This Week in Rixflix #2: March 17-23, 2017

It was an off-kilter week, with some "small world" coincidences taking place just before one of these movies in a theatre (Get Out) that made the world about two sizes smaller for me. One week before possibly having jury duty had me scrambling to burn through a bunch of stuff on my watchlist on Netflix and from amongst the zillion TCM movies on our always too crowded DVR. I saved the big stuff for other posts on this site in weeks to come, but here's a quick recap and some capsule reviews...

This week's feature film count: 14; 11 first-time viewings and 3 repeats.
Highest rated films: Get Out (2017) and The Uninvited (1944) – 8/9 each.
Lowest rated film: Area 407 (2012) – 3/9.

Pete's Dragon (2016) Dir.: David Lowery – I saw Disney's original Pete's Dragon in a theatre way back in 1977. However, I had just turned 13 and I had seen Star Wars a couple of times before then. The cinematic world as I had known it had been completely turned on its ear by the Force, and in a few weeks, Close Encounters of the Third Kind would capture my imagination even further. At that moment, I had probably closed my mind to a mere "kid's film," even though I still watched the Disney show every week and adored animation of all types. I remember thinking that the first film was just O.K.; I loved the animated parts, but never really bought into the live action antics in the film or the music attached to it. I honestly cannot hum Candle on the Water, even though I am told it was the big hit song from that movie – you know, that movie that I saw in a theatre. (To show you how bad this problem of mine is, I typed Candle in the Wind initially.) Honestly, if my brothers hadn't been with me at the show, I would have no proof that I had ever actually seen the film, so little of it do I recall. Here's the kicker: I bought a DVD of the movie a few years ago, and I have never even tried to watch it yet. (I really should remedy that situation.)

I had meant to watch the film again before the shiny, new super-CGI version of the film came out last year... but we didn't go to see that one either. However, Netflix dropped it onto their streaming platform recently, and so I wasted no time in checking it off the list. Just like with the first film, it was... O.K. They did away with the musical portion and made it more of an eco-warrior version of the story, with Pete turned nearly into Mowgli as he gets raised in the "Pacific Northwest" woods (actually New Zealand) with a bigger, altogether furry (and made to sell stuffed animals) conception of Elliot the Dragon. Robert Redford lends more gravitas to this film than it really needs, but he is always good, and I love seeing him so busy recently with his acting. Bryce Dallas Howard lends more credence to the idea that early considerations of her talent were misguided, as she is pretty much wallpaper here (as in Jurassic World). Once more, I recognize the film is well-done and will delight its target audience(s), but I can admit it is pleasant and really nothing more. The dragon is the best part, though I have already been involved in at least three debates as to whether or not dragons should have fur. I am done with that. TC4P Rating: 6/9

Thrashin' (1986) Dir.: David Winters – So happy to see this one show up on TCM Underground. If memory serves, there seemed to have once been a battle over whether Thrashin' or Gleaming the Cube was the "real" skateboard movie. Who the fuck cares? Both are equally dopey but also equally odd fun on certain terms. Those terms being whether or not you want to spend 90 minutes watching characters with little charisma riding around on four tiny wheels and doing all manner of stunts with their boards. Thrashin' predates Cube by three full years, and has a serious lack of Christian Slater in his early career glory in the lead. Thrashin', however, does have a barely legal and already crazily buff Josh Brolin heading it up, and he's not bad in the part, but the real lead of this film is Robert Rusler as Tommy Hook, the leader of a local gang of skateboard misfits. (And his chick is a pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn, wearing about forty pounds of hairspray as a punk diva.) Lots of attitude and underage drinking; lots of turf warfare and pranks between the punks and Brolin's buddies. There's a romance in here for Brolin and Pamela Gidley (very cute), but it really doesn't matter when the entire film is heading towards a downhill skateboard free-for-all race that for some reason will get the winner a coveted sponsorship and a lifetime free from worry and care. It's a truly stupid film, but you can do some '80s-spotting with it, and it also has a truly interesting young cast. TC4P Rating: 5/9

