June 26, 2000
(These are the earliest Savant Semi-daily columns, from May 26 to June 26, 2000.) MGM Video Savant Premieres, or Previews, or something. I was informed (by a contact, not by MGM) that the New Video Savant there is up for all to see. You can see it at THE NEW MGM.COM. So far the new site, with some its other attendant features, the MGM University, In Production, etc., are something you link to from MGM.COM ... they haven't supplanted the old site so far. None of this has been explained to me yet. I have a much more remote status with MGM.Com. The articles are definitely mine, but I have no say over the organization of the site, etc. But I like everything I've seen, especially the layout. Being official MGM gives me access to print some pretty rare photos ... this first month has a bunch from Night of the Hunter and ads for Vera Cruz. They haven't responded to my pleas to embolden movie titles yet, which makes some sentences hard to read, at least to my eye. For support and editorial acumen, MGM has been an excellent experience and I'm grateful for the opportunity. Video Savant at MGM is still as hard to find as it used to be, which is weird ... but something Savant is used to. The column's original modest-but-relevant readership grew when one needed detective skills just to find it. I'm in a disc drought, and work has kept me from borrowing hot titles from cool friends to review ... but I hope to have some thoughts on Sinbad pix next week. I'll to keep GOOD updates coming every couple of days as well. GE
June 22, 2000
Savant found himself playing a fun game while watching The Man Who Knew Too Much on AMC the other night. I hadn't seen the Hitchcock film in about twenty years (It's still pretty good) and was expecting to catch the scary-looking Reggie Nalder as the assassin, having seen him since in The Manchurian Candidate. What I wasn't expecting was to find a host of bit parts and character turns played by veterans of Science Fiction and Horror films. Nerdy as it sounds, it got me onto the IMDB, where I found even more matches. The group that comes to Doris Day and James Stewart's London hotel room is almost entirely made up of genre faces: Carolyn Jones (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Eaten Alive, The Addams Family) Alix Talton (The Deadly Mantis), and Hilary Brooke (Invaders from Mars, The Maze, Lost Continent). Hammer regulars Noel Willman (Kiss of the Vampire, The Reptile), Richard Wordsworth (The Quatermass Xperiment, Revenge of Frankenstein, Curse of the Werewolf) and Richard Wattis (The Abominable Snowman, Tam Lin) all put in notable appearances. There was also Lewis Martin (War of the Worlds, Red Planet Mars) and Leo Gordon (The Haunted Palace, writer of Wasp Woman, Tower of London, The Terror and Attack of the Giant Leeches) also showed up, if more briefly. Savant knows he has readers who dote on these kinds of things as much as he does - can anyone else name a notable major film with more actors from Science Fiction and Horror films in it? Watching The Man Who Knew Too Much is like watching a parade of friends.
June 20, 2000
Well, Savant got a ton of Metropolis Email - some adding to my confusion, others helping to clear it up. The definitive response is from Giancarlo (yep, from Roma) who straightened me out with this welcome info: "Hi Glenn. I have a recent DVD release of Metropolis, and it's the same that your friend is talking about. My version was made in France, and released by Films-Sans-Frontieres but it's probably the same version of the film as the one your friend mentioned. The most striking thing about it is the cover. The DVD comes in a plastic amaray case with no booklet or cover: there's a plastic/fake-metal slipcase instead, embossed with the face of the Maria robot on one side and some credits on the back (they're very hard to read because they're not printed but in bas-relief). The disc is two sided: on one side is Metropolis, on the other there's an hour of allegedly never-before-seen Fritz Lang home movies. These are, well, boring. I only managed to view 10 minutes or so, skipping and fastforwarding like crazy. If I hadn't been told they were filmed by Fritz Lang, I'd never have guessed: they're simply landscapes, mountains, travelogues in very faded color. In other words: your typical crappy home movie. No information whatsoever is given, so it's hard to say when/where they were shot. They may be of interest to the most hardcore Fritz Lang fetishists, but that's it. The Metropolis feature, however, is quite good. The film was originally 4189 metres long, according to the info in the thin "supplemental features" section of the DVD. This is the 1995 restoration (3150 metres) and the disc clocks in at 1 hour, 55 minutes and some odd seconds. This is the version restored by the Muncher Stadtmuseum/Filmmuseum and La Cinemateque Francaise of Paris (among others: the "recostruktion" credits at the very end of the DVD presentation list several other institutions, such as the Deutsches Institut fur Filmkunde of Wiesbaden, the London National Film Archive, the Film dept. of the Museum of Modern Art of New York and several others. I suspect these were all sources of material rather than actual participants in the restoration process, though). Though not credited onscreen, the restoration was supervised by Enno