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The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen, Volume Two: 1961-1964

Indicator follows up The Wonderful Worlds of Ray Harryhausen, Volume One: 1955-1960 with, wait for it, Volume 2: 1961-1964, featuring three of Harryhausen’s most ambitious productions. Good news for fans, the UK company delivers another robust box set with beautiful transfers and an abundance of extras including newly produced interviews, a small treasure trove of promotional ephemera and a limited edition 80-page book with essays from Kim Newman and Tim Lucas. The set is region free, playable on Blu-ray devices worldwide.

The Wonderful Worlds of Ray Harryhausen, Volume 2: 1961-1964

Blu-ray – Region Free

Indicator/Powerhouse

Street Date November 13, 2017

Starring Herbert Lom, Joan Greenwood, Niall MacGinnis, Nigel Green, Lionel Jeffries, Edward Judd

Cinematography by Wilkie Cooper

Produced by Charles Schneer, Ray Harryhausen

Directed by Cy Endfield, Don Chaffey, Nathan Juran

Raging thunderstorms and a tempestuous score from Bernard Herrmann kick off 1961’s Mysterious Island as a water-logged crew of Union
See full article at Trailers from Hell »

Attack of the Puppet People

All hail Bert I. Gordon, who singlehandedly carved out his own niche in ‘fifties monster folklore, and even won a battle or two against those sharpies at A.I.P.. His puppet people were originally just ‘Fantastic,’ but they had to be made into a menace with the “A” word usually reserved for icky poo Giant Leeches, Crab Monsters and 50-Foot Women.

Attack of the Puppet People

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1958 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 79 min. / The Fantastic Puppet People, Six Inches Tall, I Was a Teenage Doll, War of the Puppet People / Street Date November 14, 2017 / 27.99

Starring: John Agar, John Hoyt, June Kenney, Susan Gordon, Michael Mark, Kack Kosslyn, Marlene Willis, Ken Miller, Laurie Mitchell, Scott Peters, June Jocelyn, Hank Patterson.

Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo

Special Effects: Bert I. Gordon, Flora M. Gordon

Original Music: Albert Glasser

Written by George Worthing Yates

Story, Produced & Directed by Bert I. Gordon

It’s easy
See full article at Trailers from Hell »

The Mummy and Lifeforce: the strange parallels

Ryan Lambie Oct 17, 2017

This year's The Mummy reboot shares a surprising amount with the 1985 sci-fi horror classic, Lifeforce...

Nb: The following contains spoilers for 2017's The Mummy and 1985's Lifeforce.

See related  The Snowman review

When Universal Studios made The Mummy back in 1932, it was in the wake of Tut-mania: the fascination with Ancient Egypt following the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb a decade earlier. As Egyptian-inspired symbols and designs began to appear on everything from jewellery to cigarette ads, stories began to circulate that the pharoah's tomb was cursed - and thus The Mummy, about a group of archaeologists who provoke the wrath of a long-dead Imhotep (Boris Karloff, hypnotic as always) emerged.

The Mummy's success was such that it became a long-running franchise: Universal made four direct sequels between 1940 and 1944, with a comedy spin-off, Abbott And Costello Meet The Mummy, joining them in 1955. The UK's Hammer Film
See full article at Den of Geek »

Tobor the Great

Robot roll call! This also-ran robotic fantasy from the 1950s is precisely the kind of movie one would expect from Republic, a two-fisted anti-Commie tract for juveniles. The studio comes up with an impressive robo-hero, but short-changes us when it come time for action thrills. Still, as pointed out in Richard Harland Smith’s new commentary, Tobor filled the the kiddie hunger for sci-fi matinees, at least until Robby the Robot came along.

Tobor the Great

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1954 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 77 min. / Street Date September 12, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Charles Drake, Karin Booth, Billy Chapin, Taylor Holmes, Steven Geray, Hal Baylor, Alan Reynolds, Peter Brocco, Robert Shayne, Lyle Talbot, William Schallert

Cinematography: John L. Russell

Production Design: Gabriel Scognamillo

Special Effects: Howard and Theodore Lydecker

Film Editor: Basil Wrangell

Original Music: Howard Jackson

Written by Philip MacDonald, Carl Dudley

Produced by Richard Goldstone

Directed by Lee Sholem
See full article at Trailers from Hell »

How sci-fi went mainstream

Ryan Lambie Jul 7, 2017

To tie in with the Into The Unknown exhibition, on now at London's Barbican, we look at how sci-fi has become a major cultural force...

