Hello!

Happy holidays! We wish we had some warm & fuzzy seasonal discs to promote, but we’re still dealing with residual fantasy releases from Halloween. We hope you’re among the lucky folk surviving the weather, the politics and the general state of the world. Thanks for all the notes, comments and corrections this year.

Oh yes, the first link … This ad piece for a disc company has already received a lot of circulation, but we wanted the link to be recorded at CineSavant as well. It’s a Joe Dante plug for Severin Films that’s edging toward viral status. Several readers tipped us to it, correspondent Phil Edwards being the first.

The extended video piece riffs on Criterion’s notion of a special closet where sticky-fingered celebs get to ‘shop’ for their most desired discs. Joe doesn’t bring a shopping basket, but instead pulls titles off the wall, to wax enthusiastic over their contents, or simply to praise The House of Gregory for going to the trouble to release something obscure.

Joe Dante is a great host, as usual. He’s the whole show. Severin spins the opportunity into a potent sales & image piece.

Plus, we proudly finish off our Parade of Notable Discs for 2025, adding to the group of titles we billboarded for the first half of the year. The presentation always reminds me to think “I didn’t get to see all of that one,” and follow that thought with, “Now can I find it in my messy shelves?”

Actually, we just like to see all the disc covers spread out in one place, like toys in an old Spiegel’s Christmas catalog.

The image just above  ↑  is another random shelf from the impossible archives at CineSavant Central … This time I’ve zeroed in on the Musicals department. The shelves are all two discs deep. That’s a lot of Warner Archive and Twilight Time product up front … I guess the older, more unusual titles are in the back row. Somewhere else we’ve got a couple of large boxes of older musical DVDs. I don’t toss them, in case they suddenly become ridiculously valuable. Someday I can finance my bid to conquer the world, Moo-ah-hah-hah-hah.

The ‘favored’ titles for All of 2025 are below. Good grief, there are some real favorites here, incredibly good movies. I could watch any of these, any time. Each image is a link to the corresponding review.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

The Christmas spirit is alive here at CineSavant … decorating the place turns out to be lots of fun, once I get past the hauling-in-the-boxes part of the job. Meanwhile we’ll continue to pass off every kind of movie genre weirdness as appropriate for the holiday season. I mean, doesn’t  The Valley of Gwangi automatically put you in the yuletide mood?

Courtesy of the ongoing web searches of correspondent Michael McQuarrie, we’re posting a link to a tie-in comic book for the 1969 Ray Harryhausen monster romp. It’s not exactly a prime example of graphic storytelling — they skip the movie’s biggest action highlight — but it caught our attention. When new, it also cost only 15 cents.

The comic of course has no music, which means we can’t enjoy the way Jerome Moross’s music score interacts with the dinosaur mayhem. We’re told that the finished Moross tracks were completely re-edited to fit, dropping some sections and repeating others. But we think it works well. ‘Soundtrack Fred’ posted a  Valley Of Gwangi Jerome Moross Soundtrack Suite on Youtube.

Dick Dinman is back with his DVD Classics Corner On the Air podcast … this time covering a new Warner Archive disc, a remaster of the Eleanor Parker / Glenn Ford musical bio Interrupted Melody.

This is edited from Dinman’s own interview with Eleanor Parker; Dick says that he has “added a few somewhat derogatory comments from Ernie Borgnine regarding costar Glenn Ford.”  That raises my curiosity … I’ve never heard Borgnine say a negative word about anything or anybody. The one time I saw him in person, he was instantly likable from 50 feet away.

We can’t go away without noting that Turner Classic Movies’ TCM Remembers 2025 montage included dear friend and Trailers From Hell colleague Mike Schlesinger.

We’ll be writing more about Mike in a few weeks. He was a very special guy with a long list of accomplishments; I look forward to relating a few fun episodes with him.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We’re told that ‘Film Masters TV’ is beginning to put top quality transfers on YouTube for free. An early posting is the Roger Corman teen crime epic Teenage Doll. We’d rather see them released on disc, preferably with a theatrical aspect ratio. But this is an excellent way to get a look at prime Corman, circa 1957.

They are billed as being in HD. Doll certainly looks better than the ancient Image DVD. The inference is that more gems from what was known previously the ‘Wade Williams Collection’ may be on the way. Here’s the YouTube page for Film Masters TV.

The show stars June Kenney, Fay Spain, Barbara Wilson, Ziva Rodan, Barboura Morris, Jay Sayer, Ed Nelson, Bruno VeSota and Richard Devon.