Palatas according to the DVD cover. The new music score was composed by Galeshka Moravioff. The film opens with this text, in German: "Only a few mutilated and damaged copies of Metropolis still exist. More than a quarter of the film has gone. On this new version we have tried to re-edit the surviving sections to conform to the original version. The missing sections are substituted by summaries on clear title cards" The video quality is variable but, considering the source material, it's surprisingly good and superior to all other home video versions I've seen (I can't compare it to the Moroder version because I haven't seen it). There are some parts in worse shape than others (some sections, expecially at the end of the picture, are a bit faded) but overall it's very watchable even for the average viewer (i.e. someone who's not used to vintage pictures). The DVD is not hard to find here in Europe (I bought it in France but you can easily order it online): you need to speak German or French, though (the film has German title cards with optional French subtitles). No english anywhere. If the language is not a problem, I recommend it.- Bye, Giancarlo Thanks to Mike Dunn for a scan of the chromium cover of the Region 2 DVD. I'm updating the SAVANT LINKS page, as Giancarlo has also corrected some broken METROPOLIS links for me. Aitam Bar-Sagi's site it there, and it has some pretty remarkable METROPOLIS goodies on it. Aitam and I exchange Emails about the Robot Maria's name in Thea Von Harbou's source nove - (Futura). Aitam didn't mention any language barriers, so it seems likely that there does exist a version with English intertitles. Who needs a staff when generous friends help out like this? Well - I feel like I've used up favors on three continents this week. GE
June 18, 2000
My Israeli Email penpal Aitam Bar-Sagi told me about the European Pal VHS and Region 2 DVD release of a 1995 German restoration of METROPOLIS (a Savant favorite, check out my article.) The movie was originally 153 minutes long (at 20 frames a second) and this new incarnation is said to restore 150 of those minutes - ! Aitam also says that the video and DVD are 116 minutes long (instead of 150) because the transfer was done at PAL's 25 fps instead of 20. Since the longest 24 fps release Savant has seen is still less than 90 minutes long, this release sounds AMAZING - a half-hour's worth of new scenes. If any truly hip readers out there have the tape or disc, Savant would love to read your take on it and report it here. Savant received a screening invite to see the restored cut of the Coen brothers' first film, BLOOD SIMPLE, in about a week. I was one of the cleverest debut movies of the 1980's, and I'll be quick to report on it here. My DINOSAURS tickets I'm handing over to my computer-animator son. But I'll also get a look at an independent film called HOBBS' END, produced by an old associate, so it also might show up in print here next week. Image (bless 'em) is sending me more of their discs - I'm already putting down my thoughts on THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE, my most awaited title. Hasta Tuesday ...
June 16, 2000
SAVANT had his first production meeting with the new MGM.COM site yesterday. It is due to go online in three days, so we'll see how close it comes to that date. There'll be three new articles a month there, in a web-zine format that the MGM designers have made look very slick and attractive. There's access to good studio research and rare images that will make the 'zine worthy of serious attention! Savant'll also be answering email from MGM readers - but beware, since he's not really in the MGM fold any more Savant knows even less about their DVD and video plans than he used to. They also have a release schedule that would be fun to list online, but Savant would have the MGM lion on his ___ so fast it wouldn't be funny. Too bad - Savant also hears great news from two other studios, most of which he can't repeat. SHAFT opens today. Savant has some funny memories of seeing the original in 1971 that he'll work into a review of the original trilogy, when they arrive. This weekend is the AMC restoration festival, which features Alfred Hitchcock films. It's a good way to check into titles you've missed (even TOPAZ is good, if only to wonder what the Master was thinking about when he made it). Savant is going to wait for REAR WINDOW on better-quality DVD though. And NORTH BY NORTHWEST is coming in August (not being shown on AMC) and is supposed to have a docu on it that Savant edited in April. AMC will probably be full of commercials again this weekend. First Bravo started taking commercial breaks in their movies (which was the kiss of death for the channel for Savant - the films were already censored, now they're confetti). The curse of PAY TV is upon us finally. We started out paying for cable to be free of commercial interruptions, but they've crept up into the cable channels, and are now on every kind of video we buy (Savant HATES them on DVD). Going to the Museum and the Cinematheque and the random studio screening Savant gets invited to, is still the best way to see a film in LA. Have a great weekend, those of you who are hanging on while Steve Tannehill plays Little Pig #3, making his house of bricks. If MGM Savant launches, the URL will be posted here.