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004) Dir.: Xan Cassavetes – For this film to not bowl me over just by its existence means that the filmmakers have really dropped the ball. I should have completely loved Z Channel, which tells the story of a revered television channel in Los Angeles that played such an eclectic lineup of films in its heyday through the '70s and '80s that 30 years of filmmakers were highly influenced by its programming. Director after director is interviewed, including the obligatory and obvious Tarantino appearance, all in the service of telling us just how formative this channel was, and I do not doubt it for a second. Clip after clip of truly awesome film after truly awesome film is shown, and we totally get why the station was so beloved in its time, way before many of the cable channels we now take for granted. (The current love for TCM definitely has a precursor in the Z Channel.) The film also tells the story of its eventual main programmer, Jerry Harvey, whose tastes ran the gamut from silents to Kurosawa to animation to John Waters (much like yours truly and its many fans), but who battled depression throughout his life, and eventually took his life and his second wife's in a murder-suicide in 1988. It's rich material for a documentary, but at over two hours, the film is seriously padded, and I got the point ten minutes into it. I liked it, but really wanted to love it but could not bring myself around to it. TC4P Rating: 6/9

The Sunshine Makers (2015) Dir.: Cosmo Feilding-Mellen – I honestly don't know if I am ready to discuss this film. In the way that LSD blew the mind (and careers) of its two main subjects, Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, my eyes have been torn to shreds by the self-contained lemon party of the 80-ish Sand exercising and meditating in the nude in this documentary. And not just once. Dude, I don't even want to see myself naked. What makes you think...? Oh, never mind. I am not sure why I decided to watch this film. I don't do drugs (apart from prescription ones, and they are more in the range of blood pressure and asthma meds) and I have never even considered LSD for a second. Don't need it. I trip every time that I close my eyes or even think about something for too long. Even without my meds. So much as happened to these two since the sixties: drug arrests, court cases, Silicon Valley, and there is constantly something new thrown at you. Unfortunately, too much of what is thrown at you are Sands' nuts, and that two octogenarian nuts too many for me. For ex-hippies or current hippies only. Neither of which is me. TC4P Rating: 6/9

Area 407 (2012) Dir.: Dale Fabrigar and Everette Wallin – Found footage aircrash survival scenario in which the bickering and annoying occupants of the plane encounter raptor-like creatures (the dinosaurs, not eagles and hawks... Oh, but technically birds are dinosaurs -- shut up!) in the modern day California desert. Filmed in five days without a script – which means "ab-libbed by amateurs" – if this had not been showing on Shudder and I was looking for a light, pre-bedtime "thriller," then I probably never would have watched it at all. I don't like to get too down on low budget filmmakers outside of any studio system. Hell, this is the type of film I want to make because it looks like a lot of fun. But, still, my own artistic integrity begs me to rate this, and I can't give it more than a 3/9.

VHS Massacre: Cult Films and the Decline of Physical Media (2016) Dir.: Kenneth Powell and Thomas Edward Seymour – Yet another documentary about film, this time partially about the use of VHS tapes in the years between having to suffer through TV scheduling to see something quick and the development of laserdisc and then DVD and Blu-ray (we have it so good right now). The film is also about the cult for VHS tapes that still remains, and I will admit that I still own several hundred videotapes in my own collection. Even when I already own the DVD version, I still hung on to certain tapes that serve as an emotional connection for me. So, I totally get where these guys are coming from, and let me state that this film is definitely an example of happily biased filmmaking, since the directors themselves are collectors (and at least one of them was involved in the making of direct-to-tape, low budget films for many years). You will get little of an anti-VHS vibe from this film, and that is fine. But it also means the film kind of makes its point pretty early, and when we get to the last part of the film where the filmmakers are taking part in a podcast where they talk about closing out the documentary, it gets a little too meta and self-serving. Of interest to film nuts though. TC4P Rating: 6/9

[And for the record, dragons can have fur. See it in ancient Chinese and Japanese art all the time...]

Of Pickaxes, Popped Skulls, and Party Tapes Lost to Time...

The only downside of getting back on the writing track is that it definitely takes time away from sitting down and enjoying films as I have become accustomed. Since one is decidedly more beneficial to my health than the other, so be it. I do not need to keep up my ridiculous two-plus films a day pace of the past few years. (On a good open day, I could even get in anywhere from six to nine films, depending on length.)

