Durham County and Other TV News

Uploaded is a review of Durham County: Season 2 from Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada (the series is distributed by Well Go USA in the States), the Gemini-winning series that once again shows how weird Canadians are, and why we shouldn’t build our suburban snout-homes close to hydro wire towers.

Those of you attending Rue Morgue’s upcoming Festival of Fear can also meet series creators and cast on Saturday Aug. 28th at 12:30pm. The hour-long panel discussion (hosted by CTV’s Richard Crouse) will feature actress Michelle Forbes, co-star Greyston Holt, series-co-creator & director Adrienne Mitchell, producer Janis Lundman, and co-creator Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik.

Other TV news:

Some may have heard that the legal headaches surrounding the original Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man series for DVD release were sorted out, which is why there will finally be Region 1 releases of both series.

This far, Season 1 of Woman will debut Oct. 19 ($39.98 SRP), whereas the full run of Man will be available first as a Time-Life exclusive, much in the way Get Smart debuted. Hopefully it won’t take an eternity for the series to trickle down to standard retail outlets, because for those not willing to make that exclusive leap for this 40-DVD set, well, it’s not fair!

Coming out Aug. 31 is the complete series of Thriller (also Universal), starring Boris Karloff, and featuring some isolated score materials.

Image, who recently announced the Blu-ray debut of the original Twilight Zone: Season 1 for Sept. 14, will release Season 2 on BR Nov. 16 (also at $99.98 SRP).

Like Season 1, it’ll contain the same extras (including those isolated scores) from the DVD set, plus new material: 25 commentaries by author Marc Scott Zicree with some of the series writers, additional interviews (some archival), and 15 radio dramas.

Getting Zicree to provide commentaries makes sense, given the author / historian wrote the definitive series guide in 1982 (my copy is quite shop-worn by now), and each episode is a microcosm of the top talent that was around during the late fifties / early sixties, spanning composers, directors, writers, and actors.

Coming out via Shout Factory is The Complete Larry Sanders Show, which, like the bionic Man and Woman series, demonstrates video rights and legal bickering eventually get tempered with time. After the debut of Season 1, further seasonal Sanders sets were in limbo, so this is great news for fans of the acidic satire of late night talk shows. The monster set debuts Nov. 2 ($149.99 SRP), whereas those who sprung for Season 1 around 2007 can take gradual steps at the series’ acquisition via a separate Season 2 set ($34.93 SRP).

Shout Factory is also releasing something called The Psycho Legacy in a 2-disc DVD set Oct. 19 ($19.93 SRP), which is apparently a 90 min. doc on the franchise by Robert V. Galluzzo. I wonder if he acknowledges the TV movie / laughable attempt at a series, Bates Motel (1987), and the unrelated TV movie Psycho 4: The Beginning (1990) as part of the Psycho universe?

Lastly, Paramount will release a full series box of Tales from the Darkside Oct. 19, and War of the Worlds: Season 2 (sold separately, and in a Season 1 + 2 combo) Oct. 26. That may be the longest wait between seasons for any TV series. Season 1 of War came out around 2005, so that’s 5 years fans of this gory, mediocre show have had to wait.

I doubt Season 1’s been remastered, but it would be nice to see it cleaned up for DVD. Both War and the companion series Friday the 13th: The Series were shot on film and posted on video, and look terrible on DVD, which is either due to cramming too many episodes per disc, or broadcast masters that, during the TV’s evolution towards higher resolution, now look wringy, noisy, and smeary. That is the frank legacy of cheap eighties production budgets.

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Bring on the Virgins

There was a time, long, long ago, when the ills of a city or kingdom were solvable by sacrificing a virgin or a high-level babe to a monster. Nowadays we convene Royal Commissions (well, in Canada we do) or Senate Hearings where political chess maneuvers dominate any genuine effort to solve problems and create bridges so bickering factions can live together and govern its populace with rational intelligence and fiscal responsibility.

If money is the reason the long-form mandatory census is being scrapped by the Conservatives up here, perhaps a virgin could revitalize the nation’s coffers; it might give power to a monster more malevolent than our graying pinhead PM, but we’d have more money.

