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| Halloweeners 2011 | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Nov 8 2011, 07:59 AM (1,024 Views) | |
| Laughing Gravy | Nov 8 2011, 07:59 AM Post #1 |
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Since this is coming down off the main website soon (to make room for Laurel & Hardy!) I figgered I'd post this here for posterity.... Casper the Friendly Ghost (Shout! Factory DVD, $29.93) For those of you who asked The Great Pumpkin to bring you nearly 500 minutes worth of classic (so to speak) Casper Cartoons, well, your request has been granted. Casper was created for a 1945 one-off cartoon that proved popular enough to generate a couple of sequels, and then a series of theatrical cartoons throughout the 1950s, as well as a handful of made-for-TV cartoons in the early 1960s. All 81 of the Friendly Ghost's cartoons 1945-1963 are gathered together here for the first time, with a full-color 20-page slick guidebook, 16 min. documentary on Casper, and a comic book gallery. A lot of fun, although I urge you to watch these things over 81 months rather than in one full sitting. Also, please note that Casper is NOT a dead little boy, and that Steven Spielberg is an idiot. The Colossus of New York (Olive Films DVD, $24.95) Olive continues to license and rescue a number of interesting titles from the Paramount Pictures vault. This is a 1958 sci-fi story of a brilliant scientist, on the verge of ending world hunger, who is killed in a tragic accident (dang it!). Luckily his dad's also a brilliant scientist, and the old fart saves his son's brain and drops it into an 8-ft. tall robot, only Junior is back from the dead with a bad attitude and now he's got death-ray eyes, proving once again that death-rays are just bad things to be putting into a robot's head. There's a scarcity of low-budget science-fiction and horror films of the 1950s on DVD these days, and this one's a pretty good example of cheesy (albeit somber) fun. John Baragrey and Mala Powers star, and Ross Martin is the voice of the robot. There's a sequel in which the robot gets it on with Rosie from The Jetsons and they give birth to R2D2, but I haven't written it yet. Dark Night of the Scarecrow (VCI Blu-ray, $19.99) 1981 made-for-TV thriller (originally airing on CBS, just like A Charlie Brown Christmas!) that's surprisingly scary; a little girl is assaulted, and her mentally-impaired adult friend is blamed for the crime and lynched. Well, Bubba didn't do it, but now a murderous scarecrow is wreaking bloody revenge on the mob. Directed by Frank de Felitta, writer of Audrey Rose. Charles Durning and Tonya Crowe star. The Blu-ray has a few featurettes and original trailers, plus commentary and either 2.0 or 5.1 sound, or turn them both on and you can listen in 7.1 total. Dementia 13 and The Terror (HD Cinema Blu-ray/DVD combo, $15.99 each) A pair of 1963 Roger Corman absurdities that are a lot of fun if you're in the right mood, and by "in the right mood" I pretty much mean "on the couch with a bunch of friends drinking a lot of beer and you don't much care how awful the movies are you're watching 'cause you think you're hilarious when you crack wise while you watch crappy old movies." Both of these stinkers are in the public domain but making their (suitably inexpensive) HD debuts here. Dementia 13 is a seedy ripoff of one part Psycho, one part House on Haunted Hill, and one part "no refunds once your cinema ticket has been purchased." Axe murders in a Scottish castle, directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola(!). The Terror is one of those movies in which the back story's more interesting than the film; Corman had some footage of Boris Karloff, a little time left on Boris' contract for The Raven, and a hankering to not get caught making a cheap, non-union film. He sent aspiring directors Jack Hill, Francis Coppola, and even young actor Jack Nicholson out to direct sequences that could be stitched together, no matter how haphazardly, into something releaseable. He succeeded, although the term "incomprehensible mess" is certainly applicable here. The Blu-ray releases come with DVDs, too, so you can not particularly enjoy either film twice in two separate formats! Diabolique (Criterion Blu-ray, $39.98) Henri-Georges Clouzot is known as the French Hitchcock, not because he was fat, terrified of cops, or known to throw live birds at 'Tippi' Hedren, oh no, but because he directed some of the greatest suspense pictures in the history of cinema, including Wages of Fear, Le Corbeau, and this one, made in 1955. The battered wife of a cruel school principal and the man's ex-mistress conspire to kill him; they succeed in the crime, except the corpse vanishes and strange things begin to happen. More than 50 years after it was produced, it's still a powerful film with many shocks and twists, although you'll probably figure out what's going on. Regardless, the suspense and plot twists that occur along the way make this a highly enjoyable and still effective thriller. Simone Signoret is the mistress, Vera Clouzot (the director's lovely spouse) is the wife, and Paul Meurisse is the miserable wretch of a husband. It's based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who later wrote the novel on which Vertigo is based. Like some of Hitchcock's work, the ending ties everything up but isn't altogether satisfying, because... well, I don't want to go into spoilers, but let me just say that the film kinda-sorta pretends to have a "happy ending", but it doesn't. Festival of Fright 1, 2, and 3 (Synergy DVDs, $24.95 for the set, $14.98 each) These actually have been out there for a while, but let's give 'em a little promotional boost, shall we? Even a brief mention on THIS website can result in sales of thousands of DVDs, bub, and each title contains dozens of vintage trailers for our favorite horror classics. Highlights of each: Vol. 1, From Hell It Came, Fiendish Ghouls, Carnival of Souls, A Bucket of Blood, Curse of the Faceless Man; Vol. 2, Creature from the Haunted Sea, Screaming