June 14, 2000
A LETTER ABOUT DISNEY ANIMATION: 'Stephen writes: "No doubt by now you've heard how Disney has massacred MAKE MINE MUSIC on VHS and DVD, by removing an entire segment from the film (The Martins and the Coys) and cutting stuff out of at least one other (Casey At the Bat).(No, I didn't!) I'm petrified with rage at the thought of this (cutting cigarettes out of SALUDOS AMIGOS and MELODY TIME was bad enough, but this is a TRAVESTY!). I'm not sure how you feel about Disney films per se, but I've always been fond of MAKE MINE MUSIC and I'm trying to figure out what can actually be *done* about this heinous assault on a beloved classic. Maybe Leonard Maltin can help. At any rate, awareness is the first step, so if you and the kind folks at DVD Resource can do something to get the ball rolling, that would be great!" -- Stephen Savant thinks this is just more frustrating, aggravating Disney misbehavior ... first the innocent black handmaidens in FANTASIA, and now this. Makes ya want to hit 'em with a rolled-up newspaper. You might not be aware that several minutes were snipped from DUMBO so long ago that nobody remembers them. In a very fluid movie, you'll note quite a number of sudden fade outs and fades-ins right in the middle of music cues. Well .... there were several scenes with the jive-talking crows - the ones who are NOT black stereotypes, just cool cats who are the hippest bunch in the movie. They showed it to us at UCLA about 1973, and in the print we saw, the crows show up at regular intervals to comment like a Greek chorus on the events of the film - criticizing the elephants mostly, and feeling sorry for Mrs. Jumbo and Dumbo. And they were funny. But since they're cool characters, talkin' jive, they had to go! In the cut print shown now, the crows barely show up to teach Dumbo how to fly with the magic feather.(Savant always loved the REAL moral of DUMBO: if you wanna fly, you gotta get drunk!) Disney = CONTROL FREAKS. They don't cotton to competition, and they are lousy sports. And they have Zero appreciation for their own history, unless it means money in their pockets. This probably doesn't make them much different from any other studio - but Disney is the one that always seems to be out there bowdlerizing their animation and passing it off as whole. Savant sympathizes with Stephen - and thanks him for the reminder to vent this particular kettle of discontent. Now if only Savant could fulminate with the journalistic swagger of Steve Tannehill!
June 12, 2000
MARNIE. Gary Teetzel loaned me his new MARNIE DVD, so I got to see the latest Bouzereau docu. They handled the film fairly deftly, not avoiding its reputation as one of Hitchcock's clunkers, as much as putting a spin on it. There's so much that cannot be said when making a documentary that supports a commercial release of a film. It is only because of the 36 years that have passed that they can say as much as they do. Some of the things that raised Savant's radar: Pat Hitchcock hit the nail on the head when she said audiences rejected the film because of its 'psychologically' oriented story. MARNIE fails in conception. Its story is one of those forties-style knee-jerk Freud things where someone's psyche is blotting something out, and the shrewd psychoanalyst's cure is to force them to face whatever trauma caused the problem - SPELLBOUND is the silliest example. Psychology just doesn't work that way, as Hitchcock seemed to realize in his own THE WRONG MAN ... real psychological damage doesn't go away by simply seeing the truth of matters. Bernard Herrmann didn't give Hitchcock any successful pop tunes, true, but Savant can't help wondering if Hitchcock was getting tired of the repetitiveness of Herrmann's (superior) music. Battling egos probably had more to do with it. Ever heard the score for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE? I've never seen it stated in print, but the main theme behind the titles sounds a lot like the tune for Marnie 9 years later. Is that Leonard Rosenman? Finally, Bouzereau lets his ending hang with a statement by Robin Wood, taken almost directly from his 30 year old book HITCHCOCK'S FILMS (a terrific book, by the way). After his masterly analysis of earlier Hitchcock films, and his brilliant ideas about THE BIRDS (the birds express the tensions between the characters), Wood pushes his line of reasoning over the edge with MARNIE and tries to neutralize its flaws by saying that Hitchcock being the director is the only argument necessary. When he points out, for instance, the unrealistic boat at the end of the film, Wood argues that Hitchcock wanted it to look unreal, that he wanted us to be aware of the artificiality in it. It's true that Hitchcock's films were full of 'special cinematic effects', that were almost always successful in communicating to his audience feelings and ideas not carried in dialog. But MARNIE has a great