It's not always easy being geeky. The celebrated genre writer Ray Bradbury knew this all too well; as a kid growing up in the 1920s and 30s, he was intoxicated by all things otherworldly and imaginative: classic horror movies, pulp sci-fi stories about Mars, comic strips detailing the exploits of Buck Rogers. Eventually, Bradbury's peers teased him mercilessly, until, in a bid to fit in, he ripped his Buck Rogers comics to shreds. But far from helping the young Bradbury draw a line under his obsessions, the destruction of his beloved comics left him feeling unhappy and soulless.

See related Twin Peaks season 3 episode 8 review: Gotta Light? Twin Peaks season 3 episode 7 review: There’s A Body All Right Twin Peaks season 3 episode
See full article at Den of Geek »

Interview: Jen Handorf discusses 5 Great British Horror Films

In the latest in his “Great British Horror Films” interview series, host Stuart Wright talks to producer and director Jen Handorf about five of her favourite Great British Horror films, which include:

The Innocents (1961) Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth) (1967) Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971) The Stone Tape (1972) The Day Of The Triffids (1981 TV Series)

Twitter: @jhandorf

Use #askjen for filmmaking advice
See full article at Blogomatic3000 »

Who?

Who?

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1974 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 93 min. / Street Date , 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring Elliott Gould, Joseph Bova, Trevor Howard, Edward Grover, John Lehne, James Noble, Lyndon Brook, Michael Lombard, Kay(m) Tornborg, Joy Garrett, John Stewart.

Cinematography: Petrus R. Schoömp

Film Editor: Norman Wanstall

Original Music: John Cameron

Written by John Gould from the novel by Algis Budrys

Produced by Barry Levinson

Directed by Jack Gold

Today’s filmgoers say they want more cerebral science fiction films, and some moviemakers make an effort to comply. This year’s Arrival is quite ambitious, and last year’s Ex Machina is as good as any sci-fi movie since 2001.

But back in the 1950s producers quickly discovered that the audience wanted little more than monsters and mounting disaster in their sci-fi. Although some wonderful work snuck through, killer robots and alien invaders became the norm. From the 1970s forward, even with Stanley Kubrick aboard,
See full article at Trailers from Hell »

Federico Fellini’s Roma

Federico Fellini’s best non-narrative feature is an intoxicating meta-travelogue, not just of the Eternal City but the director’s idea of Rome past and present. The masterful images alternate between nostalgic vulgarity and dreamy timelessness. Criterion’s disc is a new restoration.

Fellini’s Roma

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 848

1972 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 120 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 13, 2016 / 39.95

Starring Peter Gonzales, Fiona Florence, Pia De Doses, Renato Giovannoli, Dennis Christopher, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Elliott Murphy, Anna Magnani, Gore Vidal, Federico Fellini.

Cinematography Giuseppe Rotunno

Film Editor Ruggero Mastroianni

Original Music Nino Rota

Written by Federico Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi

Produced by Turi Vasile

Directed by Federico Fellini

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Federico Fellini stopped making standard narrative pictures after 1960’s La dolce vita; from then on his films skewed toward various forms of experimentation and expressions of his own state of mind. Most did have a story to some degree,
See full article at Trailers from Hell »

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger officially become ‘The Archers’ for this sterling morale-propaganda picture lauding the help of the valiant Dutch resistance. It’s a joyful show of spirit, terrific casting (with a couple of surprises) and first-class English filmmaking.

One of Our Aircraft is Missing

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy /103 82 min. / Street Date November 15, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Hugh Williams, Bernard Miles, Hugh Burden, Emrys Jones, Pamela Brown, Joyce Redman, Googie Withers, Hay Petrie, Arnold Marlé, Robert Helpmann, Peter Ustinov, Roland Culver, Robert Beatty, Michael Powell.

Cinematography Ronald Neame

Film Editor David Lean

Camera Crew Robert Krasker, Guy Green

Written by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Produced by The Archers

Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

There are still a few more key Powell-Pressburger ‘Archer’ films waiting for a quality disc release, Contraband and Gone to Earth for just two.
See full article at Trailers from Hell »

12 expensive and eccentric modern Hollywood movies

Ryan Lambie Jul 26, 2016

They cost millions and they’re very, very odd. We take a look at 12 expensive and eccentric Hollywood films from the past 40 years...

