A Thousand Cuts

In The Heat Of The Nitrate
A Thousand Cuts - The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved The Movies
by Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph
University Press Of Mississipi
ISBN: 978-1496807731

You know, this book’s subtitle is far more optimistic than you may expect if you’ve already delved under the beautiful dustcover and started reading this collection of interviews with a certain kind of dying breed. A Thousand Cuts - The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved The Movies is about a bunch of people, some of them very famous, who deal, trade and collect prints of movies... and the quirkiness of the obsessive personality of collectors is, as you would expect, very much in evidence here. However, these are not rose tinted tales of maniacal outcasts restoring the glory of movies past... although, to be fair there is a bit of that in this. More often, however, it’s a sobering account of people measuring what we, as a society, have lost... where prints decay in that phenomenom called vinegar syndrome... and the chilling realisation that this is just the tip of the iceberg and modern movies are in way much more danger for future generations than the gazillions of movies we’ve already lost to the march of time over the years.

While spelling out certain truths in his introduction to the various chapters, each of which highlights one collector (or occasionally more who are tied together by a certain theme), Bartok does highlight that films as an art form are not quite so much at their last knockings in terms of the way they are sometimes welcomed by the younger generation as part of a whole package of different media feeding off each other. He illustrates this with the Harry Potter movies and mentions that many children are eventually led to the movies because they want to find out how to get through the rest of the levels of the video games of these characters... so they look at the movie versions for inspiration and then also, quite possibly, the books. And this is one way that films are not quite a redundant art form as yet. However, what this book is mainly about is film as celluloid or nitrate prints that are literally ticking time bombs and Bartock and Joseph, with the help of testimonies and recollections from fellow collectors, highlight this alarming trend and the current attitude of  a ‘disposable Hollywood’.

To be fair they do highlight that certain good things are happening to try and save ‘film as we know it’. For example, nobody is really making film stock anymore and he mentions that directors like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan have banded together and managed to persuade Hollywood to advance order so much film that the few companies providing it can keep themselves in business for another five years or so. As you find when you’re reading through the anecdotes in this tome, this is not just a nice thing to do but, pretty much, an essential thing to do if directors want to be able to keep and store proper versions of the films they make.

Asides from the heavy stuff, though, the book is a charming gem of first and second hand anecdotes about the people who buy reels of certain films for their collections. The author highlights a number of times in the book... and I’m not 100% sure of why he does this.. that the majority of the people in the world of film collectors (and I mean literally buying prints in cans) are predominantly male, gay and, for the most part, are not able to hold down a steady relationship or family due to the expense and storage space needed for their collections. That being said, there are other collectors in here that don’t fit that description... even a woman collector who is into buying and preserving terrible B-Movies (and thanks to her, I shall now be on the look out for a Blu Ray of APE, a movie I wasn’t that bothered about before reading this). And also some collectors who have turned their personal collections into goldmines for others (at a price), many of them rescuing these films from final oblivion against unbelievable odds, such as the man who specialises in sexploitation and who some of my readers might know as the man who resells DVDs and Blu Rays of his prints as the Something Weird Video label.

And there’s some truly interesting stories both from collectors most people have never heard of to some more famous names on the scene, such as film critic Leonard Maltin, director Joe Dante and, of course, the very high profile story of actor Roddy McDowell, who was caught in an FBI sting in the 1970s, when the FBI were pretty much waging war on private collectors under the crusade of copyright violation (in a campaign as destructive as the Video Nasty era of films in the UK in the 1980s was). In an ‘almost but not quite’ metaphor for the McArthy witch-hunts, McDowell was forced to confess his interests and dealings in film prints and name names so that the FBI could see who to bust next (one of the collectors in this book, who is also one of the co-authors, went to jail for his dealings at one point). Part of McDowell’s ‘confession’ document is reprinted here and it makes for interesting reading when you find McDowell would defend his passion through trying to become a better actor from watching others etc. It’s a heartbreaking document but it’s full of unusual information such as McDowell justifying his ownership of a print of Escape From The Planet Of The Apes due to the fact that it was heavily edited on television screenings.