many things that audiences don't accept now any better than they did in 1964. The editing of the horse jump is a terrible strain of awkward angles, for instance. The red flashing never works either. MARNIE is a movie to appreciate, but it take a couple of levels of detachment to find a level it works on. Dennis White in film school told me he believed it was a delirious amor fou and that it was not a romantic mystery, but a film ABOUT the concept 'romantic mystery' ( the level of detachment I was talking about). Mr. Wood's assertion that you can't love cinema without loving MARNIE is going too far ... appreciation should be enough ... but maybe Mr. Wood should be allowed to get away with it, considering the enlightenment he provides elsewhere. There is one moment that does get me in MARNIE. At the close of the 'rape'scene in the cruise ship, the camera pans from Marnie's catatonic face to a porthole and stares out at the ocean waves. This is one of the few images in the film that hit me as meaningful on that 'symbolic' level we were always trying to find in 'art' films. The porthole is an opening in a steel wall with the ocean, 'life,' on the other side. Suggesting all kinds of sexual interpretations for what Connery was doing to Hedren off screen, the shot still seems blatant and subtle and profound - the suggestion isn't a smirking dirty joke, as in NORTH BY NORTHWEST - the shot pulled the concept right from my head. I checked out the scene again. Tippi Hedren's acting is never as bad as the straight-jacket of Hitchcock's controlling direction, but the earlier part of the scene seems just as false as it ever did. When Hitchcock turns her face into an objectified mask of blank submission, and pans across to the porthole, well, it just seems to all work, as good as anything in VERTIGO.
June 11, 2000
THE PATRIOT. Savant got to see a preview screening of this last night. It was a general crowd pleaser that seemed to animate the audience most of the time. But, boy, what a bad movie. THE PATRIOT is a revolutionary war saga that is far too long, with a terrible script that has nothing real to say and substitutes flag-waving and awful miscalculated 'messages'. Did you know that 1776 Southerners often freed their slaves and that a theme of the Revolutionary War was emancipation? Sample anachronistic dialogue: "It's a free country." "Or it will be." THE PATRIOT starts off well but soon becomes very repetitious, with a heavy 'Spielberg' emotional moment for Mel Gibson every fifteen mintues or so. It apes RAMBO, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, and BARRY LYNDON. Major wounds are either sentimentally fatal (everyone seems to die in Mel's weepy arms) or do not hinder close combat. There's no privation or sickness, and the whole affair is so glamorized that everyone seems to be posing for a portrait to hang in the White House. There's much talk about war being hell, and its proper conduct, but it really comes down to 'our side can do anything, and when the enemy does it it's an atrocity." War is also very personal, kids. The script provides a repellent enemy officer who sneers as he kills Mel's children, allowing the rest of the war to become just a background for personal revenge. This of course comes Mano a Mano in the middle of a big battle. Rubbish and pablum. The effects are nice, sometimes ... although the big benefit of CGI to action films seems to be the ability to thrill the audience with views of men being decapitated (STARSHIP TROOPERS, PVT RYAN, THE MESSENGER, and now this shameless, overlong mess.) The whitewash of American history (hey, this is our heritage!) allows THE PATRIOT to be twice as bloody as THE GLADIATOR and dance past the MPAA. Doubtless it will be the hit of the summer, Savant was heard to grumble bitterly.
June 9, 2000
Off to graduation: "Sittin' in the Sun, bad boy ..." Review of ROCKETSHIP X-M just launched. It sure changes its complexion a bit now that we know Dalton Trumbo wrote it. Hope I don't get the strange letters I got on SPARTACUS, reminding me that Dalton Trumbo was a RED and that a Communist uprising in Germany in the 20s called itself the 'Spartacists'. I resisted writing a flaming response (always a good idea and the reason I don't attract a lot of that kind of mail) but my son really wanted to remind the reader that the Spartacists were crushed and the Fascists won (sort of), so the reader could sleep well knowing Germany was in good hands for the next twenty years. Dalton Trumbo usually showed his avowed radicalism only in well-intentioned diatribes that rarely got more complicated than saying freedom was good and slavery bad ... anyone wanting to silence him is afraid of words themselves. Hey this is fun. Funny that with Trumbo writing ROCKETSHIP and Robert Heinlein an author of DESTINATION MOON, the beginning of the Science Fiction genre boom of the 50s would be politically polarized!
June 8, 2000
UPCOMING REVIEWS. It's graduation time around the Savant household, but DVD Savant will still be churning out the reviews of the bizarre, the offbeat - the kind of movies that don't get reviewed much on other sites. Tomorrow will come ROCKETSHIP X-M, sort of keeping in line with all the other space-oriented discs reviewed here, I suppose. Soon thereafter will be a short review of Edgar Ulmer's DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL, another release from AllDay Entertainment, the ASPHYX and GANJA & HESS people. While Mr. Tannehill's busy finishing his house down in Texas, it'll continue to be arcane esoterica around the Savant spread, unless some hot big title crosses my mailbox. Thanks for hanging in, and all the encouraging letters.
June 6, 2000
MR DEATH. Saw this Errol Morris docu last night and the effect was chilling, to say the least. With one simple subject (and that subject's cooperation), we have here a document that makes understandable a lot of difficult concepts about how ordinary people become involved in heinous activities. Mr. Fred Leuchter is a completely ordinary, not-very-bright man who became a consultant on execution equipment and soon was designing electric chairs and other devices for various states. As he's interviewed about this morbid activity we see the intense pride in his face as he shows his scientific improvements on old equipment, which he calls 'torture devices.' Then he takes a step further. A nutcase white supremacist in Canada hires Leuchter to go to Poland and prove that the crematoriums and gas chambers at Auschwitz were a myth. Suddenly we're watching videotape of Leuchter scrambling into these crumbling ruins and stealing samples of concrete for later testing. His methodology is so feeble we suddenly question the 'science' behind his earlier electric chairs, etc. When his 'evidence' is thrown out of court and the supremacist convicted, Leuchter is shunned by his former employers, his wife, and turns for money and validation to - who else - the white supremacist movement to make a living as a public speaker. Morris' docu is compelling because Leuchter is so self-deluded he participates freely in his own 'prosecution' - treated entirely fairly, he nonetheless comes off as vain, ignorant, amateurish, and uncomprehending of any moral universe beyond his personal reputation and rights. He's scary because we can see in him our own egocentric mini-megalomania (like, what makes ME think people need to read what I write?). You can also see in Leuchter the mentality that the 1942 inventor of the Zyklon killing gas probably had when he curried promotion and self-esteem by coming up with the most efficient and economical method of murdering people. In these days when trying to watch the TV news is an exercise in mixed messages and commercial mind control, MR DEATH is an incredibly simple, mind-blowing look at how predictably small-minded and blindly destructive even non-agressive 'innocent' people can be. Mr. Morris' docu is also to be commended for its fairness and avoidance of zinger messages - we don't walk away from this show thinking 'people are no damn good', but instead with some insight into understanding some hard-to-communicate human flaws. Recommended.
June 4, 2000
THE END OF LASERDISCS. I dropped in to Dave's The Laser Place a few weeks back, and saw a slightly depressing thing happening. Dave's in Studio City was one of the first Laser stores in the 80's, and the one Savant'd drop by to ogle the bigscreen widescreen versions of 2001, etc, before he finally got a player in 1990. My first disc, the flat, uncut WILD BUNCH sat unplayed for 18 months! From about 1990 to 1996 Savant was a biweekly visitor and renter from Dave's, as they kept a rental library of everything, simply everything released and with their old club membership the rentals were dirt cheap. For editors doing promos, they were even a better source - that library was gold when some producer needed to make a montage of old movie scenes. For a hundred dollars or so, sixty or seventy films could be rented, the important material duped almost for free, and some great work done. I did this several times, for a montage of historical highlights for the makeup guild, for Charles Champlin's retirement, etc. A lot of the Oscar montages you saw in the last ten years came from lasers rented from Dave's, I'm given to understand: Chuck Workman's son (he seems to have a lock on the Academy) even bought an EBay disc of MAN OF IRON for his excellent Andrej Wajda montage, when Dave's didn't have it. I know the collector who sold it to him. Well, Dave's rental laser library is no more; they sold it all a few weeks back to collectors still crazy about the format, or at least the rarities to be found on it. Now Dave's will be strictly DVD. Three years to phase out one format and install another is about right .. DVD has certainly done a good job in general replacing the older format. Savant just regrets the dismantling of that terrific resource, even if it was being maintained at a loss. Rest in Peace.