We’re also seeing some pretty lavish special editions come roaring in, for some really strange pictures. The discs plugged here come from two different labels.  Vinegar Syndrome’s fancy boxes look good on display. The titles above all have mini-trailers online:

Chun Keung Chiu and Tai-Heng Li’s 1984  Shaw Scares Volume 1 with Sex Beyond the Grave, Hell Has no Boundary and Haunted Tales;
Nacho Vigalondo’s 2007  Timecrimes;
Michelle Manning’s 1986  Blue City with Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and David Caruso;
Dario Argento’s 1996  The Stendahl Syndrome with Asia Argento;
Claudio Fragasso’s 1990  Troll 2 with Michael Stevenson;
Rod Amateau’s 1987  The Garbage Pail Kids Movie;
and Chor Yuen’s 1983  Descendant of the Sun.

It’s quite a stack of strange movies …

Second up, we’d like to bring special attention to two bizarre foreign film released by Deaf Crocodile.

Director Ákos D. Hamza’s  Sirius aka Szíríusz is a Hungarian picture I’ll have to investigate … it’s described as a romantic time-travel tale, like the popular picture Somewhere in Time. . . a playboy and a mad scientist go 200 years back in time and meet a beautiful opera singer. It’s got a real time machine, that looks like a rocket. The weird thing is that it is from 1942.

And finally, and perhaps most weirdly, Austrian artist and director Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s  2551 Trilogy is described as “a staggering combination of avant garde cinema, post-apocalyptic sci-fi / horror / monster action, dystopian political nightmare, silent cinema techniques, and endless subterranean labyrinths shot in abandoned WW2 bunkers in Vienna” … “myriad grotesque masks, industrial and death metal music…”

The full description is at the link; it’s three separate titles, and carries a pretty serious content warning disclaimer. We’re waiting anxiously for Deaf Crocodile’s January release of  Krakatit; Here’s the

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

This Trailers from Hell entry has producer Jon Davison discussing Samuel Fuller’s legendary  White Dog. When its release stalled out, all that was left of an unfinished advertising campaign was a rough cut for a trailer.

Mr. Davison explains why the trailer looks so bad: nonlinear digital editing really didn’t take root until the 1990s, so a big film setup was required to cut most anything. The ‘fuzzy black-and-white dupe’ we see is a ‘dirty dupe,’ a cheap and fast poor quality dupe for editing purposes.

We learn that the story of White Dog is that of a studio trying to un-do a film during production with meddlesome memos, and ‘fix’ it with more outrageous kinds of interference. The point of Fuller’s movie is that a racist is training dogs to attack non-whites. Davison says that the trailer editor’s instructions were to make it look as if a movie is not about its own subject matter.

And people wonder why so much fighting went on behind the scenes of movies. It’s always good when this kind of film history gets told.

This entry gives us old TV ads starring actors that feature in today’s reviews.

Sent in by the always-appreciated Michael McQuarrie, this 30- second TV spot explains itself.

It stars a scintillating Spaghetti Western personality beloved by children everywhere. And must have been a hell of a lot of fun to shoot.

I’d say the joke was based on a popular series of comical  Granny Goose potato chip commercials from the middle 1960s. This is where most of us first saw the actor Philip Carey.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello! … the holidays are closing in …

Circulated by Joe Dante is a link to an IndieWire article by Ryan Lattanzio, about Stanley Kubrick’s final movie — a reminder that I need to review Criterion’s new 4K disc. We were harsh on Eyes Wide Shut back in 2000, but it’s sustained a weird mystery appeal.

The new disc reinstates the uncut, uncensored Kubrick original. The article is an extended interview with Nigel Galt, Kubrick’s trusted post-production wrangler. After Kubrick’s death, Galt was the person who shepherded Eyes Wide Shut through the censorship process in a way that kept it from being permanently vandalized.

A full 20 years ago Wayne Schmidt visited from afar, and I got the idea of stopping off on La Brea avenue to take a picture of him with good ol’  Gort,  from the old Fox film  The Day the Earth Stood Still.  ↘

I’ve posted photos from that day several times now, but never really mentioning the picture framers that displayed Gort in its shop window. So let’s make it an official ad this time, in thanks for a business that has made living here just a little a bit more fun: Gray Goose Framing.

The figure has been displayed this way seemingly forever. It appears to be an authentic dummy from back in the day, made for the movie or perhaps for promotional use in movie theater lobbies. There are likely several more out there somewhere. The shop has often posed Gort with his head turned to one side or tilted down. The robot can’t do that in the movie, but it looks good in the Up Angle. At least once, they put a Santa hat on him for the holidays, but so far not this year. He inspired my daughter’s festive Christmas banner, ‘Peace on Earth Or Else.’

For a number of years, the Gray Goose Framing shop moved across the street on La Brea, but then relocated again on North Hillhurst Avenue in the Los Feliz district. If you find yourself toodling through Hollywood, perhaps going to or coming back from the Griffith Observatory or the Greek Theater, it makes a nice Gort Drive-By for Sci-Fi fans.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson