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Wendigo, Night Tide
A week or two back, Stephen Volk asked me if I’d seen “the peculiar, eerie Wendigo“. And the answer was, yes, I have. Stephen Laws had discovered it and was determined that he was going to get me to see it. On the face of it, Larry Fessenden’s modestly-budgeted indie horror reads like a standard…
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The Fall of the Roman Empire
DVD Savant has an extensive review of the Miriam Collection special edition of the Samuel Bronston production, from the days when American dollars plus a European army gave you an epic. I have an earlier no-frills DVD of the title, but this new release gives it the restored-to-glory treatment. It’s a film that planted two…
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Tarzan the Silent
A heads-up regarding the dirt-cheap DVDs available from Alpha Video, a company whose output I can best describe as ‘glorious tat’; a lot of public domain stuff and many titles that would be below most commercial distributors’ radar, but I wish they’d been around when my dad was alive so I could have bought him…
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The Turn of the Tide
Looks like the high-definition format war is as good as over and that the next time I upgrade my Jason and the Argonauts, it’ll be to a Blu-Ray disc. I mean, I haven’t got a Blu-Ray player or anything. I haven’t even got a hi-def TV. But at some point I will. I was an…
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Whistle Down the Wind
I thought it worth giving more prominence to this comment by Stan in response to the Where I’m At post: I looked after the remastering of Whistle Down The Wind about 5 years ago and usually we have to transfer full frame in 16:9 for broadcasters but because this was specifically for a DVD release,…
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Out of the Unknown
The classic BBC anthology series. Only a few still exist, but when they first aired I watched them all. Best TVSF I’ve ever seen, because they treated the literary sources with the same fidelity and presumption of serious intent given to any classic adaptation. I’ve no doubt they’d appear creaky and flawed if I saw…
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Wallace and Kong
A post header which sounds like it has to refer to the most ambitious Aardman stop-motion film ever… A sequence in one of the Disc One extras on the 2005 movie boxed set shows that Peter Jackson owns a copy of the Edgar Wallace material. It’s used as the prop for the script that Jack…
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Lost, in Transition
You know where I came across the pilot episode of Lost? The one with the graphic plane crash and everything? It was part of the in-flight entertainment on a Virgin Atlantic service to the US. I mean, it didn’t bother me, but, you know… Apparently eight episodes of the new season were shot before the…
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Of Robots and Heroes
While we’re talking about the old-time stuff, and recuts and mashups, and harking back to this earlier post… I still have my Super-8 print of the 1942 Lewis Wilson/Douglas Croft Batman serial, which was only available as six 200 foot silent spools… back in my student days I cut them all together, put a mag…
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Monster Munch (2)
Although prolific British thriller writer Edgar Wallace has a ‘conceived by’ co-credit on the 1933 film, Merian C Cooper later denied that Wallace had any hand in the finished product. “Edgar Wallace didn’t write any of Kong,” he said, “not one bloody word.” Wallace died before production began, but in his diary mentioned completing a…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