There are many kinds of stories packed into A Thousand Cuts. Such as the tale of a gay, Nazi collector who was proud of his print of Thoroughly Modern Millie but who also had a small can found next to it labelled ‘Jew outtakes’... because he’d cut out the Jewish wedding scene where Julie Andrews sings that fantastic song so he wouldn’t have to look at that when watching. And thanks to Maltin, I now know the projectionist’s term for an adequate distance between the projector and the screen is referred to as ‘a good throw’. And there are also many stories that highlight how in danger film now is. There are not many of these collectors left (and very few young ones) but, here’s the thing... because nobody in Hollywood is making or looking after any prints (and even less so with the somehow more volatile digital movies), often they will seek out these private collectors to borrow the print for new screenings or to get the best print for a Blu Ray restoration. However, the well is drying up and, with a lot of films made over the last 20 years or so, there is no well to plunder at all when the next release of a specific film is required. And, what’s worse (and I saw this coming from the moment I first heard about film restoration), as Joe Dante points out, most of the films are not being converted to digital and saved in that way. The content is very much cherry picked to just... what will make money or is a big movie or future classic... but there are gazillions more films that the high profile restorers are just not interested in.

There’s a wonderful the tale of one collector in this book which says a lot about the state and worrying future demise of the art of film, actually. It’s a man who loved the classic movie The Day Of The Triffids so much that he spent over thirty years of his life, in all his spare time, going over his print with a needle to take out the hundreds of thousands of white specks on what I am assuming is the only print existing worth talking about. And that’s the only reason, from what I can make out, as to why we have such a nice looking, blemish free print of The Day Of The Triffids on home video now. Without this guy’s battles for copyright and to restore it over the decades, it would probably be a lost film by now. Or at least, a film in a much less watchable condition. And, frankly, I find that prospect to be a grim and frightening one and, it has to be said, a lot of the collectors in this book seem pretty depressed when asked about the future of film. I mean, sure, some of them can agree that the latest Blu Ray restorations, if done correctly, can sometimes look better than the original film print ever did (something I learned myself from a documentary on the first Blu Ray restoration of the Bond films from a few years ago) but, yeah, having access to everything a film lover may want in the future will be.... well, I suspect there will be quite some outrage in 20 or so years time when people start to realise just what we are losing right now... especially in relation to modern films.

So, yeah, that’s my little review of A Thousand Cuts - The Bizarre Underground World
of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved The Movies. It’s a fabulous tome and one of those books about film that I’m very happy to have on the shelf. This is absolutely recommended to anyone who is in love with the idea of owning little pieces of celluloid history and also for those of us who buy films regularly on DVD and Blu Ray. There’s a lot to learn from this vastly entertaining and well written book. A definite read for all cinephiles, buffs or just casual fans of cinema... a real goldmine of information and trivia awaits.

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

We’re Warner Git You Sucka!

Hammer Horror -
The Warner Brothers Years
2018 USA Directed by Marcus Hearn
Screened 26th August at FrightFest 2018

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years is the latest in a series of documentary films written by the director, Marcus Hearn, about certain sections of British cinema and TV heritage from times gone by. He has written a number of books, too, on his specialist areas of interest such as, amongst others... Amicus Studios, The Avengers, Doctor Who and, of course, Hammer Studios. So he’s definitely one of the main people you could want researching, writing and directing a documentary like this which, it has to be said, certainly has a very specific, honed down subject matter. That being the films Hammer made with money flowing to them from Warner Brothers/Seven Arts. This was during the last ten or so years of the original studio’s last hurrah although, there were also other films being made with other distributors before, during and after this which obviously don’t get much of a mention here.

So this one doesnt quite cover the last few years of Hammer’s descent into non-existence (in that particular incarnation) but it does show them as they are attempting to change the way their movies are produced and in turn perceived by a target audience that was clearly changing. So this covers mostly films such as Taste The Blood of Dracula, Dracula AD 1972, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires but doesn’t talk about some of their films with other distributors in which they were also trying to have a hand in changing their image, so to speak.