The risk-averse nature of filmmaking means that the world’s more maverick and outrageous writers and directors have to make do with relatively low budgets. Nicolas Winding Refn drenched the screen in all kinds of sordid, violent and startling imagery in such films as Only God Forgives and this year’s The Neon Demon, but the combined budget of those probably didn’t even match the catering budget for something like Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.

Every so often, though, a truly bonkers film slips through the Hollywood studio system - often by accident. From horror sequels to original sci-fi adventures, here are 12 incredibly expensive and gloriously eccentric Hollywood movies from the past 40 years.

The Exorcist II (1977)

Budget: $14 million

Like most films made for purely financial reasons,
See full article at Den of Geek »

DVD Review: Poor Cow

  • 25 July 2016
  • by CineVue UK
  • CineVue
★★★★☆ 1967 was the year of Carry On Doctor, Quatermass and the Pit and two James Bond movies. It also saw the feature debut of acclaimed television director Kenneth Loach with Poor Cow, starring Terence Stamp, fresh from his first brush of Hollywood fame and Carol White, who had starred in the television drama Cathy Comes Home that had propelled both its star and director into the national limelight. Based on Nell Dunn's novel - Loach had used her work before in another Wednesday Play Up the Junction - Poor Cow tells the story of Joy (White), a working class young mother whose progress through life seems beset with woes.
See full article at CineVue »

Don’T Bother To Knock (1952)

The icon-establishing performances Marilyn Monroe gave in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) are ones for the ages, touchstone works that endure because of the undeniable comic energy and desperation that sparked them from within even as the ravenous public became ever more enraptured by the surface of Monroe’s seductive image of beauty and glamour. Several generations now probably know her only from these films, or perhaps 1955’s The Seven-Year Itch, a more famous probably for the skirt-swirling pose it generated than anything in the movie itself, one of director Wilder’s sourest pictures, or her final completed film, The Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller and costarring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.

But in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) she delivers a powerful dramatic performance as Nell, a psychologically devastated, delusional, perhaps psychotic young woman apparently on
See full article at Trailers from Hell »

Conflicts in the work of screenwriter Nigel Kneale

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From Quatermass to The Year Of The Sex Olympics, the voice of classic British screenwriter Nigel Kneale is still resonant and exciting...

Conflict drives drama. What people want and how they set out to get it makes for the best entertainment: Chief Brody wants to make Amity Island a safe place for his kids; Indiana Jones wants to find the Ark of the Covenant; Mark Watney wants to survive on Mars, A giant shark, a bunch of Nazis, and a planet without an atmosphere respectively stand in their way.

But conflict isn't only a device from which to hang big action sequences. The tension between ideas can make for brilliant drama - the kind of film and television that you think about for years afterwards - and one of the best screenwriters for this conflict of ideas was Nigel Kneale.

Kneale was born in 1922 in Barrow-in-Furness and,
See full article at Den of Geek »

DVD Savant’s Guide to the New Wave of Classic Hammer Blu-rays

Curious about all those Region B Hammer Blu-rays from overseas, the ones requiring a region-free player? As a public service, Savant has solicited an expert opinion (you'll have to take my word for that) of a film restoration/transfer specialist who is also an informed fan of the filmic output of the little horror studio at Bray. I know, real Hammer fans buy first and worry about quality later, but this little guide might be of help to the rest of us budget-conscious collectors.

A 'Guest' article Written by a trusted Savant correspondent.

(Note: I receive plenty of emails asking for advice about the quality of Region B Blu-rays, most of which I don't see. I have access to industry people qualified to compare and judge the discs, but they stay off the record, because their employers forbid them to go online with their opinions. They must sometimes simmer in
See full article at Trailers from Hell »

Clifford Hatts obituary

BBC television designer behind the science fiction serial Quatermass and the Pit

Clifford Hatts, who has died aged 93, designed many landmark productions for BBC television – most notably the seminal science fiction serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59). Broadcast live from Riverside Studios, it was the most ambitious and memorable of Nigel Kneale’s trio of 1950s stories concerning the British scientist Bernard Quatermass. The production contained a number of pre-filmed inserts staged at Ealing Studios, most of which were set in the titular “pit” designed by Hatts – a building site in which the remains of palaeolithic humans are discovered next to a 5m-year-old Martian spaceship. Memorably horrific and thrilling, the serial tapped into such contemporary concerns as unexploded bombs, race riots and mankind’s propensity for war.