Maybe that sounds a bit extreme, but in the worlds of demi-god Perseus and dragon Vermithrax, a virgin did the trick until a hero brave enough to scrape away the stupid stuff came along. His success (and the general safety of virgins) banished the demons into oblivion, and allowed peace and civility to reign again in ancient Greece and grubby Medieval Scotland.

When Clash of the Titans was released in 1981, was part of a three-film offering of ancient lore. There was John Boorman’s Excalibur, beloved by some in spite of it being visually steeped in bad eighties décor, costumes and soft focus lenses (not to mention the most amateurish use of Carmina Burana on record); Matthew Robbins’ Dragonslayer, with stunning cinematography, music, and a real dragon; and Titans, which also featured soft focus cinematography, but was mostly redeemed by a stellar montage in which Perseus and his crew cross the River Styx, and venture into Medusa’s lair to hack off her snake-encrusted head.

Warner Home Video recently released both the 1981 and 2010 versions of Titans on Blu-ray, and I’ve uploaded reviews that examine the virtues and flaws of the first, and compare the main changes made to the ’81 script by a trio of screenwriters for their ’10 remake.

Not addressed in either review is the need for studios to adapt existing scripts instead of going back to the original Perseus myth and creating something new. The presumption is that Beverley Cross’ script was so well structured that there was little point in creating more work when the filmmakers of the remake already had a well-defined skeleton. Titans is, in fact, not a bad remake of an older script, and a good point of comparison is The Jackal (1997), which is a godawful attempt to rework an older script based on a good book into something hip and kinetic.

Also uploaded is a review of Dragonslayer, which I’ve wanted to see for a while because it represents an early attempt by Disney to venture into more adult fodder. The film was in fact a co-production with Paramount, and unlike Disney’s other co-production with MGM, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), it doesn’t feel schizophrenic.

It also helps that Dragonslayer wasn’t affected by major reshoots, child actors growing older between principle and secondary shooting schedules, and Disney’s desire to lighten up an otherwise grim and gloomy story. Dragonslayer is probably PG-13 material, since it has some moments of graphic violence that’s unnatural to the Disney brand. The fact the film was left alone is perhaps a miracle, or maybe it was Paramount who wanted to make sure the production didn’t get dumbed down for a younger audience.

Tied to the DVD review is a review of Alex North’s score, which was recently released in a newly remastered and expanded CD from La-La Land Records. In the case of Wicked, Georges Delerue’s darker score was junked in favour of James Horner’s music (which is actually quite affecting), but there apparently wasn’t any danger of North’s dissonant music being tossed; the filmmakers loved it too much, and he essentially delivered what they wanted, so a replacement would’ve made as much sense as, oh, Wolfgang Petersen junking Gabriel Yared’s Troy music in 2004 because of some bizarre panic attack, and brining in Horner (again) to write a new and more accessible score for Western audiences.

Ahem.

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Abandoned Matinees

When a movie theatre (or any performing arts house) has outlived its usefulness, or is abandoned and left to rot, or has been allowed to disintegrate by private or public city owners in order to justify the wrecker’s ball for the sake of public safety, it’s all just sad.

Reading about a building’s glory years in print is rather dry, but there’s something impressionable in the still photos of a modern ruin taken by amateur historians, preservationists, photographers, urbanauts, or the curious.

There are a number of websites either dedicated to the state of forgotten buildings, or collections of stills in which the photographer has made a point in capturing the sadness, the mystique, and hypnotic decay of what was once a top-notch centre for artistic and commercial pleasure.

Think of your current favourite theatre… and now imagine the walk up the stairs towards the auditorium by flashlight… stepping around rubbish, plaster from crumbling walls, mold stains, a dead mouse, and piles of seats packed to one side, waiting for a scrap metal pickup that never happened.

Now the torn posters outside of the auditorium’s main doors… and then inside, where you see patches of rotting cloth seats… and a giant whole in the ceiling through which light, water, and pigeon dung have littered the torn red carpet and seats with crud.

The screen still looks good, and one side of the curtains hangs at the halfway point, as though the motor crapped out and no one bothered to finish the job in closing the curtains to signal the last show has long past.

This may be an irregular series for Sundays, or it may be regular, depending on how many collections of forgotten movie houses and drive-ins are out there in the internet’s ether, but for this starter, I’m picking the abandoned Loew’s Poli and Majestic Theatres in Bridgeport Connecticut.