The film is, as you would expect, as series of talking head shots of various surviving creators and actors/actresses such as Veronica Carlson, John Carson, Madeline Smith, Peter Sasdy and the incomparable Caroline Munro, all interspersed with clips from the movies (and even rare behind the scenes footage) and interviews with such modern experts on the phenomena including author Jonathan Rigby, director Joe Dante and Sir Christopher Frayling.

There is a lot on offer here with, perhaps, not a lot of time to cover the ground the documentary so obviously wanted to try and get to. Consequently, I’m sure most people will find that not enough of their favourite movie from this, admittedly, somewhat short selection of films is being covered... which is not particularly a fair criticism, to be sure, because you’re always going to get that kind of thing happening. For instance, for me personally, there were some issues with the documentary which really only rang true for me and I’m sure everyone will have a very personal response to what has been covered.

Caroline Munro states here that a lot of people are warming up to Dracula AD 1972 after it coming under fire a lot over the decades and even in Kim Newman’s introductory interview with Marcus Hearn before the film screened, he put in a good word for it. I dunno, I somehow found it hard to believe that, despite the treatment of the gothic, church bound Dracula in this movie, which various interviewees rightly pointed out, none of the people in the documentary realised that Dracula AD 1972 is, indeed, the greatest Hammer Dracula film (followed closely by The Satanic Rites of Dracula and Taste The Blood Of Dracula). It might also have been nice to get Michael Kitchen’s view on his role in Dracula AD 1972 too, I think but... maybe it’s not a film he looks back on as fondly as some others.

And while I’m on the subject of that particular film, nobody in the documentary addressed the glaring continuity problems with the Van Helsing character created by the opening, pre-credits sequence in Dracula AD 1972 and the later movie The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires. Neither did anyone address the astonishing differences between the two actresses playing the character of Jessica Van Helsing in the two movies... Stephanie Beacham and Joanna Lumley. Nor indeed why that transformation occurred in the first place.

Another problem for me was the relatively short amount of time spent on Moon Zero Two (reviewed by me here) and When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth. The latter because it’s one I’ve never got around to seeing and I’m kinda interested in it and the former because, frankly, asides from the various Quatermass adaptations that Hammer did, I personally think Moon Zero Two is their next best movie. I would have loved to have had more insight into the making of that one, to be honest and, also, the way that I suspect it must have influenced Gerry Anderson when he came to make his live action TV show, Space 1999.

All this being said, Hearn clearly knows which noggins to tap for this particular story and it was truly a pleasure to watch the likes of Frayling and Rigby talk about some of this stuff at a variety of locations including the Cinema Museum and the Natural History Museum. It was also great that Hearn managed to talk to Peter Sasdy, who I don’t quite recall seeing before in one of these kinds of productions. In fact, one of the things Hearn pointed out in his introductory interview with Kim Newman before the movie played was that with the Hammer films of this period, now, it really is almost a race against time because at some point all the people who have first hand knowledge of working on these things will depart this earthly plane.

The one thing which did surprise me a little is that, given some of the books I’ve read about Hammer over the years (including some by Hearn, no doubt), there was only a hint of the problems behind the scenes with the various producers and studio heads at Hammer at that time. The death of the company was looming but it was perhaps not quite as chaotic or damning at the time these particular films were made to really taint the story of this period with the negativity which would later engulf the studio and rip it from this world. I did, however, notice a certain resistance on the part of some of the interviewees who starred in these films in that they weren’t all that enamoured of the direction that Hammer was taking but, as others pointed out both in the film and in the pre-screening talk, it was definitely something Hammer had to do. Hammer was being perceived as a somehow cosy and toothless brand of horror compared to some of the other, American, bigger budget horror movies which were coming out at the time and they really did need to change the way they wrote and produced these kinds of 'dark fantasies'. After all, as this film points out, 1973 was also the year when The Exorcist hit cinemas and so Hammer really were beginning to be perceived as the quaint, cutesy alternate to what I’m sure many people of the time were thinking was ‘real horror’. Alas, it becomes obvious at some point that they clearly weren’t doing enough to change their approach and it’s also made abundantly clear in the documentary that, when Warner Brothers withdrew their money and support from Hammer, it was the beginning of the end for the company that had fairly recently won the Queen’s award for best British exports.