Yes, it is a new era for me, though really, I have merely reverted back to my ways of the first few years I was in California, when I was actually eager to be here, start over my life, and cut loose with the verbiage. Let's call it a bold new second edition of an old era. However, I am still watching films, just not at the same relentless pace. As proof, here are some capsule reviews and/or personal musings regarding a few that caught my attention recently:

My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009) [non-3D version]
Dir: Patrick Lussier
TC4P Rating: 5/9

I have a nagging suspicion that I have never given the original My Bloody Valentine film from 1981 a truly fair shake. To be honest, it was one of the few of what I would term the "original slasher bunch" that really gave me a good scare, chiefly through use of the creepy mining mask and pickaxe, but I used that knowledge against the film. Instead of embracing it like I normally would when a film delivers on its promise to be bloody and frightening, I stepped away from it, and I am not sure why. Another thing in its favor would be that it had more plot than the normal slasher film did in those days, but again I used this to turn my favor from it. And once again, I am not sure why. Several scenes from the film have always stuck with me, as has its memorable catchphrase said evilly by the trailer announcer as the ad's tension-fraught editing builds to its conclusion: "Take your pick!" Yeah, that was pretty effective.

It was inevitable, of course, that MBV would get remade, and I guess it was equally inevitable, given the eye-popping gore, that it would come out in 3D. I did not see it in the theatre, and so I have only now watched the 2D version of the film, but one thing has not changed in the 28 years between the versions, no matter the number of dimensions: a coal-filthy surplus of plot and characters. This new version is even more overloaded than the first. They seem to have taken the plot of the original, shaken, stirred, and shuffled it around a bit, twisted some details, and then added even more plot on top of it. If you are looking for the definition of "convoluted" to be summed up by a movie, you have it here. Here, having so much story becomes a detriment because most of the main characters are either so monumentally dull-witted or blind to their environment that you can't believe they even made it past third grade.

I need to talk about Jensen Ackles, and I am sure that I am about to infuriate some longtime Supernatural fans with this. I don't get him. Last year, I finally decided to check out Supernatural myself, and waded about chest high into the first season before I had to stop. I know the show, according to what I see online, is supposed to get AH-MA-ZING a few seasons into it, but I need to get past the first season. And one of the things keeping me from doing it is Ackles, whose performance I find understated to the point of being proclaimed one of the living dead. I assume he gets better in later seasons of the show, or maybe the fandom is simply made up of people who like to watch pretty muscle-boys fight monsters. In My Bloody Valentine, he fits the role he is given I suppose, especially since his ability to not impart any believable emotion at all helps to keep viewers guessing as to his guilt or innocence in the murders in this film.

Maybe the film is better in 3-D, as my friend Aaron mentioned to me the other day, and I just need to get the Blu-ray and watch it that way. Maybe I am wrong about Ackles, and I will get to a later season of Supernatural and find that I really like the guy and I just needed to let him grow into that role. I am pretty sure that I need to revisit the original MBV film and give it a grown-up viewing to establish a modern opinion on it. I don't know. Maybe I will do all of these things. Or maybe I will just take my pick.

Pop Skull (2011)
Dir: Adam Wingard
TC4P Rating: 6/9

So, I went bonkers, as I sometimes do, over a movie a couple of years ago called You're Next (and seeing it again recently, justly so). I noted at the time of my initial viewing the name of the director, Adam Wingard, and it wasn't long before I encountered segments he had directed in the anthologies The ABCs of Death, V/H/S, and V/H/S/2. None of these struck me as much as the grim fun I encountered in You're Next, and to be truthful, didn't really strike me as anything special at all in comparison. Earlier this year, at the behest of Aaron, I dove into a recently produced film called The Guest, starring Dan Stevens and Maika Monroe (whom I had was marvelous in It Follows). I went in knowing Wingard was the director, and really hoped it would at least live up to the promise shown in You're Next. Which it did. While I liked The Guest a little less than that film, and a little less than Aaron as well, it was a very enjoyable horror/action effort that manages to both complement many classic '80s action flicks and also raise the genre artistically. (As I write these words, my brain is compelling me to watch the film again right away.)

