WhistlingJack said:
HMV are currently selling
The Hammer Collection, a 21-disc DVD collection comprising
She (1965),
The Nanny (1965),
Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966),
The Plague of the Zombies (1966)*,
Rasputin the Mad Monk,
The Reptile,
The Witches (1966),
One Million Years B.C. (1966),
The Viking Queen,
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967),
Quatermass and the Pit (1967),
The Vengeance of She,
The Devil Rides Out (1968),
Prehistoric Women,
Scars of Dracula,
The Horror of Frankenstein (1970),
Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1971),
Straight On Till Morning (1972),
Fear In the Night,
Demons of the Mind (1971) and
To the Devil a Daughter (1976), along with a documentary,
To the Devil... The Death of Hammer**, for £40, marked down from £149.99.
* A flop film vehicle for the She's Not There hit-makers.
** But not perhaps the most terrifying Hammer film of them all, Holiday On the Buses.
This one has been available in huge numbers over the Christmas and New Year period at the same price Jack records for November. It's a good buy as are the cheap Hitchcock sets from WB & Universal. These are piled up instore in such vast quantities that they can hardly be remainders.
DVDs are like strawberries: we are asked to believe that the proper price is the season of scarcity. In the case of DVDs that is when they are new and in the case of strawberries the season of expensive importation.
I love the way HMV use those supposedly hand-written reduction stickers which emulate felt-tip mark-downs. We are usually paying the market-price and our perception of what constitutes a bargain has been meddled with till we are dizzy.
I am looking forward to seeing Quatermass and the Pit again, having fond memories of the time when it was shown one Christmas Night on telly. She and 1,000,000 years BC was a double bill at the ABC, enjoyed by my brother and me as a treat with Grannie! It will be good to see The Devil Rides Out in OAR.
A few titles do not respect the Cinemascope ratio of the originals, alas and those title-safe opening sequences cause a sigh as they reveert to standard w/s ratio for the rest of the picture. I wish there were some of the earlier Quatermass films in the box but I don't resent the inclusion of the clinkers quite so much as some reviewers. There are nights when pictures such as Viking Queen are about all the brain can handle. A cute little box with drawers and a pleasing booklet with postcards complete the package. Hammer films were sniffed at in their day: they positively revelled in the X-certificate, sending films back to the bbfc for reconsideration, if they failed to get more than an A.
Under new ownership - HMV, since you ask - some of the Fopp shops re-opened before Christmas. In the North-West, that seems to mean just the Manchester branch in Brown Street. Their stock looks mainly to be that which was locked up in the shop when they closed. Some things are worth the trip, however. The double-pack of Capote/In Cold Blood at £7. The Special Edition 2-disc Last Exit to Brooklyn at £3 and the bfi version of Visconti's The Leopard at £11.
Since bfi discs are rarely much discounted, The Leopard is a bargain. Admirers of the movie will enjoy the extended cut but regret that this precludes the English language soundtrack. So hold onto those precious tapes of the BBC print which is NOT the cinema version but a partly-restored cut, adding non-dialogue footage. The DVD is longer still but the film as originally seen is lost for ever it seems.
Recent bargains elsewhere have included Polanski's The Tenant, available at £3 in Morrison's supermarkets - or at £5 for two, if you can find something to match. Poundstore fare has not been wonderful of late but animation fans can find decent Digiview versions of Animal Farm (Halas & Batchelor) and Gulliver's Travels (Fleischers) in the Cartoon Craze series in Poundland. The repackaging of cheap movies gets ever more intense: now you can get four movies for a quid in the shape of 2 double-sided discs. I picked up RKO 281, the award-winning Home Box Office tv-movie about the making of Citizen Kane. It's full-screen but was probably made that way. You get with it a race-drama called A Lesson Before Dying, an Australian watime-set musical called Rebel and soapy tear-jerker called the Angel Doll. Twenty-five pence each. What do you mean they're not on your shopping list!
My other chosen quadruple-bill packages Cronenberg's early Canadian horror Shivers (widescreen, whatever the package says, albeit in pale Eastmancolor, blown up from 16mm) together with The Shawshank Redemption,, Final Scream, a youth-horror with supposed homo-erotic subtext - I read that on imdb. The package concludes with a thing called Witchcraft - or Ghosthouse II. This stars the Exorcist girl Linda Blair and schlockmeister David Hasselhof. The Director credit is bogus - online sources suggest Fabrizio Laurenti. Any horrid scenes excised from the picture itself appear to be fully in evidence in the trailer. Straight-to-video nasty fare, I guess, and the film - like all these apart from the Cronenberg - is in full-screen.[/code]