As the director himself pointed out in his introduction to the film at FrightFest, this documentary is really an attempt to put together an ‘extra feature’ which is sadly absent from various Hammer DVDs and Blu Rays and it certainly has the look and feel of other extras he’s been involved with (and yes, it does often reference Mike Vicker’s main title score to Dracula AD 1972 throughout... a bit of a go to track for a lot of ‘Swinging Hammer’ documentary spots, it seems to me). That’s certainly fine with this audience member, though, as it’s solidly entertaining and certainly informative in a few places to boot. If you’re an admirer of the Hammer Horror brand with a fondness for this period in their celluloid history then Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years is probably something that you need to see. I, for one, hope the director might consider doing another such documentary on some of the other films that Hammer was producing at that time, sometime in the near future before the well of the legacy of talent dries up.


FrightFest 2018 @ NUTS4R2

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World

Luciferina

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

Videoman (aka Videomannen)

Crystal Eyes (aka Mirada De Cristal)

Gremlins Christmas Double

Mogwai-Fi

Gremlins
1984 USA
Directed by Joe Dante
Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

Gremlins 2: The New Batch
1990 USA
Directed by Joe Dante
Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

Okay then.

For my other Christmas double bill I chose the two Gremlins movies, the first of which is set at Christmas.

Gremlins
I remember all the hoopla surrounding this film when it came out, which was much more focused on the “Steven Spielberg presents...” part than any contribution by the wonderful director Joe Dante. There was an absolute obsession with the cute furry creatures in their “mogwai” stage and I remember all the kids used to have either a plush, furry mogwai or a rubber, flexi-gremlin figure. If you went to the seaside and looked at any crane machine, these things were filled with little mogwai. This film caught the public imagination and didn’t let go for a while and the first movie, at the time, deserved its success, I think.

Starting off as a little tongue-in-cheek urban myth from the Second World War, if I’m not mistaken, the idea of gremlins as the creatures who were always blamed for malfunctions in machinery in that period became very popular at the time. These days if something goes wrong with a piece of software we say it’s got a “bug” in it... if something was going wrong with something in those days it was a “gremlin”. This was lovingly personified in an old episode of The Twilight Zone (Nightmare at 20,000 Feet) where William Shatner gets hysterical watching a small “gremlin” taking apart the engine of the passenger plane he is travelling in and it was this story which was later remade for release the year before Gremlins in 1983 and used as one of the segments in Twilight Zone: The Movie. The production of the  movie presumably sparked the imagination of Spielberg enough to get Gremlins off the starting block and he hired Dante, who had directed a different segment of the Twilight Zone movie, for the job.

The film is a bit of a classic and, though I found it had dated quite a lot since the last time I’d watched it, I still think it’s a classic piece of movie making. I’m not going to summarise the movie here too much, suffice it to say that when free-lance inventor Randall Peltzer buys the mogwai for his son Billy for Christmas, the three “rules” that one must never break when looking after such a creature are quickly and accidentally broken, which leads to the birth of a fresh spawn of mogwai (from water) who then gestate and metamorphose, once they’ve eaten “after midnight” into creatures that are, way more than mischievous. Indeed, I remember there being some quite hard censorship objections to the film which made the national news at the time because, although it’s clearly intended for a young audience, it was slapped with a 15 rating due to some quite nasty sequences involving gremlin death (gremlin pulverised in a liquidator, gremlin shredded in a waste disposal unit, gremlin exploding in a microwave etc) which worried the hell out of parents and censors at the time.