In my estimation, following the twin successes of You're Next and The Guest, Wingard has become someone worth watching in regards to future productions. But what about his earlier work? Reviewing his filmography, it turns out I had already seen another of his feature films, A Horrible Way to Die, which garnered some praise and citations on the film festival circuit a few years ago. I found the work underwhelming, and definitely not remarkable enough to make me remember the name of either Wingard or the film's screenwriter Simon Barrett. (It turns out I should have, because Barrett was also the clearly talented screenwriter of the other two films.) I recall that I gave Horrible a middle of the road rating (a 5 out of 9), and never made the connection that the same guys made You're Next one year later. I will probably need to revisit Horrible as well.

And now I go back further in time in Wingard's resume to Pop Skull, before Barrett was in the picture putting words down for Adam to turn into crazy pop culture totems. The title Pop Skull is the truest definition for what this tiny budgeted wonder can do to your psyche should you approach it openly. The story of Daniel (played by Lane Hughes), who spends his days in his home popping pill after pill and having increasingly horrific visions, Pop Skull is like a modern version of The Trip, though this one feel so much more real and terrifying than the bullshit hippie fest that Roger Corman and Jack Nicholson (the director and screenwriter, respectively) foisted upon the world. 

Daniel's visions of murder and mayhem could be many things: repressed memories of something monstrous he has already done, psychic projections of something he is going to do in the future, or just complete, drug-addled hallucinations. The biggest problem though are the spirits/ghosts that seem to inhabit his abode, haunt his every move, and won't let him get his wits about himself. Wingard doesn't want to make it easy for you either. The editing here is manic to the point of distraction at times, with the film flitting from style to style, from pill montage to hallucination to memories of a girl with a catnip-for-guys hairstyle and back to more pills so quickly it once again points to the film's title. For a film whose budget has been reported as a mere $2,000 and is, given the setting of a druggie shack, fairly dingy looking, there are some beautiful images to be found in Pop Skull, amongst all of the screaming, sweat, and blood. This may be a cult film of the future.

Blood Cult (1985)
Dir: Christopher Lewis
TC4P Rating: 4/9

I remember running across the VHS box of Blood Cult many a time in the horror sections of my hometown's video stores back in the late '80s. I had memberships at six different stores (and that's not even counting the memberships for renting from the rival grocery stores I frequented, where the horror content tended to be somewhat tamer), and while I was always looking for new titles or something to thrill me, somehow coming across the truly cheesy looking cover of Blood Cult just never got me excited about renting it. And so I passed time and again.

Twenty-five years or so have passed, and I have just watched Blood Cult for the first time. Was I right to skip it? Yeah, it's pretty bad, so my instincts were probably right. Should I still have watched it back then? Yeah, I should have, because for all its badness, it was kind of fun to see it, and the film is also kind of a piece of history. The story behind the film is that the producers wanted to skip theatrical release altogether and just shoot for the profits of putting the film out directly on video. The other thing they did was actually shoot it on video, thereby saving a lot of film costs as well. This was novel for 1985, and Blood Cult often gets attributed as the first of its kind: a film both shot on video and then released and marketed as a straight-to-video title. In fact, they used this status as a selling point for the movie. "Why would you want to watch something on film in a theatre," I can almost hear them say, "when you can watch something with half the quality of a daytime soap -- and with even worse acting -- on video?" Ah, marketers...

There is a campus, showering coeds are being dismembered, and it all could lead to some sort of "blood cult" out in the woods, hence the title. Who is behind the killings? The town sheriff, who looks like how I imagine Roger Ebert's grandfather to have appeared, wants to know, and it is going to take scene after scene of mind-numbing exposition and chats in small town diners to help him figure it out. I will give the film credit for not holding back on the gore. There are extreme closeups of facial disfigurements on victims in dumpsters and a severed, gushing forearm lying in a bloody shower stall. The second victim in the movie gets beaten to death with the decapitated head of the first victim. (I think that is what happened...) Blood Cult goes for the true grue, even if it ends up being sort of dull. It's utter shit, but its wicked little heart is in the right place. I could see this film being pretty fun at a party. And since it is likely that is exactly how I would have employed it had I rented Blood Cult back in the '80s, there is something to be said for that.