June 2, 2000
While there's nothing to thrill the mainstream folk, Savant was excited to see Image announce titles like BLACK SABBATH and fave Science Fiction classic KRONOS (in RegalScope, too!). To start the weekend, here's a new review and mini-essay on the new release of LISA AND THE DEVIL / THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM. Yes, these are the kinds of films that Savant gets sentimental about ... Happy weekend to all!
June 1, 2000
Curse you, FedEX! The only real perk for DVD Savant is the occasional DVD surprise package from the Generous God Steve in Texas. Every few months or so I get a box-0-goodies. I'd given up on getting QUATERMASS 2 and THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN and ordered them online ... then Steve said he was sending them along with about 5 lbs of assorted wonderful review discs for me to write about! Hail and Hosannas were heard... I quickly found a friend to sell the preordered discs to . Then Steve reported that the FedEX people had just plain LOST the package (my &%$#, some clever &^$% in Texas cribbed MY goodie box!). So my clever sidestep with the coveted Anchor Bay discs backfired in my face. Luckily, there's always the good folk at Image. Besides LISA and THE DEVIL (coming this weekend) I'll be reviewing ROCKETSHIP X-M and HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, the latter of which I've never seen. Then hopefully it'll be time to review the terrific MABUSE films. So I can't complain too loudly, even though some Texan thief is watching MY discs right now and LAUGHING at me! Have been wrapping up editorial work on television spots and consumer promos for the DVD release of JAWS. Looks like this is going to be one heavily promoted release; if you see a TV spot for the DVD try and think of Savant up at 2 in the morning, trying to remember how to get his AVID to function correctly. See you tomorrow, dear friends!
May, 2000
MCARNIVAL OF SOULS RIDES AGAIN. The new Criterion disc has a nice extra surprise: two docus by Bill Shaffer, who Savant met squabbling amiably over FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE on the old MGM Video Savant page. Mr. Shaffer is a cameraman-editor-producer for a television station in Lawrence Kansas, the hometown and stomping ground for "The Man" Herk Harvey. The Criterion Disc contains Bill's 1990 re-premiere piece, a warm and funny assemblage of preview and interview footage with Harvey (in whiteface ghoul makeup) and the still-arresting Candace Hilligoss, the NY actress wooed to Kansas to go wadin' in cold mud for cinema history (Kind of a reverse Dorothy Gale). Some pretty odd cinema history, since her debut film remained a ghost itself until ten years ago when Shaffer's docu helped with its revival. His second piece is coverage of the history of the Saltair Paviliion, a pretty bizarre story itself. Savant has been reviewing so many lowbudget overachievers that he's run out of things to say about the subgenre (and doesn't have any personal brainstorms about the title) so he won't be reviewing it. But hey, weird fringe movie folk already know how special the late Herk Harvey's opus is. The best thing about the package is seeing Bill's scenes showing Mr. Harvey enjoying the attention that eluded him - for 27 years!
May 29, 2000
Got Some Excellent feedback on the 'Rat in the Abyss' topic. Steve Light emailed me with 5 (count 'em) 5 URLS with info on the process, which appears to not only be real, but is in experimental use - on premature babies! Steve writes: "I too have always heard and believed that the liquid the rat and Ed Harris breathed was real. It reached Urban Legend status it seemed. So when I read your piece, I decided to find out. Below are some of the most seemingly reputable sites I could dig up. The final one is an interview with Cameron. The IrYdium Project: Liquid Breathing Apparatus Liquid Ventilation: University of Glasgow Taipan Technology : Turning a Breathing Fluid into Liquid Gold The Flutec Fluids: For Liquid Ventilation - - and, from Cameron: Life's Abyss and then You Die, By Michael Dare Thank you Steve .. DVD Savant = Medical Savant ... I don't think so. I wonder if the King of the World's film actually helped animate some of this research? ON ANOTHER SUBJECT - THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW ... Savant overheard through a credible source that 'sometime around Christmas' a DVD of this cult title will be appearing. The good news is that the audio controversy of the 1990 (?) Laser release will be straightened out. That attempt to stereo-ize Dr. Frank N. Furter by grafting stereo record album takes into the soundtrack was a disaster. This time out, they have unearthed all the original recording elements and are creating stereo tracks that actually match the performances on screen.