And that’s the little trick of Gremlins, in that it takes the, now familiar, key signatures of Dante’s work in the lighthearted touch of an old Warner Brothers cartoon sensibility but then swiftly, about half way through, turns into a much more darker entertainment, much more akin to a horror movie, as the film's main human protagonist fights off a gremlin who is trying to chainsaw him to death, for example.

Still, if you’re of an age when you are not going to get freaked out by such stuff (I must have been 16 at the time I saw it on its original cinema release) then it was a great little movie and packs a lot of industry in-jokes in such as having people like composer Jerry Goldsmith appearing in a few shots, along with The Time Machine and the original Robby The Robot from Forbidden Planet... indeed, the much used Robby even does some lines from his debut appearance in this film if you listen carefully.

Talking of Goldsmith, the score is composed by him in his usual effective and entertaining style (he was a frequent collaborator with Dante and was able to capture just the kind of atmosphere that was required) and its fitting that he was called in to score this as he composed the music for Twilight Zone: The Movie which included a little melody, orchestrated for dominant fiddling, for the gremlin on the wing story which Goldsmith appropriately used as the basis for the main gremlin theme in this movie.

It’s still a great watch of a movie and is full of fun, moving sequences of unabated cuteness, quirky and dark horror and it has a beyond fun score. Definitely one to watch out for if you’ve never encountered it before.

However... then came Gremlins 2: The New Batch... and my view of that one remains exactly the same as the only ever time I saw it, when it was released in cinemas back in 1990.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Gremlins 2: The New Batch has more of everything in it, concentrated in a single more claustrophobic space of a tower block which is obviously inspired by the Trump tower, known as the Clamp tower. Indeed, there’s even a main character clearly modelled on Trump in the movie. So the main human protagonists from the first film, Billy and his romantic interest, are now working in this tower in the big city, where they once again encounter the original mogwai from the first movie, Gizmo, who is once again accidentally forced to spawn a mischievous and deadly infestation of gremlins which the humans must try to stop leaving the tower and reaching the streets of New York.

But where, say, a film like Die Hard worked better from limiting the setting, the second Gremlins movie just becomes hamstrung by the indulgence of the director who is allowed to let his toys out to play in earnest. There are the usual movie references (Christopher Lee playing a mad scientist who is, at one stage, seen carrying one of the original seed pods from the 1950s version of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers) but somewhere in the midst of all this excess of cute gags designed purely for laughs, the film kinda forgets to make us feel anything or let us care for any characters.

Worse, it betrays the memory of the first film where characters you thought were killed by the Gremlins are brought back (aw, they were only slightly injured after all) and even the brutal but effective sequence where Phoebe Cates character Kate in the first film explains exactly why she hates Christmas... is spoofed and made light of in this movie in a sequence that leaves a bad taste of condescension in the mouth.

Even Goldsmith’s Gremlin Rag has been transformed by the composer into something that is a little more like a “pop-shortening” of the original theme and it’s far less effective than his score to the first movie... and certainly less fun.

All in all I generally like Joe Dante and think films like the original Gremlins, Matinee and Looney Tunes: Back In Action are all little masterpieces... but I think Gremlins 2: The New Batch is probably one of his all-time worst movies and it feels much less subtle and overplayed than the original classic.

At the end of the day, most fans of the first movie are going to want to see this one due to the memories of the first, but I really wouldn’t recommend this second, over-blown yet watered down confection to anybody. Stick with the original movie and give this second a wide berth.

Piranha

The Long Fish Goodnight


Piranha USA 1978
Directed by Joe Dante
MGM Region 2

So I finally took a look at the Roger Corman produced, lets-all-ride-the-Jaws-bandwagon movie Piranha because, frankly, I can’t resist the allure of the Piranha 3DD trailer which has been doing the rounds (using a bust size to denote a movie’s chronology... genius) and so I want to see the previous four Piranha movies before this one gets unleashed in cinemas (that includes the first remake of Piranha if I can get it, the TV version called Piranhas). So that’s why, if anyone asks, I’m watching movies about fish with teeth.