Haunted Until Only Quite Recently: The Slight Return of “Poltergeist”

Of all the films released in theatres in 1982 during the year of my 18th birthday, the one of which I am most ashamed of not seeing at that time is the original Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg version of Poltergeist. I have made up for it in spades since then. A viewing of Poltergeist is a pretty regular affair for me, whether by throwing in a disc, catching ⅔ of it on television by accident or, as I jumped at each chance to do it, seeing it four different times on actual movie screens both large and small over the years since its release.

But the first time I saw it, the following year, I was in an entirely comfortable setting, in a room full of my (still) closest friends at my pal Tony’s parents' house, during one of our regular movie marathon festivals that actually meant something back in the time when no one really owned very many prerecorded videocassettes personally. Let me explain… in the early '80s, while each of our homes had a VCR or two, the homeownership market for prerecorded VHS (and Beta) tapes was really just for techno-geeks who wanted to pay anywhere from $50 to well over $100 for an individual tape so they could play them while showing off their nascent home video theatres and sound systems.

For a movie marathon party for regular, non-wealthy kids just out of high school to work at the time, you had to rely on two things: 1) videotapes of things you recorded off television and cable, and 2) video rental stores. You could buy used videotapes at your local video store at the time, but they usually had beat up boxes, had pictures that were possibly quite jumpy, and often had one or two spots where you weren’t sure whether the tape was going to go all wonky inside the machine. You couldn’t walk into a store at that time and just buy a fresh, brand spanking new copy of Poltergeist to take home. The store owners would not have a huge display of $19.95 copies of the latest film released onto tape by Hollywood. This would happen soon enough, but not in 1982-1983.

Pricing of videotapes was largely set by the design of the rental market. If you wanted to own a new personal copy of a film, you could purchase it, but it was going to be at the price that the store paid for a copy (if you knew an avenue through which you could get it at the wholesale cost), but more than likely, if you really wanted a copy, you were going to be paying an even greater mark-up on that cost. Thus, not a lot of people wanted to pay well over $100 for a mere videotape (though the price I remember being quoted most of the time was $99.95). But, I digress…

We were basically poor kids, only a couple of us had regular jobs, most of the gang were going to college, and so money was tight. But we each had a video store membership. You could generally only rent (depending on the store) anywhere from 1-3 videotapes at a time in those days (two was the average, it seems). So, to pull off any sort of marathon, we each needed to pitch in. We were determined to hit as many genres as possible: comedy, thriller, action, sci-fi… even porn (the XXX film at this particular video marathon would be The Erotic Adventures of Candy). And while only a couple of us were full-on ragin' horror fans, most everyone in the gang liked ghost movies, and so Poltergeist stood up for the horror genre.

I am not sure how the original Poltergeist escaped a visit from me upon its theatrical release. I do remember the television commercials, which in retrospect, were pretty damned effective, in much the same way that the film continues to be. I know that I had wanted to see it, but just didn’t. It might have something to do with the fact it was released a week apart from Spielberg’s own E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, so maybe in those pre-employment, cash-poor days (in June 1982, I was still dependent on allowance), I opted for seeing a film directed by Mr. Spielberg rather than one simply produced and written by him. [Note: I am most definitely not a member of the “Spielberg actually directed Poltergeist” cabal.]

And so, there I was in a room full of my nearest and dearest pals, in the early days of the video revolution, watching movie after movie through a long Saturday afternoon and evening (which would eventually turn into a Sunday morning tableaux showing most of our crowd passed out and barely cognizant that someone was still changing tapes on the VCR). In the middle of the showing of films was Poltergeist. And I was watching it with vested interest. And I was... levitating?

That is the only word I can possibly use to describe the feeling from that evening. I don’t know if it was because I was kneeling through much of the film with my legs underneath me (in a way I couldn’t possibly sit now with the middle-aged knee problems), but it is likely I just couldn’t feel them any longer as I sat on the floor of Tony’s parents’ living room getting sucked into an otherworldly realm. Or was it the thrill I was receiving from the early Spielbergian chutzpah, before he came to rely too much on giving the audience what they expected, and was instead doing what he thought was exhilarating or entertaining? Or maybe I still thought the supernatural might be a real thing, and got caught up in the fervor with my friends. Or maybe I was just in the mood for a good time.