Skull, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Giant Gila Monster; Vol. 3, Arsenic and Old Lace, Beast with Five Fingers, Ghosts on the Loose, Mighty Joe Young, and a bunch of Abbott & Costello meet the monsters pictures. Quality varies but is generally good, particularly on vols. 1 and 3. Kerry Gammill contributes excellent cover art, and each volume includes a music track so you can play the darn things at parties and not be interrupted by the hyperbole of the voice-over narrators. House (Criterion Blu-ray $39.98) School vacation, and a teenage girl is supposed to take a trip with her widowed father, but he invites his new fiancée along, so the unhappy girl instead writes her maiden aunt, who lives far away, and asks if she and some of her friends can visit. She had not seen the aunt in over 10 years, but the old lady agrees. The girl and six friends arrive to a large, rather cold and spooky house on a hilltop, and strange things start happening. It seems the aunt, whose love was killed in the War, is a spirit who preys on virginal girls since she never knew love herself. Her house of horrors begins to devour the girls, one by one. That sounds like a pretty standard horror film, but there’s nothing standard about House, an unsettling and wholly original 1977 film by former TV commercial director Nobuhiko Obayashi. Obayashi, assigned for his first feature to make a scary movie "like Jaws" instead went to his 10-year-old daughter and asked her what SHE found scary. She responded with tales of mysterious houses, a piano that "bit" her finger, a strange face in the mirror, etc., that gave the filmmaker the foundation he needed to create this film, which was intended to play in Japan as the co-feature of a standard teen romance, so he tossed in a lot of pop songs (many in English), and added in Teen Beat style graphics, sequences that appeared to be right out of the Monkees, and a plot that mixes Scooby Doo with Italian gore films. The seven girls (with names like Georgeous, Kung Fu, and Sweet) are nubile things, and as the film progresses they get less dressed, which is unsettling in itself. The piano devours one of the girls, finger by finger. The cat spews blood the way a burst water main floods the street. I love this movie; it’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen. The Criterion Blu-ray is magnificent. Who could think a film this bright and sunny could be so freaking unsettling? Humanoids from the Deep (Shout! Factory Blu-ray, $26.97) A cannery is coming to a small coastal town in California, and the locals are split about it and tempers are flaring and fists are flying and sabotage is occurring. That sounds like a pretty good movie all by itself, maybe, but that’s not all: it seems that the cannery company has hired a scientific firm to breed bigger, better salmon, and some of the test experiments got loose in the waters nearby (I love half-assed scientific explanations in monster movies and in political debates, don't you?) and pretty soon mutated man-fish are stalking the beaches, ripping open the men and raping the women. Uh, yes, you read that right. Good guy Doug McClure and bad guy Vic Morrow unite to combat the menace, while dozens of large-breasted young women take off their bikini tops to keep things even more interesting. God, do I love Roger Corman. You always know what you’re going to get with his pictures, and I have never seen a-one that wasn’t massively entertaining. Barbara Peeters, one of his protégés, directed this thing, but when Corman decided it needed more violence and nudity, she left New World Productions and never worked for him again. It’s okay, the violence and nudity are what everybody remembers this thing for, anyway. Special effects are actually pretty good, the monsters are well-constructed, the gore is appropriately used and nasty, and the rape scenes are disturbing and disgusting. The film’s finale is a legend in the industry, and I’m not gonna tell ya what happens just in case ya haven’t seen the film. By the way, another Corman find: the score’s by James Horner (Titanic, Braveheart, Avatar). The Phantom Carriage (Criterion Blu-ray $39.98) Viktor Sjöström wrote (from a novel by Selma Lagerlöf), stars, and directed this chilling fable based on the legend that a person who dies at midnight on New Year's is cursed to drive a ghostly carriage and pick up newly departed souls for the next year. Ingmar Bergman said that this film (made in Sweden in 1921) inspired him to become a filmmaker himself. A lovely edition, beautifully tinted, with two scores, an audio commentary, and a wealth of other bonus material. A real treasure. The Sadist (Johnny Legend Blu-ray, $29.95) This is an hour and a half of excellent, low-budget, taut filmmaking that is frequently overlooked because it stars Arch Hall, Jr. (Eegah!, Wild Guitar), but Arch - whom we LOVE - is terrific here. A trio of school teachers are on their way to a Dodgers game when their car breaks down; they manage to make it to a small, off-the-road repair joint, but nobody seems to be home. Attempting to find a workable fuel pump amidst the wrecked cars, they instead find two corpses and psycho thrill killer Charles Tibbs (Hall) and his teenage nitwit girlfriend (based, of course, on real-life killer Charlie Starkweather and his girl). After that, it's more than an hour of shocking suspense as the killers taunt, tease, and murder their victims one by one, until... Well, we won't give away the ending. All-Day Entertainment released this on DVD a few years ago, in widescreen and all, with commentary by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who would go on to do Close Encounters and The Deer Hunter and is still active today. The newly restored Blu-ray version includes the commentary and is a noticeable improvement in sound and picture. Watch out for snakes! |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| mort bakaprevski | Nov 8 2011, 08:11 AM Post #2 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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He's a dead little girl????? |
