Hello!

Happy two days after Christmas. You think your day was special — I got new bath towels … to replace a set so frayed, you’d think an animal had torn them. The nice thing is that it felt like a real treat. Correspondent “B” in New York sent me a fancy Big Apple coffee cup, and a compendium book of Nancy comics. My granddaughter is just old and patient enough to maybe enjoy them with me, the next time we get together. So no complaints here.

What’s with the images of Lon Chaney?  The one on the left might be an AI generated ‘almost’ image of the great silent actor. We’re being flooded with interesting AI experiments; this week Gary Teetzel forwarded links to two parallel features touting ‘restorations’ of the lost horror thriller London After Midnight.

The first is from Sci-Fi N Horror A Go Go, with the title

It clocks in at 43 minutes. The second, from Bakémon: Japanese Monster Legends is called

and is 46 minutes in duration. They are curious exercises that grossly misuse the word restored. We immediately think of the disc companies that identify the cosmetic fixes they put on bad copies of movies, as ‘restorations.’  What the AI programs do is indeed impressive. Given a stack of high quality production stills plus the text of old intertitles, each AI experimenter has cobbled together what I would call a clever ‘enhanced photo novel’ narrative.

It’s truly amazing how dimensional motion is created from still images. We see attractive but mostly static images that rely far too much on inter-titles to tell a story. As the original production stills mostly pose characters in sets, standing next to each other, that’s mainly what the individual shots show.

Most of the action on view is conveyed via push-in and pull-out trucking motions, that have little connection with the way most silent films look. One of the AI presentations uses a few dissolves between shots, something even less associated with the silent era. Fake digital ‘film damage’ scratches and dirt here and there, a real ‘fan made’ giveaway.

The experiments are interesting to see, and too easy to criticize. Every so often we see something clever, but in most shots characters just ‘hover’ in motion. Sometimes they appear to move in reverse. It’s like a slightly vivified slide show.

Why are we not ecstatic about the possibilities of AI in visual media?  The idea that a lost film could be recovered this way is simply dangerous to cultural history. With more clever ‘borrowing’ of from other movies, one could probably concoct a bogus London After Midnight that would fool many viewers. We are already seeing completely bogus videos that can fool experts.  AI could be the end of movies, and the political possibilities are much worse.

Michael McQuarrie found this 1970 publicity piece produced by Hammer Films, promoting actress Victoria Vetri and Val Guest’s  When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. It begins with clips of Hammer’s offices just off Piccadilly Circus.

Sir James Carreras is fronted as the big name; the questionable voiceover identifies him as the ‘discoverer’ of Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch. We see a quick blip of (I think) Aida Young, the real producer of When Dinosaurs. We get a bit of behind the scenes footage, and some abbreviated shots of Jim Danforth dinosaurs that include a random shot from the 1960  The Lost World. Is the Ms. Vetri-versus-Snake scene in the completed film?  I don’t remember.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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