There are several ways you can approach the entry into the past:

--- via the brief historical listing at Cinema Treasures, and a scanning of reader comments

--- pictures snapped by 826 Paranormal, and archived at Flickr.com

--- 826 Paranormal’s creepy YouTube video

--- or look for clips in the Steven Seagal actioner Pistol Whipped / The Marker (2008) and the upcoming Ryan Gosling / Kirsten Dunst film All Good Things

My suggestion is the photo galley, because its silence says a lot more about the glory that used to be, and leave Seagal until the very, very, very end, because, you know, it’s Girdle-Man doing his squintry-eye routine under a helmet of jet black hair that’s impervious to fire, water, and bolts of lightning.

Why do that to yourself?

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Sanity Slippage

Sometimes an environment can drive a person slightly cuckoo, and it takes a major effort to pull one out from a destructive tumble into insanity – assuming that’s what the director and screenwriter wants.

In Erik Skjoldbjaerg 1997 detective thriller Insomnia, it was the incessant daylight in the high north that drove the film’s otherwise sane detective to lose his mind, making clumsy mistakes that endangered the lives of colleagues and eventually himself.

Christopher Nolan’s 2002 remake doesn’t improve upon the original Swedish / Norwegian film, but it manages to be its own thing, and stands strong as a superb procedural thriller that also boasts a strong, creepy performance by Robin Williams, and perhaps one of Al Pacino’s last good performances before he started picking mediocre projects where he could yell for a good 90 mins. Warner Home Video’s sparkling Blu-ray ports over all of the DVD’s heavy extras, and the review is up & running.

Isolation (and lack of prescription medication) affects a son who travels to classic Ontario cottage country to see why his estranged father isn’t answering the telephone. Mike Stasko’s Iodine (2009) is a moody, meditative drama that catalogue’s a man’s decline when major stressors just don’t let up. The son’s delusions eventually smother his perception of reality, and what’s left is a badly damaged psyche (and maybe a cadaver or two). Stasko wrote, directed, co-edited, co-scored and co-starred in this intriguing suspense drama (with the great Ray Wise among the small cast) which Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada is releasing in a solid special edition.

The label’s Canadian arm also offers the film version of George Ryga’s Hungry Hills (2009), in which a black sheep boy returns to his home town, and stirs up a lot of latent anger. It’s a period drama about old conflicts, but it’s also a somber, strikingly visual drama where the desiccated, disintegrating town has turned its inhabitants into bored ghosts, frozen in time because their ugly town is smack in the middle of nowhere. People stay and rot, and manage to merely dream of escaping.

The last entry in this quartet of mental misery is Nightwatch / Nattevagten, Ole Bornedal’s excellent thriller that has a broke law student becoming the suspect in a serial killer investigation. The film’s subtext is what makes it a worthy entry: a boring job, and working the night shift in a building where silence and the stench of pickled and fresh cadavers transform our unlikely hero in a pale victim.

Anchor Bay released the DVD back in 2001, which is frankly a miracle, since Miramax distributed the film theatrically, and has since left it on the shelf to rot while the movie is available in other parts of Europe.

Bornedal’s 1997 Hollywood remake is still around on DVD, but its script (co-written by Bornedal and Steven Soderbergh) was gutted to suit the North American market; there’s nothing controversial, risqué, or dramatically powerful in the ’97 version, and it’s unsurprising Bornedal went back to Denmark, where he continues to make good films.

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Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Chloe and Tronno

Toronto (or as locals tend to say, ‘Tranna’ or ‘Tronno’) rarely plays itself in movies, and having grown up in T.O., it’s often been fun / frustrating to see glimpses of the city in movies, teleplays, and TV shows (often just in pilots for U.S. productions) when the setting is supposed to be the U.S., or sometimes Europe: fun in the sense of spot-the-location (like the bank machine I used outside of Bayview Village, both of which were also used by Carrie Hamilton and Carol Burnett in the 1988 TV movie Hostage); and frustrating because the city rarely appears as itself, and as a noteworthy tertiary character.