Whatever it was, I remember feeling as if I was squarely pitched about three to four inches above the carpet of the living room, and with every spook popping out of a closet or every tree branch grabbing a kid’s leg or every clown with an evil leer not being under the bed when expected (or every bra-less JoBeth Williams), I seemed to move about a quarter inch upward. The only other film where I can recall being so out of body was when I fought back urination for the last 133 minutes of the 153-minute Empire of the Sun (hey, maybe it is a Spielberg thing), digging my legs farther and farther underneath my theatre seat with all my might in order to not break my movie code, never mind my bladder. [Kids, when saddled with a ridiculous set of rules that do not allow you to leave a movie theatre during the running of a film for any reason short of natural disaster, always plan what you are drinking, and when you are drinking it, while preparing to see a film of any great length. At least Lawrence of Arabia -- which I have seen in a theatre six times -- has an intermission break…]

Apart from Dominique Dunne’s murder late in 1982, which made national news, the supposed “curse” of the film was really not a part of common film lore at the time we watched the film, as most of the elements that make up the curse had not occurred yet. But the film had so much up its sleeve that was, at the time, so unthinkable and out of left field, that the added threat of a curse was unnecessary. Even though Poltergeist is one of the few films that can truly be described with the title of being a “rollercoaster thrill ride,” I don’t remember coming back down to the floor for the run of it, possibly due to the ramped up anticipation of the next jolt of excitement. A steak crawling across a kitchen counter, a little girl conversing with people inside the television, someone’s face falling off in the mirror, coffins popping up in the front yard, skeletons in the swimming pool, a house folding in on itself, a rope going through a wall and coming out from the ceiling in another room, a giant closet vagina… a one-stop shop of fun and absurdity, but done with knowledge of how to get under one’s skin with the right amount of creepiness.

It would be the first of many, many viewings of Poltergeist for me, and it has stood (along with The Changeling, The Uninvited, The Haunting, The Innocents, The Legend of Hell House... I won't name them all, but perhaps a couple of others… oh, yeah… The Others) as one of the few haunted house/haunting movies that really worked for me. And because the film, at least as I see it, took the genre perhaps to the height of what could be done with such material at a summer movie, blockbuster level, I never considered the notion that someone would have the cojones to remake it over thirty years later. Well, having balls made out of brass doesn’t mean you aren’t a stupid idiot… it just means you have brass balls.

Video Kong the Second [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 6]

[Did you know this is part of a series? Read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4 and Pt. 5 first!]

About a year after I finally acquired a prerecorded version of the 1933 King Kong on videotape, I ran into a second version, this time from a company called Nostalgia Merchant. As far as I can tell, a lot of Republic and RKO films came out under this label, and through the 1980s, I ended up with many of their tapes, including the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Plan 9 from Outer Space, the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Thing From Another World, Mighty Joe Young, Son of Kong, the Randolph Scott version of The Last of the Mohicans, Invaders from Mars, and my very first copy of Citizen Kane.

It certainly wasn't the cover of this second copy that sold it to me. The cover was far more garishly colored than my RKO Classics tape; in fact, the cover beheld a colorization of the classic image of Kong's feet gripping the top of the Empire State Building, biplane in hand as he makes his last stand against any human that doesn't look and smell like the beauteous Fay Wray. I believe it was the muddy colors of the cover that provided the chief warning to me of how the proposed colorized Ted Turner version of King Kong would most likely look once it was threatened to be unleashed upon mankind.

That much-discussed issue of the day was looming in the near future, but for the moment I had a decision to make regarding a second edition of Kong. It was actually a no-brainer, and the decision was made for me by one simple declaration on the video's cover: "THE ORIGINAL UNCUT VERSION." My RKO tape only said "ORIGINAL STUDIO EDITION," and if you know me at all, you would realize that there is a world of difference in those statements, even if the running time has remained the same on every edition of Kong that I have ever owned (100 minutes). No, I had to make sure that there wasn't a single scene that I was missing, and thus I purchased a second edition of the movie.

Talking about picture quality differences on separate editions of videotapes is something that I am not going to get into, as I was always at the mercy in those days of whatever televisions and decks that I could either cheaply afford or that were given to me. To elaborate on it would be fruitless, as I would always run this VCR or that into the ground at a fantastically high rate due to my huge consumption of film viewings. I went through VCRs like candy, if indeed I had ever gone through candy like that. I cannot recall if I ever found a difference between the two tapes, because both had the restored scenes that I was not privy to when I viewed the film as a youth: mainly many of the more supposedly "racist" or "shocking" shots from when Kong goes apeshit on the native village, along with a handful of other minor scene outtakes.

