Hey, Universal... What's Up with Your Hammer Horror Library?

As I've written on this site more times than I care to Hammer Horror is in a sorry state in the United States. While select titles have slipped out in hi-def from several production companies (Shout! Factory, Millennium Entertainment, Synapse Films), the studio's most essential films remain MIA. Two of the most essential are Hammer's first Dracula sequel, Brides of Dracula, and its one and only werewolf picture, Curse of the Werewolf. Both of these films are the property of one of the biggest studios with Hammer rights in the U.S., Universal, and both were originally released on DVD in 2005 as part of the "Hammer Horror Series 8-Film Collection", which also included Kiss of the Vampire, Paranoiac, Night Creatures, Nightmare, Evil of Frankenstein, and Phantom of the Opera. 

On September 2, Universal will rerelease "Hammer Horror Series 8-Film Collection" on DVD even though this double-disc collection isn't even out of print. The press release made no mention of a blu-ray version, and my inquiry to Universal regarding the hi-def fates of these films has gone unanswered as of this writing. OK, so Hammer doesn't quite have the sweeping rep and influence in the US it enjoys in the UK, but this is still pretty confounding treatment for some unforgettably horrific films that would look astounding on blu-ray. I'd suggest starting one of those online petitions calling for their release on blu-ray if I believed that sort of thing accomplished anything. For now we can only hope that Universal--the studio that did right by its own horror legacy with its "Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection" blu-ray box in 2012-- comes to its senses... or gets its throat torn out by Oliver Reed.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'

With a sudden boost of government assistance by way of Prime Minister John Gorton, Australian cinema really came into its own in the seventies. The boom gave us some extraordinary films, such as Nic Roeg’s dizzying Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff’s brutal, horrifying Wake in Fright. But the most enduring masterpiece of that era is Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. Faithfully adapted from Joan Lindsay’s lyrical novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a dreamy and rather creepy allegory of Victorian sexual repression.

Farewell, Rik Mayall

I'm saddened to report that the People's Poet has passed at 56. Rik Mayall, best known as Rick of "The Young Ones", died today. Aside from his iconic work in film and TV, which also included the great "Black Adder" and a small role in the very best horror film of the eighties, An American Werewolf in London, Mayall wrote an absolutely hilarious book called Bigger than Hitler, Better than Christ that you simply must read. Details of his sudden and tragic death have yet to be determined. 

For now, a couple of great Rik and Rick moments: 

Rick's first encounter with a tampon (featuring young Jennifer Saunders!):


Rick, Neil, and Vyvyan Sings My Generation:
 

A Batch of Monkees Videos for a Wednesday Evening

Watching Mike Nesmith's recent Q&A at the 2014 Monkees Convention sent me down a rabbit hole of Monkees-related videos. The most interesting one brought Davy Jones (who treats us to a terrifying Joe Cocker impersonation) together with a member of another favorite group when he appeared on "Pop Quiz" as part of John Entwistle's team in October 1984. Rounding out the Ox's team and serving as trivia secret weapon is Feargal Sharkey of the great Irish pop-punk group The Undertones. The opposition unites Cheryl Baker of Bucks Fizz and Tony Butler of Big Country (who also worked with John's band mates Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey and also does Cocker), on a team helmed by Dave Dee.

As a bonus, here's Nez's talk at the convention:



...and here's an extra bonus--Peter Tork taking a member of David Letterman's audience on a date in 1982 before sitting down and chatting with the host:
Anyone have a cool Micky Dolenz video they'd like to recommend?

Review: '33 1/3: The Beach Boys’ Smile'

