DVD??

Hello Dream7939

Nice to know you agree. What are you in disagreement with?

If Odeon Entertainment puts out House Of The Long Shadows – as they're also putting out Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (which has recently had a Stateside release from Scorpion Releasing) – it would hardly qualify as a labour of love unless the time, resources, money and effort is given to all those pesky, time-consuming, expensive little details like colour-timing; removal of debris, hiss, pops, etc.; otherwise it amounts to nothing more than another acquisition hastily assembled for a careless DVD release. I suppose it could be argued that at least someone’s made it available but that depends on an individual’s standards as to the level of criteria that constitutes a good release, which as a fellow collector, I’m sure you appreciate.

It’s a business after all, and concerning these "labours of love", it really comes down to who decides which titles get red carpet treatment. In the world of small and independent film labels, the decision as to which titles are deemed worthy of months (sometimes years) of cleaning and restoration is usually a combination of the film holding a special place in someone's heart and that someone having access to the purse strings, or enough enthusiasm to whip up interest with external parties willing to invest, so yes, God bless people like Don May, Jr. As to all movies – bad or good – being given such care and meticulous treatment, you and I both know that’ll never happen.

Companies like Media Blasters have earned themselves a notorious reputation for screwing up a large number of their releases and I’m sure you would hardly call their Day Of The Animals DVD a labour of love, when you know things would have likely been handled very differently had a film label such as Synapse, Blue Underground, et al, acquired the licence.

Media Blasters’ initial DVD release of Lizard In a Woman’s Skin is a travesty masquerading as a 2 disc special edition complete with fancy embossed slip case – on disc 1 is the splendid looking anamorphic transfer complete with DD 5.1 audio but the film is butchered by bowdlerisation of key scenes that resulted in many of the film’s fans boycotting the disc, in spite of disc 2 having the longer Italian version of the film that is ruined in the eyes of many Fulci fans because it isn’t fully complete and the transfer is awful. To add insult to injury, it’s also the wrong aspect ratio.

Media Blasters corrected this by re-releasing a DVD with a re-mastered version derived from the Italian "Federal Video" restoration, which itself made partial use of the master supplied to them by MGM (and we are talking about MGM on this thread). Media Blasters also acquired additional footage included in their re-master resulting in a version that contains almost every snippet of footage known to exist.

So, should Media Blasters be given credit for this effort? Well, yes and no. Certainly yes, insofar as making the film available in its fullest version but fans of the film still want / need the earlier 2 disc DVD since Media Blasters, in their infinite wisdom omitted to include the excellent 34 minute documentary “Shedding the Skin” that’s on their earlier release. Perhaps they assumed its inclusion as surplus to requirement since fans already own it on the earlier release, but what of those buying for the first time? For true Fulci fans there’s only one option – we need both DVDs. This is the reason I double, triple and occasionally quadruple dip on titles because as fanatic film fans / collectors, we have to take the best of what we can get. What I dislike going along with, is made to order availability such as DVD-Rs.

Don’t get me wrong, when it’s the only available option, then I might consider it – if I want a film badly enough but I for one don’t need this House Of The Long Shadows DVD-R since my Guild VHS is amazingly still in very good shape. I’ll hold out for a decent release while being aware that even when it surfaces, the audio probably won’t be up to scratch and the transfer may not be any great shakes. We’ll just have to wait and see, eh.

As for Day Of The Animals, the first Media Blasters release came out in April 2006 and at that time, the DVD released by Jef Films (released December 2005) was still in print, with Media Blasters DVD arriving on its heels less than 6 months after Jef Films DVD. In fact both the Jef Films and much earlier DVD release from NuTech Digital (released January 1999) both remain easily obtainable. I appreciate Media Blasters DVD while poor, remains the best option of the lot but this illustrates that other releases from different labels rarely have any bearing on other releases being in or out of print, so I really don’t know where your reasoning comes from that re-releases are unlikely while earlier releases remain in print because it just ain’t so. That’s a general rule that applies to mainstream, large studio releases but even many of those are given multiple releases.


What we see as spectacle is in fact a ceremony