What this led me to discover was that I wasn't so much interested in finding the best quality Kong cut, but rather had turned into a minor Kong collector. So, it was also a no-brainer when the frightening Ted Turner brought out his first Kong edition in 1988. Luckily for me, it was not the much-feared colorized version, but a tape which declared boldly on the cover: "NEW ARCHIVAL VERSION. PRODUCED FROM A ONE-OF-A-KIND MASTER PRINT. IMPROVED FOOTAGE! HI-FI-STEREO! STATE-OF-THE-ART AUDIO!" Roll out the hyperbole carpet, why don't ya, Teddy Boy! Sheesh!

I said that I wouldn't discuss individual tape differences, and I will continue to hold to that statement. But this tape did somehow look better than the previous ones, though that could have been due to my switch to a much larger and better television, VCR, and stereo system at the exact same time that the Turner tape was released. As a matter of fact, this edition of Kong was the inaugural tape for my new system, "Hi-Fi-Stereo" and "State-of-the-Art Audio" included. My memory of this tape is tainted by that experience, and while I still possess both it and the RKO Classics version, my Nostalgia Merchant copy somehow has gotten misplaced over the years, so I am unable to run a comparison (not that I would now that I finally have the DVD release). [Note: The Nostalgia Merchant image of King Kong at the top of this page was found on Ebay; the other NM covers are my actual copies.]

By the time I had three separate copies of Kong, I had to make a decision. My collection was already taking up so much room I had little space left for new titles. It was either continue on collecting new editions, or call it quits. Calling it "good" was exactly what I did: even when Turner came out with a 60th Anniversary Edition in 1993, I resisted temptation (though it was really, really hard). No matter how much you love a movie, you have to draw a line. Three copies of any movie is more than enough for me.

As for that apocalypse-bringing colorized version? I saw it one afternoon on WTBS, Turner's famous Atlanta station, and it was OK. It was strange seeing it all dressed up in oddball shades, but the argument that is often used against colorization, that of interference with the filmmakers' decision to film it in either black-and-white or color, never seemed to be an issue with Kong. Merian C. Cooper was one of the earliest proponents of the Technicolor process, and it was his interest in its development that convinced Selznick to film Gone With the Wind in color. So, certainly Cooper would have relished the chance to film Kong in full color if it were a viable option at the time, which it really wasn't in 1933. Color films were relatively rare at that time. (As opposed to Casablanca, which it would have been a crime to colorize though Turner kept threatening to do so, as it was made in 1942, had a director -- Michael Curtiz -- who had already made a few color films, and was clearly designed to be filmed in black-and-white).

(I still believe Turner should do time for even considering colorizing Casablanca. Or at least for owning the Atlanta Braves...)

[To be continued in Part 7...]

Video Kong the First [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 5]

[Stop! Have you read Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3 or Pt. 4? Well, you should...]

After the summer of 1977 and the couple of summers that followed, where I saw it regularly a couple of times a year, I only ran into King Kong sporadically after that. Odd televised airings of the movie on Saturday afternoons or late night here and there. But with the addition of cable television to my life, I would search constantly for a viewing of the movie, and finally captured the great beast on videotape when I recorded a WTBS airing. This tape became like unto a holy object for me for the next few years, as poor a quality as it happened to be, and I cherished it wholeheartedly. That is, I did until 1985.

I had started out working in the Hallmark warehouse of a news agency in Alaska (or rather, the news agency in Alaska, and in a moment of superlative marketing clarity, such a business happened to be named the Alaska News Agency). Actually, I worked for the Book Cache, a chain of stores that were owned by the same people who owned ANA (and which would eventually, through a morass of corporate gobbledygook which I don't wish to go into any further than I have, sadly go the way of the dodo). Hallmark held a large presence in the bookstores, but I had recently been swept into a new position: that of the Hardback Returns Manager. The title was B.S. though; since there was only one person in the department for 98% of the time, it wasn't really a management position, unless you count the sometime rather unruly stacks of books, which required supreme management on my part.