Shoot ‘em Up (2007) wasn’t set in a specific city, but the filmmakers made no effort to conceal the city, allowing even the trunk of the CN Tower to appear in shots, but perhaps the best examples of the city as itself are in works of lesser value.

Director / local boy Clark Johnson (Homicide) had the grand climax of The Sentinel (2006) take place at City Hall; a racing sequence in Sylvester Stallone’s Driven (2001) had the actor drag racing his formula car down University Avenue (Ha! Like that could happen with total impunity); there was also Bill Robertson’s awkward comedy-drama Apartment Hunting (2000), and during the tax shelter years, both The Kidnapping of the President (1980) and Circle of Two (1980) were wholly shot in and around City Hall and the Toronto Island, respectively.

(Note: I’ve never seen 1970’s The Heart Farm / The Man Who Wanted to Live Forever nor 1982's Highpoint, so I can’t vouch as to whether Toronto played itself, or was some generic American city that happened to feature Canuckle landmarks like the CN Tower. I would like to see them, but as with all tax shelter films, the damned things have vanished from circulation, except perhaps in Spain.)

That’s a select list, but you get the idea. While it’s not unusual that local boy Atom Egoyan set Chloe (2009) is set in Toronto, it is pleasantly surprisingly that he took pains to show the city’s striking architectural style (yeah, we have some, but you have to look hard beyond the banalities) and impart a sense of its cultural flavour.

Setting aside Chloe’s story, the city, as a character in the drama, actually looks like a great place to live, and in winter, which is saying a lot, because winter sucks.

I’ve uploaded a review of the Chloe Blu-ray from Sony (which is apparently another American-import-of-a-Canadian-movie home video release), and it’s also worth checking out the review of Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie (2003), the original French film upon which Chloe is based. These are two very different films in spite of them sharing the same premise of a wife who hires an escort to flirt and have an affair with her cheating husband for revenge.

One of the two is a drama that keeps side-stepping away from the trappings of a psycho-sexual thriller and focuses on the peculiar friendship between the two women, and the another film falters with familiar genre cliches.

Guess which one…

I’ve also added links to the Chloe review for online news pieces, an Atom Egoyan interview at Spacing about his use of real T.O. locations, and my recent review of Mychael Danna’s excellent score (Silva Screen)

I’ll also have an update of new scores in a few days, but the most important soundtrack news this week is the reissue of Alan Silvestri’s original 1987 Predator score, via Intrada. The album’s been remastered and apparently features a slightly longer music content. Released Aug. 2, it’s now… sold out… which means the 3,000 copy run was not enough, just like the prior Varese CD from 2003, which sold, at its peak, for $425 smackaroons on eBay for a sealed copy.

I guess this will happen again, though you have to wonder why Intrada didn’t consider coughing up the extra licensing fees for a larger 4000-5000 run to satisfy its customer base, the composer’s fan base, and fans of Predator.

Since 1997, this score has been bootlegged 3 times on CD, and there’s clearly a demand for Silvestri’s classic and muscular horror score.

Why not charge a higher retail price for a larger run that’ll still sell out, since Fox is determined to reboot the Predator franchise every few years? By releasing it as a score with a broad appeal ‘limited’ every few years, it just promotes the album’s distribution via file sharing, and one would suspect the loss of sales due to the album’s availability via torrents and P2P networks and bootlegs on auction sites is greater than any loss Intrada might have had from excess copies sitting on the shelves.

Limited releases are logical only when the run is catered to the general size of a score’s fan base. Labels spend only as much as they have to in order to get the music out there, and in general the low pressing run ensures only the people who really love the music and want to own the album will get it within a reasonable time-frame. A 48-hour sellout of a genre classic for an active franchise isn’t smart business sense; it may guarantee there will remain pent-up demand among fans who lucked out on the disc for another seven years, but I’d call this a colossal missed opportunity.

Again.

In other news related to Fox, the folks at the Digital Bits have reprinted their inside look at the Alien Quadrilogy, the mega-set that Fox put out in 2003 for the Alien franchise.

Why is this of interest? Because it’s a glimpse at the production of an exhaustive special edition set, and it relates to the upcoming Blu-ray monster set coming this fall, which will feature new content, including isolated scores.

Coming shortly: films in which the mental stability of disparate characters are affected by isolated environments.

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Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com