However, there’s good compensation to be had from sitting through some of this twaddle. For instance, this first movie in the sequence is only the second feature film by a director you may have heard of... you know, Joe Dante? He’s a great director and some of his trademark signature points are already showing up in this one, such as the use of cartoons on television. It’s also got a few of his usual cast of character actors turning up to help him out including the one and only Kevin McCarthy in the role of a crazy over-acting scientist. Of course, he doesn’t run down a street shouting “They’re here! They’re here!” but, you know, good enough.

In addition to a raft of great character actors, the cast includes Bradford Dillman as the male protagonist Grogan (in kind of a lethargic Burt Reynolds mode) and TV's Jessica 6 from Logan’s Run, Heather Menzies, as the main female protagonist. In addition to these two, there’s also genre favourite Barbara Steele (Black Sunday, Pit and The Pendulum, The She Beast, Shivers etc) as a military scientist and ex-lover to Kevin McCarthy’s character. So there’s a real display of interesting actors (or at least “personalities”) to look at in this one.

And all this is wrapped up in a package scored by the popular Italian composer Pino Donnagio... it’s not his best score but it does have some interesting trademark flourishes and, though I’m used to watching Joe Dante movies when they’ve been scored by Jerry Goldsmith, I’d happily take Pino Donnagio as an alternative.

Oh... and did I mention it’s the first story and screenplay to make it onto the screen that’s been written by John Sayles? So, yeah... there’s that too.

Now you might think that, with all this incredible talent both in front of and behind the camera on this one, it means we have an absolute masterpiece of “death fish” mayhem on our hands. Alas, I’m afraid that’s not true. It certainly wasn’t as trashy or exploitational as I’d expected it to be but, with films of this nature, I find that a lack of sleazy fun injected into the proceedings is not neccessarily a good thing... it could have done with being a lot trashier in my book. Because of the quality of the artists involved, what you have is a movie which strives to be more than its budget allows and, though this is not neccessarily a bad thing, in some ways it’s to the movies detriment. On the other hand, it’s a not bad showcase/calling card for some of these artist’s talent so there’s that too. Worthwhile creatives have begun to forge a career off the back of this one.

There have been attempts made, probably by Corman post-rough cut I should think, to “trash the movie up good”... and I guess in some ways this works better than others. There’s an obvious flash-cut (if you’ll excuse the pun) where a body double has been unceremoniously cut into the footage to make out that Heather Menzies is flashing her breasts... this is so obvious and it kinda kills the mood. Doesn’t work well at all. Kinda makes you wonder what Heather Menzies was thinking, getting involved with a Roger Corman movie.

There are, however, a lot of plusses to the movie as well. For instance, a completely superfluous stop-motion animation a-la-Harryhausen styled miniature creature is wandering around Kevin McCarthy’s lab in some of the early scenes. It doesn’t interact with the human characters, just gets out of their way, and the human characters don’t see it at any point. Now it could be argued that this loosely animated character is there to show the demented nature of Kevin McCarthy’s experiments for the military (in almost direct contradiction to what he tells our main protagonists later) but my guess is that this little creature wasn’t even mentioned in the script. I think it’s probably Joe Dante practicing his craft for his future movies where knowledge of how to handle such scenes would be more than relevant. As it is, it’s a cute curiosity which adds another little layer of interest to this film.

Piranha is certainly, and perhaps surprisingly, not a terrible movie. Nor is it a particularly good creature feature, although to be fair to the producers... it was popular enough to spawn a sequel, a remake and then a rebooted franchise, so it was obviously liked by enough people to make these things possible. I wouldn’t personally go out of my way to recommend it to anyone but for fans of this genre of film (technically I think this counts as a horror film since the plot deals with a genetically altered and mutated school of fish) then it’s always going to be worth a watch and, certainly, for anybody interested in the early careers of some of the cast and crew, it’s a bit of a modern historical document. Fish around for a while in this movie and you might find something interesting.