie was new, I of course had no personal memories of its original release; for me it was a pan-scanned B&W item chopped up on TV until MGM once again made (faded) theatrical prints available in the 1970s.
Forbidden Planet looked fine projected on the giant Egyptian screen; the colors are now brighter than I've ever seen them even if they still look as if they had to be 'rescued and revived' from faded materials. And on the huge Egyptian screen the audio sounded better than ever. (Note, 01/05/07: Bruce Chambers has corrected me ... Warner Home Video supplied a DLP projector and a hard drive containing a K2000 version of the film; what we saw projected was not a 1080 DVD.)
After the screening Barton invited the guests down front for a lengthy discussion: Earl Holliman, Warren Stevens, Richard Anderson and the lovely Anne Francis, still as trim and frisky as ever. Faced with some uninspired prompting, the group self-generated a lively discussion of the Sci-Fi movie that pleased the audience and showed plenty of respect -- if they once dismissed it from their personal list of proud achievements, it's back up there now. Ms. Francis has always been a favorite, and she's every bit as charming today.
Savant doesn't drag cameras to these events, so there won't be any photos posed with the Robby the Robot facsimile. That now seems like a slightly missed opportunity. But you may report me to Warner Home Video for filching an extra Robby the Robot Cookie to create the above graphic.
For those incredibly hip people that gravitate toward the Russian Science Fiction Festival that's been touring the nation, it's now playing in Vancouver. The films are being shown more than once, giving viewers a second chance at the more interesting ones; they're also showing more titles than we saw here at the American Cinematheque. Robert Richardson provided us with this info, and points out that the organizer and host of the series is our own respected Robert Skotak, effects expert and Sci-Fi Film authority, information that wasn't even publicized here. The series is showing a film called FIRST ON THE MOON, a 2005 mockumentary about a glorious Stalin-era moon shot - 30 years before Apollo 11. I wish I could have seen that one -- maybe it will find a rightful distributor on DVD.
Also, correspondent Christophe Michel clued Savant to a new German DVD of Hangmen Also Die! that has the entire missing Hangmen Also Die! Jump Cut footage intact! The Jump Cut article has been fully annotated. And it was only a six-year wait! Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at November 10, 2006 08:19 AM