There are two excellent books about The Beach Boys’ “lost” masterpiece SMiLE, both very different and both by Domenic Priore. Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! is a scrapbook of period articles and more recent essays chronicling the anticipation leading up to a release that never happened and the cultish (though deserved) fan obsession that followed. SMiLE: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece is a more straight forward biographical look at the record that takes us up to Wilson’s solo recreation of it from 2004. Since the SMiLE story didn’t end there—The Beach Boys have since did the once unimaginable by sanctioning the release of a wealth of the original sessions in a deluxe box set—a third book on this particular record is not necessarily unnecessary. The SMiLE Sessions opens the story further by providing a more thorough portrait of the music and its making than most people previously heard and finally providing some closure to this uniquely open-ended story. However, Luis Sanchez doesn’t get into that in his installment of the 33 1/3 series. In fact, his Smile doesn’t really deal with SMiLE much at all, at least not for the first 88 pages of his 118-page book. Those pages are spent with each Beach Boys record leading up to SMiLE. They are discussed with light criticism and basic history most fans will already know. When Sanchez finally gets around to the ostensible subject of his book, he gives SMiLE a bit more attention than Surfin’ USA or The Beach Boys Christmas Album but not nearly enough to satisfy. I applaud the writer for not falling into the worst traps that 33 1/3 writers sometimes tumble into. His book is not preciously personal. It is not inaccessibly academic for a book on pop music. It does not eschew The Beach Boys for tangential discussions on agrarian economics or Vampire Weekend. However, this simply is not a book about a single album, which is supposed to be the purpose of the 33 1/3 series. It’s a brief history of The Beach Boys on record from 1961 through 1966 finished off with a decent but general essay on SMiLE that touches a little on the album’s troubled history, a little on Van Dyke Parks’s consequential contributions, a little on its themes and sounds, and a little on its more recent rebirth. While it is not satisfying as a 33 1/3 book, Smile certainly isn’t bad as an early-Beach Boys primer. I don’t think Domenic Priore is going to lose any sleep over this one though.

The Mother of Sci-Fi Movie Franchises Was Also the Darkest

Warning: The Spoilers will damn you all to hell.

Star Wars gets all the credit for being the first major science-fiction movie franchise, segueing off into a plastic avalanche of every product imaginable from the ubiquitous toys to clothing, house wares, books, hygiene products, food, and so on and so on. First appearing a decade before George Lucas’s juggernaut, Planet of the Apes wasn’t quite as over-commercialized as its successor (what is?), but kids could still get their paws on a plethora of Apey action figures, mugs and bowls, t-shirts, comics, puzzles, piggy banks, Ben Cooper Halloween costumes, and so on. They could also get a healthy dose of harsh reality by actually watching the movies. Forget Darth Vader’s traumatizing revelation in The Empire Strikes Back and even all the skin-charring nastiness and off-screen “youngling” killing of Revenge of the Sith. The Planet of the Apes series is by far the darkest, downright cruelest film franchise ever pitched at kids.

Review: '33 1/3: Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville'

When the term “women in rock” became an inescapable buzz phrase around 1993, the women to which that label applied—Polly Jean Harvey, Kim Deal, Tanya Donelly, and Juliana Hatfield, to name a few—often reacted to questions about it with irritation, bugged that lazy journalists were reducing their considerable musical achievements to gender matters. Their irritation was completely legitimate, yet the Rock scene was becoming more gender-balanced than it ever had been before, and to ignore that would have been to pass on a pretty noteworthy story. It was a frustrating inevitability for the talented musicians who had to field the same tired questions about their gender over and over and over again.

Ten Outstanding Performances in David Lynch Works

David Lynch a master of conjuring uncanny, dreamy atmosphere, of terrifying viewers with films that aren’t quite horror movies, of blending genres into swirling nightmares that defy pat analysis. This is the stuff of which the term “Lynchian” is made. But let’s not forget that he is also an expert conductor of actresses and actors, and he has superb taste in them despite his cheeky use of specimens like Billy Ray Cyrus every now and then. The emotional and logical demands of a David Lynch script require remarkably talented interpreters and very often result in thoroughly unique, flat-out stunning performances. Here are ten of the greatest.

1. Jack Nance as Henry Spencer in Eraserhead

Jack Nance would deserve a place on this list if for nothing but his commitment. Eraserhead famously took five years to make as Lynch kept running out of money. That meant Nance had to both remain in character for five years and wear Henry Spencer’s—ummm—distinctive hair style for five years. Nance’s work in the film is far more than that though. With a bare minimum of dialogue, he relies on his subtly expressive face and masterfully controlled body language to convey the real emotion roiling away beneath Henry’s placid surface as he contends with his monstrous, mocking baby. The slightest smile conveys a flash of fatherly pride, the upturn of eyebrows conveys his despondency with his lot in life, his restful expression at the end of the film let’s us know that he finally feels loved, and it is a most moving climax. And when Nance does speak, his choked delivery draws out the film’s humor and sadness with expert balance. Lynch regards Nance as one of the most expert actors with whom he’s ever worked and handed roles in almost all of his films to Nance until the actor’s death in 1996.