While I still worked in the Hallmark warehouse, we had started carrying two series of cheap VHS tape lines. The first line was from a company called Outlet Book Company, who then and now specialized in bargain books. I did not know it at the time, but the movies were what is known as public domain titles, ranging from Chaney's Phantom of the Opera to Lugosi and the Ritz Brothers in The Gorilla to Joan Crawford in Rain to Charles Laughton in The Beachcomber. The quality proved to be sometimes substandard, but such is the way with public domain movies. You get what you don't pay for... the tapes were cheap because the movies were cheap. The boxes looked all the same, and comprised of oversized plastic shells that popped loud when you unstuck the plastic from each side. The design of the covers only showed titles on the front and descriptions with a brief cast listing on the back, and were gray and generic.

The second installment of movies, a few months later, came from another bargain book specialty company called Crown, which, while I didn't know it then, actually owned Outlet. (And eventually, Random House would purchase Crown, and thus Outlet, and make it a subsidiary in 1988.) So, really, this was a line within a line. Once again, the movies were still public domain, but at least had actual pictures from the movie on the cover, and had morphed into the size and shape that nearly all VHS tapes had taken on by that point: little video rectangles, compact and neat. The boxes were not quite as generic as the Outlet ones, thanks to the covers having a variety of colors, though the pictures used on them were in black and white. It looks pretty silly now, but I actually found the somewhat "pop art" aesthetic pleasing to the eye.

Many of the titles were the same as with the initial Outlet batch, but there were some surprises: Walk in the Sun stood out for me. Best of all on this go-around though, there was not only a few early English Hitchcock thrillers, none of which I had seen yet, but also a copy of Godzilla vs. Megalon (without Belushi, I was sad to discover, but dubbed in English... though since I saw it initially on TV this way, it was not a problem).

We had some success with these runs of videos, and the decision was made to venture into carrying a larger selection of videotapes in our stores. When the studios started concentrating on retail sales of videotapes, moving beyond the rental market, there were no Best Buy or Suncoast-type stores yet in our state. The rental stores were slow to pick up on the first-run sales market, but we dove into it wholeheartedly at our stores. We made most of our sales on first release titles like when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial first came out on video. We would several hundreds of copies of those titles in a very short amount of time. But at some of our bigger stores, we carried around a hundred titles or so (not counting local Alaskan videos), finding out which movie titles sold regularly, and restocked them from our warehouse. 

As a side gig to my regular work, because I was the movie buff in the building, I was given control over the warehouse stock for a period. I would eventually become the buyer, along with audiocassettes, in a very short time. While she didn't want me to go crazy, I was given almost free rein by my boss to order whatever I felt we should carry. This was all around 1985. And RKO had just released King Kong onto video.

Of course, apart from getting my own copy, I just had to carry King Kong in our stores. When Paramount released a handful of Godzilla titles like Monster Zero and its ilk, I convinced my boss that we should carry them as an experiment. (They ending up selling pretty well for a couple of years.) But Kong was a no-brainer. We had to carry it. It was a bonafide, acclaimed classic and there was a lot of publicity about its release. Beyond wanting to get one for myself, I wanted the whole world to have access to getting their own copy, and felt strongly we should be selling it. 

The videocassette was proclaimed on the cover as the "Original Studio Edition," put out under RKO's "Film Classics Series," and was led with the famous shot of Kong on top of the Empire State Building facing the onslaught of the biplanes. On the back was the shot of Kong about to charge through the gates of the Skull Island wall. I don't know how many copies we sold, but we ended up carrying multiple editions of King Kong throughout the handful of years that I ran the video line for the Book Cache stores. Whatever changes in taste or preference our customers had in that time, I always made sure to keep the mighty Kong in stock. Kong wasn't cheap at first either. I think it leveled out around $19.95 eventually, but our initial retail price was around $39.95. At least, that is the price I recall from when we first carried it. And the price I paid... before my employee discount that is.

The important thing, though, is that I finally had a copy of Kong of my own that wasn't recorded at an atrociously fast speed, and that was supposedly duplicated from the finest archival print that could be found at the time. And I cherished that copy of King Kong for about...oh...a year.

[To be continued in Part 6 here...]