Continue reading...
See full article at The Guardian - TV News »

How Hollywood soundtracks repeat the same old tune

If you see a movie for the first time and swear you've heard the score before, it may not be your imagination...

Last month, the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (Afm) sued six major studios for reusing film soundtracks in other films without paying the appropriate compensation. It's the kind of news that will make people roll their eyes. Ah yes, they'll say after seeing the headlines. Typical Hollywood. Not even the music's original any more.

But go beyond the headlines about reusing the same music too much and delve into the lawsuit and it reveals an interesting insight into the kind of situations where music does get repeated.

The lawsuit, it soon becomes evident, isn't about the use of music in itself (a quick browse through the soundtracks for the titles in question, such as This Means War or Argo, reveals that they have
See full article at Den of Geek »

The London Film Convention Celebrates 80 Years of Hammer in the Shadow of Big Ben

  • 04 March 2015
  • by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
  • CinemaRetro
Iconic Hammer actresses Martine Beswick, Veronica Carlson and Caroline Munro. (All photos copyright Adrian Smith. All rights reserved.)

Retro-active: The Best From Cinema Retro's Archives

(The following article was originally run in November, 2014)  

By Adrian Smith 

With around sixty special guests in attendance, the Westminster Central Hall on Saturday the 7th of November was packed to its domed roof with excited Hammer film fans.

Familiar faces including Caroline Munro, Valerie Leon, Madeline Smith and Martine Beswick were providing some glamour, but the organisers managed to make the event extra-memorable by securing the presence of Edina Ronay, George Cole, Freddie Jones and others who had not signed autographs at a fan event before. At times queues to meet them ran out of the building and down the street! Other rare UK appearances were made from Veronica Carlson and Linda Hayden, flown in from the Us to meet their fans. It was
See full article at CinemaRetro »

Comic Book Review – Judge Dredd Megazine #353

Villordsutch reviews Judge Dredd Megazine #353…

Welcome to you squaxx dek thargo to the review for Megazine issue #353 in which we have a new starter with Judge Dredd: Dead Zone – Invisible, an ending from with the Man from the Ministry and our tales in Lawless and Uprising are continuing on. So let’s not hang around here whilst there’s scrotnig things to read!

Judge Dredd: Dead Zone – Invisible

With Invisible we’re following the hapless couple (Yodie and Belle) that stumbled into the grave-robbing/murder excellent story of the last few issues; it was in the final couple of chapters that Yodie discovered a possible piece of alien technology. The alien tech is built in the form of a bracelet, which Yodie now wears and Dredd and Co. are desperate to get hold of in what appears too be for the couple’s safety. Yodie in fear has
See full article at Flickeringmyth »

Kim Newman to present ‘The Visitor’ at the Phoenix Cinema

The Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley have announced that Kim Newman will be presenting Giulio Paradisi’s fantastically bizarre 1979 sci-fi horror The Visitor - which stands as a completely unique fusion of horror films like The Omen and Birds with sci-fi such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars - on Friday 5th September at 11.45pm. The screening is part of the Scalarama series in September and the ongoing Phoenix Nights series at the Phoenix Cinema.

John Huston stars as an intergalactic warrior who joins a cosmic Christ figure in battle against a demonic 8-year-old girl, and her pet hawk, while the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. Multi-dimensional warfare, pre-adolescent profanity and brutal avian attacks combine to transport the viewer to a state unlike anything they’ve experienced… somewhere between Hell and the darkest reaches of outer space.

A novelist, critic and broadcaster, Newman
See full article at Blogomatic3000 »

Human vs. Alien Films: The Must-Sees

Humankind’s collision with otherworldly life forms can make for unforgettable cinema.

This article will highlight the best of live-action human vs. alien films. The creatures may be from other planets or may be non-demonic entities from other dimensions.

Excluded from consideration were giant monster films as the diakaiju genre would make a great subject for separate articles.

Readers looking for “friendly alien” films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953) and the comically overrated Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) are advised to keep watching the skies because they won’t find them here.

Film writing being the game of knowledge filtered through personal taste that it is, some readers’ subgenre favorites might not have made the list such as War of the Worlds (1953) and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).

Now let’s take a chronological look at the cinema’s best battles between Us and Them.
See full article at SoundOnSight »
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