2. Freddie Jones as Bytes in The Elephant Man

Review: 'Wild at Heart' Blu-Ray

1990 was a wild year for David Lynch. That’s when he and Mark Frost revolutionized TV with “Twin Peaks”, shocking a passive viewing public with more bizarre humor, cinematic atmosphere, graphic violence, and red-hot sexiness than it had ever seen on the little screen. The vibrations “Twin Peaks” sent out into world—making possible such future series as “The X-Files”, “The Sopranos”, and “Mad Men”—were so intense that we sometimes forget that ’90 was also the year Lynch had a breakthrough on the big screen when he won his first Palme d’Or with his adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart. It is significant that both pieces came out in the same year, because both Wild at Heart and “Twin Peaks” share steamy pulp-romance sensibilities, post-modern humor, pure surrealism, and lots of cast members. Both were also rejected by a fickle public as quickly as they were embraced, TV viewers losing interest in the second season of “Twin Peaks” and critics increasingly deciding that Wild at Heart was too self-referential and self-conscious. That’s always a misinformed way to approach a David Lynch film as he may actually be our least self-conscious, most purely intuitive filmmaker. Despite its nods to such pop-culture touchstones as The Wizard of Oz and Elvis Presley, Wild at Heart really follows a Rock & Roll rhythm all its own, and though it shares similarities with “Twin Peaks”, it diverges from that show and Gifford’s novel in its refreshing hopefulness. It is a film that completely believes that love can survive in a world that’s “wild at heart and weird on top.” While words like “weird” and “ironic” are overused in describing David Lynch’s movies, one word that isn’t is “sweet,” and Wild at Heart is ultimately a really sweet movie—even with its head-smashing murder, toilet seduction, severed-hand snatching dog, gross self-decapitation by shotgun, and close up of puke on a motel room carpet. Hey, it’s sweet, but it’s still a David Lynch movie.

Wild at Heart first came out in a pretty spiffy DVD edition by MGM in 2004, with a nice selection of extra features and refurbished sound and vision personally overseen by Mr. Lynch. The disc’s vibrant clarity was a revelation after so many years spent watching the film’s absolutely wretched incarnation on VHS. Ten years later, MGM has apparently decided that a breakthrough movie by perhaps the greatest living director is not worth putting out on blu-ray, so it passed Wild at Heart off to Twilight Time. It also passed along all of the extra features from its old DVD, which appear on the new blu-ray in standard definition. These are all worth a rewatch, especially for Diane Ladd’s interview. Her explanation for Marietta Fortune painting her face with lipstick is impassioned and it makes perfect sense of one of the film’s craziest scenes. The only new extras are a booklet essay (the cover of which is one of the sexiest movie stills I’ve ever seen) and Twilight Time’s standard isolated music and effects track. It would have been really nice to get those 75 minutes of deleted scenes that Lynch released on his Lime Green set in 2008, but I’m assuming Lynch personally owns that footage since his company Absurda released that DVD box and it wasn’t MGM’s to hand out. Oh, well.

The main draw of this new disc is obviously the blu-ray upgrade. No new tinkering has been performed, but the remastering of the old DVD was sharp enough that it has made the transition to high-def very well. There are some white specks here and there, but if this is the best we’re ever going to get Wild at Heart on home video, I have no complaints.

Get Wild at Heart on blu-ray at screenarchives.com here.

Date Confirmed for My 'Who FAQ' Interview on WFDU

Update: I just received confirmation that my interview about The Who FAQ on WFDU's Vintage Rock & Pop Shop will be airing on Sunday, May 11. Once again, the show airs at 11am and you can either hear it on your radio dial at 89.1 if you live in the NJ area or you can stream it live at www.wfdu.fm here.