May 27, 2000
The rat in THE ABYSS... Several requests to tell this tale, so here goes ... While making a flashy and expensive promo for James Cameron's underwater epic in 1989, we constantly discussed the film's 'liquid oxygen' scene, the one with the rat. I was particularly surprised when no mention of this amazing-looking scene was made in the publicity or papers, because the idea that oxygen-impregnated fluid could be substituted for air to keep pressure equalized on a deepsea dive was pretty far out at the time ... like, more intriguing than everything else in a movie with a lot of nice concepts. At first I said, "Is that real?" watching the little rat 'breathe' underwater, and I was assured it was real. I was told (by unreliable sources) that the fluid was experimental, did work with animals, but wasn't useable on humans. That's great, was my response, we have to have this in the promo ... an idea that went nowhere. Savant believes that the reason there was no coverage on this scene was because the rat, if he was breathing fluid, almost certainly died. Think about it. You fill your lungs up with liquid, any liquid, and it's a death sentence. If you try to get the liquid out, it won't go - all those zillions of little lung pockets to grab air are spongelike recesses where any liquid would stay forever. A tiny bit of water in your lungs and they call it pneumonia, remember? So forget about getting the liquid out. So you decide to become a mermaid or Aquaman or whatever. Living with all the oxygen-liquid you can get won't work either. Your lung tissues are meant for a certain humidity of air ... and would soak up the liquid and clog and tear and not function. If Mr. rat breathed the 'real thing' in THE ABYSS, I have to think it croaked pretty quickly. One last killer concept: how does the rat, or you, eat anything? If you want to try eating something underwater, make sure there's an ambulance ready. You are used to putting liquids down your esophagus and air into your lungs ... how do you train yourself otherwise? I'm sure a digestive system full of oxygen-fluid wouldn't be very yummy. So, assuming little ratsy-watsy bought the cheese farm in his starring role in THE ABYSS, just how did the future King of the World shake the ASPCA weasels? In Hollywood, you can't sneeze at a gopher without getting into hot catnip. Was shooting in Georgia a way of getting away from more than just Unions and industry rules? If someone knows more about this fascinating story (which I have no way of verifying), Savant would appreciate a line ... and no Fox publicity handouts, please! NIGHT TIDE, the review is up ... next stop, LISA AND THE DEVIL / HOUSE OF EXORCISM. You know, mainstream DVDs!
May 26, 2000
Savant Fills in as Guest Host for DVD RESOURCE ... With Steve Tannehill out for the count for seven weeks or so, I'll be doing my best to fill in. If I can think of anything day-to-day to report from my smoggy headquarters here in downtown Hollywood (well, Larchmont, a not-so-shabby LA neighborhood), I'll be writing it here with the best Tannehill imitation I can muster. DVD Resource will also be stepping up the reviews while the Cat ... I mean, Steve is away ... with all varieties of FRINGE and WEIRD and OFFBEAT movies ... until I get depressed by the hit counts and go back to reviewing Kubrick movies and other things sane people really want to read about. Coming up quite soon, NIGHT TIDE, a fairly obscure Horror item from the early 60s, and a discussion of LISA AND THE DEVIL, not just the movie, but the whole Euro-horror craze which has finally reached American shores in decent-looking DVD releases. I've also been requested to review the Criterion CARNIVAL OF SOULS, which I'll do as soon as I get my paws on a copy. Oh, and those of you who might have purchased it - THE BEAR has a cute featurette edited by Savant in 1989. Anyone want to ask any questions about that film or THE ABYSS, at least from a marketing point of view, let me know. I have some interesting stories about the Cameron set and his drowned rats to blab about. Remember, DVD SAVANT is like a magazine that just keeps growing ... check out the long list of articles and there's bound to be something you've missed. Gee, this feels like Tony Curtis in THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS ... I'll try keep something of reading interest here at SAVANT for the next six weeks ... or you can at least laugh at what SAVANT thinks is of interest! - Glenn This was the beginning of Savant semi-daily columns begun at DVD RESOURCE when Steve Tannehill went on hiatus .... Early in May, 2000. [Savant Links] [Article Index] [About Savant] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 1997-2001 Glenn Erickson Go BACK to the Savant Index of Articles. Return to Top of Page [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © DVDTalk.com All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use