| "Nov Shmoz Ka Pop." | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Nov 8 2011, 08:33 AM Post #3 |
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Mouth Breather
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I didn't get that either, especially the part about Spielberg. If he's an idiot, I'm a mallard. What Casper really is, is a dead fish. These wretched cartoons are one trick ponies: imagine sitting around trying to dream up what weird things happen to the bodies of people screaming "A ghost!" and you've got it all. Dull as dog doo. At the old all-cartoon shows we used to holler "Boo!" when a Casper came on. I think what bothered us was Casper's voice, obviously a lady trying to sound cute. |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Nov 8 2011, 08:37 AM Post #4 |
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Yes and the lady's daughter is interviewed in the disc. Casper is a mythical creature like a unicorn, a giant, or a pixie (all of whom appeared in the comics and cartoons), not a dead little boy. Spielberg dumbs nearly everything down, and if *I* say a movie's dumb, well, then, you can just IMAGINE what I think of it. He's a genius for making money, I guess, but I don't like his films and find his attempts to be 'adult' mainly embarrassing. I didn't even like Schindler's List or, what was that movie, the war picture with Tom Hanks? I guess that says a lot about me. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Nov 8 2011, 08:48 AM Post #5 |
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Mouth Breather
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Um, well, if you say so... I can't see why it matters myself. To me what Casper is, is this disgustingly sweet lump of ever-so-cuteness, concocted by cynics to please an imaginary dimwitted public. I don't see what it is about brilliant directors that makes you so testy, Gravy. Mizoguchi, Robert Mulligan, and now Spielberg. What's up with that? |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Nov 8 2011, 09:04 AM Post #6 |
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You splatter me with an awfully wide brush. If I told you I didn't like Under Capricorn, I assume you'd post that I hate Hitchcock? |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| mort bakaprevski | Nov 8 2011, 10:07 AM Post #7 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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On you, it looks good!! |
| "Nov Shmoz Ka Pop." | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Nov 8 2011, 11:50 AM Post #8 |
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Mouth Breather
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Well actually Cliff I believe you said you hated all of Spielberg, and I just don't understand that. You also characterized Mizoguchi as a relatively minor director a while back, and not many who know movies would agree. I confess I threw in Mulligan just to tease. |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Nov 8 2011, 12:31 PM Post #9 |
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I liked the first and third Indiana Jones pictures. I said Mizoguchi was no Ozu or Kurasawa, and I still don't think he is. Frank Hale said he's no more than "competent". Go pick on Mr. Hale. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| mort bakaprevski | Nov 8 2011, 01:24 PM Post #10 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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Good lord, how safe & sanitized!! Amazing how the Fleischer's studio, that once was the only real artistic threat to Disney (& frankly I liked 'em better) became so compromised after it became Famous Studios. Another sad Hollywood tale of Jewish siblings who just couldn't seem to get along (at least Harry & Jack Cohn were smart enough to have a continent separating them). |
| "Nov Shmoz Ka Pop." | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Nov 8 2011, 04:08 PM Post #11 |
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I agree with everything you just said. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| mort bakaprevski | Nov 8 2011, 04:35 PM Post #12 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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?????? You DO ?????? Where the hell is that defibrillator when I need it????? |
| "Nov Shmoz Ka Pop." | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Nov 8 2011, 05:57 PM Post #13 |
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Well, okay, technically, I disagree with your first point: in a series of funnybooks for kids (and the cartoons made from them), it was a much better idea to have Casper be born a ghost in the Enchanted Forest than to have him die an untimely death and come back as one. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Nov 8 2011, 07:55 PM Post #14 |
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Mouth Breather
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Oh, please. There's nothing in the movie cartoons about that. Technically. |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| Fantomas | Nov 8 2011, 08:40 PM Post #15 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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If Casper's not a dead kid, how come he's sitting around a graveyard? And all the other ghosts are shown rising from tombs? There's Good Boos To-Night And how come the fox has to die to become a ghost? And is this just about the worst cartoon you've ever seen? When I was a kid watching 25 cartoons in a row at a special Saturday matinee with my friends, we'd cheer for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons. We liked the Disneys too--they weren't quite as funny as the Warners, but they looked great. But the Casper cartoons--none of us could stand them. I never knew an eight-year old who thought they were any good. The idea of an adult enjoying them--now that's scary. |
| "For life is short, but death is long." | |
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