Vinegar Syndrome Spring Collection

I enjoyed my recent viewing of the Section 3 trailer disc of Nucleus' Video Nasties Part 2, that this week I've been dipping into Vinegar Syndrome's 3-disc Spring 2017 trailer compilation showcasing their considerable catalogue. I’ve taken my eye off the US labels in the last few years, so this is was a good opportunity to catch up.

This is a particularly interesting compilation, unlike the 42nd Street and Grindhouse series, most of the films featured here are relatively obscure, at least to me, and I've been scribbling down things I'd like to see in their entirety - Raw Force, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, Sugar Cookies, The Executioner Part 2 to name but a few. There's some absolutely godawful trash on parade as well and I especially enjoyed the trailer for the 1985 film Flesh and Bullets, a sort of Strangers on a Train style thriller made by some porn film makers with a few days off. So inept and dismal looking, the Rudy Ray Moore films presented alongside it look like big studio productions. Somehow, the producers of Flesh and Bullets managed to grab bit parts from Cornel Wilde, Yvonne De Carlo, Cesar Romero and Aldo Ray whom I'm sure would have all been mortified by the finished product had they ever seen it. Actually, the Exploitation/Horror disc is something of a mini-marathon of late era Aldo Ray, I think he turns up in 5 or 6 trailers.

Disc 2 of the set contains the Adult film titles and I wasn’t expecting to see so much hardcore in the trailers. In fact I was surprised to see some hardcore action in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1971 sex ed. film Black Love, (which is included on one of Vinegar Syndrome’s early efforts, The Lost Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, a disc I bought when it first came out but never did get around to seeing! Two recent Vinegar Syndrome acquisitions have been Liquid Sky and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, and they did such a stellar job on both, it made me pine for a Vinegar Syndrome edition of the 1974 Sun Ra film Space Is the Place...

In the depths of Hell

Lead Cenobite Doug Bradley peers out from under the skin of the British quad poster of Hellraiser…

I’m currently reading Paul Kane's 2006 book The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy, and it’s good to be back in the world of Hellraiser again. I saw the original film on VHS in 1988 and at the time it was far more intense a Horror film than I was used to seeing. Subsequent viewings over the years have diluted some of the film’s power, while Hellbound has improved, and remains my favorite of the series. Stefan Jaworzyn was notoriously cranky about Hellbound in the pages of Shock Xpress, comparing the dusty corridors of Hell to a bad Lucio Fulci set (there’s some truth to that), but I can enjoy the absurdities of Hellbound, and the outrageous gore.

Paul Kane’s book provides some good analysis of the films, enough to make me go back and see the core trilogy again, but if truth be told, I’m skimming thru the chapters devoted to the sequels Bloodline, Inferno, Hellseeker, Deader, Hellworld, Revelations, and Judgement (a roll call of the damned if there was ever one, and none of which I’ve seen), picking out the passages which delve into their productions, all of which seemed plagued with reduced budgets, reduced ideas, and a dearth of talent on both sides of the camera. I don’t know how the Children of the Corn or Puppet Master series have fared, but I can’t think of another Horror film franchise that has fallen from grace in such spectacular trash film style. I’ve read that the penultimate film to date, the universally loathed Revelations was cobbled together over 11 shooting days by Dimension Films to safeguard the film rights which were due to expire. A television series is now in the works, which I have no doubt will be absolutely missable…

Housekeeping...

I had a few hours to spare yesterday and took on the task of liquidating my duplicate DVDs. Well, nothing that drastic sounding, I took the discs from their cases and put them in micron sleeves, while the covers and inserts were flat-packed and filed away for safe-keeping. I should have done this job ages ago considering I had to re-pack well over a hundred discs - the recycle bin is heaving now with alpha cases, and there's still more to go. Upgrading DVDs has always been a necessary evil of collecting. When a DVD of Last House on the Left first appeared in France in 2000, I snapped it up rather than patiently waiting for a US edition, which duly followed 2 years later, making the French DVD instantly obsolete. And that MGM DVD was in turn replaced by the 2008 Metrodome edition, which was then replaced by Arrow’s 2018 BR. Fortunately, these barnacles are mostly restricted to DVD, with just two Blu-Rays in the collection awarded upgrades - the original Universal BR of The Thing which was supplanted by the Arrow edition, and Arrow's 2010 City of the Living Dead which Arrow revisited with a fresh scan for their 2018 BR.

But this got me thinking that perhaps it might be best to forgo 4K, and not get into that headspace where I feel compelled, even required to upgrade my BRs of say 2001 and Alien to 4K editions. I’m watching fewer and fewer contemporary films these days anyhow, and while the likes of Suspiria will look glorious on a 4K disc, the Synapse Blu-Ray simply looks fabulous enough. A few things were granted a stay of execution however - the 1999 3-disc Criterion edition of Brazil, and the 2004 4-disc Anchor Bay edition of Dawn of the Dead - both of which have been bested by their BR equivalents, but I remember well the excitement when I first picked up these two editions, each loaded with a bounty of supplements, and both beautifully packaged, Brazil, in a lovely transparent slipcase, while Dawn of the Dead came housed in a huge fold out digipak. My Swedish DVD copy of The Sacrifice also escaped the culling, the essential companion film Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky is regrettably absent from the Artificial Eye BR, so the 2004 Swedish Film Institute DVD will remain in service…